Cody Ko joins Shaan for a wide-ranging conversation about building a creative career from scratch — starting with his viral iOS app iCapThat at Duke, grinding through Vine, and scaling to tens of millions of YouTube views. They cover the music behind Tiny Meat Gang, the business side of being a creator, what it was like to end up at Elon Musk’s house at 3am with Post Malone, and how endurance racing pulled Cody out of a dark period post-COVID.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host, not present), Cody Ko (guest, YouTuber / comedian / musician)
Introduction [00:00:00]
Shaan: By the way, I listen — this is like one of my favorite podcasts.
Cody: Oh hell yeah. So it’s an honor to be on it, right? Because it’s one of two that I listen to.
Shaan: Yeah, obviously. But yeah, they’re good too. I like them too.
Shaan: So you guys just switched between us and How I Built This? You listen to both, so you kind of know the vibe. I invited you to come on. Did you think about like what’s gonna happen here? Because it’s different than our normal episodes — Sam’s not here.
Cody: Yeah.
Shaan: You’re the cool entertainment guy and we’re usually like nerdy tech guys. What did you think was gonna happen?
Cody: I don’t know. But being the guest on a podcast is so much better than being the host of one. Because like — the pressure’s on you. I can just sit here and answer questions, you know?
Shaan: Good. Okay. Well that’s what we’re gonna do. But the interesting thing is you actually started as kind of a nerdy tech guy too.
Cody: I did. Yeah.
Shaan: You were an iOS dev, right?
Cody: Yep.
The iCapThat Origin Story [00:01:00]
Shaan: Let’s start there. The origin story is you go to Duke, and you make a viral app at one point — during college?
Cody: During college, yeah.
Shaan: What did it actually do? I know it was called iCapThat?
Cody: Yeah, iCapThat. Very funny name, by the way.
Shaan: Yeah.
Cody: So I was a senior in college, and I was on the diving team all four years. In the summers I was just training, so I never did an internship. I didn’t have any resume by the time I was a senior, and all my peers were doing internships and had jobs lined up for graduation. I had nothing. That kind of scared me because I’m Canadian and I wanted to stay in the States, so I needed a visa — which meant I needed a job — and I just needed money for when I graduated.
I was studying computer science at the time. They didn’t have an iOS class, but I was obsessed with my phone and I really wanted to know how to make an app. So I bought a book and taught myself. The way you really teach yourself something is by thinking of a project and trying to make it come to life. That was my project.
There was one app that did something similar but it was paid, and I was like, “Oh this is a perfect opportunity because it’s not a hard idea.”
Shaan: What was it? You’re captioning photos — like a meme generator?
Cody: Yeah, basically. You’d select a picture from your library or take a picture, and it had an internal database of funny captions that we all just got drunk and came up with. It would automatically apply one to the picture in white font. But the captions were general enough that people thought there was AI going on.
Shaan: Like what’s an example?
Cody: Like a stupid one would be — you take a picture of someone and it’d be like “addicted to cocaine” or something. And people would appreciate it — “Oh, he does look like a cokehead.” So it worked.
The way I got it to spread: it kept getting rejected by the Apple review board for being inappropriate. I was like, “I can’t make this app clean because then it’s not funny.” So I wrote some code where the internal database was timed. I knew the review process took about a week, so after seven days it would release all the dirty captions. I got through the Apple review system.
Shaan: Amazing.
Cody: And then everyone was like, “Oh my God, this app is so wild.” It just blew up. It was the number one app in the App Store — above eBay and Google. And I paid zero dollars for marketing.
I’m on campus like, “I don’t know what to do, because I know I should be making money from this but I’m not.” I had no idea how to monetize. I talked to my friend and he was like, “Dude, you should sell ads.” And I was like, “I don’t even know how to do that.”
Shaan: And you knew your shelf life — like, every day at the top is great, but it might not be the case a hundred days from now.
Cody: Exactly. When you blow up that fast, the graph goes the other way just as quick. So I was stressing about what to do when I got an email from a CEO of a startup in Palo Alto. He was like, “Hey, I saw your app. I love it. I want to hire you and buy the app.”
Shaan: Perfect.
Cody: Which was cool for me because growing up, being obsessed with Apple and Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley was like a dream. And this company — a mobile ad SDK company — needed my app to drive traffic through their network. I needed money and a job. Pretty mutually beneficial. They acquired it. I think it was for 50K — half cash, half stock.
