MFM #162: Why Clubhouse Will Fail

Shaan Puri

My favorite kind of podcaster content person out there DM'd me and was like, "This is a fucking great thread." I was blown away that this guy wrote this. Then CNBC was like, "Hey, would you like to do this?" Some German news station was like, "Will you come on and talk about it?" I was like, "Wow, this is unbelievable!" What could happen with just a random-ass tweet?

Sam Parr

how many people did your tweet reach

Shaan Puri

how many people did my tweet reach

Sam Parr

yeah so go to twitter and then click insights and then look at reach I'm gonna guess 5,000,000

Shaan Puri

Okay, let's give it a shot. It has **13,000 likes** and almost **5,000,000** impressions—specifically, **4,800,000** impressions.

Sam Parr

Wow, and who are some of the more interesting people who reached out to you? Well, first, what happened here for the listeners who...

Shaan Puri

Don't... okay, so what happened? I went on Twitter and I wrote a thread. I wrote a thread about Clubhouse. The thread starts basically saying, "You know, everybody seems to think that Clubhouse is the next big thing, and I think it's gonna fail. Here's how I think it's gonna go down." I wrote it in a way that's a little bit goofy. I kind of went over the top. I was like, "Alright, you're the CEO. First of all, congrats champ, you did it!" I walked through the high that they're on right now because everything's going great, and everybody thinks it's the hot shit. Then, I discussed where things might start to go wrong and what might go wrong based on the way that the product is set up, the nature of that product, and all that good stuff. So, that was a thread I put out there, and I thought it was gonna kind of flop because right away, nothing happened. Usually, you can tell pretty quickly within a couple of minutes if your tweet's gonna get any action or not. It didn't look like it was gonna get any action. Then, the first reply was this guy being like, "Dude, this is way too effing long! What are you doing?" The way he said it made me feel super embarrassed. I was like, "Shit, let's just delete this. This is stupid." Then, I just let it ride for a few more minutes, and then it took off. Now, some crazy stuff is happening, and I'm going on CNBC tomorrow to talk about it. So, all kinds of crazy stuff has happened.

Sam Parr

You're going on CNBC tomorrow? I wonder if it's the same person who invited Trung on. So, you're the second person associated with the company who's been on in the past two weeks.

Shaan Puri

I'm hot on Trung's heels. I saw him last week talking about Cathy Wood and ARK and stuff like that. He was great! So if I can do half as good as he did, I'll be in good shape.

Sam Parr

and who else reached out to can you say you told me a couple

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I mean, okay, so I can't say all the names. I'll say what... First, I started getting mentioned by a bunch of cool people. Like, the guy who started YouTube was like, "Dude, this is fucking hilarious! I love this!" Then, a bunch of people who should have started big companies kind of were saying something. I started getting DMs from people, and I kind of went to sleep. At first, I was refreshing for like four hours because I couldn't stop. I was mid-workout, and then, like, between sets, I would go check my Twitter. It was kind of annoying. Sony was like, "What the hell are you doing? What is this?" And I was like, "I don't know, I'm obsessed! I really just want to see..." It was like I would pull the refresh thing, and then a different kind of famous person who I look up to was usually saying, "This is awesome!" or something like that. So that was kind of addictive. I went to sleep, and I woke up the next day. In my inbox was an offer for a book deal. A famous movie director, who directed a bunch of movies that we've heard of, wrote, "Dude, amazing storytelling!" He found my email address and emailed me. I think I could say it; he's the director of like *Space Jam 2* and a whole bunch of famous movies. Then, I don't know if I could say this one, but my favorite kind of podcaster, content person out there, DM'd me and was like, "This is a fucking great thread!" I was blown away that this guy wrote this. Then CNBC was like, "Hey, would you like to do this?" Some German news station was like, "Will you come on and talk about it?" I was like, "Wow, this is unbelievable! What could happen with just a random ass tweet?" How long...

Sam Parr

does it work to write

Shaan Puri

Not even a good one, really. It took me an hour. I sat down, and so the way this played out actually was I had already believed this, but I thought, "Okay, that's not cool. Nobody thinks it's cool to just say, 'Oh, a startup is gonna fail.' Well, duh, most startups fail, so there's nothing that original there." But because I had built a product very similar to Clubboss, I kind of knew what the challenges were going to be and where they might get tripped up. I knew what was going to be really hard for them. So I thought, "Well, I kind of feel like I know the product strategy here." But like, it's kind of a... if I just write about the product decisions, some of the product challenges, and the product strategy, it's a pretty boring tweet storm. Nobody's gonna really care. So when I ended up writing it, I wrote it like an episode of *Silicon Valley*. I affected Ehrlich's ability to jerk different dicks simultaneously. Shit! Yeah, I think it would be like the HBO show. I basically wrote it in that style. I wrote, "Okay, you know, Emily Chang invites you on to whatever CNBC to do an interview. You wear your visionary gray V-neck shirt, you go on, and you say this, this, and this." So I was just kind of writing in a goofy style. I wasn't just writing information; I tried to entertain a little bit. And then Emily Chang replies to the thing being like, "You know, I can't confirm or deny this, but this is on."

Shaan Puri

And so, all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. But it took me about an hour, and then I just hit publish.

Sam Parr

and you got like 30,000 followers from it congratulate or 20,000 maybe

Shaan Puri

Yeah, dude, that's the way Twitter works though. It's like you think it goes against all the conventional good advice, which is just: - Be consistent - Put out content all the time - Try to hit a bunch of singles But what I found, and I don't know if you found this too, is that it's just like 5 tweets that grew me from 20K to 120K followers. **5 tweets**. Everything else was just the cost of doing business.

Sam Parr

it's a it's the hits business yeah it is

Shaan Puri

totally a hits business

Sam Parr

And so... Summarize this actually. Brady asked me to ask you to summarize this: your bear case for Clubhouse. Because we're actually going to use this probably for one of our Twitter videos.

Shaan Puri

Okay, alright... so let me... We gotta... we gotta... [addressing the crew] Video guys, this is the part you're gonna edit. Alright, here we go: Everybody's saying that Clubhouse is the next big thing. You're hearing about it all the time. They went, you know, from a test... I think they were in test flight, and they raised at a $1 billion valuation, which is kinda crazy. The Apple's no...

