#1146 Howard Lerman | Millionaire Reveals How He Runs Company With No Meetings

Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and co-founder & CEO of Roam. In this conversation, we talk about productivity hacks, how to run meetings, how to make a more effective organization, favorite books, YouTube interests, and the future of remote work. ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more. We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details. This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Howard Lerman is a serial entrepreneur, an inventor, and the co-founder and CEO of Rome. In this conversation, we talk about productivity hacks, how to run meetings, how to make a more effective organization, what some of his favorite books are, why fiction may actually be worth spending your time on, what he watches on YouTube, and we generally pontificate about the future of remote work, corporations, communications, and the various software tools that you'll end up using. I really enjoyed this conversation with Howard. I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, what you liked and what you didn't like.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I always appreciate the feedback. Okay, here's my conversation with Howard Lerman.

• 0:52Speaker 01

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  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang, I've got Howard here with me. I thought a great place to start. You've taken companies public. You've got a great business today. You've been highly successful as an entrepreneur, but you have a bunch of productivity hacks, which sound like woo woo nonsense. But you think differently about how to be productive. And then you have these hacks that somebody can watch this right now and immediately go implement in probably like two or three X their productivity. So the first one is the idea of calendar zero. What the hell is calendar zero?

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Well, you know, it's interesting because we all treat our money as our most valuable asset. But the thing that is scariest is our time. Yet we dull out our time every time we allow people to book things up on our calendar. And so think of your calendar like it's your bank account. And it starts with, you know, completely full when your calendar is empty. And every time someone books a meeting, you're they're essentially taking a deposit out of your bank account. And people's calendars get filled up and clogged up. And we, we end up with, particularly in business,

• 4:24Speaker 06

  with people inviting us to all kinds of stuff, which frankly, often is pointless, pointless meetings. So.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  There's a lot of, there's a, there's a, there's a focus around a thing called inbox zero, which is how can I delete all the emails in my inbox? But what I've always focused on is to try to get to calendar zero. Now, this is not an absolute term. There's still things that are booked on my calendar. For example, this session today, or a thing that I have to do a board meeting. But I try to really minimize what, what ends up on my calendar. And when I look at my day, the less I have on my calendar, I think the better off it's going to be. In fact, the wealthiest people I know tend to have the least amount of stuff on their calendars.

• 5:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is that? That's like a shocking thing to me, and I've noticed that as well. The most successful people have the least amount of things on their calendar.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  Here's what successful people have figured out. Number one, you can accomplish a lot in a very short amount of time. I want to tell you a story about Teddy Roosevelt.

• 5:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 5:23Speaker 06

  My favorite president. There's a lot of great books written about him. My favorite might be The Bully Pulpit by Doris Corns Goodwin. So Teddy Roosevelt used to hold five-minute meetings. Now, I want you to think about a five-minute meeting. And when in business you've ever scheduled a five-minute meeting, no one would ever do that. There'd never be a five-minute meeting on your calendar. But the President of the United States used to put people in a line. He'd have them line up, he'd have them come in, and there'd be a clock. And when there's a five-minute clock counting down, you'd be shocked. The forcing function of time helps you accomplish so much.

• 6:08Speaker 06

  People get to the point right away. Decisions are made, you move on to the next thing. And so, one day, I was reading about TR doing this, and I was like, well, you know, if the POTUS can do this about matters of extraordinary national importance, I certainly, in my company, can.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  Do five-minute meetings and learn about things that might be happening in our company and make decisions quickly because the decisions I'm making for a software company in no way are as important as the decisions that were made in matters of national interest. So I adopted these and we started a thing at Yext called Teddy Roosevelt Meetings. Teddy Roosevelt Meetings are an hour or two hours. People sign up for a five-minute block. I might say travel to a London office. There might be 100 people in the London office. I would meet with all 100 people in 500 minutes. Here's how a five-minute meeting works. Person comes in, sits down.

• 7:11Speaker 06

  I'm really careful to not make eye contact with the person when they're in the meeting because I've found that when you look down and take notes, people tell you more. So I'm taking notes and they begin to talk to me about what's going on. After 10 or 20 meetings, you get a really great sense of what's going on without doing these big 30 or 60-minute meetings and bringing a lot of people together. And so five-minute meetings are an incredibly effective way to really become effective and get to calendar zero. It's funny, the original inventors of short meeting times were lawyers.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  If you've ever looked at your legal bill, you'll note that lawyers bill you in six-minute increments, one-tenth of an hour. So they are clearly tracking their time and billing you in these little bits of six-minute kind of meeting times. So the other thing I've done is there's, it's funny, each year, when, a lot of times when private equity buys a company, they take out the company and they try to take out all the costs. And so they have zero-based budgeting. 3G Capital is famous for doing this. And so they cut out everything each year and then you have to rebuild your budget back up from zero. They do that for money. I think people should do that for their time. So constantly I look at my calendar and I just delete stuff.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  So this is like doing zero-based time budgeting for your calendar. And One of the very first things to go on my calendar, and I figured this trick out a long time ago, there is a enormous focus in companies. And maybe you pomp in your companies do one-on-one sort of weekly check-ins with your staff. Like, we'll do half an hour with this person, half an hour with this person, once a week. And when you do that, you know, and I also like to have a pretty flat organization. So I might have in my company 15 or 20 direct reports. Now, if I spend an hour with every person every week, all of a sudden, literally,

• 9:23Speaker 06

  half of your, you know, 40-hour traditional working week is eaten up by these one-on-one meetings. Also, one-on-one meetings slow people down. So if you and I have a calendar time on the block, and I need to tell you something right now, I might say, you know, I have a meeting with pomp tomorrow, I'm gonna wait till tomorrow to give him this critical piece of information. So not only are you clogging your calendar up with one-on-one meetings, you're also actually slowing down information. So a different paradigm, in a better way, is to say, let's have no one-on-one meetings with people. But instead, let's talk to each other as necessary. So if I need to talk to you, like, I'm gonna tell

• 10:07Speaker 06

  you right now, I'm gonna come find you. And if you need to talk to me, my door is always open. Come find me. Let's talk ad hoc. Jeff Bezos does not do one-on-one meetings. He won't meet with people. He only will meet in small groups, because he knows, number two, that in addition to slowing down information, one-on-one meetings that are recurring tend to become not work-focused. And you begin to go into other places. I remember I was given this advice, always have one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. And

• 10:38Speaker 06

  I used to be sitting there and after like the third one, they tended to become kind of therapy sessions. And, you know, like, if you need therapy, like, I'm not your guy, you know? And a lot of times people walk in and I'd be like, how's it going? This is in a one-on-one meeting with a team member. And they say, I'm doing great. Fine. I'm like, are you sure? And they're like, well, I guess, I guess now that you mentioned it, I can think of some things that aren't going great. And there's just no reason to, to add that in, to slow people down to do this. So I, I clear out all recurring one-on-ones with people in addition to having five-minute quick meetings. I think ad hoc is better than recurring. Recurring meetings, I don't know if you saw Shopify, just last

• 11:21Speaker 06

  week, Toby, he tweets, you know, recurring meetings are a bug. And Shopify literally wiped all of their recurring meetings off the calendar. Now, think about, I mean, how many employees does Shopify have? I'm guessing

• 11:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Thousands.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  Thousands, 10,000, let's say. How many meeting minutes do you think they saved from just wiping every single recurring meeting off the calendar?

• 11:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Millions.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  And, and their cost at Shopify is, you know, their, their primary non-cogs cost has got to, non-server cost has got to be people. So they just increased their productivity tremendously. Now, some of that will come back, but, you know, wiping calendars, wiping, you know, wiping your calendar clean, you'll never get to calendar zero. But I am a huge fan of trying to get to really, really short, crisp meetings. You can get done a lot when you have a little bit of time. And time is the ultimate forcing function as, as, as death, you know, looks upon us.

• 12:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So there, there's two things that immediately come to mind. The first is, uh, when I started to say no to meetings, um, I thought, or maybe it was in hindsight, I realized there's momentum to it.

• 12:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start saying yes, you say yes more often. When you start saying no, you say no more often. And there's like a momentum to it for sure. Uh, and so I would say, no, but, and the but was, but send me an email with exactly what the, uh, information is, what they ask is, or whatever, and I'll quickly get back to you. And What I found was not only did I save time for me and the other individual, but also I got the information in a much more digestible manner because they were forced to write it down.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so usually what happens in these like, uh, kind of one-off meetings, not the recurring one-on-one meetings, but, but just somebody say, hey, you know, do you have 30 minutes of, of talking about something? Is they kind of come in and they would be like, well, there's this thing and then this thing. And then, oh, wait, I forgot about this. Oh, oh, wait, hold on. You don't have this context. And they were like all over the place. But by having to write it down, it was like very clear. Like, listen, you're going to send me this email. This is the only context I have. If it's not in here, then I don't have that context. And so it made the, uh, quality of the decisions that I would make better as well. So it was kind of a double win. And then the second thing was on the calendar, uh, at the start of this year, I went through, uh, and I did this like huge calendar audit. Now there's two types of audits that, uh, I've done. One is every week, um, the executive assistant that I work with, she puts together a report.

• 13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, I got the template from Mateo over at Eight Sleep. I think he actually stole it from somewhere else, so I don't want to give him too much credit. But what we basically do is we go through and we characterize every single, uh, I'm sorry, categorize every single minute of my week. And we know what is for what business, what is what activity, all this stuff. At the end of the week, I get this report and it tells me you spent 10 hours doing this. You spent 20 hours doing this. And we try to make adjustments and it's very clear, like how I'm investing my time is a direct reflection of what is going to happen. And so if there's a business that's struggling and I'm only spending two hours a week on it, well, we probably should spend more time on that, right? And vice versa. So that like week by week.

• 14:23Speaker 06

  You should kill that business and then spend all of your time on the one that's doing well.

