Personality-Market Fit | Nuseir Yassin, Nas Daily

0:00[Music] what up how's it going man ah it's early for us uh i feel like we normally do these in the evening and i i drink alongside them but it's like the rare morning recording that we're doing right now yeah so but i know you're like super caffeinated so i feel like you're ready to you're ready to go well i'm not as caffeinated as i otherwise would be you know for context but this is like you know morning after the super bowl so i'm like you know a little hungover um got into it a little bit last night and it's it's early i'm this is actually

0:34my first cold brew of the day which is pretty rare and i'm only like a third of the way into it so i actually i feel like i need to need to get some energy going here what do you got for me today to give me a little energy i mean i'm still thinking super bowl um favorite super bowl ad obviously the qr code the bouncing around qr code give me your take on that so for people that don't have context or didn't watch the super bowl there was an ad basically it was a black screen and there was a qr code which some people know what they are some

1:08people don't but basically this qr code was just like ping-ponging around the screen in different colors um it was a fit it was a coinbase ad and if you popped up in your phone and scanned the qr code it took you to coinbase um and it crashed the site like within two minutes the site was down from all the traffic from you know 100 million people watching the super bowl and presumably a bunch of them logged into it at once and it took down the site so what was your take on i mean so i'll give you my macro take and my micro take so my macro take

1:36on the bouncing around qr code is it's an ode to like you remember in school when they used to like bring in a tv and we'd wait for like a video and it was that basically this like bouncing around image and it never hits the corners and i think there's like an office episode actually that like talks that there's like a clip of it maybe we can put in the show notes where like the whole office um is like watching uh the screen and they're just kind of waiting for it anyway so the whole point is um it's an it's a a nod to nostalgia and i think like the

2:14macro thing is that nostalgia is one of the most powerful sales techniques of all time and we saw that everywhere that was the theme of the super bowl in my opinion like the winner was nostalgia so for example like the halftime show like was nostalgia you know to the max um so that's the macro and then the micro which is uh this particular ad um [Music] you know i just think it's a brilliant way to get you know if they're gonna spend seven million dollars on an ad and they're trying to get like a hundred thousand sign ups like yeah it makes sense to put a qr code and then it's

2:51like yeah it does make sense to like combine direct response plus nostalgia so the stats on it are pretty staggering by the way i completely agree with you nostalgia the actual stats on the ad which i looked up this morning are crazy because they spent 14 million dollars for the 60-second spot during the super bowl it was literally 60 seconds of this thing ping-ponging around and uh it crashed the site within a couple minutes because of all the people going to it the app went from being 186th in the world to second in the world overnight from running this ad during the super bowl and so

3:2914 million dollars and the return was that that massive jump plus all the earned media of people just talking about it constantly we're sitting here talking about it all the news articles this morning i actually tweeted out something saying if i were gonna go drop a bold super bowl ad i would probably pre-program my site to be down like two minutes after the thing dropped because i personally think that the earned media of saying oh we crashed the site with our super bowl dad that we ran is more valuable than the site being up and people being able to like do something on the site when they go to it

4:02because i think it extends the half-life of that overall kind of ad impression for much longer than it otherwise would have been yeah i thought that was i i agree with you i also think that like you mentioned like the app store charts like one you know one thing about app store charts is once you hit the top of the charts like other people basically will be like oh what's you know we'll just be discovering the charts and be like oh what's coinbase and so there's a certain amount of staying power that happens when you hit up in you know and and you do what's called a

4:34you know that's called like a burst marketing campaign where you you go up and there's a certain amount of staying power so overall like coinbase i mean my guess is they crushed it on those ads in terms of numbers um it makes it makes me think like you know for late checkout and our clients like should we be like taking out more tv ads like and throwing up qr codes um are tv ads undervalued are you and your team still using your personal phone numbers for work do you call customers partners or candidates with your personal phone number do you find it hard to manage your work and

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7:15it's sort of interesting i mean with with um how expensive digital advertising has gotten do you go back like to the point of nostalgia do you go back to doing the old way i mean we've seen it in consumer i spent a lot of my time in consumer in my old job and the re-emergence of things like direct mail and catalogs within consumer was fascinating because it was like what's old is new right um you had all these people all of a sudden realizing it was so expensive to acquire customers online and spend money on google and facebook and all of those things and so they went

7:45to sending direct mailers and like these beautiful catalogs that were really immersive and interesting and that became the new way to acquire customers it was the same thing with small footprint retail like three four years ago all these stores realized that it was more expensive to acquire customers online than to put up a small you know store in soho and have that be like a billboard plus a place for them to create an immersive experience um but this feels like the next emergence of that it was also very clear that crypto was kind of one of the themes of super bowl ads this year you just have all

8:14these crypto companies that have raised so [ __ ] much money and needed to find creative ways to deploy it and it was kind of a cool coming out party for a lot of like web 3 crypto the nouns thing that you've talked about in the past that ad where they made an appearance in the budweiser ad um it was pretty cool it was cool to see definitely definitely cool to see um i definitely had like moments where as a crypto person i was watching that and my you know my heart warmed a bunch of times um i think going back to like tv ads as a medium in 2022 i think like

