The 2026 Anti-Trend That Will Make Millions

Join me as I chat with Jonathan Courtney about how businesses can thrive by going against current digital trends, particularly by offering premium in-person experiences while others focus on AI and virtual offerings. He shares how his company has successfully transitioned from digital-only to in-person events, charging higher prices for physical experiences that consistently sell out. The conversation explores how physical products and experiences create perceived value, authenticity, and scarcity that digital alternatives cannot replicate. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:33 - The Anti-Trend to AI 05:53 - Why IRL Events 09:09 - Frameworks for Creating IRL Events 17:20 - JC’s Process for throwing IRL Events 30:27 - The power of physical products vs. digital offerings 36:22 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions Key Points: • Jonathan Courtney explains how to profit from the "anti-trend" to AI and digital automation by focusing on in-person experiences • In-person events are becoming increasingly valuable as people seek relief from digital overload and AI-generated content • Physical products and in-person events create scarcity and authenticity that digital offerings cannot match • Building small, dedicated audiences (even just "100 true fans") can be sufficient to run successful high-ticket in-person events The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL Unscheduled CEO Podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  One of the most common questions I get is, "How would you make a million dollars if you were starting from scratch?" I'd either create an AI startup, a GPT rapper, build an audience, sell to that audience, or I do what Jonathan Courtney said in this episode. In this episode, he talks about the anti-trends. I think that there's a tremendous opportunity right now to go actually against AI and do just a lot of IRL stuff. He talks about how he rented an Italian village, how he got customers via DMs to fund it, how you don't need an audience to do this. He explains the entire playbook. I hope a lot of people listen to this episode. I hope a lot of people watch this episode. It's not as hypey as the latest AI tool,

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  but for the people who stick around to the end, I think that they're going to have an unfair advantage for building a million-dollar business in 2026. Enjoy the episode.

• 1:01Greg Isenberg?

  Jonathan Courtney, by the end of this episode, what are we going to learn?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  What we are going to learn is how to use the anti-trend of all of this AI explosion to make your business more successful.

• 1:16Greg Isenberg?

  So, put it another way, you're going to teach us how to make money doing things that have the complete opposite to do with AI. The anti-trend, meaning the complete opposite of all this AI stuff that I normally talk about.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there's a massive opportunity, or lots of massive opportunities, to take a look at what's happening in the AI space, the social media space, the content space. Just go the opposite way, and you're going to find that a lot of people want exactly that. And I mean, obviously, I was triggered by your tweet from today, earlier today. I guess you'll bring it up on screen, but just some of the highlights from it are, you showed this chart. I don't know if you want to bring that chart up on screen, but it showed that in many countries, social media peaked in 2022. And it's the young people who are cutting back on social media first, which kind of shows the trend

• 2:17Speaker 01

  that from a perspective of something as powerful as social media, a lot of younger people are starting to get off social media. And I think this trend, I mean, I'm a millennial, I'm in this thirty five to forty four range, and myself and a lot of friends have quit social media. I'm the only social media that I'm on is X, and I'm even that I'm trying to get away from. And I think there's with these trends, with the AI stuff, just like accelerating everything, especially around content, especially now people can just write stuff without writing, create videos without needing to create or being able to create videos, being able to create

• 3:01Speaker 01

  all of this like slop or brain rot, as you said in your post. I'm seeing more and more opportunities for the opposite. And the opposite of that is, you mentioned a couple of things there, slow media, like, you know, reading long form articles again, maybe on print. But what I'm literally doing myself is, over the last year, I've been moving a lot of the digital elements of my company, which are very profitable and scalable because they're digital, to a much less easy to do in-person version of these products. And

• 3:42Speaker 01

  what I'm seeing is a lot more, I'm finding it a lot more easy to market these products. I'm able to use like less, I guess, clever marketing techniques to get people to join these in-person events, even though they're actually a lot more expensive. And an example of that is like, you know, one of our, we sell like certifications for learning facilitation in one of our companies, facilitator.com. And for the last six years, the most popular versions of those certifications have been an online version of the certification, which costs $6,000. Uh, two years ago, after COVID, I had the feeling people would want to come back in person.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I had the feeling that that would also help us stand out because no one else was doing it. Everyone was still doing remote. And so we released a version of the certification, which was $15,000, well, $14,300 in person. And three of those events sold out right after announcing them. And so those in-person events now are essentially replacing the digital version of these events or accompanying them, not because they're like, you know, an easier thing to run or because that's like the best way to scale, but just it's so much more enjoyable to market these things because people are craving these in-person experiences

