#423 Brock Blake on Small Businesses During The Pandemic

Brock Blake is founder and CEO of Lendio, an online marketplace for small business loans. Lendio offers borrowers access to loan options from more lenders than any other marketplace in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss the small business reality right now, how PPP funding impacted these entrepreneurs, and how Brock and his team serviced 100k businesses with $8+ billion in funding. ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit http://www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today. ======================= Harvested Financial makes options incredibly simple. They’re the first options robo advisor, where you can build and customize a personalized trading plan that gets automatically executed. Options help you speculate in capital efficient ways, diversify your holdings with market neutral strategies, and generate passive income by selling premium. https://www.harvestedfinancial.com/pomp ======================= Did you know only 1% of day traders actually turn a profit? So why are so many of us mistaking picking stocks for serious investing? You can’t control the markets, but you can control your risks. So how do billionaire investors control their risk? They invest in blue-chip art. If that sounds unusual to you, you’re not alone. But the ultra-wealthy have been investing in art for centuries. And since 2000, art has outperformed the S&P by an incredible 180%. Just a few years ago, a single work sold for $450 million! Imagine... Being able to invest in the very same paintings as millionaires and billionaires, at a fraction of the cost. Masterworks.io is an exclusive platform that makes it as easy as trading stocks online. And the best part is: you don’t need to know anything about art. Their experts will create a custom portfolio to meet your investment needs. With Masterworks.io you don’t have to choose between big risks and big returns. Sign up today, select PODCAST and you can skip the 70,000 waitlist to get first dibs. Just go to http://www.masterworks.io and select PODCAST. =======================

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.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Brock Blake is the founder and CEO of Lendio, an online marketplace for small business loans. Lendio offers borrowers access to loan options from more lenders than any other marketplace in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss the small business reality right now, how PPP funding impacted these entrepreneurs, and how Brock and his team serviced 100,000 businesses with $8+ billion in funding. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brock, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin. They're a new sponsor, so make sure you pay attention to this one. There are a lot of crypto exchanges for us to choose from. Whether you're new to crypto, an advanced trader, or an institution,

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• 5:09Speaker 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.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Brock here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 5:48Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's just jump right into your background. Kind of tell us everything you did before you got to Lindio.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Quite a ways to start. So, short and sweet. I've been an entrepreneur since college. I was at BYU, was playing soccer there. I heard about an entrepreneurial competition, kinda like the TV show The Apprentice, without Trump saying, "You're fired," and the glitz and glamour and all that. But we had 100 entrepreneurs that applied. They narrowed it down to 20. 20 of us went through an eight-week boot camp where we were learning about being an entrepreneur. It was competition. We did all these things. And at the end, they chose five and gave them each $50,000 to start a business. So I was one of the five that was fortunate to win the $50,000. And I could use that money to do anything that I wanted as far as any business.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I looked at buying an ice cream store and looked at building a technology company. And every business that I was talking to, the main challenge was that they all needed financing. They needed money somehow to grow or start their business. So, you know, early on, my career was, we were gonna connect these entrepreneurs to wealthy, private angel investors. And we kinda built this dating website and literally made every mistake in the book along the way, but realized something pretty valuable along the way, which is most businesses in America are main street businesses. They're restaurant owners and landscapers and all that type of thing. And they're not gonna be the next Uber and Facebook and all of these.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  They're gonna be good businesses, but they don't need a million dollars. So, we changed the model on its head and started focusing on debt financing. And so, that's, in a way, we've gone with it, with Lendio, connecting entrepreneurs to debt financing and banks and credit unions and fintech lenders across the country since then. So, that's the very shortened version.

• 7:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And I think what's so interesting about your business is it's lending and it's small businesses. For those that don't know or haven't been paying attention, there was this public health crisis with the pandemic that then caused an entire economy in the United States and then economies around the world to shut down. The velocity of money goes down. There's massive, massive issues.

