Shaan brings a list of six under-the-radar trends he believes will be big in the next few years, ranging from short-form drama apps modeled on Chinese mini-drama platforms, to rucking, plastic-free products, nervous system work, AI-assisted plant biohacking, and the next generation of AI-powered social networks. The hosts riff on business opportunities embedded in each trend and share personal experiences that have convinced them the waves are real.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Surfing the Right Wave [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, today we’re talking about trends. I have a list I’ve been keeping and I want to bring it to you and riff on it, because a lot of success in business just comes from surfing the right waves. Founders like to believe it’s our own genius that’s causing our success, and when it’s failure, it’s market conditions. Actually, often it’s the opposite — it’s the market conditions that create or really amplify your success. I’ve learned the hard way that the most important thing is finding the right wave to surf.
Sam: Have you ever been on the inside of a product that has taken off like that?
Shaan: I haven’t, but I’ve had friends who were texting me as it was happening. Have you ever seen that?
Sam: Yeah, a couple of them. There’s one we did recently — I invested in a friend and they’re doing a… I can’t say, I don’t want to say the thing because the trend is still hot right now. But it’s a health supplement. In the health world there’s just, every few years, a new diet trend. A few years ago a big thing was leaky gut — like, oh my God, leaky gut health, I gotta do something about that. So there are these things that come in waves of awareness. We backed one of those and it’s crazy growth. Zero to $30 million in one year, profitably. That’s wild.
Shaan: We have another company we started that I haven’t announced yet, maybe I’ll do that soon. Same thing — in one year, doing millions in recurring revenue, profitably. It’s just like wow. And it’s not because we did something so much better, we didn’t work harder, we weren’t smarter, we didn’t have some genius strategy. We just picked something that had market pull inherently. The market wanted this and all you had to do was show up. You’re selling cold water on a hot day. That’s what I want to do.
So in any case, here’s a bunch of trends. I think I have three or four trends that are going to be really big. I think if you watch this episode two years from now, a lot of this will be proven right. And then I have some bonus ones for you.
Sam: All right, you ready?
Shaan: Yeah, let’s do it.
Trend 1: Short Drama Apps [00:04:00]
Shaan: All right, trend number one: short drama apps. What are these? If you remember a few years ago, there was this company called Quibi that was started by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who created DreamWorks, and Meg Whitman, former CEO of HP and eBay — somebody big in Silicon Valley. Quibi raised $1.75 billion in funding pre-launch to build this out. They were like, look, the future is short form. You see what’s happening with TikTok? That’s what the next Netflix is going to look like.
They take their $1.75 billion, hire a crack team in Silicon Valley, fancy offices, they got the executives. They actually came to our office to pitch us — they wanted MFM to be like a content series.
Sam: Yeah, I was like, guys, we’re laptops all day. This isn’t interesting for video.
Shaan: They were like, we need you for business scripted. We were like, what does that mean? They’re like, it’s a category. We’re like, we’re in that, okay, never mind.
Anyway, Quibi launches, fails in under a year. $1.75 billion, all this talent, all the resources, all the brand names — DreamWorks, Meg Whitman — under a year, it folds.
Sam: And they were mocked. I thought that was kind of nonsense. I thought, you take swings, you’re in the arena doing stuff.
Shaan: People don’t like when people with pedigree and resources go after something. They like the underdog. So the consensus since then has been: Quibi equals failure, that whole category is failure.
Well, quietly in the meantime, a handful of apps have basically run where Quibi crawled. They’re doing pretty much exactly the same thing, but to tremendous success. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of these.
Sam: Tell me.
Shaan: They all started in China — Chinese companies — but they’re big in the United States. Here’s the revenue of the top four apps. Number four: $150 million. Number three: $160 million. Number two: $275 million annually. And the top one: $350 million.
Sam: That’s insane. Isn’t that insane?
Shaan: Okay, how do these work? I downloaded a couple of these and watched them. What they did that was very smart was they realized the American consumer is pretty much… and what Katzenberg did wrong was he tried to give people what they should want rather than what they do want. What they should want was well-made series — Netflix original level content but just made for your phone. Ten-to-fifteen-minute episodes and you’ll pay for it because otherwise how do you fund these million-dollar productions?
These guys came out differently. One is called Drama Box, another is called Reel Short. I’ll show you the first one — can you read the title?
