6 under-the-radar trends (+ our business ideas)

- March 19, 2025 (about 1 year ago) • 01:03:39

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Alright, today we're talking about trends. I have a list that I've been keeping, and I want to bring it to you today and riff on those with you, because a lot of success in business just comes from surfing the right wave. I think founders like to believe that it's their own genius that's causing their success. When there's failure, they blame market conditions. Actually, often it's the opposite: market conditions can create success or really amplify your success. I've learned the hard way that the most important thing is finding the right wave to surf.
00:39	Sam Parr	Have you ever been on the inside of a product that has taken off like that? I haven't, but I've had friends who were texting me as it was happening. Have you ever seen that?
00:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah, a couple of them. There's one we did recently that I invested in—my friend is doing a... I can't say the thing; I don't want to say it because the trend is still going. It's still hot right now. But it's a health—it's a health supplement. In the health world, every few years there's a new diet trend. A few years ago, a big thing was "leaky gut"—it was like, "oh my god, leaky gut, I gotta do something about that." These things come in waves of awareness. We backed one of those, and it just had crazy growth—$30,000,000 in one year. It's wild. And profitably too; it was just crazy growth. We have another company we started that we haven't announced yet—maybe I'll do that soon—but we have another one in that space that's similar: one year and it's doing millions in recurring revenue, profitably. It's just like, wow. And it's not because we did something so much better. It's not because we worked harder or were smarter. We didn't have some genius strategy. We just picked something that inherently had market pull. The market wanted this, and all you had to do was show up. You're selling cold water on a hot day—that's really 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. If you watch this episode two years from now, a lot of this will be proven right. Then I have some bonus ones for you. Alright—you ready?
02:23	Sam Parr	Yeah, let's do.
02:24	Shaan Puri	It—alright—trend number one: short drama apps. So, what are these? If you remember, a few years ago there was a company called Quibi that was started by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who created DreamWorks, and I think Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HP. Wait—who is she? I don't know who she is, but she's somebody... a big deal in Silicon Valley — eBay.
02:45	Sam Parr	And HP.
02:47	Shaan Puri	Quibi raised $1.75 billion in funding — pre-launch, pre-launch, pre-launch... launch — to build this out. > "Look: the future is short-form. You see what's happening with TikTok? This is early days of TikTok. You see what's happening with TikTok? Well, guess what — that's what the next Netflix is gonna look like. It's gonna look like TikTok content." They took their $1.75 billion of funding, hired a crack team in Silicon Valley, set up fancy offices, and brought in the executives.
03:16	Sam Parr	Dude, they came to our office to pitch you and me. They wanted Sean and Sam—or MFM—to be a content series. I was like, "Guys, we're buying our laptops all day... isn't that interesting?"
03:26	Shaan Puri	They were like, "We need you guys for Business Unscripted." And we were like, "What? What was that?" They're like, "It's a category." We're like, "We're in that," and then, "Okay, never mind." They—you know—they wanted content. They needed content on the platform. Quibi launched and failed in under a year — $1,750,000,000. All that talent, all the resources, all the brand name. The guy who created DreamWorks... in under a year, it folded. It didn't work.
03:53	Sam Parr	And they were mocked, and I thought that was kind of nonsense. I thought it was a great... that's you — you take swings.
04:00	Shaan Puri	Just in the arena, doing stuff.
04:02	Sam Parr	Yeah, I mean... it was like—they tried something. People might have mocked them for that.
04:10	Shaan Puri	People don't like when people with pedigree and resources go after something. They like when you're the underdog. So the consensus opinion since then has just been "Quibi equals failure" — that whole category failure. Well, quietly, in the meantime a handful of apps have basically run where Quibi crawled, and they are doing pretty much exactly the same thing but to tremendous success. I don't know if you've seen any of these apps. Can I tell? </FormattedResponse>
04:38	Sam Parr	You about?
04:39	Shaan Puri	Some of these.
04:39	Sam Parr	Tell me.
04:40	Shaan Puri	Alright, so they all started in China and they're Chinese companies, but they're big in the United States. For example, I'm just going to tell you the revenue of the top four apps: - Number four: $150,000,000. - Number three: $160,000,000. - Number two: $275,000,000 (annual). - Number one: $315,000,000.
05:01	Sam Parr	Okay, that's insane.
05:02	Shaan Puri	Isn't that insane? Okay, so how do these work? I downloaded a couple of these and watched them. What they did — and this was very, very smart — was realize the American consumer is pretty much an idiot. What Jeffrey 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… these series that were really cool, premium. Hey, we're not going to do that short-form, just rubbish. We're going to do Netflix-original–level content, but made for your phone: 10 to 15-minute episodes, and you'll pay for it. Because otherwise, how are we going to fund these things that are like millions of dollars — artsy shit? So these guys came out. I'll give you an example of one of them: one is called Drama Box, the other one's called Real Short. I'm just going to show you the first one on this. Can you read the title of that?
05:57	Sam Parr	"Yeah, it's called Pregnant with My Brother's Baby."
06:02	Shaan Puri	And I didn't just show him, you know, Cornhub. This is—this is a real thing, right? So these are all kinda trashy, soap-opera-style shows. Now, what they did differently was the key change from Quibi: it was free instead of paid. Quibi was a subscription—you had to pay for it. 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. The next thing was the content: they did kinda trashy TV. It’s like, “Hallmark and Maury Povich have a baby.” That's the type of content this is. I watched one. Honestly—was it bad? I'm not gonna lie, it's bad. But it's not like—I watched four episodes. I probably only needed to watch one for my research. The episodes are only 90 seconds long, so it's not that big of a commitment.
06:58	Sam Parr	Alright, my friends. A lot of you who listen to the show listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose, or you may not even have an idea. You like our podcast My First Million because we've done a lot of the work for you researching all these business ideas. Well, friends, we've made life a lot easier for you because HubSpot just put together an entire list of resources you can use to find a market opportunity and validate your next business idea. If you're looking for a market size calculator, tools to identify market trends, or a huge list of ideas to get started, there's a link below. Click it and you can have access to the whole thing—it's completely free. Now, back to the show. Whenever I think of these, I think of that scene in Wedding Crashers where there's a Jamaican guy—he's like the butler—and they're trying to bother him. He's like, "Hey, I'm watching my stories, man. Like, it's this time to watch the soap operas," and you can't interrupt him. You can't interrupt anyone when they're watching their stories because the soap operas are so good. We talked about this in 2019 or 2020, right? </FormattedResponse>
08:06	Shaan Puri	What do you mean? We talked about it. What did—what did we say, then? </FormattedResponse>
08:08	Sam Parr	So we talked about it in a few ways. The first was that there was this massive trend. This was when YouTube was obviously not up-and-coming — it was already established — but in 2018 and 2019 there were guys making somewhat tacky dramas. They were doing something very different on YouTube: making thirty-minute fictional videos. It was tacky in the sense that it felt like a soap opera, clearly appealing to middle-American women. So it was a little cringey but very addicting. Do you remember these creators who would get like 8 million followers? Or who were making Facebook videos that were huge dramas — like the one about "the kid who got bullied on the bus and how he grew up to become president"? Do you remember these twenty-minute videos?
