After selling a company, Shaan hired a life-direction coach whose personality test showed him off the charts (110) on narcissism. The coach explained that believing the world's averages don't apply to you pushes you to start companies despite 90% failure rates, but because that sense of being special is vague, it drives you to chase validation from others.
The coach's fix for validation-seeking had two steps: notice when you're craving others' approval, then get clear on exactly what is special about you so you stop needing it from outside. Shaan admits he felt this even while hosting an event with 30 of the world's top founders.
At 21, Shaan and two friends cold-emailed restaurant founders about their fast-casual sushi concept and got lunch with the founder of Noodles & Company. He flipped through their binder with visible pity and told them restaurants start with a lease, a deposit, and serving customers within 90 days, not with planning.
A year after the restaurant flop, Shaan's team would take a mentor's advice, execute it, and return within 48 hours with results and next steps. After three rounds, the mentor wrote a public blog post calling them the founders with the highest bias for action he'd ever met.
After the restaurant embarrassment, Shaan watched the Seinfeld episode where George swaps his usual chicken salad for tuna on toast and decides to do the opposite of every instinct. He dropped planning and approval-seeking and adopted one rule: whenever there's a choice between action and inaction, choose action.
Shaan says his early grind was fake productivity: like many people, he avoided the actual work by doing the kind of hard work that felt safe, which for him meant forecasts, financial models, and planning down to employee uniforms and promotion paths.
A dentist pitched Jeff Harmon's university class on selling his OraBrush tongue cleaner. The class said only 8% of people would buy it online, so he should license it to a giant; Harmon pointed out 8% of the US is about 30 million people and argued for focusing on them.
OraBrush's $500 video worked because YouTube had just launched ads at under a penny per view, letting the company spend $1 to make $2-3. Harmon calls this 'finding your glitch': cheap early traffic buys the data to optimize, so you stay efficient as costs rise, giving you a beachhead (a term he credits to Paul Ahlstrom).
Harmon's first rule for finding a winning product is to solve a problem you personally have. OraBrush began as a dentist's superglued prototype to fix his missionaries' bad breath, and Airbnb began as founders renting air mattresses to cover their rent.
Harmon says he no longer uses Google for search and that many people now have AI assistants like Grok shop for them. Businesses that expose an agent-friendly checkout, so the bot talks to an API instead of scraping pages, can reach a fast-growing group of shoppers. He calls it a current glitch.
When Game of Thrones was at its peak, scrubbed versions without sex and violence hit torrent sites within 24 hours and were downloaded by millions. Harmon read that as proof of demand and built VidAngel as a legal way for families to filter content.
After the OraBrush campaign, YouTube spent several days with Harmon's team in Provo, Utah, and they came up with the skippable ad. Harmon argued against capping ads at 15 or 30 seconds, because if an ad holds attention it should be allowed to run long. As he puts it, give me 5 seconds and I get 5 minutes.
Angel ran The Chosen's short-film pilot as a full 20-minute YouTube ad that ended with a pitch to invest. 17,000 people put in $11 million, using about $800K of ad spend, and the show went on to reach about 200 million viewers.
The Chosen's director was upset that about $800K of the $11M raise went to advertising. Harmon's view is that this is a normal cost of capital: Wall Street would charge 8-12% to raise the money, and the ad spend also built awareness for the show.
Harmon says one lesson from building the Harmon Brothers agency was that comedians are core to a creative marketing team. It's far easier to teach comedians the marketing formula than to teach marketers to be funny.
Weeks before a retreat, 3-4 comedy writers use the product and write rough scripts. On day one each reads their script, the team picks the strongest skeleton by evening, and the next three days go into moving the best parts of the other scripts into it. Every stakeholder who has to sign off is in the room, so nothing gets watered down over email.
Social algorithms recognize faces in videos and serve related content, Harmon says. To promote a Kevin James movie, James first reposted old clips to get his face trending, then launched a fresh channel as his art-teacher character. The algorithm recognized him and pushed the new videos to his existing viewers.
The Kevin James art-teacher campaign got over a billion views. It ended with a Super Bowl stunt: Angel bought 12 seats, sat James in the middle in his wedding costume with flowers, and placed influencers nearby to post 'is that Kevin James?' He ended up on the stadium screen without any commercial message.
Members of the Angel Guild pay a subscription, vote on every film headed to theaters, and get two tickets to each release. If the audience vetoes a film, Angel can't distribute it. Harmon calls this 'the user method at scale.'
Harmon describes Angel as a base-hits business that gets the occasional home run. Sound of Freedom cost $14 million to make plus about $40 million in marketing, and grossed $250 million worldwide.