• 8:03Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're a large corporation with billions of dollars on your balance sheet, you're not, maybe you're not doing okay, right? But, uh, but, but you can survive, right? You've got access to capital. You've got access to partners. You can raise equity quickly. You can kind of do all the things you need. Small businesses don't have that. And I think early on in, in March and April, I went back and I looked at some data. And it was something like, uh, most small businesses, especially in the restaurant and food industries, they only have about two weeks of cash on hand in their bank account, right? So they can't even make it 30, 45 days without having, uh, you know, kind of no revenue. On top of that, they don't have access to capital, right? They, they can't raise equity very quickly, especially when every investor is actually not deploying capital, but actually trying to find cash and hoard it during uncertainty.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you guys became this great option. Maybe talk about like in the early days of the pandemic, what you guys saw as the opportunity? And then we'll get into kind of how you guys actually executed. But, but what were you seeing in March and into April, uh, during this kind of economic shutdown?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so March, it was crazy time where all of a sudden, you know, we, everyone's starting to recognize that pandemic's hitting and we're shutting down the NBA and all the different sports teams. And, and, um, you know, we started to recognize that, that these businesses to no fault of their own are going to be in a really tough spot. And, uh, we started to see that, you know, the, the Congress was going to pass a package, a stimulus package, the greatest stimulus pack or the, the largest stimulus package in the history of the U.S. to provide every business owner in America access to these paycheck protection loans. Um, and when we caught wind of that, I had sent a text to, to our board members and said,

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Lendio is perfectly positioned to help these small business owners. In fact, the text was, it was a quote, it was a Winston Churchill quote. And it was, it says this, "To every man, there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a very special thing, unique to him and fitted to his talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for that which would be his finest hour." And I just, you know, we didn't know what the PPP program was going to be like, but we knew that millions of business owners across the country were going to be devastated. They were seeing their cash, you know, go out the window.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  They were seeing that they were going to have to do layoffs and shut their doors and turn off their lights. And our mission at Lendio is fueling the American dream. And in that moment, we decided to change our mission temporarily to saving the American dream. And we were going to go all in. So the text I sent to my board was, I don't know what this means. I don't know if we're going to make money. I don't know what's going to happen. But we are going to go all in and do everything we can to help as many small business owners get access to capital. And we have the platform to be able to make a significant impact. And so in a matter of a couple of weeks, we stopped everything we were doing from an operations perspective. We have 300 to 350 employees.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  We dedicated our engineering team on building a digital app. We went out and onboarded 250 financial institutions. By the way, normally when you onboard a bank, it takes six to 12 months, right? They're the slowest moving organizations in the world. And but we did it in 10 days. We onboarded 250, provided technology for them to accept the PPP loan. We hired, we went out on a limb and hired 250 employees in 10 days, all working from home, workstations that we had to, you know, get and ship to their house and train them remotely. And we just said, there are businesses out there that we need to help get access to capital.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  And the reason why is because a lot of businesses, their bank that they worked with either was not approved for an SBA loan or not approved to offer SBA loans. They weren't SBA lenders. Or their bank was prioritizing other customers that were much larger than them. And which meant there were all these business owners that were at a disadvantage and we felt like we could make an impact and help them. So we started seeing that writing on the wall and decided we're going for it.

• 12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What was so crazy is I remember thinking back in, you know, really April, kind of once the PPP program got approved and we started to get some numbers around just how quickly I think that first tranche went, it was literally gone in like less than 24 hours or less than 12 hours maybe. And then also all the stories piled in of like, oh, the bank's best customers, they got all the loans first. Like you kind of have this sense of just like, you want to stick your middle finger up and say, you know, hey bankers, like, I knew you would do that, but the fact that you did it still pisses everybody off, right?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, thankfully, these businesses had options like Lindio to kind of get to it. When I saw the numbers from what you guys have done so far, so I think these are correct, but correct me if I'm wrong, over 100,000 small businesses, you guys have helped kind of access that, some form of capital, most of it being PPP loans, and over $8 billion of funds that they were able to tap into, which is just, when you think of those numbers, like you can rattle off millions and billions and thousands and all this kind of stuff, but like 100,000 small businesses is an absolute operational nightmare, I've got to imagine. It's a technological nightmare in terms of, I can only imagine like the surges that you guys were getting, especially when