Shaan: Nice lump sum to get an apartment and furniture.
Cody: Yeah, exactly. And then my first job was to make iCapThat Plus, which was the paid version. We launched it and immediately it made 200 grand.
Shaan: Damn.
Cody: I know. I was like, “Damn it.” I should have just done this myself.
Shaan: You’re early to the plus train, but there wasn’t Apple Plus yet.
Cody: Yeah, I hadn’t patented it actually. So then we made iCapThat 2, then iCapThat 2 Plus, and we just milked the thing. How much do you think the whole thing made? Like half a million bucks or something? But then it died.
Shaan: So you had that run — made something, it succeeded, kind of failed but also succeeded. Where was your head at? Did you think, “I could just do this again”?
Cody: It was my first little taste of independent success, so that definitely gave me some courage. My plan was: I’ll stay at this company and work my ass off and try to make the stock worth something. That didn’t happen. But it gave me my first taste of momentum — where something’s working and the graph is going up and to the right and you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m onto something.”
Vine and the Grind to an Audience [00:07:30]
Shaan: And then you tasted that again when you started doing content, right? Vine was the next time you hit that kind of crazy virality?
Cody: Actually, everything since Vine has been more linear. I’ve never blown up out of nowhere — like this year it was Alex Earl, or the octopus kid —
Shaan: He sounds promising. What is that?
Cody: He’s really funny. But for me it was always a grind. I had to build an audience literally by downloading Vine and making videos every single day. I was actually pretty late — the whole first class of famous Viners, like KingBach, Brittany Furlan — they were already people. So when I downloaded it I wasn’t trying to become somebody. I was just keeping tabs on new apps since I worked on a social media app for that company.
Shaan: Like a Snapchat for video?
Cody: Basically. Then Snapchat for video actually came out, so I was like, “Damn it.” And Vine came out so I downloaded it and started playing around. I lived alone in Palo Alto at 21, which has the most boring life imaginable. So I’d get home from work and just start making videos. I was flexing my creative muscle for the first time in a while.
Every day I made more videos. Getting involved in the community, making online friends with other people getting some traction. Then I started showing up on the popular page, people recognized my face. I just kept doing it — genuinely didn’t try to make it a job. Programming was my job; this was my hobby. I treated it like an art. I think people liked the sincerity behind it.
Shaan: What do you mean? Like if you compare people trying really hard to become famous on Vine versus what you were doing — what was different?
Cody: Selling out was a much more obvious and binary thing back then. Now it’s completely expected — someone takes off, they do ad reads, and their fans are like, “Yeah, get the bag, let’s go.” Back then it was different. And also six seconds is really hard to sneak something in — you can’t even say “get the bag.” So it was pretty obvious when people started making money and fans would be like, “You sold out.”
I think it helped that I had an actual job on the side making decent money. I had no incentive to try to monetize it.
Shaan: You got to a couple million followers on Vine?
Cody: Yeah, I think like three or four. Maybe two — I don’t know exactly.
Shaan: What happened to Vine?
Cody: I think it was a little ahead of its time. If it came out five years later I think it would have worked. But Twitter bought it before they launched it, launched it, and it worked — but then the traffic started tapering off. Twitter was having a really hard time monetizing, and I think there was some famous meeting where creators were like, “We want money,” and Twitter was like, “We don’t have it.” And then they just shut the whole thing down instead.
Breakout Moments on YouTube [00:13:00]
Shaan: Okay, so you’ve been doing content — podcast, YouTube — for almost ten years. You said it was linear. What were the breakout moments? Things you remember where you were like, “Something just changed”?
Cody: I remember the first time I hit a million views overnight. It was a “That’s Cringe” video — one of the most-viewed series on my channel. We’d done a couple and they seemed to be working, but it wasn’t apparent how much more people liked them than my other stuff. Then we posted the third or fourth one and I woke up to a million views. I was like, “Oh my God.” That was unfathomable to me even five months earlier — those numbers just didn’t make sense.
Another one was when Noel and I went on tour for the first time — and the second time — and the tickets just sold out. That was a moment where I was like, “I can’t believe this is converting into real-world sales. People want to come to a venue and see us in person.”
Shaan: That’s always a weirdly sobering thing. What do you guys do at those live shows? Because we did two live shows this year and both times people showed up, which was shocking, and then we were like… “What do they want? Do they want us to just do the podcast in front of them?”
