Sam Parr and a guest break down how to make content go viral: start by picking one emotion you want to trigger (LOL, WTF, AWE, etc.), then build around that. They walk through real examples like turning a reCAPTCHA fact into a meme, and explain why stepping away before editing actually works.
Chapters
First of all, creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling, and you've done it a ton. I mean, you built The Hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts. Like, this is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog post you guys wrote. And also, you're a writer, so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is gonna go viral, whereas for me, I'm not really a writer. This is kind of me just trying.
No, I mean, you, you, you have the it factor. I think that, um, I think you can study and how to do it. I think that you can just be born with the skill set. I think you and I are quite similar in that it's both born or we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft, right?
I think you've tried it a lot more and therefore your hit rate, I think, is higher. I personally, I just think that. But the question I was going to ask you—
I mean, dude, you got to 120,000 followers on Twitter in like basically 6 months.
Yeah, that's true. So I wanted to share. So the way this came about, because I think this is ultimately more interesting, right? The rant is kind of interesting, but how this happened, I think for people who are listening, they'll probably find it interesting. The way this started was a pretty high-profile VC person called me one day. I had never met them before. They had said, "Oh, you seem interesting on Twitter. I'd love to meet." So we did a phone call and then we were talking just about each other's backgrounds. It was cool. And then They were like, well, what do you think of Clubhouse, by the way? I got to ask. And I think they asked this because they had looked at investing. They ultimately didn't invest, and they were trying to figure out, is this going to haunt me for the next 5 years that I missed this deal, or is this going to be a good one and a good pass? And I just went on this rant on the phone about this. It just kind of came out of my mouth just the way I kind of explained it here and without the whole kind of dramatized TV show script, but just the reasons why I think it's gonna struggle. And they were like, wow, that was great. Like, that was amazing. And I was like, shit, I should have wrote that down. That was like, that would've, I feel like that would've been like a good like piece of content. And so I went in, I kind of like quickly was like, I gotta go. And I hung up the phone and I went to my computer and I just typed the whole thing out and it turned into, and then I was like, okay, whatever. I kind of edited it. I took it out. I did your tip, which is I took a break for an hour Yeah, just went and did something else, came back and I edited it for about 30 minutes.
Editing is the magic to everything. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a viral tweet, a good email, editing is the magic. They say write drunk, edit sober.
Oh, that's a great one. I've never heard that. I love that.
I think Ernest Hemingway said it.
I used to just edit in the moment, like I'd write it and then—
No, no, no, no, no.
And that was a mistake. The tip you gave me a while back was go do other shit, let it simmer in your head while you do other things. Don't even actively think about it. By the time you come back, you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes.
Yeah, and there's actually some science behind it. I can't tell you the exact science off the top of my head, but basically, you know how there's like a shower thought? Yeah. Of like not doing it. So there's like science behind like doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you. There is science behind why that works and that's kind of what you're doing.
Yeah, basically like the brain relaxes in some way and then when it relaxes, it's able to be creative in a new way. And so, okay, so then I post it and then whatever, you know, shit goes wild. So then, so that was the, oh, sorry, the other part that I forgot, which I think is my new, it's something I've been doing. And I'm curious if you do something like this. Before I write anything now, at the top of every page, I have a template. And at the top, there's like 7 lines that says, what reaction is this meant to get? And I have 7 emotions. It's like, LOL, like this is meant to be really funny. Is it WTF, where it's like, dude, what the fuck? And that's when you're talking about something that's really unjust or people are pissed off and you want to explain, hey, there's this really messed up thing that's happening and people will be like, oh my God. Then there's other ones like, you know, like AWW, something really cute. AWE, aw, like that something is awesome. Like, wow, that is like kind of amazing.
Wait, did I tell you that I do this?
No, I actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos, Rubber Republic. They had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions and it would pull up viral videos that had that, that were based on that emotion.
I thought it was so smart. Well, so the way to go viral is you always wanna start, you start with the emotion that you're trying to get out of someone. And you, and we already know that certain emotions get more shares. So for example, creating depression or sadness, that doesn't get shares. Creating outrage gets far more. And with small tweaks, you can make something sad outrageous, and that's far better.
Right. You know, so it's either amazing, it's super funny, it's really, really outraging, it's really touching and heartwarming. That's another one, hard to do. And then the one I had for this, which is kind of like a new emotion, which was, I wrote, finally someone said it. And I actually think that's its own genre that I didn't even have in my template. 'Cause I was like, I think this is gonna go viral, but it doesn't match any of these. I was like, I think for some people it's gonna be WTF. Like, dude, this guy's a jerk. Why is he predicting failure? What an asshole. But I thought, no, it's gonna go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking, but they've been afraid to say, or they couldn't put words around it exactly, but they had this hunch, they will share it because they agree with your opinion and you state their opinion for them.
It's the idea of recognizing something that you feel that you weren't sure if other people feel, but you see it on paper. So that same example is with with location. So when you see like, how you know you're a San Francisco bro, or how do I know, do you know Sean Parr? Like if I saw an ad that said, do you know Sean? I'd be like, oh wait, that's directed just towards me? And so what the emotion that you just evoked was like, finally, I didn't think I was the only one who thought like, it's a recognizing something type of vibe.
