340: Greg Isenberg On Building Consumer Internet Products

Greg Isenberg is the Founder of Late Checkout and a Growth Advisor to TikTok. He previously built and sold a number of technology companies, including acquisitions by Stumbleupon and WeWork. In this conversation, we discuss businesses as vending machines, why momentum matters for social companies, working at WeWork, the no code movement, and various startup ideas that people should go build. =============================== Our second sponsor is Choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Greg Eisenberg is the founder of Late Checkout and a growth advisor to TikTok. He previously built and sold a number of technology companies, including acquisitions by StumbleUpon and WeWork. In this conversation, we discuss businesses as vending machines, why momentum matters for social companies, working at WeWork, the no-code movement, and various startup ideas that people should go build. I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to tell you about our sponsors. The first is BlockFi. BlockFi has three products currently. They allow you to deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan. You can buy and sell crypto on their crypto exchange, or my favorite product as an investor and a user is their interest-bearing account,

• 0:55Anthony Pompliano?

  where you can deposit crypto or a stablecoin and earn up to 8.6% APY. It's an unheard-of interest rate compared to the legacy fiat world. Go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. BlockFi is standing by, ready to help you achieve all your financial goals. Our second sponsor is Choice. They're a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too, but not anymore, thanks to Choice. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it, too.

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right, a self-directed IRA product that allows you to buy Bitcoin, hold your private keys, and use tax-advantaged dollars to do it. Absolute game changer. Head on over to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com/pomp, and let me know what you think. Lastly, I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Greg. I hope you guys enjoy.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got a special treat for us today. I have my friend Greg here. Greg's done things on the internet for a long time. What's up, man?

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Not much. I mean, a lot, but not much. Looking forward to getting into it.

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. For those that don't know you, let's start with, you're from Canada, right? All right. How did, when you get to the US and what was your first foray into the tech world?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I don't really talk about this much, but maybe I'll give the, the real deal story on, on here.

• 3:18Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the best time to do it. This is why you come on, to just share the truth.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll share the truth. So I'm from a city, Montreal, Canada. It's kind of like Paris meets Las Vegas in a lot of ways. And, you know, it has one of the largest internet companies no one's ever heard of. It's called MindGeek. Now, MindGeek actually is a monopoly on all of the adult, adult content. So they own YouPorn, Pornhub, Brazzers, Playboy Digital. It's all owned by one company, one holding company. It's also where a lot of gambling and a lot of the gaming companies are based as well, Montreal. So, you know, I got my start really in the underbelly of the internet.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And that's where I really learned, um, you know, we would do deals like, you know, as a teenager, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, it would be like adult friend finder, you'll pay us five dollars for every lead we generate. And we basically used to buy traffic, me and my friends. And if we can spend four dollars to make five dollars, then we put, you know, we'd go from ten dollars a day to a hundred dollars a day to a thousand dollars a day to, you know, and the numbers kept getting bigger. Um, and I attribute like, pretty much everything I know about human psychology and what, and how do you get people to do things to my early days working in that space.

• 4:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, it's interesting to hear this. I did not know this. Uh, because, um, most of the best product people that I know, and you know, we've got a lot of mutual friends, at some point worked on growth type products. And that's essentially what you were doing, right? You were just arbitraging the cost of traffic for what somebody else would pay you for it. And you figured out how to essentially grow that traffic over time and make money. And like, that in essence is like what every business should be doing, right? It's like figuring out how do you make something for less than you sell it for. Uh, so it makes sense.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it got me thinking about like businesses as vending machines. And, you know, if it costs four dollars to make five, it's like, okay, I want to put more money in there. And I just, you know, I learned a lot from that experience. Also, the difference between, you know, having a, you know, a woman or a man look at, look at you, you know, on the landing page, or if it's red hair or brown hair, and if that's the difference, if you make fifty grand that day, or at least fifty grand that day, you're gonna pay attention. You know, so those, learned a lot.

• 6:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so at what point do you decide to go from working on that to actually building, uh, various technology platforms or companies?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  So after that, I was kind of like, I need to get credibility.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  You know, I want to do, so I basically teamed up with a few friends and got into the agency game. And we designed a lot of stuff that was like, you know, cool, you know, at the time, cool, like techcrunch.com and WordPress VIP's product. And then we took some of that money, we built our own startup. So we built a studio model. This was in, this is like almost 15 years ago.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  And that's when I realized,

• 6:44Speaker 02

  you know, why am I building, why am I spending 100% of my time on client work when I could actually build multiple startups? So I did that. And we created a bunch of startups. Some of them got acquired. Some of them didn't work, but that's kind of what, how I got the startup bug.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  And then after that, you know, I started a company, went to San Francisco. It was called Five Buy. It was like, sort of, the, at the time, there was, YouTube was getting really big, 2012. There was, you know, millions of videos being uploaded every day, but people needed sort of curation on top of it. So we built that platform.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And we sold that to StumbleUpon, which at the time was one of the largest social networking apps. So I joined the management team there. And, and then after that, I sold, I started Islands, which, yeah.

• 7:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the experience like working at StumbleUpon when it was so big and just so powerful, really?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so StumbleUpon was started by Garrett Camp, actually,

• 7:57Speaker 02

  who is the co-founder of Uber. And he had, he had recently left when I had joined. He was still on the board.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And, you know, That experience working with that caliber of a board, you know, Garrett Camp, Sameer Gandhi, who's at Excel, Ram Charan, who was on the board of Google, he literally put like the first dollars into Google. You know, this was me, like I had come from the underbelly really, and I'm in Silicon Valley now, I'm like hanging out with all these guys, they're teaching me so much, and stumbled upon was generating, you know, a billion plus page views for publishers. And I was able, easily able to say like, oh hey, like Buzzfeed, let's generate 100 million page, we can generate 80 million pages to you today, you know, 100 million page views. So there was, that was a really cool experience.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  But I think the big learning I had from it was, if you're a social app and you lose steam, like you can't really come back from it, you know, you don't often see consumer, so I can't think of one example of a consumer social company that became really big, and then kind of went down, and then like became really big again.