Cody: I know. That’s boring. Our first couple shows were just on-stage like podcasts because we didn’t really know what else to do. But you guys are funny — so it kind of works like a comedy show.
After that we did another tour and we wrote a show. We started writing songs. It became like a third music, a third live “That’s Cringe” that we did on stage, and a third stand-up comedy — because Noel was a stand-up before we started doing anything together.
Shaan: In my research I saw a video of you doing stand-up.
Cody: Oh God. Please. Please do not look that up. I do not want to see that on my own channel.
Shaan: What’s it like doing stand-up?
Cody: Horrifying. The thing is, I DJ now, and I find myself way more comfortable with that because it’s not just you and the mic and the audience. There’s something in between — it’s music, there’s a buffer.
For the live shows, by the end of the tour we’d done like a hundred shows worldwide and the show was literally word for word scripted and memorized. When you do it that many times it becomes the same show, but you alter it a little each time — if something gets a laugh you add that back for the next one. It evolves.
Samir’s Prediction: Cody Could Be a Billionaire [00:18:00]
Shaan: We had Samir from Colin and Samir in here yesterday, and I asked him — “What three creators do you see that could become billionaires?” He said Mr. Beast, Dude Perfect or something like that… and then he said you.
Cody: No way.
Shaan: Yeah. I was like, “That’s amazing.” He named fifty other YouTubers during the episode that I’d never heard of — I’m not deep in YouTube culture — and I was like, “He’s coming in here tomorrow, I’m gonna tell him this and see how he reacts.”
Cody: I’m definitely surprised.
Shaan: He said it’s not that you’re going to be one — he said it’s like, it’s up to you. He was like, “They totally can, if they choose to optimize in that direction. They have the audience, the intelligence, and the capability. Or they might take their energy in a different direction.”
Cody: Yeah.
Shaan: Also — I was telling the team before you walked in — I feel like you and Noel could do a Harold and Kumar-type movie. Like that’s your guys’ wheelhouse.
Cody: We are working on something, I can’t really say too much about it. But I’m a believer in that direction — I think it’d be a lot of fun.
Shaan: I had a funny aside. When I was younger I acted in a movie as a kid actor, and my older brother in the movie was Kal Penn. So he called me one day — I didn’t even know what to say, like, “What are you doing now?” He was like, “Oh, I’m filming Harold and Kumar 2: White Castle.” I didn’t know what White Castle was where I was from, so I thought it was a fantasy movie. I went to school and told my friends, “Yeah, my older brother’s going to some fantasy epic castle thing.”
Cody: He was just checking in on you?
Shaan: Yeah, he was just saying — you know, when you’re on a set you sit there for nine hours waiting for them to line up the shot, do five minutes of acting, then sit again. So he was just calling to say what’s good.
He actually came to speak at Duke, and I went up on stage and was like, “I look totally different than when I was eleven.”
Cody: That’s really funny.
Shaan: He seems like a nice guy.
Cody: Ultra nice. Really nice guy. What I really like about him is he just grinded super hard at a time when there were almost no Indian actors. The only Indian acting jobs he could get were like — “you’re the convenience store guy, thick accent.” I remember talking to him on set and I was like, “What are you gonna do after this?” He’s like, “I’ve been talking to my agent. They just want me to be the stereotypical Indian guy. So I’m just gonna wait until I get a real role. I have no money. I’m just gonna risk it all and grind through this period until I get there.”
Shaan: Yeah — I took an acting class one time. They were talking about leaning into your typecast at the beginning of your career. We did this exercise where we’d all write in a journal what we thought everyone else’s typecast was, and then reveal them one by one. Gets to me — “influencer, cokehead, DJ, sells coke in the bathroom.” Like five minutes of just the most offensive stuff.
Cody: You looked like a douchebag.
Shaan: I guess that’s what it was. But I’m an influencer and a DJ now, so I don’t know — they nailed it.
Cody: Kal Penn actually had a similar thing. He got a call — “Oh yeah, I’m gonna be on CSI” — and they’re like, “CSI, there’s a terrorist plot.” He was like, “Come on.” So what he did was he changed his name. His name is actually Kalpen Modi. He wasn’t getting auditions for the roles he wanted, so he split his first name and created a fake name. Started getting calls. He’d show up, they’d see he’s not white, and they’d be like, “Okay, go ahead and read the role.”