• 13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  everyone's so kind of fearful. The program had a lot of, you know, unknowns to it. And I think a lot of banks were kind of slow because they didn't fully understand everything. Talk a little bit just about like, now looking back over the last seven, eight months, like, how does it feel to have, you know, over 100,000 businesses, $8 billion in funding access and know that like you and your team were able to kind of facilitate that?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Well, during the moment, I mean, it was, uh, it was way more customers than we, we've ever seen before. In fact, there was one day I was on CNN and CNBC right at the beginning. Both, uh, stations, uh, the first day talking about what was happening. And we saw a thousand times more traffic in that afternoon than we had seen on any other day previous to that day. It was just nuts and, and.

• 14:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Not a thousand percent, a thousand times.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Thousand X, yes. And fortunately, our engineering team is amazing and everything kind of. He's still, still stuck together and, and, and held. We didn't crash. And, you know, during, in the moment, you're going through this and you're like, I'm not sure if this is going to be the best thing we ever did or the worst thing we ever did. Because you're trying, every business owner has a story and, and you're trying to help every single one of them. And many of them, it became personal because it's, it's, you know, it's my brother and my brother-in-law that are like texting me every day. Am I going to be able to get a loan? And, and every person that you've ever met in your life that, that has owned a business that knows you, what you do.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Whether that's from elementary school or college or the community or your best friend's neighbor or whoever. Is reaching out to you with this urgent call that my business is going to go out of business and I can't make payroll if I don't get a loan. Please help me. And so you can imagine the amount of stress and pressure that you feel. As, as you're getting that all day long from everyone. Um, and it's not like, you know, that happens once a month. It's like 10 times a day. So, you know, at the time we were just like feeling this immense amount of pressure. It was neglecting, you know, my family and, and it was waking up.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Early, you know, four thirty-five and literally going to bed at midnight and all day long without any time to shower or eat. And I'm not, I am not even exaggerating these things. Sometimes you, you say that and it, it sounds great, but. Literally it was just like this pressure every moment to, to help these small business owners. And, um, there were times where I thought it was going to crash and burn. Like we, we didn't have like, well, I'll just tell you this real short story. You mentioned this first weekend, how the money was going so fast and all these business owners seeing the capital like, "I need to get in on this. If I don't, I don't know if there's gonna be another chance." And we had 300 banks right from the get-go that all said, "I can take as

• 16:50Speaker 02

  many customers as you can send us." But what they didn't, none of us anticipated, was in that first weekend, they would get more loan volume applications in that weekend than they'd ever seen. And they said it would be more in that weekend than they'd seen in the last 15 years combined. And so all of a sudden, these banks came back to us on Monday, saying, "We went from 300 to literally zero overnight." Because the bank said, "We can't take on any customers. We've got more than enough for our own, with our own customers. Sorry." And we, at that time, already had, you know, tens of thousands of business owners that had signed up to Lendio applying. And so there was this moment from Monday to about Wednesday,

• 17:35Speaker 02

  where we were scrambling, saying, "Who, which lenders can we send these customers to?" And we ended up cutting a deal, 11:00 PM on Wednesday night, with a lender that ended up taking on 25,000 customers and $2.5 billion of loans. And like, there were moments like that all along the way, where you just, again, you didn't know if this was the best thing that ever happened to you, or the worst thing that ever happened to you. But in the end, looking back and saying, 120,000 businesses, $8 billion, and each of those has a story,

• 18:13Speaker 02

  1.2 million jobs. Looking back at that impact we had, and seeing the videos of thank you car, or the thank you videos, and the testimonials, and the emails, and all the things that we did. And sometimes I'll go and I'll meet someone, and they'll be like, "I got a loan from you, you know, during this time." It's incredible. It's 10 times more challenging than anything I've ever done, but 10 times more rewarding.