And they're really sharing because they're like, I knew it, I'm right. So they're not saying, wow, he's so right. They're actually saying, I'm right. Read this. This proves I'm right. Which is like a real subtle thing, but I'm so interested in studying the like psychology around why people do what they do. Why do they share what they share? Because I wanna grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it. And I feel like this, I'm, this process that I'm doing, I'm so glad you said you do it too because I thought I was a little crazy. I was like, oh, I'm gonna try.
No, that's what we used to do. I mean, that's what I do when I, I'm like, I start with the emotion. Then I start with the package, like how am I packaging this? And then I start with the headline, then the preview image, and then I work backwards from there. Right. Um, and I always trying to find, like, I'll find something that catches my attention, just one fact or one line. So for example, um, I was just doing research on one yesterday. Do you know, um, what reCAPTCHA is? You know, like, um, when you're signing up for something, you're signing up for something that says spot, nowadays they say like, Spot, click the thing, or type in the, uh, the, the whatever picture is assigned, click it.
Yeah, it'll be like, you know, where are the traffic lights? Click all squares with traffic lights. And, uh, by the way, this is a good example. I saw this meme that was that reCAPTCHA with the traffic lights, and in one of the squares, just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it, and it shows the guy like, suit, like sweating like crazy, like, oh fuck, should I include that or should I not include that? And that's one of those where it's like Me too, dude. I always feel that way. I'm always confused by this thing that's just supposed to separate English from the rest.
So we could turn that into a "I always feel that way" meme. Now here, I can take it another way. Do you want to know, when I looked that up on Wikipedia, you want to hear a fun fact? Do you know why they do it this way? It's because people like Google, um, I might be butchering this just a little bit, but the idea is the same. People like Google are paying reCAPTCHA to translate stuff. So for example, somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are, that actually helps Google, and Google's paying you money It's painful.
Okay, so I have a little— so the original CAPTCHA was done by this guy. He was a professor at Duke and Carnegie Mellon. And CAPTCHA originally was letters, remember? It was always these kind of like kind of hard to read letters, but you could read it. And that was basically taking— they had scanned a bunch of book pages, but who's going to convert— the computer was not good enough at getting all the book pages to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages were a little bit rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy. And so the computer couldn't do it, but a human eye could easily do it. So they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone. On the website side, they just want to make sure you're not a bot who's signing up for their service, like a scammer who's going to spam everybody. But then they did good in the world also because that project ended up transcribing like millions and millions of books. I think all the books that they had scanned eventually. And then CAPTCHA 2 is about Or reCAPTCHA, I believe, is about image classification. So for self-driving cars, we need to know, is this a bus or what is this? And so I think that's where the original idea was, classifying images, let humans do it while they sign up.
And the inventor of reCAPTCHA, the second one, his name is Luis von Ahn. I think that's how you pronounce it.
Yeah, he did both. And that guy started Duolingo.
And when he started Duolingo, he started it for two reasons. One, I guess he just cared about helping you learn language. But two, when you are learning the language, you're actually translating stuff that a third-party service is paying for you to translate.
So that's crazy. So what a genius.
The exact emotion that you just had of this guy's crazy, that is the emotion.
Wow, this guy's a genius.
I am trying to evoke by sharing that so I can tell that story in probably 5 tweets and I bet it will like— virality is pretty impossible to predict, but I can bet that there's like a 3 out of 10 chance that it's going to have legs. And I could say this has all the elements, checks all the box. To get popular. I can't— I can't— anyone who says that they're going to be able to predict it, they're wrong. Like Sean's thing just reached 5 million people. He was like, this is not going to work. Right.
It's a platform. The other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we've all seen. It's a relatable— oh yeah, I filled one of those in. And you— so you took a very familiar thing, but I told you the uncommon truth around it, which I think is like really cool. Like there's one yesterday I saw, you know, Tom Cruise's name is not Tom Cruise, his real name.
No, what is it?
It's Tom, uh, Tom Cruise something. It's like his middle name is Cruise and his last name is like some, uh, like, look it up, it's some like, I don't know, random ass like name. And he changed it to Tom Cruise, which sounds like a total movie star name, makes total sense that he did it. And, um, so yeah, his real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV or something. I don't even know.
Yeah, I can't even pronounce that.
Mapother. Yeah, Tom Mapother. Versus Tom Cruise. And so you take something really familiar, we all know Tom Cruise, right? Boom, here's the uncommon, did you know? And then it's like, oh sweet, like wow, you know? And that one doesn't have as much shock factor, so it won't go super viral, but it'll get a lot of likes. But you know, the closer you can get to that, the surprise gap between what I thought I knew and what's real, the more shares people will get.
Yeah, I think if anyone cares about this stuff, I like the book Made to Stick, and I like the book Contagious by Jonah Berger. Contagious. Made to Stick is how to say something so people remember. And Contagious is a great book by this Wharton professor on how to make things get popular. Uh-huh.
Yeah, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