Sam: Yeah, it’s called “Pregnant with My Brother’s Baby.” I didn’t think you just showed me Pornhub, but this is a real thing?
Shaan: These are all kind of trashy soap opera style stuff. The key changes from Quibi: free instead of paid. Quibi was a subscription; this is free, but you pay to unlock more episodes. You get hooked on one of these little dramas and then you buy coins to unlock the next episodes once you’re hooked. So they lowered the friction. And they went kind of trashy — Hallmark and Pornhub have a baby.
I watched one. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. I mean, it was bad, but it wasn’t like — I watched four episodes. I probably only needed to watch one for research. The episodes are only 90 seconds long, so it’s not that big of a commitment.
Sam: Whenever I think of these I think of in Wedding Crashers where there’s the Jamaican butler and they’re trying to bother him and he’s like, “I’m watching my stories, man.” You can’t interrupt anyone when they’re watching their stories.
Shaan: Right, and we talked about this in 2019 or 2020 —
Sam: What did we say?
Shaan: There were these guys making these somewhat tacky dramas on YouTube — 30-minute fictional videos — clearly appealing to Middle America women. Like a soap opera but very addicting. Facebook videos with huge dramas, the kid who got bullied on the bus who grew up to become president. Do you remember those?
Sam: I get sucked down that rabbit hole often. I’m on Facebook and it’s like a kid getting bullied, and it’s very hard to turn away. Market research, right?
Shaan: Yeah. And then you told me the story about helping Ramone, whose original idea was to do short-form romance audio stories.
Sam: Romance — it was romantic. Tasteful. So tasteful that they were in love.
Shaan: Basically he had a friend who loved writing these, wrote one of them, had a Fiverr voice actor read it, ran an ad — spent like $50 on ads and got like $100 in recurring revenue on a crappy WordPress site. My point is all signs have pointed to: yeah, this makes sense.
So one I watched is called “AI Crashes on Her Husband” — I’m on episode six, actually. The story starts: a girl is so excited because a guy is going to propose to her. He thinks she’s a DoorDasher but she’s actually a billionaire heiress who hid that because she doesn’t want him to want her for the money. Then his mother is like, “She’s not good enough for you,” and she’s like, “You don’t even know who I am,” and she reveals it. Cliffhanger. Got to see more.
Sam: So what they’re doing is 60-to-100-second episodes, free to watch, pay for more, growing like crazy.
Shaan: Yeah. Half of China’s internet users are watching these — what they call mini-dramas. And I think a lot of Americans are going to do this too.
I’d be very interested if an American company came out and did this. Today the top four are all Chinese companies and I don’t think that’s going to last. Maybe it will, like TikTok, but I think there’s an opportunity.
Also, it’s not just here. My mom for years — when she comes over, we hang out, we eat, she plays with the grandkids, it’s great. But then at 9:30 at night I hear the most annoying sounds on the TV. It’s special effects from what she calls her “Pakistani dramas.” Basically soap operas from Pakistan. She’s Indian but she says they make the juicier stuff. She’s watched series with 650 episodes and finished multiple of them. It’s not just her — all her sisters love these. They watch them on YouTube, 15-to-20-minute episodes. The top-10 of these channels have like 4 billion views.
Sam: I remember when people talked about YouTubers and I was like, I only watch a YouTube video when someone sends me a link of a funny clip or a basketball highlight. I didn’t just browse YouTube. I thought that was a weird behavior. And sure enough, now I do it every single day.
Shaan: I think it’s a young person thing and then people our age — men only. Did you think you would do that when you first saw people doing it?
Sam: No. Same thing with watching video games. I don’t even play video games but sometimes I watch people play. I had a Twitter account for years before I ever tweeted a single word. I was like, why would I tweet? I’ll just consume. Some of these behaviors take a lot of time to propagate.
Shaan: In the tech world they say what the nerds are doing on the weekends we’ll all do in 10 years. I think there’s a version of that in culture: what the degenerates are doing today, we’re all going to do. I remember hearing about Musical.ly and being like, people are doing lip sync videos on their phone, that’s stupid. And then TikTok buys Musical.ly, becomes huge. You’re now making videos for your — well, we all know what you do.