• 9:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually can't think of a single one that that's ever happened, right?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I can't, I can't think of one. I think, you know, social, you just kind of have to, it's a growth game, and you have to continue growing, you have to continue to reinvent yourselves,

• 9:27Speaker 02

  day after day, and kind of always be on the prowl, that like someone's gonna eat your lunch.

• 9:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's really momentum, more than anything, like growth is a big piece of it, but the momentum game of how are you going to keep the growth and kind of keep accelerating is a huge piece of it. And so, all right, so you do that, leave, you decide that you're gonna start Islands, that's when we first met, and maybe talk a little bit about like what you were trying to build there and why?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, end of 2015, I'm like, group chat is the new social network, it's going to verticalize, you're gonna have a place for chat with your work friends, that was Slack, chat with your gamer friends, that ended up becoming Discord, and then a bunch of different verticals. I've always been into creating communities in different verticals, was on the board of the largest cannabis media company in the world.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  I, you know, one of the startups that came out of the agency was one of the largest financial education communities in the world. So like always been like, pick a vertical, learn how to grow it, grow it. And then in my, in my experience, sell it and get acquired. I saw this mass, if I was like, I was like, okay, if group chat is the new social network, where do I start?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  And I, you know, was in San Francisco, I raised $2 million on basically here's group chat is the new social network. And I said, give me money and I'll pick a vertical. And we ended up on the vertical of college students because we were like, oh, hey, you know, Facebook started at college and there's no real easy way to like open up an app and like communicate with, you know, like-minded people at college and, and see people around you. And that's what we did. And, um, you know, it, it worked, it worked. So on one hand, it worked. We had between five and 25% penetration on every school we launched at within seven days. The average user would send 50 messages every day.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  The average user would invite 2.1 people. So we had all the metrics. On the other hand, what didn't work was the timing sucked. You know, now people care about social and want to try new things and want to download new apps. But, you know, fast forward to 2018 and it was the lowest amount of venture capital in social since I think it was like 2002, right after the internet bubble. And it just goes to show you that like you can be right and you could raise from the right people and you could hire the right people, hire the right people and you can do all the right things. But if the market isn't in your favor, like that sucks.

• 12:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I think part of this that was really interesting to me is, uh, the way you found the college campus market. You, let's say, did things that maybe other founders wouldn't be willing to do. And so talk a little bit about, uh, your, what was it, six or 12 months, uh, basically living on college campuses and kind of what you were doing.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, my whole thing is, You know, vertical networks, right? And if you really wanna get to know a vertical, you kinda have to be at one with the vertical. You have to really embed yourself. You have to really get to know it. And, you know, I, you know, explained a bit of my past now, like I barely went to college. I went to McGill in Canada, but like I dropped out. Schools in the US are very different than in Canada, or anywhere in the world for that matter. And we hired, you know, an ex, you know, one of the founding team members of Viaciac, which was another popular social network back in the day. But I still needed to be, I needed to be there.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  So I said to myself, I'm gonna spend six to 12 months and literally go every school that we're gonna launch at and speak to people. And I'm like a 28-year-old dude, just like walking around wearing like all black and like, you know, Oxford, Mississippi. And people are like, who the hell is that guy? And cuz that's where we started. We started in the South, you know?

• 13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I get the feeling that they're like, hey, who's the old guy dressed in all black?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I remember like, I was, I was actually in Oxford and I was at, you know, end of the day, sitting at a bar, I was, for whatever reason, wearing a black hat, you know, black James Purse shirt, and then these like black jeans with like black John Barbados Converse shoes. And I'm in this like bar and like I was just on my phone and I look up and I just see like everyone is like, it's like 80, mostly guys wearing like polos, stretch-up socks, like, you know, didn't fit in and like people were looking at me. But like, you know, I think, I think that's what you have to do. Like if you really care about like crafting a business and trying to understand, then you have to go there.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Like, you know, did I wanna be in Oxford, Mississippi, like drinking a Bud Light, you know, surrounded by like 80 dudes named Chad and Brad? Looking at me funny? Like absolutely not, but I wanted to win.

• 14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what ends up happening. And ultimately, what happens?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Ultimately, what happens with the business is I go out there to raise money. I want to raise a lot of money. I get offered a little bit of money. And I was just like, all right, you know, I'm a go big or go home type of guy, like all in. You know, I didn't move to Silicon Valley to to like, not go big on this. And so I just reached out to 15 potential acquirers and got, you know, a few offers, got the best one and we sold to to WeWork to basically power their social networking experience pre-IPO and I joined as a head of product strategy there.

• 15:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So a lot of people don't know this, but what you just said is a very difficult but wise decision for founders, which basically was, and I was privy to some of your thought process at the time. So I can cheat here a little bit, but it takes a certain amount of capital to do the things you need to do in order to take something that was, you know, starting to working to kind of working to now, hey, you got to slam on the gas and you've got to drive that momentum to scale nationally very quickly, right? And that's basically the inflection point you were at, but it takes capital. And so when you don't get that capital, there's kind of a fork in the road. You can either say, hey, I'll take a small amount of capital and I'll kind of do my best. Or you basically say, look, I've got deep conviction in what needs to happen here.