8:46why super bowl ads work um is because people tune in to the to this to super bowl ads like i bet you more you know more people prefer the halftime show and super bowl ads than the actual super bowl itself the dif and the difference between like regular tv ads is it's interruption you're just like you're there you're like okay you know clorox you're like in my face like get out of there so i think that what works is you know traditional tv advertisements or traditional advertising in in channels where people are tuning in not tuning out so that's that was a small takeaway i had

9:29yeah i think that's a really interesting point it's also an interesting point on the halftime show because i don't know if you've ever seen the mechanics of how that works but basically the nfl contributes like a million dollars towards the halftime show and any other amount that the artists um want in order to create an amazing experience at halftime show is self-funded by the artist so like last year the weekend i think invested seven million of his own capital into making an amazing experience a halftime show this year dr dre put in six million dollars and so they spent seven total in addition to the one um and the the rationale behind

10:01it is pretty interesting because it's basically a 15-minute ad for that artist to go and hook people on what their the content that they are creating and so relative to like spending coinbase spent 14 million dollars for a 60-second spot dr dre spent seven million dollars for a 15-minute spot of all these artists might not be quite as relevant for uh dr dre snoop dogg eminem maybe they're not touring as much but for the weekend last year the amount of um roi that he got on that seven million dollars is probably astounding in terms of you know tour ticket sales merch uh spotify streams all of his songs

10:38ended up on the top charts in the days that followed that's worth a lot of money um so it's pretty fascinating when you think about the mechanics of these halftime shows as well it makes me think like is there an opportunity to do half-time shows but for other events so obviously super bowl has 100 million people watching or more um but there's tons of events that have a million people watching 100 000 people watching 10 million people watching where you can create a business that basically creates these tours and you can combine these artists you combine the brands and then you sell it to the nfl the nhl

11:12college whatever thoughts yeah it's kind of interesting i mean i the the challenge is would you still capture as much attention as you do during the super bowl that's your point the value here is the fact that there's i don't know 100 million people watch this how many of them are tuned in specifically for commercials and for the halftime show and so you know you have this massive captive audience when you're delivering that content could you start to shift the narrative around these other events and create a place where the halftime show is actually drawing people into the other event maybe and you could i mean

11:46effectively get a discounted rate um from the fact that you're actually contributing value to the main event via the halftime show so it's it's sort of an interesting here's what i like about halftime shows so and by the way this is a stream of consciousness so let me know if this makes doesn't make sense so halftime shows are for everyone games or for some people so if you could create interesting you know halftime shows and create cultural statements and and bring culture to events that are beyond just like hardcore sports um i just think that there's in a a it makes the game like richer and more con

12:30and more interesting to folks and and b i think it it gives artists a channel to um to access audiences and to you know be on their tour dates or beyond like shows that they're gonna do it also brings communities together i i don't think it's crazy what you said it brings communities together because i mean you think of the case the super bowl the amount of super bowl parties people that come together cool moments that that creates and that's because it's an immersive and welcoming environment where it's not just you know men watching the super bowl it's um everybody my wife loves to watch the

13:07super bowl because of the commercialism because the halftime show and she likes the football and gets engaged in it and it's a fun experience for us together so i don't think it's crazy at all i think uh like post pandemic that these super bowl type events are going to get a lot bigger and the ecosystem events around a lot of these events are going to get a lot bigger so yeah yeah it's a cool it's cool to think about what how you could build a business around creating i mean you kind of alluded to it earlier create um halftime shows or similar events short like 10 to 15 minute events that are

13:45really immersive that can be um inserted into either physical or digital events uh because these these gatherings are going to be uh more and more prolific and at more and more scale within the digital world right you can just get so many people versus in a physical place um and so how do you insert how can you like aggregate and insert interesting content into that um in a profitable way i think it's interesting cool yeah i mean i i think uh that was my light bulb moment last night nostalgia and halftime shows something there yeah so i was thinking more and more it kind of got me thinking more and more about

14:27these ideas that i've talked about around creators and owned audiences you know we were talking about the the kind of owned audience effect of people tuning in for the super bowl and um how it's a good way to capture a bunch of people at once and it's effectively priced in right they priced the super bowl ads and so you're not really getting a deal on it per se but if you do something really splashy like what coinbase did coinbase did you can really win and you know there's this whole concept um now that creators are kind of the future of of brands and advertising i was talking

14:59with um alex one of the founders at morning brew recently and he was talking and he's been tweeting and doing videos about how he thinks that creators are really the future and and um you know the fact that they have an owned audience and the fact that they have a really fervent and passionate audience and a community built around them that that is the future of consumer consumer brands distribution etc and it got me down the rabbit hole on mr beast who i'm sure you're familiar with but like one of the most prolific youtube creators i think we've talked about him in the past in the context of that squid

15:31games reenactment video that he did um which i think now has like 200 million views or something like that something completely insane um but mr beast recently launched this chocolate company and that was like a light bulb moment for me personally as i was thinking about it because look this is a 23 year old young man he has 90 approaching 100 million subscribers on youtube um i think 15 billion plus video views to date 40 million in revenue or something like that in 2021 um that squid games reenactment video did more um generated more revenue than the original which is completely insane to me um and

