[DELETED ON YOUTUBE] Best Products of 2025 (Apps, Video Games, AI)

Join me as I sit down with Jonathan Courtney to host the second annual “Sippy Awards,” the most prestigious award show in tech for the products, games, and tools that shaped 2025. We crown our most-hyped products for 2026, favorite games of the year, best productivity tools, and best products under $100. We also dive into analog tools like Traveler’s Notebook, hi-fi systems, Japanese porcelain, and simple clothing uniforms as ways to make everyday life better and de-fragment your brain. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 03:23 – Most Hyped Product of 2026 14:43 – Game of the Year 2025 19:49 – The Way to Innovate 25:41 – Premium Domains 29:56 – Best Productivity Product 42:02 – Favorite Product of 2025 54:10 – Best products under $100. Key Points The Sippy Awards are a playful but serious way for Greg and Jonathan to highlight the products and games that genuinely improved their lives in 2025. They argue that cult classics (Wind Waker, Pinkerton, Kid A, Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring) come from creators who put the audience last and follow their own taste, even at the risk of initial backlash. Distinctive visual identities and premium dot-com domains are framed as both trust builders for users and commitment devices for founders. Their favorite productivity and lifestyle tools—ChatGPT, Things, Endel, Traveler’s Notebook, YouTube Premium, Japanese porcelain—show how small, well-crafted tools reshape daily workflows and rituals. Analog practices (morning pages, notebooks, hi-fi listening) and simple clothing uniforms are presented as ways to de-fragment your brain, reduce decision fatigue, and focus on what matters. 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/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: 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?

  In this episode, I share what are my favorite products of 2025? What is the best productivity product of 2025? What is the best product under $100? What is the most hyped product of 2026? This is an award show for some of my favorite products in 2025 and what I'm looking forward to in 2026. I bring on my friend Jonathan Courtney to bring some of his favorite products in 2025. This episode will give you some ideas, physical products, AI products, non-AI products. And it's just kind of a fun conversation that I hope you enjoy because I had a blast doing it. This is called the Sippy Awards of 2025. Enjoy the episode.

• 0:43Greg Isenberg?

  And if you don't mind, if you got this far, like and comment. So I know, I know that you enjoy this stuff. See you in there.

• 0:59Greg Isenberg?

  All right, we are here, Jonathan Courtney. This is the second annual Sippy Award Show, baby, where we are going to give away awards in 2025. What awards are we going to give away, JC?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  First of all, this is, if anyone hasn't seen this before, this is the most prestigious award ceremony of the year for tech companies, product companies. Everyone's been waiting for this. It's like one of the most hyped things on X. And getting one of these awards is bigger than getting something like a red dot award or a Nobel Prize, Nobel Peace Prize. Those things are kind of like the kind of low level stuff, and this is the high level stuff. So I think it's important that people know that this is not just sort of like a, you know, quick, we're just making it up on the fly sort of thing. There's a whole jury, like it costs billions of dollars to put this thing together. It's completely objective.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  And as for the awards that are coming up, just to give a few previews, we have our, I mean, of course, we're going to, we're going to reveal our favorite product of the year. Both of us will probably have different answers there. Most used product of the year, best productivity product. I'm just making stuff up now.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  So like, oh, uh, best, most, um, best product for under a hundred dollars. Like the product that improved our lives the most for under a hundred dollars award.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  The, and also I think one of the rules we have to clarify is that the products don't have to have come out in 2026. They're ju- just like the Nobel Peace Prize. The people weren't born in the year they got the Peace Prize, right? So by that logic, uh, we are pick pulling from products, um, from all through time, but we have to be using them. We have to have used them this year and benefited from this, uh, from them this year. Also, our most hyped product of 2026. That's a big one. And, um, that's kind of it.

• 3:09Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Um, so Nobel Peace Prize for technology, basically.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Basically, exactly.

• 3:16Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. We, we prepared a ton. We aren't doing this on the fly. It's gonna get crazier. Here we go. All right. Where do you want to start? Favorite product of the year?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I think favorite, uh, best product of the year, favorite product of the year might be, I mean, do we want to start with like the best thing, basically?

• 3:34Greg Isenberg?

  No, we, that'll be the end, you know?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  How about most hyped product of 2026?

• 3:41Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Do you want me to go first?

• 3:44Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  My most hyped product of 2026 is Half-Life 3. It is a video game from the company Valve, who are my favorite video game company in the world. They are also launching three, uh, physical products next year in approximately March, which is a new controller, a new product which is called a Steam Machine, and a new VR headset called a Steam Frame, uh, which I'm super excited about. So the whole Steam Machine product launch last week was, in my opinion, a masterclass on launching products. But the rumored, but still not confirmed, most hyped thing about all of this is the idea that there'll be a new Half-Life game. And so for me, Half-Life 3, which obviously encompasses all of these products

• 4:30Speaker 01

  because I'm going to buy all these products, um, for me as someone who plays video games, that's my most hyped product of 2026. I'm very excited about it.

• 4:40Greg Isenberg?

  So it's so your most hyped product is Half Life 3, but you're also excited about Steam Machine?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  It's the software that's going to play on the Steam Machine I'm the most hyped about.

• 4:51Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And that'll just kind of that all goes together with the whole Steam Machine as a product itself.

• 4:59Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. And what's the difference between the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a Steam Deck right here, actually, which I love. Steam Deck is so basically the simple answer to it is that the Steam Deck is a portable PC video game player, basically, a completely customizable, open, you know, product that runs Linux, but you can also run Windows on it. If what people are wondering, what's the difference between a Steam Machine or a Steam Deck and like a Nintendo Switch? The Steam Deck is just a completely open platform. You can do whatever you want on it. The difference between the Steam Deck and the Steam Machine is the Steam Machine is number one, it's six times more powerful because it's not a portable product,

• 5:45Speaker 01

  and it's made for playing 4K things on a big screen. It can play them natively. That's a whole thing, but whatever, we're all good. But the Steam Deck cannot do that. It just doesn't have enough power because it's built to conserve battery. So basically, it's the same platform running across all of these products, which is called Steam. By the way, do you know? Do you know Valve is a private company and has like 300 and something employees and has the highest revenue per employee for almost any company on earth? They make about $16 billion per year.

• 6:21Greg Isenberg?

  Not only that, did you know that they're bootstrapped?

• 6:24Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 6:25Greg Isenberg?

  Did you know that?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Gabe Newell basically put all his own money into it. It's insane. He just got himself like a massive new yacht, by the way. He's like the only billionaire that people are okay with having a yacht.