• 18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What was it like negotiating the deal at like literally the 11th hour? Uh, and you're like, hey, I got a lot of people who need money, uh, and they're all counting on me to get this deal done.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't public at the time, and I don't know if I should make it public now, but, but, um, to, as an agent in the, in the thing, your margins are tiny. You can get 1% a half a percent or a quarter of a percent. And, um, and, and I said, you know what? And, and we could barely make any money on that or to even make it happen, but the cause was worth it. Um, but I cut a deal that night 11:00 PM the night where we were going to give up 50% of our economics. Um, and for the first 10,000 loans that we funded, we'd give up 50% of our economics and, and, um, and that was painful. We didn't make any money on any of those loans, but I didn't care.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  I want, we were motivated to help those small businesses. And so when we got that deal cut, it was like, an amazing, you know, it was, it was awesome. Um, just because it opened up the opportunity to help these small business owners. Then we ended up going and adding a bunch of other lenders that could then take on more customers and so on. But that first deal we cut was, uh, was critical.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And obviously one of the big questions has always been around the PPP program. Just like, okay, cool. In March, April into, uh, uh, May and June, like we got money into the hands of these small businesses. How long can it last? Right? And so maybe give us an update as to like what you guys are seeing on the small business front today. Some states have or cities have business still shut down. Some have them kind of partially open. Some are back to normal from like, uh, you can open and do whatever you want. Just what are you seeing in terms of the financial needs of these small businesses today?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's three things I would say briefly. What number one is, There's a lot of small businesses that went through that PPP loans in the two and a half months, and that's all it was supposed to last. It was to cover your payroll for two and a half months, and they burned through that, and they're in a tough spot. A lot of restaurants and retail and hotels and theaters and all of those, and to no fault of their own, especially in some of those places where the restrictions of the pandemic are so tight. And I can't tell you how extremely frustrated I am personally, and our small businesses should be at our politicians right now. The fact that they have gone this long, you know, bickering over a stimulus

• 21:13Speaker 02

  package that they're trying to, you know, with their own personal agendas, and they're playing politics, and meanwhile, you know, businesses are shutting their doors permanently. Hundreds of, I mean, we have nearly, you know, I've seen stats of a couple hundred thousand. Sixty percent of them are shut down permanently, and yet we can't, everyone agrees on PPP, but there's other things they're trying to insert in the package that they don't agree on, so PPP is being held hostage, at least the second round. That's frustrating. And we're pushing as hard as we can to try and get our politicians to do something. The second thing I would say is that other lenders have,

• 21:54Speaker 02

  you know, they stopped lending in April, but then they've recognized, yeah, the rug was pulled out from under them April 1st, but since then, there's been some, it's totally different than pre-COVID, but at least it's stable. And it's a different stable, but at least it's stable. So lenders are now starting to be able to underwrite again, because they can look at the last three to six months of cash flow and recognize, okay, this business, you know, it's maybe revenues are down 25%, the lease is consistently down 25%, I can underwrite to that. So, you know, literally week over week, month over month, our volume at Lendio, the loans that we're doing, and they're getting funded by our lenders, is increasing because lenders are

• 22:37Speaker 02

  starting to get more aggressive and comfortable around lending again. And then there's this third set of small businesses that, you know, the pandemic's the best thing that's ever happened to them. From, you know, recreational vehicles, whether it's RVs or mountain bikes or boats or, you know, or, you know, I hear construction, home remodels, you know, a lot of those things. People are at home and they're seeing their home needs to be repaired or upgraded or things like that. So those things, I think there's some industries that are doing extremely well. So those are some of the things that we're seeing in the market.

• 23:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And what's crazy to me is in a span of a couple of weeks, you hired 200 to 250 new employees. What is that like? Like, to me, that's such a crazy thing. And it sounds like maybe it was almost doubling the size of the business, right? From a headcount standpoint. So talk through that kind of experience.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I never thought we would go through an experience like that. I mean, you know, scaling is one thing. And, you know, we were at a pace of hiring, you know, something like 20 a month, which was a big deal. But 250 over 10 days. And what made it even more challenging is that we were all work from home. So getting the computers into their hands, getting training. And so there's, we were extremely creative on how we did that. We had some other offices in the area that were looking to do furloughs. And so it was kind of like we were renting some of their team members for a period of time. We had people that were, you know, all of a sudden universities were closed and everything was