Harmon calls Hollywood a knife fight and quotes a retired executive who said his best friend in Hollywood was worse than his worst enemy in Las Vegas. He argues more money than ever is coming into the industry, and that Angel's job is to fix how much it costs to make and sell films.
Harmon has a dedicated person who takes his half-built AI prototypes to an MVP before passing them to the product team. Shaan argues every executive at a mid-size or large company should have one, because AI isn't the bottleneck: the executive's time is.
Harmon thinks companies blaming layoffs on AI are looking for excuses. In his view, when a tool makes everyone 10x more productive, the rational move is to hire more people, and he doesn't expect AI to cause mass unemployment.
Asked what he'd tell his younger self, Harmon says nothing in his professional life compares to marriage and kids. He advises having children earlier and having more of them than feels sensible.
When clients refused to pay the agency after successful campaigns, a mentor told Harmon not to fight over anything under $5 million. A fight takes 18 months to 3 years, and in that time an innovator can create more value. Harmon walked away from a few million dollars, and says doing so changed the course of his life.
Asked what he would build if he lost everything, Anduril and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said he would use oxytocin, the mammal pair-bonding hormone, as an aid in marriage counseling. Sam and Shaan praise it as a rare original answer that came with the pitch already packaged.
Sam says he first heard about GLP-1s, testosterone, and now oxytocin from odd biohacking subreddits. Most of what gets posted there is wrong, but the occasional thread carries a real early signal about the next mainstream health trend.
After describing people on the oxytocin subreddit who keep dose-by-dose journals, Sam predicts the hormone will go mainstream quickly enough that within a year he and his listeners will be seeing Meta ads pitching it as a fix for divorce.
Shaan cites Eli Lilly's roughly $2.8 billion purchase of AtaiBeckley, which he calls probably the biggest psychedelic acquisition ever. He uses it to show how fast a fringe intervention can become accepted, with the same path possible for peptides and oxytocin.
In 1882 Catholic priest Michael McGivney got about 200 men to pool money to support the family of a parishioner who had died. That mutual benefit society became the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal order with 2–3 million members and $30 billion in assets that makes its money selling life insurance to members.
Sam points to the Knights of Columbus, Good Sam (RV owners), and USCCA (concealed carry, about $400M a year in revenue) as long-lived businesses built on shared identity. His pitch is to start a new one aimed at today's loneliness epidemic and make money from financial products.
Shaan sums up the model. Gather a deep interest-based community (religious, RV owners, gun owners), justify dues with community and discounts, then sell a commodity financial product that members prefer because it comes from their own group.
Shaan says Angel Studios, a public studio and streamer of 'values-based' content with no cursing, drugs or sex, does about $450 million in ARR. Its founder came from the viral marketing team behind Poo-Pourri and Squatty Potty.
The founder first built a filter that removed cursing, sex and drug scenes from Hollywood films, which Shaan calls a 'gluten-free movie.' He was sued and paid around $10M, but 100,000 people wanted the service, so he stopped fighting the studios and started making clean films and shows himself.
Angel Studios shows trailers or clips of finished films to its roughly 2 million paying members. Anything under 70% approval is dropped. Shaan says this gives them better Rotten Tomatoes scores and hit rates than the major studios.
One of Shaan's business theories is that a dominant product or trend creates demand for its opposite. Permanent public Facebook photos led to disappearing Snapchat photos, cheap abundant calories led to GLP-1s, and screen addiction led to apps like Brick. He says A24 was a reaction to risk-averse Hollywood.
To promote a Kevin James film, an upstart studio bought him a block of Super Bowl seats, left the rest empty, and sat him in a tuxedo holding flowers, recreating a scene from the movie. They paid influencers to sit nearby and post about it, with no explanation given. Shaan says traditional studios lack the DNA for this kind of guerrilla marketing.
Breaking down a studio's biggest hit, Shaan notes it grossed $250M on $14M of production and $40M of marketing. Theaters and distributors keep about half, which leaves roughly $125M against $54M of cost, about a 2.3x return in a hits business that also has to pay for its flops.
Sam recalls Mark Manson saying his parents only took his blogging seriously after his publisher's annual report credited his book, which sold about 20 million copies, with outselling Hillary Clinton and making the company profitable that year. Publishing, games and movies all run on one or two hits that carry everything else.
Shaan passes on the studio founder's explanation for the industry's thin returns. Rich people love to fund films, so far more get made each year than ever get distributed, and the excess capital drives returns down.