Shaan and Sam break down the early adopter mindset — the habit of leaning into strange behaviors and niche communities instead of dismissing them. They trace this idea through the origin stories of Twitch and Nike, and catalog emerging trends like breathwork, stem cell therapy, and gene editing that they think are following the same pattern.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host, co-founder Milk Road), Sam Parr (host, co-founder The Hustle)
Leaning Into Strange Behavior [00:00:00]
Shaan: I would also say there’s been a big lesson I’ve learned. Anytime you discover a group of people who are very interested in and living a lifestyle that is different than yours, it’s very easy initially to write it off and say, “Oh, that’s frivolous,” or “they’re weird,” or whatever — no matter what the category is.
Shaan: When I saw gamers and people who stream video games and watch other people playing video games, it was so strange to me. I remember making fun of this kid in college because I walked in on him and he was watching somebody else play a video game on a live stream. The guy was playing in Korea. And I was like, “You’re watching a dude in Korea play this video game? Why don’t you just play? Better yet, why don’t you get outside?” I made fun of him — and then years later I’m selling my company to Twitch, talking about how great this trend is, and he calls me like, “You motherf***er — you made fun of me for this ten years ago and now you’re on board.”
Shaan: That’s happened to me so many times in life that now I go the exact opposite way. I see somebody like you who says the same thing our other buddy said — “Maybe I should go to the Mayo Clinic and get these advanced scans done once a year.” And I think, “Huh. Maybe that’s something more people are going to want to do.” Why would he want to do this? Why are people choosing plant-based lifestyles? What is that all about?
Shaan: Now I lean in any time I discover these things. That’s become some of the best discoveries — either life changes I can make, or investments. It’s a great way to invest because you’re actually on the cutting edge of stuff. You’re in early, which is obviously super important.
Crossing the Chasm — The Bell Curve of Adoption [00:02:30]
Shaan: There’s a famous business book — I think it’s Crossing the Chasm — where he talks about this bell curve of people. In the beginning of the bell curve there are innovators, the people actually figuring things out. Then there are early adopters. Then early majority — the big chunk. Late majority — the other big chunk. And then there are the laggards, people who still have AOL email addresses and are driving around looking for Blockbusters.
Sam: You got the idea right but you’re butchering the names.
Shaan: Yeah, that’s basically it. And for a lot of things, I would say you are on the right side — you’re either an innovator or an early adopter. And I’m intentionally trying to go that way.
Being Wrong Made Me a Better Futurist [00:04:00]
Sam: I’m just not a futurist type of guy — or at least I wasn’t, because I’ve been so wrong. And I figured out the formula for it. The formula is: have an ego, make a prediction, be wrong like five times, and have it rubbed in your face. Boom — you’re a futurist.
Sam: I remember when the iPhone came out. I was like, “Who the f*** wants to read tiny text on a screen? Nobody’s going to watch a movie on this tiny square — that’s worse than an airplane headrest.” I was a junior in college. Nobody remembers this, but I remember being that wrong.
Sam: Snapchat — my username still has the word “test” in it because I was so certain. I was like, “This is stupid. This is just for kids and dick pics. It certainly won’t go beyond this.” Bitcoin — guys in my office were telling me about it back in 2012, 2013, and I was kind of laughing, saying, “Guys, let’s focus on something legit.” Now I’m like a bitcoin evangelist. Twitch — same thing, I was wrong about streaming.
Sam: I’ve been wrong so many times that I actually had to reassess and say: I’m not going to be a good technology entrepreneur or investor if I keep writing off big things as dumb and stupid early on. I need to go the exact opposite way. So I inverted. Now any time I see that same feeling — the “this is strange” feeling — I lean into curiosity. What’s making people want to do this? And that’s flipped the script for me.
The Twitch Origin Story [00:07:00]
Shaan: We had Justin or Emmett on at HustleCon — or on here — and they were talking about Justin.tv, which was the site before Twitch became a thing. Basically anyone could log in and create their own live TV channel. And Emmett — correct me if I’m wrong — I believe the story was there was a small corner of the site where guys were watching video games. Not a lot of people. Thousands of people. But they were spending a significant amount of time watching.
Sam: Right. And I don’t think it was even that data-driven at first — the data actually pointed against it. It was a small amount of traffic.
Shaan: They had a combination of two things working in their favor. Number one — the current thing wasn’t working. They were going to run out of money and fail, or they had to try something dramatically different. When you have nothing to lose, you play completely differently than when you feel like you have something to lose. That’s one of the greatest assets you can have.