Sam Parr

they were in test flight and they raised at a 100,000,000 but it's right

Shaan Puri

but now they're at a $1,000,000,000 valuation it hasn't been long they're still ios only still pretty exclusive you can't even you can't even join the app unless you have an invite and so but I see the other side of it I think that they're gonna fail I hope they don't fail I think the world is more fun if they win it would be awesome if they win but I don't think me wanting them to win doesn't mean that that's what's gonna happen I I sort of I said in the twitter thread I said you know if if me wanting something to happen would happen then every bag of chips would come with guac but that's just not the way life is and and so okay so here here's how it works alright pretend you're the ceo of clubhouse sam you know first of all you fucking did it you made it people actually like the thing you made and they don't even like it they love it and you know you check your dms and chris sacca is in your dms he says dude congrats this thing is this thing is kick ass and you know naval is liking your tweets and keith raboy is basically saying like this isn't shit you know this is not garbage and so you take that as a huge compliment as it is and it feels like every day you open up the app and like a new star is coming on the platform like first kind of like just tech dork stars like you know the marc andreessen's and ben horowitz people that we like but they're kind of niche in our in our circles and then it'll expand and all of a sudden you'll get you know nba players coming on you know famous musicians logan paul will come on and then this was the most liked tweet in the thing was I said you know gary v realizes that you've created a new place to yell and he starts telling everybody hey if you really wanna make money go move back in with your parents and sell their furniture on craigslist and so every life is good right you get a term sheet you're valued at $1,000,000,000 and you know you're doing interviews about and you and you gotta kinda ham it up right because you can't just say oh I made this app where you can go in chat rooms and talk to people that doesn't sound very very fancy so you try to play it simple but you talk really fancy you say things like you know this is like a this is a serendipity network this is this is not not just chat rooms this is audio escapism this is you know you start saying like historical shit like you're like you know humans have been talking to each other since the dawn of time you know around the camp you know around the campfire and you know audio is so powerful because you could see your your tone and texture and and so you're going on the media tour and then like you get back to your computer one day and you look at the charts and you know the graph doesn't look as you know as upbeat into the righty as it's supposed to be and so you're like what what's wrong with this thing you refresh and it's still the you know the growth is kind of flat maybe even declining and you you start to look a little deeper and what you'll find if you're the ceo of clubhouse is after about you know a year into the product you see that retention is not so good it's not as good as it used to be in the early days and you know why is that the case and and what will happen is that you'll realize that clubhouse is used for 2 totally different things there's 2 ways that clubhouse can be used if you talk to users or you watch them you'll see these 2 things number 1 it's a place to create content and number 2 it's a place to just chill just to go hang out with other people and have conversations and so content is what we see all the time on there it's panels it's fireside chats q and a's amas and it's like oh this is content it's like the next youtube it's where you go you make make content people consume it you know and the problem is that a lot of the content like on youtube is just like meh you're right 98% of the content is junk and that's okay that's the same for every platform you just need to find that gold and there is gold on clubhouse right if you watch the good times show or the the nyu girls who go on there and they have that show called shoot your shot that is gold but you and so you want to triple down on that you're like guys this is what this is what we need to double down on how do we make this how do we get more gold content and you tell the whole team we're gonna go get more gold content and so the the engineers they go start building features for content creators they build like a scheduling feature and q and a tools and like a monetization feature where you can make money from your fans and the creators are happy but the retention stays bad and what you realize when you talk to somebody who knows what they're they're they're talking about here is that there's this like problem called the interestingness problem which is that when you open up an app there's one metric that matters called ttf and ttf is time to fun how long does it take me to have some fun inside this app get some dopamine and all the great apps within 7 seconds if you open tiktok youtube instagram in 7 seconds you're gonna get something juicy you're gonna get fun and and you know the way those apps do it is they have billions of pieces of content to choose from and the algorithm knows okay this is the most liked content the last 24 hours so it shoves it in your feed and when you open the app it's gonna show you something great right tiktok calls this the for you page because it's here's the best stuff for you and that's why tiktok is so addictive every time you open it you get something great but for clubhouse you know know you tell your engineers hey that's what we need make an algorithm that will do that and the engineers you know they they sit you down in a chair and they'll say okay we're gonna do our best but just so you know it doesn't like it's one thing to just find what's interesting but we have to find what's interesting and is being created live right now and when you multiply those two things together it doesn't become twice as hard it becomes 200 times as hard to find interesting content when you open the app and so the what happens is most people will download this app they heard about clubhouse they heard it's cool they'll open an app and whatever's on right then they'll walk into the 1st room and it'll be kinda boring it'll be kinda meh and then they'll walk into a second room and then within 30 seconds like why the hell am I here this app is stupid they'll close the app and they'll probably never come back and so they'll get a bunch of downloads a bunch of sign ups and then but they'll all just be leaking out the bottom of the bucket and so you know you're the ceo and so you're like oh okay yeah live is harder I get it but twitch did it twitch is live and look at that they got you know 100 of millions of users so clearly it can work you guys the engineers you guys just need to make it happen and then you know the product manager or the engineers will come back to you and they'll say well twitch is a little different right because on twitch the great content creators are creating about 40 hours a week of content they stream every day 6 to 8 hours a day and they're playing a game so they could do that they can just play a game for 6 hours straight and just talk while they're doing it it's hard but it's not anywhere near as hard as just opening clubhouse and being entertaining for 6 hours straight while talking maybe some radio host can do that but the average person cannot and and then the second thing they'll say is like also you know almost all the content on twitch is about gaming so as a viewer if I come on there maybe one creator is not live but another fortnite creator is live or another fortnite creator is live it's like density around one passion whereas clubhouse is every category some people come there for music talk some for sports some for tech and so if I'm a sports person and I see a tech room that's of zero value to me so twitch is vertical clubhouse is horizontal this is gonna be really hard to get great content in every category and so you know I kinda fast forward and you know you okay this is tough and you know your your meeting ends the next meeting engineers leave next meeting is the biz dev guys biz dev guys come in and the biz dev guys are like you know they're what do you want us to do boss and you say you need to go get great content go get all the stars we got all this money in the bank go go pick cut some checks let's get some star creators on the platform and you'll go to people who have who have a big audience you go to podcasters right you go to people like us and then we're gonna say okay so if I could spend an hour on clubhouse and get I don't know 2 1000 3 1000 people in the room that's good right but like if I just record a podcast I'm gonna reach 300,000 people with that so why am I why would I ever make this trade why would I go live here when I go live there right when I could just record my podcast so you're the ceo you say alright that's a tricky problem but maybe you could do both right why do you have to choose do your show live on clubhouse and we'll add a recording feature so that you could just make a podcast out of it later you can have your cake and eat it too and so you do that and some creators start to use it but you realize there's a big problem with that which is as soon as you start to like let people record and the core thing becomes I'm recording my podcast here I'm just doing a live version that will turn into my podcast turn into a youtube video well then this live thing becomes a second class citizen and I stopped letting guests hop on my clubhouse room and chat with me because I don't know what the hell they're gonna say it's unpredictable and you know what makes for a great live session is that spontaneity but that makes for a shitty recording and so you know that's that's another trap there so okay you finally you have an emergency team meeting you say this whole content thing sucks you know we we only have a few piece of great content only a few hours a week for every vertical this is gonna be impossible to do in every category that's like recreating all of tv and that's just really hard to do you know and and I'm tired of all these people on there doing shows and q and a's and these success coaches trying to manifest millionaires and all this bullshit you know what is this discord for douchebags like screw shows we need a new plan and we go we're going to plan b plan b is chilling right this is a social network it's not a performance network you come here to socialize you come here to just talk to other people that's the most human thing in the world 7,000,000,000 people on earth talk to their friends this is what you know this is what we'll do here and you know you you you ask people who had a great experience so far in clubhouse the people who think it's amazing like our you know our friend narendra or you know a bit different people who have really enjoyed their experience and you ask them why and they'll say well I came on and I was in this room where this really cool thing happened and marc andreessen was there and then this guy was there and then you know I went into a side room and I met a bunch of other cool people in the tech world and we got along great I made a bunch of new friends and you say alright that's what we're gonna do and and sure enough that actually solves your retention problem because people will come here it will solve loneliness people will come here they'll hang out and they'll make friends but all of a sudden your growth will stall right because if I'm coming here to make friends then I'm not bringing friends to the platform that's kind of the the the rub there right so any platform where the value prop is to make friends I'm not gonna bring friends so now you have sticky retention but now you have no growth and in the other world you had fast growth but no retention and so you're stuck in this catch 22 and you know so then you know just to kinda round it out you you eventually get disillusioned you realize this shit's not gonna work you try to pivot you eventually sell the company to facebook you spend a year as the manager of facebook voice and then you quit you go you travel in southeast asia for a year you do some ayahuasca and you vow to yourself I'm only gonna ever work in enterprise saas again you know screw this social thing and so that's my story over the top I hope I'm wrong but I think that's how it's gonna play out

