# How To Build A Media Business With Anthony Pompliano

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oGXQab1oJQ
Duration: 37 min
Language: English
Words: 7556
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/-oGXQab1oJQ

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[0:00] we pioneered something called a visual newsletter you get bullet points on news stories but it also comes with Graphics charts visuals around a story Etc it launched in February of 2023 by may we had 20,000 subscribers today it has over 260,000 subscribers two people with no employees scaled it all the way up the whole goal here is can we get to a million in Revenue per employee 2 million 5 million 10 million in Revenue per employee it's good to see you Anthony pum pomp Leana I want to start with what's one thing you believe that if you said out loud you would get cancelled for Content I host dinners

[0:37] with my wife if you come to one you will receive a list of all the people coming you'll get a link to who they are so you can do your stalking and research make it super easy to do stalking and research on top of that I propose a couple of questions but my go-to favorite is this one it tells you what they think is controversial one of the aspects that I find most interesting is someone will say something and everyone else at the table will say yeah that makes sense I agree things people think are un popular to say in public many more people agree with you then you

[1:09] realize and so by voicing it sometimes that actually elicits the positive response and then you realize hey this is a hell of you help by many people so an easy one is climate change it is obvious temperatures are changing things are in some cases getting better in some cases is getting worse but the evidence of human driven change is not nearly as compelling as many people think so it's easy to say things are changing humans are on the earth so it must be humans but when you go and talk to a number of these climate scientists probe into why exactly is it changing like explicitly is that human driven or not the evidence

[1:49] is not compelling yet I say yet because we may have a study that comes out and all of a sudden it's like bam this is exactly what it is also think of this if you take all the cars off the road or if you were to prevent all the cows from forting would the climate stop changing is it enough to reverse the trend I don't think that we have compelling evidence yet I'll try to get canceled with you right here just piggy back backing off that I was in Montreal and Montreal you go to the grocery store and you have to bring your own bag I

[2:19] bought a ton of stuff and didn't realize that I had to bring my own bag and I asked the cashier why do I need to bring my own bag and they go um well we don't want to hurt the environment which I understand but the question is plastic bags how much is that really impacting climate change the thing with data and the scientific studies is it depends who you ask one of the skill sets I think is going to become incredibly important in society over the next I don't know 10 20 30 40 50 years is can you critically think and have independent thought those two things are related many people say

[2:53] oh critical think is important is because they're worried about Ai and fake content all that but if you look at public narratives and go and read Source material and actually do some of the work yourself you start to understand there is a disconnect between some of that Source material and public narrative so you also have to be careful sometimes it doesn't matter what the truth is the public narrative is actually the thing that prevails I'll give you a great example financial markets show this all the time a company can be bad not worth buying but the public narrative is that the company is great and so for long periods of time

[3:27] the stock price can go up if you find a company and you're like this company sucks everyone else thinks it's amazing I'm going to short it at $20 a share well if it rips to a 100 you're going to lose money you're short and yes maybe eventually you are correct and the company goes to zero but the public narrative was more important in the run from $20 to 100 than actually quote unquote truth if you want to understand the minutia the details the Nuance you also have to understand does the minutia actually matter in terms of making money sometimes those two things are billin sometimes they're in direct opposition

[4:04] and that's what makes investing so hard you're canceled by the way I'm cancelled I tweeted something that went viral that's kind of related to this I want to get your perspective on if it's true or not the thing I said was we're in a newsletter bubble we are in a newsletter bubble for commodity content we are in a scarcity in a unique content vertical I'll give you two examples we do not need another uh political news hey here's what happened just the regurgitation of the events right in a newsletter there's tons of them they're actually competing so aggressively with each other that has become a commodity

[4:41] there is however room for a newsletter about politics from a very specific point of view that is not being shared in the mainstream media I know of an individual Marty bent he has a newsletter called Truth for the commoner he writes about Bitcoin r about financial markets but he also talks about politics that is a unique view on news that is being shared elsewhere in in aonez way from that perspective let's say he was only writing about politics and you said okay I can go to Politico I can see what they're writing I can go to five other political newsletters the other five newsletters in politics are