16:13i think he grew by like five million subs from that one video which is remarkable as well so mr beast has gone and launched this chocolate company called feastables and they've done it in a very uh interesting way where the whole launch was tailored around this like willy wonka chocolate factory type deal where you had like tickets like golden tickets in there and so there's a chance to win his actual chocolate factory there's like a million dollars um in prizes you can be in a mr beast video if you get one of the lucky tickets um and it's such a fascinating case study of like the future of where these consumer

16:50launches and brands are going because he has a massive owned audience i mean imagine the number of people that are going and buying this because they're seeing him holding it in their videos they're seeing him interact with it talk about it etc it's a good product you know they're like doing the whole like very few base ingredients i'm sure it's kind of best in class in terms of a formulation standpoint and they brought in a really legit team to help run it because they know that immediately this has scale to it it's not like a consumer brand that you need to get off the ground and slowly build a

17:20base he has this enormous embedded community and audience around it um so i've just been thinking more and more about this and like what are the opportunities to um to build at scale around this concept like it's great on an individual level that a mr beast can go do this um but what are the business opportunities that exist around this general trend that is developing have you uh have you heard of knight media no okay pull it up um yeah so i know about these guys because we work with them on some projects um and basically is it night as in like a middle medieval or like night like it's it's night time

18:08it's the website is night. okay i got it yeah so basically they manage talent including mr beast they oh this is a dope website by the way um they're a venture studio so they basically partner with operators so like you sahil bloom might partner with like a top you know youtube creator that they manage to create a product and they do investing this is really cool so this is what i'm getting at like there has to be an opportunity to create a like holding company of sorts where this is more of like an agency as far as i can tell where like they're representing these people and they will

18:57kind of bring them to bear and then there's ownership i thought it would be interesting if you got like 10 creators together and basically gave them joint ownership like you came together twitter tick tock youtube etc and you kind of take joint ownership of this holding company and the holding company then has an investment fund which i imagine you could go raise a billion dollars for because people would definitely give you capital given the collective influence the fund would have um and then you would have everyone's individual brands underneath it probably some sort of just like revenue share where like 10 of the profits they make go back into the

19:30holding company pool um and then you have any individual brands you're launching off of it and you launch them and then they you kind of hire a team and you can spin them out like it becomes this like creator iac of the future um that i think is like a really really cool content and you know you call it too right you call it um halftime ventures halftime ventures there you go there you go there's probably something really cool to do with it um you're normally the guy that brings up tokenomics and web3 but i'm just thinking about like over time because you would set an ownership base

20:06presumably at the beginning but over time as different people grow in different amounts and are contributing different value to it it would be pretty interesting if you had a way to kind of um have the creators that are growing the fastest and that are contributing the most value to the holding company actually kind of profit from that in some way and similarly the people that are following them that want to kind of participate within that value creation might have a mechanism by some form of token yeah i think the really cool thing about creators in general is and we talked about ecosystems before is you have the creator and then you have their

20:35communities and ecosystems around that so if you could create um you know a new a new version of iac or holding company where these creators are incubating products but you know they're seeing upside which is really cool um their communities are seeing upside which is really cool and you can use web3 to do really fun things like for example you know maybe you can't uh you know maybe you get if if you stake let's say your tokens you get certain benefits you get extra tokens like you know maybe there's ways to reward um you know communities and creators that are more uh i guess just are in it for the long haul so i i do

21:22like that yeah that piece of it it's a good point yeah i just feel like um one of the trends that i see happening right now is that creators are individually um going and building um kind of equity in things right and you kind of have like a bunch of creators that are raising small funds we've seen that obviously a bunch of our friends um i'm a part of that movement like there's a bunch of people doing this and i tend to think that like one plus one equals three if you bring these people together if you had the collective sway of a bunch of the

21:57biggest youtubers a bunch of the biggest twitter a bunch of the biggest tick tock um a bunch of the biggest instagram etc and you kind of brought it into a single fund that would guarantee be able to go and raise and collect more value from lps and the fee base of that and the potential future carry of it than just these individual small funds that people are able to raise um so i think it'd be pretty interesting to actually see something like this come together i've seen like another friend marshall sandman who runs uh animal capital which is like the sway house guys um josh richards and those

22:30guys is that his name josh josh richards right um and uh that's pretty interesting because they're bringing this collective kind of sway but can you go do that on a mass scale where you bring a bunch of people together and you have a holding company structure where you can spin things out i think it's pretty interesting and there's probably a bunch of adjacent infrastructure businesses that would need to be built in order to enable people to so how would you do it how would you do it so let's just say someone is listening to this and wants to go and create this um easier for sahel bloom to do it with you

23:00know half a million twitter followers by the time we hopefully uh by the time we put this out um you know what what sort of advice can you give to people who who might not have a an audience but who want to create something like this yeah i mean i guess the actual putting together of the structure um i think would need to be led by the individuals that were going to be a big part of it like they would need to all be on board for it but the individual pieces of like business and infrastructure around it i think could really be anybody um like when you think about pitch first

23:39off pitching them on it i think there's an interesting thing to just be pitched i i would be glad to be a part of that because i think it's a pretty interesting concept that i've played around with different people but i do tend to think that like the infrastructure uh layer of somebody going and launching a new brand like a feastables um is there a kind of um is there is there infrastructure and tools that exist that allow creators to very quickly spin up product drops or new consumer brands um things like that where you're kind of playing the adjacent trend i think are are probably the more reasonable way for