08:55	Shaan Puri	There's been some YouTube series like this.
08:58	Sam Parr	And, by the way, I get sucked down this rabbit hole often, where I'm on Facebook and it's a kid getting bullied and it's very...
09:07	Shaan Puri	Clear market research.
09:10	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah. It's hard to turn away. Also, I told you the story about when I was helping Ramon. His original idea for a business was to do "erotic fiction Audible stories." We ran a test with about $50 of ads for erotic...
09:29	Shaan Puri	I think romance... it was short-form romance, right?
09:34	Sam Parr	It was erotic. It was like—no, it was like sex. It was like... it was like it was for women. </FormattedResponse>
09:40	Shaan Puri	"Tasteful... so tasteful, though." </FormattedResponse>
09:42	Sam Parr	They were in love. It was not — it was romantic sex, yeah. Basically, what we did was: he had a friend who loved writing these stories. He wrote one of these stories and then had a Fiverr voice actor read it. Then we ran an ad and we called it "Captivating Claire." I think — I forget what we called it, but we described it as short but romantic. We spent about $50 running ads and got about $100 in recurring revenue on a crappy WordPress site. Anyway, my being is like, "All signs have pointed to—yeah, this makes sense."
10:15	Shaan Puri	For example, this one I watched is called "Eris Crash Lands on Her Husband." I think I lied—I'm on episode six, actually. The story starts with this girl who is so excited because she thinks this guy is going to propose to her. She thinks he thinks she's a DoorDash driver, but actually she's a billionaire heiress. She hid that from him because she doesn't want him to want her for the money. She's so happy that he's going to propose, and then his mother-in-law says, "She's not good enough for you—how about this other girl?" The girl replies, "You don't even know who I am," and then she reveals it. Cliffhanger—I had to see more. What they're doing is short episodes: 60 to 100 seconds free to watch, and you pay for more. These things are growing like crazy. I guess half of China’s internet users are watching these mini-dramas, and I think a lot of Americans are going to do this too. These will continue to grow. I'd be very interested to see if an American company can come out and do this—maybe better—because today the top four I think are all Chinese companies. I don't think that's going to last... or maybe it will, like TikTok. I think there's an opportunity for somebody to do this—not just in the U.S. For example, my mom: for years when she comes over to my house, it's wonderful. We hang out, we have fun, we eat together, we talk, she plays with the grandkids—it's all great. But then there's this moment at 9:30 p.m. when I just hear the most annoying sounds on TV. Those are the special effects coming from what she likes to call her Pakistani dramas. They're basically soap operas from Pakistan. She's Indian, but she says, "They make the juicier stuff—they make the better ones." I'm like, "Where did you find these, and how many episodes are there?" She's watched series that have 650 episodes, and she'll finish multiple series. It's not just her—all her sisters love this—and they're just watching these on YouTube today. They're like 15–20-minute episodes. I looked up some of these channels, and the top 10 have around 4 billion views. I remember when people were talking about YouTubers, and this was a long time ago. I used to think, "I only watch a YouTube video when somebody sends me a link—a funny clip from Saturday Night Live or a basketball highlight. I don't just go to YouTube and browse to see what's on." I thought that was a weird behavior people were doing, and sure enough, now I do that every single day.
12:50	Sam Parr	I do it every day.
12:51	Shaan Puri	Every single day.
12:52	Sam Parr	I think it's a man thing, by the way. I think it's... a young‑person thing, and then, for people our age, it's only men.
12:57	Shaan Puri	But did you think you would do that when you first saw that people do that? Because I...
13:00	Sam Parr	No, I had the same thing: watching video games. I don't even play video games, but sometimes I watch people play.
13:05	Shaan Puri	I had a Twitter account for years before I ever tweeted a single word. I was like, "Oh, why would I ever just tweet? I'm not going to try to do that — I'll just consume." Some of these behaviors actually take a lot of time to propagate. It's sort of like — in the tech world they say, "what the nerds are doing on the weekends, we'll all do in ten years." I think there's a version of that in culture, which is: what the degenerates are doing today — like the daytime TV watchers — we're all going to do. I remember hearing about Musical.ly and thinking, "Oh, people are doing lip‑synced videos on their phone? That's stupid." Then, sure enough, TikTok buys Musical.ly and becomes huge.
13:47	Sam Parr	And sure enough, you're now making videos for your lipstick. You haven't shared it here, but we all know you do. What's another one? </FormattedResponse>
13:55	Shaan Puri	Alright, next trend that I want to do is one that 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: rucking. Secondly, I just keep seeing this — I've seen it four or five times from four or five of the right people, and it instantly resonates when you hear it, which tells me that this is just going to spread more and more. So, what is rucking? Sam, do you want to describe it?
14:23	Sam Parr	You put a heavy bag on your body and go for a walk. It turns the hot girl walk into a workout. So, you know how you go for walks in the morning? Except now you do it with a 20-pound pack on.
14:36	Shaan Puri	You either wear a backpack, or... I like the ones that are like the weighted vest. It's like a bulletproof-vest-looking thing.
14:43	Sam Parr	Yeah — that's the downside of all this, by the way. I did it particularly when my daughter was born. When the kid goes to sleep — because they're sleeping all the time — that's when I really got into it. At first, I screwed up: I wore a 40-pound vest because I thought more is better. Then my back was killing me, so I realized 20 pounds is more than plenty, and then you just walk. If you wear a heart-rate monitor on an hour walk, it would be around 120 beats per minute, which is a pretty hardcore walk, and it didn't feel that bad. So it basically supercharges a walk — you get more fitness out of a leisure activity.
15:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. There are charts you can see — I'll put this up on YouTube — but it's basically calories burned. In the same amount of time, just walking but wearing the rucking vest, you will burn about 200 more calories. That's enough that, if you did nothing else differently, you might go from a surplus to a deficit, or from break-even to...
15:48	Sam Parr	A deficit significantly harder.
15:50	Shaan Puri	It's not significantly harder, right? 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. I think rucking is one of the most accessible versions of fitness. My parents, in their sixties, will go for walks. Over time, if you realize that, hey, if I wear this 15-pound vest, I'm getting much more of a benefit without having to learn a new thing, do a new thing, or add an extra workout, I think that's going to be really popular. I want to buy one of these, and I looked at some of the brands that are taking advantage of this trend. You see people talk about this—you see Huberman [Andrew Huberman] and others—talking about how rucking is really good, how there's this thing called "low-intensity steady-state cardio," which is known to be really good for fat loss. It's basically just walking at a moderate pace for a long time, like 40–45 minutes.
16:45	Shaan Puri	Of time and how that's actually better for weight loss than traditional high-intensity cardio. So then you go look at these brands. Have you seen this brand, GORUCK? Do you know about these guys?
16:57	Sam Parr	No, let me look at GoRuck. The issue I've had with a lot of these packs is that when I do my walks—sometimes at night—it looks like I'm wearing a bulletproof vest.