[5:19] going to overlap with politico's coverage because they're regurgitating what's happening Truth for the commoner is going have a unique view cut through the noise it will not be for everyone so a lot of times when I evaluate content newsletters media properties I ask myself is this content going to repel some large portion of people because if it is going to repel some large portion of people it will attract another large portion of people and so it's an edge it's an opinion it's a it's a perspective where I think that you're correct this over supply of newsletters just regurgitating the same content yeah that's not going to work in my opinion

[5:55] and they're acquiring users all the same way using conver bird kid or beehive boosts or meta ads and competing against each other and I'm curious in terms of paid email subscribers are they just as good as organic not as good as organic the acquisition method doesn't matter nearly as much as the quality of the content we have Bay Area times it is a newsletter focused on business Tech and finance we pioneered something called a visual newsletter you get bullet points on news stories but it also comes with uh specific visuals be Graphics charts visuals around a story Etc and so it helps you retain the information and

[6:35] frankly people don't want to read a lot they would rather just view pictures right it's why children like picture books uh same thing here um and so we have been able to grow very quickly it launched in February of 2023 by may we had 20,000 subscribers today it has over 260,000 subscribers so 12x growth in four or five months that growth has come from organic that has come from referral that has come from Paid Etc so a bunch of different acquisition channels at the end of the day if you have a product that people want they're going to open the email if you have a shitty product

[7:05] nobody wants they're not going to open it there's been so much focus and optimization in media around acquisition of audience that people forget if you want that engaged audience a year from now you got to have the right product the right quality if people do that I don't think it really matters where they find the user this leads me to another one of my spicy takes which is open rate doesn't matter to me open rate is like when you think of valuing a company open rate is revenue I don't care what your open rate is I care about clicks perent because that shows me how engaged it is

[7:39] what do you think about that it depends on what your business model is email specifically if you are doing brand awareness ad campaigns that's your model for monetization you don't need anyone to click all you need is be able to open and look at the ad it is increasingly harder to do that as advertisers get more data driven and direct resp response oriented if you have direct response advertisers then you absolutely need clicks the whole point is how do you drive the ROI a lot of people talk about founder market fit or product Market fit I think about content Advertiser fit and audience Advertiser fit if you look at Bay Area times or any

[8:16] of our other media properties we turn away advertisers all the time I sent an email this morning somebody want to offers a ton of money for our media property as an Advertiser and I just said to him look I don't think this is going to convert it's more important to build a long-term relationship with the right people and for words spread throughout an industry that every time I advertise in that specific newsletter it works that is way more valuable to me than a single ad campaign that might be worth you know 10 $20,000 and so I think it's it's really just asking yourself based on content audience and the

[8:45] business model I'm pursuing what is my metric who's the best in the game I don't know maybe a Gora like they didn't even care about clicks right what do they care about they care about like conversion at the e-commerce point of contact right like digipay and so for them they don't care about opens they actually don't even care about the clicks all they care about is we send an email how much revenue do we drive per email how many people convert as a paying subscriber each one's different maybe a macro point that you're making is just like it's not one siiz fits all and people want it to

[9:18] be that way you have to really understand this game if you want to build something defensible and that can scale because otherwise you know if you just want to make $100,000 with an email you can do that for sure but I think that is becoming less interesting to folks as everyone's ambition increases they see what is possible uh with this delivery Channel and they want to go build bigger business 10 years ago we would have thought oh come on newsletter like that's that's dying or you can't build a big business on top of it but we were wrong every business is a newsletter business basically look every

[9:50] business is definitely a marketing business r or sales business the first email effort that I ever did was in 2018 like five and a half years now um that I've been doing doing it and I've evolved we have direct paid emails substack I've been writing that literally since early 2018 to now we have platforms on email that are just advertising there is no subscription there is no anything else people are monetizing media we have media businesses that pay based on subscribers media businesses that do advertising we have media businesses that the bulk of Revenue comes from events we have media businesses saying hey I'm going to do