• 24:19Speaker 02

  online. So they needed a summer job. We were hiring our team members, you know, their spouse or their brother or their their son or whoever, you know, a lot of personal referrals. And but one thing that became really clear. So that the logistically, it was, it was quite the challenge. But one thing I it became so clear to me was that people love to be a part of a cause. They want to be, they want to go and help. They want to solve a problem. They want to do something bigger than themselves. And, and we had so many that just bought completely into this idea of saving the American dream and helping small businesses. And that was

• 25:02Speaker 02

  that's what was incredible, is they sacrificed a lot and their training, it wasn't a 95 job. It was like, I need to know this because I need to be, I want to be able to be a part of this. I want to, I want to help more businesses and so I need to become an expert. And so it was a lot of logistics, but a lot of like clear motivation of these team to be a part of something special.

• 25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And in terms of where you guys are now, so you have this massive influx of kind of small businesses and activity for the PPP program. How do you think that kind of positions you guys moving forward? Is this something where you'll kind of continue to help these small businesses and there'll be some ongoing support? Is it something where you're kind of dependent on what the government programs are? Just talk through kind of how you see the relationship with those 100, 120,000 small businesses moving forward.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So PPP for us is just another loan product. So we're a marketplace and we've got a lot of loan products and some come and go. And so right now, you know, it's PPP is one of the products that we offer, but we offer other SBA loans, lines of credit, term loans and so on. So those businesses that we helped get a PPP loan, there's other things that we're, that we want to help them with. Number one is we have a cash flow product. It's kind of like a QuickBooks Lite where it pulls their bank data each day and it gives them cash alerts. So it cashes up and cashes down, all invoicing management, bookkeeping, things like that to help them, you know, preserve and manage cash. So that's one thing that we've got a lot of those customers that are, that are finding benefit in that product.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  The second thing is, is that, you know, with those customers, we are going back to them and making sure they are aware of other loan products that are available. In case they need another loan for growth or other reasons down the road to be able to help them secure other types of financing. And, and so, you know, it's really, it's, we make money through our lenders. We're trying to do everything we can to add value to those business owners to, to build a relationship of trust. That when they need financing, they go to Lendyo.

• 27:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And do you see a world where eventually you'll help on the equity side as well? Or is it pretty much debt is really kind of the sweet spot? And you see that as like the number one best way to help the small business?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  So because we started with equity financing and I have nightmares, I even start twitching a little bit when I think about getting back in equity. And there's reasons for that. And the couple of reasons why, number one is with equity capital, there's no formula. In other words, if you're investing in a business, the types of business you're going to invest in will depend on how you feel that day, whether you connected with that entrepreneur, how your 401K is doing. And it's so, it's so subjective, right? And there's no way to build, you know, A plus B equals C. And you can do that every single time. And the second

• 28:12Speaker 02

  thing is, is that business owners, like raising capital is just, it's a relationship thing. It's a challenge. It is who you know. And then third, only about 1% of businesses actually raise venture capital or angel capital. And, you know, I'd prefer to focus on the 99% of Main Street America that needs, you know, debt financing. So for a bunch of those reasons, will probably allow someone else to go and solve that problem.

• 28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And then in terms of kind of future plans for Lendio itself, you'll kind of continue to service these small businesses with various types of debt products. Talk a little bit just about how does this affect or position you guys from a headcount standpoint moving forward? How do you think about kind of growing the business? It's become quite popular for, you know, versions of fintech companies to want to go public or, you know, kind of do all kinds of things that maybe over the last 10 years hasn't been as popular? How do you kind of just view building the business? So not necessarily serving the customers, but like you have to build a business and you're responsible for employees. How do you see that evolving over time?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it all starts with, you know, building a marketplace that's the best, most efficient way to get loans for business owners. And then there's a bunch of things that we can do to build off that. So if you start with that foundation, which is a very difficult foundation to build and start, and marketplaces are challenging in themselves, but we think about then, okay, we've got two customer bases. On one side, we've got financial institutions. On the other side, we have small businesses. How do we build a relationship with them that will last a long time? So on the small business side, I talked about our Sunrise product is helping them with cash flow and helping them with bookkeeping and invoicing. And we have a really high,