• 5:10Speaker 01

  versus you have to kind of like with, with, with online virtual stuff at the moment, you kind of have to, you have to really do the marketing thing. You have to do the marketing shtick to get people excited about it. And how do you like differentiate yourself, differentiate yourself from everybody else? Well, what we're saying now is we have the best in-person way to do this. And it's just so simple. And so our entire, yeah, our entire marketing behind our full stack facilitator program is this little like apple-like piece of copy, which is in-person incredible. So 50% of the marketing is dedicated to you just get to hang out with people. And it's working really well.

• 5:53Greg Isenberg?

  So, okay, so let's unpack that so we can make it extremely tactical for people. So.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Those tactics.

• 6:01Greg Isenberg?

  People need that sauce.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  They need the sauce. Yeah, not the juice. Sorry. It's the sauce.

• 6:06Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, they, and not the tactics either. I don't know what I was saying by saying the tactics. They need the sauce. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that from 2020 to 2022.

• 6:22Greg Isenberg?

  You know, there was a rush to build, we have the best digital community.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Greg Isenberg?

  To do XYZ, correct?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. And we were in that rush as well. We were just a little bit earlier, but 2020 is where it exploded.

• 6:41Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So let's, let's talk about this. So, um, you know, if you wanted to become, I don't know, a day trader, there's a community for that. What else? Like if you wanted to become?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  A facilitator. Just because it's our thing.

• 7:04Greg Isenberg?

  Facilitator. There's a community for that. Basically, XYZ community for that.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Greg Isenberg?

  Is the new app for that. There's an app for that, right?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a paid community. There's a free community, et cetera. Yeah.

• 7:21Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So.

• 7:25Greg Isenberg?

  What you're saying is this became more competitive.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Very competitive.

• 7:31Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. And you're not saying that there's not opportunity here, right?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  There's still, I mean, we still broadly make more money with our online certification versus our in-person certification. But I think that that's going to change within the next two years and they're going to flip.

• 7:50Greg Isenberg?

  So basically.

• 7:54Greg Isenberg?

  Here's the framework.

• 7:57Greg Isenberg?

  For this. And by the way, I think that there's literally thousand, a thousand plus.

• 8:04Greg Isenberg?

  One million dollar ARR businesses.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  There's, I haven't even mentioned the other one that I'm building, which I want other people to steal. Because I don't want to do more than one million ARR for it. And I want other people to create it. If you just remind me to talk about that one, because I genuine, I genuine, genuinely want other people to build it.

• 8:27Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. At the end, you can, you can get that one.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. You have to wait till the end.

• 8:31Greg Isenberg?

  You have to wait till the end.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And then it just gets right to the end. Fuck.

• 8:38Greg Isenberg?

  I thought, I thought you were a YouTuber, man.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Dude, have you seen my YouTube channel? It's a disgrace. It's like, actually, yeah, mine is also the anti trend of just everything on YouTube, which is why it's not working.

• 8:52Greg Isenberg?

  Well, the anti trend doesn't work until it works, right?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm, I'm, that's the thing. I'm waiting on the sidelines. I'm just, I'm, I'm like, I don't know, Radiohead, when they released Kid A and everyone was like, what the hell is that piece of shit album? And then now it's like, it's a classic. That's going to be my, that's going to be my stuff.

• 9:09Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. So let's give people the framework for, for, for this. So,

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Greg Isenberg?

