We hit record on our private strategy session

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Okay, so this was supposed to be private, but we decided to do it in public. As any good influencer would do, we said, hey, why do this if we're not gonna have the camera on?
I guess the setup here is, me and Sam are on camera, but you'll also see Arie and Cassie, doppelgangers, and Cassie's the new, she's the new girl on the team. She came on and we were supposed to do a strategy meeting of like, oh, you're here to help with the podcast. What are we trying to do again? What's the strategy? We said, why don't we actually just record it, and we'll just do it live and see what comes out of this session. That's what I'm here to do. Sam, is that what you are expecting here?

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
Yes.
We all filled out something in advance. You are the only one who did not submit yours already.

**Shaan Puri** (1:01)
Well, okay. Yeah, that's right. I did, but I'm like the collator.
What I like to do in these situations, and I think anybody should steal this.
I stole this from Amazon when we got acquired there. I learned this method, which is, you send a little bit of pre-work in advance, and it makes the meeting so much more interesting and so much more valuable because some people are fantastic at thinking on the spot and coming up with insightful, accurate, true, honest things on the spot in front of a larger group of people, but that's like 1% of people. Most people don't think very well that way. And so if you actually want to get to the right answer, a really good thing to do is to send out some questions or have people write in advance what they're thinking. And then one person's like the gatherer. You gather all the materials together and you use that to have a good discussion. And so I asked you guys 10 or so questions and they were questions like, what's working really well with the podcast right now? What's not working? What's your biggest pet peeve? What's something we're just stupid for not doing right now? Right, like just very simple questions. And so I gathered all that and we're not gonna use all of it, but I wanted to share some of the most interesting findings. Can we just start with the most interesting findings? The first one is, Sam, you had a bit on almost like the virtue of selfishness. You were basically like, I wanna do the selfish thing with the podcast. Because there's one way to look at this, which is it's all about, what should we be doing to be more successful? How do we make this external thing work? And you were just like, you said, I wanna do this selfish thing and have fun and learn and improve myself. I think others will enjoy that a lot more than us trying to appeal to them in an inauthentic way.
And it reminded me of the Rick Rubin quote of the best way to serve your audience is to ignore them completely.

**Sam Parr** (2:45)
I actually think I was like nervous to even put that on there, because I'm like, oh, we're gonna do a podcast on this and I'm just gonna go tell the audience to have themselves.
I just think that, so originally you started this podcast, then I came on and for the first three years, I don't think you and I ever looked at the data.
And I couldn't even tell you a bunch of the numbers. Frankly, I still don't really look at the numbers, but every once in a while, I get drawn and sucked into this thing where I look at the YouTube numbers, those are the most public. And I started thinking in headlines. And I started thinking in what can get the highest click-through rates. And then occasionally, I suggest we do some of those episodes. And we do do some of those episodes. And I noticed the night before, I get the Sunday Scaries out of Tuesday night, because we record on Wednesdays. I noticed that I dislike those the most. And then I noticed there are so many times, like when you will tell me a story, or we will have a guest like Graham Weaver, who I think Graham Weaver is popular, so it's maybe not the best example, or Sarah Moore, who you did a podcast with, where we do these podcasts, and I leave with more energy than I came in on. And almost always that happens when it's not data driven, and it's simply what am I curious about, or if I read a book and I'm like, I'm so excited to tell Shaan about this, or Shaan goes and does something, and he goes and visits Austin, and I just want to hear his opinion of who he met, and what was cool about it. I am more excited and energized at the end of those than I am at the things where I've done based off of a headline that I think will be popular. Right.