Trend 2: Rucking [00:18:00]
Shaan: All right, next trend. This is one you probably know a lot about. It’s a fitness trend. Trend number two is rucking — which is first of all just an amazing word. I keep seeing it from four or five of the right people and it instantly resonates, which tells me it’s going to spread more and more. What is rucking, Sam?
Sam: You put a heavy bag on your body and you go for a walk. It turns the hot girl walk into a workout. You go for walks in the morning, except now you do it with a 20-pound pack on you. Either a backpack or a weighted vest.
Shaan: I like the weighted vest — the bulletproof vest-looking thing. I got really into it when my daughter was born. I’d want to get steps in while she was sleeping. I screwed up — I put a 40-pound vest on because I thought more is better and then your back is killing you. Twenty pounds is more than plenty. You just walk. With my heart rate monitor, an hour walk at 120 beats per minute — that’s a pretty hardcore walk, and it didn’t feel that bad. It basically supercharges a walk.
Sam: You get more fitness out of a leisure activity. There are these charts — I’ll put this up on YouTube — basically calories burned: in the same amount of time, just walking but wearing a rucking vest, you burn about 200 more calories. Which is enough to go from a surplus to a deficit.
Shaan: It’s not significantly harder. And I think this is going to be a big trend. It’s sort of like pickleball where pickleball was the much more accessible version of tennis. Rucking is one of the most accessible versions of fitness. My parents in their 60s go for walks. If you realize, hey, if I wear this 15-pound vest I’m getting much more benefit without having to learn a new thing or add in an extra workout — that’s going to be really popular.
I looked at some brands taking advantage of this trend. Huberman and others are talking about how rucking is really good, how there’s this thing — low-intensity steady state cardio — which is known to be really good for fat loss. Basically just walking at a moderate pace for 40 to 45 minutes, and that’s actually better for weight loss than traditional high-intensity cardio.
Have you seen this brand GORUCK?
Sam: No.
Shaan: The issue I’ve had with a lot of these packs is I do my walks sometimes at night and it looks like I’m wearing a bulletproof vest.
Sam: People were staring at you?
Shaan: One walk in particular I was walking at night and people stared at me funny. Then Neville saw me and goes, “Dude, you look like you’re about to go on a shooting. You have a bulletproof vest on.” I was like, man, everyone’s been staring at me. So I went and bought a different one that looked less like a bulletproof vest.
This company GORUCK — they make backpacks, that’s their hero SKU, but they have the vest too. The brand was started by an ex-military guy — Marine, I think — and he started partnering with these fitness and toughness influencers.
Sam: A toughness influencer, that’s a good one. David Goggins — what is he? A toughness influencer.
Shaan: Jocko? Yeah, toughness influencer. Off the dome, that’s a great one.
So they take off. I guess they’re doing over $50 million a year in revenue now.
Sam: No way, really?
Shaan: They announced $46 million last year. They turned it into a whole lifestyle brand — shoes, shorts, shirts, the whole thing. And I think this is really smart.
Now where’s the opportunity? Go look at the prices on their website.
Sam: The ruck bag is $450. $420 for the one I’m seeing.
Shaan: My friends, it’s time to undercut. If I were entering this space I would try to be the lowest-cost good-enough solution. Which is never a sexy pitch — the sexy pitch is highest quality, most premium, most unique, made in America. That’s their pitch: $450 backpack. There will be somebody in that category. But guess who makes more money? The good-enough at the more accessible price point almost always makes more money.
When we were hanging out with Mr. Beast, he was talking about chocolate — Hershey’s versus whatever — and everyone there was rich people who either don’t grocery shop for themselves or only eat Whole Foods. And he was like, yeah, their chocolate’s great, but Americans can’t buy $7 chocolate bars. We sell at Walmart. Look where that brand is at Walmart — way off to the side in this tiny little footprint because it’s not the mainstream price point.
So I would be trying to build the Walmart ruck brand. I know that’s not really sexy but it would work very well.
Sam: Do you remember Echelon? When Peloton was really popular, I was at CES with Moyes, and there was this booth for this fitness bike called Echelon. It was 100% identical to Peloton. The only difference was it was half the price. I think they got sued by Peloton but they still exist, and everything Peloton has, Echelon has — just literally half the price. They’re at Costco. They are the hero fitness product at Costco.
Shaan: Exactly. They just took a knife and scraped off the letters and were like, here’s a new sticker. Even the name “Echelon” sounds like a ChatGPT name. They even had the same red logo — I remember going to the CES booth and being like, wait, are you a sub-brand of Peloton? And they were like, we’re not familiar with that brand. Completely coincidental.