• 6:38Greg Isenberg?

  This is him?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is Gabe Newell.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  This is, Valve are my favorite company in the world. And if there's any company that I copy and like, try to recreate the most for my business, it's, it's been Valve from day one.

• 6:55Greg Isenberg?

  Dude, is that like, is he drinking like a Mai Tai out of a pineapple right there?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yes. That was like a screenshot from the launch of the Steam Deck.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  If you want to, there, this company is like, I don't think, no, it's just, there isn't another private company that, first of all, garners this much attention, makes this much crazy amounts of revenue, but also then just really pushes the entire industry forward. Like the fact that, you know, Sony, which is so much bigger, Nintendo, which are so much bigger, Microsoft, which are like billions of times bigger, can't create as much excitement or as much love as a very tiny company as Valve, even though they still are huge. It's, they're so impressive to me.

• 7:42Greg Isenberg?

  Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine Week by taking delivery of a new $500 million super yacht with a submarine garage onboard hospital and 15 gaming PCs?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Fuck yeah.

• 7:55Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Fuck yeah.

• 7:57Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. I mean, he's doing it right. He's doing it right. He's got the pink t-shirt with the pink, uh, the pink sunglasses with the Mai Tai. He's doing it right.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  And one of the things I really respect about this company and the Half-Life 3 meme, if you go on X right now and type in Half-Life 3, this is the most hype that's ever happened around this product. You'll see a lot of people posting this meme called Hopium. It's a picture of the main character getting, yeah, there you go, the hope, he's getting like injected with hope. Um, that's the meme. So because everyone basically, so this game came out 20 something years ago, and the rumors for the third, Half-Life 2 came out 20 something years ago, and the rumors that a third one will come out have been going on for, well, since, uh, 2017 or 2007 or something. And this week,

• 8:52Speaker 01

  A lot of different things have happened, including the announcement of the steam machine and a lot of insiders. It's the first time it actually feels like it's going to happen. Yeah, this guy's been posting every day for eight years about whether there's news for Half-Life 2. It's, I've been showing my girlfriend the whole Half-Life 2 thing because I've been, I've been looking at this for years. I've been waiting for this for years and she's just like so into it now and she's asking me like, did Half-Life, did Half-Life 3 get announced? I'm like, don't worry, if it does, I'll be on top of it. So, anyone else in your audience, if you're waiting for Half-Life 3 like me, if you've got hope, if you're excited, let me know in the comments.

• 9:32Greg Isenberg?

  This is a good one. I will never forget the time I saw the Half-Life 2 video before it came out. Do you remember that?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  The leak.

• 9:42Greg Isenberg?

  The leak.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Oh, man, there's a, there's a whole two-hour documentary which goes into like how, how damaging this leak was to the company and their morale. It was a German guy who leaked the game. I think he's in prison.

• 9:59Greg Isenberg?

  For leaking?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  He didn't just, so he downloaded it, so he hacked it to get the game. Then he also like hacked loads of other companies, like banks and stuff, and he was doing like fraud stuff. I, I know he got charged and like caught in Germany for this.

• 10:15Greg Isenberg?

  So, I remember the leak. It was huge. I, you know, it was like in high school, I think, and it was such a big deal because of the physics.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, the physics of Half-Life 2, so crazy.

• 10:28Greg Isenberg?

  It was crazy. Like, the idea of real physics in game didn't really exist back then, and that was such a big deal.

• 10:37Greg Isenberg?

  Half-Life 3, I don't know what will be that, that equivalent. So that's my only kind of question I'm thinking about.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  That's the exciting part about it because Gabe Newell, the CEO, specifically said the reason they're not going to release another Half-Life, that Half-Life games are like What he says is like, they're products that can show off a new innovative way of playing games, like a new way to interact with the video game world. And the last Half-Life game was this VR game called Half-Life: Alyx, which is a prequel. So it still wasn't Half-Life 3, but it was a prequel. It's still the only AAA VR game. There isn't another VR game with this level of quality and also the length of it and just the detail. It's amazing. But why everyone's excited about Half-Life 3 is that if Valve is launching a game under the Half-Life

• 11:25Speaker 01

  brand, it means something really big for the gaming industry. I mean, they always come up with crazy shit like Portal, the Portal guns. That was just such a cool, crazy, weird innovation.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  So I'm just excited to see. I mean, more than anything right now, I'm just enjoying the silliness of being on X during this week. Well, everyone thought it was going to release on Tuesday and it didn't. Now everyone thinks it's going to release during the Game Awards, which is in a couple of weeks. So yeah.

• 11:56Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. So I mean, I could speak about Half-Life for an entire

• 12:01Speaker 01

  This episode should just be about Half-Life.

• 12:03Greg Isenberg?

  Because it's so good. But I'll give my, I'll give my sort of most hyped product to 2026. It's also in the gaming

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 12:12Greg Isenberg?

  sector. And it's also kind of a meme. Could you guess what it is?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Um, a GTA 6.

• 12:19Greg Isenberg?

  GTA 6.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Aha, of course. The two, I mean, these are the two most hyped video games of all time ever.

• 12:27Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So I think what's interesting about GTA 6 is it's been delayed so much, right? How many years has it been delayed?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Has it been like, well, how long has it been since GTA V? Is it like over 10 years now?

• 12:42Greg Isenberg?

  It's around, I would say it's around 10 years. Yeah, 2013, so 12 years.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Still not Half-Life 3 levels, but yeah, it's crazy. I think it's gonna be, I mean, the cool thing about Valve, or Rockstar, who's making this game, is that also everyone expects them to not release something unless it's essentially the best game of all time. And there are not so many, there are not so many franchises where you just, the expectation is so high. I think Zelda and like mainline Mario games and mainline Zelda games from Nintendo have the same general thing, where if it were not to get a nine out of 10 in all of the, at least a nine out of 10, people would consider it to be a massive failure.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  They're just, GTA, Half-Life, Zelda, Mario, these all have very different standards to everybody else. And I mean, Red Dead Redemption 2, I don't know if you played that, is pretty, pretty amazing, pretty like crazily detailed. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do. I'm also excited. I've never finished a GTA game, but I'm always excited to play them.

• 13:55Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, same here. It's actually, I, the type of games I love is actually like, I love my Switch 2. Like, I love the idea of, it's just no murder, no violence, just like good music,

• 14:14Greg Isenberg?

  happy, warm, fuzzy, cozy games. And so like, this is the opposite of that, obviously. So I don't know if I would play it to the end, but I'm just hyped to actually just see, like, how do they push the envelope forward? And what does it look like?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you wanna see like, what does a company that's obsessed with perfection, has crazy high standards and an infinite budget, what does a company like this do? Actually, maybe one of the awards should be our game of the year for 2025, since we went in a gaming direction.