  You know, how, how do you, how do you get ideas from this world? Um, and sort of bring it to an I R L?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Okay. So I want to just say that the framework we're using is because we've, we have three different businesses and all three of those, but all three, it sounds weird to say, all three. Well, all three of them have digital elements that are, used to be in person, then became digital because it was just so much better. And then now moving to in person, but like, almost like freshly moving from digital to in person. So I can tell you the things that are working for us. Number one, you're looking at what other people are doing in the digital only space. And for example, I ran this event in the summer called Summer Camp in August. I think I invited you to it and you didn't come. It's okay. No problem. And what I was doing is I was looking at the communities around funnel building and

• 10:10Speaker 01

  around kind of digital marketing. And for me, I had the feeling if, the feeling I had is if I do an in-person version of it, call it summer camp, give it that nostalgic vibe, make it really not bro-y. And it's a place, not just to learn marketing, but also to just hang out with people and kind of get out of your dirty cave and interact with other humans. And if I sell that idea, the idea that you're getting out into the real world, it's away from, it's, it's a little bubble away from everything else that's happening. And it's also fun, which is why I called it summer camp and not. Revenue camp or something. And so what we did is we took something pretty boring that everyone is doing, which is sort of like a mastermind.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And we stripped out all of the virtual elements of it. There's no virtual element of this mastermind. There's also no recordings of it. There's also no virtual tickets, even though people wanted virtual tickets to keep it really like aggressively in person. We just made it an in-person only event, charged 6,800 per ticket and sold 30 tickets. So this was a, and, and those are the easiest 30 tickets I've ever sold in my life for anything, even though there, it's a lot more expensive than maybe what the others were charging for the digital version of it. And so I, I ran that now two years in a row. And this is me just taking something that's out there. I know, maybe I'm not helping you create this framework, but I'm just looking at what's

• 11:39Speaker 01

  there, what's digital and popular. And how can I turn this into something that will give people a sense of community? Something that will give people like, like give people the ability to have some fun. And I also strongly believe, and this is part of the marketing as well, is that people learn better through osmosis, meaning just sitting in a room with people and just the conversations that happen during coffee breaks and all that kind of stuff. Learning through osmosis. We sell that idea that it's not just you sitting at your computer for four, four hours and then going back to what you're doing. It's complete immersion. And so this is, this was just like a big part of the selling point for summer camp.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  So we take something that exists out there, something that's maybe cold and boring, but it's working, turn that into like a themed event, summer camp for me. I'm also doing a winter camp. And just like highlight why virtual is so much more inferior to everything else. And then also make it exclusively virtual.

• 12:47Greg Isenberg?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Okay, make it exclusively virtual, meaning there's no, there's no way to like dial in. Sorry, make it exclusively in person.

• 12:57Greg Isenberg?

  That's what I figured you meant.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the, the last thing, what was I about to say? It was really important.

• 13:05Greg Isenberg?

  You were about to say, I love you, I'm pretty sure.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I love you. Oh no, there was one really important element.

• 13:10Greg Isenberg?

  I'm in love with you.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  I want to kiss you. I know, there was something.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, oh fuck, here it is. You know scarcity is really hard to do with a digital product? Like, there's tricks to make a digital product scarce, so that there's some sense of urgency. In-person events actually have a limited amount of tickets. And so it's way easier to create a true sense of urgency and scarcity, because it just is inherent to in-person. And so these things are just so much easier to build campaigns around. And so the campaigns don't need to run all year, they can just happen once. I'm, I'm closing a campaign tomorrow for our Full Stack Facilitator Event. It was a one-week campaign. We're gonna sell 50% of the tickets in that one week. And we don't have to think about it for another 11 months. And then all the rest of the tickets sell in the last few months.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, in-person is like, in my opinion, in my opinion, if you can do really good in-person events, and I'm not talking about conferences, I think conferences are generally like a money sink. Like, I please do not think I'm talking about conferences, I'm really not. Conferences are like a completely separate thing, but if you're good at doing events.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  And there's a guy, you know Skool, the S-K-O-O-L thing? There's a guy in, in one of these communities. His name is Goose? G- Goose? I don't know, Goose Delvani? And his thing is just just doing in-person, even though he's like the biggest proponent of Skool. And so he uses like in-person as a hard-to-compete-with element of being part of his community.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  No one else can compete with because he's like, I'm just going to keep doing these really fun in-person events the whole time. And so there's no way that people will want to be part of another similar group that doesn't provide the in-person element. We also launched a new product a couple of days ago, which also has this thing called Campfire, where once per year, we all meet up in person for five days. And that was never naturally part of our, our product. So it's a virtual product, which has a 12-month subscription for $6,000. And once per year, we meet in person. So I'm all over the place here. I have so much more even to say about this, but yeah.