[10:25] media and then I'm going to sell my own products through the distribution there's a article that came out in the financial times yesterday that is now talking about a media company that is going to monetize with a hedge fund behind it and so the reporters are going to go do primary research and investigative reporting they are going to write a report they're going to show it to the hedge fund the hedge fund is going to buy positions and then they are going to publish the report so it's almost the inverse of what short sellers have been doing and now they're going to be long Sellers and so when you think

[10:57] about this you're like okay again there's a lot lot of legal Nuance in there how are they going to recruit journalists to do this type of work like there's a lot of questions but it's very obvious people are saying okay there's a tension in media how do we monetize it people are going to continue to experiment with a whole bunch of different methods five years from now we're going to be like okay here's the ones that worked here's the ones that didn't everyone's going to go run out and pursue the ones that work Bay Area time specifically did you have the idea for the visual newsletter first and then

[11:25] you were like how do I apply that to Tech business news this was not my idea somebody else was like Hey I've started this newsletter they actually reached out to my wife Paulina uh to interview her she sent it to me and was like this is pretty high quality as soon as I saw the first issue I was like this is a grand slam as long as it's scales and scale means you got to do it every day we're going to be in your inbox every morning got to keep the quality you got to figure out how to begin to monetize it stay disciplined and do those things

[11:54] over and over again for years without losing enthusiasm I reached out out to him I was like look I think this could be very valuable I think that there's a specific path here you write it every day we can do everything else he said let me think about it he he was not just like let me jump in and have a partner which is like a green flag from a partnership perspective if he would have been like yeah let's go today I'm ready to me I would look at that as a pink flag let's call it yeah on one hand I'm like hey let's get going we're losing

[12:22] days on the other hand the longer you play this game the more you realize that uh you only want to have Partnerships with people who actually want to be in the partnership I can be pretty compelling I've been doing this a long time I'm persuasive but if your heart's not really in it let's figure that out now versus six months from now when you're like ah the persuasiveness has weared off now we're in the grind of the day-to-day why did I do this well like we just wasted six months and it's not going to end up working I want to find long-term Partners in these businesses

[12:52] and make sure that we're both double opting in kind of like marriage right like till death do us part uh in sickness or in health like we're in this together and so what you end up finding uh with B area times it was just me and him from February until two weeks ago there was no employees there was no anything there's not very many people who have had any degree of success that are still willing to do something like that our partner in Bay Area times has also had success before right he he's the founder of our company it it's a known company in his industry like it's

[13:24] pretty legit and uh he writes the email every single day personally right and so two people with no employees scaled it all the way up and then we went and we've hired the first salesperson after almost a year of just us two with no employees doing this now we know this works let's go scale everyone wants it to be successful immediately and we didn't see subscribers growing very quickly and and figured out stuff there but we were very slow to add expenses we knew to optimize for long-term success not just short-term grab as much money as we can and then all of a sudden you know it blops and uh ends up being

[14:02] worthless like it very much can we build a news outlet that ends up being unique and has great resilience to it because that's really where the bulk of the value will end up being well yeah I'd make the argument that if it is unique it will be resilient I remember seeing Bar times a few months ago and being like okay yeah I see this working I also think the name itself Bara at times like I was like whoa was this created in 2023 or 1923 the the two questions everyone has is one was it created and is this like a small paper in the Bay Area or is

[14:33] this just leveraging Bay Area there's a bunch of tick uh tricks and t uh tips or hacks or whatever that probably will lend itself to a higher uh degree of success but then sometimes you just get the ingredients right if you're cooking like you have a recipe you did a tablespoon maybe tablespoon and a half it tastes good right who cares walk me through how you want to scale bar at times it has a quarter of a million Subs I know you're thinking big walk me through where you want to take it I try not to be super prescriptive about the long term I know that news specifically

[15:05] around business Tech and finance is ready for a new property that is able to deliver on two things one is visual content and two is a perspective on the world that Tech and business is good and not spend our time kind of attacking these industries what is beautiful about how we built this is we have deliverability we have direct relationship with these individuals take the pomp letter uh which is the subsect that I write I mean it's getting six figures of readers every day on any given day that's probably the number one article on a CNBC or a Bloomberg website Barry at times is very quickly going to