• 14:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So like literally we have those conversations, right? Of like, is this not worth spending any time on? So that's the week by week. But then at the beginning of the year, I did what I thought of more as like a macro audit. And when I looked at the macro of what I was doing, I realized the structure of my day was off. And what had happened was over time, over about a year, I had gotten what I call morning creep. So I know myself in that when I write, when I think, when I am most productive is in the morning. And so from the time I wake up to about 11 or 12 o'clock. I will put myself up against anyone. I can be hyper productive.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And I can think very clearly and that's the best time I write. But over the last year, I started to take meetings at 11, 10:30, 10, 9:30, 9. To the point where I was taking meetings at 8 a.m. And so we basically just went back to the drawing board and we said, okay, basically the zero based time budget. How do I want to spend every hour of the day? And rather than go to calendar zero, we actually did it, uh, tried to get to the same thing, but we did it a different way. We blocked the times. So from eight to 11, no meetings, no calls. Right. And we've done it in a way where like, everyone knows he is doing X during this block of time. Then from 11 to two, there's a block of time. And then two to four is when I'll take the meetings or the calls.

• 15:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you, you kind of do that, what it also does is it forces everyone in the organization. Like damn, he's only going to spend two hours meeting with anyone in the organization today. Is it really worth five minutes, 30 minutes of that two hour block? And so what happens is you're pushing decision making, you're pushing responsibility to everyone else. And from what I've seen so far, it makes the organization operate much more productively. But also it allows for, uh, people to gain confidence that like they can do things without having to come to you, I think.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  That is absolutely true. People end up making more decisions. They get to the point faster and you know, the human brain works on chunking. The human brain works on being able to, you know, categorize things. And when, when they can categorize things at a higher level, that's the executive function that you want your team to be doing and making those decisions.

• 16:37Anthony Pompliano?

  In, um, Good Profit by Charles Koch, I know you and I share this love of reading. And for those that don't know, uh, Howard and I, whenever we're reading a book, we like take a picture and send it to each other. And, uh, we, it's always like a 50 50, I already read that one. Or like, when you get done, tell me if it's good or not. Right? But in Good Profit, one of the things that I took away from it is they treat the employees like entrepreneurs. What that means is that they try to delegate decision making down. The decision making can only be high quality if everyone is aligned on what the vision is, right? This is where we're all going. You're a talented person. Help us get there and make the decisions that will do that. But then they also compensate people on a kind of a commensurate, you know, perspective as well. And they say, look,

• 17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  if you deliver a certain amount of value to the business, you are going to get paid more than if you deliver less value. And so how do you structure both Yext, which you took public, and then you've got a new business Rome? How do you think about this like delegation of decision making, but also then compensating people based on value they create?

• 17:37Speaker 06

  Right. Well, there's a lot packed into that question. Let me start, just go back 30 seconds and say, I was really glad to hear you talking about working your day. We just got through the new year and everyone asked me, what are your new year's resolutions? And frankly, I do not have new year's resolutions. I have not made new year's resolutions in a very long time. I make adjustments constantly and, you know, at the end, it just so, you know, sort of December 31st or January 1st, just so happens to be like a random day.

• 18:07Speaker 06

  But what I do try to focus on, instead of making annual goals, which everyone has annual goals, but you, you try to focus on the daily routine. And if you can build a great daily routine, then I believe the longer term outcomes can happen in a better way. So I'm not a morning person. You're a morning thinker. I mean, I know because you're up so early and we're all getting your emails and stuff early in the morning. You know, I'm a night thinker, but I try to build my days so that I do something physical. So I do something intellectually challenging. So I take a Mandarin lesson probably three times a week, that kind of thing. And then, you know, once I've done those two things, then I feel like I'm ready to take on anything.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  So I think instead of for people focusing on their annual goals, focusing on their daily routine is how the Stoics would do it. And being able to build that up. And it's funny also because you blocked off your time.

• 19:04Speaker 06

  I think the analogy there, going back to sort of time being money would be just like, that's how you've chosen to allocate your investment portfolio. And you've said, okay, I'm taking, you know, this particular piece of my investment portfolio, which is my time and saying, I'm going to put that in, I'm just making this up. And the S and P 500, which would be one part, another part would be allocated like this. So, you know, smart people, the most successful people I know, think about their time, just like you just said, which is, we're going to allocate it like it was our portfolio. And we're different asset classes and, you know, different parts of the time are worth different parts, but the, the way they think about it is totally by morning, by time, when they know they're most productive, least productive, and so all that kind of stuff.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  Now, shifting gears to your next question about Charles Koch and, you know, his market based management philosophy, I think is what he called it. He was even, he even registered the trademark on it. So I'm, I'm nervous that I might get a lawsuit just by bringing it up in this, in this conversation we're having. That was a great book. I, I enjoy reading about him. He really had a lot of advantages in starting a company. You know, he, I don't remember the exact story, but I think his dad started the company and then he definitely, he, his brother took it, you know, sort of.

• 20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  His dad started it and then they came in and they were like, hey, do you want to grow it? And his dad was like, ah, we got a good thing going. And his dad passed away and then him and his brother, you know, took it to the, I think they're the second largest privately held company in the world now.

• 20:31Speaker 06

  Yep. What's the largest, Mars?

• 20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Cargill, I think.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Cargill.

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Or at least in the United States, Cargill I think is larger. And it's estimated that Koch Industries, I think the latest number I saw was 125 billion in annual revenue.

• 20:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, so we talked about how they empower people and how they compensate people. And, you know, you asked how we did that at Yext and how we do that at Rome. I mean, the one thing I've learned in being an entrepreneur and going from zero to one and beyond, and now back to zero to one again, is just when you're in different phases of a company's life cycle, you do different things. So when you're running in a $125 billion annual company, he's operating at such a high level that he's just trying to, you know, focus on culture, pretty much, and probably. Some M and A. But the the fact is that running a private company, which I think is kind of the point, is a lot different than running a public company. I ran a public company for five and a half years. I did 22 earnings calls. I did,

• 21:25Speaker 06

  you know, dozen appearances on CNBC and it's a lot different running a private company. Where you can take a little bit of a longer term focus than, you know, having to explain to Jim Cramer why EPS is off a 10th of a point quarter over quarter due to currency fluctuations in Europe, which is definitely not my personal strong suit.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  So, you know, when you're running a private company, you're not accountable for that. So the way you compensate your people is totally different. When you're in a public, particularly in tech, you give out these RSUs, which is essentially stock in the company. And we can talk about stock compensation in a second because I have a whole philosophy on this too. But the RSUs, people pretty much treat them as cash. I mean, it's just, it's a way for a company to, you know, give people an incentive, but the reality is that it tends to just be cash. Now you get them in the future and they invest in the future. So of course everyone wants the stock price to be higher.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  But, you know, when you're running a private company, if you get a piece of the profit or something like that, you're absolutely incentivized completely differently. And the company itself is not run on a quarter by quarter base. I'm sure they look at their quarterly financials, but you are not doing things that, you know, you're thinking about this quarter a lot like, and, you know, when you're running a public company, you're definitely thinking about your sales this quarter.

• 22:45Anthony Pompliano?

  When you ran the private company and then took it public, is that the biggest difference that you saw was like that quarterly earnings report?

• 22:51Speaker 06

  Actually, no.

• 22:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  The biggest difference between running a, and again, it's, we're talking about the size here. So, once you get to, I'm just making up a number, 100 million of recurring. At that number, you're a pretty big company. You can be public or not. The biggest difference in addition to, you know,

• 23:11Speaker 06

  The quarterly earnings call is the investor base. So when you're private, your investor base is VCs and entrepreneurs, whoever you have in your cap table, and they share one thing. They all want you to succeed. When you're public, you learn quickly that hedge funds and even famous investment houses are not all long only. And the thing is, you don't know when you're meeting with an investor, if they're long on you or they're short on you. Then it gets even more complicated.

• 23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't disclose that?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

• 23:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they're not allowed to? Or because that would then give away what they consider to be a potential edge in learning something?

• 24:01Speaker 06

  You know, it's funny, the way that the reporting works, I'm pretty sure you can see if people have shares and if they've short your shares, you can't tell if they own your shares or they've shorted your shares. So it's an interesting kind of thing to be sitting there saying, are, you know, are these people with us or against us? When you're private, everyone's with you and it's either going to be a big outcome or it's not. And they're all taking that sort of binary risk. When you're public, it's, you know, people might not be with you. And by the way, they might be with you for a minute. That's the other thing. When you're private, your VCs, you know, they're with you for eight years while they, you know, kind of have the whole lifecycle with you. People could come in for a minute. I had shareholders come in, they buy the stock, they, you know, get in the stock and they'd be there for a quarter.

• 24:46Speaker 06

  I'd meet with them, they'd say, this is great. Then I'd meet with them a quarter later, they say, we sold out, but thanks. We appreciate you, you know, making us 8% this quarter or something like that. So they're in and out too. And so there's a lot of timing that you don't really think about when you're, you know, a private company with long-term shareholders. There's just, there's not a long-term, there are long-term shareholders and you know who they are. Often though, those same long-term shareholders will own your stock, but then they also do complex stuff like loan it out to shorts. And so they make money on that too. So there's a whole weird sort of...

• 25:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's very complex.

• 25:19Speaker 06

  Very complex.

• 25:20Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start thinking about overlaying the productivity hacks of your day to the organization, what are some of the things that you would do in an organization outside of just the structure of meetings that would increase the productivity of the organization? Hey guys, I hope that you're enjoying this interview. Before we continue, I want to quickly remind you, I'm hosting a conference, March 4th, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. That's right, it's a big venue for a big event. On March 4th, I'm bringing together some of the absolute fan favorite guests from the podcast and this show, and we're going to debate ideas. The event is called Lyceum Miami. The Lyceum was the public gymnasium in Athens, Greece. That ancient gymnasium was important because it's a place where

• 26:01Anthony Pompliano?

  people from all walks of life came together to have a war of ideas. You were able to not only participate in the debates, but also people could sit and watch some of the smartest people in the world talk about important issues. That's what we're going to be doing on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. If you want to join us, go to lyceummiami.com or click on the link in the description, and I'd love to see you there. Okay, let's get back to this conversation.