• 30:05Speaker 02

  you know, retention rate there and some exciting... And what I love about that is that we turned it into a one-time loan application to what I call an always-on application, meaning we can alert you the minute that you're qualified for a loan down the road. You're just running your business. We're helping you run your cash. And all of a sudden, we say, "Hey, you're getting an alert on your phone. You're qualified for a $50,000 loan. Click here to take it," because we already had access to that cash flow data and to add more value that way. On the flip side of the business, with our lenders, we've never seen in history, in the history of financial institutions, a more urgent demand to go digital.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Most of these banks, they realize no one wants to go into the branch anymore and fill out a piece of paper and an application. They all want to apply online and they want to do it through technology and things like that. So a lot of the technology we have built has, we can go to our lender base as well and deliver technology that way. So, and there's a lot of other pieces to it. My point is, is we feel like it's an enormous market. It's very inefficient. There's a very large opportunity. We're growing 75%, you know, to 100% year over year. So if we keep that up, then that'll create optionality for us to be able to decide

• 31:32Speaker 02

  where we take the business.

• 31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Where can people go to find more about Lendio or find you on the internet?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so lendio.com. It's free for small business owners. We make our money through lenders. And then on Twitter, at Brock Blake is where you can find me.

• 31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I wrap up every episode asking the same two questions and then you'll get to ask me one to finish up. The first question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Wow. A business book or any book?

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever, whatever you want.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  All right. Um, I'll, I'll probably take, I'm going to take a personal, a book that's means is near and dear to my heart. And it's changed my life. Um, is the Book of Mormon. Um, and so I'm going to take that one.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Because it, it helps, it has, there's been nothing that, as I've studied, um, I'm a religious person. And I've studied a lot of different things and, and there's been, and what I love about that book is that it, um, there's, there's promises to it. Well, it, it gives you guidance on why we're here and where we're going, the whole adage of where we came from, why we're here, where we're going. Um, and it, and studying it each day gives me a lot of peace in my life. Um, and so that, that book, uh, and would, would be my, be my selection.

• 33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that I've noticed is, uh, the books that people think were the most important in their life have a lot to do with when they read it. Do you remember the first time, how old you were, kind of where you were in your life when you read it?

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, um, you know, I, I, I heard about it or other things like that, but where it really came to life for me was my freshman year of college.

• 33:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it, um, it's crazy to me, uh, right in the like 16 to 25. There's a lot of people who that seems to be the age when they read something and it can be a religious text, it could be fiction, nonfiction. You know, philosophical, whatever it is, but it just, it resonates and, uh, and some of it's probably nostalgia in some cases, some of it is they took a specific learning. And some of it is, you know, like the religious texts where they continue to read it on a daily basis. And it's kind of stuck with them to their life. So it's, uh, it's cool to hear that story.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  And you're looking for answers, right? You're trying to figure out what's, what is all this stuff mean? Why are we here? You know?

• 34:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so I had somebody come on the podcast once and he very intelligently said that every human will ask the same two questions in their life. One is what happens when we die? And the second is, are we here alone? And so my second question's more fun, which is aliens. Are you a believer or a non believer?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Uh, I believe that there is life on other, on other planets. I don't know if it's the form of aliens. Or, or if there are other earths out there or other things like that, but I, I do believe there are other spheres that, uh, that there are, that there's life, signs of life.

• 34:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  I don't know if they're kind of green Martians, but.

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The green men, I don't know if I'm sold on, but, uh, but intelligent life, I think that, uh, it's just too big. It's gotta be there somewhere. Right?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Yep. I agree. Amen.

• 34:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, you could ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  So, um, for you, like, what was your favorite interview that, that you've done? Or the, whether that's been on a podcast or just like an, an experience where you've sat down with someone and he was just like, this was incredible. Who, who was it? And what was the topic?