[15:46] become bigger than the pomp letter and so as that scales then it just comes down to how do you want to monetize it and so again there's ads there's subscription there's events there's uh all sorts of stuff around data Etc in the first 12 to 24 months all we try to do is launch nail the operations and become profitable what that exactly entails we don't even know yet we only have ads we have one ad slot in every email like we haven't optimized this at all but guess what we sell out all the ads right we've got revenue and we're able to say okay we've earned the right

[16:23] to think about stage two of this business the the beauty of media is it's very similar to software software is words in a database that you sell over and over again media is words in a database that you have to write every day but it only takes usually one or two people to write those words over and over and over again BuzzFeed has over, employees they do $400 million in revenue and the company's worth $50 million in the public market it's crazy Vice has I think 3,000 or 4,000 employees what are these people doing right you're telling me you got $400 million in Revenue a buzzfeed you

[16:59] probably could fire two-thirds of the staff now again it's horrible I don't want people to lose their jobs but how do you optimize the business you could cut cost significantly keep 70 80% of the revenue make it a profitable thing the question is are the businesses that already got really big able to do that or do you need the upstarts the people to come along and say hey actually we're not going to get big in terms of headcount the whole goal here is can we get to a million in Revenue per employee to 2 million 5 million 10 million in Revenue per employee you know uh if you

[17:33] think about the most profitable Media company on a per headcount basis in the world it's Joe Rogan's podcast two employees right I thought you were gonna say Warren Buffett yeah Warren Buffett is the influencer Warren Buffett created the Creator economy everyone gets mad when I say that on Wall Street but the guy is 100% a financial influencer you have the pom's letter he has the Warren Buffett's letter same thing listen the guy throws a financial conference every single year and people literally take like the financial Mecca trip to Omaha and they sit there and he basically hosts a live podcast he's an amazing investor but Warren Buffett would not be

[18:10] Warren Buffett without all of the influential components of media and interviews Joe Rogan's got two employees himself and one other person and they have a $100 million deal with Spotify they do $50 million per employee we are entering a world where there are going to be businesses with very small teams that have significant Revenue you segwayed into this brilliantly so here's my spicy take from this tweet I said solo preneurs equals solo burnouts think you're a one manwoman Army cool give it a year you'll be so fried you'll hire a team just to get a day off many solopreneurs will hire teams and be even more profitable and be happier than

[18:49] being a solo operator think software employees Capital these are all leverage points for an entrepreneur when it comes to entrepreneur ship you can definitely have an advantage in terms of less employees but I don't think that we are going to see very many oneperson companies reach significant scale measured in nine figures of Revenue the world likes black and white it likes the extremes but maybe the common format is going to be great entrepreneur small team big revenue is there a difference between one employee and five employees not really but there's a huge difference between five employees and 500 employees the solo preneur they're like okay I

[19:32] just don't want a big team I want a big Revenue which is much more feasible then I'm literally going to do it exclusively myself my point on solopreneurship is you don't want to be the single point of failure it's one of those romantic ideas Escape your 9 to-5 and be a solo preneur and make millions of dollars a year but the reality is it's about making some million dollars a year of Revenue to hire yourself out of rols to create Le there are a ton of people who operate one person businesses Lawn Care writing on the Internet or anything in between that make 500,000 a million if you want

[20:08] to make more you got to get some sort of Leverage what ends up occurring is a lot of people saw oh I can make money doing this and they ran 100 miles an hour but the person who's able to do 80 90% of financial performance in terms of profit but do it for 20 years going to make way more money so it go back to like what do you want to do and and by the way some people are literally I don't care how much money I make I just want to work by myself and not have to interact with people then great go do that but I think

[20:37] there's a lot of people who are playing the game of business who are saying Hey I want to make as much profit as I can while also enjoying the freedoms of owning my own business and those people are definitely going to have a team so who are you looking up to these days in the high leverage High Revenue world I don't really look up to anyone in that world the people I spend the most time studying are like the goats of of uh you know last 50 years who did it in the Legacy world what lessons can I learn from the deal they did the strategies