• 26:26Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I think that it depends on whether you're pre or post-product market fit, okay? And pre-product market fit, it's super important to be very close to your customers. I want to be talking to my customers all the time. In fact, you know, my new company, Rome, we have this genius bar where we engage with all of our customers all the time, and they can chat with us. It's like a support bar. They can come in, we offer them live support. If they're troubleshooting something, we'll show up to their Rome and talk to them about that. So I think pre-product market fit, the most important thing is to talk to your customers. And by the way, the vast majority of startups are pre-product market fit. They, even if they think that they have product market fit, when the founders have

• 27:09Speaker 06

  used their sort of sales muscle to close some deals, you know, from people they know, that's not true product market fit. Product market fit, I think, is best described as when your ability to keep up with demand is limited. And, and so, most startups are actually not there. So, pre-product market fit, you need to be kind of taking in as much signal as you can from customers, which means observing, talking, tweaking things, seeing what happens, experimentation. Post-product market fit,

• 27:40Speaker 06

  For most tech startups, I'm talking about software here, it becomes all about go to market. And so that's kind of a whole different ballgame. And so, okay, we have a product that works. Now, how are we going to keep up with the demand? We're going to hire a CRO and we're going to hire a salesperson. We're going to hire a vice president of sales. We're going to hire sales engineers. We're going to hire sales enablement people. We got to train these people. We're going to have a whole operation devoted to how to head a customer success, how to customer support. We're going to hire analysts to be looking at all these different kinds of things. And so then, then the ballgame becomes much more about go to market. And that's an entirely different phase of the company. And it's almost like running a military at that point.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  I mean, it's like you have these pods of people and you have, you know, when you're pre-product market fit and you have a tight team, I'm just making up a number of 12 people, designers, engineers, you're all in there. It's primordial soup. You're using your creativity to come up with what is the winning formula? That is going to get the most possible customers to buy, you know, use and love and buy our product. Once you get past that, then you have to hire in like the generals and the colonels to kind of figure out how to put teams of salespeople together. It looks like the military because you're dividing up territories. You know, who's got this territory? Who's got the southwest territory? Who's got Europe? Who's got Japan? You know, then you go, once you, once you get the US, then you go international.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  So, um, so in terms of productivity hacks, you know, it's, it, you really have to just rely on your people. Because

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Just hire great people and then basically get out of their way.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  I mean, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're doing. I mean, in my case, when it comes to scale and go to market, like I legitimately don't know what I'm doing there. So I wanted to find great people and I did that with hiring Jim Steele and Dave Verninsky, who ran sales at Salesforce. Jim was the president of Salesforce. Dave was right with Jim and running that. And so those guys came over to Yext and helped us build out a real Salesforce, real professional Salesforce. In fact, you read Marc Benioff's book, Behind the Cloud. There's an article, a whole chapter about Dave and Jim. So, you know, it's funny though, because all the advice you get as an entrepreneur is you hire the experts and get out of the way. And I did that with our CFO, I hired Steve Cakebread, who was CFO of Salesforce and took them public in 2003.

• 29:58Speaker 06

  And so, you know, got out of the way, but at the same time, you lose control. So you don't know how things work like it used to you, you, you, you know, when you hire your professional sales force, they get in between you and the customer, not intentionally, but that's just what happens because it's the size and scale. And so

• 30:16Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you manage that? Like you're, you're hiring these experts, you're deferring to them, but ultimately you're still responsible. If things doesn't go right, or let's say the CFO made a mistake, like people, yeah, they're like, okay, the CFO made a mistake, but like you're the CEO of the business. So how do you kind of give them the space to run and do what they do best and be an expert, but also kind of have the controls in place, whether it's on the financial side, sales side, whatever, where you feel, still feel like you, you kind of understand what's happening.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  You know, on, on the, first off, don't hire a CFO that's going to make a mistake. You don't want your CFO to make a mistake. You can have your salespeople make a mistake. You don't want general counsel or CFO to make a mistake. They, they don't, they don't get to make a mistake. They, they fortunately have, you know, a controller, auditors, and then they have auditors that are looking at their work to double check it. And then they even had the auditors have auditors that are auditing the auditors, internal audit, making sure that they also are not making a mistake. You can make mistakes in sales, you can make mistakes in R and D, but just don't make a mistake when it comes to financial reporting. And there's, there's all kinds of things to make sure that that, that that is unlikely to happen. But putting that stuff in, putting those controls in slows you down. It changes your business. You don't,

• 31:25Speaker 06

  yo, when we started early days, yes, we used to do these deal, you know, you could, we would do all kinds of deals to win customers and they'd look different. They're, you know, different payment terms, all different types of structures and stuff. You have to standardize. And so standardizing gives you those controls, but at the same time slows you down.

• 31:43Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start to see the meetings and then you start to see the organization, you're hiring the right people, what is the biggest mistake you ever made in business?

• 31:53Speaker 06

  Biggest mistake I ever made in business was in 20, in March of 2020, when I decided and announced to the company right after the pandemic that I would not lay anybody off.

• 32:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Ooh, interesting. So that was like a pride thing in terms of I don't want to lay one off. So like, let me say it and I'll like force it into reality. Or what was going through your head?

• 32:10Speaker 06

  We had 1500 people pandemic hit. You have all these media reports of, you know, and again, you have to go mentally back to COVID, March of 2020, not where we are today. Complete uncertainty, you know, pictures of people in New York, hospital beds piling up, you know, Italia, you know, Italy, everyone's whatever. So everyone's freaking out, total uncertainty. I announced to the company, we will not lay, your jobs are all safe. We will not lay anybody off. You will, uh, we're not going to anybody a raise this year. So everyone's salary is going to stay flat year over year. But in return for that, it seems like the human thing to do right now is to guarantee you all your jobs and your health insurance during a pandemic.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  I'm not going to put anybody out in the street. And at the moment I was lauded, you know, I was, everyone was like, that's a great, you know, the employee base thought that was great. Meanwhile, Airbnb laid off 10, you know, thousands of people, thousands of people. They later that year had a $100 billion IPO. And my big mistake was it turned out that in not laying anybody off and telling everybody we weren't going to lay anybody off, that it was a performance management nightmare because a lot of the good people that didn't get a raise were like, wait a minute, I can go to a different company and switch jobs and get a raise. So why would I stay here? So your loyalty was not rewarded, number one. And then number two,

• 33:38Speaker 06

  a lot of people that were poor or mediocre performers were like performers were like, woo hoo, I can just like do nothing and I won't get laid off. And so it gave people an excuse to do nothing. And so

• 33:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically removed the carrot and the stick.

• 33:54Speaker 06

  It's a bad idea to take the carrot and the stick away.

• 33:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. And so did you have to go back and correct it at some point?

• 34:01Speaker 06

  You know, you, you do, you do correct it and you have to correct it over time. It's not the kind of thing that you can do quickly. I think what hurt me most was not that the people who didn't perform well, didn't, you know, kept not performing well. It was the people that were the, the best performers that

• 34:23Speaker 06

  Did that left that didn't show any loyalty that hurt me the most. Now, I will tell you today.

• 34:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Losing your best people was more painful than keeping your worst people.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 34:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, the worst people are already dragging you down. So like, how much worse could they almost perform? But losing your best people was a big blow.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  It was the fact that they showed no loyalty. That I thought that, and again, not everyone, not all the best people left, some of the best people left. And when they would leave for a higher salary somewhere else, after we, as a collective unit, said, hey, we're going to protect all of our people here. You know, we're all in this together, we're one team. They were unwilling to share the sacrifice or burden a little bit. By the way, today, you know, you see Salesforce line people, you see all these layoffs happening. And I just, you know, I just

• 35:19Speaker 06

  wouldn't have done that again. That was a, that was a mistake. It was a mistake because it hurt the best people and it may have saved some of the worst people. But ultimately, it hurt the company too much.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  And I would undo that if I could.

• 35:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. When you think about Rome, the business you're building now, I am very proud to be an investor.

• 35:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, I'm going to call it a Zoom killer. I don't know if you're going to call it that, but describe a little bit as to, we moved to this remote work world.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Zoom works. It's fine. I use it every day.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Why even think about going after an area that already has such a dominant player? Who is being positioned in the media and elsewhere as the disruptor, right? So it's not that Zoom is some, you know, 100-year-old incumbent company that no one's tried to take it off. Like, they kind of are like the startup that just made it.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And you guys are already coming after them.

• 36:18Speaker 06

  Well, let me just take a step back and tell you about what Rome is. So during March of 2020, when we were talking about, you know, who to lay off and what not to lay off. I one day set up a Zoom. And when you run a big company or a small company, you're doing Zooms all the time. I put 100, you know, and the bigger the company, the longer and more boring the Zoom tends to be. And you're, you know, you set up those calendar invites where you add all the people and you add their email address in. And I was setting up a Zoom calendar invite. And I think it was for 100 people and I forgot to add someone. And when you forget to add someone to a Zoom in a remote world, that person does not exist. It's like they didn't know the meeting was supposed to happen. Like, nobody told them.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  They just, they blissfully ignorantly go about whatever they were doing and like they missed out. In the real world, if there was like a meeting going on with everyone and like a person walked into the office and saw all the people there, be like, oh, I'm probably supposed to be in there. So it was at that moment that I had this flash of insight, which was, well, what if there was a bird's eye view of all the meetings going on in a company at the same time that everyone could see? Just like in the real world, you walk into an office, I walked into your office here, I see it's a bustling office. There's people talking to all kinds of people here. There's, you know, I see who's in, who's not in, who's talking to who, and I get a sense for what the heck is going on. We lost all that when we went to Slack and Zoom. You, you know, and what Zoom did a phenomenal job, better than anybody in the world.