24:15anyone to get involved in that type of movement um but i don't know i need to think about it more we should muse on it more because i actually do think there's something interesting here and something that we're probably uniquely well suited to go and play like here's how if anyone's listening here's how i would think about it to me it's very similar to how you start a conference and you want to get guest speakers so the thing or you're starting a podcast and you want to get you know great guest speakers um you know you try to just like get bigger and bigger names and use

24:51those names to leverage other names [Music] and then once you have you know let's say mr beast as a part of this or mr beast coming to your event then it's really easy to get anyone else so i think the way to do this is you have to make a compelling like make a video or something like record a video make something really cool like grab an iphone but make it like unique and interesting and just like dm as many people as possible and then wait until you get that one person to say yes and then use that one person to say yes to like leverage and then be

25:28like i've got this person you should come on board yeah it's a hustle game it's a hustle game in the early days um i feel like that's a good transition too to bring in our guest for today who is a amazing creator in his own right but also has kind of taken the creator um the creator path and now effectively transitioned into building really scale businesses and equity around it um so i want to bring in i want to bring in our guest and we can uh we can dive into it with him and go a little bit deeper here cool let's do it um so

26:02i want to kick off by just wait we're recording now we're recording yeah but we can delete out whatever you don't like oh okay wait well first of all nice to meet you greg nice to meet you man nice to meet you i must i must admit i've i've seen i've seen your your videos so it's like it's weird for me because you and 10 million it's weird for me because it's like i don't know if this is a video or am i dreaming or what's going on but great to meet you [Laughter] greg tell me more about yourself who are you um yeah background in in building

26:35you know internet communities um was an advisor to tick tock uh advisor reddit started and sold three companies ran product strategy at wework now i run a holding company which is called late checkout which uh does investing incubating and uh agency work building web three and community based products for some of the biggest brands that's smart that's cool i love your website thank you okay great this is great wow amazing website um it's an insane website completely insane website um so okay maybe we can just start um i want to dive in and get your story and background because i think it's so interesting how you have

27:25progressed from where you start you know you grew up in israel um i want to kind of hear the background like yeah i've looked up and spent a bunch of time understanding you know your path and it's such an interesting one to where you are today and the business building um that you've kind of created around the creator economy as well but maybe we can just start at the beginning i'd love to just hear your kind of journey nus yeah yeah first of all guys uh greg sale thank you so much for having me here uh really appreciate it um yes my name is nasir like yes sire no

27:55sire yes sire no sire it's complicated uh i was born raised in israel uh i'm palestinian israeli so it's double whammy moved to the united states for college got into harvard not a double whammy uh graduated worked as a software engineer at venmo before it was cool now venmo is really cool back then it was cool too um and and then decided to become a creator and so i started making videos put them on the internet and then to my surprise like people started to watch i made a thousand videos in a thousand days never missed a day not even once i adopted facebook as my platform as opposed to

28:36youtube maybe that's why half your audience doesn't know me uh and uh and it blew up from there and now nas daily has you know 47 million followers in 13 different languages around the world and after i finished that journey of making content i started a tech company going back to my software engineering roots so we're building basically a master class for creators and we have been building it for two years we're venture funded series a and we will be serious b very soon i hope and that's me i'm talking to you from dubai so i need this i need to back you up a little bit on this whole thing because

29:17there's so many interesting um points in that story so you got into harvard you ended up at harvard i think i read that you were originally going to do an aerospace engineering degree ended up doing economics and computer science which i think is probably more practical practical maybe you'd be working for spacex or something now working in the space economy but you end up at venmo how did you decide to quit your job and go off on this journey because you were on like probably what was a very lucrative and great track and as uh as someone with um uh with immigrant parents uh and india you know an indian

29:55mother um jewish father i uh i was always someone who felt like the safe track was the one i was supposed to be taking and i imagine your parents had maybe similar perspectives yeah i know that's a great question i mean that decision happened six years ago i think the riskiest part of that decision is not the money it's actually the visa because when you quit your job as an international you lose your h-1b and you need somebody else to sponsor it and you need to win the lottery again and i was just like i don't know it was just a stupid decision in retrospect actually made me smart but i was like i

30:29don't i don't need america i don't i don't need the visa and i don't need the 120k per year because i had 60k savings already so 60k is is all it takes really to feel a sense of i'm never going to be homeless you know um yeah are there companies just to pause you on the visa point because you're sparking an idea are there companies that um help people with this like a company that um you can nominally work for and acquire a visa via that when you're doing a non-traditional path yeah that sounds like illegal yeah nominally work for equals illegal um do you think so i i don't know like

31:12like a company that will um kind of basically take people that are going to go on a non-traditional but potentially lucrative path and bear the risk of the payment on you know on whatever it costs to get them the visa but then gets a percent of the upside around it it's sort of like they're investing in your future which could be potentially much more valuable and they're the ones that are going to incur the costs around the visa process well you are very entrepreneurial man i i get i gotta admire that but i i think the us government asks you why you want the visa i'll uh i'll raise you you know

