#421 Mario Gabriele on Writing About Technology Companies

Mario Gabriele is the Founder and Writer at The Generalist, a new publication that covers the technology industry from idea to IPO. He previously worked at a number of venture capital firms, including Charge Ventures and Red Sea Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss how Mario built The Generalist so far, why he enjoys writing so much, how he has handled a hedge fund bully who is threatening him, and his stories on Ant Group and Audience + Wealth. ======================= Masterworks qualifies paintings with the SEC, takes them public through a Reg A offering, and makes shares available to their 100,000+ investors. So if you are already investing in your IRA every two weeks, make sure to check out Masterworks.io - and use promo code "POMP" to skip their 22,000 person waitlist. Again that's masterworks.io promo code "POMP" ======================= Athletic Brewing is re-imagining beer for the modern adult. We love beer. But we also love being healthy, active and at our best. No matter your motivation, if you want to keep a clear head and drink healthier, we are here for you. Athletic makes non-alcoholic beer that you don't have to compromise to enjoy. The beers are fully flavored, clean ingredient, and a fraction of the calories of full strength beer - they fit in any occasion. Check out http://www.athleticbrewing.com for more details and free shipping nationwide. ======================= Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100.

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Mario Gabrielle is the founder and writer at The Generalist, a new publication that covers the technology industry from idea to IPO. He previously worked at a number of venture capital firms, including Charge Ventures and Red Sea Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss how Mario built The Generalist so far, why he enjoys writing so much, how he has handled a large hedge fund bullying who is threatening him, and his stories on Ant Group and Audience and Wealth. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mario, and

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 5:05Speaker 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.

• 5:36Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm super excited. I've got Mario here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, man. I really appreciate it.

• 5:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's just jump right into your background. Before you started, the generalists, kind of walk us through what you did to get to that point.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I actually had a pretty weird path, I would say. I, despite my very American accent, I grew up in England, came to America when I was 18. My mother's American, so I always spoke an American accent at home. But coming to the States, I was very much like interested in doing public policy, public sector stuff, and only really fell into tech after a few different weird career choices. So I went to culinary school, I cooked for a little bit, I worked at a law firm, I wrote a lot, working on a novel. And then coming out of grad school, basically went to a fund called Red Sea Ventures, which does mostly like consumer-facing investing in New York, then a stint operating at a company called Antco, and then for the last couple of years have been at a firm called Charge.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  And Charge does pre-seed, seed investing, also in New York, a little bit more tech-focused. And yeah, had the chance to work there before trying to emulate your solo success.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So I saw this Italian culinary arts on your LinkedIn and I was like, I gotta ask him about that. What was that? Because that just fascinates me in terms of, it seems like there's this like creative element to it and a bunch of other stuff. So what was kind of the thought process there?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I always found my main creative outlet to be writing growing up. So always was trying to write a novel as a kid and stuff like that. But food in my family was definitely a big thing. My father was Italian, still have a lot of family there. And just really respected the ability to cook well. So when I was sort of in this period of wilderness, after working at a law firm and realizing, you know, I wasn't gonna wanna be a partner at a big firm and then go try and, you know, win a congress, a congressional seat, I decided to go to culinary school and like test that out as a different life for a little bit. And was lucky to do it and had a really good time.

• 7:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And then talk us through, so you were at Charge, right? Kind of doing what I would consider a pretty traditional venture capital type job and career path. And then you start The Generalist. And so kind of how did that begin and why the kind of focus or fascination with going out and doing this?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Charge is, I think, in and of itself, a little bit of a startup. It's a super new firm. I really went because the partner at Charge, a guy called Brett Martin, is like this fascinating electric thinker and just person. And so building with him was something I really wanted to do and loved getting to do it. But for me, writing like kept being the thing that I wanted to spend more time on. So, you know, I mentioned I spent some time writing the first draft of a novel. I did that probably in 2013. And then for the next seven, eight years, would wake up early in the morning, work on it for an hour or two, and then go to work. And so always had this like muscle of trying to write more.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  And realized that I should start applying it to some degree at least to the world of venture and tech. And so, starting in August of last year, I wrote this article about YC and how YC creates this manufactured urgency that's really bad for founders and investors. And that was really prompted because I was talking to some YC companies and one of the founders in a LinkedIn message was like, "Cool, I'm happy to hop on a call, but can you make a decision in 30 minutes?" I was like, "No, of course not." Like, why would you want someone who could make a decision in 30 minutes? That's insane for a decades-long relationship, potentially. And that piece did fairly well

• 9:32Speaker 02

  for me at the time and really opened my eyes to what it is like to share your ideas publicly. And bit by bit, I just kept doing that. And that became The Generalist. It became a product more and more. And as I started to see that happen, I realized that I wanted to give more time to it. So that's the experiment that I'm running now, and we'll see if I can make it a sustainable business.