• 37:45Speaker 06

  Zoom was the first video conferencing technology that worked. And Eric rewrote the video Kodak. He didn't use the existing stuff in web browsers, which didn't really work that well. He rebuilt the whole Kodak from scratch. And, you know, famously left Cisco and that whole thing. So, so they solved the video conferencing technology problem. But what they completely failed to solve, or didn't attempt to endeavor to solve, was the workflow. And so what we have today is this amazing technology, but our workflow around it's totally broken. Things that used to take two people, you know, five minutes in the office to get done right now. Hey, I walk pump, can you help me with this thing? We, we do it like we're done.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  Now is being scheduled for a Zoom call for 60 minutes with nine, next week. And so, and then the other thing about this that's funny is, you know, when you're scheduling a Zoom call for 60 minutes next week, you know, I put you on, I put you on it and it's like, well, I should probably be inclusive. I'll just invite everyone to it. And so you end up, this is the calendar recorder we were talking about before. The workflow is backwards, the workflow is broken. There's too many meetings, the meetings are too long. Things that, you know, could be done right now are being scheduled next week. So it's slowing companies down. And so we invented Rome. Rome is a cloud headquarters, that's the positioning for it, cloud HQ. It does three things. It, uh, it makes companies, it gets, it helps them reduce the number of meetings they have. The average meeting time in Rome is eight minutes. Wow.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  Eight minute meetings.

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Not down to six like lawyers.

• 39:18Speaker 06

  Well, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna try to get down to five. All right.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  And I'll talk about more about the meetings for a second. Second thing does it makes companies feel more connected. Ninety percent of people that use Rome feel more connected to their company. You know, in a remote company or a hybrid company, or even a distributed company. And let me be clear, Rome is not just for

• 39:41Speaker 06

  remote or hybrid companies. The fact is any company that gets big enough becomes distributed. The X had offices from Berlin to Beijing. We're all over the place. So we put companies together under one roof. Anyone from anywhere can see everyone and see who's meeting with who and pop around. And so this vision is this bird's eye view of the whole company. Everyone in one HQ from anywhere. And then the third thing, and we'll talk about this in a second about SaaS and my views on SaaS. We have a business model innovation. We only charge for active user.

• 40:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So where most SaaS companies would say, you signed up 20 people. You owe me X dollars times 20 people per month in perpetuity. You say, no, yes, you signed up 20 people, but only 14 of them actually logged in this month or this week. And so therefore you owe me for 14, not for the 20.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  You got it. And it's paid at the end of the month as opposed to SaaS, which says you have to prepay us. You have to guess how many licenses you're going to need for this year. 50, well, you're going to grow. Okay, 60, you know, and there's a salesperson sitting there trying to upsell you more and more and more. 60, 70, 80. And then, okay, it's a hundred, you know, bucks a year per user or whatever. You have to prepay that upfront for the year. We say, we're going to do active user pricing. It's an all in one bundle. So we're going to include the ability to do chat and video conferencing, all this other stuff. By the time you add up the other apps that we can get you out of by using Rome. It's 2,000 bucks a year for them. It's 120 bucks per active user only for Rome.

• 41:14Speaker 06

  So we have a business model innovation here too. And I, and I worry, by the way, a lot about other SaaS companies that have. Kind of a lot of unused licenses sitting around as companies try to get more efficient. They're going to just cut that stuff out.

• 41:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 41:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:29Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're not, if you're paying for something and not using it right now and over the next six months, there's a lot of companies trying to figure out where those are in the company.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  It reminds me a lot of the Groupon breakage. Groupon would sell, you know, a hundred Groupons or whatever, and then only 30 of them would be redeemed. And that's how they literally made all, that's how the merchants for Groupon made all their money. They could discount it so much, knowing people would buy it and never redeem. So I worry about that in SaaS. You see that in SaaS a lot. But Rome, you know, our, our ability to, and let's talk about meeting minutes for a second. So I said, the average meeting time in Rome is eight minutes long. And it's because when you use this and you have to see it, you're in this immersive HQ and it's a 2D HQ. You can see who's meeting with who. I see Pomp is talking to a designer and I know, oh, I'm supposed to talk to those two people about something. I pop in for two minutes and we have a quick conversation. It's serendipitous. It's ad hoc.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  I needed to tell you guys about something and we may or may not be pre or post-product market fit, but I'm able to have that conversation with you as I, as I need to have that conversation.

• 42:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've got the demo. I, I went, you showed it to me and let me do my best maybe to describe from the outsider's view, kind of the, the initial experience was you can look and see, I'll call it a floor plan. You guys probably call it something else, but on a floor plan, what you can see is everyone has kind of their own offices. And so there's Howard's office, there'd be my office, so all the way down the line. And then there are conference rooms on this floor plan where multiple people can all meet. But you could also meet in one person's office. So like I could come to Howard's office, virtually knock on the door. You say, yep, come in, we talk, I leave, I go back to my office. Or we could say, hey, me, you and five other people, let's go to this conference room and we move over.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So literally like you would do in the real world, just now you're doing this virtual experience. And the kind of, I'll call it automagically, all of the people's video feeds that are in whatever the one-on-one meeting or the group meeting, it just works, right? When you go into the room, bam, everyone's connected and like you can just talk kind of in that serendipitous way. But then, uh, Probably a little bit of showmanship on your part. You were like, hey, let's go to the theater. And I was like, what the hell is the theater? And you basically sent a message to your entire team and you're like, hey, guys, meet me and Pomp in the theater. And everyone kind of virtually moseyed their way over and they end up in this theater section.

• 43:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And literally you could go onstage and you could hold a company all hands with everyone in the entire company. And then they also could react. And so while you were talking, I think they were throwing tomatoes at you.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely.

• 44:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All kinds of different things.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  There's a boot icon to kick me off the stage.

• 44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, they could boot you off the stage. Like, it's very interactive in terms of how it would be in the real world. And so what's fascinating about this is your comment that this is not just remote teams that are dealing with this, right? When I worked at Facebook, I don't know, I think I joined, there was like 3,500 people. By the time I left, there was 12,000. Well, guess what? We would have meetings. There was one meeting that's like now this infamous meeting in the growth world, where it was all, a bunch of growth people would come and a bunch of people from the ads team. And this is when Facebook 2014, like, it just exploded. And what we would do is we would have the people in Menlo Park. We would have some people dial in from New York, but we also would have people in London. So the London team, the New York team, and the Menlo Park team were all in this meeting together.

• 44:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And in the Menlo Park physical location, people were sitting at the conference room table, but there were so many people in the meeting that then there was benches around the edges of the room, and people filled those up to the point where the guy who used to run the meetings, his name is Mike Hudek, used to sit on top of the filing cabinet and like run the meeting, right? And that's how packed it was. But then we had all the virtual stuff. And you could imagine the, this is way before anyone realized like, hey, you should care about the people on video. Like, it was kind of like the meeting was happening in the room and everyone else was just like, kind of sort of there. Maybe they would chime in when needed. It feels like if we had something like this, that meeting would be very, very different today

• 45:30Anthony Pompliano?

  because you would now have the people in the room and the people remotely all interacting, kind of a much more even playing field.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  You know, there's a lot of- There's a lot, the fact is, any company that gets successful gets distributed. So, you know, it's not about five people remote, or 50 people remote, or 500 people. Any successful operation requires people all over the world. And that's what allows companies to go to market in different countries and different regions and have sales reps, people are in WeWorks, people are in, you know, in the field. People are doctors in offices or retail stores. And, you know, you want to be able to link everyone in a company together in one HQ to make that company, to bring that, to really bring that company together and help them feel more connected and be able to reduce meetings and stuff. But, you know, in the old world, it used to be that I would try to schedule a 60-minute meeting with someone.

• 46:22Speaker 06

  And now I can just go right over, see that they're available, knock on their door, have the conversation with them, and we're done. And, you know, getting into hybrid for a second, there's a lot of opportunities. Let me talk about hybrid. I think the Zoom room concept, where there's eight people in a physical room, and there's a TV with eight people dialed in, like the Brady Bunch on Zoom, is fundamentally broken. Why? Because if we're all in a conference room, and the six of us or eight of us, let's say, we're in there, and there's eight people dialed in, and they all get a head on a screen. If I'm talking, my head always goes over to the TV. I'm always looking at the TV, even if you're right in front of me and I'm talking to you,

• 47:07Speaker 06

  because I want to make sure they can see my face. It's an awkward interaction. Now, it technically, again, this is an example of technically works, but humanly, you know, it's an inhuman way to interact. And I think a better approach, just to give you an idea of something that could feel more natural. Well, actually, let me take a step back. That approach was designed by AT&T for the 1970s video phone. The original video phone for the World Fair. And it works really well when both conference rooms are exactly equal.

• 47:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  Yep. So there's like six people around one side, six people around the other side. There's a camera and we look like, you know, a circle. But as soon as it becomes multiple people on the screen with different heads from different places, everything becomes kind of uneven. And so a more natural approach would be you and I bring our, everyone brings their own device to the meeting. Forget the TV, turn the TV off. You don't need the TV. You're in a conference room, everyone has their laptop or their iPad and everyone has a camera on their own face. By the way, think of the experience for the people that are dialing in the old way too. Like I can see like one screen, I see all these heads of other people that are dialed in. And then there's one screen where all the people are in a semi circle around and I can't even see who's talking.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  It's too small. Like I can't figure out what's going on. So a more natural approach is bring your own device to the meeting. And you sit there and like you have a, everyone has a camera on them. So right, right off the bat, every single human has a camera and is even on the screen. And then, uh, and then when I need to talk, like I can kind of, if I'm talking to you, Pomp and you're across from me, instead of looking at the TV to make sure that like the people over there can see me or whatever, so I can see them. I just like look at you and talk and I can look down and the camera is still on me. I don't have to move my head at all. I just, I think the future of hybrid meetings is going to be people with their own device.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  As opposed to a centralized big device where we all kind of have to look at it.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How much of, um, the like video conferencing stuff is actually screwing up companies versus it's helpful? Like, is it a net positive or a net negative?

• 49:19Speaker 06

  Well, I'll give you an interesting fact about that, which is that the most popular meeting format by a factor of three to one in Rome is audio only. With screen share. So it's not just like, oh, I could call you. Sure, I can call you. But our offices are audio only. So there's an audio only room type. People pop in, I might need to chat with you. I don't need to turn the video on or whatever. Like I can worry about like whatever. I just go, hey, Pomp, can you help me with X? And you're like, yeah, the answer is Y or do you think about this? And I'm like, well, hold on, let me show you what I'm doing. Pull my screen. You can see my screen. We're just chatting, chatting, chatting, audio only over. So audio only formats are 3X more popular than video on. And I think people, I think personally, the default should be audio only.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  And video can be there as necessary, but it shouldn't be default video. And then you can default back to audio.