• 15:36Greg Isenberg?

  Right? So, once you've built this event series of IRL community, it's funding, like now go vibe code your SaaS. And now sell the SaaS to the people. Or sell, it doesn't have to be a SaaS, right? It could be just software. It could be a mobile app or whatever.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  But the funny thing is that's, this is what ClickFunnels do. They run these events and the goal of these events is to fund their software that they then sell to more people at the events. And it's like this very circular thing. But they are just so goddamn good at these events. I've been to a couple of them and they're, like, they were, they were like the first people. So I went to Funnel Hacking Live in February 2020. And then COVID happened and Funnel Hacking Live was like back immediately the next year, still during COVID. They had, they moved it to Florida so they could do it again. Cause they knew it was just not like a good idea to do it virtually.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people who understand in-person, Tony Robbins, I mean, Tony Robbins is still doing in-person, right? He's back to in-person already. And it's not because that is more convenient, because it is not more convenient to do in-person. It's way less convenient for me to be traveling all over the world to deliver these events. I'm traveling next week and then I'm traveling. Like it's, that is annoying, but it is a very hard to compete with element of a business when you have these in-person events where people are coming together and they, these people also become like a very core element of the brand and they're, they spread the word better than any marketing can do.

• 17:20Greg Isenberg?

  Number one, look at what other people are doing in the digital only space and what's popular and then bring it to I R L. How, how do you actually do that? You know what I mean?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  How we do it is like, we're pretty chaotic with it. So we did a, okay, so I'll show you an example of this, the most chaotic version you can ever imagine. And this is, this is real. I mean, it's real. I'll show you the actual video of it or I'll, I'll link you to it. If you search AJ and Smart Retreat, there's a video says, we rented an entire village. And I'll tell you the story behind how that happened. So it says, we rented an entire village for this is the thumbnail. This, okay, let me tell you how this one came together because this one was an absolute nightmare to put together. Okay. So first of all, COVID was just over. I knew if we did an in-person event, that people would just want to do it.

• 18:12Greg Isenberg?

  Wait, hold on. I didn't know you had, that, that actually looks like, sorry to interrupt here, but that, I thought that was Jim Halpert from The Office on flute.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Of course, we paid for Jim Halpert from The Office to come to this event. See, you can see this is back in 2022. So we had done like three, we had, you know, COVID. And then before COVID, we also had stopped doing in-person events because I was so sick of it. I was still had braces here. I was so sick of doing in-person events that I decided, ah, I don't want to do this anymore. Online stuff is so much easier. And so this was our first in-person event in six years. So this retreat, you asked me, how do we literally do it? Okay, here's how we literally did it. Number one, I, myself and Laura went to Italy because we heard there's this cool location. We went to this cool location and we did a small team retreat at this location.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  It's called a Workation Village in Italy. If anyone wants to ever rent this place, it's an actual entire village you can rent. It's normally rented for weddings, I think.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  So I don't know the actual Italian name, but Workation Village Rent This Place Out. It's actually very cool if you ever want to go there. So it's an entire village in Piedmont in Italy. And if you are willing to spend the money, you can rent the entire place. Meaning like tons of buildings, all the rooms, swimming pool, like an entire forest. It's ludicrous. It's kind of, it sounds like a Mr. Beast type thing to do. But, so I found the location and then I was like, I think people in our audience want to do a retreat. Because I'd seen yoga retreats and I was like, I think I want to take yoga retreats and like do it for our topic. And like a wellness retreat, but do it for our topic.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And so we decided to sell this facilitation retreat to our audience. And, and we didn't know if anyone would buy it. And so what we did is we, we got footage from that place. We got permission, like if we would actually sell the tickets, that we could book the place. So we didn't book it yet because we didn't know if it would sell. But we like, you know, blocked the location preliminarily. And then we did a campaign around how beautiful this location is. It's a video of me walking around the location, showing people what it's going to be like. I didn't have any speakers. I didn't have anything to show besides the location and that it would be fun. And so literally I announced this and people, it sold out in like two days.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  The tickets were like $7,800 because it was so expensive to rent out the space.