• 10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And kind of this tagline of "from idea to IPO," right? Most people would focus on just early stage, or just maybe growth stage, or public companies. You really are trying to span the full spectrum of, literally, from the earliest days of a startup all the way to the largest public companies. Why not focus on one specific part of business? Why go after the full stack?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Honestly, just bad strategy. I should almost certainly do one. I've had lots and lots of people tell me I should, but the truth is, the more serious answer is, I think there's a lot of people who actually love thinking across that stack. And I think that's more and more common, simply because tech moves so fast, companies move so fast, that you can be following a company one day, and it's IPO-ing not that long from now. Or it's suddenly at growth stage not that long from now. I also think there's just a ton of overlap between the type of tools that are useful at one stage or another. The folks that are looking at companies in the public markets have some amazing frameworks

• 11:09Speaker 02

  that frankly, like I didn't see a ton at early-stage investing levels, but that I think are incredibly useful. So my hope is that, you know, The Generalist can be a community and a publication for people that want to go through the effort of really learning how to think about the future and about tech across that span.

• 11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And who do you find kind of this is most attractive for? Are there certain types of occupations? Is it a US-focused audience versus international? Like, how do you think about who's actually consuming the content?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there's probably a ton of VCs, at least from the emails that roll in, and that's probably just like a function of my network and reach. Definitely a lot of folks who work in big tech or at startups, definitely a lot of folks that work in finance to some degree or another, who maybe like are in a TMT group and are interested in what's bubbling under the surface of the stuff they usually look at. Mostly US, from what I can tell, and then a big audience in India and China, and to a certain extent, the UK.

• 12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And when we say big, it's nothing is big like it's big for you, for the record. Like, I'm at, you know, 12,000, 13,000 subscribers, and so still very much like chipping away.

• 12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  How have you grown that so far? Like, what have you done that's been successful in terms of going from, you know, no subscribers to now 12,000, 13,000?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the classic startup do-things-that-don't-scale thing. So, you know, so many of my early subscribers were me reaching out to the VC Club president of Harvard's group, or, you know, the Dartmouth MBA group, or whoever it was, and saying, "Hey, this is a free newsletter. It's read by a bunch of your classmates. Like, maybe you would like it, and maybe you'd want to send it out to your group." And that, like, would get me 10 or 20 new folks, just with a little bit of extra effort. And then, you know, bit by bit, I think honing the sort of content that I became a little bit better known for also helped a lot. So.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Things like the S1 clubs that really had, I think, a clear positioning and were timed around a specific event often would like catch on in a way that, you know, maybe a piece about a startup that raised a Series A would.

• 13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so recently you wrote this piece called "The $6 Billion Stare." And, you know, when I first saw it, I was like, "Oh, wow, that's like a pretty good headline." I wondered what that's about. I click on it and then I basically read this like really horrific kind of telling of a situation you've been going through recently. So maybe just kind of give us an overview of what exactly happened.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I will preface by saying I'm really sorry that if my voice shakes a little bit because this gets me like, I feel my adrenaline pumping when I talk about it because it gets me really frustrated. So apologies on that front. But basically, the situation is that on October 18th, I with a collaborator wrote a piece on quote-unquote "compounders." And compounders are public companies, I guess they could be private companies too, but traditionally public companies that grow double digits over an extended period of time. So, an example from the 2010s is Netflix, right? Like, huge amount of growth over this decade. That's