• 16:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And if I can't do that, then it doesn't make sense for me to pursue this. And by choosing the latter, I actually think it's a more responsible thing to do, right? Because because you're locking in early investors getting a return and not putting a new investor's capital at risk with a plan that you're not necessarily convinced will work to some degree.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly, I actually, I was like, that's exactly how I felt. I was like, hey, like, If I raise an extra $3 million, I'm not sure that the market, I had to ask myself, do I think the market is going to be better in 12 months or worse than 12 months or the same? And I was like, it's probably going to be the same, like the venture, the venture environment. And when you're a social app company, you need venture capital to survive, to grow, right? We talked about in the beginning, you need to grow, grow, grow. So I was just like, you know what, if I can get a return from my investors,

• 17:09Speaker 02

  and my team, you know, everyone on my team pretty much bought houses from the outcome of it. You know, that makes, that makes me feel really good. So I think that it's, it's something that, you know, one thing founders should do is really like, understand who's, who should, like from day one, like make, you get, you're starting a company. Who's the, who are the seven companies that would, are going to buy your company? And who are the three people that you need to know at that company? You know, call it the law of 21, how do, you know, how do you get those 21 people and know them? From day one, you start the company so that, you know, for us, like selling the company was just a tech, it was just some texts, right?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  It was like, hey, like we're selling, hey, you know, head of product at XYZ company, we are selling the company, are you, do you want to make an offer? Versus like trying to scramble for like an intro and it's like, you know, they don't know who you are and you don't have that trust. And I see, that's where I see a lot of founders kind of struggle.

• 18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree. You worked at WeWork, WeWork had a incredible rise and then had its infamous stretch, which you were there for. I know you can't say too much, but any kind of thoughts or, or lessons learned or takeaways from the entire WeWork experience?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, you know, I can write a book about it, but I think a lot of people are.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  You know, you, you, you learn the most about yourself, people and, and companies when, when, when you're at your high and when you're at your low. And, you know, I think.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  You know, I remember having a conversation with Garrett, actually. When, you know, he was on the board, Garrett Kemp, and he was on the board of Stumble and he was at Stumble Upon and he was on the board of Uber. And I was like, what do you learn more from Uber or Stumble Upon? And he said. Uh, he said Stumble Upon. He was like, you learn more, you learn more from your downfall than your upfall and you know your upswings. He's like, everything is going right at, at, at Uber. So, um, I got, I got a, a chance to, to learn a lot about, you know, ups and downs from that, from that business. Um, I got a chance to learn a lot from the SoftBank team and what they did. Um, and, uh. But, you know.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  I, I don't want to learn for the rest of my life.

• 19:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so you recently left, uh, and you started Late Checkout Please, uh, which one is a amazing name. So I'll have to talk about where kind of that name came from. Uh, and so let's talk a little bit about what you're planning to do now. And then I want to spend the rest of the podcast talking through just every business and startup idea that you and I have ever had. We're just gonna. Open the, uh, the kitchen sink here and kind of just dump them on people. But where did the idea for Late Checkout Please come from? And then what the hell is up with the name?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll, I'll take a step back. Um.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  In a lot of ways, I'd rather be a VC than an entrepreneur. Because you, you know, you're, you're all in, as an entrepreneur, you're a hundred percent in, basically. Close to a hundred percent of your net worth is tied to the outcome of this business. And. I think it, that's actually a really foolish way to live your life.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  From a, you know, from an economic standpoint, you know, so my belief is that

• 21:01Speaker 02

  owning smaller pieces of a business, but in a lot of businesses is a, is kind of the most

• 21:10Speaker 02

  responsible kind of thing to do. So that's one thing. The second thing is,

• 21:16Speaker 02

  you know, I believe fundamentally that the internet is is have, is undergoing a complete makeover right now from broadcast to niche. And what I mean by that is there's, you know, in the Facebook era, it was all about, and Twitter really era, it was all about broadcast, get things out there. These big social platforms. And now there's these, you know, people find the refuge and Fortnite worlds and Discord chats and iMessage groups and Slack communities and all these like kind of virtual places. And that's, and people are willing to spend money to, to access those zones.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  And, and they also get a lot of meaning for, you know, meaning just being in those places.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  So, you know, the reason I started Late Checo was because I said to myself, I, I want to start a product studio. I want to build as much as possible during this time. You know, because I believe that this is the Renaissance time for, for so many. And I don't want to create, you know, one art piece during the Renaissance, right? I want to create as many different pieces as possible. So what Late Checo does is number one, it's a product studio. Number two, we acquire internet, profitable internet communities. So we'll literally find businesses,

• 22:50Speaker 02

  you know, and acquire them. And, and the third thing we do is we have a few clients. You know, and we have basically an agency business where we help, you know, companies like,

• 23:02Speaker 02

  companies like TikTok, companies like Warner Brothers Music, just figure out what does community really mean?

• 23:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And so when you are doing this, kind of transitioning back and forth between an investor seat, an entrepreneur seat, an acquirer seat, and an advisor seat, you get a really holistic view of consumer social type companies. And so where are the areas right now that are the obvious things that are working? Right? So I know that you're a growth advisor to TikTok. So that's kind of working. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. And then what other areas or companies do you see kind of working? Most people would say, yes, that makes sense. And that's an obvious thing.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, right now, I'm kind of just obsessed with

• 23:54Speaker 02

  just how big platforms have gotten and how horizontal these platforms have gotten and how vulnerable these platforms have gotten. So I'll give you examples.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Zoom, we're on a Zoom meeting right now. It's, you know, being used for 1,000, 10,000 different use cases.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Now, if we sat down and we kind of like jammed on it, I'm sure we can figure out 1,000 businesses where we can look at Zoom and we can target at a vertical and we could put a paywall up and we could do some content distribution that's free. And then we can bring influencers on and we can make a million dollars. And I bet we can launch a few, you know, one of those a month. And if we tried, that's that Zoom. LinkedIn, LinkedIn launched stories yesterday, I think. LinkedIn stories, like, are you kidding me? I think there's a massive, there's like so much opportunity to look at LinkedIn

• 25:02Speaker 02

  and trying to figure out where they're most vulnerable. And there's certain people doing elements of this. Some people are looking at the, you know, looking at it from the corporate hierarchy, you know, organizational behavior kind of thing where they're like,

• 25:20Speaker 02

  you know, putting, you know, you creating LinkedIn for their internal companies and stuff like that. Some people are creating professional Slack communities and trying and putting paywalls on it. Again, a bunch of ways to make a lot of money by just chipping away at LinkedIn because, you know, I don't really want to live in a world where LinkedIn is the end all and be all of professional networking. I think we can do better than that. And then Reddit, you know, Reddit is surging in traffic. It's become a place where it's, you know, it's, you can easily find like really great content and feel like you're a part of a community. And the beauty, what I love about Reddit is you can actually see through these products

• 26:06Speaker 02

  like redditlist.com and redditmetrics.com, which basically give you an insider information, information as to like what subreddits are trending, what's happening. And basically opportunities like inside info, basically opportunities where you can actually go and create and unbundle it, unbundle certain subreddits, create businesses around it. That's where I'm spending most of my time thinking about vulnerabilities.