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So people are gonna like revolt when I say this. It's nobody I've ever talked to on the podcast. Uh, the, the podcast is, um, it's great. And I meet amazing people and I get to hear some really amazing stories. But I do think that there's this sense of, uh, um, some people are very guarded and, uh, they don't want to be vulnerable because they know a lot of people are going to listen to it and things like that. And, uh, in person, it used to be a little bit better. Remote is even harder, right? Because then it's like, uh, kind of you're talking into the portal that is your, uh, your computer or whatever. Uh, but the best conversations I've ever had are with complete strangers. Like, you know, I can think of a couple off the top of my head. Uh, you know, when I was in Iraq, I met a kid.

• 35:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Who barely spoke English and just like seeing that viewpoint or um I was with my wife in Bulgaria where she's from and just met somebody who spoke. You know, English and just kind of again getting their viewpoint or being on a train in Italy and some guy happens to sit down next to us who. Is a restaurateur in uh in the United States and he starts talking about kind of his life and. And those are the stories I think that are like really, really interesting. Um, some of it's probably a fascination with like. People who have a story different than your own, right? Um, and then also two is like everyone always focuses on. The most successful people, the richest people, the people who kind of accomplished uh more than everyone else and it's just like aspirational.

• 36:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell me how you did it or you know, kind of tell me your story. Uh, but I tend to think that many of the people with the most interesting stories are the people who. Maybe aren't the most successful, right? They're the people who are kind of still in the story. Um, and so I I don't know if I could pick one, but it's. Those types of situations uh to me are like incredibly rewarding, which uh almost seems like um. You know, it's counterintuitive or blasphemous for somebody who spends so much time talking to people on a podcast uh to say, but for sure that that would be the answer.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Totally get it. Can I ask one more?

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Come on, one more. So what uh you know, each of us go through these times where we're we're thinking at something, there's a topic, there's a cause, there's something that is. Consumes our thoughts that we're passionate about that, you know, in our comp, when we, when we. When we aren't forced to talk about something else, we choose to talk about this topic. What is that for you right now?

• 37:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I I think it's probably something around like financial education, right? And and I say that mainly because um. To me, it's just the one thing that uh we can give to lots and lots of people. It's not controversial at all and it probably can have. A significant, if not the biggest, impact on someone's life, right? And and it's just this idea of, I think a lot about um kind of education and knowledge is the. Equalizer, right? So you, if you look at something as simple as just uh, hey. Yes, you should save money to a point and then you should invest the rest. Right. And so like have your rainy day fund, but investing is how you will not only protect yourself

• 38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  from all sorts of things around inflation, et cetera, but also like that's how you're going to grow your wealth. And rather than trading your hours for money and you know, all these kind of like very basic timeless financial education. You know, kind of learnings or lessons, uh, they're timeless for a reason. But what you start to realize is there's probably 50%, maybe more of the country. If you went and you sat down with them, like they don't know this stuff, right? And it literally is just a lack of knowledge. And then you explain it to them and they see the world differently. Right. And so, you know, again, most of people who come on the podcast have been fortunate enough where like somebody along the way taught them that. Right. And whether it was literally, they just happened to stumble upon an article on the internet or a parent or a friend or whatever.

• 39:03Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that's the one thing of like, if we could get everyone to understand kind of the basics. One, you probably have a lot fewer problems in society, just around like people wouldn't go and get into, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and kind of all this like crazy stuff that creates these chain reactions. But then also too, like you literally can improve the quality of somebody's life. And that doesn't mean somebody's going to go from, you know, hey, I make minimum wage to now I'm going to be a multimillionaire. But it does mean that can you help that person over a 20 year period have enough money so that they can actually retire when retirement comes. Right. And like, I think a lot of people get lost in this like, oh my God, you don't have a mansion. That must mean you didn't do well in life.