• 14:49Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Like, most played game, maybe?

• 14:52Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Go for it.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  I can go. My most played game of 2025 is called Ball X Pit,

• 15:01Speaker 01

  which I've been playing on the Steam Deck. It is a kind of like a very fun combination of about 10. It's like a Frankenstein of about 10 different games pushed into one.

• 15:12Greg Isenberg?

  Ball.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Ball X Pit.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  It's so addictive, so much fun. The mechanics of this game are just perfect. And yeah, this game is super addictive, really easy, especially, I mean, if you've got a kid, just to pick it up and pay for 10 minutes, play for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. If you don't have time to get into some big story, this is a great game to just play on the couch. On the Switch 2, it's also on Switch 2. Ball X Pit, super fun. And shout out to Amar at AJ and Smart who recommended that I check it out. Really great.

• 15:48Greg Isenberg?

  So what's the concept here? Like, what is the gameplay?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Honestly, it's really hard to describe. So you're a little dude in the middle. And all of these things are coming towards you, a little bit like Space Invaders. Like, all of these things are getting closer and closer, these enemies. And you're shooting balls at them. And as you shoot balls at them, you're sort of upgrading your balls. And as you do, there you go. And it's just this very satisfying ball management game, kind of like normal life, but the balls are even more fun. And it's very, like, the art style, everything, the music is great. And it is a combination of a couple of different games. It's like a rogue-like.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  It's a puzzle game. It's really addictive, really fun.

• 16:37Greg Isenberg?

  And for people who listened to my Logan Kilpatrick Gemini 3 episode, we talked a lot about building video games and how you can use Gemini to build video games. So. People listening, like, go and play some of these games, get inspiration, and then go build your own video games.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Another thing, just on that Gemini thing, if you're looking for video games that like, GTA 6 would probably be a hard game to replicate and learn about how to build games using something like Gemini 3, but Ball X Pit being one of these indie games that's a little bit more confined, I can imagine that that's, if you're looking to replicate something, looking for ideas of things to try out, that's probably a better starting point than trying to make a massive open world crazy thing.

• 17:24Greg Isenberg?

  Love it. Okay, on my end, I've been playing the most, a game called, a Zelda game that I think is underrated. Can you guess which one it is?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Underrated, okay. An underrated Zelda game. The only underrated Zelda game I can think of would be like, Skyward Sword?

• 17:44Greg Isenberg?

  No, not close, but it's Wind Waker.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Majora's Mask? Oh, Wind Waker's not underrated. That's like one of my favorite, that's one of the best ones ever. Are you playing it on the GameCube emulator thing?

• 17:57Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Did you get the GameCube controller?

• 18:00Greg Isenberg?

  No, I didn't know they had that.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  You can get the GameCube controller to play along with it. Wind Waker is really great.

• 18:09Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, so, okay, so I played it when it first came out. We've got the graphics on screen. This was a game changer, and you're sensing a theme, like, I love games that push it to the limit, that, you know, show something new. This was a cel-shaded video game. That was the visual design style. And when it first came out, people hated this game.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were so angry about it.

• 18:34Greg Isenberg?

  So angry, right? Because they were used to, you know, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, like, realistic Zelda, and this felt like super kiddy, right?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  People were super, super annoyed about it. And I remember they were also irritated that you were playing as the young Link because they wanted like the story to continue after Majora's Mask and people thought it was going to stay as adult Link and kind of dark adult themes. But then it went to this. And yeah, people were so irritated.

• 19:05Greg Isenberg?

  So irritated. And I just remember playing this full game and being like, wow, what an incredible experience and so bold of the team to actually, you know, produce something like this. Now, over time, people realized, wow, this is actually an incredible game. And it was brilliant that they actually explored the visual design style this way. So now, yes, I agree. Like it's, you know, I wouldn't say it's underrated. It's probably not one of the most well loved, but it is, you know, if people listen to music, the way I think about it is Weezer came out with an album called Pinkerton. When it first came out, people hated it. But now it's like a cult classic.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  You're hitting on, yeah, you're touching on something that I'm a really big fan of, which is, so what Nintendo does and what Weezer did in that case is something that people, there's different ways of saying it, but the audience is always last, like designing things, ignoring the audience and basically ignoring their wishes is one of the only ways to actually make innovative things that are special that people are excited about. I think like, you know, the Henry Ford thing is if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And I think the extension of that is being willing to make things that you are excited

• 20:28Speaker 01

  about and want to come out of you versus making things that are, you know, people will like. And I think like Radiohead, in a music example, their, one of the biggest albums of all time, one of the most famous albums of all time, OK Computer, was Radiohead's like, It was crazy. Everyone loved them. They were the biggest band in the world. It was like the best reviewed rock album. It's always in the top 100 best albums of all time. And then, instead of doing what you would expect, which would have been making a follow-up album that was also an amazing rock album, Radiohead just were like, "We don't do that anymore." And their next album was Kid A, which barely had guitars, barely had drums,

• 21:09Speaker 01

  barely had vocals, barely had any normal verse-chorus structure. A lot of people were super pissed when they did this. And now it's seen as like, you know, a cult classic, and Kid A is also now in those lists of best albums of all time. But Radiohead, Nintendo, Valve, they keep doing that over and over again. They keep subverting expectations. Like Breath of the Wild, which was the big new Zelda kind of format, when that came out, people were like, "There's no dungeons? Like, we had this big open world game and now there's no dungeons?" And dungeons were always the core of a Zelda game. And Nintendo was like, "Yeah, we're just trying to, we're just, we want to do something else."

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And I think, thinking about building businesses, thinking about making art, thinking about making things and producing things, the best companies, the best bands, which have the most longevity, are absolutely not the ones who care about their customers and obsess about their custo— obviously care about the customer service, but they don't care and obsess about— they try to insulate themselves from what the customers want and are asking for, so that they don't end up just making something that they want, or doing the even more stupid thing, which you saw with maybe the ending of Game of Thrones, where the showrunners were reading all the Reddit posts about what's going to happen,

• 22:37Speaker 01

  and they were like, "We're just gonna do the opposite." So, without thinking about something better, or without thinking about something special, they just did the opposite, which also nobody liked. So I think that's a really— creating something, and Hideo Kojima, the game designer, also says this, "He doesn't want his video games to be loved immediately. He wants them to grow on people." And I'm a big fan of creating things that people— Don't immediately love and grow on them because usually my favorite albums, favorite movies, I didn't maybe love them or even understand them the first time. I mean, Elden Ring is one of my favorite games of all time. I hated the first 10 hours.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I thought it was a stupid crappy video game. So yeah, I'm, I'm really the cult classic thing. It's a huge thing. It always starts out with something that's just a little bit too far ahead of its time. And then everyone else catches up like the iPhone with no buttons.