• 26:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I guess part of this is when you talk about unbundling Reddit, right? Let's walk through kind of an example. So there's a subreddit, it's exploding and it's in some niche industry, right? Or interest, you're not talking about going and rebuilding Reddit's functionality for that industry. What you're talking about is potentially building ancillary or complementary products for that industry, building other types of services for those types of people. But you've identified, hey, there is a group of people that are all coalescing around this one idea and it is growing fast in both size and engagement. And therefore I know that if I build the right thing, I can expose this community to it and I'm likely to build a business that ends up being successful. Right?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I'll give you an example. So, you know, one of the, one of the things we do at Late Checkout is every week, every, you know, all the people on the product and design team think about one subreddit and spend time in one subreddit and they come up with an idea to how to unbundle it. So recently I did this and what I, you know, I was in basically a ride sharing subreddit and it's growing a lot. I'm in this ride sharing subreddit and I keep seeing that they're referencing this dude named the ride share guy. Like who the hell is this guy? So I go to his website. I do some poking around. It's a blog. He also has a podcast, but it's some guy who basically gives tips and tricks around how to make more money

• 28:04Speaker 02

  as an Uber and Lyft driver. Simple enough. The guy's making seven figures on this blog, okay? And it's literally like, I think it's a WordPress blog. It's like super simple and he's creating good content. But you know, the question there is, you know, is there an opportunity to, you know, extract that value and display it in maybe a more interesting way? You know, and trying to really, you know, understand what are people asking for and why do they, why are they flocking to this website? That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about like, you know, I think what a lot of people, when I say unbundling of Reddit,

• 28:44Speaker 02

  a lot of people think of it as like, okay, I'm gonna go create like a Reddit but for like Uber drivers. And it's like, no, because Uber drivers might not need that and they probably could do that very well on Facebook groups and Reddit. What I'm talking about is, how do you figure out what, what do they need? And what is the tool that you can create? Or the network that you can create to serve them?

• 29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what are some ideas there in terms of in that writing? The ride sharing subreddit, obviously you can take that guy's information, you could put it into a book or other format and kind of resell it. You know, bundle it up, make it look nice, but it almost feels like you can go even further and you can create chat specific type stuff for ride sharing. You can create all of the video live streaming. You could sell any sort of kind of video cameras, hardware that they end up putting inside the cars. You could create an entire brand around like, hey, here's your starter pack, right? And that starter pack gives you, you know, whatever they hang on the back of the seat and a sign and a camera and, you know,

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  all of this type of stuff, like there are 10 to 20 businesses just to serve the people who are doing ride share driving. Right, right, right there. And now you've found the customer. And so I want to extrapolate that out and get to this idea of like, what you're, as you're finding the customers and then building the product for the customer. Right? You and I have talked about this before. We're seeing that not just in unbundling of Reddit, we're seeing that across the world. Right? If you look at Kim Kardashian, Kylie, Kanye West, same thing. They built massive audiences, then figured out what's the product I should build to then go sell to this audience. So maybe talk a little bit about how you think on that kind of reversal, instead of building a product and going to find customers, now finding the customers first and then building the product.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the way I think about it is like, how do you start with the community and then build the software versus starting with the software and then building the community?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And so, for example, with this Uber driver ride sharing example, I actually created, oh, and then the other beauty is it's ridiculously cheap to, to design and create products, either through no code or low code. So one of the things, you know, I did to just test this idea of, you know, we tested a bunch of ideas in this ride sharing component.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  This ride sharing subreddit, but one of the things I did was, it's like, oh, hey, what are they saying? What are they, what are they actually saying in the subreddit? They're saying that they want ways to make more money. And they're saying actually that they want to be surrounded by other, you know, people and ride sharing. So I was like, okay, what if we can create in a half that was basically like a party line, but for Uber drivers? And, you know, I posted it and it went completely viral on, on, on the ride share subreddit. And it's like, okay, maybe there's a business there, right? Maybe, maybe there's a business there. And I think. You know, I actually think that people, you know, we don't have an audience in, in right in that, in that, in ride sharing.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  So we have to go and like lease it and like create those relationships with like the mods, the moderators and all these people. But I actually think that people who have, have audiences right now, the influencers, the micro influencers of the world actually have like an unfair advantage. And if they can actually partner with people like Late Checkout who can actually create products, then there's a huge, that is a huge opportunity there. Cause what like, you know, if I look at you, Pomp, it's like, okay, you have all this credibility and, you know, in the Bitcoin and crypto world. And the question is like, you know, how could you, you know, I mean, it's, it's age old, like endorsing.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  It's Michael Jordan made most of his money from Nike. It's, it's Dr. Dre made most of his money from, from Beats. It's, but there's not enough happening in, in the digital product realm. And my whole point of this thing is that literally, literally, if you go into Reddit and you go into Facebook groups, they're serving it to you on a platter. They're telling you what, what they want.