Trend 3: Plastic-Free Everything [00:28:00]
Shaan: All right, I want to do the next one.
Sam: So you have “plastic-free everything.” Are you on board with plastic-free? Is that what you’re doing at your house?
Shaan: I’m not hardcore about it. I can’t say with a straight face that we’re eliminating all plastic and then I’m giving my kids Kraft mac and cheese sometimes. Common sense test fails. But at my house, we only have glass Tupperware.
Sam: Nothing more yuppie than any sentence that starts with “at my house” — the rest of that sentence has to be uppity.
Shaan: At Par Manor, it’s glass only.
Sam: For the record, I have Diet Mountain Dew in the refrigerator right now, and tobacco in my lip presently, and I’m worried about microplastics.
Shaan: You have a hole in your gum, yeah.
Sam: So I get a pass sometimes. But no, we don’t do plastic stuff. Anything that goes in the microwave is not plastic. Our new thing is my daughter has this lovey — and we’re doing all-cotton ones, which are way less comfortable. I understand why they make them out of fleece or whatever. We don’t give her a pacifier — she quit taking it at three months. We even have glass bottles. We’re not crazy — we use the Teflon pan for scrambled eggs, that’s the only thing we can’t get away with for nonstick. But mostly it’s not plastic.
Shaan: A company I like — no affiliation, I just think they’re cool — is Reiker clothing. Natural fiber workout gear.
Sam: Yeah, I just ordered some of their stuff, it arrived, I love it.
Shaan: The trend you care about — you had plastic-free everything, and I saved a tweet by this guy named Miles Snider. He said, “Lululemon and Vuori really scoped a whole generation” — have you noticed that word “scoped” trending?
Sam: It’s trending. Someone tweeted that they scoped me and I didn’t understand what it meant.
Shaan: So he said, “Lululemon and Vuori really scoped a whole generation. Seventy-dollar shorts made from plastic petroleum that smell disgusting every time you work out in them and destroy your fertility, meanwhile cotton shorts are cheaper, comfier, and better on every metric.” So you had listed plastic-free everything. Plastic-free or Teflon-free pans — same ballpark.
Sam: I think the obvious thing right now is plastic-free. And I also think there’s going to be a supplement that people sell to remove microplastics from your body. Because every category is going to take this angle. It’s like protein — protein became a thing and now there’s protein chips, protein cookies, protein brownies, protein everything.
Shaan: Protein water?
Sam: Yeah, I had protein water yesterday. It was amazing. It was basically water with a scoop that looked like lemonade mix and was high protein. It sounded filthy and disgusting, and it was delicious.
Shaan: Fruity and protein — that sounds unacceptable. But you liked it?
Sam: I loved it. I had to get over that barrier. Like, mentally I had to commit.
Shaan: So microplastics on that wave — I think plastic-free is going to extend into clothes, homewear, pans, cups, baby products. The way Honest came out with Jessica Alba and said these products are full of chemicals so here’s the clean version — I think there’s going to be a plastic-free big brand built in the baby space.
Sam: You know what that used to be? I grew up using this because my parents were a little hippy: cloth diapers that you threw in a hamper and then you had to wash them. Disgusting. My wife tried to propose that, by the way.
Shaan: What was the look you gave her?
Sam: I mean, I was just like, listen, you can cheat on me, you can do whatever you want, but you will not bring cloth diapering into my lifestyle. And it was a service — they’d come pick it up once a week — but it’s still just the idea of using cloth that other kids have used. That’s filthy. We’re animals.
Shaan: Wait, it’s not even just your cloth — it’s a mixed pool?
Sam: Yeah, it’s like a wash-and-fold service except the clothing has poop in it. You throw it in a bin, they come pick it up, bring you new ones that are clean, and you’re just reusing them. It is disgusting.
Shaan: Now that I’m saying this, cloth diapers are actually kind of interesting from a content angle. The idea is revolting but it is clickable. And I actually just talked myself into cloth diapers.
Sam: Sounds good.
Shaan: I also think the plastic-free thing is going to beget supplements — people are going to try to sell stuff that removes microplastics from your blood and your balls. In the same way protein made its way into everything on the protein wave.