Sam Parr

and I think a lot of people who are hating on you didn't realize that this is the life that you led

Shaan Puri

Yeah, some people are like, "Wow, that's really detailed. Where is this coming from?" And some people are like, "Dude, that's way over the top." I'm like, "Dude, I built this before. We built an app similar to this that grew to 4,000,000 users. Tony Robbins was using it, ESPN was using it, the Jonas Brothers were using it, and then Oracle was using it. Some of the tech guys and the 37 Signals guys were using it. It was an awesome product. Help was using it." Then we hit 4,000,000 members and we just started to see these same issues. We tried everything to fix it. I hope these guys find the solution that we missed, or maybe the world has changed, or there are some differences. The reason I mention this is that this was 70% my experience and 30% fantasy that I wrote this thing with.

Sam Parr

I guess we're going to have to check in on this podcast in like maybe one year. I bet we'll see how things shake out in about 12 months.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and I guess the more interesting part that I wanted to talk to you about was... Okay, so first of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling, and you've done it a ton. I mean, you built The Hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. This is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog posts you guys wrote. Also, you're a writer, so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is going to go viral. Whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kind of me just trying...

Sam Parr

To get it... you have the "it" factor. I think that you can study how to do it. I think that you can just be born with the skill set. I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both: we have that natural gift, and also we learn and master the craft, right?

Shaan Puri

I think you've tried it a lot more, and therefore your hit rate is higher. Personally, I just think that. But the question I was going to ask you... no.

Sam Parr

I mean dude you got to a 120,000 followers on twitter in like basically 6 months

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's true. So, I wanted to share how this came about because I think this is ultimately more interesting. The rant is kind of interesting, but how this happened, I think, for people who are listening, they'll probably find it interesting. The way it started was a pretty high-profile VC person called me one day. I had never met them before. They said, "Oh, you seem interesting on Twitter. I'd love to meet." So, we did a phone call, and then we were talking about each other's backgrounds. This is cool. Then they were like, "Well, what do you think of Clubhouse, by the way? I gotta ask." I think they asked because they had looked at investing. They ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out, "Am I going to kick myself for the next 5 years that I missed this deal, or is this going to be a good pass?" I basically went on this rant on the phone about it. It just kind of came out of my mouth, like the way I explained it here, without the whole dramatized TV show script. I shared the reasons why I think it's going to struggle, and they were like, "Wow, that was great! That was amazing!" I was like, "Shit, I should've written that down. That would have been a good piece of content." So, I quickly said, "I gotta go," hung up the phone, and went to my computer. I just typed the whole thing out. Then I was like, "Okay, whatever." I kind of edited it, took it out, and I did your tip, which is I took a break for an hour.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

just went went and did something else came back and I edited it for about 30 minutes

Sam Parr

Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet or a good email; editing is the magic. They say, "Write drunk, edit sober."

Shaan Puri

oh that's a great one I've never heard that I love that I think

Sam Parr

ernest hemingway

Shaan Puri

I used to just edit in the moment, like I'd write in the interview, and that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was: > Go do other shit. Let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes. And that's... yeah.

Sam Parr

And there's actually some science behind it. I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a "shower thought"? Yeah, of like not doing it. So there's science behind doing something really hard and then not doing it, and then things hit you. There's science behind why that works, and that's kind of what you're doing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, basically, the brain relaxes in some way. When it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way. So, okay, then I post it and whatever, you know, shit goes wild. Oh, sorry, the other part that I forgot, which I think is my new thing—it's something I've been doing. I'm curious if you do something like this. Before I write anything now, at the top of every page, I have a template. At the top, there are like seven lines that say, "What reaction is this meant to get?" I have seven emotions. It's like "LOL," meaning this is meant to be really funny. Then there's "WTF," where it's like, "Dude, what the fuck?" That's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or when people are pissed off, and you want to explain, "Hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening," and people will be like, "Oh my God!" Then there are other ones like "Aww," something really cute, or "Wow," like something is awesome. It's like, "Wow, that is kind of amazing."

Sam Parr

wait can I tell you that I do this

Shaan Puri

No, I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, Rubber Republic. They had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions, and it would pull up viral videos that were based on that emotion. This is why...