The funny thing is one of the bigger roles he got was the Indian doctor on House. Still kind of stereotypical, but he split the difference.
Getting Good: Reps Over Tricks [00:24:30]
Shaan: Did you have any intentional process for getting better at what you do? Like, do you hire coaches, read books, study people who are already good?
Cody: I think a lot of the time, if I’m thinking about what makes a good podcast or a good YouTube video or a good song, I’ll consume a lot of it and think about it a lot. But the number one thing is just to do it. You learn by doing. That’s how I’ve gotten good — reps over time.
If you go listen to my first episode of my podcast, it was complete garbage. I’ve gotten better through the years. I’m still not that great at it, but it’s improved. And I’m going through that now with music production too — at the beginning stage where everything I make is a little bit better each time.
Learning to enjoy that zero-to-one phase, leaning into the joy of it — that’s really important.
Shaan: What’s something you figured out with “That’s Cringe” specifically? You used to do it this way, then figured this out and made it better?
Cody: I don’t know if it’s anything conscious — it’s mostly stuff you just innately pick up when you do things over and over. You read comments, think about what people are reacting to. But like — the first time we did a video like that, we were riffing and stepping over each other’s lines and punchlines. The next time we got a little better at letting each other speak and breathe.
That’s one thing Noel and I are really good at now — we never speak over each other. We never interrupt. We’re really good at riffing because we’re just conscious of what the audience wants. No one likes to hear people interrupting and stepping all over each other’s jokes.
Shaan: I like that answer even though I wanted you to say there was a trick. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn so many times — there really isn’t the trick. It’s reps. And caring.
Cody: And there’s so much joy in getting a little better at something every time and seeing a little evidence of it — you know, a few comments like, “Wow, this was better than the last one.” That drives me. I love that feeling.
Shaan: We had Mark Manson in here the day before and he said — “People think happiness comes from not having problems. Happiness comes from solving problems.” And the better version of that is: if you feel like you chose that problem. Like with you doing 50-mile races, 100-mile races — you’re choosing a set of problems that you’re gonna struggle with but get satisfaction from overcoming.
Right now what are those for you? The endurance stuff? The business stuff?
Cody: Yes, definitely both.
The Business Side: Creator Brands [00:28:30]
Shaan: Let’s talk about the business stuff. A lot of creators are building brands off their style. Are you doing any of that?
Cody: I am. I’m developing something I’m gonna launch in the fall. For me it was always kind of difficult. I’d see people doing it and think — the money that companies are paying us to promote their stuff, like ExpressVPN for example, they’ve probably paid us an insane amount over the years. But their ROI must be way higher, otherwise they’d be crazy to re-buy ads year after year. So I’m like, why don’t we just own something we’re promoting? Then we see all the upside.
But it always killed me trying to think of the right thing. I didn’t want to force anything on my audience. Comedy is a hard thing to align with a product because it’s not like fitness or cooking where there are products people use every day.
When I started doing the endurance stuff, I was like — oh, there’s a lot I’m doing every day that’s natural for me to promote.
Shaan: Like Cody’s Run Club?
Cody: Yeah. This is kind of my first product in this direction. I wanted to make something more fitness-focused. This is the first time I’ve done running shorts, for example.
Shaan: When you’re promoting it, are you leaning into the humor or trying to be more serious?
Cody: That’s something I still battle with. Comedy is a very easy crutch because I like making fun of myself. And if I’m self-conscious about something, it’s like, “Oh, I was just joking.” It’s hard for me to sit in a studio and make a proper fitness video because I’m not that guy. I’m just doing endurance races because I like the challenge. So I blend the two — that video where I’m on the bike and the guy’s spraying mist in my face to look like I’m sweating — I mean, that’s kind of perfect for me.
So this is my first time generating a product in the fitness lane, and then I’m gonna do something else I think will be a little bigger.
Shaan: It’d be funny if you were sort of the anti-David Goggins — just went the complete other way. Just stay soft. Sign off with something so incredibly soft.
Jesse Itzler, Living With a SEAL, and Running [00:32:00]
Shaan: Have you read Living With a Seal?
Cody: No.
Shaan: It’s a great book. There’s an entrepreneur named Jesse Itzler — do you know him?
Cody: No.