17:07	Shaan Puri	"The issue or the benefit — it's the main reason I'm trying to get one."
17:10	Sam Parr	Dude, people would see me… There was one walk in particular at night where people kind of stared at me funny. Then Neville saw me out on a walk and he goes, "Dude, you look like you're about to go on a shooting. You look like you have a bulletproof vest on." I was like, "Man, everyone's been staring at me," because it just looks very intimidating.
17:30	Shaan Puri	True. You do have...
17:31	Sam Parr	I got the look-good vibes.
17:32	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I...
17:33	Sam Parr	I had the look, so I actually went and bought a different one that looked less like a bulletproof vest. There's this company, GoRuck — it looks like they make backpacks. They're basically backpacks, right?
17:44	Shaan Puri	They do it as a bag. I think the backpack is their hero SKU, but they have the vest too. I probably wouldn't have even realized—they're looking at me for the wrong reason. I would have thought they all think I look so cool and that's why they're staring at me. Like, "Dude, if I could wear a Superman cape and get away with it, I would." Why would I not want to feel like a superhero—or like a Navy SEAL? This brand was started by, I think, an ex—he's an ex-military guy. I don't know if he was a Marine or what; he was like, "Yeah, this is a big deal in the Marines." So he created this brand called GoRuck, and he started partnering with these kind of fitness and toughness influencers and
18:22	Sam Parr	He's a toughness influencer. That's good, yeah.
18:25	Shaan Puri	"Toughness influencer David Goggins—what is he?" "Yeah, you're right: influencer." </FormattedResponse>
18:29	Sam Parr	He's a...
18:29	Shaan Puri	Toughness influencer.
18:30	Sam Parr	"That's a good one."
18:30	Shaan Puri	"That's a good one. Jocko—what's Jocko?" "Jocko's a toughness influencer."
18:33	Sam Parr	"Did you just make the supper? Is that the category?"
18:35	Shaan Puri	On the spot. Off the dome. Off.
18:36	Sam Parr	That's great.</FormattedResponse>
18:37	Shaan Puri	A tough.
18:37	Sam Parr	A toughness influencer. Okay, cool.
18:41	Shaan Puri	And so... as you can see, that's a trend. They take off. I guess they're doing over $50,000,000 a year in revenue. No way.
18:50	Sam Parr	Really.
18:51	Shaan Puri	So they're doing really well and turned it into a whole lifestyle brand. I mean, they announced it — they were like 46 million last year. So, you know, they're gonna be higher this year. They also do shoes, shorts, and shirts. It's a whole lifestyle brand now, and I think this is really smart. A lot of people do this now. Where's the opportunity? I think the opportunity is: go look at the prices on their website. How expensive is their "rock bag"?
19:17	Sam Parr	"$450, correct. $420 for just one that I'm seeing here."
19:22	Shaan Puri	My friends, it's time to undercut. I think if I was going to enter this space, I would try to be the lowest-cost, good-enough solution, which is never a sexy pitch, right? The sexy pitches were the highest-quality, most premium, most unique — "Made in America" — that's their pitch. A $450 backpack. That's great, and there will be somebody in that category. But guess who makes more money? The good-enough at the more accessible price almost always makes more money. Like when we were hanging out with MrBeast and he's talking about chocolate — he's like, "yeah, Hershey's or whatever." All of the people there were basically rich people who either don't even grocery shop for themselves anymore or only eat at Whole Foods. We were like, "We like Hu chocolate." It's like, I like their cashew butter, you know, a $7 chocolate bar. He's like, "Yeah, yeah, their chocolate's great, but Americans can't buy $7 chocolate bars." He's like, "We sell at Walmart — and look where Hu is at Walmart." It was so off to the side in this one tiny little footprint area because, again, it's not the mainstream price.
20:34	Shaan Puri	So, I would be trying to build the sort of, like, Walmart ruck brand. I know that's not really sexy, but it would work very well.
20:41	Sam Parr	Do you remember Echelon? When Peloton was really popular, me—and I don't think you went—but for some reason I was there with Moyes at CES [Consumer Electronics Show]. There was this booth for this fitness bike called Echelon, and it was 100% identical to Peloton. There was only one difference: it was half the price. It was called Echelon, and I think they got sued by Peloton, but they still exist. Everything that Peloton has, Echelon has—it's just literally half the price. It's the same logo, it's the same everything. Dude, have you ever seen Echelon?
21:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah, because they're at Costco — they are the hero fitness product at Costco, which is, again, the same thing: the Costco price. What they did was take advantage of the Peloton trend. They basically said, "Peloton — great. Okay, we got the trend; we even got the brand, we got the shape of the bike, we got the whole arsenal. Awesome." Then they literally took a knife, scraped the letters off the bike, and put a new sticker on it: Echelon. I think it was like a "chad gbt" name. [phrase unclear]
21:48	Sam Parr	Like, it was— I think they even got sued. It looks like they changed their logo. They were literally the exact same red; everything was the same. I remember going to the CES booth and thinking, "Wait—are you guys a sub-brand of Peloton? What's going on here?"
22:02	Shaan Puri	"We're not familiar with that brand. We... have no comment and no familiarity with that brand. Completely coincidental."
22:10	Sam Parr	Alright, I want to do the next one. The next one that you have is pretty cool. Did you see the tweet that I have there for your next one? That's a good, a good way to kick it off.
22:21	Shaan Puri	Okay. Do it.
22:22	Sam Parr	Alright, so you have plastic-free everything. You're on board with plastic-free—is that what you guys are doing at your house?
22:28	Shaan Puri	I'm not hardcore about being plastic-free. We still have plastic stuff and whatever. I mean, I can't, with a straight face, say "Okay, we're eliminating all plastic from our life," and then I'm giving my kids Kraft Mac and Cheese sometimes. So... you know, the common-sense test fails.
22:45	Sam Parr	Do you go out of your way to buy cotton clothing or natural clothing?
22:52	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I try to... I try to buy the highest-quality stuff for myself because I know I can. With my kids, that's the monkey wrench, right? I can't get my kids to eat certain things yet, and so, you know, that's where we fall apart a little bit.
23:07	Sam Parr	So, the trend that you care about—you had plastic-free everything. I had saved a tweet by this guy named Miles Snyder. It happened March 2, so only ten days ago from when we're recording this. He said, "Lululemon and Viore really psyop'd the whole generation," which, by the way, "psyop'd"—that's a new word. Have you noticed that word's trending?
23:24	Shaan Puri	This dude's trending like crazy.
23:26	Sam Parr	Psyop? Is it psyop? Is it... it's high.
23:29	Shaan Puri	Agency psyop. I don't know what else is trending, but those two are on my radar. </FormattedResponse>
23:33	Sam Parr	"Someone tweeted out that they psyop'd me, and I didn't understand what it meant. I still don't entirely understand, but I was like, 'Is that, like, an insult towards me?'"
23:42	Shaan Puri	Yeah.