• 14:39Speaker 02

  a concept that I thought was really interesting and that my collaborator had taken a class about at Columbia Business School. And so we worked together to give sort of like a primer on compounders, what they are, a few patterns they might follow, a few characteristics. In general, I think it's like a fun piece because we frame it in the lens of like Jay-Z's investing career and, you know, Wu-Tang rap quotes and stuff like that. But in terms of content, it's stuff that you can find in a bunch of Morgan Stanley pieces, T. Rowe Price pieces, podcasts, white papers, even like a lot of it's drawn from something like Investopedia. It's really... Not the most secret sauce that we're sharing.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  But regardless, the next day I heard from my collaborator that a fund he used to work at, contracted for, had ordered him to pressure me to take the article down. And they did that, saying that we had relied on, quote unquote, proprietary information. Now, I knew that we had not, but I also knew that my collaborator was in a pretty tough spot. This is a fund he used to work at that he was going to rely on for a reference for a future job. He was out of work at the time. And out of respect for him, I said, I'll take it down, but let's find a solution, because I know that we have not done anything wrong here. And I really wanted to find like a win-win here.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  I was sure there had to be some sort of misunderstanding. So, you know, I thought maybe we could do an interview with someone from this hedge fund. Maybe we could highlight some of their work. But when sort of I talked to them and this partner the next day, it became clear that they really had taken a pretty hard-line stance, and also a pretty confusing stance. I never really found out exactly what parts of the article they considered proprietary. And I really did try and find out. So, for example, at one point in the article, we talk about how compounders sometimes follow a good-to-great pattern, simply meaning, in the classic Jim Callen sense, that they, you know, start out good, they undergo some sort of transformation,

• 16:52Speaker 02

  and they become great. And the partner I spoke to mentioned that that was problematic to them. And when I asked, like, is it the phrase "good-to-great" that's problematic? Or the idea that companies sometimes improve? Immediately, the response was, "I need to get the general counsel involved." And that, to me, just demonstrated that there was no real argument to this, and that it was really bullying, or scare tactics. And so... At that point, I really didn't know what to do. I think we sort of brokered a little bit of an agreement on the, or what I thought was an agreement on the call, which was delete the whole section about good to great and something else. I just wanted to be over with

• 17:34Speaker 02

  it at that point. But even after we had agreed to that, they then came back the next day and said, nope, you can't even put the revised version up. And parts two and three of this series that you plan to write, you also can't write those. Even though, I mean, they don't even know what's going to be in them yet. But basically, they wanted me to cease the whole project. And so that was sort of the problem. And I'll, I'll take a break there because I know I've been talking for a moment and happy to dive into, you know, what came next or anything else.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So my whole thing when I was reading this is just like, it seems pretty petty, right? In terms of like, saying, hey, we have not even ownership of a word, but an idea, right? And kind of like, I would think that if you understand how the internet works, you want as many people writing about your ideas as possible and saying, hey, like this great idea came from this person or this group or this organization, especially when it's something that is kind of out there. And I could understand if it was like an algorithm or a formula or, you know, something that could give you a specific advantage. But when it was more of like a, a mental framework, right? It's kind of, I don't know, it just

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  seemed very out of the ordinary that somebody would try to lock something down. Because ultimately, what ends up happening is like you get the Streisand effect, right? Where like now, there's much more attention on this, there's much more kind of eyeballs looking and being like, wait, who's the group that's being petty, right? And it just, I don't know, it seems like a miscalculation in my opinion.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  I think it was definitely a miscalculation. I think it was one individual who maybe saw something that she didn't like because, you know, maybe she felt ownership over the concept because she had researched this herself. I mean, she clearly, I must, I must state very clearly, did not invent it, but for whatever reason felt ownership over it, made a bad call, and then I think just kept doubling down on it. And, you know, I had never heard of the Streisand effect before this happened, but like, yes, I think that's exactly what has occurred here.

• 19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And talk a little bit about, kind of, you write the pieces on Substack. Obviously, as you're just starting a business, you've got kind of, you know, we'll call them the bully in the room, in terms of this hedge fund that is threatening to use their general counsel and all these things. It feels a little bit like your best defense, or kind of the best tool in your toolkit really is to just shed light on the nonsense, right? And just say, hey, look, if you're gonna be a bully, that's fine. I'm just gonna tell everyone you're being a bully, and I'll let kind of the market take care of this because I can't fight you dollar for dollar or anything like that, right?