• 20:50Greg Isenberg?

  Wait, how did you sell out? Cause a lot of people are going to be like, how is that even possible?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Well, we, we did, I mean, my system for that is always, we did a webinar to our, like we had a,

• 21:03Speaker 01

  a week of inviting people to a webinar to talk about like, what like, I think the idea was like,

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Take a look at our first in-person retreat in six years or something. But for people who didn't know us, I think we had a separate name for the webinar, which was like, where we see facilitation going in 2022. And at that presentation, I just basically told people about how much, reminded people about how much they miss in person, like for about an hour. And then at the very end, I announced, and we have this retreat. Obviously, people are going to say, yeah, but you need an audience to do that. Actually, yes. For this particular event, we needed an audience because this was a big expensive event. We had 75 people coming to it. But summer camp only has 35 people coming to it.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  I only have like 1,000 people or 1,000 to 2,000 people listening to my podcast. And my podcast is the only audience for the people coming to my other in-person events. And still I can fill, you know, one to two 35 people events per year. And at a high ticket price, that's still a nice little business. So, okay, the facilitator.com retreat, that's a big expensive thing. It cost us like 100K to rent the village. But the thing that I did in August, like last summer, I just asked Sam Ovens, if I can use his office for my summer camp. And he was like, yeah, all right, mate. And by the way, like Sam Ovens then asked me,

• 22:38Speaker 01

  or one of the guys from Sam Ovens' company's school asked me, can we use your office? And I was like, yeah, no problem. You can just use places for free. Like, people are often very happy for you to use their places. Like, we've used, like, for events, we've used the Teachable offices in New York. We use like, I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this because they're like, they don't want people to know we used all these places for free. But WeWork always gives us space for free to do events. We are very rarely even paying for event spaces because we just pitched the idea of how cool the event will be to companies and places. And they're often, especially if you're Using their product, they're often like, yeah, that sounds cool.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  For example, if you have a school community and if you want to do an in-person event and your school community is kind of fun and interesting, let's say Sam really likes the artistic one. So like if you're doing like a painting school community or a guitar learning school community, by the way, don't let him, I don't know if he will say yes to this, this is just a thought, but there's no harm in asking him, hey, like we're doing an I R L event for our, our school community. Is there any chance we could use your office? He'll say no 80% of the time, probably, but 20% of the time he might be interested in it. Or you could ask like, there's so many places to get spaces. So you asked me ages ago, and I went on a very big ramble. How would I actually do it?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Number one for me actually honestly is just choosing the dates. Number two for me is finding a location. Number three for me is kind of figuring out, how do I, how do I, how do I pitch this? Like, what do I even say about this? I'll give you an example, I'll give you an exact example. I have an event that doesn't have a name yet, that doesn't have a price yet, and it's only a vibe, but I know what's happening in February. So February 2026, I'm hosting an event. It's going to be an art retreat. So like a art retreat, writing retreat, painting retreat, whatever. And it's happening in February. I kind of have the location, I have to drive there and have a look at it in the next few weeks. I've already looked at one and I wasn't happy with it. Now I'm going to look at another. As soon as I like the location, it's done.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  First thing I'll start doing is, is messaging people directly who I think might want to come to it. So that's the very first thing I'll do. So I'll try to get like four or five people with direct messaging to like soft commit to coming to it. So that like, let's say the place is going to cost me like $12,000 to rent and then the tickets are $5,000. If like two or three people say yes to me, then I'm like, fuck it, I'm doing it now. At least I know I won't lose money because this location I have to buy ours rent. So that's the first thing for me is that I'll just. Choose a date so that I lock it in my mind, choose a location, then I start messaging people. And by the way, sometimes these are people I know, like just to give you an example.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  The guy who I was doing a project with two weeks ago, a guy who runs this company called Pip Dex. I asked him if he'll come, would you come to this? And he was like, yeah, I would love, I want to come to that. So I'm asking people I know as well, if they want to come to these things, if it's somewhat related. And then, once that's done, it's just one foot in front of the other. The cool thing is with in-person events is you have a clear target. It's fill that event. Like, what do I do? Fill that event. There's no like ambiguity around, oh, maybe we need to do our branding today, or maybe we need to do. No, it's fill that event. And then when you fill that event, especially for us, for example, summer camp, we filled summer camp. We got 35 people to come to it.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Out of those 35 people, three people booked us for other consulting gigs that we offer. So at the in-person event is like the best place to tell people about all the other stuff you offer. And if they like you, it's essentially a three-day advertisement and teaser for the way you are. And that's one of the best ways to get like bigger ticket things if you have something else to sell. So I don't know, I'm just a huge fan of in-person, even though I kind of find it very inconvenient to do it. I love that almost no one else is doing it in my, in the niches that I'm doing it in.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And everyone's like, no, I do it virtual, everything's virtual, it's all way more convenient. I'm like, you're right, but also I can then compete with you. I can compete in the same space in a very different way.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I'll say one last thing about in-person. It feels more legit. So, okay, if somebody, and I don't mean, I don't mean generally. Like, let's say you get an ad for joining one of our paid communities, AJ and Smart's paid communities. And you're like, I want to see if these people are real. And you go on our YouTube channel and you see this video of like, you know, this crazy location that we booked with all of these people having a great time. You're going to be like, I want to be part of whatever that is. Like, these people are obviously up to some real, real life shit. This is not some cave dweller who's going to steal all my money. It's actually a real person who goes out into the real world and meets the customers.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And so it's also like an aspirational thing for customers when they see what they could be part of. And then, you know, the, maybe the digital products are like the path towards that. So we have our, on facilitator.com, our first product that we show on the website is Full Stack Facitator, our in-person event in California that costs, you know, almost $15,000. We know that's aspirational and we know that most of our customers won't be able to buy that at first. And so they usually take a cheaper product first, which would be Workshop or Master, which is in virtual only. But they get exposed over and over and over to the in-person option.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And eventually people want to come to that and they're like, fine, I'm ready to come to that thing now. So, yeah, but the in-person thing gives sort of like a legit anchor. I know you asked me, how would I do it? And I just went on a big ramble, but I think I answered, how would I do it? Date, location, kind of know what I want to do, then start talking to people about it. And then eventually I'm like, I'm ready to. I'm ready to like either announce it on my podcast, which almost no one listens to again for your audience. Like if people are looking at Greg's audience and you're like, easy for Greg to say, because when he does a tweet, like 1,000, 17,000 people like it. Guys, look at my X account. I am probably-

