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Podcast Notes: Hasan Minhaj with Shaan Puri

  • Podcast
    My First Million
  • Episode Title
    Hasan Minhaj – Comedy, Netflix, Haters, and Money
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Spotify • YouTube

Hasan Minhaj: What resonated with me as an artist is: play big. Why are you playing scared? Cook. You’re on the court. Cook. Let it fly, launch, like be loose. Do the impressions, do characters. That’s what my thing. That’s my goal. I want to be loose. I want to have fun.

In a different “My First Million” episode, Shaan talks about how the episode will be “all ideas, no frameworks, no mindset stuff”.

This interview with Hasan is the opposite: All mindset, frameworks, a couple ideas. Close to the end of the year and this might be my favorite episode from any podcast this year. (MAJOR recency bias, but still.)

  • Cook: Hasan uses a few basketball analogies and talks about preparation for shows. If you do the work and you really know you’ve done the work, the practice, the drills, then you can go out there with confidence. You know you can cook, so cook.

  • Reasonable: Hasan talks about the negative feeling in his gut when he read about pseudonyms in Shaan’s thread on web3/metaverse. (It’s one of the reasons they did this interview in the first place.) But they didn’t just say “Hey you’re an idiot” “No you don’t get it, you’re the idiot.” They talked their sides out knowing they don’t know everything and it’s worth hearing another perspective from someone you respect. Always good to see reasonable people disagreeing in today’s world.

  • Psuedonyms: Hasan did the work in comedy clubs, did the years on The Daily Show, rose up through a very difficult ladder. So it sucks to be attacked by anonymous trolls. Especially as those attacks have had more and more real world implications.

Hasan: “But for the first time in history, there are people that stand on stage that stand on the stage of business or life or comedy or art, and they use their actual government name. And then pseudonymous trolls who don’t use their government name, can launch digital drone strikes attacking you, your character, your family, that can then potentially impose economic sanctions upon your future. And they do it pseudonymously. Philosophically, I don’t rock with that.”

  • Authenticity: Shaan points out that all of that traditional fame is still very valuable in ways that pseudonymous fame can’t approach.

Shaan: “I think basically the reason you get the rewards you get, are because of all these things as well. So by you going out there under your real name, with real face, with authenticity, telling your real life stories, which is what you do, right? You’re talking about fertility issues. You’re talking about stuff like that. You’re getting like bing, bing, bing. The score… the meter is just running up. Why? Because it’s in such scarcity today.”

  • Awareness: Near the end of the 2-hour episode, they comment on what the feedback for the episode will look like. Shaan mentions that people will say “People are gonna be pissed, by the way, they’re like “Dude you had on Hasan, you just talked about your own philosophy the whole fucking time?” “Shaan… you know you’re not the star of this, right?”. In this episode, there’s ample time for the conversation to breathe. Hasan and Shaan can both go deep.

  • Time: Speaking of time, Shaan does the “I want to be respectful of your time” podcast host thing and Hasan says he can stay on, nothing planned right after. Which makes it more believable when Hasan says he’s fairly independent. He’s not rolling around with an entourage from appointment to appointment.

  • Routines: Hasan always does a workout before a show: pull-ups, cardio, nothing too crazy. Something to get things moving inside. Shaan has been practicing a mindset routine and has it down to 10-minutes. At a certain point, Shaan realized that money is good, business success is good, but if you’re not in control of your own mindset then it doesn’t matter. Given that, mindset work became the most important skill to work on.

Hasan: On tour, it’s just about body maintenance. So I’ll do running, I’ll do some pull-ups, some core stuff. Just stuff to get my body going and start breaking a sweat. And what I love about like right around minute 30 to 45, I’ll get out of my head and into my body and so much of life right now, getting out of getting out of your head.

  • Seen: Hasan Minhaj is touring again. Shaan Puri went to his show and got the VIP treatment and they recorded this podcast in the days after that. Shaan asks what it’s like at the end of the show when you’re closing out and you’re standing on stage knowing you just killed.

Hasan: Every artist, and I think every human being… Whether it’s intimate relationships, personal relationships, collaborating and business, family dynamics, and hopefully your career: everybody wants to feel seen.

Last thing, Shaan with a $100 million mindset that costs $0.

Shaan: I want to be able to have as much fun, whether I’m in a mansion, having a feast with celebrities as if I’m stuck in an elevator by myself. Which means I don’t want to have to have some nice shit in order to feel good. I don’t want to have to have the circumstances be going my way for me to feel good.