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'll make it even more tangible, right? So, uh, take Joe Rogan, which many people know who he is and he's got this massive podcast. And when he did the deal with Spotify, everyone was freaking out. They're like, oh my God, Joe Rogan sold out. Like he only made a hundred million dollars. Like he could have easily, uh, done other things to make money, right? And yes, that's true. Some of those things included sell his own advertising rather than go through the agencies and he would have made more. Some of it would have been, uh, introduced subscriptions. So people pay him for whether it's extra episodes or he just brings the whole thing behind a paywall, whatever that was. But I kept going back to this idea of no, the most profitable thing that Joe Rogan could have done

• 33:55Anthony Pompliano?

  is started companies and then kicked all the advertisers out and taken his own companies and pushed them through his distribution and said to people, you know, take, uh, Traeger grills is, is, uh, one of his sponsors. If he went to them and said, hey, this is what we're going to do. I will, I will continue to advertise a grill, but I want to set up a legal entity with you. We're 50 50 partners and we're going to create the Joe Rogan grill. And when we create that grill, I'm going to push it through my distribution and I own 50% of the equity of this product. You own the other 50%, let's go make a bunch of money. He would make more money by doing that than simply just doing the advertising for Traeger grills. Right? Because he owns the equity of a business and then he could just go down the line.

• 34:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Every single product that he has as an advertiser, he could simply just recreate, do the exact same advertising, only it's his brand versus somebody else's. And he'd make a killing. He would make billions of dollars doing this, I think, compared to just tens of millions of dollars in the advertising.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think, you know, creators don't understand the value of their brand equity. I think that's what it comes down to. Um, because it's really hard to value it. Like how, you know, there's not a website you can go and say like, at Pomp, what am I worth? What am I worth for cereal? What am I worth for, you know, different, different, uh, you know, verticals? Um, I think that, you know, Joe Rogan did a bad deal, frankly. Um, I think, um, and I, and I bet he's probably feeling it today. I mean, obviously you got, you, you know, listen, it's, he got, what is it?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  A hundred million dollars. It's, it's great. You know, that's awesome. But I think that he definitely,

• 35:43Speaker 02

  he definitely didn't get as much as I think he deserved.

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And Spotify is the one who, when you look at that deal, it's less about like, is it a good deal, bad deal in my situation? It's just that Spotify got much more value out of it than Joe Rogan did. Right? Cause the deal would be fine if he got paid half a billion dollars or a billion dollars, right? You know, it's just the, the, um, the difference of value transfer there was definitely in Spotify's favor, which is, that's just the way deals happen. Uh, what, what else are you guys thinking about or, um, kind of playing around with, uh, with like checkout? What are some other ideas you have or, or areas that you're interested in?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I have a list of ideas that I always have that I can pull up and we can just talk about them.

• 36:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's do it.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  And we could just pick a random one. Um, I literally have hundreds of ideas, um, in the, in here. Um, and I'm gonna, I'm just gonna literally spin the wheel and just pick one random one that comes up. And then you can tell me what you think, what are your thoughts? And some of these are just like, also like, had a couple of glasses of wine and you write an idea.

• 36:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's hear them.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Okay. Um. Boom.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Well, this came out of, so, uh, the, the subreddit Battle Stations. So, everyone's working from home.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Um, or a lot of people are working from home, I should say, um, especially knowledge workers, um, have, you know, are starting to want to like, have dope setups. Um, one of the big, you know, trending subreddits right now is this Battle Stations where people are taking pictures of their setups and, and posting it. So the question, pump, is there a business? Um, to create that leverages something like Battle Stations?

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this, this is why I love talking to you. So I've been telling people, I'm waiting for somebody to come pitch me. Uh, I call it WFH, or WFHbox.com, just work from home box.com. Go onto a website, pay 500 bucks, three days later, a box shows up and it is a camera, a microphone, headphones, a backdrop, an instruction manual, whatever, and it is like level one of getting started with work from home in terms of all of the equipment you need. Spend $1,200 and you get level two and go all out and spend, you know, $3,000 and you get level three, for example. And something just that simple of arbitraging somebody who knows

• 38:21Anthony Pompliano?

  nothing and doesn't want to spend the time to research, what's the best microphone, what's the best headphones, what's the best camera, what's the best light, you know, all that kind of stuff? With, I already know what the best light, microphone, headphone, you know, whatever is. And how much does it cost? Oh, it cost me $250 to get all of the equipment, put it in a box for 500 bucks. Run some paid ads, get it in front, put it in this, you know, Battle Stations subreddit, like, it's not very hard to find that traffic right now, right? And so, again, it's not going to be a billion dollar business, but could you make, you know, 1, 2, 3 million bucks a year? Absolutely, I think.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the other thing I just wanted to highlight, which is you don't, for a lot of these like unbundling ideas, you don't need venture capital. To get started. I know the VCs won't like hearing that, but like, you know, there's nothing wrong with starting a business and doing, you know, a few million bucks a year and making money and just, and then that's it. And it's a self-contained business. It's a vending machine. You've built a vending machine. You create value and that's, that's it.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. What, what type of business would you build for battle stations?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Um, so battle stations. So I think for, for me,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  I would do a high-end. So I would try to create an invite-only community that's luxury battle, battle station. So basically, I would, I would, you know, people like aspirational brands.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  And especially with battle stations, like it's basically like porn for these people. Like they're, they're going on and they're like salivating, like, I wish, I wish I had that. I wish I had that. Um, I would try to source some of the most expensive, kind of, uh, some of the most expensive, like mahogany, like beautiful sort of desks and like these screens that are like zoom enabled and stuff like that. And I'd bundle it all up. I would do all drop shipping. Um, and I'd create like a feed on top of it that just shows these like beautiful pictures.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  And I try to figure out a way to make it a monthly subscription because I'm just obsessed with monthly subscriptions. So, maybe every month I get some sort of box at my workstation where we partner with different brands. So like, that's it. You know, I'm just, we're just riffing here, but you know, brands want access to that real estate, that battle station, real, but real estate. And maybe that's the real idea, right? Like maybe it's like, how do you, how do you, you know, send like little cactuses or succulents or, um, different part, different partner products and, and stuff like that, stickers and stuff like that.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Something there.

