Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en 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 like this is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog post you guys wrote and 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 to i mean you you you have the it factor i think that um i think you can study and how to do it i think that you can just be born with the skill set um i think you and i are quite similar in that it’s both born or we we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft right i think you’ve tried it a lot more and therefore your hit rate i think is is higher i personally i just think that but um the question i was going to do i mean dude you got to 120 000 followers on twitter in like basically six months yeah that’s true um so i wanted to share so when i uh so the way this this came about because i think this is ultimately more interesting right the rant is kind of interesting but the how this happened i think for people who are listening they’ll probably find i think they find interesting um the way they started was a pretty high profile vc person called me one day i had never met them before they had said oh you seem interesting on twitter i’d love to meet so we did a phone call and then we were talking just about each other’s backgrounds was cool and then they were like well what do you think of clubhouse by the way i gotta ask and um and i think they asked this because they had looked at investing they ultimately didn’t invest and they were trying to figure out like am i gonna kick is this gonna be is this gonna haunt me you know for the next five years that i missed this deal or is this gonna be a good one and um you know a good pass and i basically i i just went on this rant on the phone about this it just kind of came out of my mouth just the way i kind of explained it here and um without the whole like kind of dramatized like tv show script but just the reasons why i think it’s gonna struggle and um and they were like wow that was great like that was amazing and i was like [ ] i should have wrote that down that was like that would have um i feel like that would have been like a good like piece of content and so i went i kind of like quickly was like i gotta go and i hung up the phone and i went to my computer and i just typed the whole thing out and um and it turned into like and then i was like okay whatever i i kind of edited i took it out i did your your tip which i took a break for an hour yeah just went and did something else came back and i edited it for about 30 minutes editing is the magic to everything it doesn’t matter you’re talking about a viral tweet a good email editing is the magic they say write drunk edit sober oh that’s a great one i’ve never heard that i love that um think you’re in attendance i used to just edit in the moment like i’d write i don’t know and that was a mistake the tip you gave me a while back was go do other [ ] 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 yeah and there’s actually some science behind it i i 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 of like not doing it so there’s like science behind like doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you uh there is science behind why that works and that’s kind of what you’re doing yeah basically like the brain relaxes in some way and then when it relaxes it’s able to be creative in a new way and so um okay so then i post it and then whatever you know [ ] as well so then uh so that was that was the oh sorry the other part that i forgot which i think is my new it’s something i’ve been doing and i’m curious if you do something like this before uh before i write anything now at the top of every page i have a template and at the top there’s like seven lines that says what reaction is this meant to get and i have seven emotions it’s like lol like this is meant to be really funny is it wtf where it’s like dude what the [ ] and that’s when you’re talking about something that’s really unjust or people are pissed off and you want to you want to explain hey there’s this really messed up thing that’s happening and people will be like oh my god um then there’s other ones like you know like aw aww something really cute awe oh like like that something is awesome like wow that is like kind of amazing wait did i tell you that i do this 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 had that that were based on that emotion wow so the way to go viral is you always want to start you start with the emotion that you’re trying to get out of someone um and you and we already know that certain emotions get more shares so for example creating depression or sadness that doesn’t get shares um creating outrage gets far more and with small tweaks you can make something sad outrageous and that’s far better right you know so it’s either amazing it’s super funny it’s really really outraging it’s um it’s really touching and heartwarming that’s another one um hard to do and then the one i had for this which is kind of like a new emotion which was i wrote finally someone said it and i actually think that’s a that’s its own genre that i didn’t even have in my template because i was like i think this is going to go viral but it doesn’t match any of these i was like i think for some people it’s going to be wtf like dude this guy’s a jerk why is he predicting failure what an [ ] but i thought no it’s going to 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 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 so when you see like uh how you know you’re a san francisco bro or how do i know uh do you know sean perry like if i said if i saw an ad that said do you know sean i’d be like oh wait that’s directed just towards me right so what the emotion that you just evoked was like finally i didn’t think i was the only one who thought like it’s a recognizing it’s it’s a recognizing something type of vibe and they’re really sharing because they’re like i knew it i 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 like 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 i’m 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 my god no that’s what we used to do i mean that’s what i do when i i’m like i i i start with the emotion then i start with the package like how am i packaging this then i start with the headline then the preview image and then i work backwards from there right um and i always try to find like i’ll find something that catches my attention just one fact or one line so for example um i was just doing research on yesterday do you know um what recaptcha is you know when like um up for something you’re signing up for something that says spot right nowadays they say like spot click the thing or type in the uh the whatever picture is a sign click it 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 and it shows the guy like suit like sweating like crazy like oh [ ] should i include that or should i not include that and that’s one of those where it’s like me too dude i i i almost feel that way i’m always confused by this thing that’s supposed to so i always feel that way meme now here i can take it another way do you want to know when i looked it up on wikipedia you want to hear a fun fact do you know why they do it this way is because people like google um i might be butchering this just a little bit but idea is the same people like google are paying recaptcha to translate stuff so for example somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are that actually helps google and google is paying you money because it’s paying a little bit so the original captcha was done by this guy he was a professor at duke and carnegie mellon and capture originally was letters remember it was always these kind of script like kind of hard to read letters but you could read it and that was basically taking they had scanned a bunch of book pages but who’s going to conv the computer was not good enough at trent getting all the book pages to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages were a little rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy and so the computer couldn’t do it but a human eye could easily do it so they basically outsource the work and solve two problems with one stone on the website side they just want to make sure you’re not a bot who’s signing up for their service like a scammer who’s going to spam everybody but then they did good in the world also because that project ended up transcribing like millions and millions of books i think all the books that they had scanned eventually and then captcha two is about a recaptcha i believe is about image classification so for self-driving cars we need to know is is this a bus or what is this and so i think that’s where the original idea was uh classifying images let humans do while they signed up and the inventor of recaptcha the second one his name is luis von on i think that’s how you pronounce it he did both and that guy started duolingo and when he started duolingo he started it for two reasons one he i guess he just cared about helping you learn language but two when you are learning the language you’re actually translating stuff that a third party service is paying for you to translate so this is crazy so what a genius the exact emotion that you just had of this guy’s crazy that is the mo emotion wow this guy’s actually i am trying to evoke by sharing that so i can tell that story in probably five tweets and i bet it will like virality is pretty impossible to predict but i can bet that there’s like a three out of ten chance that it’s going to that has legs i could say this has all the uh this checks is all the box to get popular i can’t i ca anyone who says that they’re going to be able to predict it they’re wrong like shawn’s thing just reached five million people he was like this is not going to work um the other part the other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we’ve all seen that’s a relatable oh yeah i’ve filled one of those in and you so you took a very familiar thing but i told you the uncommon truth around it um which i think is like really cool like there’s one yesterday i saw uh you know tom cruise’s name is not tom cruise his real name no what is it it’s tom uh tom cruise something it’s like his middle name is cruz and his last name is like some uh like very looking up it’s some like i don’t know random ass like name and he changed it to tom cruise which sounds like a total movie star name makes total sense that he did it and um so yeah his real name is thomas cruz mapother the fourth or some i don’t even know how yeah i can’t even pronounce that mappather yeah tom mappather 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 and 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 the surprise gap between what i thought i knew and what’s real uh the more shares people will get 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 contagious made to stick is how to say something so people remember and contagious is a great book by this wharton professor on how to make things get popular i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like my days off on the road let’s travel never looking back