Sam Parr

So, the way to go viral is you always want to start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone. We already know that certain emotions get more shares. For example, creating depression or sadness doesn't get shares; creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks, you can make something sad *outrageous*, and that's far better.

Shaan Puri

Right, you know, so it's either amazing, super funny, or really, really outrageous. It's also really touching and heartwarming—that's another one that's hard to do. Then, the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, was, "Finally, someone said it." I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template. I was like, "I think this is gonna go viral," but it doesn't match any of these. I thought for some people it's gonna be, "WTF? Like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What an asshole!" But I thought, no, it's gonna go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking but they've been afraid to say or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them.

Sam Parr

It's the idea of recognizing something that you feel, that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see it on paper. So the same example is with location. When you see like, "How you know you're a San Francisco bro" or "How do I know... do you know Sean Purdy?" Like if I saw an ad that said "Do you know Sean?", I'd be like, "Oh wait, that's directed just towards me." And so, with the emotion that you just evoked was like, "Finally! I didn't think I was the only one who thought..." It's a recognizing... it's a *recognizing something* type of vibe.

Shaan Puri

And they're really sharing because they're like, "I knew it! I'm right!" So they're not saying, "Wow, he's so right." They're actually saying, "I'm right! Read this, this proves I'm right!" Which is like a real subtle thing. But I'm so interested in studying the psychology around why people do what they do, why do they share what they share. Because I want to grow an audience, and this is the best way to grow it. And I feel like this process that I'm doing... I'm so glad you said you do it too because I thought I was a little crazy. I was like, "Oh, I'm..."

Sam Parr

Not gonna lie, that's what we used to do. I mean, that's what I do when I... I start with the emotion, then I start with the package. Like, how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there, right? I always try to... I'll find something that catches my attention, just one fact or one line. So for example, I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know what reCAPTCHA is? You know, like...

Shaan Puri

know what signing up for something

Sam Parr

You're signing up for something that says "spot." Nowadays, they say like "spot," click the thing, or type in the whatever picture is assigned. Click.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it'll be like, you know, "Where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights." And by the way, this is a good example. I saw this meme that was that reCAPTCHA with the traffic lights, and in one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it. It shows the guy like... sweating like crazy, thinking, "Oh fuck, should I include that or should I not include that?" That's one of those where it's like, *me too, dude*. I always feel that way. I'm always super confused by this thing that's supposed to separate the... [humans from bots]. I'm always super confused by these traffic lights [in reCAPTCHA tests].

Sam Parr

To a "I always feel that way" meme. Now, here I can take it another way. Do you want to know when I looked that up on Wikipedia? You want to hear a fun fact? Do you know why they do it this way? It's because people like Google... I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying reCAPTCHA to translate stuff. For example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are actually helps Google, and Google is paying you money. It's paying reCAPTCHA.

Shaan Puri

A little... so the original CAPTCHA was developed by a guy who was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon. CAPTCHA originally consisted of letters. Remember? It was always these kind of script-like, hard-to-read letters, but you could read them. Basically, they had scanned a bunch of book pages, but the computer was not good enough at translating all the book pages into text because some of the pages were a little rounded, wrinkled, or kind of fuzzy. The computer couldn't do it, but a human eye could easily read them. So, they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone. On the website side, they just wanted to make sure you weren't a bot signing up for their service, like a scammer who would spam everybody. But then they also did good in the world because that project ended up transcribing millions and millions of books— I think all the books that they had scanned eventually. Then CAPTCHA 2, or reCAPTCHA, is about image classification. For self-driving cars, we need to know, "Is this a bus?" or "What is this?" I think that's where the original idea was: classifying images and letting humans do it while they sign up.

Sam Parr

And the inventor of reCAPTCHA, the second one, his name is Louis van Haan. I think that's how you pronounce it.

Shaan Puri

he did both and that guy started duolingo

Sam Parr

When he started Duolingo, he did it for two reasons: 1. He genuinely cared about helping people learn languages. 2. When you're learning a language on the platform, you're actually translating content that a third-party service is paying for.

Shaan Puri

so that's crazy what a genius

Sam Parr

The exact emotion that you just had, of "this guy's crazy," that is the emotion.

Shaan Puri

wow this guy's a genius I am

Sam Parr

Trying to evoke by sharing that... I can tell that story in probably 5 tweets, and I bet it will... Virality is pretty impossible to predict, but I can bet that there's like a 3 out of 10 chance that it's gonna have legs. I could say this has all of the... this checks all the boxes to get popular. I can't... Anyone who says that they're gonna be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like Sean's thing just reached 5,000,000 people. He was like, "This is not gonna work," right? It's a popular thing.

Shaan Puri

Another part you had that was good is that you took something we've all seen. It's relatable. Oh yeah, I've filled one of those in. You took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is really cool. Like there's one I saw yesterday. You know Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise. His real name... no, what is it? It's Tom... Tom Cruise something. It's like his middle name is Cruise and his last name is like some... right, look it up. It's some random name and he changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name. It makes total sense that he did it. So yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV or something. I don't even know how...

Sam Parr

you pronounce it to pronounce that

Shaan Puri

Mapother... Yeah, Tom Mapother versus Tom Cruise. And so you take something really familiar - we all know Tom Cruise, right? Boom, here's the uncommon: "Did you know...?" And then it's like, "Oh, sweet!" Like, "Wow, you know?" That one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. But you know, the closer you can get to that surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, the more shares people will get.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book "Made to Stick" and I like the book "Contagious" by Jonah Berger. "Made to Stick" is about how to say something so people remember it, and "Contagious" is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular - how to make them spread like a virus, hence "Contagious".

Shaan Puri

I like it I haven't read that

Sam Parr

you wanna talk about paid newsletters really quick a topic that we've discussed a lot

Shaan Puri

yeah let's do it

Sam Parr

But this one is particularly interesting. The reason why is we've talked about this company a lot: Agora Financial. I've brought it up to you a ton. They spun off a couple of their brands and they tried to do a SPAC. When they tried to do a SPAC, the company that they were SPAC-ing with just kind of went down, like dropped significantly. So, there was already a publicly traded company that was going to buy a few Agora brands. The stock went down big time, but that's not that important. What's important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business. So, there's this company called... actually, I don't know what they call this little subsidiary of Agora. I think they call it Beacon Hill. It owns twelve different newsletter brands. Collectively, those newsletter brands do... where did I put the number? $550,000,000 in revenue and $200,000,000 in profit.