Shaan: He married the woman who created Spanx. He started off as a white rapper, then worked at a record label. His intern was this guy who was trying to be hard — it was 50 Cent. 50 Cent was his intern, goes off and blows up. So Jesse’s like, “Okay, that guy had it. What can I do?” He started creating jingles — rap jingles. He created the Knicks theme song, sports jingles for companies. Sells that company for something like four million dollars.
Then after selling, he met a rich guy who took him on a private jet. They were like, “This is amazing. We can’t afford a jet, but what if we could just own, like, a few rides? A piece of a jet?” So they created that and ended up selling it to NetJets, which was owned by Warren Buffett. Huge sale.
Now he owns a piece of an NBA team, invested early in Zico coconut water — because he’s an endurance athlete and he’s like, “The running community loves coconut water, I think mainstream will too.” Found a small brand, put money in, they ended up selling it to Coke.
But the point of the book is — he was at some race in Death Valley, like the hardest race. He sees this huge guy running by himself, bleeding, just running. That’s David Goggins, before anyone knew who he was. Jesse meets him and is like, “Hey, I want to run this race next year. Will you train me? Will you live in my house for 30 days?” And he did. Then a few years later Jesse wrote a book about it — called it “Living With a SEAL,” never mentions Goggins’ name, but this character is just hard as hell. He’d wake Jesse up at 3am: “Wake up. Let’s go. We’re running again.”
Cody: I gotta read that.
Shaan: It’s a great read. Why do you do the endurance stuff?
Cody: My parents did it growing up, so it’s kind of in my blood. They raised us going on bike trips all the time. We’d see them do these incredible feats of fitness. I was an athlete in college, and when I graduated I was like, “I need something to stay in shape.” Running seemed like the most natural thing. And once you do three miles you’re like, “I think I can do five.” You get addicted to it.
Then my younger sister signed up for an Ironman and did it, and I was like, “Damn it, she did that before me.” So I signed up, did one, and through that I was going through a pretty dark period right after COVID. Training for the ultramarathon and then the Ironman, I kind of refound my confidence and my happiness. Now it’s something I want to make a permanent part of my life. I started the training channel, and I’m planning more things — the New York Marathon, and then a 100-something mile ultra I’m trying to do.
Tiny Meat Gang and the Music [00:38:30]
Shaan: What about the music videos you guys do? They’re amazing, and almost like too amazing. Where did that come from? Why is it that good?
Cody: A lot of the stuff I’ve done — I’m the kind of person to look at a pipe dream and say, “It would be really cool to do that,” and then actually try. I believe everyone is capable of most things. I’m pretty good at not turning myself down at the beginning.
During that dark period I lost that confidence. If I thought of something I’d revert to, “No, you couldn’t accomplish that.” But with music — it’d be cool to go online and say, “I have a new song out.” I never played instruments besides drums growing up, wasn’t really musically inclined. Had a good sense of rhythm and loved music. And I was like, “Why can’t it be for me?”
So I downloaded FL Studio, made a beat, and invited Noel over for a video — because he used to rap in high school. I said, “I made this beat, can you just rap over it and we’ll make a funny song for the end of this video?” It took a little convincing because he was like, “I closed this chapter of my life.” But he came over, put a verse down, I recorded mine, and we made this horrible song called “Keep Your Dick Fat.”
Shaan: That’s still up?
Cody: Yes. My first beat ever. Horrible. But comedy is a nice crutch — you’re bad but it’s funny, so people don’t put too much pressure on you.
After we released it, we shot a music video using a friend who was a DP. We’re like, “This is a fun thing — doing something higher production value.” Then I got a DM from a producer in LA named Diamond Pistols, who’s now a fantastic friend. He’s like, “Hey, I’m a producer. Let me produce your next song — this is really funny.” We showed up at his place and made a song called “Super Zan” in a day.
Shaan: How do you make a song? You just get there and…?
Cody: If you’re working with a good producer, they ask what you want to make. Usually you listen to music together, find some inspiration. We didn’t really have anything, so he started making a beat, we wrote some lyrics. At the time Xanax was the big thing — Lil Pump and all those guys were talking about it — so we made a song called “Super Zan” where it doesn’t make any sense because we don’t actually know what mainstream rap lyrics mean. We’re just hanging on to trending references.
Then we made the video, Noel called in a bunch of favors, we got a horse. At the time that was a lot of money for us. A lot of it was done on favors because people liked us — “a paid actress but a friend, someone who had a horse, paid them 500 bucks.”