• 29:26Greg Isenberg?

  Actually, don't. There's, there's-

• 29:28Speaker 01

  There's nothing on there. Like, if you look at me and if you're wondering, like, do you have to have a large audience? I am the perfect example. I post something on X and I maybe get two likes or three likes and I can still get one of these events filled up. So it really, let's see, what did I get for five likes for my last post, two likes for the second last post? I don't have any, I don't have an audience, but I still, like, you know, the, there's this concept of the 1,000 true fans. Well, I have like the 100 true fans or the 10 true fans.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And that's all you need. If, especially for in-person, in-person is so tangible. Fuck, you know, the other thing, Greg. So events is one thing. That's one element. The other thing that's so powerful, and I'm going to hold this up to the camera. You know this, right?

• 30:29Greg Isenberg?

  Yes, I do.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So this, what I'm holding up to the camera for anybody who, who's just hearing the audio version, I'm holding up a folder, which is Alex Hermosy's $100 million playbooks. And so this folder,

• 30:46Speaker 01

  why would he print out and create a physical folder? And why would he charge $5,800 essentially for it? And why would someone be stupid enough to buy it? Well, let me tell you the unbelievable power of having a physical thing to show off, especially if you're doing any sort of info product. So we just launched a new kind of info product, like a coaching program on the 1st of October. And one of the key elements of it was a physical, because I saw Alex Hermosy doing it, I'll just tell you straight out, I just loved the physical element. And one of the key elements for our one

• 31:26Speaker 01

  was all of the materials are printed and they're in a nice box. And inside the box, you get like some other cool stuff.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  People, people want the physical thing. People are, people crave the physical thing. And people know as well inherently, and I know that if you have the thing in front of you, you're much more likely to read it than if you have like a big bunch of PDFs. And also especially now that you can essentially generate all of that stuff on ChatGPT. And knowledge is becoming less and less valuable. The ability to have something curated for you physically, in my opinion, is becoming more and more valuable. But the other thing is it's just so much easier to pitch something to people if you can physically hold it and show them what you're talking about.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It sounds really stupid, but another element of this whole anti-trend is that extreme convenient access to content, I think, is the wrong way to go. And literally printing out these playbooks and telling you the only way to get them is in this physical format is a way to make someone like me salivate. It's a way to get someone like me to spend $5,000. I spend $5,000 only for this folder.