• 50:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I am, the reason I ask that is it was like fun and novel at first, like, oh, video like, oh, we're like on the computer, whatever. Now I

• 50:17Speaker 06

  Oh, look at my bunny rabbit ears. I can use the filter.

• 50:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I hate the video because it's like, this used to be a phone call.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And then it became like a zoom, which was default video.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And now I'm trying to, as much as possible, force back going to a thing to the point where I was like calling in. But then you can't see if they do want to pull something up.

• 50:41Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 50:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So you basically, you have to get on through the app or online, you know, in front of the computer.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But also then they know that your video is off because it says your name rather than the number, like the whole thing, right?

• 50:52Speaker 06

  Well, like I said, we need to get back to technology that supports the workflow, not the other way around. And your tech, you know, what you were doing before is like, we would talk to each other and or call you as necessary. And now everything is anchored around zoom technology, which is in, which is encumbering our ability to interact with each other naturally. And therefore be creative.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You went to a very unique high school, Thomas Jefferson. Tell us about this high school in terms of when you were showing me the demo the first time. You kept introducing me to people on the team like, what's a TJ, what's a TJ, what's a TJ, right? What's going on with this high school?

• 51:30Speaker 06

  Well, there must be something in the water. You know, I was really fortunate to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in Virginia and then have an out in having gone to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which is a STEM high school.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  By the way, I'm super pro STEM. And none of the companies I've ever created, whether it was Yext or Confide, which is a mobile messaging app I made, or Rome, or anything else I've ever made would exist without TJ. And TJ was, you gotta go back to, and again, the eighties here. It's like Stranger Things, you're riding your bike around the neighborhood. This is the era was founded.

• 52:16Speaker 06

  In the DC area, I think in partnership with corporations, because there was a view of corporations, and again, these are government contractors. Take Lockheed Martin with the view that science, technology, engineering and math was the path forward to make and keep, you know, America, particularly the military, to have the most cutting edge stuff. And so in the DC area, you have all these government contractors selling to the government, the federal government, a lot of them live in Northern Virginia. And so this idea of TJ was incubated and formed and it became the top high school in the nation. And the way that, and that's an objective measure, but you know,

• 52:59Speaker 06

  the way that you got into TJ was pretty simple. In eighth grade, you took a test, it was a math test. And I'm pretty sure they just literally didn't look at anything else. There's no, you know, it wasn't like there was an English component. It was literally just math. Was literally just, you know, problem, math problems. And, and they cut, they cut off the top, you know, four or 5% of people that took the tests and they were, they got the letter and they were admitted. And there was no interview process, there was no, it wasn't like if you were good at sports, you got in, it wasn't like if you excelled at the flute that you would, you know, be helped build this, you know, community of excellence or whatever.

• 53:43Speaker 06

  It was literally just STEM. And the consequence of that pomp was you had this bubble of people that were not there because they wanted to get into Harvard, that were not there because they wanted to get to the best school and escape and have a better life and make the most money and become a McKinsey consultant or whatever people do, but they were there because they loved STEM. They were there because they literally.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  Things like a supercomputer, which was pretty awesome back in, you know, 1998, when I went to high school, which was in our, in our computer lab. Things like that like got people going and they would just like hang out there all day. And so this vibe, I imagine it was a little bit like Stanford, you know, 20 years ago, but it was this, this vibe of everybody just loving STEM and pure, with, with no, with no, it wasn't commercially focused at all. It wasn't commercially focused and it wasn't like a stepping stone to anything else. It was just love of STEM, whether it was robotics, whether it was computer science, whether it was mathematics.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  And so the people there were really self-selected for that and that alone. And, you know, I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of really, really, really great people there. There's been some notable alums, Vlad Tenov, went to TJ. He's much younger than me, of course. There's other alums that have gone through there, but I met my co-founders at Yext and at Rome and at Confide at TJ. And it has continued to serve as a really tremendous recruiting bed for us in my career, where, you know, we know if someone was a sysadmin at TJ, which is like the highest honor, like the students there like ran the school networks. Really? It's actually funny, I had a call with the principal a couple of weeks ago

• 55:44Speaker 06

  and they were like, I'm sorry, like, we can't use Rome, it's not approved by FCPS. You know, it's not a technology that's approved. And I was just like chuckling to myself, like, all I had to do was like ask a sysadmin and like Rome would be through the network in like one second. Did you do it? No, I didn't want to put anybody up to that. We just, they actually, but here's what I did. They said, sorry, we can't use Rome. Can we use, you know, the one approved technology from the school board is Zoom? Can we use that? And I said, I'm sorry, Zoom is not approved technology for us to use at Rome. So.

• 56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So what'd you do, a phone call?

• 56:19Speaker 06

  Phone call.

• 56:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, though.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:22Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of a school like that, should we have more of them? Or is it important to have like a couple of them that are, you know, have like the difficulty to get in? And you couldn't replicate 10,000 across the country?

• 56:35Speaker 06

  Well, they're changed. They're, they're, they're, this is a hot button issue right now. And I am not a Northern Virginia School Board political expert. But what I will say is that it does appear that they've changed the admissions process to focus less on STEM, pure STEM, and more on helping, you know, people escape and get into a great college. And, you know, the school was not founded to be a college preparatory institute. Like, you want to go to like a good college? Or you want to go to Princeton? I don't know, go to St. Albans. I'm just making this up. I don't know. But this, this place was like just a place to go and, you know, learn about STEM and get into that.

• 57:19Speaker 06

  My view is that American exceptionalism is fundamentally driven by STEM. And that the reason that we have the standard of living that we have today is because of STEM. The reason we have, you know, companies and all the things we have, this wonderful technology, the incredible, you know, medical capabilities. Of course, everything can be improved and get better. But what's going to make it better? And what's going to make our economy better is absolutely, you know, leaps in technology. And, um, and making sure that we recognize and have a system to recognize the people that can excel in that early on. And putting them together with other people like them early on is absolutely not just in the interest of the nation,

• 58:04Speaker 06

  but the interest of all of civilization.

• 58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, it feels like if we have smart people who are told that they're smart and are encouraged to try hard things, we probably will be better off.

• 58:18Speaker 06

  You were preaching to the choir on that one.

• 58:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It goes back to Coke, right? Like, if you think of Charles's, one of his fascinations is around creative destruction. This whole idea, and it's top of mind because I just read the book. But.

• 58:34Anthony Pompliano?

  If we are so big and so successful, we could sit back and say like, we're great. We're too big to fail. $125 billion of revenue, like, we're good. But this idea of creative destruction is they actually view it as a race. If you're my competitor, I want to destroy my business before you do. And if I can do that successfully, then that means that I have innovated. I have created a new product, a new service, a new type of organization, a new whatever, to stay one step ahead of you. Because if I don't do it, you're going to do it. And it feels like a school like a Thomas Jefferson, although it's not explicitly said, implicitly, there's this go build things, innovate.

• 59:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you kind of, it feels almost like there's like a soft nudge in that direction. And then we kind of now see, you know, 20 years later, what the results are. It's like, pretty impressive.

• 59:27Speaker 06

  Failing is okay. Failing is key. You know, it's funny, you mentioned creative disruption from Coke. Another book I read recently was creative selection. I don't know if you've, of course, you've read creative selection.

• 59:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Ken Kosina.

• 59:39Speaker 06

  You got it, the keyboard. You know, thank God, by the way, can you type? How do you, can you type on your iPhone really effectively?

• 59:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 59:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you?

• 59:47Speaker 06

  No, I think my fingers are too fat for it or something. I still, I still struggle every time.

• 59:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't do two fingers, I just do one.

• 59:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, just, now my thumb will probably fall off.

• 59:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, this is actually like a weird question. Uh, I don't think I've talked about this yet. Do your thumbs hurt at all?

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  They hurt more when I used to use a BlackBerry.

• 1:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  You're, you're too young for a BlackBerry.

• 1:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I had the, uh, my, my first, like, we had the razors and then, uh, the, remember the sidekick? This, like, you'd slide it and you had the real keyboard?

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, the T keys.

• 1:00:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and, um, yeah, my thumbs hurt sometimes just from typing so much. And then the other thing too is, uh, if you had to put a score on the degradation, the degradation of your posture.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  As I'm sliding down the chair here.

• 1:00:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally, literally, I was like doing something yesterday and I just happened to walk by this like mirror looking thing and I looked and I was like, what the?

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  Who is that guy?

• 1:00:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I was like, and like immediately you like correct your posture, right? But you're like, dude, come on, like we're little, you know, monkeys over the keyboard or whatever. So I think some of that, but Ken, uh, his whole story is like fascinating because he basically was like, okay, how do we create a keyboard without the physical keys? We need to do it in this glass.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And the problems he describes in there are problems that most people wouldn't really think about.

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And like the big innovation was not actually the keyboard layout. It was the whole like auto text.

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  Dictionary.

• 1:01:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Which is fascinating.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Right. And you know, I, what I took away from that was less about that specific innovation, but about the way that Apple used demos to bring ideas to life in a short, concise way. The demo for Steve was the ultimate sort of pinnacle of any Apple inventor, engineer's person of their, of their career, but also the, you know, the, the fact that when they were all in there together greatness happened and it wasn't, yes, there was the individual that came up with the breakthrough, but getting that quick feedback from people, um, other like-minded people

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  that shared the love of wanting to make something great was the key to it all happening. And at Jefferson TJ, there was that feeling a bit. And so when you're, you know, 15 and you experience that, you can bring that forward for the rest of your life. There's a lot of TJ people at Apple, by the way. And, uh, in fact, the iCloud database at Apple uses a technology called Foundation DB, which was, which was one of the first databases to break the acid test conundrum. And, uh, one of my high school classmates founded Foundation DB, which Apple acquired.