23:42	Sam Parr	So he said, "Lululemon or Yori really sold the whole generation $70 shorts made from plastic and petroleum that smell disgusting every time you work out in them, and they destroy your fertility." Meanwhile, cotton shorts are cheaper, comfier, and better on every metric. And you had "plastic-free everything" listed here. I think the obvious thing that's going on right now is plastic-free or Teflon-free pans, which is in the same ballpark. For example, at my house we only have glass Tupperware. And so... bro.
24:13	Shaan Puri	There's nothing more uppity than any sentence that starts with, "At my house." Once you say "At my house," the rest has to be uppity, and literally you're spitting on somebody every time. Anytime anybody uses that phrase — not you particularly, I'm just saying.
24:29	Sam Parr	At my estate. At my estate — the Par Estate, at Par Manor — it's glass only. How dare you. Exactly. For the record, I have Diet Mountain Dew in the refrigerator right now, so I think I can get away with saying this. </FormattedResponse>
24:43	Shaan Puri	You have tobacco in your lip presently, and you're worried about microplastics. You have a hole in your gum.
24:50	Sam Parr	Yeah, so I think I get away with it sometimes. But no—we don't do plastic stuff. If it's something that goes in the microwave, it's not plastic. Now our new thing is my daughter has this thing she calls her "baby." What do they call it—lovey, loveys, or whatever. I don't even know what they are. But we're doing all-cotton ones, which, by the way, are way less comfortable. I understand why.
25:11	Shaan Puri	"Do you use a plastic pacifier in her?" "No." </FormattedResponse>
25:15	Sam Parr	We don't give her a pacifier; she quit taking it at three months. We even have glass bottles—it's a lot of glass stuff. We're not crazy—we use a Teflon pan for scrambled eggs. That's the only thing we can't get away with for nonstick. But mostly it's not plastic, and we're taking it to clothes, too. A company that I like—I have no affiliation with them; I just think they're cool—is Ryker Clothing. Have you seen them?
25:42	Shaan Puri	They're—yeah, I actually just ordered some of their stuff because I want to try it out. It just arrived, so I'm gonna...
25:46	Sam Parr	I love it. It's great.
25:47	Shaan Puri	"Give an honest review."
25:48	Sam Parr	I think they're cool, but it's actually really hard to find all-cotton workout gear. I'm on board with the plastic-free trend.
25:57	Shaan Puri	By the way, I'm also so prepared for somebody to be like, "Oh my god, Cotton — haven't you heard?" and then be like, "Cotton is a lie. Cotton is a huge lie." It's like when Joe Gebbia told us that "recycling was a lie."
26:08	Sam Parr	Have you heard this part? This bit I've been saying for years: "Recycling is 100 percent bullshit. It should be reduce, reuse — get rid of the 'recycle.'"
26:17	Shaan Puri	"And you're saying it because what?"
26:19	Sam Parr	It all gets thrown away in the trash. Recycling is nonsense.</FormattedResponse>
26:23	Shaan Puri	But there's even more to it that he told us about. I wanted to get him on to do his recycling rant because he's got a great recycling rant. I believe that one of the core things is: recycling is a sop. You ready? Yes — recycling is a sop. The companies that make all the plastic products were under some heat. They were like, "Oh shit, this is really bad." And they were asking, "What do we do? What do we do?" Then someone suggested, "Blame the consumer." They were like, "Blame the consumer — that's brilliant." "How do we do that?" they asked. "What if we made it their job to deal with the plastic?" They wondered, "How would we do that?" So we convinced them that it's their obligation to recycle these products. They funded the recycling movement, even though most of it isn't getting recycled anyway. It doesn't really work.
27:08	Sam Parr	"Dude, the blue bins are bullshit. They're bullshit. Yeah, they're totally bullshit — it's like they..."
27:13	Shaan Puri	Cotton's next. I can feel it coming.
27:17	Sam Parr	They could... You know what I often would do with the blue bin [recycling bin]? It would, like, freak people out. I remember people at my office—the hippies, the typical granola people—would complain to me. But I was like, "Just throw the trash in the recycle bin. It doesn't matter. It's all going to the same place." They would flip out. I could tell they were losing sleep over this because they based their personality on this blue bin. It's always been my attitude: it's okay to consume something and throw it away, but it all goes to the trash. Instead, we should reduce the stuff we consume or reuse what we can, right? The blue bin—I can't stand the blue bin. So Joe and I are the same on this one. I'm on board with plastic everything.
27:59	Shaan Puri	So: plastic-free everything. I think this is going to extend into clothes. I think it's going to extend into homeware — pans, everything, like cups that you use. I also think it's going to extend into baby products. All baby products — there's going to be a shift. The way that Honest came out with Jessica Alba and was like, "these juices are full of sugar," so they're like "honest juice." They have wipes and diapers and they're like, "oh yeah, you need to use these products." I think there's going to be a plastic-free big brand that gets built in the baby space.
28:31	Sam Parr	Well, you know what that used to be, right? I grew up using this because my parents were a little hippie. It was cloth diapers that you threw into a hamper and then you had to wash them. It was disgusting.
28:43	Shaan Puri	And for that reason, I'm out. It was...</FormattedResponse>
28:46	Sam Parr	It was honestly filthy, but my mother...
28:48	Shaan Puri	My wife tried to propose that, by the way. She was like, "I think we should cloth diaper."
28:51	Sam Parr	It is like the look of...</FormattedResponse>
28:53	Shaan Puri	Disgust. I gave her... I mean, I was just like, "Listen: you could cheat on me, you could abuse me, you could do whatever you want, but you will not bring cloth diapering into my lifestyle."
29:03	Sam Parr	There was this thing my parents used to do. We were poor, and they said it was cheaper: they had a service that would come and pick it up once a week. But it's still... just the idea of using cloth that other kids have shit in — it's filthy. Like, we're...
29:21	Shaan Puri	Animals—wait. So the cloth diapers are not even just your cloth; it's a mixed pool of cloth.
29:26	Sam Parr	It was like a wash-and-fold — it was like a wash-and-fold service, except the... [unclear: "stuff did they"].
29:32	Shaan Puri	Put one together.</FormattedResponse>
29:32	Sam Parr	It had poop in it, so it was basically: you throw it into this bin, they come and pick it up, and then they bring you new cloth diapers that are clean. You're just reusing them. Yeah... it's disgusting, but that's how it used to be. Now that I'm saying this, by the way, this is kind of interesting. We had Jake on—or Zach, whatever—the young guy the other day who talked about how he thinks of ideas through Jake. </FormattedResponse>
29:58	Shaan Puri	Zach, same thing.
30:01	Sam Parr	The kid we had — what was his name? Zach was his name. We had Zach on, and he was talking about how, when you ask him how he comes up with ideas, he's like, "Just think about what would be awesome in an ad." "A cloth diaper is, like, revolting, but it is clickable and it is interesting." So I actually am on board with cloth diapers now. I just talked myself into it.