Shaan Puri

and by the way growing some that grew 77% over last year

Sam Parr

Is that crazy? Now I'm gonna tell you all some more numbers: They have 10,000,000 free subscribers, so kinda like The Hustle. That's like they've got 10,000,000 of that. This is even wilder: - They have 550,000 people paying them between $1 and $600 for subscriptions - Then they have a quarter of a million people paying them $600 to $5,000 - And finally, they have 100,000 people paying them more than $5,000 for a product... for a paid newsletter!

Shaan Puri

and what is in this paid newsletter what's the what's the so here's where things get it's way

Sam Parr

Here's where things get way crazier. They have some paid newsletters that cost $35,000. Now, the reason why this gets crazy is that they have 160 products across 12 brands. So what's that math? Each brand has 12 or 13 products. The products, I don't even understand, but basically, I understand the business model. The business model is they get you to buy a $49 thing, and then they get you to buy a $2,000 thing. So they get you to buy that $49 thing, which is like a monthly paid newsletter. It's not significant, right? I don't understand how they get it to work, and a large percentage of those $49 people buy the $2,000 thing.

Shaan Puri

okay so but I feel like okay so these must be b to b oh newsletters right

Sam Parr

No, they're not. Yeah, that's an important part that I left out. Nearly all of this is around... and we'll link to their deck. They have a whole deck. It's kind of scammy. So, it's a financial and a wellness company, which is kind of weird. They're talking about health and they're talking about wellness. If you click "Agora" up there, Sean, under my name, you'll see the deck. They say that their target demographic is self-directed investors. What's that mean? Well, I'm going to tell you. If you look at the website, it's just a bunch of old, kind of wealthy, white people who are probably Republican. The reason I think this is because they have ads that say things like, "Nancy Pelosi is coming for your guns. You better invest in these 8 stocks." They say crazy stuff like that, right?

Shaan Puri

it's basically the like motley fool on you know steroids right

Sam Parr

Yes, but I think Motley Fool's ethical. These guys aren't they? Also, they sold a book on how to cure diabetes.

Shaan Puri

oh okay I was gonna ask you why do you think they're unethical and then you answered my question

Sam Parr

And so it's all financial news, financial newsletters, financial news-related stock picks. It's just a crazy story. I've brought this up tons of times, we don't need to spend too much time on it, but it's pretty wild to actually see these numbers. I actually guessed that this is how big they were, and now we have proof.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you've been talking about Agora as like, you know, doing hundreds of millions of dollars. Some people know about them, but I would say most people don't know about this empire. This blows away most people's expectations of, you know, a paid newsletter. Right? Like, oh, I just had a paid newsletter as an individual. I made a few hundred thousand dollars total, and I thought I was crushing it. These guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars. So when you look at this, my honest reaction is, "Dude, why couldn't you have done this with The Hustle? What did they do, or why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this?" Because this is huge.

Sam Parr

I don't think it was too hard to scale. I think I could have done it. I would say that this business has been around since the seventies.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

So it's kicking ass now. It didn't always kick ass. If you're willing to be patient, you can do it. Second of all, if you're willing to put your ethics aside a little bit, it actually is quite easy to do.

Shaan Puri

It helps. So, how would you do this? Let's say you want to be these guys or beat these guys. What does that mean? You know, you're saying you're probably one of the most well-equipped people in the world to do this. How would you have gone about it?

Sam Parr

Well, what you have to do is create multiple brands under one. It's really hard to have one brand and only a couple of products make all this money, right? So, for us, we would have done this, and we were going to do it, but then we got bought. The reason I got bought was a whole different set of reasons, which is basically I wanted to get a payday. I mean, I was pretty clear about that before. I wanted it. It was cool; it's awesome. I'm going to stay here, but it was nice to hit a lotto ticket. If I wanted to be patient and do it for 50 years, which I kind of do, to be honest, I would have created trends for subset subcategories. You make the first newsletter the one that people pay for, only like $49 or $50, and we send you just a couple of things a month. Then the second thing is you go to subcategories and charge $1,000. For example, if there was a newsletter that dissected media companies—I work in the media industry—and you told me it was $4,000 and I also got access to a community, I ain't gonna complain about it.

Shaan Puri

right I'm I'm in

Sam Parr

I'm gonna do it if there's something for digital streaming. You know that the five analysts are smart. Twitch is gonna buy that. It's not that challenging. It's not.

Shaan Puri

that hard right

Sam Parr

And so that's what I would do from multiple industries. The thing that a lot of newsletter writers do, which I've talked about plenty of times and I don't want to talk about too much, is they do one of two things: 1. They charge too little 2. If they charge too little, they don't have a higher-end back product You need a front end and a back end. So you need your cheap thing that gets a lot of people, and then you need your paid thing that gets only a few people but charges a lot of money.

Shaan Puri

So, you guys at Transiz... I don't know, $300 something a year? You could have been $49, and then $5,000 would have been a better mix of value. If you were optimizing for "How do we get this thing as profitable as we can, as lucrative as we can?"

Sam Parr

yeah and had we not gotten bought I would have done that I would have I was actually we were about to change it we were about to make that change

Shaan Puri

and by the way what happens to transnow people still pay for it or it's free now

Sam Parr

They pay for it. We might lower the price. Before, we are either going to make that the back end or we're going to make that the front end. But we were going to copy this model of a $99 thing and then a $2,000 thing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, dude, when I see companies like this, it just makes me want to do it so badly because it seems so doable. Now, I know that in practice... and by the way, we get heat for this sometimes because we're like, "Dude, it's so easy, it's so simple." We're talking relatively, like... building a successful business is hard, okay? It's not just going to instantly happen.

Sam Parr

We're not saying things are easy. Sometimes we actually do say that word "easy," but really what we mean is simple. So, like, being able to bench £500, that is simple. It's straightforward. What?

Shaan Puri

do you do you just you

Sam Parr

Here's how you get strong in the bench press: you lift a lot and then you eat a ton. Now, that is quite hard to do for 5 years, but those are the steps you take. So, it's simple. What we're saying is that this is simple; it is not easy. I think I...