• 41:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. What's another idea?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  All right, spin the wheel. Okay. Okay, so this just came out of an insight. So 15% of people actually get jobs through job boards. 85% are mostly through friends. What's a product to connect you? To your friend? What's a product to connect you? To jobs via your network?

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I think right now, if you said, what's the one job board somebody should create? I would immediately go and create a Substack support job board, which basically would say, there's a bunch of people creating like Substacks and kind of these personal media companies and stuff. And I would basically create a job board where they could post either one-off tasks or actual, you know, part-time or full-time roles. And they could say, hey, I need an editor, for example. Right? And so there's a opportunity for editors to either do it in a freelance capacity or actually get a job working for some of the most successful ones. And you could eventually expand this to all of these different creator-type platforms

• 42:28Anthony Pompliano?

  where people are just being incentivized and given the tools to create those personal media companies. They're gonna need help, right? They literally can't do it by themselves. And so you can just play matchmaker. Again, doesn't have to be massive, but you could easily build a million-dollar business simply by creating an interface where people could post the opportunities and other types of folks who want to support those creators come in and find jobs.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  So Toby said something, Toby from Shopify said something I really like, which is arming the rebels. And it's all about this whole new passion economy. And it's about, you know, arming the rebels and giving them the tools necessary they need to succeed. So I think this idea is, I mean, it's perfect, right? Like, there's this whole new economy that's being created. And people need help. I think it's now, it's like, how do you verticalize it specific for this use case? You know, someone might want an article to be ghostwritten. So how do you allow them to like, you know, create anonymous, anonymous posting, right? I have a Substack with 20,000 to 30,000 subscribers. I'm looking for XYZ. This is like.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  I mean, this is definitely $500,000 plus business like like pretty instantly.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree. What is one business that you think somebody could start in a weekend? Like if I gave you right now $10,000, you only had the weekend to build it. And you think that within 12 months, it could do five plus million dollars.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What's something that you could look at?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  I would think about unbundling Fiverr, which is like a big sleeper. Have you know Fiverr, like the $5 marketplace?

• 44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  They're starting to get really big and and it's cool because it had, there's a habit there. Um, so it's like, you know, it's more than $5 now, but $5, $10, $20 for social media posts or something like that. I would just create a marketplace targeted targeted at something, you know, maybe it's just like,

• 44:38Speaker 02

  uh, we create TikTok videos for you. And, um, and then I would do, and then I just take out a bunch of Facebook ads and I'd, I'd basically go consist. I would, and I would create a bunch of different, I'd basically unbundle Fiverr in like five or 10 verticals. I would, uh, market it specifically to that, those audiences. I'd pick verticals or services that are growing and new. So that's why I use TikTok as an example, like what are things, your Substack is another great example. What are things that you can do and then you and use marketing, direct paid ads on Facebook to drive it? That's an easy one. What about you?

• 45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, I'm really obsessed right now with, uh, figuring out ways to take creators, I would reach out to like 10 creators that have, uh, large audiences. And I would say to them, all right. We can do drop shipping of a specific product. We're gonna put your brand on it. We're gonna treat you like the historically athletes have been treated and we're going to sell these products. But I wouldn't do something like merchandise. Like that's too easy and it's too kind of saturated, I think. Instead, what I would do is I would create really unique

• 45:55Anthony Pompliano?

  products. So a very simple one that that I've seen is Jaco Willink sells a poster that has his like the 10 rules of a warrior kid, I think it's called. And it's literally just like a really nicely done poster that's got these 10 kind of rules of how to live your life for kids. And he signs it, sells it for 250 bucks a pop. And I can't remember if it's just the poster or it comes with a frame as well. But like, how hard is it to create the poster and the design and all this kind of stuff? It's not that hard. Well, why is it sold for 250 bucks? It's because you've got somebody who's got a massive audience and people want to kind of be associated with. And so you could go and replicate that and create an entire poster business with creators. And maybe you don't sell them for

• 46:40Anthony Pompliano?

  250 bucks, but could you sell them for a hundred dollars? And just, you know, replicate it over and over and over again. It costs you nearly nothing. You drop ship it. And you've got, you know, a couple million dollar business pretty easily, I think.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  You got me thinking about a website I saw today called bonsai Marai. Have you seen that one?

• 46:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No, what's that?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  So basically, it's this dude who is like big in the bonsai community. And he charges you 30 bucks a month to to watch him trim bonsai trees. And I looked into the traffic and the guy is, let's just say the guy is, I mean, definitely seven to eight figure revenue from it. So the, so the question I have is, what are other verticals where you can find the guy or the girl? Create a live stream that someone create a subscription around that people would be willing to pay for?

• 47:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I've always thought that there will be a live stream subscription service that will replace daytime TV or the talk shows. And if you think about who that audience is, it's moms, right? It's moms sitting at home. And if you say, hey, it's 10, 20 bucks, and we're basically gonna livestream and talk about gossip, right? I mean, just entertainment news and kind of all that stuff. I think there's a lot of people who would pay. One, you're diving into an industry you know exists. Two, you already know there's big businesses in terms of, you know, the magazines and all that kind of stuff. Three is you know that the people are sitting at home. And then four is they've got disposable income.

• 48:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, you're solving kind of this problem of loneliness, you're solving access to information. And if you could even build it more community than just livestream, and now all of a sudden, they can actually engage with you. It's just you're taking the quote unquote gossip, right? When rather than go to go on a walk with your girlfriend, right? For a mom, like my mom used to go and she wouldn't go on a walk, but she would like go meet up with a friend. And they would sit and they would talk about, you know, oh, did you see this actress did this or this actor did this or whatever. If all of a sudden, they had a community where you could go do that with all the people in the world. And then, of course, as you spend more time on it, you get locked in because you're actually getting a community, you're learning who the members are, you can somehow, you know, hey, do I want to talk to my friends today? Or do I want to like meet new people?

• 49:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You could build a whole little product around it and 10, 20 bucks a month. Where else are they gonna go gossip?