• 39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, no, actually for the majority of people, like retiring on time is a, like a bar of like, I did the right things. Right. And if you can do it earlier than that, even better. Um, and so I just think that like, that's the stuff to me that, uh, it's so simple that people kind of like forget about it. Cause they want to, you know, have us live forever or go find aliens or like, you know, like all that stuff's fun. I love talking about it, but like the basic stuff is still the basic stuff. And, and so I think there's a big impact there. What is it for you?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Well, that, that, that, there's some, there's some depth to that, uh, your, your response. Um, and I, I agree with, I agree with that comment. Um, you know, I, right now with the election and everything that's going on, you know, I, one of the conversations that I'm having is just, um, I feel like back in the day, um, as a society, we, we all, that we, we pretty much want in the end, a similar result. And whether we were red or blue, or whatever, whatever stigma or, or label we put on ourselves,

• 40:59Speaker 02

  we would, we would look at someone across the way and say, okay, I don't agree exactly with their opinion on how to get there, but I believe in that they want the same, just very similar result in the end that I do. And so I'm going to respect their approach. Um, and, and, and I, I just am, you know, for me, it's just disappointing, a lot of my thought right now, just because of the election is just so, is disappointing with how, um, divisive the, the nation is around, you know, any topic, any, it doesn't matter what it is, we have to, you know, we have to fight over it.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  And I just would love to be able to see, you know, um, us respect, that, that's what makes this nation great, is this is United States of America and, and we, we all have different opinions and we all value their opinion, but we can respect each other's opinions and it's not always a fight. So anyways, a lot of my thought right now is just around, how do you, how do you, and I think a lot of that comes from leadership, you know, how do you unite people versus create contention and division and, um, and, um, I, I feel like it's a tough time with the pandemic and, and everything that's happened from, you know, from the, from, um, from race and, and social injustice and some of those things that.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Our nation could use a lot of, you know, healing through and I'm anxious for that to happen. So that's a lot of my thoughts right now around how do you, how do you, how do you solve for that?

• 42:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I went through an exercise with a friend, probably two, three weeks ago. I said to him, you give me a topic and I'm going to tell you both sides of the debate and not because I'm some expert on this stuff.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But just to show you, there is two sides in terms of, and it usually falls on the party lines of Republicans and Democrats, but in general, there's kind of a, you know, very divisive, extreme type view in these situations. And he was like, why do you, what's your point? And I was like, because the topics you could throw out could be super mundane, like masks, right?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's like crazy extreme views. And by the way, that's not a pro or a con, like in terms of the argument, right? Like both of the extreme sides of that argument are pretty crazy. And so it's like, I, I just think that when you get in a world where whether it's masks, whether it's the Federal Reserve, small businesses, you know, I literally said to him, I said, you could say American dream and I could show you two different sides of that, right? Which is like pretty, pretty crazy. And I do think that I'm assuming that you're about the same age as I am, in my early to mid 30s. And, you know, when you kind of look at it, it's like, there's going to be a generation where they eventually kind of come back around, right? And I think that there was, you know, probably our grandparents

• 43:50Anthony Pompliano?

  were relatively moderate, not super divisive, very kind of leadership oriented, et cetera. You get some diversion from that. And I think that you kind of then go back into more of a consolidation where people say, hey, look, like you want more moderate kind of candidates that embrace, you know, unity and all this kind of stuff and go through a cycle of that and then you get back to the divisiveness. And so like, I try to remind myself, like, we still live in the best, safest, most prosperous time in human history.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  If you like that, if you like, you know, if you watch television or anything like that, but that's my one saving grace is it, it might not feel great, but, but it's better than it ever was before, which is, is crazy to think about, but.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Amen. Amen. There's a, it's not all bad. It's not all divisive. It's not all, you know, negative. There's some amazing positive things that are happening and we're fortunate to be here. And so I don't want it to come across ungrateful. I'm just, it's more of. How do we solve some of these problems that exist and create more unity?

• 44:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, you guys are doing a fantastic job. There's a lot of small businesses who are very big fans of what you guys have done over the last six or seven months. I think you're doing just fine.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Thanks, Paul. Appreciate it.

• 45:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Brock. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. We're gonna definitely have to do this again in the future.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for all you do. You're doing some incredible work and love listening to you.