Trend 4: Nervous System Work [00:36:00]
Shaan: There’s another health trend I think is going to be big. Have you ever heard of nervous system work?
Sam: Our most popular retreat at Hampton is called Nervous System Reset. People go to the woods and we have a facilitator who guides these things. This is totally a niche thing, and it was really smart of you to call this out.
Shaan: You’re already on it. My spidey sense is just tingling — I’m hearing little things. It’s the new leaky gut. Who doesn’t want their nervous system reset or calmed down? It’s so central to literally everything — your central nervous system, the vagus nerve, all that.
I first got hooked on this because my trainer was talking about it. He said, “When you eat, it’s not just about what you do, it’s about what state your nervous system is in.” I was like, what do you mean? He goes, “You have two modes for your nervous system: parasympathetic and sympathetic.”
Sam: I’ve heard those words before, yeah.
Shaan: My bro science version: basically you have two core modes. One is fight-or-flight — adrenaline, cortisol. These hormones aren’t just bad. Stress is good in certain scenarios. You don’t want to be in it all the time, but you need it when you need it. If there’s a lion chasing you, you want fight-or-flight.
The problem is there’s no lion chasing us. It’s just Slack and email and scrolling on Instagram and feeling like you’re not good enough. When you eat stressed you’re stress eating, not sleeping, things like that. When you’re in that sympathetic mode, your body shuts down other functions — like digestion. Your body says, guys, we’re not digesting food right now, the lion is chasing us.
Then you have the parasympathetic system, when you’re more rested, more relaxed — your body can digest, recover, do other things. Being able to shift your state from one to the other is really important. How do you do that? Some people get it from exercise, the sauna, cold plunge, breathwork, meditation. There’s a bunch of ways. All of them are a means to an end: calm your nervous system down. And a lot of good things happen — healthwise but also decision-making and creativity. You operate differently in different states.
Sam: You’ve been about breathwork for like four or five years now, yeah?
Shaan: The breath to me is like… I always look for advice nobody can sell me. In the health space, rucking resonates because it’s just walking with a little extra weight. Cold plunging I never really got into — it seems extreme, like it’s for show. Breathwork resonated because I could tell just controlling my breath for a couple minutes I’d feel much differently at the end of it. And it makes sense to work on your breathing since I’m going to do it 50,000 times a day.
I went to a breathwork class in San Francisco and it made me kind of high. It was awesome.
Sam: Yeah, that’s the Wim Hof stuff. You can literally hyperventilate yourself and you’ll get high, you’ll pass out.
Shaan: So our buddy Jack Smith came on and told us about this thing — he went into a room with like 50,000 screens of different colors that flash things. He sat in a lawn chair and paid these guys thousands of dollars and said it healed him.
Sam: There’s one 200 yards from my house. We went to it.
Shaan: How was it?
Sam: It was insane. Basically 90% of people are going to say you’re crazy and 10% are going to be into it. You go to this room and you’re surrounded by literally 20 TV screens playing white noise — like when your TV wasn’t working. The room is about 50 feet long, 20 feet wide, just a plain room with reclining chairs. I go, I sit in the chair, and I fall asleep.
Shaan: You’re supposed to fall asleep?
Sam: You’re supposed to close your eyes and relax. Part of me was like, did I just do a Ron Swanson thing where I’m just standing there and he says, “This is so stupid, I just stand here and I’m thoughtless”? Like, is that what I’m doing — I just fell asleep?
But then I go to Jack and I say, I kind of liked the vibrating chairs. He goes, “Dude, those chairs weren’t plugged in. They were not vibrating.” I was like, no, I vibrated the whole time and it made me relax. He goes, “Brother, I talked to the owner. There was no electricity in those chairs. They did not vibrate.” And I swore they were vibrating the whole time. So something happened.
Shaan: How is it to be a Scientologist?
Sam: You know, the guy who owned the place explained how his wife had cancer and he went into debt to start this place and it cured the cancer. I felt like these people took advantage of you, man. You’re delusional, I feel sad for you — which is silly for me to judge. And yet I left thinking my body was vibrating. So maybe there was something there.
Shaan: I’m fascinated by it. It feels like something a YouTuber would invent for a prank video. It also feels like the Dharma Initiative from Lost. Part of me is like, this is nonsense. However, I do believe nervous system work makes sense. Who am I to say that’s not one of the methods?