[21:05] they pursued Etc and then how do I morph those for the modern world look at Rupert Murdoch built a massive Business News Corp if you are in the media world and you don't understand how News Corp works if you don't know the story of how Rupert was able to go from basically owning a newspaper in Australia to literally owning Fox News like go study right you haven't done the work yet to really understand how that game got played and so the way he did it is not the way to do it today but a lot of the lessons a lot of the insights he had can

[21:37] be applied today for example when he went and acquired some of these uh less journalistic Publications that were more like the Tabloid type stuff he understood eyeballs pay the bills he understood where the eyeballs were doesn't mean that you or I or anyone else should go out and buy tapids but you know it' be really simple takeaway where are the eyeball today and maybe you should go try to either build or buy those types of properties too many people they're a student of now and you can learn of a hell lot by going back and looking at people over time it's so much lazier to copy people who are doing

[22:16] it now the takeaway for me from the Tabloid is like where is mispriced eyeballs and where is cheap eyeballs I can take that and within the context of email newsletters within the context of X within the context of in where are these mispriced eyeballs and then how can I put together a deal that allows me to buy some of these businesses yeah and understanding where the similarities and the differences are right rubert Murdoch rolled up a bunch of media properties in News Corp he also then tried to start a number of companies within similar verticals or kind of tangental they started book publishing like all this stuff

[22:50] entrepreneurship is the same thing like you're playing a sport and you can either be a professional or you can be an amateur an AM get rolled did you put the work in to actually understand how to win this game I remember sitting down with Anthony scaramucci this's actually a a point in my where I was like wow I went to go talk to him for the podcast got my two little microphones we're gonna do this whole thing he was not into Bitcoin but the man gave me a lecture quality breakdown of the history of currencies you think that guy's going to figure out how to invest Capital

[23:23] right of course he is when you start to look at some of this stuff you realize it's still hard even if you have the background you've done all the studying whatever but man do you have a higher probability of being successful doing the work is beneficial one thing that I do spend time is I look horizontally to peers for what they're doing and tactical things that are working less strategy and more like tactics like your newsletters growing where you getting those people from how are you creating the campaigns what what is the price Model that you're using all these different details that's where I Look to

[23:56] peers because reading a book about rer Murdoch's not going to help you understand that level of detail one of the most powerful feedback questions that you can ask any friend or anyone is what would you do if you were me I'm running Bay Area times I'm looking to grow it to 500,000 subscribers within the next four months what would you do if it was me I'm actually more careful now than I used to be about giving straightup advice maybe it's maturity maybe it's just like a a lack of um self-awareness uh or or like social awareness previously but now I'll ask a lot of questions hey what do you think

[24:36] about this or have you tried this thing what do you think would happen if you did try it like get them to just think and usually what you find is they know the answers and one of my favorite conversations is where you're basically telling someone like dude let's go you you got to speed this up and you realize they just kind of been bullshitting themselves right and then they like oh yeah you're right okay I got to get to work see you what people should be doing is motivating each other and keeping everyone focused in a world full of distractions now that you're older what are you 34 35 now 35 I'm a real old guy

[25:11] I meet 20 year olds and they're like dude now that you're older do you think you feel more comfortable asking questions now versus you're 23 when I was younger I was arrogant and like hey I know it all I wanted people to think I had the answer even when I did in hindsight you're like man that was so stupid now I'm very Unapologetic about it I was at dinner recently somebody was there he owns one of the hottest movie production companies in the country meet this guy I was like hey man I apologize in advance I got a lot of questions and I started grilling him out of my own

[25:44] curiosity when we got done maybe 20 30 minutes later this guy had the smile on his face from ear to ear he was like nobody ever gives a about the details of my business and so it was cool because then it led to a conversation where he was essentially asking hey what do you think I should be doing how could I use things from the internet to better operations or whatever if you're just like Unapologetic and you explicitly tell people like I'm interested in what you do I don't know anything about it I would love for you to teach me people are so excited to do that and they will

[26:13] end up telling you like a crash course in that industry in that thing that you just can't get anywhere else and so if you think about podcast if you think about all these different tools that we have from a media perspective that's why I enjoy it so much the podcast is the way for to trick smart people into teaching me and then I'm just like oh by the way I'll trade you for your time I'll send out the same conversation to a bunch of people and they'll all like it too but at the end of the day it's like they came on and for an hour taught me