• 23:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Yeah. I will say for, for people listening, like one of the takeaways I have is, you know, if you're building anything, you're building a product, you're building art, you're building a mobile app, you're building software, you're building a Mac app. If you dare to be different, in this case, like a Wind Waker, Pinkerton, a Kid A, especially visually, and you post it to social, you're more likely to be scroll stopping if it's just a completely different

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:05Greg Isenberg?

  visual language. I think one of the reasons why, you know, even you had success on your IRL event series. What was it called?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  All the way, alreadythere.com. Yeah, it's completely hurts people. When people look at it, they're either like disgusted, or they're either disgusted and intrigued, or disgusted and not intrigued.

• 24:31Greg Isenberg?

  Like, I almost didn't, I know you, like, you're one of my good friends, and you sent me this link. And I almost didn't want to click, show me over here because I was like scared, you know? But that was kind of like a part of the brand, I felt like, right? It's, you're supposed to feel a little bit scared.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  I wanted to make something, I mean, I have companies that are very easy to digest, like facilitator.com, and I wanted to make something that was.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Harder to digest, but really just like, I don't want this to sound too woo woo, but like coming from my soul, I just made, I just sat down and I was just making it in the middle of the night. I was just writing the stuff and I was just like, this is the vibe I want to go for. And I knew it, my, my sense was that it was going to turn a lot of people off. But the goal for that was to be also a thing that sort of grows on people and, and maybe, you know, the second version of it, people are talking about it more and the third version, people are talking about it even more. But yeah,

• 25:35Greg Isenberg?

  I want to go to the next category, but before we move on, how much did you pay for alreadythere.com?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Alreadythere.com, it wasn't that expensive. I think I, I think I paid $12,500 maybe, but I did it, I did it on a whim. I was just like sitting there, like sitting, journaling. And then I was like, Laura, alreadythere.com, that's something, that's something, isn't it? And I always ask her first and she was like, oh, that's on, yeah, already there, that's something. I gotta get it. And I just like immediately started negotiating and bidding using GoDaddy or whatever. And yeah, they asked for like 30 something K first, but I got it down to like 12 something. But the funny thing is

• 26:21Greg Isenberg?

  That's nothing, dude. That's like the price of a latte.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  The funny thing is I'm using alreadythere.com for this one off funnel.

• 26:32Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, man. You're so relatable, you know, $12,500.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  I'm using the money generated by my businesses. I'm not just like pulling $12,500 out of my pocket and paying for it. It's like, it's part of the, the holding company machine, the reservoirs.

• 26:53Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I think the way to think about it is, you know, will you make an additional $12,500 from having a great domain and great brand?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 27:06Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think so, too.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I think it gives you, it makes, for anyone who knows how expensive domain names are, like with facilitator.com, I know that just by somebody seeing that they're on that website, facilitator.com, they kind of know that must have been expensive. And that already does some of the trust building for us without them even having to know us.

• 27:29Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, cool. By the way, for 2026, I want to buy some baller dot coms. My thesis is that dot coms are just going, you know, are, I mean, this isn't, what I'm going to say isn't rocket science, but dot coms are only going to get more and more value because they, you know, it's waterfront property of the internet, right? Like, dot com is the best. And I think that when you're trying to get people to scroll stop and you're trying to get people to trust your brand, a dot com just is a little more of, it's a little more

• 28:14Greg Isenberg?

  trust, it's a little more, it's a, you just, yeah, people trust it more. So I think, you know, when you look at especially, I would say, you know, $2,000, $2,500 to $15,000, that range, if you can get like a one or two word domain that rips, worth it.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also think there's another side of it, and that when I buy an expensive domain name, I mentally commit myself to the project. So when I bought alreadythere.com, I was like, okay, I have to do this now. Even though I kind of was, it was going to be easy for me to not take on that project because it's not as big as the other things I'm doing. But just by buying that domain name, I was like, you know what? Fuck it, I'm going all in. This is me mentally committing to making this happen. So yeah, there's, there's that element as well of your own confidence and your own, like, energy being put into something.

• 29:10Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, most, a lot of people don't know this, but you can lease to buy domains.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 29:17Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  You can lease a domain name?

• 29:20Greg Isenberg?

  So like, I'm on this website and I've never been on it, adam.com, no affiliation, but like, you can pay in installments, right?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:29Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it's a new thing. Even GoDaddy, I think on some of them have it.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 29:35Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  I almost lost already there.com because I bought it from some dude and then like the transfer kind of broke and there was like, there was like two months where I had no access to it and I was like, oh, come on. That was, uh, yeah, I have a lot of, I still have a lot of unused domain names, a lot, dot coms.

• 29:55Greg Isenberg?

  Well, um, let's move on to the next category.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  All right. What is the next best productivity product of 2025? I think that's a good one.

• 30:05Greg Isenberg?

  You want to start?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  I'll start because I have a boring and obvious one, but.

• 30:09Greg Isenberg?

  Are you gonna say ChatGPT?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  I actually am.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  It is, ChatGPT is my most used productivity product of all of 2025 by, I wanted to do some, I wanted to choose something more niche and that would prove that I'm like really more into the AI topic. But the true answer to the question is ChatGPT.

• 30:34Greg Isenberg?

  And do you use ChatGPT? Like, do you have like GPT set up or are you kind of just brute forcing it?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I am like boomer level. I just use ChatGPT raw. I mean, I downloaded their browser. I'm testing out all the agent stuff, et cetera, et cetera. But most of the time I'm just going, even though I have the desktop app, I'm going to ChatGPT, straight to the website, typing in my query, mostly on my phone. Um, and I just.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  It is just the most useful tool ever. It's amazing, even just in its replacement of Google's simplest format. Even just like the the voice mode, sometimes when my daughter has a question for me that I'm kind of not able to answer and that we can talk to it back and forth and it has this natural sort of sounding voice. I think ChatGPT is just excellent and we've probably all become very accustomed to it. I'm using the other ones. I'm using Gemini, I'm using Claude and I just keep coming back to ChatGPT.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Maybe just because I'm used to it, but I've heard Gemini 3 is better, but I'm really in the whole year, if you just look at the pure amount of hours that I've put into ChatGPT, that is the that is my most used productivity product of the year.