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, in hindsight, that seems really obvious of like, of course, internet's undefeated, you know, put the people behind you and share the facts and people will realize that this is very, very silly and undignified behavior from a hedge fund with a great deal of money. I would say that until I actually shared the story on Friday, I was insanely anxious about this and how it would go down. Not that people would disagree, but just that like, maybe no one would care, and maybe it would annoy them more and like, bait them to chase me down harder, because I hadn't seen a lot of behavior that seemed

• 21:05Speaker 02

  particularly rational or logical to me at that point. And so I was like, it feels like this is emotionally driven, even pushing a little bit, maybe could just like, force them to take this to another level. But what happened was obviously the opposite. And, you know, I still don't know how it's gonna pan. I'm optimistic at this point that it would just be like insane for them to keep this going. But man, people came out in full force, shared a million compounder examples, great resources, offered to like chip into a legal fund, you know, just unbelievable. So in hindsight, like,

• 21:44Speaker 02

  yes, that was the only way to balance the asymmetry was to like bring the people into it. And so I'm like, you know, it's always annoying when people say they're really humbled by something. But like, this is one of the few times where I'm like, I really do feel pretty humbled by this. This was wild and like, I feel incredibly grateful.

• 22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I just love the idea of the internet is undefeated because I think that is is very, very accurate. You also have written, obviously, many other great pieces. I don't want to spend all of our time talking about just that one. Two in particular that I found interesting was one, you wrote about Ant Group. Maybe talk a little bit about kind of your process. Why did you write about this? How did you gather the information and what you learned from it?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was really fun because I I like to try and do collaborations as often as possible, both from a personal learning standpoint as well as a strategic one. And I'd be really curious to hear like how you think about this. But when you look at the YouTubers out there that scale audience effectively, most of them rely on collapse, right? Like cross promotion is just so huge for distribution that it makes sense to do it. And so, one, I like doing it strategically for that reason. And two, there are so many intelligent, brilliant people out there who are carving their own little niche that as often as I can, like, I want to try and find ways where we can furrow some path together for a piece or a couple

• 23:09Speaker 02

  pieces. And so that was the plan with compounders. And it was also what we did with Ant Group. I worked with Lilian Lee, who writes a Substack called Chinese Characteristics, covering tech in China. She reached out about one of my pieces, asked if, you know, we could connect. We had a great conversation. And on that call, I was just sort of, we were batting around ideas. And since Ant was coming up, I was like, we should just do a, you know, Thoughtful teardown of this that hopefully can stand on its own. And so that's what we released today and hopefully it's an interesting breakdown of a generational business that we just don't have the likes of in the US. It's really unique.

• 23:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the biggest surprise as you kind of learned more and more about the business? Like, was there one kind of takeaway where you're just like, I did not expect this?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  The scale. I mean, the scale is just insane. The title of the piece is Ant Group Financial Infestation. And it really feels like that. They have just managed to both create dominant positions in, you know, individual product lines, but also create this insane scope across payments, insurance, credit and so forth. And, you know, when you look at sort of the transaction volume of Ant versus a PayPal, it's really like orders of magnitude higher. And so PayPal is, you know, a behemoth. It's a 200-plus billion dollar company. And so for Ant to have reached this scale and still for, I think, many in the West to not

• 24:42Speaker 02

  recognize that was shocking to me.

• 24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the part two that is so fascinating is like, I think in the United States, many founders, they kind of stay very focused on the one thing that they're building. Maybe you could say like a Google or an Amazon. I think it's to the point where they can kind of expand past that. And, you know, if you say, what is Amazon, you describe them as an e-commerce company. Now people are like, eh, kind of, right? They have all these other things that they do and they do very well. It feels like Ant, one, was early to that, but also, two, has done it in kind of a global digital scale as well, right? And so I think that just from the American viewpoint, we just don't understand how important that company is.

• 25:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, yeah, maybe you could compare it to like an Amazon or something like that, but it just feels like it's much more ingrained in the everyday person's life than an Amazon would be, right?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  I think that's totally right. You know, it's by owning the payment channel, they're now able to serve customers in all of these other ways. It's the way that you check out on Taobao when you buy something. It's also the way that you like buy groceries at your local store to swipe a QR code. And you know, one of the parts of it that I really loved is that it really initially began as essentially an escrow service for Alibaba, just so that, you know, buyers and payers money could be safe until a transaction was complete. And it happened almost exactly at the same time as eBay partnered with escrow.com in 2004. And it's just insane to imagine that like,

• 26:17Speaker 02

  these almost exactly similar features and products, one remained essentially as as small as it as it always was, you know, a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. And one, you know, got bitten by this radioactive spider and morphed into this financial mega company. So it's just, yeah, it's, I think it's testament one to like the Jack Ma laddering up of products, as well as the idiosyncrasies of Chinese tech.