People are really into grounding — going in the grass. My college friends used to do this after playing sports. The basketball players would take their socks off and stand in the grass because they said something about negative ions going from the Earth to your body.
Sam: It’s the same to me as Brett Favre promoting the copper balance band. I don’t know the science. What I’m saying is I think there’s market demand. I think it’s a trend. When you talk about it, it has that leaky gut thing where people say, “You know what, I think I have that problem, I want that fixed.” Whether it’s through breathwork or grounding or the room with the screens — that’s a wave and a lot of people are going to surf it.
Shaan: Go check out one of those screen rooms and let me know if you have a similar experience. I’m a hater on it but I’m telling you, I left and my body felt different.
Trend 5: Biohacking Plants [00:50:00]
Shaan: All right, let’s do something that’s not a health hack. Let me do one more. Trend number five: biohacking plants.
There’s a moment right now where biohacking has never been more popular — thanks to Bryan Johnson, thanks to Ozempic, thanks to people realizing, oh, I can take this, stab this, eat this, drink this, and improve my own health. Biohacking is a thing.
And AI has changed the game of science. AI is now doing remarkable things. Have you paid attention to AlphaFold? It’s basically an AI breakthrough where AI was able to predict how proteins fold — which is really important because the shape of proteins matters. It matters how other things can connect to it. Humans didn’t know how to predict the shape, only what it was made of. AlphaFold beat all the competition in modeling protein folding. The implication: we can make new drugs, new therapeutics.
You have all these technologies: CRISPR, protein folding, general interest in biohacking. But biohacking in humans is really hard — you have to worry about health concerns, approvals, it’s a long hard road.
In the same way I think longevity startups focused on dogs are going to do well — because who doesn’t want their dog to live longer, and dogs are an easier regulatory path — I think the even easier version of this is plants.
David Freeberg is doing this at a company called Aalo — which is basically biohacking but for different crops. How do you make a strawberry that’s resistant to certain bugs, or riper, bigger, juicier, or can grow in different weather conditions so certain places can now grow their own crops instead of importing? If you could biohack plants — and plants are food — and plants have been central to genetic research forever. The Punnett square, understanding genetics, came from plant experiments.
I think there are going to be some really successful startups that take AI and the concept of biohacking and use plants as their target market rather than humans.
Sam: What’s David Freeberg’s thing called?
Shaan: Aalo. “Accelerating Evolution to Unlock Nature’s Potential.” They’re basically creating new seeds or new-style plants. They have something called “boosted breeding” — how do you get more yield on your crops? And “value-added traits” — how do you take a crop and add a trait you want? Gain of function, but for your strawberries. For your almonds, your potatoes, your corn.
Sam: This is so much better than working on creator economy software. When you tell me about this, part of me is like, if I had a friend who started something like this I would quit everything to go work there. It’s such an easy mission to get behind. So much more important than creating a new Linktree.
Shaan: Yeah, I love this. I think it’s a really interesting thing to watch.
Trend 6: AI Social Networks [00:58:00]
Shaan: All right, I’ll give you another one: AI social network. What does this mean?
Every decade or so a new social network comes out. You had Facebook in 2004, and then roughly 2012 you had the next generation — Snapchat and Instagram. And what did they do differently? They took advantage of new tech. The new tech was your phone — the phone with a camera, a GPS, always with you. It unlocked a new social use case.
I think the new social use case coming out is AI. What is AI going to do here? I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I’d bet with very high probability the next breakout social app is going to be based on AI.
Arguably it already happened — arguably TikTok is the first breakout AI app.
Sam: What do you mean?
Shaan: A few ways. The most obvious: everybody thinks TikTok’s big innovation was short-form video, but short-form video was around before — Vine, Musical.ly, others. What TikTok did was say, “How about the AI just tells you what to follow instead of you?” Every social network up until that point was based on the user creating a graph — following people, friending people. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of them. You chose content interesting to you and kept coming back.
TikTok came out and said: let’s never let the user say what’s interesting. Let’s see if AI can figure out what’s interesting at a higher rate. Like with the crops thing — what if you got higher yield of “interestingness” if you used AI for the feed instead of the human choosing? And so Tik Tok did that. It’s super addictive. It has a higher usage rate than every other social platform. The AI is serving you content instead of you picking it. That was the real innovation of TikTok — the For You page. Everybody’s copied it. Instagram and others have all moved to algorithmic feeds.