Then we released it on Spotify, got a lot of streams because people watched the video since it was funny. We did an EP, then signed with Arista. Two songs with them — “Broke Bitch” and “Walkman,” which has like 80 or 90 million streams. Almost certified gold.
Shaan: That’s funny as a flex — “We went gold.”
Cody: Exactly. Yeah, I might steal that. I’m funny too.
Constructive Criticism on MFM’s Cold Opens [00:44:00]
Shaan: Okay, one of my questions was — am I funny and how do I get funnier?
Cody: You’re definitely funny. I chuckle. I’ll give you some constructive criticism from a listener, from a fan of the show: you need better cold opens.
Shaan: Agreed.
Cody: A lot of times you use the wrong moments. You should use the funnier moments.
Shaan: It might be even dumber than that — we just come from a different world. Like, oh, you should actually care about this, you should run a process that looks at the feedback and the data and makes it better. Watch it together and be like, what could we do better? We’ve never done that.
Cody: Yeah, but you should. The cold open is such a great opportunity for a laugh right before the smash cut to the intro. It’s such a beautiful moment. So we tend to take our cold opens seriously — we need a good laugh right at the beginning of the show so when someone turns it on they’re like, “Huh, I knew I liked this show. One more week.”
Shaan: You stick around for ten more minutes.
Cody: Exactly.
Frozen S’mores and Business Pitches [00:45:30]
Shaan: I had a section for you where I was going to pitch you some ideas.
Cody: Oh yeah, okay.
Shaan: We had one before you walked in — Frozen S’mores. Why isn’t there something called Frozen S’mores? Why me though?
Cody: Well, we have the idea of right before you arrived — and I was like, “I gotta ask Cody about Frozen S’mores potential.”
Shaan: So here’s how this came about. I was in the studio and I was like, “I want to buy an ice cream truck and turn it into a podcast studio and roll it up to whoever I want to record with.” Then Ben was like, “Well, we gotta create an ice cream brand if we’re gonna do that.” And then yeah — Frozen S’mores.
Cody: Okay. It’s a s’more. I see the chocolate, the marshmallows, vanilla ice cream. That’s idea number one. I like that.
Shaan: Good. Marshmallows are my least favorite part of s’mores though.
Cody: Agreed. Agreed.
Shaan: Okay, next one — let’s make a Netflix show. Business unscripted category. So Shark Tank is a great show. People took that format and remixed it — The Voice, America’s Got Talent, The Masked Singer. People like the amateur business thing. There’s not really another remixed version of Shark Tank. What if we did one for creators? People come in and pitch their channel or TikTok idea.
Cody: I like it. I’ve heard someone doing that actually — it’s not the first time I’ve heard the idea — but it’s awesome. How would it work?
Shaan: They come in, you’ve got successful creators as the judges. What does the contestant get?
Cody: Money to fund their idea?
Shaan: And as a judge you’d be like, “Hey, now I get 10% — I’m your manager.” In the future, yeah.
Cody: Okay, I’m in.
Shaan: Third idea — app startup. You already did iCapThat, iCapThat Plus, iCapThat 2, iCapThat 2 Plus. Have you had any other viral app ideas you haven’t pursued?
Cody: I had one — it was an app where you could figure out where to buy Frozen S’mores.
Shaan: Yes! But then I was like, wait, someone has to invent them first. Then I’ll make the app.
Shaan: Also — you were almost a part of Cameo. Your friends were building it in your living room.
Cody: I could have been in at the beginning. They were literally making it in my living room and I was like, “Okay guys, cool.” Then I went and recorded a YouTube video. I thought that was cooler. And then it blew up. I invested in the Series A, but still — they were building it beside me and I didn’t notice.
Shaan: Any pain points or opportunities you’ve seen as a creator that a business-minded person should go after?
Cody: AI has kind of revolutionized things. There’s a lot of potential to help creators — whether it’s with thumbnails, or a title. I’ve noticed people using AI to make thumbnails stand out in crazy ways. A lot of times they’ll make it look a little bit cartoony but blend it with the original, so it’s not obvious but it’s eye-catching. You’re like, “Something’s weird about that thumbnail.” And that’s what it takes — people think good thumbnails are about contrast and colors, but a lot of times that just blends in. You just want to look different.
I remember in history class at Duke learning that Hitler did this — all the posters at the time were colored, and all his marketing was done in black and white, because it was just contrast to everything else. So take a page out of Hitler’s book on thumbnails.