• 26:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Another series that you've been working on is this series around audience and wealth. Talk a little bit about that one and the process behind it.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this was really me trying to figure things out for myself. The generalist is 100% for you right now. But as I eventually realized I will have to make money at some point, I was like, cool, what are the models available to me and who are doing, who are the people doing interesting things? So, you know, everyone knows that there are ads available. Everyone knows that there are subscription fees available. I think there's this sort of third wave that's happening that you're a part of, which is using your audience to build ownership, right? Like now you have your your rolling fund, you're using your power of distribution to say to founders, hey, like, distribution is a really tangible benefit that I can give you. And honestly, is actually quite differentiated

• 27:37Speaker 02

  from many VC firms, in my view. Like, VC firms are speaking the same language so often, that I think most founders can't actually tell what value they bring. Because they say, you know, we're your first call, we're, you know, good advice for you, we have some portfolio services. Whereas you can say, cool, but I have like 400,000 people following me on Twitter. Like, if I tweet about you, that's going to make a difference. And so I think there are more and more creators like you who are able to compete with the best VC firms at early stage rounds, or, you know, taking a piece of a later stage round, and building their wealth that way. So one, I think that's really interesting. And then two, I think there are a lot of sort of modified

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Business models that are happening that are really worth exploring. So Mr. Beast is a great example, right? Mr. Beast is a YouTuber who, instead of taking ad dollars and just giving a casual shout out during a clip, uses those ad dollars as the content itself. The $1 million that he gets from the Dragon City game, or however much, becomes the prize, which he then uses to bring in all of these other users to compete. And so it fundamentally changes the dynamic between creator, audience, and advertiser. Advertisers suddenly become part of the content. Audience members suddenly become part of the content. And it just creates a much more virtuous cycle where you can start to use that

• 29:06Speaker 02

  that growing ad dollars to do more and more interesting pieces of content. And I think there are lots of examples of this where, you know, there's a lot more we can do as creators to change and blur those boundaries in a way that ends up benefiting the people who are reading or paying attention or engaging with us.

• 29:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And it also feels like not only are the lines blurring between kind of the audience and the creator, but it also feels like who is a creator is changing as well, right? So we've seen, obviously, somebody or a company like Substack be able to say, "Wait, if you're a journalist, you're just as much a creator as anybody else." We've seen YouTube take people with all sorts of different interests, whether they're very mainstream or niche, and say, "You're a creator," right? So talk a little bit maybe about how you see that evolving?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're seeing essentially the entrepreneurialization of the creator as a pathway. So whereas someone who maybe had a very traditional career path in mind, you know, was going to work at a bank or a consulting firm and then sort of rise up the corporate ladder, like so many others, we're seeing the relationship between institution and individual untethered, unmoored, attenuated in some way. Often that's been, that's resulted in entrepreneurship, right? You're like, "Cool, I'm not..." I'm not going to work at a bank, but I'll start a startup and raise a couple million bucks and you know, try and grow that.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  But I think we're seeing the creators are now a very legitimate pathway for that sort of ambitious person.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Who recognizes, cool, maybe I don't have one idea that is a software product that I really want to build and want to pour $20 million into. But maybe I have a passion that I think is commercializable in some way. And so I think as a result, we're getting like a different sort of creator in some fields. It's like, you know, the business analysts in our world. Who are excited to build like a personality business rather than, you know, down the venture backed route. Or, you know, just start a Patreon account and hope that something's going to happen for them.