Shaan Puri

think I think weight loss is actually a better example because £500 is a is a hard thing to bench

Sam Parr

weight loss

Shaan Puri

It is literally simple. It's like, "Hey, you need to eat these, you know, avoid carbs, avoid sugars. You need to eat a little bit less, fewer calories than you're burning, and you should work out regularly." Just try to get an hour a day to break a sweat. If you actually just did those two things and said, "Hey, give it like 4 to 5 months, 6 months," boom, you're in great shape. Everybody knows that formula. It is actually simple; executing it and having the discipline and rigor to stick to it is hard. But it is way easier, relatively, than becoming a CrossFit champion. When we're talking about business, the scale is similar. It's hard to create the next Facebook; that's really freaking hard. Is it hard to create a paid community? Well, I don't think most people who try it will succeed, but it's relatively way easier than creating the next Facebook. For people out there who get sensitive when we call something easy, we're not trying to mislead you. Yes, it's going to take work. Most likely, it won't work, and it'll take some time. But on a scale of 1 to SpaceX, this is more like a 1 than it is a SpaceX. That's a scale for people to think about.

Sam Parr

I completely agree. Now, let's talk about what makes this hard. The first thing is that you have to sell your soul a little bit. Many people will not be comfortable with this stuff. Sean is pretty comfortable with it, I think I'm comfortable with it, but I think I'm a little bit less comfortable with it. You have to be a face sometimes. You have to say, "I'm an expert at X. Pay me money for me to tell you my thoughts."

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Second, well no, this is all that... So guys like James Altucher, who we've had on this podcast, he was ridiculed for doing this with Bitcoin. Everyone made fun of him. He made $60,000,000 doing it, but he still got mocked constantly. Shockingly, most people would actually prefer not to make the money and not get made fun of, than they would to make the money and get made fun of.

Shaan Puri

Well, the way I think about it is most people truly will not... They are afraid that they're not gonna get the money and get mocked, and so they're like, "Fuck it, I won't do it." If you really had a guarantee, I think people would happily trade reputation points for bank points.

Sam Parr

But, well, yeah, then perhaps, but that's a moot point. Because the fact is that most people don't even want to. The first point you mentioned, that they may not get the money at all, is also true. That's why they're not going to do that. So, you have to do that. Second, it's a treadmill; you can't stop. This is a lifetime job. If you are a content creator, you can hire people to do it for you. You 100% can do that, but you have to actually do the work for a little while anyway. So, you're going to have to work.

Shaan Puri

And by the way, quick question on hiring because people ask me this and I have no idea. I'm like, "Why don't you ask Sam? He's the one who did it. Why are you asking me?" They'll be like, "Dude, The Hustle has had amazing talent." Like, they talk about Trung, they talk about Steph Smith, they're [talking] about some of the people you guys... Well, you...

Sam Parr

Do me... I mean, right? I consider you to be part of our crew. You, me, Trung, Steph, Colby... we've got a bunch of people.

Shaan Puri

So, the question is: where the heck did you find these people? Can you give me the 10 seconds on each? Where'd you find Trung? Where'd you find Steph? Where'd you find Colby? Where'd you find, you know, all these people?

Sam Parr

Colby worked at a PR firm where he was doing some copywriting work, and Trung, Eamon, and Troy were also involved.

Shaan Puri

did he just apply to you or you like recognized like oh this guy's good

Sam Parr

Mutual connection. A friend of a friend said, "You should talk to this person." Trung came from Eamon Troy, a mutual friend and investor of The Hustle. I found Steph on Twitter because I read her blog. Who else?

Shaan Puri

I'd say I just kind of want to know. When you found these people, did you cycle through 30 people who kind of sort of sucked before you found the gems?

Sam Parr

When we actually sold to HubSpot, they were like, "Wow, you guys have a lot of churn." I'm like, "Yeah, but here's what we do." This is actually quite normal in the editorial industry. You hire a bunch of people, and you've got to either fire them or there's a mutual agreement like, "Alright, we tried it, it won't work out." And that happens a lot.

Shaan Puri

And you also have to do it with tone. I would say that was also a key, right? Because you were writing it originally, and so you...

Sam Parr

Yeah, and you saw the trends community. People, I was the one actually doing all the work.

Shaan Puri

every day you were posting in that thing

Sam Parr

Yeah, and that sets the culture and attracts like-minded people. I also think that once you find the winners, then you go all in on them. So, Trung is what I call a "made man," and Steph is a "made woman." Whenever Steph wants to do something cool, I say, "Sounds good! What do you need?"

Shaan Puri

when others come meet

Sam Parr

with an idea

Shaan Puri

Time to negotiate, baby! It's time to double it. Time to double that number, whatever Sam's number was. It's time to double it.

Sam Parr

These guys are all doing great. Whenever an outside person, or a non-main person, comes with an idea, it's, you know, "Why don't you just show me a little MVP and let's just see what people think?" If Trung says something, it's, "Alright, yes sir." Right? Yeah, like you, you're a proven hitmaker. So, the last thing is, when we interview them, I always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume, which is like the college classes and all the things that they take. I want them to entertain me during the interview. So, in the same way that you are really good at storytelling, you have to have other people that are good at storytelling as well.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. Okay, I like it. Can we do one idea real quick before we jump? So this is... kinda gonna feel like it's out of left field, but I would say there's something interesting here.

Sam Parr

so highlight it on the page

Shaan Puri

Oh yeah, so I'm down here for virtual team building. For a long time, people have had this problem: we have a team, we're working on stuff together. You know, as the boss, sometimes you gotta crack the whip, and it feels like it's just task after task and deadline after deadline. You want to make sure that this team is really coming together and is bonded. You want people to have a good time here, and you don't want them to leave. All the good things you care about are your people and the experience they have working for you. In the old world, this was different. Team building solutions included off-sites. I don't know what you did with the hustle crew, but some people go to a shooting range, some people go to an escape room, and some people do things like painting and wine tasting. You know, whatever you would be doing, it's tough.

Sam Parr

you know what I liked most just like a fancy dinner right

Shaan Puri

yeah let's go out to dinner right let's go to a cool place I you know it's on me order what you want type of thing

Sam Parr

I just like we we would do like fancy dinners

Shaan Puri

Right, and this is every team. Literally, I heard an NBA coach talking about this the other day. He goes, "Man, we got all these new players. It's so hard with COVID because in the old days, you just go to the bar, you put your card behind the tab, you know, and you say, 'All the drinks are on me tonight. Go crazy, guys.'" He's like, "You didn't have to have conversations; you just needed to give guys a night out together and good things will happen." So, with the remote work trend, everybody's going remote. How are those teams going to do it? How are they going to do team bonding? Because although you get to spend more time with your family and you spend less time in traffic commuting, you do lose the water cooler. You lose the team bonding. So, how are people going to do this? I've seen some cool companies popping up that are doing this, and I think they're doing quite well. I want to point out a couple and then get your take on whether you think these are good ideas, bad ideas, or how you would do it. So, the first one is...