31:49i'll add to that idea so linkedin but it's for jobs that you know u.s companies will sponsor your visa j1 which is your internship visa which is really easy to give tn which is your canadian us you know it's just all br broken down and categorized around different categories as a canadian myself and moved who moved to the us like i dealt with so much pain around just like visas and stuff like that and so many friends have totally and it doesn't need to be this way i mean and and we're in a job shortage right like we need to hire people yeah and highly technical and skilled workers

32:32too i mean it's um it's an insane problem i mean i have um close close family who grew up in in bangladesh and are still bangladeshi citizens i believe and um it's impossible one of them worked for him oh one of them worked for amazon and then was wanted to go start a startup but literally couldn't leave amazon because of that challenge of like oh well then i'm gonna have to move back to bangladesh because i won't have a visa yeah wow crazy from amazon to bangladesh anyway back to you guys super interesting anyway i'm sorry i i gotta add so you know you said something

33:08uh when you're kind of explaining a bit about yourself which i i really dialed into which is you basically were like hey i started making a bunch of videos and then to my surprise people started watching and i made it a thousand videos every single day so number one like how surprised were you actually like um and how long did it take for you like how did you do it basically like what advice could you give to people listening who want to create something uh who want to you know create videos create tweets create whatever um what sort of frameworks could you give to people to help them get hundreds

33:47of millions of people watching yeah well greg the problem with this podcast is that people cannot see my face right when they see when they see my face they realize wow this is not a hollywood face you know there's a lot of this is why don't sell yourself short come on man you know what i thank you for being nice but that's [ __ ] because before starting nas daily i i went on tinder and i swiped right basically on every single girl for the next 500 girls and then i just got like two swipes back people don't want a hollywood face anymore they want a tick-tock face

34:26that's what they want okay well i i guess preference changed in the last six years well unfortunately i've been in a relationship for five years so i don't need to swipe anymore but when i swiped i got no responses so that's when i knew statistically speaking i don't have the face to go viral that's number one number two is i scream in my videos i don't know if you've seen the videos but i [ __ ] scream and a lot of people think that's annoying uh number three you know i'm from israel which is a very controversial country and all this stuff so yeah a lot of reasons that's why i was

35:07surprised people resonated to my storytelling my my recommendation for people watching is probably uh you know i what is my recommendation actually you know the truth of the matter is you know how there is like companies that find product markets fit i think there is such a thing called personality market fit there are just some personalities that literally cannot go viral that literally cannot be relatable and there are some personalities that are just make one video and you'll be immediately in love people in love with you like charlie demilia for example so my recommendation is first understand if you have personality market fit and for that you need to look at very early

35:58signals in your day-to-day life to see if you could rally the crowd around you so i'll give you one of the earliest signals i knew that i could have i could have i potentially could have a career here um despite my tinder failure which was i looked at my facebook my personal facebook and i uploaded a status update and it got 60 60 likes 6-0 and i looked at my roommate and he uploaded one status update and he got six likes now i was wondering why is my status update 10 times more engaging than my roommate who is actually 10 times more attractive than me and also the signals i started to

36:42understand like oh my god like my personal facebook is consistently popping you know if i if i throw a rooftop party people show up if i throw another summit six years later people consider showing up and i was like huh there's something there i wonder if i could find 60 million people as opposed to 60. and now we found 47 million and we have 13 million more people to go so that is fascinating to me the way that you laid that out because i i think it it clicks with me in a lot of ways in my own experience as a creator with the twitter stuff i've done because in

37:19prior lives i had done i had experienced something similar with facebook on a personal level or with linkedin um on micro scales and then with instagram i had a i had a brief uh appearance as like a travel instagram photographer deleted my instagram in 2017 because i didn't think it was healthy um but i had those same moments and just never really thought about it the way that you laid out that you have these kind of signals the other thing that you're not giving yourself credit for is you created 1 000 videos over a thousand days yes and one thing that we consistently come back to

37:52on this show whether it's with um the founder of reddit alexis ohanian or whether it's with scott belsky the head of product at adobe these amazing entrepreneurs founders creators that we've had on is the consistency the relentless consistency of effort is a common thread among all of them all of them actually say that they're not particularly special which i call [ __ ] on by the way like everyone says that i think it's this great thing of humility awesome i like i respect the hell out of it yeah i think it's [ __ ] i think all of you are very special but one thing that you all have in common

38:26for sure is this uncommon relentless consistency around the efforts once you've found something that works you know how to just go deep deep deep deep down that route yeah that is very true i think you would call it in a different world like obsession because it took me 270 videos to actually you know make it big with nice daily to get to uh you know to 4x um in one day so so my overnight success took 270 days every single day every single weekend working and making that one minute video um so i would say it's like you know like deep down inside like i knew this was

39:09this is supposed to work from day one but it took 270 days for it to actually work um how did you deal with the emotional side of creation and of the process like it's it's very similar to entrepreneurs great to this in his own entrepreneurial journey the highs and lows the swings are enormous and there's a high incidence of depression i think among entrepreneurs and among creators for this reason because you have this daily scorecard of your performance and when you're posting something on facebook every day and you thought it was amazing and two people like it or in your case you know 200 versus 2000 you're the only