• 31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. When you think about kind of the work you've done so far, talk through maybe. What have you found to be the hardest parts of kind of building this, you know, in this unique kind of new creator or solopreneur type model?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  The hardest parts are carving out time away from it.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I think like when, I mean, this is, this is a very privileged position, but like when you're doing what you really enjoy doing. And also when you are reliant only on yourself of whether it works or doesn't work. I think it's really hard to switch off either because you're excited about the project you're working on. You want to just keep going and, you know, blaze through dinner and blaze through bedtime.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Or because you're like, damn, I did not get many subscribers this week. Like this sucks. I need to fix this if I'm going to, you know, get on the trajectory I've set for myself. And so, yeah, I mean, you just kind of live or die by. By your own actions in that respect. And so I find that really hard. And then there's a bunch of stuff that like more tangibly is, I think, an opportunity for startups and builders where it's like, man, the creator economy gets a lot of mind share and a lot of attention because obviously that's what it's aimed to do. But the infrastructure is is quite underbuilt for the most part. So I think there's a lot of things that people could do to streamline the creator's life in a really interesting way.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  And I have a bunch of ideas for any builders out there that want to want to work on them. I'll probably share them in requests for startups or something like that.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What's one or two that you're just like, this is a no brainer. Every person you know would go and use it if they built, if somebody built it.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'm curious if you will agree, but I would really love a creator specific.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Like, man, I'm blanking on the world word, not CMS. What's a, what does Salesforce do?

• 33:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, like a CRM, like a CRM. Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Took me a minute. Yeah, a creator focused CRM that basically aggregates all the data from every platform where you interact with people, YouTube, Twitter, Substack, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Can pull out interesting information about those people. So who's the person who responds the most? Who is the person who shares the most? How are people interacting? And then allows you to set up automations for rewarding or engaging with those people. So you can say, cool, the people who always answer the riddle correctly at the end of the general list, like, I'm going to create a special, you know, offer of the hardest possible riddles for those people. Or, you know, here are the people who keep showing up to my events. Like, I'm going to host a private salon of just 20 people and do it for them. And I think there's a secondary element, which is like, I think you can also start to do interesting things around

• 34:16Speaker 02

  badging and rewards that are visible to say like, cool, you're one of my super engaged people like in the Slack channel, here's some sort of visual significance, visual token that I can give you to show to the rest of the people. So I would love to see some exploration around that. Would you use that?

• 34:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that the big issue is just, I counted one time, you know, on my phone alone, what are all the ways that somebody can communicate with them? There's like 17 platforms, right? And that includes, you know, DMs on social media and like all this different stuff. And then two is like, you actually may not realize, especially with like student anonymous accounts on Twitter or something like that, you may not realize that the same person who's responding to your email is that person on Twitter. So like, that's completely lost to you. And it is definitely weird when they think that you know, but you don't know. And then on top of that, like, there's definitely this element of like, who are your kind of MVP consumers or audience, right? And you can measure that a whole bunch of different ways. It may actually be different for you versus me versus somebody else. But being able to

• 35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of identify that and, you know, treat those people how they deserve to be treated, right? It's kind of, you know, the airlines do a great job with it, right? Where if you fly a lot, you get points. If you have a lot of points, then you get free flights and you get a better service on the plane and, you know, you can board first and all of those types of things. And so I think that, you know, eventually these communities will figure out how to do that. Right now, the people who are doing it well are literally doing it on spreadsheets. As we know, you know, being able to productize what something, somebody's doing on a spreadsheet has historically proven to be quite valuable.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, even the idea that like, sometimes someone signs up to your email list that you're like, that person is a G. I want to like, send them a personal note or try and arrange a one-on-one talk with them. But like, I mean, if you have any number of people signing up a day, there's no shot you see it.

• 36:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I actually don't look at who's signing up. And Polina looks at everybody. And there's a lot of people who have signed up and she's like, you know, been able to connect with them or whatever. And she's always like hitting me over the head being like, you gotta look at who's signing up. And I'm just like, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, right? And, and for me, it's just one last thing I need to do every day. But it is, it's incredibly valuable. So if there was a way to kind of just surface that information quicker, more efficiently, and with accuracy, right? That's the other thing. A lot of times, like, people have tried to, you know, rank social media accounts or something. It's like, sure, you can do that. But if it's not effective or accurate,

• 36:58Anthony Pompliano?

  then you kind of lose the value proposition of doing.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah, 100% agree. So Paulina, it sounds like she's much more evolved than us about this.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What uh, what's the one thing that you can point to so far since you've been doing this? And you're like, this is my favorite part.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Honestly, my favorite part is just that I like get to write every day as my job.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  I am obsessed with awesome sentences and beautiful sentences. Like I mostly read fiction. Nonfiction, I think, can be awesome, but it's just, I think I really care about that part. And so it gives me insane amount of pleasure when I can turn a phrase in a way even about like a Palantir S1, where I'm like, I'm proud of that. Like, that sounded good to me. And so I feel lucky that I get to work towards mastery of that. Because that's what I'd like to get.