Sam: Okay cool, so what’s coming next?
Shaan: Up till now all social networks were based on content that humans make. I think what’s coming next is content that AI makes.
That sounds farfetched — why would I want to follow an AI influencer? Let’s start with one example. Lil Miquela — we talked about her years ago. She’s an Instagram influencer that’s just AI-generated. An AI image of a girl who posts photos. Do you know how much money Lil Miquela makes?
Sam: We talked about it — was it 800 grand a year?
Shaan: I heard it’s over $10 million now.
Sam: Okay, so I like Lil Miquela, and a few million other people do too.
Shaan: All right. But here’s a more interesting version, because I think people have heard the AI influencer thing. I’ll pitch a different style of AI social product — actually in the music space.
I think there’s an opportunity to create the AI version of Spotify. I started listening to a non-trivial amount of AI music. My pie chart of music consumption used to be 100% real artists. Now I’ve started adding in AI-generated music. There’s Suno, which has a lot. And there are YouTube channels — like this one called Golden Age Hip Hop. It makes mashups. If you go look, it’s like Mac Miller meets J. Cole. Main-character playlist stuff.
Sam: I listen to it too. I’m getting recommended all of these and at first I was like, this is weird. But lately I’m even more attracted to them. It’s what I listen to all day when I work.
Shaan: Golden Age Hip Hop has 730,000 subscribers. Every thumbnail is AI-generated. The concepts don’t even make sense — it’ll be somebody from the ’80s and someone from the 2000s collabing on a song. The most popular video has 11 million views: Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, DMX, Eminem, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Xzibit, and Ice Cube all on one track. You’re like, what? That never happened. And that song has 8 million plays.
I think the person is a mashup artist like Girl Talk, just sampling from different songs and overlaying them. But I think this is a sign of what’s coming. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using AI, or if they’re going to take an artist’s voice and use AI to make a new song from it.
Sam: Didn’t you tweet something about the number-one song right now being AI?
Shaan: The Beatles won a Grammy this year and it didn’t get talked about much, but basically they had lyrics from when John Lennon was alive and they used machine learning and AI to finish the song. And it won a Grammy. It’s a great song. I saw it and I was like, this is a huge deal, why isn’t anyone discussing this? It felt completely undercovered.
Sam: You’re the only person I know who talked about it.
Shaan: So here’s what I think’s going to happen. You’re going to have a service sort of like Pandora or Spotify where you prompt it, or tell it what songs you like, and it just starts generating AI music on the fly. It’s going to generate music in the genres you like, train on existing songs, and create net new songs.
And the last piece — in the same way that today you have vibe coders —
Sam: What’s vibe coding? This just got on my radar Monday.
Shaan: So there are startups like Cursor — absolute blowup, maybe a $10 billion company now in a very short time. Cursor is basically a coding terminal with AI built in. You can tell it to write the code for you, debug it, build things. Replit is doing the same thing. You go to Replit and it says, “What would you like me to build?” You just tell it. It starts spitting out code on the screen, scrolling huge amounts of code. Then it’s like, “Hmm, the initial screen’s not loading properly, let me see… ah I found it.” And it just continues. I’ve built a bunch of little Replit apps that way.
What’s happening now is people can make software without knowing how to write code. I think what happens next is I’m going to be able to make music without knowing how to make music — without instruments, without being able to sing.
Now get ready, because I’m about to go full-blown idiot here. Three letters you’re not going to like: NFTs.
Sam: Wait, wait —
Shaan: Listen, listen. This is where it actually pairs up and it’s not so crazy. Do you remember when you used to say, “Ding ding ding, we found a use case”?
Sam: Is this it? Did we find a use case?
Shaan: Exactly. What is an NFT? It’s basically any kind of digital collectible, digital art, digital property that’s unique — a way to say this is unique, I own this, I made this, and if you bought it now you own this. It shows who made it and royalties are attached. If I make art in Photoshop, being able to say I made this and nobody can say they made it — that’s important. Being able to sell it — also important. And if you sell it, me being able to capture a royalty on subsequent sales — also cool.
Now what’s going to happen in the music case: I’m going to be generating music with AI and I’m going to be able to mint that song. Say that song — I helped create it by prompting it. All of the artists whose music was used, I think they’re going to get parallel ownership. And now I’m going to be able to upload that track as a musician.