Sam Parr

team team team rotery is that right

Shaan Puri

Yeah, Team Rotary is like camaraderie but for a team. This is actually backed by some pretty legit players, like some pretty famous people in Silicon Valley, which I'm surprised at because it kind of just looks like a goofy idea. They seem like small bootstrapped ideas, but actually, they have some big backing. I think people recognize the space. Big companies pay tens of thousands of dollars per division a year to have team bonding. In a big company, you have easily high six figures to low seven figures worth of spending on this type of thing. That's my guess. I'm not in the finance team, so maybe I'm off, but I think that's about right.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at Team First. Of all, Team Rottery looks interesting. Horrible name, what an awful name! They've got a pretty badass set of advisers. Guys like Heathrow Oy, who seems to hate everything as you've said, is on their advisory board. Pretty interesting.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So he's on this, and it says "trusted by 33,100+ global teams." Do you see Pinterest sliding in the network? Who?

Sam Parr

summer sanders

Shaan Puri

who's that

Sam Parr

Do you remember Summer Sanders? She was a swimmer in the nineties and then hosted all the Nickelodeon TV shows.

Shaan Puri

no way that's that's hilarious

Sam Parr

summer sanders works at product development at team rotary

Shaan Puri

So, like, you know, you could do things. If I click their experiences, right? I click the "Bond and Engage" category. It's like a coffee and tea tasting, a wine tasting, a guacamole tasting, a painting class, or whatever it could be. If you do kickoffs, team kickoffs, okay, we got our guacamole tasting again. But we also have the "High Heeled Shoe Project," a lesson for inclusion. You know, so there are these kind of team experiences, lessons in a box, or bonding in a box experiences. So that's one. Then our friend from the pod, Greg Eisenberg, created one called "NiceBreak.fun."

Sam Parr

dude this guy loves like cute names

Shaan Puri

yeah give me give me a name check how do you feel about nicebreak.fun

Sam Parr

It's okay. It's good. He'd love... Greg is like the coolest guy in my class. He likes public school, or like school work, or like the school bus.

Shaan Puri

well his studio is called late checkout

Sam Parr

late checkout like you know the grocery store

Shaan Puri

I remember thinking, "Why don't we open this agency, Late Checkout?" It seemed like a weird thing to do. Like, you're an entrepreneur; why are you doing this kind of product design, creative agency thing? Then, every week, he would say, "Yeah, I'll post a cool product that I think is awesome." I'd respond, "Oh yeah, we worked with them; we designed the prototype." I'm like, "He's doing it for all of them!" I realized, "Oh, actually, this is **fucking awesome**! You're on the ground floor of all these things. You can invest in them, you're meeting them, you're seeing all these spaces, and getting paid to do it." Okay, that's pretty cool. I mean, he's using that to fund his own projects, their internal projects, which I don't know... that's actually a pretty cool way of doing it. They have things like a comedian doing an improv class with you guys over Zoom, or a virtual escape room, or a wardrobe makeover, or stuff like that, right? So I think this is kind of cool. There are other products like this that are just a straight-up Zoom escape room. It's like 8 people enter, 1 hour goes on the clock, and the whole thing happens in Zoom. I think this is going to be a pretty big space that starts out looking like a toy but ends up being a pretty solid business. What do you think?

Sam Parr

Yeah, first of all, **LateCheckout.com**—or sorry, with **LateCheckout.com**—is Greg. It's mostly Sean's buddy. He's got a community design firm. Go to that website and look at what he's doing; it's really good. That guy is really good. **NiceBreak.fun**—I think it's cool. They're charging a lot of money, which I think is badass. So they charge $2,000 a month. Okay, so a grand a month gets you two nice breaks per month, and that's for companies that are 25 to 50. If you're okay, I understand how this works. Yeah, this could be a hit. I think this is great. This could totally be a hit. Can it be a huge VC thing? I don't know, but this could make tens of millions of dollars in subscriptions.

Shaan Puri

Revenue, exactly. And the other thing is, one way to think about problems like these or find opportunities is to go into the C-suite. So you say, "Okay, there's a CEO, there's a CMO, there's a CTO, CFO, CIO, whatever." You go through all of them. We were laughing because you were like, "What the hell is a CHRO?" So this is what a CHRO thinks about. They're the Chief People Officer, essentially, of a company. I kind of use this interchangeably; maybe there's some nuanced difference. Sorry to the three CHROs that listen to this podcast, I didn't mean to...

Sam Parr

what is the chr chief

Shaan Puri

Human Resources, I think, officer, right? So, they think about this stuff. They're like, "Okay, the whole workforce has just gone remote. We really care about what's called employee engagement," which just means how happy people are to work here. Are they going to leave? Is this a toxic work environment or not? So then they have this... One thing you could do is talk to these people and just sort of say, "What sucks? What's keeping you up at night? What are you stressing about?" You start to ask these questions, and at first, they won't give you a whole bunch. But then you say, "Alright, can you show me your budget for the year?" "Oh wow, you spend a lot of money on your people development. What does people development mean?" It's like, "Oh, that's corporate training and blah blah blah." "Oh interesting, who do you guys use for that?" You go look up those companies. Sometimes people ask, "How do you guys think of these things?" That's how we learn these things. We just start to sniff in these types of ways, and you start to learn about all these spaces that are outside of just your day-to-day worldview. So if you're out there as an entrepreneur trying to figure out where you can build a company, where there's... I don't want to just guess on demand. This is one way: you go talk to somebody who's in charge, you figure out what's stressing them out, what problems they need solved, and what language they use when they describe it. That's your landing page, that's your ad. Then you look at their budget and see if the money maps to the problem. If the money maps to the problem, you start to see, "Oh, okay." You ask them, "Hey, which budget line item is growing a lot year over year? Which line item was smaller last year and bigger this year?" Because that's the space where they're still looking for new solutions.

Sam Parr

You can do that for an individual as well. I think what you can do is: 1. Sign up for Mint or a similar service 2. Look at the categories of your spending 3. Analyze the trailing 12 months Then ask yourself, "Wait, what am I consistently spending money on?" Do this with 5 or 10 friends, and that's actually a great way to find a business idea. Doing this with businesses is far more profitable. You just go and look at their QuickBooks and say, "Alright, what's going on here? Where's all the money going to?" It's an awesome approach. That's actually kind of a cool business idea in itself, which is...