• 1:02:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. That's crazy. How many people do you think have built a successful company that were in your high school class?

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  My high school class? Well, there were 400, I would say 10.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  I would say 10, 10 to 10 to 10.

• 1:02:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 06

  10 out of 400, which is a high ratio.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Two and a half percent.

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  Right. I have a high, yeah, high bar for success.

• 1:02:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that good math? Right? Two and a half percent? Right? Yeah. I don't do public math because you know how that goes. I've done too much public math over the years.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  Well, it's better to run a private company than a public company. You can make mathematical mistakes.

• 1:03:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, true.

• 1:03:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the best, like, three or four books that you've ever read? If somebody wants to get into reading, you and I share this love for reading. What would you say some of the top books are? Well, let's go like one for one. You say a book, I say a book.

• 1:03:21Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:03:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So. Hey, guys. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show. That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers, and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that, though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology, and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us, and it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis.

• 1:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's get back into this conversation.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  You asked if someone wants to get into reading. I wouldn't recommend this one for anybody who wants to get into reading, but it is my all-time favorite book. And I don't know if you've read it. It's called Gudel Escher Bach.

• 1:04:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I have not read it.

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  It is by Dr. David Hofstadter. He, you might want to warm up to him a little bit before jumping into it because he can be quite tedious. But Gudel Escher Bach is this just insane book about how your mind works. And he, you know, Escher was the artist that makes all these paradoxical images, like the hands kind of drawing each other or like the impossible buildings where you walk up staircases that couldn't possibly exist. And a better book by Hofstadter that you might start with is called I'm a Strange Loop.

• 1:04:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  That one you'd see in airports and stuff. And it really gets into cognition. He also wrote a third one. I guess I'm really going deep on Hofstadter here called Patterns and Essences. And that one gets into how your mind works and how the human brain uses categorization specifically to chunk things together and reference each other. And so if you have interest in how your mind works, not at like a, you know, not like a biological level, but like, you know, trying to understand the brain is, is the study of his career. And he approaches it from a, in a, in a perspective that we

• 1:05:38Speaker 06

  can like, kind of relate to. So I love Hofstadter. Gudeluscher Bach is this like masterpiece. I might not start with that one, but it probably is my favorite book of all time.

• 1:05:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:05:49Speaker 06

  G E B, it's known as. There's like a cult kind of following around it too, among some nerdy people. So you would definitely like it.

• 1:05:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I don't know. Now I'm nervous. So I'm gonna say two. One that I know you've read, because we've talked about it, and then one that most people won't have read. The Rise of American Growth is, to me, it's super dense. There's lots of charts and numbers and all that stuff, but it really highlights from, what, 1870s to like 1940s, give or take, literally the rise of American growth and how so much innovation happened there. And one of my favorite data points is like, airplanes go just as fast today as they did in like the 1940s and 50s. There's been no real innovation in speed.

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  Right. The worst, the worst is actually, we had the Concorde, right? That was faster.

• 1:06:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  And we don't have it anymore. It makes me so sad.

• 1:06:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's crazy. So there's, that one's fantastic, very dense read, difficult for some people to get through, but if you enjoy that stuff. And then the other one is the book we were talking about before, I was showing you in the office. It is laid out like the Bible. So.

• 1:06:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Just take another grain of salt, but 50 Cent, yes, the rapper and Robert Greene, the author, wrote a book together called The 50th Law, a play on Robert Greene's 48 powers, or 48 laws of power. And in the book, they basically, Robert Greene goes through all these different things. And it's really about overcoming fear. Like, that's the general premise of the book. But he overlays 50 Cent's life events on top of his writing. And so he talks about all these different details. And I've given the book now to a couple of different people. And like, they're from very different walks of life. And they all come back to me, and they're like, yo, Loki, when you gave me that book, I thought that was stupid. But like, that was actually a fantastic book. So I'm just gonna keep beating the drum. And maybe Robert Greene will give me like, a percentage of sales on that one.

• 1:07:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What other ones?

• 1:07:45Speaker 06

  All right. So I like to try to study people. So Doris Kearns, good one, is I think maybe the best presidential historian. I'm sure you've read all her stuff. I mentioned Billy Pulpit, which about TR is the best. She also had a couple of others. But she wrote one on leadership that tied together TR and FDR and Lyndon Johnson. And I didn't understand, I knew obviously the relationship between the cousins, but I hadn't understood that FDR really helped Lyndon Johnson when he was a, I guess, congressman from Texas,

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  and kind of identified him, this was like, in the early, early 40s, before FDR died, that in late 30s, as like, a potential person that could be the, you know, a president of the United States. And so, that connection was not known to me. And so that was fascinating for me to, for me to read that. And it was interesting. By the way, she's got Lincoln in there, too. So, you know, she's, she's got them all covered. But, you know, it was, it was fascinating for me to learn about that link, which was one that I had not understood before.

• 1:09:03Anthony Pompliano?

  A Curious Mind, Brian Grazer.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:09:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is a, is a great one, all about curiosity and how important it is. I like to think that I, better or worse, am able to have the curiosity conversations, just publish them while he has them in private. But another book that.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  And he's the guy that would reach out to people, just sort of, hey, I have nothing that I want from you, except 30 minutes of your time.

• 1:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 06

  And.

• 1:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'd love to just talk.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  Talk.

• 1:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And he did it with, I think, former presidents. He actually, although it wasn't under the pretense of a curiosity conversation, he met with Fidel Castro, with a bunch of like, other movie producer people. And he tells that story.

• 1:09:46Speaker 06

  Maybe he's using it as an excuse.

• 1:09:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And he met with, you know, obviously movie stars and all that type of stuff, but it was really trying to get and meet with people that are outside of his world. And one of them, I think if I remember correctly, in the, what, 1980s, the riots in LA happened, right? And he met with the police chief, like, the day the riots kicked off. He just had it on the meeting. He thought for sure it was gonna get canceled or whatever. He shows up and like, the way he describes it, he's like, there's a lot of police at the police station that day, right? And he still sits and he meets with the, with the police chief. And he's like, and it was fascinating because I saw what was going on out in the streets. I saw the news. And then like, I just, you know, by the luck of the draw, I was able to meet with a guy who was like, the responder.

• 1:10:29Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:10:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And like, see how he was interacting internally on the same time. So that one's always a, a good one. What else?

• 1:10:37Speaker 06

  You know, my favorite business book, and again, it's gonna be cliché, is definitely Zero to One. I think Peter Thiel just absolutely nailed every possible concept in there. I even kind of have some passages in my head, you know? Well, my favorite line in the entire book is, if you want to build a big business, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. And when I just, I, I, it's like, I think, pulled out, like, in like, you know, a special, special phrase. And that, that whole kind of idea where, you know, there's pretty much two business, two kinds of businesses, those that are commodities and those that are monopolies.

• 1:11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's true.

• 1:11:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's better to be dealing with the antitrust people than to, you know, be just chopping your prices over time. And that, that particular book, I just, I think absolutely, you know, encompasses so, so much. And again, we're all, we're talking about nonfiction here predominantly.

• 1:11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you read a lot of fiction?

• 1:11:33Speaker 06

  Not really. You?

• 1:11:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think I've read a fiction book. This is gonna sound horrible in like a decade.

• 1:11:39Speaker 06

  So I read the Foundation series, which is a sci-fi series because I saw Paul Graham tweet about it and I was like, okay.

• 1:11:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Was it good?

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I mean, I didn't, I feel like I could get most fiction from watching Star Trek.

• 1:11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, this is, I'm gonna get absolutely blasted for saying this. Never watched Star Trek, never watched Star Wars. I don't really read fiction, like, yeah, stuff. I would say that-

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  Did you read The Fountainhead?

• 1:12:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, yes, but like-

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  In college?

• 1:12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Years and years ago. I think the last fiction book that I read that I can remember like immediately is, uh, damn, what are the three books? So when you join Facebook, Sam Lessin, I don't know if you know Sam?

• 1:12:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, Jessica.

• 1:12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  He, yeah, he, he put together-

• 1:12:31Speaker 06

  The information.

• 1:12:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, yeah. And so he was at Facebook and he put together, or at least had a hand in selecting the three books that product managers would get. And one of them was Snow Crash.

• 1:12:41Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:12:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, you know, pretty telling, pretty, pretty forward looking. And there's two others, I forget what they were. But Snow Crash was probably the last, like, fiction book that I remember, uh, reading. And, um, it was like fascinating. Like, you join this place and, and it's supposed to be, you know, this amazing company that's growing really fast, like all these things, and like they hand you fiction books.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, it just like kind of spoke volumes, I think.

• 1:13:03Speaker 06

  I think the one fiction book that I loved is Ready Player One.

• 1:13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I watched the movie, I didn't read the book.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  Oh, the movie was awful.

• 1:13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:13:12Speaker 06

  Oh, I thought it was, I mean, you might have liked it, but I mean-

• 1:13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe if I read the book, I would have thought the movie was awful.

• 1:13:17Speaker 06

  The other, the other way that you're gonna start to read fiction again, you're gonna discover that the greatest author of-

• 1:13:25Speaker 06

  I think last century was Roald Dahl.

• 1:13:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Who?

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  Roald Dahl, you know, James and the Giant Peach, all the kids books.

• 1:13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 06

  Like Charlie and the Chalk. The problem is, you know, when your, when your kids get old enough, you read this to them and you realize when you get through the final book, you do the whole series, Matilda, Roald Dahl, you do James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and Chalk Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and then you're done. And there's nothing else nearly as good until you get to Harry Potter.

• 1:13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Speaker 06

  And then, you know, that's its own thing. But at that age, the genius of the writing and the storytelling. But I did worry a lot about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I'm sure you're familiar with the story, right? So you've seen that movie. Charlie goes, he wins the golden ticket. He ends up being sort of the chosen one and Willy Wonka gives him the Chalk, Chocolate Factory. And I thought to myself, like, Charlie's main problem is that Willy gives him this chocolate factory, he is worth nothing and he's come and comes upon this chocolate factory that's worth, you know, billions of dollars. Charlie can't pay the tax bill on that.