• 37:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Before I wrap up, where can people go and find the writing that you've done or find you on the internet?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so ReadTheGeneralist.com is a website that you can sign up. Most of the writing is actually on Substack. If you search The Generalist Substack, you'll find it. And then my Twitter name is Mario D. Gabriele. And yeah, would love to hear from anyone in YouTube media.

• 38:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there another Mario out there that stole without a D?

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Ah, dude, it's an empty account with no one on it. There's not been one tweet. There's zero people following. There's no picture. I'm like, please. And I don't even think their name's Mario. Their like Twitter handle is like Mauricio or something. I'm really confused by it. But yeah, unfortunately, I can't, I can't seem to get it.

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  If you work at Twitter and you're listening, help the guy out. Come on.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Do me a favor, please.

• 38:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I asked the same two questions, everybody, before I let them go. The first one is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I love these questions. I ask these questions of people, too. Important is a good word, but a tricky one. I will say that.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Honestly, the most important is probably Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl, because that was the book which I read as a child, which I was like, man, I am obsessed with reading and I will always be obsessed with reading. And so I think that like cemented a love in my mind, whether it was true at the time or not. More recently, I would say my favorite books are Invisible Cities by Tallo Cabino, which is like every sentence you could spend an hour thinking about for the most part. Disgrace by J. M. Kotsia, which is an amazing account of, well, sort of not account, a reflection of apartheid in South Africa and just incredibly written.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  And then I would say The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, which is essentially a prose poem. And again, just like every sentence is insanely beautiful.

• 40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, those are great suggestions. The second question is more fun and then you'll get to ask me one question to wrap up. The second question is aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 40:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I sort of suspect there have to be aliens just from like the sheer vastness of the universe and the various Goldilocks zones that, you know, exist. So, yeah, I don't see why not. There was a really interesting tweet a long time ago from, strangely enough, a Premier League footballer or soccer player, which was, "It's probably likely that we will interact with aliens' technology before we interact with them, because if you think about it, that's almost certainly how they would interact with us." And so it's worth wondering, like, is there any technology on Earth that could be from an alien that we're not familiar with? So, yes, I think there probably are.

• 41:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Mario, don't go down that rabbit hole with this audience. They will start tweeting at you all of their speculation as to what the alien technology on Earth is.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Really? That's so funny. I would love to hear that.

• 41:21Anthony Pompliano?

  If anyone's got any ideas, go ahead and tweet at them. But I'm just warning you that you're opening up a can of worms on that one.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Ooh, fascinating. Okay, excellent.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, last thing.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  I get to ask you, right?

• 41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Huh? You get to ask me one. What do you got?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Put you on the hot spot. Okay. What is something that you think is important to know about you that is not visible in early interactions?

• 41:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I don't really think there's anything that is important. Uh, the thing that I always say to people, I think that is the most surprising is they're always asking me like weird questions like, you know, what is your goal? What are you optimizing for? Like all this kind of stuff. Um, and a long time ago, like I reached this place mentally where, uh, it was just, look, we're all gonna die and you get to say you lived a awesome, fulfilled, successful life as long as you're happy. Like that's it. And that can mean different things for different people, but, uh, there's people out there who have financial goals, who have status goals, who have kind of all these different goals. And that's not to say that those goals are wrong or bad. Um, it's just like my goal for a very, very long time has been just be happy.

• 42:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And that can take many different forms. Uh, but when you can do that, like you kind of just get to say like, I don't care about like all the nonsense in life. Um, you know, it's like, look, there's a massive like political election going on right now. And, and if you go on certain, uh, TV channels or on certain social media feeds, it literally looks like people are about to kill each other. Right? Like, like they really, really disagree with each other. For me, it's like, I'm paying attention, right? Like, like it has an impact, but like I'm personally happy. And so regardless of who wins, like they're not going to affect my personal happiness, right? Cause like, kind of, I'm in charge of that. And I think like in, that's a really extreme example, but like when you turn over

• 43:15Anthony Pompliano?

  the ability of whether you're happy or not to like who the president is, or, uh, you know, somebody down the street or a coworker at work or whatever. Like you kind of just like lose control, right? And for whatever reason, like I've always just thought about it that way. And, uh, I think that really surprises people because they don't expect me to kind of think that way.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Can I ask you one more?