• 32:01Greg Isenberg?

  Have you looked at ChatGPT Atlas, their new browser?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I've used it and it's it's cool, but it's slow. Like a use case, I think these companies need to be better, by the way, at showing use cases because the use case that I needed when I showed it to people, they were like, holy shit, now I get it. I needed to find gluten free, a restaurant that serves gluten free stuff on their menu that was available for a specific date, for a specific time, for a specific amount of people in Berlin. And even though it took long, it took like 15 minutes, I was able to just walk off and do something else while the agent went around and clicked shit. And that was a huge aha moment for me.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Or like also just for other people who I was trying to show it to, that's an amazing functionality. It's really cool. I think it's cool. Also, by the way, the setup, the animation, they created this like weird visual when you're setting it up on the Mac before you install it, like the installation screen. I don't know, no one's talked about that on X, but when you move around the little installation box before you install it, it like warps your screen with like this kind of rainbow effect and I've never seen that while installing a product. That was really cool.

• 33:19Greg Isenberg?

  I didn't see that. I'm gonna, I feel like no one's talking about that.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  You have to write installing chat or Atlas.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  It's like light coming through a glass rainbow effect.

• 33:34Greg Isenberg?

  There's no way that this is how to download. Maybe it's in here.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw nobody talking about it at all.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  So it's, it's the next step, I guess.

• 33:48Greg Isenberg?

  No, it's here, isn't it?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, no, just.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Maybe it's only on certain, I think it was this, I think it was the screen where you like drag the little that thing into the Mac folder.

• 34:05Greg Isenberg?

  You sure you weren't on drugs?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  I promise you, I wasn't on drugs. It was like a really beautiful animation that was very confusing because I've never seen one of those. And it was outside of the app product.

• 34:21Greg Isenberg?

  By the way, is this guy's macOS? Is this like the updated macOS?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  That looks like the updated version, yeah?

• 34:31Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, mine doesn't look like this. I got an update.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  You got an update, man. I'm just updating Atlas to see if I can, maybe in the settings or something. Someone will know, someone who is listening to this will know.

• 34:43Greg Isenberg?

  Anyway, check it out, people. Atlas. Although I will say that ChatGPT has not posted about Atlas in like 35 days. Which leads me to believe like they're creating a B2 or I don't know what's happening. They're probably not happy with the product, so.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  It was very slow and it kept getting stuck on the privacy pages, like the accept the privacy terms pages, which are full of them in Europe. It kept getting stuck on those.

• 35:12Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. Europe, full of privacy pages and not full of air conditioning.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Did you see that the cookies banner thing is going away in Europe?

• 35:22Greg Isenberg?

  No, I didn't see that.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  It's going away. So you guys, I know you have like, oh, there it is. There was the effect. Go back. There, right now on his screen, you can see it. Just let it play. Look, look outside of the box. These like beautiful light effects that are coming off the little box.

• 35:38Greg Isenberg?

  I don't see it, bro.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  All right, just go back, go back. Yeah, stop here. Yeah. Now just look, look at his tabs. You'll see the little lights going over the tabs.

• 35:49Greg Isenberg?

  Tabs like up here?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, just look up there and you'll see an animation that's gonna like do something.

• 35:54Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, wow.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, see?

• 35:56Greg Isenberg?

  What?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I told you I wasn't imagining it. I've never seen something like that on a product on a, on a Mac.

• 36:02Greg Isenberg?

  That's cool.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when you drag it around, they moved with the thing and it was really, those types of small little

• 36:11Speaker 01

  touches really.

• 36:12Greg Isenberg?

  Details.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved it. Anyway, ChatGPT is my favorite fucking productivity product of 2025. Couldn't be more boring. People listening to your podcast, which is all like hardcore AI people who know about everything. And I'm like, guys, have you heard about this thing? So yeah, um, I'm sure that the ChatGPT team will all be watching this and being like, thank you so much for this prestigious, prestigious more than the Nobel Prize award.

• 36:39Greg Isenberg?

  I'm gonna give a, a, uh, my favorite product of the year, which has been actually my favorite product for the last few years, but I continue to love it. I'm gonna give a non-AI answer.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 36:51Greg Isenberg?

  And you know this project, Things To Do List App?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's a German company.

• 36:56Greg Isenberg?

  Is it?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:58Greg Isenberg?

  Culture Code, I think. Culture Code?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're German. You've chosen a European product.

• 37:03Greg Isenberg?

  That's crazy. I will say, I would love to disrupt this company.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Honestly, I don't think that, I don't know if it would be possible because there are already a million identical competitors and there's just something about this product that just feels so robust and clean or something.

• 37:25Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it feels so clean. It feels like I'm taking a shower. So it's a to-do list app that really is clean. That's all it is.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Spotless.

• 37:34Greg Isenberg?

  Spotless. That's, that's what the product is. It's a one-time fee. So it's not a monthly fee, which I love.

• 37:43Greg Isenberg?

  And

• 37:43Speaker 01

  I got it as well here.

• 37:45Greg Isenberg?

  I don't like to do list apps. I find them clunky and then I end up not going into them. And then I'm using my calendar to like to do to do things and it's a bad situation. And things is the only thing that gets me to stick to a to do list.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  That's really cool. It's also probably the first app I ever paid for. Like back in the day when I got my first iPhone or something, they were like the, they were like the company that all the designers were really excited about kind of copying because they were, they were like making these beautiful, really clean, like perfect, pixel perfect designs. And yeah, this was the first product I purchased. And the reason I bought it was to like copy design stuff like animations because my job was a designer. And then I was just like, oh, this is actually a beautiful product. Do you remember around the same time a to do app called Clear came out?

• 38:42Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, my God, that was so awesome. I had that too.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  I was like, it was like to do apps were just going crazy back then.

• 38:51Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, it's still around.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still have it. I don't use it, but I still occasionally open it just to look at it.

• 38:57Greg Isenberg?

  So this is a great example of there, you know, there's, it's such a competitive space. You, people thought that the, the category was done, but from a visual perspective, like we talked about with Wind Waker, this just hits.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:13Greg Isenberg?

  It's different, right? So you might not like it. You might be like, oh my God, I can never see myself using a to do list app like this. But for a lot of people, they're like, wow, this is so interesting, so cool. I'm going to give this a shot.