• 49:15Speaker 02

  I think there's probably an opportunity to do like, an HQ trivia type thing with gossip for moms, paid monthly with some sort of community aspect.

• 49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. I mean, look, one of the biggest businesses that I've been really surprised by is the games, right? All of these things like, what do you meme? And you know, you would talk to like the guys who run that business. It's a massive business. And then they've created, you know, six, seven other games off of it and all this kind of stuff. And so like, whether it's a digital product or a physical product, the whole idea of entertainment and games, I think, kind of like went to the wayside and like Zynga and all these guys. People were just like, oh, like that's over. It's still a massive, massive business.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think a hundred percent I agree. And but also like going back to like, you know, sort of like magazine mom sort of insight, which is, you're right, like, think about all those, like, like the view, right? Like, how do you modernize the view? That's the question.

• 50:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I think so. I think there's a big, big business there. And especially if you kind of seed it the right way. I just think people will, will spend time, you know, watching it. In the live stream, how long does the bonsai guy live stream for? Do you know?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  I think, oh, thirty minutes.

• 50:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So you pay thirty dollars a month to watch him cut the tree for thirty minutes a day?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  A week, a week, thirty minutes. I think it's thirty minutes a week, but you also get access to videos like, so think about like a master class, you know, that's what's also happening is the master classification of everything, which is kind of another thread, which is interesting. So you have to like, and that's what people, that's what founders, that's what I encourage people to do is to map all this stuff out. It's like, hey, what, listen, I know nothing about bonsai trees, literally. But like, people know a lot of stuff about, you know, weird, all kinds of whatever they're into. So it's like, okay, how do you look at master classifying it? How do you look at like, you know, unbundling Reddit and that, you know, go to all those places and see where you can fit yourself in?

• 51:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree. What's, what's another idea you have on, on the list?

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Let's see.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Spin of the wheel.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Um, okay, this one's, this one's kind of dumb, but I'll, it's just hilarious. The, uh, people, so my, you know, my brother is a doctor. He, he was working in the Corona ward when it was, it was really bad up here. And, you know, I was like, hey, would you ever go on a, like, are, you know, would you fly? Would you fly and how would you fly today in 2020? And he was just like, yeah, like I'd wear a mask and I'd wear maybe, maybe a face shield. And I would, I would, you know, get rid of my, I would basically, as soon as I leave the plane, I would like basically throw out my clothes. So the product is a flight suit for flying.

• 52:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I literally got on a plane in the last four months, one time. Uh, and there was a guy who had a hazmat suit on and like, wasn't kidding, like had the gloves, the, the mask, the face shield, like he was, I didn't know if he was there to check on people or if he was a passenger, right? And so like, I don't know if it would have to be that extreme, but could you see people basically putting something on over their clothes that at least if it didn't look horrible to get on the plane? Sure, why not?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I think it, I actually liked the idea of it being somewhat extreme because I think that like will go viral and like, you know, I think that's really important. And then like, okay, you know, the question is like, okay, well, how big of a business could that be, you know, well, you know, is that $5 million in revenue, $10 million revenue? Well, you can actually, A, that's significant and B, like what are other products that people are going to need in this new world, like that you can expand into? So you're building a brand. Um, so yeah, maybe you do hand sanitizer, maybe you do masks, maybe you do this, maybe you do that. Um, so I, yeah, I think there might be something there.

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell everyone about the haircut product. Cause I realized that we haven't talked about this and this will, for those that are saying like, oh, these guys are just talking about ideas, but they have no clue what they're talking about. Maybe explain what you did with the haircut thing during the beginning of quarantine.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Sure. So, uh, pretty simple, um, sort of viral idea called you probably need a haircut.com. Built in under 48 hours, no code.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  You know, Google domain, Wix editor, like literally, but you know, nothing, nothing. Okay.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  And, uh, and basically built a marketplace for people who need haircuts. Um, and, uh, and then stylists, actually people of color were stylists who were out of work and who wanted to give haircuts. Um, and we launched it and kind of went to sleep and in the morning we woke up and it was like everywhere on the Today Show, ABC, Fox, NPR. Literally millions of people went to visit this website and still continue to visit this website to book haircuts. Cause they don't feel, either their barber shops are, are salons are closed. Um, or they just don't feel safe and they're just like, you know what? I want my girlfriend to help cut my hair. It's fine.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  And, uh, it's been, it's been cool. There's like, it's, it's still super popular.

• 55:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And the beauty of this is like, you're not joking when you said it took you 48 hours because of the way you built it. Right? Like, like this is, this was not something where people go, how do you get on the Today Show? Well, it's because you lined up a lot of things. And we should caveat it with like, you have done a lot of work and that was the product of decade plus of experience, expertise, all that kind of stuff. But other people could have built the exact same thing. So it's not the building that's the hard part. It's thinking through what is the product that people will find valuable and how do I actually go ahead and launch it?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think, I think it's that some of the nuances, like some of the things I was thinking about. I think I think naming is underrated, like picking a really a name that people will remember is really important. So like you probably need a haircut, brings a smile to people's faces. So that was really important. We did a video, like when you go to the website, we got like a celebrity to do the video for us. And or, you know, he had a show on the Food Network. So he has a community, so he brought his initial community to like use the product. Again, little thing. And then we kind of just worded the product in like plain English, you know, just like super simple. You go on, you get it.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  And that was it.

• 56:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. What's one thing that you've tried that didn't work?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Well, there's thousands of things I've tried and didn't work.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  You know, I think I I helped start something called Wall Street Survivor, which was a

• 56:50Speaker 02

  it is the most popular financial, well, it's the most popular stock market game on the internet to this day, actually.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  But and in and then I I added this component to it, which is like kind of like a Code Academy for investing. So basically, you would like get fake cash and you'd go on this like sort of missions and you'd learn about the stock market. This is like post 2008, when like people's net worth dropped 50% and they're like, why? So we're just like, hey, financial literacy needs to be a thing.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  You know, the problem is we raised venture for it. And what we didn't realize is that like we we we became the biggest, like 85% of the top US business schools use it as a part of a finance curriculum. They pay for the product. The it is still the largest stock market game, but like the the market is a cap so. So my mistake there was basically raising, you know, raising too much money.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  And and picking, it's okay if the market is capped. But it's not okay, it's okay if you're self funded, but it's not okay if you you have other people's money.

