Sam and Shaan break down the mechanics of going viral. Shaan shares his emotion-first writing template — seven target emotions including LOL, WTF, AWE, and “finally someone said it.” They walk through the recaptcha and Duolingo origin story as a case study in “wow this guy’s crazy” virality. Key lessons: start with the emotion, make the familiar strange, and editing is the magic.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Emotion-First Template [00:00:00]
Sam: You built the Hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. You’re a writer, you have a process for sniffing out stuff that’s going to go viral. For me, I’m not really a writer — I’m just trying to figure it out.
Shaan: I think you and I are quite similar. It’s both born and learned. You’ve tried it more, so your hit rate is higher. I went from zero to 120,000 Twitter followers in basically six months, so something was working.
Here’s how it happened. A high-profile VC called me out of nowhere, said I seemed interesting on Twitter. We talked, and then they asked: “What do you think of Clubhouse?” They’d looked at investing and were second-guessing the pass.
I just went on this rant on the phone — it just came out. Without thinking, I explained exactly why I thought it was going to struggle. They said: “Wow, that was amazing.” And I thought: I should have written that down.
So I hung up, went to my computer, and typed the whole thing out. Then I took your tip — stepped away for an hour, came back, and edited for about 30 minutes.
Sam: Editing is the magic. Doesn’t matter if it’s a viral tweet or a good email. Write drunk, edit sober.
Shaan: There’s actually science behind it. Doing something really hard, stepping away, then coming back — the brain relaxes and becomes creative in a new way. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes.
But there’s another part — something I’ve been doing that I think is new. Before I write anything now, I have a template at the top of every page. Seven lines asking: what reaction is this meant to get?
The seven emotions:
- LOL — this is meant to be really funny
- WTF — this is unjust, people are pissed off, dude what the hell
- AWW — something really cute
- AWE — something awesome, like wow, that’s amazing
- WAIT — genuinely useful, practical information
- FINALLY — finally someone said it
- TOUCHING — heartwarming, hard to pull off
I actually learned this from a company called Rubber Republic that made viral videos. They had a search engine where you searched by one of these emotions and it pulled up viral videos built around that feeling.
Sam: I do the same thing. I start with the emotion, then the package, then the headline, then the preview image — and work backwards from there.
The “Finally Someone Said It” Category [00:05:00]
Shaan: Certain emotions get more shares. Creating sadness doesn’t get shares. Creating outrage does. With small tweaks you can make something sad outrageous — and that gets far more traction.
The one I had for the Clubhouse post was a new emotion: “finally someone said it.” It’s its own genre. I thought it might go WTF — like, dude, this guy’s a jerk, why is he predicting failure? But I also thought it would go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking but were afraid to say, they will share it because they agree with your opinion.
The psychology: when you recognize something that you felt but weren’t sure others felt, you share it. You’re not saying “wow, he’s so right” — you’re saying “I’m right, read this, this proves I’m right.” It’s a subtle difference.
Sam: It’s the same with location. If someone says “you know you’re a San Francisco bro if…” you think: that’s directed at me specifically. The emotion you’ve evoked is: finally, I didn’t think I was the only one.
The ReCAPTCHA and Duolingo Story [00:09:00]
Shaan: I always try to find the one fact or one line that catches my attention. I was doing research yesterday on reCAPTCHA — you know, the thing where you click all the traffic lights or all the fire hydrants.
I saw a meme of the reCAPTCHA grid with a traffic light in one of the squares, but only the tiniest corner of it is there, and it shows a guy in a suit sweating like crazy: should I click this or not? And that’s one of those relatable moments — I almost feel that way every time.
But do you want to know where reCAPTCHA actually came from?
The original CAPTCHA was letters. Those fuzzy, hard-to-read letters were actually scanned book pages. Computers in the early days couldn’t convert wrinkled, rounded book pages to text — a human eye could. So they outsourced the work to you while you signed up for a website. The project ended up transcribing millions of books.
Then reCAPTCHA became image classification — for self-driving cars. We need to know: is this a bus? So they let humans classify images while signing up for things.
The inventor of reCAPTCHA is a guy named Luis von Ahn. He did both the book one and the image one. Then he started Duolingo. And when he started Duolingo, part of the idea was: when you’re learning a language, you’re actually translating content that a third-party service is paying for.
Sam: The exact emotion you evoked when you told me that was: this guy’s crazy. That is exactly the emotion.
Shaan: That’s what I was trying to evoke. I can tell that story in probably five tweets and I bet there’s a three-in-ten chance it has legs. It checks all the boxes.
The other part: I took something familiar — everyone’s filled out one of those — and told you the uncommon truth around it. Take something really recognizable and give them the hidden angle. That’s the combo.
Making the Familiar Strange [00:13:00]
Sam: Tom Cruise’s real name isn’t Tom Cruise. His middle name is Cruz, and his last name is Mapother. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV. And he changed it to Tom Cruise — a total movie star name, makes complete sense that he did it.
Shaan: That one doesn’t have as much shock factor, so it won’t go super viral, but it’ll get a lot of likes. The closer you can get to the surprise gap — between what I thought I knew and what’s real — the more shares you get.
Sam: If you care about this stuff, I recommend Made to Stick and Contagious by Jonah Berger. Made to Stick is about how to say something so people remember it. Contagious is a Wharton professor’s breakdown of how to make things spread.