• 39:28Greg Isenberg?

  What happened with these guys? Did they get acquired?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  No idea. I have no clue.

• 39:35Greg Isenberg?

  You gotta think they got acquired. Let's see.

• 39:38Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it was acquired by Impending, the company behind Heads Up in 2024.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I don't know who any of, I don't know who Heads Up are, or Impending. Do you remember the, the, the app Readable for iOS?

• 39:52Greg Isenberg?

  Yep.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That was another German team. They got acquired by Dropbox.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Man, it was, it was crazy.

• 40:00Greg Isenberg?

  Tell me more, tell me more about Germany.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Uh, do you know the product Endle?

• 40:05Greg Isenberg?

  Endle? Like the music app?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  It's actually one of the most beautiful iOS apps. It's really, really beautiful. Um, also one that I pay for. They're based in Berlin, so I'm, I'm very happy about that. So I, they, they also have really good, uh, they have really great marketing, like their upsell tactics are like 10 out of 10. Um, right now, when you open the app, it's like, if you live in the northern heavens hemisphere, chances are you felt the seasonal blues. And then you continue, oh, man, I love it. Their, their visual style is also, they've managed to like not fall into all the trends of different visual styles. And yeah, I love the app. It's great. I'm not an investor or I, I just like the product.

• 40:55Greg Isenberg?

  Very cool. Yeah, I need to check this out. I, there's like a theme here, right? This is also different visually.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  It's very, very different. And again, these are things that, these are things that if you would just look at it on paper, you, people will be like, yeah, but can't you just play those sounds on YouTube? It's like, yeah, you could just play those sounds on YouTube, but they've created, they've packaged this up in a way that just feels convenient, feels delightful. And it just, I just love it. It just feels great. They also have like loads of, you know, every so often, the last time they got me to do a yearly, um, thing was, I told you, I think they did, they had this Mifki, AKA a free gift, which is one of my favorite, favorite things ever. Actually, I have to remember to come up with a good Mifki for Black Friday next week, but they had a really good Mifki, which was just a bag.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And because I was like, I like how that bag looks and I can only get it during this sale. I just bought myself another year, annual renewal, even though I hadn't used it in about three months. I was like, I need the bag, so we gotta get it.

• 41:59Greg Isenberg?

  Gotta get it.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Endal is cool. All right. What's the next category?

• 42:04Greg Isenberg?

  Uh, do you want to do best product under a hundred or most used product of the year?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Should we do most used product of the year? So basically best, our favorite product of the year, essentially?

• 42:17Greg Isenberg?

  Well, then what's the difference between favorite product of the year and most used product of the year?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Do we have favorite product of the year? Oh, yeah. I think we should just combine them into our favorite product of the year, which is likely to be the thing that we got the most use out of or most love. I don't know, something.

• 42:34Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  What do you think?

• 42:34Greg Isenberg?

  You got something?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  I do. My most used product of the year and my favorite product of the year, which also happens to be the best product under a hundred dollars, is this notebook, which is called a traveler's notebook from a company called Traveler's Company, which is also like, yeah, it's, a lot of people will know this. The big thing about this product is that if you've ever been one of these people who keeps buying notebooks, but then you kind of write a few pages of it and then you're like, I don't know if I should open this other one. And then you start another notebook and then you just pile up loads of notebooks because you don't want to use them and you don't know what to use them for.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  The traveler's notebook is basically a system where you can buy the leather outside part of it and then you can keep refilling the internals of it with different little booklets of paper, which are all really nice because it's the company, what is the company's name again? Not, not Midori, whatever, one of those really famous Japanese companies.

• 43:38Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, Midori.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Is it Midori?

• 43:40Greg Isenberg?

  Midori's Traveler's Notebooks.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, Midori's Traveler's Notebook. So they sell the inlays, all the inlays for the paper, and you basically just keep the same thing. And when you're done with one of those inlays, you just add it to one of these little folders. This is my 2025 one. And you can see them like building up in here. And so for me, who's been one of these notebook hoarders and I keep buying notebooks and I'm like, you know, I just, I still keep buying notebooks, Field Notes, I've got a subscription to them, all of that kind of stuff. But now I'm like, I've got one notebook, one source of truth. Every time I finish one of the little notebooks inside it, I put it into a folder and I replace it with a new one. And the cool thing is you can also put multiple notebooks inside.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  So my front notebook is my like actual work notebook. And my back notebook is my art notebook, which is just where I do like paintings and drawings and like non-practical stuff. You can also put like calendars in there, to-do lists in there, all of that stuff. So if you're someone, if you're someone, by the way, we should definitely do like affiliate links or something because we're talking about all this stuff and we never, just to be clear for people listening, this is not an actual sponsorship or something. These are just things we like. And so for this, I bought this one in Japan, but you can buy it online in lots of different stationery shops. It's also what I've realized while looking into it, it's more of like a, this, I hope

• 45:11Speaker 01

  this is not controversial to say, these products are actually marketed more to women. And so when you look on YouTube, it's like almost only females talking about this product and talking about scrapbooks. And so I also thought, if I ever wanted to start like another content company, I'd be like one of like four guys on the planet talking about this product in just a different way. So if any of you are out there who are guys who love the Traveler's Notebook as well, fist bump to you over there. Because yeah, I, it is, I think it's an amazing product. You don't have to use it for scrapbooking. It can be used for just your daily, daily work.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And it comes with like loads of cool customizations and stuff. So yeah, my favorite product. I got it in March. I've been using it every single day since then. It's the Traveler's Notebook.

• 46:05Greg Isenberg?

  So I'm not a guy who writes down anything. Like the last

• 46:11Speaker 01

  The end.

• 46:12Greg Isenberg?

  Like period, like.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you write it into your notes app or something or?