30:24	Shaan Puri	Okay, sounds good. I also think, by the way, for plastic — for everything — there's gotta be a supplement that people are gonna try to sell that's going to remove the plastic from your balls and your bloodstream. I think people are gonna get on the — you know — every category is gonna try to take this angle. It's sort of like protein: how protein became a thing. It's like, "Great, eat more meat," and then they're like, "Or take this powder." Or, "You want protein chips? How about protein cookies? How about protein brownies? How about protein everything — protein waffles, protein pancakes?" Protein just made its way into everything on the protein wave. I think water... yesterday.
31:04	Sam Parr	It was amazing. What was protein water? It was basically water with a scoop that looked like lemonade mix. It was high in protein, and it sounded filthy and disgusting—but it was delicious.
31:16	Shaan Puri	That's how I drink my protein shakes. I just put a scoop in water. Yeah, it tastes nasty.
31:21	Sam Parr	There's something cool where you think "creamy and protein" — for some reason that's okay — but "fruity and protein" is just unacceptable. Do you know what I mean?
31:30	Shaan Puri	So, this was fruity, or this was...?
31:32	Sam Parr	It was fruity. It was lemonade.
31:35	Shaan Puri	But you said "unacceptable," but you liked it.
31:37	Sam Parr	Yeah, I loved it, but I had to... get over that barrier, right? Is that...
31:43	Shaan Puri	Was that really hard for you? Yeah.
31:45	Sam Parr	I had to watch it as a motivational talk to figure it out. Yeah—David Goggins definitely had to hype me up.
31:53	Shaan Puri	How bad do you want it? We fight for these inches. Alright, so next one—ready? There's another health trend that I think is going to be big. Have you ever heard of anybody who is doing nervous system work?
32:09	Sam Parr	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. It's very — this is totally a niche thing — and it was really smart of you to call this out. So, go ahead.
32:25	Shaan Puri	Okay, great. So you're already on this. This was... I just... my spidey sense is tingling. I'm hearing little things. It's the...
32:31	Sam Parr	"New leaky gut."
32:32	Shaan Puri	It's the new "leaky gut"—because who doesn't want their nervous system to be reset or calmed down, right? It's literally so central: it's your central nervous system. It's so central to you. You have your vagus nerve and all this stuff. I first got hooked on this because my trainer was telling me about it. He was talking about how when you work out and when you eat, it's not just about what you do—it's about the state your nervous system is in when you do it. I said, "Do you mean...?" He goes, "Well, you have these two modes or modalities for your nervous system: parasympathetic and sympathetic. You're familiar with this?"
33:09	Sam Parr	Yeah, I know what those are. I've heard those words before. I can't teach a class on this, but I... I vaguely...
33:15	Shaan Puri	Here's my bro science for this, which is probably half wrong, but basically there are two core modes you can be in. One is your fight-or-flight response. This is where adrenaline and cortisol get released. They're not just bad — stress is useful in certain scenarios. Adrenaline is good when you need it. You don't want to be in that state all the time, but you need it when there's a real threat. If there's a lion chasing you, you really want to be in fight-or-flight mode. The problem is there is no lion chasing us. It's just Slack and email, scrolling on Instagram, feeling like you're not good enough, looking at your body in the mirror and feeling like you're too fat. Then when you eat, you stress-eat. Or you're working too hard and then stress-eating, or not sleeping — things like that. If you're operating in that sympathetic system [fight-or-flight], your body's secreting certain hormones, but it also shuts down other functions. For example, one of the problems with stress-eating is not only that you overeat or make poor choices, but your body literally digests more poorly when you're in that system. If you're in fight-or-flight, the body's going to take its resources and say, "Guys, we're not digesting food right now. That's not what's important. We gotta be doing these other things — the lion is chasing us." Then you have the parasympathetic system, which is more rested and relaxed. In that state your body can do things like digest and recover. Being able to shift your mood or state from one to the other is really important. How do you do that? Some people get it from exercise, some from the sauna, some from a cold plunge, some from breathwork, and some from meditation. There are a bunch of different ways, and all of these are means to an end: to calm your nervous system down. A lot of good things happen when you can do that — both for health, and for decision-making and creativity. You operate very differently when you're in different states. So that's the theory. That's where it first got on my radar. I believed it, and I started paying attention to it.
35:21	Sam Parr	"Well, you've been doing breathwork for, like, four years now—or five years now?"
35:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah. And the breath to me is... I'm always—I'm not trying to supplement, and I'm very skeptical of the flashy, hard things. So I always look for advice that nobody could... no, no.
35:38	Sam Parr	"You're not... You love that. You love? No."
35:40	Shaan Puri	No — like, in the health space, let's say. Why did I talk about rucking? I'm like, "Oh, it's walking with a little extra weight." Cool. That kind of resonates with me. That makes sense. I never really was able to get into cold plunging, because I thought it was an extreme thing that seems like it's for show. I don't know — it didn't resonate with me in the same way breath work did. With breath work, I could tell that literally just controlling my breath for a couple of minutes would make me feel much different at the end of it. It also makes sense to me to work on my breathing system because I'm going to do that, I don't know, 50,000 times a day. And so I went to... </FormattedResponse>
36:20	Sam Parr	A breathwork class in San Francisco. It made me kind of high. It was awesome. </FormattedResponse>
36:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. Well, that's like the Wim Hof stuff. You can literally hyperventilate yourself and you'll get high; you'll pass out. You could do a lot of things.
36:32	Sam Parr	Yeah, it was great.
36:35	Shaan Puri	That goes more into the category of the extreme, but okay—fair enough. Our buddy Jack Smith came on [the podcast]. Remember that thing he told us about? He said, "I went into a room with 50,000 screens of different colors." He continued, "Basically they flashed things. I sat in a lawn chair, and I paid these guys, like, tens of thousands of dollars, and it healed me." I was like, "Well..." We were both just like, "Okay." Then we were both like, "What?"
36:57	Sam Parr	Dude, there's one down there. Like—he came to visit me at my house. I live in a tiny suburb in Connecticut. There's one, I'm not joking: 200 yards from my house. We went—we went to it.
37:07	Shaan Puri	How was it?
37:08	Sam Parr	Was it amazing? I forgot to bring this up — it was insane. So basically, to everyone listening: this is like 90% of people are gonna be like, "you're crazy," and 10% of the people are gonna be into this. It's very French shit. You go to a room and you're surrounded by literally 20 TV screens, and it looks like it's playing white snow — you know, like when you're...
37:30	Shaan Puri	White noise. Yeah.
37:31	Sam Parr	Yeah, like where your TV wasn't working. The room is about the size of—let's say—it looks like a mini bunk room. It was about 50 feet long and 20 feet wide: just a plain room with reclining chairs in it. I sit in a chair and I just fall asleep. That's all I do. So I go home.
37:50	Shaan Puri	Are supposed to fall asleep.
37:52	Sam Parr	You're just supposed to do whatever you want. You're supposed to relax.</FormattedResponse>
37:54	Shaan Puri	Are you supposed to close your eyes?