Shaan: The things that were popular on the site were all illegal streams — live sports streams. They knew people want to watch this, but we can never build a business around it. So ninety percent of what people were doing on the site was a dead end.
Shaan: The two percent that worked — and the other key factor — was Emmett saying, “I personally like watching these.” He’s like, “I’m going to go with the ones I find most interesting.” And actually most of the company wanted to go work on the hotter, sexier idea, which was called Social Cam — basically instagram for video. Instagram was the hottest startup in Silicon Valley at the time, just photos. We’re going to do Instagram for video.
Sam: And they were able to instantly raise money, got tons of initial hype, press, and all the talented people in the company wanted to work there.
Shaan: Right. I talked to this guy Jacob, the OG designer at Twitch — he’s still there today. I asked him, “How’d you know to bet on Twitch instead of Social Cam?” He goes, “Oh no, dude, I wanted to be on Social Cam. They were just full. So they were like, ‘Go work on Emmett’s thing’ — Emmett’s his childhood friend. He said, ‘You’ve got to go to that one.’ And I was like, ‘Oh fine.’”
Shaan: So what seemed like the lesser idea — leaning into this really weird behavior where gamers were streaming themselves playing for eight hours a day — turned out to be the thing.
Finding the Next Thing: Niche Communities [00:11:00]
Shaan: My point is that there are these niche communities. I do it on online communities — particularly Reddit — but you can do it on Twitter too, or just type in any idea or any hobby and add the word “forum” and find these communities of people who are kind of freaks about something.
Shaan: For example — intermittent fasting. It’s everywhere now. But I remember about eight years ago, Business Insider wrote an article mocking a Microsoft executive for intermittent fasting. “What is this?” And yet there were communities online that had been talking about it forever.
Sam: They always make fun of Silicon Valley for stuff like that first. Coronavirus — VCs are so paranoid about the real world that they’re wearing masks to conferences. Guess what everybody’s doing now?
Shaan: Exactly. “Intermittent fasting — Silicon Valley’s latest craze, not eating till noon every day.” You know what Google engineers are doing? Media loves to make fun of it. Guess what — that’s what everybody’s going to be doing.
Trends That Are Next [00:13:00]
Shaan: Meditation was like that too. People made fun of it and then boom — it’s the new yoga.
Sam: What are some other things that are like that right now?
Shaan: Stem cell or blood platelet spinning — like, you have knee pain, so you go to Puerto Rico or Germany and get this blood spinning treatment, get stem cells injected in your knees, and you feel great. I think that’s coming.
Shaan: Gene editing is another one. Breathwork — I think breathwork is where meditation was ten years ago. I invested in this thing called Othership. They just launched their app. I use it every single day, religiously, because it makes you feel so good.
Shaan: I do it outside now because Huberman said to get sunlight on your eyes first thing in the morning. So I’m sitting in my driveway doing breathwork. Neighbors walk by walking their dogs — doing what feels like a very normal thing — and they see me doing breathing techniques on my driveway and they think I’m a nut. And I love it. I go louder as soon as somebody walks by. I want them to know they live next to somebody from the future.
The Nike Origin Story: Jogging Didn’t Used to Be a Thing [00:15:30]
Sam: There’s this guy named Arthur Lydiard — he’s dead now, but in the ’60s and ’70s he was a New Zealand track and field coach. He had runners like John Walker, Peter Snell, all these New Zealand guys who started winning the Olympics in the 1500 meters, 5K, and 10K. Everyone’s asking, “What are you doing with your runners?” He says, “We run 120 miles a week. Long distance, slow, and just a shitload of it.”
Sam: This one coach from Oregon got really interested. His name was Bill Bowerman. He was the track and field coach at University of Oregon. He goes over to New Zealand in the early 1970s to learn from Arthur Lydiard, comes back, and two things happen.
Sam: University of Oregon gets really good at track and field. And Bowerman starts making shoes for his runners so they can run a little faster. He calls that company Nike — starts it with another runner, Phil Knight.
Sam: The other thing that happens, and this is the part that gets me, is he starts talking about it to all his friends. He even writes a book — I believe it’s called The Joy of Jogging — about jogging. The idea of jogging wasn’t even a thing in the ’70s. People would literally ask, “Aren’t the police going to go after you?” Prior to the 1970s, people just didn’t go out and run for exercise. It wasn’t a thing.
Sam: And so there was this jogging craze of the ’70s, prior to that it simply wasn’t part of culture — and Bowerman created Nike to capitalize on it. That’s another example where a behavior that seemed completely strange became the default, and someone in early built something massive around it.