Shaan: What do you think about for podcasting?
Cody: I think the most obvious thing is training AI on how you speak — feeding it the transcript of 500 episodes — and having it write the ads in your own voice. Then synthesizing your voice to actually read the ads, so you don’t record anything. Eventually just doing the whole podcast. The ad thing is so obvious it should happen right away.
Shaan: Has anyone ever sent you a link of yourself doing an ad?
Cody: Yeah. This company reached out — I think they were looking for investment. I didn’t reply to the first email, so the second one they’re like, “By the way, here’s your voice.” It was an app where you could call Elon or whoever and have a conversation with them on your computer speaker. So we called me on the podcast — both of us just talked with me — and it was so scary.
Shaan: Wow.
Cody: I was like, “Our job is over. We’re not gonna have this job in a year.”
Partying With Elon: The Post Malone Story [00:55:00]
Shaan: You met Elon, right? You went to his house?
Cody: I partied with him one time. How does that even happen?
Shaan: Tell me everything.
Cody: So this was the first time I ever met Post Malone. We’re good friends now — I love the guy. Whenever he hits me up I’m down to hang. But the first time he DMed me, he hit me up on Twitter and was like, “Hey” — or something like, “I love your videos.” I was a huge fan of his music so I was thrilled. Then he was like, “I’m flying back from Australia in three days, let’s get drinks.”
I think I was at Kelsey’s family dinner at the time, and he was like, “I’m back in town, let’s meet at the Rainbow Bar in an hour.” I was like, “All right guys, I gotta go. Sorry.”
Shaan: You dipped from the family dinner.
Cody: We went, met up with him at the Rainbow Room. Got drunk — we were drinking lemon drops. Just this surreal experience. He has the same sense of humor so we’re joking around, riffing, having a great time. And then he looks at his phone and he’s like, “Elon’s been texting me.” We’re like, “Sure, yeah, totally” — thinking it’s a joke. Then he showed us his phone. Elon Musk: “Come over.” And we’re like…
He was like, “Should we go over to his house?” And we were like, “I mean, yeah.”
So he got in cars and drove to his house. We got to his house and Elon and Grimes are standing on the driveway with lanterns.
Shaan: What?! That’s insane.
Cody: I swear to God it was like a dream. The whole thing. It was the weirdest night of all time.
Shaan: Was it a thousand people or just you guys?
Cody: Like ten people. Not even. It was Post’s crew plus us — some hangers-on — and then Elon, Grimes, and maybe two other people. A couple of producers.
We’re all sitting around outside — around a fire pit, some ledge, sporadic chairs — and it’s like two or three in the morning. Post and Elon are talking, Elon’s nursing a glass of whiskey. I remember thinking: this house has no furniture, which is really weird. Someone said, “This is his party house. His family house is across the street.” I was like, oh — that makes sense. Billionaire things. I’d have a party house.
Eventually it was like 4am and I was like, “Okay, I gotta go home.” We go downstairs, can’t figure out which door leads out. I was like, “I don’t want to open a random door and find a spaceship.” So I go back upstairs, lean around the corner — Elon and Grimes are making out. I was like, “Okay, I’m not gonna interrupt that.” So we went downstairs, found the door.
Then we’re both sitting on the curb afterward just looking up like, “What the hell. No one’s gonna believe this.” It was crazy.
Shaan: What’s he like?
Cody: He was nice. I was pretty drunk, so my memory is a little foggy. But I remember him saying some things that were like — okay, he clearly thinks a little differently about things.
Shaan: What was your headspace meeting him? Because whenever I meet celebrities I make a complete ass out of myself.
Cody: I think it was one of those things where we weren’t invited — it was Post that was invited. So Elon really wanted to get to know Post, and they were talking and we were sitting beside them just kind of going, “Yeah, yeah, totally, I agree.” We were trying to not be a nuisance.
Shaan: That’s a better mentality. That’s my new mentality with celebrities — just be there, don’t be a nuisance, don’t make people wish you weren’t there. That’s the new win.
Cody: Exactly. Because my win used to be like, “We’re best friends after this.” So what I’d do is try to just turn him on somehow — not a good approach.
Shaan: Yeah.
Cody: I was too scared, honestly.
Wrap-Up [01:01:00]
Shaan: This was fun. Thanks for coming on.
Cody: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me.
Shaan: Appreciate it.