37:55	Sam Parr	"Close your eyes and relax." You're supposed to close your eyes or just relax, and I fell asleep. Part of me was like, did I just do, like, a Ron Swanson thing — where they're like, "I'm just standing here meditating," and he's like, "This is so stupid; I just stand here and I'm thoughtless"? And I was like, is that what I'm complaining about? I just fell asleep, and I actually did achieve it. I wasn't sure what happened, but then I went to Jack and I said, "You know, I kind of liked how they had vibrating chairs there. The vibrating massage chairs they had were amazing." He goes, "Dude, those chairs weren't plugged in. They were not vibrating. The chairs didn't vibrate." And I was like, "No — I felt it. I vibrated the whole time and it made me relax. I felt so calm." He goes, "Brother, I talked to the owner. I saw the whole thing. Here's a photo. It was not a plugged-in chair. There was no electricity in this chair. It did not vibrate." I swore that it was vibrating me the whole time. So something happened. That's my story with this place.
38:51	Shaan Puri	"And how is it to be a Scientologist?"
38:54	Sam Parr	It went... it felt crazy, like it does. I was so turned off because the guy who owned the place explained how his wife had cancer, he went into debt to start this place, and “this cured the cancer.” I sort of felt like these people took advantage of you, man. You didn't use modern medicine — you're so delusional. I feel sad for you, which is silly for me to judge, but that was my judgment. And yet I left thinking my body was vibrating, so maybe there was something there. That's all I'm saying.
39:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so I'm kinda fascinated by this. It does feel like something a YouTuber would make up to make a whole YouTube video — like a prank video. It also feels like the hatch in Lost, like the Dharma Initiative created this thing. So, you know, there's definitely a part of me that's like, "Oh my God, this is bullshit." However, I do believe that nervous-system work makes sense. Who am I to say that's not one of the methods that would reset, rewire, calm, or change the frequency? I don't know... I don't know all that stuff. But people are really into grounding. You've seen grounding — going down in the grass [physically lying on the grass to "ground" oneself].
40:06	Sam Parr	Isn't saying to me. My college friends used to be into this. After playing sports—well, all the basketball players would do it: they would take their socks off, go and stand in the grass, because they said they used the word "ions." Yeah, something about negative ions or negative electrons were going from the earth to their body and that was going to heal them. It was the same thing to me as, like, "Do you remember Brett Favre promoting copper?"
40:31	Shaan Puri	The Copper Band
40:33	Sam Parr	The balance band—it's... I don't know, man. I don't know about any.
40:37	Shaan Puri	I absolutely don't know about this. I'm not—I have no— I don't know the science, and I don't know if this works. What I'm saying is: I think there's market demand. I think this is a trend. I think there's pull. This is an area where, when you talk about it, it has that "leaky gut" type of thing—people say, "You know what? I think I have that problem; I want that improved." Whether it's through this room with screens, grounding, or breathwork, I don't know what it is, but that's a trend. I see it—it's a wave—and I think a lot of people are going to go surf that wave.
41:07	Sam Parr	You should go check out one of the—what's the "screen" thing called? It's called "electromagnetic therapy" or something like that, maybe. Let me know if you have a similar experience. I'm a hater of it. I'm telling you, I left my body; I felt different. </FormattedResponse>
41:20	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's do something that's not a health hack. Real quick—I have another one for you.
41:25	Sam Parr	"Religion, AI, social network — which one? Dumb phones?"
41:31	Shaan Puri	Okay, let's do biohacking in plants, which I don't have a lot here. I'm just gonna say it out loud. But there's a moment in time right now. So this is... what is this, trend number three or four we did?
41:45	Sam Parr	Five.
41:46	Shaan Puri	This is five — okay, five. Trend number five: biohacking plants. There's a moment in time right now where I think biohacking has never been as popular as it is, thanks to Brian Johnson, thanks to Ozempic, thanks to people using real peptides — people realizing, “I can just kinda take this, stab this, do this, eat this, drink this, whatever, and I'm going to improve my own health.” So biohacking is a thing. AI has changed the game of science because AI is now doing remarkable things. I don't know if you've paid attention to AlphaFold or some of the stuff coming out of Google. AlphaFold was an AI breakthrough where AI was able to predict how proteins fold, which is really important for a couple of reasons. The simple explanation is: the shape of proteins really matters. It matters how other things can connect to them, how the building blocks can link. It was something we, as humans, didn't know how to do. We knew what proteins were made of, but we didn't know how they would fold — we didn't know the shape of the protein. AlphaFold basically beat everyone; they won the competition for modeling protein folding. Let's assume this is only going to get better.
43:06	Sam Parr	And the implication of this is that we can make new drugs.
43:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. Therapeutics — drugs — you know, so you have all these different technologies: CRISPR, protein folding stuff that's going on. You have, in general, instrumentation and biohacking. But the problem is biohacking in humans is really hard. When you biohack humans, you have to worry about all kinds of health concerns and about getting approvals for things. It's going to be a long, hard road. So, in the same way, I think the longevity startups focused on dogs are going to do well — because who doesn't want their dog to live longer? I think that's a problem everybody has.
43:43	Sam Parr	The background of that is that we had Kevin Rose on. He was trying to create—or he invested in—a longevity drug company. Their model—phase one—was using it on dogs because that's an easier way to get into it.
43:56	Shaan Puri	An easier way to go to market and to test your products — I think the even easier version of this is plants. I know that David Friedberg is doing this for a [unclear: "a hollow"], which is basically biohacking for different crops. How do we make a strawberry that has certain properties? Maybe it's resistant to certain bugs. Maybe it can ripen more evenly, be bigger, be juicier, or grow in different weather conditions. If so, certain places could grow their own crops instead of importing them. There are all these implications if you could biohack plants, because plants are food. How do you do biohacking in plants? For a long time, many breakthroughs in people's understanding of genetics came from plant experiments. You breed crops with each other and discovered patterns — the Punnett square shows how genetic combinations work and the combinatorial effects of crossbreeding. I think there are going to be some really successful startups that combine AI and the concept of biohacking and then use plants as their focus — as their target market — rather than humans.
45:10	Sam Parr	"What's David Freberg's thing?"
45:14	Shaan Puri	"It's called a hollow."
45:15	Sam Parr	And so it's "accelerating evolution to unlock nature's potential." That sounds like a great mission. And so he's basically creating new seeds, or new-style plants, yeah.
45:30	Shaan Puri	I don't know. They haven't been super public — they're not in stealth, but it's not obvious what exactly they're doing. They have this thing called boosted breeding. Basically, it's about how to get more yield on your crops. They'll also have value-added traits, which is how you take a crop and add a trait you want — "gain-of-function," but not for viruses; for your strawberries, almonds, potatoes, corn, and other core crops. This is going to become technology that they'll either build vertically themselves or sell to farms. That's kind of what he did with his other project — climate, or whatever.
46:10	Sam Parr	This is so much better than working on creator-economy software. When you're telling me about this, I'm... I'm a dumb-dumb. I will never be able to start anything in this space. But part of me is like: if I had a friend who started something like this, I would quit everything I'm doing to go work there, because this is such an easy mission to get behind. Yes — this is so much more important than creating a new Linktree. It's so much more exciting, and I love this. I think this is really, really interesting to call out.