• 46:15Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, you know, since school, I've been like, all right, I'm not writing down anything. It's like the last time I did calculus was the last time I wrote something down. You know what I mean? And what is your advice to someone like me? Like, should I be writing things down? Or if I have a system that works for me, just continue going?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  First of all, everyone should just do whatever they want. I think there's no right way. I would say if you're thinking about writing stuff down as a way to remember things, that's not the ideal way to think about it. I'm not thinking about this, even though I am storing them. And even though I have gone back to them for like ideas and stuff, I'm mostly writing to get things out of my head. And so I'm not, for me, writing stuff down. If I really want to remember it, I'll probably also put it in the Notes app or something. So this is for me, sort of like a stream of consciousness thing. When I'm in a meeting or when I'm in a session, or when I'm just having like a stream of consciousness of ideas, I'm just writing stuff down.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  It's more like a write now, scratchbook or something. And so it's basically, I'm using it as short-term memory in the moment. So like while we were talking right now, I wrote this while you were talking. The audience is always last because I wanted to remember to say that when you were finished talking without interrupting you. And so I'm using it as like a short-term memory and this little place to scribble ideas while I'm talking to people on the fly. I always have it with me.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  So, and the other thing is there's, there are kind of studies around and there's a lot of things around creativity. I don't know if you've ever heard of morning pages? It's a really powerful exercise. We do it at some of our events. We do this exercise at our events. And even when people know about it, it's always like unbelievably powerful. The exercise, anyone who's listening to your podcast right now will know it's from

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Julie Cameron or Julia Cameron. I hope I'm, one of those names is correct. And she wrote a book called The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron. And the idea of this exercise is you sit down in front of your notebook or in front of just like in, you know, paper and you fill three pages and you're not journaling. That's the important part. It is not journaling. It's stream of consciousness writing. So you're just writing essentially anything that's coming into your mind. And this is a really amazing way to dump what's kind of spinning around in your subconsciousness and kind of eating up your brain power onto a page.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  And often just writing is a really great exercise to solve problems that you don't even, that somehow are locked inside your head and spinning around. And so for me, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna show you what's written in them because you'll think I'm insane, but I use this as well for morning pages, not all the time, but when I'm feeling like my brain needs to be defragmented, when I need to just get some blah out onto the page. And so that's, if you don't want to write stuff down, I think an exercise that can be fun to try if you haven't written so much before is something like morning pages.

• 49:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, this is cool. I'm gonna try this out, I'll let you know how it goes. I never heard about this.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  It's really cool.

• 49:41Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. My, my product, um, let me get the name. So I heard about this, this product, um, just walking around in Tokyo. You, you actually gave me this idea, uh, to, to give a Japanese sort of product recommendation. It is called Yu Miko Ihashi Porcelain. So it's a dinnerware line, uh, that is absolutely stunning.

• 50:24Greg Isenberg?

  And I love their mugs, I love their tea sets, it's so clean, and it's my favorite product of the year because it, uh, the website's not loading, that's how like, how much they don't care about.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I love companies that don't care about this stuff because they're just like, we want to make our products really good.

• 50:41Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And everything else just gets ignored.

• 50:44Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, here it is. Look at this.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Looks very nice. Oh, it looks beautiful.

• 50:48Greg Isenberg?

  It's so calming. It is so calming. Every time I pour myself a cup of coffee, or some tea, or I have a little pastry or something like that. The other thing I like is, I live in America, as you know. And in America, bigger is better. It's all about, right? And what's cool about Japan is, you know, you see people in Japan having pastries every day and having sweets every day. But they're not having like huge portions of it.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  They're tiny portions, yeah.

• 51:19Greg Isenberg?

  They're super tiny. It's like literally a couple bites. So it's also a reminder to have just, you know, not to overindulge, but to indulge.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I think this, I'm really glad you chose this because I think a lot of people, one of my, I guess, values or philosophies in life is to optimize for your day to day and not for like, so you buying this, you get to see this product and use this product every day. And so on a random Tuesday, this thing is making your life better. And I think a lot of people are a bit confused sometimes when they come to my apartment and they see something like I bought a new Hi-Fi system. And they ask me how much it is and I tell them. And they know I could have also bought something else more practical or like I could have had a better, I could have a better car or something else. I could be investing in getting a house, whatever it is.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  But I'm like, I am looking at this thing every single day. Every day I wake up, I use this thing. And that is more incrementally making my life better than if I were to have spent the same amount to get a better car, which I'm, which is down in the garage and I'm using it every so often. And so something like this I love because I don't know how expensive it is. I would imagine it's more than like an Ikea plate, but you probably care about it and think about it when you use it, which improves just your basic every Tuesday. I don't know if you know what I'm trying to say, but I like investing in things that make just.

• 52:54Greg Isenberg?

  Right now, you're speaking to my core. This is exactly like why I chose this as my favorite product. It's because every day I see it. I also love that it's like. There's no USD prices or euros, right? It's like, this is what it is in yen.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's super cool. I love things like that.

• 53:11Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, look how nice it is.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. That's what I also, this notebook is just feels beautiful. The paper in it is beautiful.

• 53:18Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  I like to hold it in my hand. I recently oiled it, like I oiled my notebook.

• 53:24Greg Isenberg?

  Whoa, now you're taking it too far, my friend.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I oiled my notebook, baby. By the way, when I use this voice effect, does it? Do you hear me speaking weird now?

• 53:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I didn't know I could bring this into your podcast. Amazing. Anyway, wait, I oiled it.

• 53:42Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. How do you do that?

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I have the Rodecaster down here, which is also a great product. And you can kind of build, build voice effects into it. Rodecaster.

• 53:55Greg Isenberg?

  Are we, are we done?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Can I give like a, because I mentioned the, the Hi-Fi system? Can I give like a?

• 54:04Greg Isenberg?

  Your best product under 100 is?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  I think that's the traveler's notebook.

• 54:09Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 54:11Greg Isenberg?

  I'll give my best product for 100 and then we'll go to.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, so wait, I did my best product is traveler's notebook, but it's also best product under 100. So I'm just going to use my two on that one on traveler's notebook.

• 54:24Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. My best product under 100 is, if you're not on YouTube Premium, I don't know what you're doing.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, you gotta have YouTube Premium or else you're just gonna see nonstop ads of me.

• 54:39Greg Isenberg?

  It's really good. I also started in 2025 to use YouTube Music. So with your YouTube Premium, it comes with YouTube Music. And YouTube Music, like you can see some of the stuff I'm listening to here, like.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  It's great because you have these long compilations. A tip for YouTube Music, if you want something like this. So you can search for people doing live sessions. Like if you search "live, Japan, vinyl, jazz", you can watch like a three-hour recording of someone and then go to videos instead of, oh yeah, videos, and then go to like the third one.

• 55:20Greg Isenberg?

  Okay.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  For example. And you can, what's really nice about this is it's not AI. It's just a dude playing music for like three hours. And I really like that. These videos are great. I play these in the background.

• 55:34Greg Isenberg?

  So good, man, so good. So I find myself just spending less time on Spotify putting this on. And I use a DIA browser most of the time. And you know, when you minimize on DIA browser, it puts it in like a small corner. So.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Oh, DIA browser, I've never used it. I thought you were saying Idea Browser. Everyone should check out Idea Browser, though, I think.