39:47person that really thought about that by the way but it really does impact your mood so how did you deal with that emotional side of the of the process and journey yeah the truth of the matter is i i don't i don't deal with it it stresses the crap out of me and and you're so right is very similar to entrepreneurship like yesterday i thought my company is going to be 10 billion today i think it's going to be a failure you know like literally within 24 hours there's a 10 billion dollar difference every day when i was every day every day when i was making those videos

40:20if one video tanks i say okay i lost my facebook page it's gone it's dead forever and i had that feeling 500 days out of a thousand i'm not here to give any advice because i suffer from this every day i do think about getting a shrink i do think about getting into like a mental hospital or something um because it is you know it's when you take content and entrepreneurship at the same time you know the highlight the highs and lows are doubled so yeah here's another solution to it you got to suck it up here's an idea mental health hospitals for creators dude i completely agree i'm

41:03i'm all in on that i i think it's i think it's brilliant like even just like a tailor-made um daily video or something that you can click on um when you're facing those very common problems that creators all face like hedonic treadmill you know getting a thousand likes on a twitter thread in the past for me was like holy [ __ ] i just got a thousand likes on this now a thousand likes i feel like holy [ __ ] that's a dud why did i spend the time to write that i'm useless i'm a piece of [ __ ] yeah it's like dealing with those daily things that's something

41:36everyone deals with and you're again you're it's such a personal journey and you're the only one that thinks about it so i i agree greg i think you could build a very simple uh mental health curriculum with like little modules where you could just click on that video of like something to give you perspective on x y or z plus kind of peer-to-peer matching or like a community yeah where you could talk with other creators in real time about how you're dealing with that like our whatsapp group does is um is one of the most amazing things because it's a it's a whatsapp group that was put together by our

42:09friend um sriram over at a16z and it has just a bunch of amazing creators in it across youtube twitter tiktok you know instagram etc and people actually share things they're struggling with on a daily basis and then other people come in and give them perspective on it or you want to think about it i asked one time how to deal with negativity and everyone gave their perspectives and it really helped me so and that's how we connected that that's how we connect exactly that's how we connect it um and so thinking about how you productize that greg to your point i think okay i got the idea you know the company i sorry i

42:43gotta sorry i got the name i got the name we're gonna register the name after this as soon as so when this is live and if anyone wants to work on this because i think it would actually make the lives of creators a lot more healthy and happy and in turn hopefully make other people happier and healthier so the name is um creatorsgeneralhospital.com

43:10okay that's amazing i love that we could bring in like i bet we could bring in 10 or 15 creators as like part owners of this by the way and you'd have buy-in from people that could talk about it with their audiences because creators tend to have a lot of aspiring creators in their audiences so the distribution of it would actually be really easy because you could just talk about it you would know you had you know five percent ownership or something of this company we just need to find someone really good to build it and run it yeah but i think you you you cannot put hospital as a

43:39trademark in the in the in the company name i think uh it must it must be reserved somewhere but actually a similar company that's doing it is from israel it's called better help no well i like look i think that that is um i think the thing that's really interesting about this idea is that um it's like this general framework that i talk about often um of like the uh i think it's like generally christensen's model of disruptive innovation where you you have a space that is massive in mental health and you have companies that are trying to serve the entire spectrum of mental health that's

44:13very hard because what happens is you end up over-serving some customers under serving others you're not providing the perfect service to some people and so what you'd focus on with this for creators in particular is provide the exact set of mental health services that creators need and you'd go to creators and figure out exactly like what are the 10 or 15 you know swings in emotion that tend to happen whether it's too high or too low you know negativity on the platforms whatever it is and you'd create simple modules and simple products that would allow you to feel better in those moments and then you'd pair it with community

44:48because i think that that's a super interesting thing that you and i nods have seen is really powerful when you when you have a community you can talk to or rely on um and you'd figure out basically how to provide that very specific set of services and i don't think it would be that hard to set up actually as a company um and you could be the creator mental health platform very quickly and if you launched with creators and partnership as part owners of the company you could probably get to scale pretty quickly as well there you go there you go that's a 100 million dollar

45:20idea greg what do you think um i love it i think what i like about it too is it's it's relatively simple to to get going like it's just about scoping what are those nuanced services that you need how do you ensure that the mental health professionals are high quality and can do the job and it's just like a landing page really a brand a great brand and a landing page um yeah yeah and i think you go talk to a hundred creators like go talk to 25 tick talkers 25 youtubers 25 twitter or whatever and ask them what the you know swings of emotion are give us like three

46:01things that impact your daily mental health as a creator um and then you go you know partner with mental health providers and and mental health doctors who can um actually create the services that would improve their lives and those in those regards and then you you pair it with communities so that people can pop in and ask their questions or talk to someone that's unbiased or even anonymized um to help with those things on a daily basis because i do think there's going to be more and more people it's a great macro trend there's more and more people that are going to be creators that are thinking these things

46:33um and people are going to feel this more and more because we're in this world now that is going to be increasingly digital and so that connection um and the more time you spend there the more negativity you're going to face the more of this like kind of highs and lows swings you're going to face there's a pretty interesting business to be built around this yeah and i think uh there's a social good angle too right you could do like for every hour of mental health help that the creator buys maybe you give an hour to to to someone who needs it who can't afford it