Info Diet: Backing into the new year edition

Okay so I have been doing a bunch of reading, listening, watching videos, etc. And even taking notes! But then I don’t end up actually posting anything. Back to basics:

  • Post here first: I can sort of always write. I can’t always record audio. I can’t always edit video. And writing is foundational to those other things. And I can post writing here.
  • Start in the editor: If I write notes then I sort of mix writing for public consumption or private thoughts and then if I want to use them for something I’m posting somewhere then I need to translate it in some way.

I should probably post to Twitter by default instead so that I can work out crisper writing and have some skin in the game and a chance that people will see it. But for whatever reason that’s gotten into my head as a heavier lift than writing paragraphs here.

So I’ll write here.

Onto the actual info diet.

“Dune” by Frank Herbert (book) — A couple hundred pages left here but I’m enjoying it a lot. I talked to a friend about it who is reading it before watching the movie. I’m realizing watching the movie first really helps with some of the things that might be confusing in the book. The houses and all that. In any case, of course everything you read goes through your current lenses. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about web3/NFTs etc and read The Sovereign Individual this year as well. How does Dune fit into all that? Information flow, religion, culture.

“Idleness, no more,” he said. “Don’t try to divert my attention by trying to make a simple matter appear mysterious.”

It’s December, so there’s definitely some mix of reflection of this year and looking forward to the new year.

You might be setting health/fitness goals for next year. Oftentimes there are simple changes to make but we can be pulled toward things that appear mysterious. Fad diets have mysterious names. (P.S. I’m not saying all fad diets bad!) “Intermittent fasting” creates the right type of curiosity. If it were called “The skip breakfast diet” then it brings on too many immediate objections for some people to get past. But intermittent sounds scientific enough to make you think it’s not just someone telling you to starve yourself.

Phrasing matters. Control of information matters. Dune shows how this plays out on a distant planet.

(Or: ARE SANDWORMS ON KETO???)

“To Pixar and Beyond” by Lawrence Levy (audiobook) — Levy was Pixar’s CFO for over a decade. Interesting look at a creative company from a financial perspective. Again, I’ve been following some web3 things this year and one of the interesting threads is seeing the mix of finance and digital art. Releasing a web3 art project can also mean you’re creating a mini economy or joining a mini economy. It’s evolving fast in that new world.

Pixar is an example of this working really well in the traditional world. At a certain point, Pixar was the majority of Steve Jobs’s net worth. Levy fought for Pixar’s creative control when Disney had leverage built over decades.

“The problem with success, even a little success, is that it changes you. You are no longer walking along the same precipice that drove you to do great work in the first place. Now you have something to defend: a reputation, money in the bank, a brand, real customer expectations. Success can take the edge away.”

Pixar had an incredible run. Marvel had an incredible run. Star Wars had an incredible run. Disney has an incredible run going.

I’m writing this the day after UFC 269, when Amanda Nunes’s streak came to an end against Julianna Pena. Nunes had 12 straight wins coming in. 

  1. Toy Story
  2. A Bug’s Life
  3. Toy Story 2
  4. Monsters, Inc.
  5. Finding Nemo
  6. The Incredibles
  7. Cars
  8. Ratatouille
  9. Wall-E
  10. Up
  11. Toy Story 3
  12. Cars 2

Pixar had 11 straight wins before Cars 2.

Whether you’re known for hitting or known for hits, that’s a whole lot of success to navigate through.

“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson (audiobook) — I’ve been re-listening to this in a weird way. I just put it on to sleep and put a 30-minute sleep timer. So I’m listening to 30-minute chunks but listening to some range between 3 to 30 minutes (if I can’t fall asleep) at a time.

This is a terrible way to read a book. But fine for a fiction re-read to experience different scenes again.

And in Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it. So Hiro starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.

Text is resilient. Similar to Dune, Snow Crash involves language and how languages affect information transfer. Some languages can spread ideas faster than others.

2021 showed the power of memes on a global scale. Memes are more than text over images—but that specific meme format is one of the most viral forms of information today.

(And now I’m guessing Mike Shinoda named his NFT project “Ziggurats” with some connection to themes in Snow Crash—Sumerians building ziggurats, The Tower of Babel, etc…)

#26: Starcraft lessons (for productivity!)