[26:38] something how can you not enjoy doing that so just being Unapologetic about wanting to learn is kind of a superpower in a way are you a media guy now is that how you describe yourself my entire life was always the combination of two things how can I create things or provide things that generate money and how do I invest that money right I understood there are certain sectors I have a unique advantage in because I either understand how they work or understand things that other people don't the second thing is there are industries that I am very interested in and willing to do the work on that other people are

[27:12] not and then the third thing is my track record from an investment perspective is good enough for me to continue to invest the capital in the way that I have been for the last decade it will be a very positive outcome we know the Playbook let's just keep doing this for the next 30 years um and do it in a way that um we are well positioned for resiliency if we don't shoot ourselves in the foot we could build something pretty special what does special mean to you because you can easily just pack it up and sort of write pomp letter basically and live off pomp letter I tried to retire two or

[27:46] three years ago it last like a couple weeks and then I was like already doing for years now I've basically just had the idea I want the economic freedom to be able to spend time with my family my wife and I talking about this recently like you actually don't want to spend 24 hours a day every day with your wife your kids it's important to spend a lot of time but also to have some time apart because it makes the time that you're together special there's balance and for everyone it's a little bit different but having Freedom one of the things many people who work with me know

[28:11] is in the afternoons I usually go for an hour or two long walk and I'll do phone calls while I'm doing it and if I don't have phone calls scheduled I'm walking with my wife and we're talking about various things that we're doing Etc I covet that time if I didn't have the economic freedom to be able to go do that think my life would be worse I would be less happy so that was a big goal the freedom to to spend time with my family the second thing I think a lot about is how do we identify big problems that are out there in the world and

[28:41] weaponize Entrepreneurship and capitalism to solve them if you look at many of the people who have been able to do this throughout the decades usually you have to reach some degree of success and have some degree of security before you really have the ability to do that you trade off shortterm income and and revenue opportunities for long-term impact I was talking to somebody yesterday and I said what are you optimizing for in your career and they were like make more money and that's not a negative answer that's a super honest answer great you should go try to optimize to go do that I think that there's a whole generation of people who

[29:16] are waking up and being like okay at some point that tips from one extra dollar is going to change my life to one extra unit of impact is actually going to further something in the world or give you some sort of intellectual reward I'm optimizing for the ladder what does economic freedom look like to you what does that actually mean when when you're single economic freedom is just like do I have more money than I have bills you kind of get older you get a couple more responsibilities I think it then becomes like okay do I have the ability to not work for two three four

[29:48] five years and have enough money in the bank to cover expenses or something like that and then eventually it gets to like do I have a set up where I can cover expenses for a very long time and also I have capital or value in a mechanism that will allow for my wife my kids anything if I was to be hurt die whatever they will be okay as well I have friends that uh they live in super rural area $5,000 a month they're golden right and so like I don't know right now you put $100,000 in treasury bills like you're good on the other hand I have

[30:31] friends that you know they're living on credit cards and you're like dude you literally have a lifestyle that you can't make enough money like there there is no amount of money you're going to make that is going to be able to give you true economic freedom everyone focuses on the revenue side the expense side's pretty important and expenses I put expenses as both the actual Financial expenses but also the expectations or like the mental expense and so the lower your expectation the lower your need obviously it's easier to hit and so just optimize for low need High you know quotequote return and you're in a great spot I think a lot of

[31:06] us fall into lifestyle creep there's one person I have in mind the guy makes millions of dollars a year but he spends millions of dollars a year and he's literally living on debt I think you do have to do some soul searching around what is important what are the things that I want in my life figure out what economic freedom means to you I totally agree with that I know a lot of people who spend money on things you or I think are stupid but it makes them happy and I don't think of that as a negative expense because they're getting the intellectual stimulation or the positive

[31:35] benefit of it maybe they pay a really high rent because they want to live in a nice place they work from there but they don't own a car and they're just like I really don't go anywhere and so like I don't also have a Ferrari there are ways to balance things out and obviously the point of trying to drive economic value for yourself and for your family is to enjoy it but you gota figure out what do you actually enjoy doing and what are you trying to do because everyone else is doing it can you talk about what impact you want to make and how you