46:48	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so that's a trend I'm watching. I'll give you another one: AI social networks. So 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 of social networks — Snapchat and Instagram — which were taking off. What did they do differently? They took advantage of new tech. The new tech was your phone: the phone with a camera, the phone with GPS, the phone that was with you at all times. That unlocked a new social use case. I think the new social use case that's coming out is AI. What is AI going to be able to do here? I don't know exactly what this is going to look like, but I would bet — with very high probability — that the next breakout social app is going to be based on AI. Arguably it already happened: arguably TikTok was the first breakout AI app, in the same way that...
47:53	Sam Parr	I'm like that: I'm following AI people as opposed to real people.
47:58	Shaan Puri	There's a few ways I could take this. The most obvious one was TikTok, which people often say innovated short-form video — but short-form video existed before that (Vine, Musical.ly, others). What TikTok actually did was change the discovery model: instead of the user choosing who to follow, the AI tells you what to follow. Every social network up until then was based on the user creating a graph — going and following people or friending people. That was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. You would choose content that was interesting to you, and you'd keep coming back to the app because it had content you wanted. That worked to an extent. TikTok came out and said, “Let’s never let the user decide what’s interesting. Let’s see if the AI can figure out what’s interesting at a higher rate.” Almost like we were talking about this crops thing: what if you got a higher yield of interestingness if you used AI for the feed instead of humans choosing who to follow? That’s what it did. TikTok is super addictive and has a higher usage rate than other social platforms because the AI is serving you the content instead of you picking it yourself. That was the first breakthrough — it's under the hood, you don't see it. It's the algorithm. Everybody copied it: Instagram and others moved to this "For You" feed. The real innovation of TikTok is the "For You" page. So what's coming next? Up till now, all social networks were based on content that humans make. I think the next breakthrough will be networks based on content that AI makes in some way. That sounds a little far-fetched — why would I want to follow an AI influencer? Let's start with one example: Lil Miquela. We talked about her years ago when they started her. Lil Miquela is an Instagram influencer who is just AI-generated — a girl who's basically an AI image, and she posts photos. Do you know how much money Lil Miquela makes?
49:59	Sam Parr	Last we talked about it, it was interesting but not wild. It was about $800 a year, I think. I think we started talking about her in 2020 or so.
50:07	Shaan Puri	I don't have this confirmed, but I heard it's over $10,000,000. Now that's insane. Okay, so that's... I like.
50:13	Sam Parr	I like Mikayla.
50:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you and a few million other people.
50:18	Sam Parr	It seems likable.
50:19	Shaan Puri	Alright, so that's one. But here's a more interesting version of this, because I think people have heard the "AI-first" idea. I'm going to pitch you a different style of AI social product — it's actually in the music space. I think there's an opportunity to create the AI version of Spotify. What I mean by this is: I started listening to a nontrivial amount of AI-generated music. In the pie chart of my music consumption, it used to be 100% artists I knew — Spotify or wherever. Let's just say that's where I started. Now I've started adding in a bit of AI-generated music. You go to Suno — Suno has a lot of music there — but there are also these YouTube channels, like one called "Golden Age Hip Hop" [YouTube channel]. I don't think that channel is entirely AI; he might use AI in the making of it, but Golden Age Hip Hop is a great channel. What he does is make these mashups. Right — like, if you go to, dude, listen...
51:11	Sam Parr	I listen to the channel too. Then, like, Mac Miller lo-fi or the "Main Character" playlist, for example. I'm getting recommended all of these. At first I was like, "This is weird," but lately I'm attracted to them even more. They're what I listen to all day when I work.
51:29	Shaan Puri	This is my new workout track. So, Golden Age hip hop is... If you look at the channels, it's got 800,000, 730,000 subscribers. Every thumbnail is AI-generated.
51:40	Sam Parr	Yes.
51:41	Shaan Puri	All of the concepts are like things that don't even make sense. It's like, wait — this is... it'll be somebody from the '80s and then somebody from the 2000s collaborating on a song. All the top songs are, you know, if it's sorted by "popular." This one has 11,000,000 views: it's Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, DMX — or Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Xzibit, and Ice Cube all on one track. You're like, "What? That never happened." And that song has 8,000,000 plays. What I think the person is doing is they're just a mashup artist, more like Girl Talk, where they're sampling from different songs and overlaying them well together. Yes. But I think there's a little bit of sign to come... I wouldn't be surprised if they're using AI to do this, or if they're just going to take a voice artist's voice and use AI to make a song from it. I think you tweeted something out — didn't you tweet that the number one song right now was an AI song?
52:36	Sam Parr	It was the Beatles — they won a Grammy this year, and it didn't get talked about a lot. Basically, they had lyrics from when John Lennon was alive, and they used machine learning and AI to finish the song. It won a Grammy, and it's a great song.
52:56	Shaan Puri	"That's crazy. It's crazy. Nobody's—nobody's even talked about that person. I know who talked about that."
53:00	Sam Parr	I saw it, and I was reading about this, and I thought, "This is a huge deal—why isn't anyone discussing this?" I felt like it was a totally undercovered story, and the song's great.
53:09	Shaan Puri	And so it's not that nobody's talking about it. You're right — it's a less-reported story. Here's what I think is going to happen. I think you're going to have a service that's sort of like Pandora or Spotify where you prompt it, or tell it what songs you like, and it will start generating AI music on the fly. What's going to happen is it will generate music in the genres you like. It'll basically train on the songs that exist and create net-new songs. I think the last piece of what's going to happen there is, in the same way that today you have what's called vibe coders — you know what vibe coding is.
53:44	Sam Parr	I'm still trying to figure this out. I did this... this got on my—this got on my radar on Monday. This is how new I am to vibe coding.
53:51	Shaan Puri	Alright, so there's a couple of startups.</FormattedResponse>
53:53	Sam Parr	Like this: it's from Peter Levels. That's how I know about it.
53:57	Shaan Puri	Alright, so there's a couple of startups like Cursor, which has absolutely blown up. I think it's become like a $2- or $3‑billion company or even a $10‑billion company in a very short time. Cursor is basically a coding terminal with AI built in. You can code, but the AI is built in, so you can just tell the AI to write the code for you. You can tell it to debug, or to build for you. Replit is doing the same thing. You go to replit.com now and it just says, "What would you like me to build?" You tell Replit, "I'd like an app that does blah blah blah," and it starts spitting out code on the screen—huge amounts of code scrolling. Then you'll see it "thinking," like: "The initial screen's not loading properly; let me see what's wrong... Ah—I found it." Then it just continues on. It can be kind of amazing to watch. I've built a bunch of little Replit apps that way. This is basically what's happening now: people are going to be able to make software without knowing how to write code. Well, I think what's going to happen next is I'm going to be able to make music without knowing how to make music—without knowing how to play instruments or sing. What's going to happen is I'm just going to be able to prompt the music, tell it what I want, or tell it how to tweak the songs, and then I'll make it. By the way—are you ready for me to just go full-blown idiot here? I'm going to say three letters that you're not going to like: okay, NFTs. They're coming in here. Here's the business model, here's where this actually pairs up, and this is not so crazy. But listen to this:
55:21	Sam Parr	So, do you remember when you used to say, "Used to celebrate — like ding, ding, ding — 'we found a use case'?" Is this...? </FormattedResponse>
55:28	Shaan Puri	This — we found a use case, exactly.