• 1:14:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It's kind of like in Home Alone, what was, uh, what was the dad's, uh, you know, profession? How do you have that mansion and how did he pay first class for all those people to go to, you know, Europe?

• 1:14:48Speaker 06

  Makes you wonder.

• 1:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a big question.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  Just a little bit.

• 1:14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I also was in New York recently and I went to the Titanic exhibit, which you can take a guess, there was two people who went, me and Polina. I'll let you decide who, uh, whose idea it was. But I enjoy going to that type of stuff just because you learn, right? And, uh, and so we go and it was actually like very well done. They kind of have all these different stops and they have a bunch of things, you know, original pieces of the Titanic and pictures of people and like all the stuff. But of course, when you get to the end, uh, every single couple has to have the debate. Like if Jack got on the, on the door, like, you know, would he still be alive?

• 1:15:26Speaker 06

  Right. Didn't the, didn't the director recently answer that and say there was only room for one person?

• 1:15:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I mean, I, I hear what he's saying, but I, I've seen a door before and, you know, two humans could sit on it, you know? And then you get into the weight debate and, you know?

• 1:15:40Speaker 06

  Bad debate.

• 1:15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Um, I have two questions for you and then I'll let you go. One, when you read a book, what is your process? Do you read Kindle, physical book, audiobook? Do you highlight? Do you note take? What do you do when you read books?

• 1:15:54Speaker 06

  Always buy the physical book and I tend to buy more than I get to. There's, what's the Japanese phrase? I forget the Japanese phrase that means there's far greater knowledge than you could possibly have. And so that's why we all, when we look at and gaze upon a library, it looks beautiful to us because you see so much more than you could ever possibly hope to know. And that in a way is comforting.

• 1:16:21Speaker 06

  So I have a bunch of books that I don't read is what I'm trying to say from Amazon. And I try to order them, you know, when I see somebody like you tweet about, like I bought Paul Graham. We mentioned him before, he tweeted about this book called Life in an English Countryside. And it's just like, you know, it's, it's a, it's a historical book, probably written in the sixties, but it's about the medieval times in London and how about, you know, how the meals were served. And I have this thing and it's kind of sitting on my desk like, and I'm thumb through it like, I'm not going to read it, but I still bought it. So I have, I, I keep a constant flow coming that is more than I could possibly keep up with. And I feel guilty when I don't read one, but that's good.

• 1:17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  See, I don't feel guilty. I, I do the exact same thing. If I hear a book or somebody I respect, or, or you think fondly of, and they say something about a book, I buy it immediately.

• 1:17:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And I have come to the conclusion that I don't spend any money on anything. Like I literally have a couple of T-shirts, a couple of pair of pants. Like I just, it, it isn't interesting to me and I don't feel like.

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  Oh, but sorry, I don't feel economic guilt. It's not like, oh, I wasted the money.

• 1:17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, but here's the thing is I have said to myself, the one thing that I will always spend, whatever amount of money that I want to.

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't care about dinners and this and that and all, books. I will always buy books. And so like, you know, I, I've bought a lot of books some months and some books I don't buy a lot. And I have two piles. One pile is I want to read the full book. The other pile is what I think of as the sprints. So it's like marathon and sprints. The marathons, I'm going to read the whole thing. The sprints, I will say to myself, I'm going to read 10 pages of that book today.

• 1:18:03Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And it may take me. Six months to finish the book or to finish enough of the book where I get the point.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But I'm reading it in 10 page increments where it's almost like a break from the actual book that I'm reading so that I can get a little bit of it, but like it's either too dense or it's not something I'm like super interested in or whatever. So kind of like the medieval Mule book would be appropriate.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  Do you skip ahead? Do you ever skip ahead?

• 1:18:26Anthony Pompliano?

  No, because i- if it's not good, I almost get to the point where I'm like, if it's not good, I just stop.

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Like I'm not married to the idea of I have to finish books.

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And some books like you kind of read and you're like, I don't know, maybe a hundred pages and 150 pages. You're like, I get it.

• 1:18:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:18:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Other books, you're like, man, I wish that they had, you know, gone 500 more pages.

• 1:18:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:18:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I try to find the ones where I wish there was more than the ones I'm like, okay, like I'm done. But once I feel like I got it, I just drop it.

• 1:18:56Speaker 06

  I think this year I saw Lex Friedman tweet that he had like 28 fiction books he was gonna read, like 1984, Brave New World, Brothers Khamuzov. Like I did that like 10 years ago and I read pretty much all those. That sort of encompassed my, my sort of fiction for a long time. And I did them all. They were all pretty good, except the Russian ones were just so tedious. My God, I could barely get through. Brother, Brothers Khamuzov. I mean.

• 1:19:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. See, that stuff's just not like super interesting. Maybe, maybe I'm making a mistake, right? But like, I just haven't.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm anti, I'm anti recommending it to you right now.

• 1:19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:19:31Speaker 06

  All right. Definitely do not read it. It was just a long tedious story with no point.

• 1:19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 06

  Now, of course, you know, I mentioned that on Twitter and was scolded for, you know, misinterpreting all of the, you know, brilliant literature. And I'm sure, I'm sure there are many people who deeply loved it and respected it. And I am simply not an aficionado enough to have appreciated it, but I just did not like it at all.

• 1:19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that there's some people who are like predisposed to fiction versus nonfiction?

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is it like something happens in your life? Cause I.

• 1:20:00Speaker 06

  Well, let's actually go, let's actually chunk this up to, back to Hofstadter. I bet the human brain is receptive to stories. And if you look at stories, they're the best way to pass information along. That's why even across, you know, cultures in different places end up telling similar stories. And, you know, you have these motifs in your brain.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  A great book that I loved was Carl Jung's autobiography. I don't know if you've read that. That was spectacular. And, you know, he would get into the symbolism and get into this idea that we have sort of every human brain has figures. So whether or not certain brains are more disposed to that, I think all human brains are disposed to certain religious almost figures that appear in stories, whether it's in Aboriginal tribes, you know, around the world, or Native Americans, or English, or Indian, like you see the same characters kind of appearing for societies that never talk to each other.

• 1:21:07Speaker 06

  So that means I think we are all predisposed to, to stories and characters and these motifs that the best politicians figure out how to tap into that and use those characters and narratives and stories to, so absolutely, is there something innate in our brain that that is receptive to stories? No question.

• 1:21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I just am not super drawn to the fiction. I love, but like, here's the thing of what's crazy is the biographies and autobiographies, I absolutely love.

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  Well, those are stories.

• 1:21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, right? But, but it's like true stories versus like the fiction stories. And then you know, my, uh, maybe guilty pleasure is, uh, on YouTube. Well, you tell me first what you watch on YouTube and then I'll tell you what I watch.

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  Well, just like you don't read any fiction. I don't watch much YouTube, except you, of course.

• 1:21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, but you don't watch like, uh, any YouTube, no documentaries, no anything really?

• 1:22:02Speaker 06

  Not really.

• 1:22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow. So I am like obsessive about documentaries. Some of them are like actual, you and I would think of as documentaries. Some of them, I've mentioned before that this guy, uh, Phineas is the name of the YouTube channel?

• 1:22:18Speaker 06

  Sounds like a separate piece.

• 1:22:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to waste, uh, the next week of your life, but he does these like 20, 30 minute documentaries on great investors. So he's got Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett, the recent one he did. Um, and they're just like very well done because it's like obvious that this is somebody who's learning how to do storytelling.

• 1:22:38Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:22:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But, and he's not like some big production company.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so it's, uh, pretty interesting. Um, and then I watch a lot of interviews. So I've got a, I don't know, maybe 25.

• 1:22:48Speaker 06

  Can I ask you, who do you think the best interviewer is?

• 1:22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't, I, I don't think that there's a best interviewer because I think what happens.

• 1:22:54Speaker 06

  Can I ask you a different question then?

• 1:22:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:56Speaker 06

  What's this, what is the secret to being a great interviewer?

• 1:23:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, just listen, right? The reason why I say I don't think there's a best interviewer is because I actually think people,

• 1:23:10Anthony Pompliano?

  they have good days and bad days and they go through these like cycles. I see it even with myself, but um, there's episodes that I'll watch with somebody and I'm like, goat, right? Like, like that was amazing. They got everything out of that guest. And then there's ones that you'll watch with the same exact interviewer and you're like, almost like a slow car crash. And my conclusion on why that happens is because you can't evaluate just one side of the conversation. A conversation is give and take. There's two participants and just like there's no good company culture or bad company culture. It's all about fit.

• 1:23:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Where you could take one employee and put them in a company culture and another one hates it. One loves it. It's all about like the match.

• 1:23:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing in an interview.

• 1:23:52Speaker 06

  Called Pareto optimization.

• 1:23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about uh, that as a dynamic.

• 1:23:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:23:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Now it's not about who is the best interviewer. It's actually about who are the best combinations of people. And so.

• 1:24:07Speaker 06

  Paul and John.

• 1:24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, if you pull out like um, one of my favorite CNBC clips of all time is uh, when Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman jump on live and they're yelling and screaming at each other. It's like, that's like electric, you know, entertaining television.

• 1:24:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:24:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that equivalent when it comes to interviews? And I asked actually recently, I said, you know, what's the best like podcast episode of all time? And um, I think the person I agreed with in all of the comments was uh, Andrew Huberman, said, hands down, not even close, Jaco interviewed uh, this guy Johnny Kim. I don't know if you've ever heard of Johnny? So Johnny Kim, uh, I'm definitely going to screw this up, but he was a Navy SEAL in Fallujah. He was part of Jaco's team, I believe. He then went on to become an astronaut and then went to, I think it was Harvard Medical School and became an MD.

• 1:25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And that all sounds crazy, right? Literally, as a kid, I forget all the details, but like, there was like a broken home situation. And if I don't want to misspeak, but I think what happened was, at one point, like the police, like, I think it was his dad in the attic and there was like gunshots. Like, it was like a, like a super screwed up childhood. And he went on to like all these accomplishments and you listen to things like four and a half, five hours or whatever. And you're just like, that is an extraordinary individual.

