Samir Chaudry: Why 99% Of Content Creators Fail At YouTube

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Tell me about MrBeast.

**Samir Chaudry** (0:02)
He is so unique in the fact that he is laser focused in a way that I've never really experienced, and maybe at times, in a way that-

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
I don't want to experience. Yeah, he doesn't want to experience.
You're about to hear a conversation I recorded with Samir when I went down to LA.
I've been following these guys for a little while. They are knee deep in the YouTube game. And if you're a content nerd like me, somebody who really thinks about, okay, what is great content? How do I use content to build my business? Which is what I've done.
Then these guys are very interesting because they know everything about YouTube and all the YouTubers. They've done interviews with MrBeast and Dream and all a bunch of the large YouTube channels. We talked about a bunch of things. What makes a great interview? How do you do, what are the questions you ask? How do you prep and how do you show up the right way if you're gonna do an interview? We talked about quality of audience versus quantity of audience. How do you think about not just the numbers, but like the real trick, which is getting the right type of people to actually watch your stuff.
Hanging out with MrBeast. So they've spent days and days with MrBeast. I wanted to ask them, what did they learn about this guy? He is the most popular YouTuber in the world. He's one of the most popular entertainers in the world, period.
It's rare you get that kind of access to that type of person. And I wanted to hear some stories and he told me some good ones. Then we did five great creator businesses that you've never heard of and some predictions. What YouTubers does he think have the potential to build billion dollar empires under their content? He gave me three that he believed could be the case. And there's a bunch of other frameworks. So things that you only really have these insights if you've been doing something for like 10 years, you've been thinking about the same thing from every angle for 10 years. Those are some of my favorite people to talk to. All right, so enjoy this conversation with Samir.

**Samir Chaudry** (2:00)
Colin and I spent a lot of our career making documentaries. And what we noticed was like, if we were interviewing a subject and we were just interviewing them head on, we wouldn't get good answers. And then we started taking them like driving or have them do something else. And then you would get the truth.
And it was really interesting. It's like the truth comes out in the car. I think it's something that some documentarians say where it's like, if someone's doing something else, they're much more open if their mind isn't 100% on the interview.

**Shaan Puri** (2:28)
Why is that? You think they're just performing basically when they sit down in like a artificial environment?

**Samir Chaudry** (2:33)
Probably, yeah. There's a lot of like self perception stuff that's going on, right? It's like, how am I coming across?
Who am I? Is the sounding right? And if you're distracted, then you.

**Shaan Puri** (2:43)
But you guys do your interviews at a table basically. So you don't do that.

**Samir Chaudry** (2:47)
Well, we've been trying to explore like the concept of creating the right energy for the conversations, right? Like you think about like, this has a completely different energy than if there was a table has a completely different energy than if we didn't have mics and we were lav'd or had booms.
So we've been trying to explore like where our show is moving and what type of space we want.

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
That's essentially exactly where I wanted to start, which is basically you guys do. So we came down here and we were like, oh, let's get like a place. Let's have some in-person interviews with people that we think are awesome.
And it's different than the like at home thing for sure. The vibe is different, you get a different energy. But also you can do like high stakes interviews almost. It's like the whole day kind of gets built around this interview, which is not really the case when you do it online.
And you guys have been doing some high stakes interviews. So you're doing stuff with, I mean, just recently I saw the Tim Ferriss one that was great. And I'm guessing you're like me that you grew up kind of like really into Tim Ferriss' stuff and kind of admire him.

**Samir Chaudry** (3:51)