55:30	Sam Parr	So, ladies and gentlemen, we did it!
55:32	Shaan Puri	What is an NFT? An NFT is basically any kind of digital collectible, digital art, or digital property that's unique. It's a way to say, "This is unique and I own this. I made this." If you buy it, you own it, and it shows who made it. Royalties can be attached to it. That's actually a pretty cool thing. If I make art in Photoshop — which I think both of us would agree is art — being able to say that I made this and that nobody can claim they made it is important. Being able to sell my art is also important, and if I sell it, being able to capture a royalty on subsequent sales is also cool. So I think we all agree that's actually pretty cool, despite how obnoxious NFTs became. Now, what's going to happen in the music cases? I'm going to be generating music with AI and be able to mint that song. I'll be able to say, "I helped create that by prompting it; I created it." All of the artists whose music was used, I think they're going to get partial ownership of that. I'll be able to upload that track as a musician — in the same way that a lot of musicians today are using Auto-Tune and basic digital production — they're not sitting there with a guitar strumming.
56:41	Sam Parr	Yeah.
56:41	Shaan Puri	Yeah. They're in a piece of software making the computer strum the guitar. They just type in the notes — A, B, C, D — and then they'll type in the chord and the guitar just plays it. To a purist musician, they're like, "That's not music; you're just cheating." I think that's what's going to happen next with AI. I think the 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 and say, "Oh, this is cool. I like this; I'll pay to create this and to own this," and then I'll share that with other people. Then I'll get, like, the way this Golden Age hip-hop guy is getting 10,000,000 streams on his songs. I think somebody who's a non-musician would be able to get that. Did I just go crazy, or what just happened?
57:24	Sam Parr	No, I think that's very smart. I think you're doing a very good job of looking ahead, and I agree with the future that you're painting. I'm shocked so far that music has been—well, not with AI. I guess this makes sense because the guys making AI are also into other stuff, but AI has mostly been used for coding and a variety of other tools. I'm shocked that it hasn't impacted art, and particularly music, as much—or as little—as it has. The future you're painting makes a lot of sense. I think that if you were to play me an AI Post Malone song and a real Post Malone song, I don't think anyone would know the difference.
58:06	Shaan Puri	Which is unbelievable.
58:07	Sam Parr	"We're already there, right?"
58:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, we're already there.
58:09	Sam Parr	"We're already there. Also, if you were—if I were to go to a concert, I would be into going to a concert of a fake person. Do you remember the Gorillas?"
58:18	Shaan Puri	Mm-hmm.
58:19	Sam Parr	I loved the gorillas. I listened.
58:21	Shaan Puri	To what was their story? I've only heard their songs but never been to a concert.
58:25	Sam Parr	The guy who created the Gorillaz is a genius. So, Gorillaz—for those listening who are below the age of 30—was a band. It was created by—do you remember Blur? Remember the band Blur? He was kind of a punk-rocky guy, but he created Gorillaz as a weird hobby, a side project. This was in the nineties. He wrote songs, he had the music, and he sang. He was the musician; he played all the instruments. Then he had music videos that were cartoons and animations. For years—this was before the internet was popular—so we couldn't Google who was behind it. It was just rumors. You never actually knew. In that age you didn't totally know; you'd hear it was this guy, hear it was that guy, but you didn't know who it was. Gorillaz was the band he made. It was a fake band—all cartoons. They went so far as to appear on talk shows. At the time the tech wasn't great, but they would do holograms. They appeared on David Letterman and shows like that. Eventually they did concerts. At first it was simple and janky—basically just a movie theater. Then they figured out how to hologram it. Now he goes out and performs; we all know who the guy is and he'll actually go and perform. It's amazing. But he did all of this before the technology existed. I loved Gorillaz. I loved them before I knew who the person was. I just knew the characters and I actually liked them, and I got to know their personalities. It was very strange. Because I was into that when I was a kid, and even as an adult I like it, I can now see how it doesn't seem crazy that I'm going to like the AI stuff.
01:00:02	Shaan Puri	Totally, totally. I mean, dude, I was so into WWF growing up, right? It's one of those things that, on the surface, sounds silly—fake wrestling. You might ask, "Why would you care?" But people pay thousands of dollars to sit front row and scream their hearts out to watch it. If you just described it to somebody, it wouldn't seem like it would work, but it does. That's the point I'm trying to make with this episode: these are trends that today sound small or weird, but I think in the future they're going to be bigger. Knowing that is good for two reasons: 1. You're the type of person who likes to be in the know. You like to know things before others and maybe try products early—before they become cool. I like to do that. 2. Jumping on trends early is a way to make a lot of money. There are riches in these niches if you actually pursue them. Or you can be the person who always waits for proof and then feels like you're too late every time. As an entrepreneur, being early to trends that will last or become big is a great way to get rich. The ones we mentioned: - Short drama apps (mini dramas): Apps that are basically like Netflix but with 90-second episodes. There are four apps doing over $100,000,000 a year in revenue today. They're all Chinese apps. There's an opportunity for someone to make this in the U.S. and for other geographies—make the biggest one in Brazil or in India. These are going to be very, very big. - Fitness trends — rucking: Walking with a weighted vest. GORUCK is doing over $50,000,000 a year in revenue.
01:01:50	Sam Parr	Shirtless, ripped guys are going to just tear you up in the comments, saying, "Sean, we've been here."
01:01:54	Shaan Puri	Of course.
01:01:55	Sam Parr	We've been doing this.</FormattedResponse>
01:01:55	Shaan Puri	Congratulations on being early to the plastic-free movement. Everything looks promising. I think microplastics will be the next thing people are afraid of, and there will be opportunities to sell solutions to that fear. We talked about nervous system work—specifically the parasympathetic nervous system. There is a market for solutions marketed toward calming, tuning, or resetting your nervous system—a reboot for your nervous system. We also discussed biohacking for plants: AI + biohacking, but using plants as a go-to-market strategy because it’s safer. You can kill plants and nobody cares. Ultimately, there’s a huge market in improving crops and the food that we all eat. Finally, we talked about the AI social network. Every decade or so there’s a new big social product—Facebook, then Instagram, 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-focused version, but there are probably many other variations.
01:02:58	Sam Parr	"That was very educational. Good job. You—you—you came with the goods. You carried us on this one, and I think you did a wonderful job. So, thank you."
01:03:06	Shaan Puri	Thank you. Let us know in the YouTube comments which trends you like, and I'll be replying to all of them.
01:03:12	Sam Parr	Alright, that's it. That's the pod.

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6 under-the-radar trends (+ our business ideas)

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