47:07that's interesting too like a tom's shoes buy one get one thing buy one give one rather are you guys in the are you guys in the like uh uh like brainstorming phase in your lives where you're looking for the next company to build i think we're always in that phase i um i mean part of this show um is ideating in real time basically giving people we called it where it happens which is a play on the room where it happens and basically give people a lens into the kind of insight to idea to execution journey that entrepreneurs founders executors operators go through and so democratizing access to the rooms where

47:55these interesting conversations happen and where ideas are created and and formed um so part of it is literally this type of thing where we're on and we're talking and we're like oh holy [ __ ] that's an interesting idea let's go down the rabbit hole a bit on it and then we have a community set up in discord where we'll try to go deeper on those things and where people are actually trying to go start some of these ideas that have come out of the world that's smart how many companies have like fun out of this so far well we're only what is this episode 10 greg

48:24we're not very many episodes in we launched the show um a few months ago so there's actually i mean there's three separate channels now built around specific ideas that have come out of the show and you have like people going and doing research on different things that are coming out of there the ultimate vision is that we can create a fund around the show that actually invests behind these ideas um and you can kind of seed them out where it's almost like the show becomes a holding company of sorts that's great yeah it's pretty interesting um so tell us before we run out of time i want to hear

48:57more about nas academy as a company and so you did your creator journey you had scaled massively you know on facebook you then launched your youtube and i think 2019 you've scaled enormously on youtube as well i love your video going to north korea by the way it was [ __ ] awesome um fascinating i watched it with my wife is so so good um so i'm curious then how you kind of thought about jumping into building a business and um maybe kind of you know slowing down some of your creator output and focusing on building equity and building a real business that frankly enables a lot of

49:34other creators to go and create what they want to so look here's the way i think about it for any creators that are listening to this you have a shelf life you have a shelf life that either the market dictates or your mental health dictates which is basically like say five six years you know even the algorithm on facebook and youtube does not like you forever right at some point the algorithm's best interest is to recommend other creators on the platform to keep it fresh so you can never be the biggest creator on facebook forever so your shelf life is five six years um my when i was

50:08reaching my shelf life which was roughly year three for i was like [ __ ] quick i gotta build a company so that i need to build it for the next three years so by the time i'm out of my shelf life as a creator i have a billion dollar company you know so basically i'm using my creator lifespan as a leverage to become an entrepreneur the last thing you want is to be caught in a cycle two or too late then you'll just be a husband as a creator and you'll be a failed company as a company so um this is why i made the jump i've also

50:41always dreamed of having an organization that works when you're asleep the problem with creation is that you're when you're asleep there is no creation but when you have a thousand people working you can still be productive 24 7. um and last but not least i think every creator is a business you're an individual as a business you're a business of one that's what a creator is nothing else so going from a business of one to a business of 1 000 shouldn't be that impossible uh so that's why we're taking on that challenge as well so these are the reasons why i decided to start a company now the question is

51:20why did i decide to start this specific company master class for creators well there's a need nobody's teaching in the world greg i don't think you're teaching sahil i don't think you're teaching other than those tweets and you have knowledge what the hell is you know what's what's going on like your knowledge is really highly privileged it's only your friends in that whatsapp group that can access that knowledge so we really are on a mission to convince as many creators as possible to productize their knowledge and share it with their audience and that's kind of the idea behind nasa academy so both uh sahel and i have done

51:58a few of these cohort based courses and oh you did [ __ ] i assumed you're not dj and i just checked nazicon academy is it is it cohort based or is it like recorded and could you talk a little bit more about you know the best way for creators like us to educate people yeah so it's actually cohort based recorded so that's the beauty of it it's like hybrid so the problem with just cohort base is that you need to be teaching all the time every single cohort you need to do the work it doesn't scale with nasa academy it's like it's recorded but the recordings

52:37are only available at a certain time this unlock at a certain time finish at a certain time so every 100 students are put in one group and they learn together there's a coach assigned to them to make sure they all meet each other and communicate with each other and then they watch your video files when they unlock every day that's kind of the idea behind it so it's a scalable way for creators to teach in cohorts so how would you like i'm familiar with um like i think greg and i both did our courses with maven um yeah which is sort of the biggest platform now around like

53:13the live cohort based courses um how does it work you know one of the things maven i think has done really really well is they actually teach teachers how to be effective teachers like you know the future digital professors they do a course to teach them how much training are you doing around um like with the creators so that the quality of the content and the course that they're going and creating the videos et cetera is exceptional so i invested in maven and maven invested in us so we're sister companies basically um you know we love them i love the gun and west they're incredible people um and they've done something

53:44amazing i think maven is specializing in the live we are specializing in the uh pre-recorded uh but it's all cohort based uh we actually do a lot of hand holdings we have a curriculum team we have a video editing team so we go to your house sahil and basically we shoot you for two days we help you edit the classes for very very very very cheap and then we we put them out on the internet on the marketplace setting of nas academy so nas academy is not just software to help you teach but it's also giving you distribution think of it like amazon and maven is like shopify