• 55:59Greg Isenberg?

  If they haven't already, I mean, that's, come on. IdeaBrowser.com, go get your startup ideas. Yeah. But you know, that's one of the beauties is you get like the screen on screen on DIA. So I could be like on X or entering emails and I can still kind of see this in the corner of my screen. And I just really, really like it.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yes, I 100% agree with that. I kind of decided earlier this year that I want to go more all in on music. So I just bought an entire hi-fi system. I went crazy on it. But sometimes I still will open up YouTube to one of these videos and stream it to the hi-fi system. Obviously, it's not the right bitrate for any of you hi-fi people, but still it sounds great. It's something enjoyable to listen to in the background.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  I can definitely recommend if you want to just like have like, I don't know, it's pure, it's purely just for the fun of it and the love of it. But I got a vinyl player, I got the hi-fi system. And it is a fun thing to do. It's like a kind of cliche thing to do, but whenever I'm traveling now, I'm like buying a shit ton of vinyl. It's like something to do in a city that gives me a target to go somewhere. I'm like, I'm going to that vinyl store and then on the way I'll go and get a coffee. And then on the way. I meet people, whatever, but I'm definitely, the more AI stuff that's happening on YouTube or Spotify and all these products, the less I'm interested and the more I want to just have

• 57:32Speaker 01

  humans curating stuff for me.

• 57:34Greg Isenberg?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. I'm with you.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Maybe that's it. Did we just give out all our Nobel Prizes?

• 57:42Greg Isenberg?

  I would say so. I think, uh, let's go back to the doc. Fave product of the year. We gave it.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:51Greg Isenberg?

  Best productivity product, we gave it.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 57:55Greg Isenberg?

  Best product of a hundred, we gave it. Most hype product of 2026. We went crazy. You talked about oiling some stuff. I think, I think we covered it.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Oiling the book.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  I'm wearing nothing underneath this, like from, from here down, if you're watching on YouTube, nothing, just oil.

• 58:15Greg Isenberg?

  What are you actually wearing?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Actually, you want to actually see it? It's pretty funny because it's just.

• 58:20Greg Isenberg?

  Should we do a reveal?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I just, I was in a, I was in a fucking like holotropic breathwork session five minutes before this podcast. And I was like in like a meditative state and then I'm like, all right, I gotta go put on the top half of a tuxedo and do tech awards.

• 58:43Greg Isenberg?

  So good.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  It's great. What are you wearing underneath?

• 58:47Greg Isenberg?

  I thought you'd never ask.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Show me.

• 58:49Greg Isenberg?

  The truth is, you came on to the, onto the pod and I saw you wearing a suit and I said, oh my God, that's such a good idea. Give me one second. And then like literally one second later, I reappeared. So I'll show you what I'm wearing and actually I'll show what I'm wearing and then it ties into a bonus product under a hundred dollars that I recommend. Two, actually two bonus products. I'm wearing shorts.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  You have to go back a little further. Show us that sweet little butt.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Are they Vori shorts?

• 59:30Greg Isenberg?

  These are Lululemon shorts.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Oh, man, you gotta go Vori. You gotta, you gotta upgrade to Vori.

• 59:35Greg Isenberg?

  I don't even know. I've never even heard of that.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Are you fucking serious? Dude, Vori is like, Lululemon is like, done. We're, we're all on to Vori now.

• 59:44Greg Isenberg?

  That's why I bring you onto the pod.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  It's like the, it's like the slight step up, uh, higher class Lululemon, you know? V O U R I. Yeah, it's an American, it's a California company. Like, they have the nicest shorts and like, they're, Vori's amazing.

• 1:00:05Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, what do they charge?

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  You're gonna put on something from Vori, you're gonna burn everything from Lululemon. I don't wanna say anything bad about Lululemon, but I can't go back into one of those stores after buying Vori.

• 1:00:15Greg Isenberg?

  I like, I like, first of all, they're not, they're the same price as Lululemon.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Okay, well, then you definitely need to just do Vori. These shorts are great, the, uh, up and to the right, uh, these, uh, down, down one. This, these, the black ones on the right and the left there, the bestsellers, the core shorts. I just bought crap tons of these. They're great. I mean, I don't look as good as this guy when I'm wearing them, but you know.

• 1:00:39Greg Isenberg?

  Yes, you do.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Cause I don't really exercise.

• 1:00:43Greg Isenberg?

  I, I actually love my Lululemon shorts. I think they're great. I, I don't spend a lot of money on clothes and I'll, I'll recommend, you'll think this is crazy, but I'm gonna recommend my Lululemon shorts. I think they're great. I'm also gonna recommend my Fruit of the Loom t-shirts.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Ah, classic. I haven't seen that brand for a while.

• 1:01:06Greg Isenberg?

  So I started buying these, basically, Fruit of the Loom shirts. They're literally so cheap, um, six pack for $19. It's a joke.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Is that made out of like poison or something, or just rats?

• 1:01:21Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, here, look, like, I wear it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  It's like 100% rat skin.

• 1:01:27Greg Isenberg?

  I find the fit to be perfectly good and I don't, I don't, I have it in, I have like a, like literally like 15 white tees and 15 black tees.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  That's the way to do it.

• 1:01:36Greg Isenberg?

  And I don't worry about, you know, staining it with coffee or, or whatever miscellaneous fluids. I don't, I don't, I don't have to worry about it and I could get new shirts every, you know, four, five, six months and uh, to me, it's been a game changer. Um, and uh, highly recommend it.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I think, um, I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. And unfortunately for me, in the last four or five years, I've got a, a taste for more expensive clothes and, and it's, it's very fun. It's a fun process, but it's also, it's addictive. It's bad. So.

• 1:02:16Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Well, you got, you got an, you have expensive taste.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  I, I may, I don't know. I, some things I do.

• 1:02:23Greg Isenberg?

  Look at you, look at you right now.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  I'm wearing this.

• 1:02:26Greg Isenberg?

  You're like an aristocrat.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Did you notice I keep opening the buttons?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  All right, dude. That was great.

• 1:02:34Greg Isenberg?

  Thank you. Thank you for the time. Uh, if you like this, please let us know in the comment section. If you haven't liked this video already, that is a darn crime. I'll include uh, some show notes where you can actually go and check out some of these products. And also where you can find Jonathan Courtney and his podcast, uh, The Unscheduled CEO. Uh, thanks again.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  I want to be extremely disappointed after listening to this.

• 1:03:04Greg Isenberg?

  This was fun. I appreciate you. Bye.