• 58:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Before we wrap up, what is kind of the benefit or the inflection point caused by no code? So first of all, what is no code for those that don't know? And then kind of how has that changed this idea of ideating and quickly launching products?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  So, you know, the no code, low code movement has really taken off over the last few years. And it's basically the set of services that allow anyone to create a website or app with no technical skills. And it's products like Webflow, you know, it's products like Squarespace, etc. And what it allows anyone in the world to do is have an idea, being not technical,

• 58:52Speaker 02

  buy a domain, literally, that's it, eight, 10 bucks a year, get some storage for a few bucks a month. And, you know, for the price of two or three lunches, you basically have a startup.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  And what it allows, the reason it's changed the game is it allows you to test, you can test, like, I would encourage someone listening to literally test one idea a day. Like, you can literally, if you have the ideas, and we've talked a lot about a lot of opportunities between LinkedIn, between Zoom, between, you know, Reddit, all these big platforms, like, if you can come up with the night, you can literally launch an idea a day. And you don't have to raise venture capital, you don't have to go to Stanford Computer Science and learn stuff.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  And I think a good place actually to learn about, the only, you know, there are some tutorials on no code, you can go to like Maker Pad to learn about it, which is like an educational resource around it. But yeah, it's completely democratized the playing field.

• 1:00:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Love it. I ask the same two questions to everyone as we end, first being, what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  The Road Ahead by Bill Gates.

• 1:00:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  I got it when I was when my first day in the seventh grade or second day in the seventh grade in the library of the school I was at. Um, I just randomly came across it. I opened the book and I just skimmed through the pages and and I ended up staying there like the whole day and I read, basically read the book. Um, and basically, I'm not a huge Bill Gates fan or whatever, Microsoft fan or whatever, but he basically outlined the future. He basically said, he, he predicted cryptocurrency, he protected, I predicted like video conferencing, predicted basically how the internet would work with social networking. And this was in nineteen ninety-four or something.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  So he, he really knew where the world was going. And I closed the book and I was like, damn, you know, you know, I, I, I'm gonna go and this is, I want to use technology like this is, you gotta be crazy not to be building on top of technology. It's completely, you know, as a Canadian, I always felt like an outsider looking in, you know, because Canada, ninety percent of people live on within forty-five miles of the US border. We're like kind of outsiders looking in at like, you know, the exciting, you know, or on the like, for example, Montreal's on the New York border, like New York City is right there. Um, but I was just like, wow, now I can talk, you know, I can talk to anyone. So that was the most influential book.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Love it. Um, more fun question. Aliens believer or non-believer?

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Definitely believer. Definitely believer.

• 1:01:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I've met humans who are, who are kind of alien-y and I'm kind of like, are you an NPC? Like, are you not, you know, like, are you a real person? Um, I think

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  in all seriousness, I mean, it's like, it's one of those things where it's like it. When you, when you see the picture of the Milky Way versus, you know, as one, just one galaxy and there's infinite galaxies, like you gotta be, I'm not a betting man, but like you gotta bet on it, right? So that there, there has to be out there and, um, you know, I wonder if they have their own version of Substack or their own version of Reddit. So that's, that's what I'm looking at, learn more about.

• 1:02:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's an awesome answer. You get to ask me one question to end it. What question do you have?

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Why bang bang?

• 1:02:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually don't know. That's a, that's a horrible answer. I said it one time and, uh, I can't remember where I said, I think it was on a YouTube video and everyone was like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you know, and just went nuts. And so then I said it again, and then next I knew like it was just a thing. Um, and, uh, I've actually had people like come up to me at a conference and be like, you know, bang, bang. I'm like, all right, that's weird. Uh, I've had, uh, John Najarian, uh, from CNBC and, and did a bunch of trading. Uh, when I, he came on, I was like bang, bang. And I don't think he knew that I said that all the time. So he immediately responds with bang, bang. And he starts doing his finger guns at me. And I was like, all right, man, this is getting

• 1:03:24Anthony Pompliano?

  out of control, but, uh, it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  So good. I love it.

• 1:03:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and, and also it's a thing, um, in hindsight, it, it actually is helpful. Uh, somebody sent me a clip, um, I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk, maybe, maybe it was somebody else. Can't remember. But, uh, they were starting all their videos with like a noise, right? And they were trying to like basically like audio brand their videos with that noise. And so like in hindsight, like, oh, okay. You start off every single thing with this noise. It just happens to be, you don't need editing because it's just my mouth, right? But like, it has some of the similar effects. So like, I'll take it. Uh, you know, it's one of these things where like, I didn't think I was having a master plan, but if it works, it works.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  I mean, when you open up, I think it was Steve Jobs who did this. When you open up a, an Apple computer, there's the C major chord that, that happens, the dong. And I think like those nuances, like the bang bang nuances, nuance, or the C major nuance is what makes brilliant products brilliant and memorable. And you, the truth is, most people don't, probably don't even remember that you bang bang, or that there's a C major chord, but like, they know that they enjoyed their experience and, and that's what matters.

• 1:04:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Couldn't agree more, man. All right. Where can people find you on the internet?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  They can find me on Twitter, at Greg Isenberg, my name.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  For my thoughts, or they're up there. And then if you want my deeper thoughts, I started a Substack, so you can check it out at latecheckout.substack.com.

• 1:05:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. All right, sir. Thank you so much. We're gonna do this again. I had too much fun. So you're, you're on the hope to do it again, for sure.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.