54:21right we're trying to build the destination kind of like udemy and master class while maven is building let's say the infrastructure teachable and and in shopify so do you have does nas academy have like an all-access pass in the way master class does or is it self-serve kind of individual courses yeah so the problem with the self with a with a class pass is that eventually uh you lose control as a creator of your class you have no incentive to teach in nasa academy because if you're bringing in one extra user we we make all the money you know forever so that's why we're actually keeping it

55:01by purchase only we're enabling subscription for you so you can subscribe to sahil 20 a month to learn from him so it becomes like it's like a mix between patreon and masterclass basically this is interesting um super super interesting and then how does that tie in for you as a business to these summits that you're on so we are you know nas means people in arabic it just happens to be in my nickname but nas means people in arabic and uh we just want to build the people company so nasa academy people's academy now summit people's summit nas daily people stories of people every day um nas hotel you know nas fund

55:42everything we just want to build nas um everything ties to everything you know it's like a flywheel effect in the nas summit we're bringing creators casey neistat by the way is going to be the keynote that's going to be very exciting um you know we're trying to bring creators together in physical settings just to make the tide rise for all boats and we'll benefit a little bit but you'll benefit the most and this also is the same way we run us academy you make most of the revenue we take a small cut i love it i also i just love how it overlays community into all of this

56:17because i imagine you know when you bring this many great creators together they're all going to be building they're going to start collaborating on different things they'll do videos together they'll be working together you know there's just a lot of interesting things that will then trace chase their lineage back to the summit that was happening in dubai or whichever summit had had occurred digitally or physically exactly we we just want to make interesting people meet other interesting people that's it nice uh so yeah i was just gonna say um just because we're running out of time in a few minutes but you know do you have any

56:56five-year predictions around where uh where creators are gonna go like what does the future of creators look like in five years according to nas oh man that's a great question well i want to say something controversial what can i say like if i say it will increase well whoop they do sherlock holmes also cancer you know like so of course it'll increase i think

57:33i think the idea that you need to be a video creator to be a creator is going to be like not like it it will disappear i think video creator is going to be minority potentially like you could be an nfc creator uh a 3d artist creator uh so i think the definition of creator will increase from just vlogger to nfd artist or even an engineer could become a creator uh two i think they will make a crap ton of money uh i think you're gonna definitely see a creator well you see a creator a billionaire i think you will they're 100 yeah there will be a creator billionaire

58:13i don't think it's going to be mr beast by the way um i think what is that i think they'll come from india i think a lot of people in india are like killing it but the mainstream media in the united states does not listen does not watch like unacademy for example is a four billion dollar company started by a youtuber buy you by jews is the biggest educational company in the world worth 15 billion dollars who was started by a teacher who started on youtube so i i don't you know let's get out of the u.s bubble a little bit it's already happening so we're

58:53definitely going to see a youtuber who becomes a billionaire in the next five years the first youtuber creator billionaire will come from india you heard it here first oh you should tweet that bro that means i love that that's a great i have a lot a lot of my audience is in india because of my own heritage as well but um that's a great prediction i think it's an interesting one and i think your prediction on the kind of dynamic nature of what creators will look like is a fascinating prediction as well greg and i have talked about that in various forms on the show pseudonymous creators you know creators

59:28that never show their face in any way um in this digital world and as we increasingly move towards living in and caring more about our digital worlds and our physical realities um i think it's more and more going to become the case i completely agree with you yeah that's exciting but the problem is you're we're not we're not uh building for that world you're not building for that world we're we're still uh videographer actually are you a video creator would you say you're a video we post videos around this show like this video will be posted um and we do half the episodes live in person and so that

1:00:03we can post videos but i wouldn't consider myself a video creator yet just because of the scale of my reach there is so low relative to on twitter um eventually i hope to be um i don't know i don't know if i'm what's that how's your tinder game that dictates if you have uh you know my tinder game is zero i've been married for five years so you're gonna try to get me in trouble here i've got a baby on the way my tinder game is non-existent if my wife is listening non-existent that's great [Laughter] um no this was awesome man i i'm super appreciative of your time i

1:00:41know it's late on your end as well i hope i can make it over to one of these events um and if not we need to just do more together i feel like there's a ton of energy alignment around all of these things and um the future is very very bright for what you're building so i'm i'm excited to to watch your journey thank you guys i mean greg sale thank you for for having me on this on this podcast and if you're ever thinking about teaching you know where to go absolutely now so where can people find you just give us a quick plug where can

1:01:10people find you um yes seen y-a-s-s-i-n at nasa daily nasa academy dot com now sailor dot com nasty the other social media platform we got the we got the usernames so yeah i can't i love it i love it well congratulations i'm impressed that you put your email out there to to thousands of people who who are listening so you you know people listening like hit him up we were talk we hit him up we were talking earlier about uh you know how to get creators on board for different product ideas and we talked about like the importance of just like reaching out and doing that grind so

1:01:47thank you for making it easier for people to spam you of course by the way i read every email i don't respond to every email so definitely i'm so i'm much easier to reach than some people with like 50 000 followers i don't understand like why everybody plays i'm hard to reach i'm easy to reach i just don't respond if there's no like yeah you know connection uh i read it i like that i like that well thank you so much [Music] hey everyone sahil here by now you know that i love going down rabbit holes and today i get to share one of my secret tools with you tigus in

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