[32:04] think about coming up with what that is for yourself one example we've got a business in the employment sector we've helped over 3,000 people get a job in the last two years it's like wow we changed 3,000 people's lives where they were able to go get a job make more money like do all this kind of stuff we didn't start out one we're going to make an impact in people's lives right but very much it was aligned with okay we can create a capitalist driven business where we make money but we are doing it because we are serving both companies and these potential hires and so that's

[32:34] like a great way of like jobs and employment is a problem let's go try to solve that we are making a positive impact but we also have aligned it with revenue and a sustainable business there's another way to look at it which is every time we partner with someone to create a business we are essentially giving them the option for Freedom uh take a media property we have a media property we recently launched there was somebody working at a big media company now they're not and guess what they're going to make a hell of a lot more money doing it solo than working inside of that big company we are going to make

[33:03] sure that it is successful when some weird way positive impact could simply just be one person getting into the game of owning their own business where they have more unlimited upside than inside of a corporation and then there's also impact in terms of philanthropic stuff and you know plan and I spent a lot of time there trying to think through what what can we do where is you know kind of Leverage points to to kind of create positive impact but also if people go to dinner with me one of the things I will always say if you ever get the bill let's say you're at dinner and the

[33:33] Bill's $100 throw an extra three to5 dollar in it it don't mean that much to you right it means way more to the person who's receiving it than the person giving it and what you find is you just went from 20 to 25% tip that literally is the difference someone being okay I got my 20% tip between wow that person is so generous it's three to five bucks forget the gener generosity piece that person gets that extra money looks it smiles and not to be corny but the world becomes a better place cuz that person is more likely to be more kind 100% people if they did a good job

[34:08] what's the extra five bucks whatever just having that mentality as you go through life if you can get in that mentality of like help everyone around you be better get better make more money do all this stuff I promise you value will acre back to you over the long run one of the things I tell every person I meet let me know if I can ever help you when I started saying it people were like that's weird I have had people call me and be like the equivalent of like I may be going to jail what should I do all the way to people who are like hey a

[34:36] family member needs a job or anything in between and what you find is like I'm not some magician I can't solve all these problems but you know what I can do you need a job in a certain sector I know somebody who works in that industry let me introduce you to them if you have that positive impact and you continue that over the long run then value comes back to you you're not doing it because the value is going to to come back but it's one of these things where it's good for the world you feel good selfish in the way that like you feel good doing it

[35:02] but then also it happens to be good for business over the long run I have to ask what are two three four books that folks should be studying if they care about building a business on the internet unreasonable hospitality is a great one there's Bunch on rert there's also a book called the successor on Lin Murdoch rert son that tells the story from a different perspective there's a book called the 50th law by Robert Green and 50 Cent fantastic IC about overcoming fear uh obviously Peter teal 0 to1 there's a book on sulon oen sulaman is one of the wealthiest individuals that came out of Saudi Arabia the book is

[35:40] nearly impossible to get but it really explains like he just kept saying yes every time someone was like hey do you know someone who does this and he'd be like yes I can do that and he' create a business for it I've Tak a lot of inspiration from that mentality how to get rich uh Felix Dennis uh Sam Parr told me about that one I thought that one was pretty pretty good Richard Branson's book is really good the rise and fall of American growth that one's fantastic my wife wrote a book called hidden genius Nob brainer best seller all about how successful people are successful The Outsiders by Will

[36:08] Thorndike talks All About decentralized Management share BuyBacks stuff like that um Elon Musk Walter Isaak urgency how he's built the businesses that he's built um let's see the war of art have you read that never even heard of it that's a super easy one stepen pressfield the war of art is fantastic I'll give you like a weird one good profit by Charles kooch good profit is probably one of the best business books I've ever read he went back and he looked at what made great civilizations what are the Dynamics in terms of governance and economics and incentives and all this stuff then he brought it into his business and he created

[36:42] something called market-based management coch Industries is I think the first or second largest private company uh in America and he like swears by this market-based management we'll put uh pomps list in the show notes thanks for coming on I appreciate it

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