• 32:49Greg Isenberg?

  And to bring it all back, it's the anti-AI, anti-digital product, right?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  What are we talking about again?

• 32:57Greg Isenberg?

  You know, just to bring it all back, just to bring it, just to bring it all back. And you are more likely to buy this today than you might have been

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:07Greg Isenberg?

  a few years ago.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Because now, now he can say, okay, this is a perfect example. So on, on the day that this arrived, I was doing an event at my office. And I told the audience, hey, this $100 million blah, blah playbook thing is arriving. And one of the guys in the audience said, I already have it as a PDF. Somebody posted it on Reddit or something. And I said, are you going to read that? He was like, probably not. And I was like, I am going to read this because it's it's going to be sitting on my desk. I'm going to be using it as a reference thing. Right. And it just feels more valuable. I feel like it's a more worthwhile thing because it's a big, heavy thing of playbooks

• 33:52Speaker 01

  that feels like a feels substantial. And so even the like, I also think in-person events come back to that. If if the goal isn't to make money, if the goal, just just stick with me for one second. If we think about what is actually better for the customer, for humans, when I'm thinking about it, I know that the in-person version of what we do is the absolute best way to do what we're teaching. We're teaching facilitation, which involves like a lot of improvisation, a lot of kind of scenarios that you can predict. And sure, we can teach this in an online setting and we do, but the best way to learn

• 34:36Speaker 01

  it is in person, even if it's inconvenient for us and inconvenient for the customers. And the best way to, for example, we launched a book in May. The best way to read that book is actually to get the physical version because it's like a little workbook, even though that's a pain in the ass for us to create and a pain in the ass for the client because they have to wait for it to arrive. And so for us, I think in a lot of ways, we're just thinking practically not what do people want, because people will just say, I want digital stuff and I want it to be easy. It's what do people need? So what people want is ultimate comfort and convenience, but I often feel like that's not very effective.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And so now, when a client, for example, is also contacting us and saying, by the way, if you're listening to this, clients, I don't want you to stop doing this because this is awesome for our business, but you know, I tell you this on the calls. When a client comes to us and says, I want to have 2,000 licenses of one of your courses, I say, Obviously, I want to sell you this and obviously I will sell you this happily. But I would just like to tell you that the best way to spend that money would be to have an in-person training.

• 35:45Greg Isenberg?

  Right.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  I just want you to know that I'm telling you that the best way would be that. It's not the most, it's not the most convenient way, but it's the best way. And so I think the anti-trend is also just related to the fact that.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Also, dude, you know, with the chat GPT stuff, right? That client at a certain point might just say to us, ah, we can find all of, we, we basically generated our own course using chat GPT and all of your content. What they cannot do is say, yeah, we've generated a new version of you and your team coming to our office and running this.

• 36:20Greg Isenberg?

  Right.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  That will always be hard to do.

• 36:22Greg Isenberg?

  So I'm, I'm pretty sold on I R L. I'm actually pretty sold on, on this as like being, if I was trying to make my first million dollars right now, I'd either build some GPT wrapper or I'd build this.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  That's funny, they're still opposite.

• 36:41Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I know, like the complete opposite. I think you're completely right. By the way, you got, you've got me thinking that I should do an event in 2026.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Dude, I've been trying to convince you to do this for a while.

• 36:55Greg Isenberg?

  I know, a lot of people have.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  It would kill.

• 36:58Greg Isenberg?

  Well, it's not about killing, right? It's about killing it for like, you know, to your point, it's about like, there's, there's people on the other side of this podcast or there's people in my, you know, our, our digital community startup empire that, you know, if they actually had a day with me, like in Miami or whatever, and we actually worked on growing their business or ideating, I think it would be pretty impactful.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Huge, it's huge. The, the, the problem I think is, and I think you'll, the, the problem is short-term, you'll be a little bit annoyed that it's like, oh, I could have stayed behind my computer. And all my businesses would have probably made more money while not doing that event.