In the same way that a lot of musicians today are using autotune and digital programs — they’re not sitting there with a guitar strumming. They’re in software making the computer do it. To a pure musician, that’s cheating. I think that’s what’s going to happen with AI next.
So the next version of Pandora or Spotify — the next big social product around music — is going to be about creating music using AI, being able to mint it as a curator, sharing it, getting streams the way this Golden Age Hip Hop guy gets 10 million streams. Non-musicians being able to get that. Did I just go crazy or what?
Sam: No, I think that’s very smart. You’re doing a good job of looking ahead. I agree with the future you’re painting.
I’m shocked, honestly, that AI hasn’t impacted art and particularly music as much as I’d expect. I guess the guys making AI are into other stuff. But I’m shocked it hasn’t hit music harder yet.
Shaan: I think the future makes a lot of sense. If you played me an AI Post Malone song and a real Post Malone song, I don’t think anyone would know the difference. We’re already there.
Sam: And if I were to go to a concert of a fake person, I’d be into it. Do you remember the Gorillaz?
Shaan: I loved the Gorillaz. What’s their story? I’ve only heard the songs.
Sam: The guy who created the Gorillaz is a genius. The Gorillaz was a band — this was in the ’90s — created by the guy from Blur. Sort of punk-rocky. He wrote the songs, sang them, played all the instruments, and then had a music video where it was cartoons and animations. Before the internet was popular, so you couldn’t just Google who was behind it. It was rumors. You never quite knew.
And they went so far as to appear on talk shows. At first it was janky holograms on David Letterman and shows like that. Then eventually they figured out how to do it properly. Then eventually the actual guy would go out and perform, and now we all know who he is.
Shaan: I loved the Gorillaz before I knew who the person was. I just knew the characters and actually liked them, got to know their personalities. It was strange. But because I was into that as a kid, I can now see how it doesn’t seem crazy that I’m going to like the AI stuff.
Sam: Totally. I was so into WWF growing up, right? On the surface it’s fake wrestling, and guys are paying thousands of dollars to sit front row screaming their hearts out watching fake wrestling. These things sound illogical if you just describe them to someone. But they work. And that’s the point you’re making with this episode: these are all trends that today sound small and weird, but in the future are going to be bigger.
Summary: The Six Trends [01:13:00]
Shaan: Right. And knowing that is good for two reasons. Either A, you’re the type of person who just likes to be in the know — you like to know things before they become cool, try products early. I like to do that. Or B, jumping on trends early is the way to make a lot of money. There are riches in these niches if you go pursue them. Or you’re going to be the guy who waits for everything to be proven out and then always feels like you’re too late.
So those are your options as an entrepreneur. Being early to trends that are going to last or be big is a great way to get rich.
Sam: All right, so the ones we mentioned. Number one: short drama apps. These apps that are basically like Netflix but the episodes are 90 seconds long. They’re taking off — four apps doing over $100 million a year in revenue today, all Chinese. I think there’s an opportunity for somebody to make this made in America, or for any geography. Make the biggest one of these in Brazil, make the biggest one in India. These are going to be very big.
Shaan: Next: fitness trends. Rucking — walking with a weighted vest. GORUCK is doing over $50 million a year in revenue. Shirtless ripped guys are going to tear me up in the comments saying, “Shaan, we’ve been here for years.” Of course — congratulations on being early.
Sam: Plastic-free everything. Microplastics are the next thing people are going to be afraid of, and there’s going to be a wave of products solving that fear.
Shaan: Nervous system work — the parasympathetic nervous system. People who create solutions marketed toward calming, tuning, or resetting your nervous system. A reboot for your nervous system.
Biohacking plants — AI plus biohacking but using plants as the go-to market because it’s a lot safer. You can kill plants and nobody cares. And ultimately there’s a huge market in improving crops and the food we all eat.
And the last one: the AI social network. Every decade or so there’s a new big hit social product — Facebook, then Instagram and Snapchat, now TikTok. We’re due for a new one. And the twist will be that the content is somehow generated with AI. I pitched a music version but there are probably many other variations.
Sam: That was very educational. Good job. You came with the goods. You carried us on this one.
Shaan: Thank you. Let us know in the YouTube comments which trend you like — I’ll be replying to all of them. All right, that’s it, that’s the pod.