• 43:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  If you could moderate a discussion or debate between two people, who would you choose? Like, who do you want to mostly bounce off each other?

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm gonna not answer that only because I probably can't come up with a good answer. But I will tell you one thing that I've always thought would be really fascinating is to get the two presidential candidates to sit down, long-form discussion, like kind of like a Joe Rogan style. But instead of being like, what do you think about this topic? It's to force each one of them to argue the other side.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  That would be super interesting.

• 44:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, like Trump, explain why Joe Biden believes what he believes on healthcare. Joe Biden, explain why Trump believes what he believes, you know, around taxes or whatever. And what it forces them to do is one, be able to articulate the other side's issue. So like, you can tell very quickly, like, hey, who's paying attention? Who's listening? Right? Like, like, have I taken enough time to kind of intellectually be honest? And, and look at both sides or multiple sides of an issue and then come to a conclusion? Right? And then you can almost follow it up with like, okay, like, why do you disagree with that? And so I just think that we are in this world of like, the intellectual debates don't happen, right?

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It's much more like, you know, name-calling and kind of like the salacious, who can get the headlines? All that kind of stuff. It happens from both political parties. Like, I know that everyone wants like virtue signal against each other, but like, just getting able to sit down and like have a very deep conversation. I always like asking them, you know, argue the other side. What would change your mind? Right? You know, okay, Trump, you believe X. What would it take to change your mind? Biden, you believe Y. What would it take to change your mind? And you can very quickly, I think, just like peel away all like kind of the bullshit, right? And just get to like, hey, who knows what they're talking about? And who has like the intellectual rigor to actually analyze situations and make sound decisions?

• 45:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Because that's kind of like what we want in a president, right? Is like, just somebody who makes like sound or like reasonable decisions. And they don't have to be popular, right? Like, actually, most of the more reasonable decisions are probably not popular. But I just think that the entire process, as I've kind of been watching this, and like really trying to think through like, Why is it broke? That's the thing that I keep coming back to is just like the entire process is built to avoid any sort of like intellectual, you know, kind of debate that would highlight who is a sound reasonable decision maker and who's not.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are almost incentives to misunderstand than rather than to understand. And there is such a weird human and maybe more in the US than elsewhere, I'm not sure, impulse towards thinking changing your mind is bad, which is like changing your mind is a superpower. Like that's the only way development occurs. But yeah, for some reason, like even the notion of a political flip-flopper, right? It's like, well, okay, maybe that person just like changed their opinion. That would be good, wouldn't it? Like if they changed it based on evidence, that was probably a good thing.

• 46:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think that also like flip-flopping is a great thing, right? Like there's a good side and a bad side to it, right? So like if you're just simply every time you run for a political office, you're just like pandering to one group or another and like you constantly change your position, but you can't articulate why, like what was the new information you received? But if instead you say, hey, look, my entire life I believed X, then I got pieces of information, one, two, and three, and now I believe Y. So hey, whoa, that's a rare thing. Like I would love that person. Like who's that person? So I think again, it goes back to like, you gotta go to like the more deep layers of these conversations. And the formats are just off, right? You know, network television is all about the 60 second, what's the most

• 47:33Anthony Pompliano?

  salacious clip that we can find and kind of, you know, present that keeps people's attention? The debates, you know, at this point, even with shutting microphones off and stuff are just, I mean, it's just not very effective, right? And so I do think that, you know, kind of going back to like, let's get long form, human based discussion, like forget your talking points, you know, explain why could do the entire country, you know, a pretty good service.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Well said. I think that's a stirring place to end.

• 48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right, Mario. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. Best of luck as you continue to build this and if big, large bully corporations and hedge funds want to keep being assholes, hopefully everyone who's listening to this can kind of chime in and provide a little bit of relief for you. So I appreciate you doing it. And anyone who's interested, go check Mario's workout at ReadTheGeneralist.com.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, man. It's been really lovely to be here.