• 37:38Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  But the cumulative effect of that, doing things like that, I think has a huge positive net outcome on the business. And as I, what I believe to be true is that. People would get massive value from that.

• 37:53Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Like cra- especially, I mean, you probably don't want to do this because I, I know it's not your thing. But if you were to do like, um, if you were to charge like $15,000 for a ticket for three days with you, but then only, only 20 people can come to it.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I think that would be extremely appealing to, I mean, that, that would be very appealing to people in your audience. I know from people coming to my events who pay, you know, up to 15K. Nobody has a fucking clue who I am and, and they're really appreciative of the opportunity to do that. I think it's, I think it would be pretty cool for you to do something like that. I, I don't know if you want to, but I think you should.

• 38:38Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know about, I don't know about 15K, but I do know about like.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  15 million.

• 38:43Greg Isenberg?

  If, if I did an event, whatever price tag it would be, people, you know, people would have to look at it and be like, I got 5X, 10X, the value.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You know what I do? I do something really stupid at my event. If you look at the full stack facilitator page, I, and I stole this from Tony Robbins. If you scroll down to the end, uh, see if you find it. Yeah, that's it. Scroll down to the very bottom.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  The bottom, the very bottom. And look at the guarantee, look at this garan- no, scroll up, scroll up to this satisfaction guarantee. We're so confident you love full stack facilitator that we offer a full refund if you aren't satisfied by the end of your training. You can do the entire training and we'll give you $15,000 back if you didn't think it was worth it.

• 39:34Greg Isenberg?

  How many people actually do that though?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Never once.

• 39:37Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's, that, that's the level of like.

• 39:43Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  For me, how important it is that it actually is worth the money.

• 39:46Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. No, I love that. I want to just wrap a bow on this. Okay, I got to know in the comment section. If I were to do an event like JC is talking about, would you be interested in? Comment below. The two locations I would probably do it in would be Miami, Florida during the winter, or you know, the Montreal, Canada area during the winter.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  I would definitely come to it. I would love to be a, I would, I would be like a participant in the audience.

• 40:20Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. I mean, I would love to have you to be, to be honest. That would be really cool.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I had so many more things to talk about at this anti-trend. Like every, every part of your tweet is like, I kind of want you to delete it because I think that it's better that, for me, I feel like I've had a really nice advantage the last year and a half while everyone else is like doing like zigging and moving in this like hardcore virtual direction and automation and everything. And I'm like, let's, let's build these in-person things quietly in the background. But I also, I think people are going to catch on to it at some point.

• 41:00Greg Isenberg?

  Well, they, they are definitely now as soon as we publish this. So appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you spilling the sauce. And hopefully your business can continue to grow with now thousands of new competitors. But I kid, I kid, like there's, there's so.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  It's also annoying to do in-person events. So that's the beauty. You have to compete on people actually doing it. So there's that element.

• 41:26Greg Isenberg?

  Totally, totally. It's not easy. And it's a moat where, where it's hard to, you know, come up with a moat now. I think IRL certainly is a moat. So thanks for coming on. Jonathan Courtney, JC, J Ice Cream, J Ice Cream, the Unscheduled Podcast is his podcast. Check it out.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Unscheduled CEO.

• 41:48Greg Isenberg?

  There it is. Unscheduled CEO. I'll include links where to find it and where to find him in the show notes like always. And give, give JC some love because the last few episodes.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Get three likes, three likes on X.

• 42:02Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Give him some love. He needs some, he needs some love on, on social platforms.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I'm desperate for it.

• 42:08Greg Isenberg?

  You know, let us know, let me know if you want him to come back again for a part two of this topic.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Alright, man. Thank you so much for having me.

• 42:22Greg Isenberg?

  You're a legend. Thanks for uh... No, you are a legend.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 42:27Greg Isenberg?

  You are certainly a legend.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Ah, sure, fine. I'll take it.

• 42:31Greg Isenberg?

  I'll take it. Alright. I'll catch you later.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Bye!