• 1:25:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And him and Jaco, Jaco is not only a good interviewer, but also there's like a level of trust. They're on the same team, like the, the ability to talk about certain things, the shared experiences, all the stuff. You listen to it and you're like, man, this is one of the best conversations ever documented.

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  Right. You know, it's funny. You mentioned CNBC. I once had to interview Mark Hamill. Hmm. Who I know you don't watch Star Wars, but is famously.

• 1:25:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I know who he is.

• 1:25:54Speaker 06

  Okay. So, you know, I'm sitting there, we have a conference. I'm like, well, how the hell, you know, what do I possibly ask Mark Hamill, who, by the way, he's an easy interviewer. And I'm the easy interviewee and I'm not, I have no idea what to ask this guy. So I asked Carl Cantinio from CNBC. I said, Carl, you know, what in your opinion is the best way to interview somebody? And what is the key to being able to do a good interview? He said, you ask them about a moment.

• 1:26:24Speaker 06

  You ask them about the, the instant where they felt something or they learned something. Because when you get to that moment, that's how people get into their own head and open up. So I've always used that when I, and again, I'm not an interview person who interviews people, but I use that, you know, what, what, tell me about the moment when X, when you realize something. And that really gets people going. So Carl told me that, different Carl, different CNBC Carl.

• 1:26:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but that's a great tidbit.

• 1:26:52Speaker 06

  Well, it's all about moments, right? One, you know, the moments, it's five minute meetings for Teddy. It's eight minute meetings for Rome. It's six minute meetings for lawyer and it's the magic moment from Carl Cantinio.

• 1:27:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to mispronounce his name, but do you know who Nardwall is?

• 1:27:05Speaker 06

  I do not know Nardwall.

• 1:27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh.

• 1:27:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm about to open up a whole world for you, my friend. So he is a guy who, let me paint a picture of him. You ever like, see like people pretending when they go to the golf course and they have like, maybe they have like a striped pants on, they've got like a really weird like 1970s, almost like wallpaper style, like a golf shirt and they've got like a, one of the little hats on, right? And it's like, it's a look.

• 1:27:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what he wears.

• 1:27:42Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Like day to day. But he interviews the world's top hip hop artist. And he is lights out as an interviewer because it's not the questions that he asks, it's the work he does before the interviews. So he's, and he's been doing this for like years and years and years.

• 1:28:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:28:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And he will literally, in the middle of the interview, he will ask questions of the guest.

• 1:28:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:28:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And they'll be like, dude, how do you know that? Who told you, like, not like, oh, you went on Google and spent like five extra minutes.

• 1:28:18Speaker 06

  He finds something personal that really gets them going.

• 1:28:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I told my best friend a secret in 12th grade. And nobody knows that that person's my best friend and you just repeated to me word for word what the, what the secret was.

• 1:28:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:28:30Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you know that?

• 1:28:31Speaker 06

  How do you know that?

• 1:28:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And they'll like stop the interview and they'll be like, how, like what the fuck, right? The other thing he does is he gives them gifts to start the interview sometimes. And there are things that like, you know, I think he had like Chance the rapper maybe or something. He like gave him like a vinyl record. But the vinyl record was a, a previous artist that no one really knew Chance was a huge fan of when he was a kid. And it came from the exact record shop that Chance used to go to as a kid.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:28:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so he was just like, dude, like that is incredible amount of work.

• 1:29:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And then.

• 1:29:04Speaker 06

  It's like when I bring Chris Harris to a dinner with you and he's like, you know, I roomed with your brother in college.

• 1:29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. Which is like.

• 1:29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  The world's small.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But also.

• 1:29:15Speaker 06

  But by the way, if your name is Nardwall, like you're gonna be famous.

• 1:29:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and he also, he's just like quirky.

• 1:29:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's like you, you almost set someone up to not expect a lot. And then you have this like hard hitting, not like gotcha type journalism, but more so just like, I did the work.

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think people respect the shit out of somebody who does the work.

• 1:29:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, uh, it's people like that. I, I'm always on the look. So actually, if you are watching this right now or listening, and you know of somebody who does stuff like that, like just tweet at me, leave in the comments, whatever, I'll find it. But those are the people who like fascinate me because they're able to get information out of people. That just like shows who they are as humans.

• 1:29:54Speaker 06

  Right. Well, and that's what Oprah does, right? She gets people to really open up. That's the idea.

• 1:29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's like, it's on television.

• 1:30:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they really open up? Do they really tell you the truth?

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  Guess Prince Harry did.

• 1:30:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, in the book.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  I don't know. I'm not gonna read that.

• 1:30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the, uh, the controversies?

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  I read about the controversies.

• 1:30:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Like the two that,

• 1:30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know, they weren't surprising or were surprising. Uh, they actually weren't. It was like, he was like, yeah, me and my brother like fight.

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You, duh.

• 1:30:24Speaker 06

  Wait, you fought with your brother? And he, and he like pushed you over? Wait, how many brothers do you have?

• 1:30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I have four brothers. Trust me, that happens like, that still happens.

• 1:30:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  Right. I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But that was kind of like, okay.

• 1:30:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and, and, uh, then the second one was, uh, he claims that he killed 25 people at war. As an Apache helicopter pilot. People are like, you killed people? It's like, he's a combat helicopter pilot.

• 1:30:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Who was awarded things for seeing combat.

• 1:30:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, yeah, probably. Right? And, uh, I think that people, when they saw like the headlines, they thought that he like walked up to someone, like pointed a gun and like, you know, shot him, right?

• 1:31:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And he's like, no, no, no, like, I was like in a helicopter. Like, yes, we still see people running and like all stuff, but like, it is a little bit different than, you know, he's a Navy SEAL and he's like white to the eyes in the middle of the night type stuff.

• 1:31:20Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know. It was just like, why do people care?

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, let the guy live his life.

• 1:31:25Speaker 06

  Let the guy live his life. But he, but they care because he's making a big deal of it.

• 1:31:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. If you write the book, I guess.

• 1:31:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. He's trying to make money.

• 1:31:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, does he have to make money?

• 1:31:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:31:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:31:35Speaker 06

  He got cut off, right?

• 1:31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, one of my favorite stats from last year is I did not know that the Queen of England, or the now the King, gets paid a dollar per head of every Australian citizen every year.

• 1:31:46Speaker 06

  That seems about worth it.

• 1:31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  If you think, and I, I looked it up before, but they've got, you know, a couple of million people. And so like, just that alone, like they're getting a $1 tax per person in Australia.

• 1:31:58Speaker 06

  Well, you know, if you tax people without representation, as they may have learned in the past, bad things can happen.

• 1:32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just a lot harder when you're all the way in the middle of the ocean in Australia, and they live very far away.

• 1:32:10Speaker 06

  That's true. They can't send people to Yorktown.

• 1:32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But like vice versa, can they send people to Australia?

• 1:32:16Speaker 06

  You know, I don't think that those two countries are going to end up at war.

• 1:32:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But just like, what if Australians just were like, we're not paying anymore?

• 1:32:22Speaker 06

  Wait, who pays who for this?

• 1:32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  The Australians pay.

• 1:32:25Speaker 06

  Australia is come out of their wages, like a federal tax, like it's like a line item, or is it just like?

• 1:32:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not, I just know that somehow, uh, the King or Queen gets a dollar per head.

• 1:32:33Speaker 06

  Australian dollar or British pound, I guess.

• 1:32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a good question, too. Yeah. But like, when you start to think about it, it's like, what if the Australians are just like, no, we're not paying anymore?

• 1:32:41Speaker 06

  We're not paying anymore. I think.

• 1:32:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Would the UK really, like?

• 1:32:44Speaker 06

  Kick them out?

• 1:32:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Show up? No, would they just like show up and like, give us the money?

• 1:32:48Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, I'm not really sure how their whole system of government works, but does the Queen have to sign off on their Prime Minister in some way?

• 1:32:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is fascinating, too, because, uh, who is it? Ryan Holiday, uh, in his latest book, um, he talks about how the Queen is actually, has no power. Like, the Queen does not actually make decisions. The Queen does not, you know, whatever. And now I guess not the King. Um, so there's like a separate and distinct government function, but like, no one wants to piss off the King or Queen.

• 1:33:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:33:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you almost have to like, rule by influence, rather than rule by authority. A very interesting, uh, dynamic.

• 1:33:26Speaker 06

  It's kind of like running a sales force.

• 1:33:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot about military is very authoritative leadership like

• 1:33:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a rank on your chest. I have a rank.

• 1:33:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Like mine's higher than yours. Like do what I say.

• 1:33:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There's authoritative leadership for sure in corporations, but it's a lot of influential leadership as well, right? That people kind of forget about.

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  Yep. Well, it's funny because technologies like Slack have shifted the balance from, and frankly, any technology that helps people communicate faster and better, I don't want to say undermines, but reduces the needs for authoritative hierarchies. Because if you think about something like channels, like Slack channels, like, you know, anybody that wants to can make up their own channel and call it whatever they want and add whatever topic they want to it and therefore start a movement. So, you know, it used to be that all communications from a company were top down. There's a hierarchy. There's a president and a vice president and a, you know, area vice president. And, you know, in a sales force, you have these layers.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  And, you know, you relay the message down and no longer is that necessary to do. So,

• 1:34:38Speaker 06

  yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. I think in a military, you, you obviously still need that. In a tech company, it's interesting how few people you may need to run a big tech service.

• 1:34:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a different world. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Rome?

• 1:34:53Speaker 06

  You can always find me on Twitter, at Howard. I'm OG. So, at Howard. And we asked, we also got at Rome on Twitter, but on our site, it's ro.am.

• 1:35:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Ro.am.

• 1:35:08Speaker 06

  Is the website. And then Twitter, we're at Rome. And then you can find me at Howard.

• 1:35:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I always enjoyed talking to you. I expect more book recommendations in 2023. I will send mine as well. And I'll do this again in the future.

• 1:35:21Speaker 06

  Love seeing you, Paul.