Shaan Puri

how do

Sam Parr

I see wallet share how do I what

Shaan Puri

Like wallet share... how do I see how wallet share these people have? These are moms in America. Where is their wallet going, right? What are they spending their time and money on? I think, you know, big brands like Procter and Gamble, they think about this a lot. They interview a ton of moms and say, "Oh, okay, you know, the mom controls this much of the household budget, you know, 70% or whatever." Then, within that, every month she's spending X% on groceries, Y% on household cleaners, this% on this, this% on that. And that's how they decide, "Okay, we need to invest our product development according to where the budget is," because that's how we make our money back.

Sam Parr

That's such an interesting way to do things. I guess you could do it with how many public companies there are. There are 2,000 public companies in America, so you could easily... 4.

Shaan Puri

I think there's like 4,000 something like that

Sam Parr

$4,000 - however many Michael actually said in the last episode. Let's say $4,000. You could easily do that with all their categories, right? You can't see line items, but you could see like G&A [General and Administrative expenses]. But you might be... that's kind of an interesting study.

Shaan Puri

Right, and you can do this with just media companies. How do media expenses look? Where are they allocating their funds? Where do they spend all their money? Which ones are changing over time? Where are things shifting? I think that's kind of an interesting signal that you can use at the company level, one division in a company, or even an individual person. I believe you can gain a lot of insights from that.

Sam Parr

I think that's a great idea. I think what we just said, like, "Did you make up that name 'wallet share,' or is that a thing?"

Shaan Puri

I think that's a term in general; it's a general term. But I've also seen this, by the way, in terms of the social networking space regarding time. So, WeChat, I think, or one of the Chinese companies, had this presentation I saw. You know, I'm sitting there trying to go through a Chinese presentation, so maybe someone lost their translation, but I got the general idea. What they want is an app for every minute of your day. China has all these super apps like WeChat. You can pay your house bills in it, and it's like WhatsApp. You can also subscribe to Netflix through it, you know, their version of Netflix. But it's also where you post photos and stuff like that. So, what they said was they took a person's day. They said, "Okay, a 15-year-old kid wakes up in the morning at this time. For the first 10 minutes of the day, what products are they using? What apps are they using?" They start to break it down minute by minute, basically looking for gaps. Today, we're taking up 4 hours of this person's time. If they're awake for 12 hours, how do we get 12 hours or 16 hours of mindshare from this person? Well, they watch movies at night, so we need an app for movies. During the day, they message their friends, so we need that. They need news, so they would get the news. Alright, cool, we're going to do news. That's how they think about it. Because how do they expand? If you're an ad-based business, you need attention. So, how do we get more attention? Well, I need more hours of the day from you. How do I get more hours of the day? Well, I have to figure out how you spend it today, and I have to insert myself there.

Sam Parr

I have a few friends that have worked on that at Facebook where they were like, "Alright, we have found out that if you put stickers on the photos, people spend like 5 seconds more." And they have like 50 people just working on stickers. I'm just like... [shakes head] These people hated their job.

Shaan Puri

Dude, one of my best friends... his job at Facebook was literally in the "Security and Safety and Privacy of Community" or something like that department. He's like, "I just try to make sure a dick doesn't show up on your Facebook feed." He says, "You wouldn't believe how many dicks are posted on Facebook every day." He asked me, "Have you ever seen a dick [on Facebook]?" and I was like, "No, never. Not one." He replied, "That's right." At least there's [that].

Sam Parr

that's cool you're like trying to protect people whatever that's cool but like

Shaan Puri

I'm mad. He's like, "I'm writing... I'm reviewing folders of images that are just being like 'dick, not a dick, dick, not a dick.'" Right? And then, like, also the same thing on the algorithm side. We're writing programs to train the computer to recognize this versus that, and he's like, "It's a cat and mouse game." [It's] always harder than you think. They're always one step ahead.

Sam Parr

Like stack of dimes or Sean... Sean's D? No, that's just about a dollar and pennies. They... but yeah, I mean at least that job is alright. But like, I can't imagine working at a Facebook or an Instagram and just... all I'm trying to do is suck more of people's time.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it is sad when I think about it. The best brains of our generation are basically sitting inside the giant slot machine, thinking, "Okay, how do we get the rat to come back again? How do we get her to come back more and more and spend more time?" That's the reality, and it's like: > "Hey, I get paid $500,000 a year to do this, and I get free lunch, and they do my laundry, and I get foot massages on Fridays." People think I'm joking, but those are all true things that happen.

Sam Parr

Before we wrap up, did you see that you're... So you and I are one for one of being turned into memes. You posted something like: > "I'm looking for a meme creator, $500 a month, no vacation" And you posted all those other funny stuff. People like, mocked you... A bunch of people mocked you. It's pretty great. I think hopefully they realize that we do this shit on purpose.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, or like it's not even... okay, I'd love to say I'm in on the joke. I knew this... like, yeah, I knew it was silly, but I didn't think it would turn to a... like, we...

Sam Parr

we know like we're self aware enough to know this is like like yeah mockable

Shaan Puri

I wrote, "No vacation. It's not even a real job." Of course, just look at what... this is a fake job posting. Not fake, but I'm basically just being like, "Hey, does someone want a side hustle for me by making a bunch of memes? You can make $500 a month just by making me a few memes every week." That's really what I was trying to say. But if I say that, it's only going to get like 100 likes. If I say it the way I said it—over the top—boom! I got thousands of likes. Then the thing spread, and a bunch of people got angry. Literally, Taylor Lorenz was like, "Why does this person not get sick leave?" I was like, "Because it's not..."

Sam Parr

a job feel worse

Shaan Puri

Just chilling. And so yeah, we're kind of doing this on purpose, but also I am just kind of a character. I don't... I'm just saying things, you know, as I think them, and then I move on with my life. And like, I win either way: - I win if you get mad - I win if you take it seriously and you apply It's... I win, I win no matter what. As long as I don't get completely canceled, I win.

Sam Parr

which might happen one day soon but could happen we'll have we'll have fun until then

Shaan Puri

And I will explain someday why I am hiring a personal meme god to do some memes for me. I will explain. Do you even have to?

Sam Parr

explain that why I mean there's nothing well there's something

Shaan Puri

There's actually a cool story around it, but it's not quite ready yet. The story will be cooler if I put the whole thing together and then explain it when it's ready. So that will come in, I don't know, a couple of months.

Sam Parr

and I guess you'll have to share some of the best ones you got

Shaan Puri

yes sir

Sam Parr

alright that's it