The Pomp Podcast - 287: Nathan Latka On Growth Hacking Everything

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

Nathan Latka is a serial entrepreneur with a top business podcast, an investor in B2B SaaS companies, and a bestselling author. In this conversation, we discuss the future of media, how he tactically grew his podcast to 10 million downloads, why he believes debt financing for SaaS businesses is the next frontier, and how business in a post-COVID world will evolve.  =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com  ===============================  Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link http://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

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. Nathan Latka is a serial entrepreneur with a top business podcast, an investor in B2B SaaS companies, and a bestselling author. In this conversation, we discuss the future of media, how he tactically grew his podcast to 10 plus million downloads, why he believes debt financing for SaaS businesses is the next frontier, and how business in a post-COVID world will evolve. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you guys do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to talk about our sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD. BRD was the first

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I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com or go click the link in the description. Again, pompletter.com, every day breaking down complex topics into easy to understand language. All right, let's get into this episode with Nathan. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited to have Nathan here. Thanks for doing this, man. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. For sure. Now, you're in Austin, Texas, correct? Yeah, locked down here in Austin. All right. Is the virus actually keeping people inside? I'm in New York City, and it seems like on the weekends or when it's sunny out, no one's listening. well you know the governor just you know opened basically everything so you're starting to see people come back out but it is it's this weird kind of social dynamic which is I feel healthy I feel good I want to go outside and be social but I have elderly neighbors and like what if I

walk by their sidewalk and cough and then they walk by five minutes later and like breathe something you know it's it's this like social responsibility thing which is I think keeping everyone hesitant yeah for sure for those that don't know you let's just start with with your background and kind of what you did pre-college. I think once you were in college, a lot of kind of fun, you know, cool stuff started happening. But what was life like pre-going to Virginia Tech? I was living in a log cabin in Northern Virginia, Loudoun County, before the political wealth moved from D.C. to Loudoun. So Loudoun was not exploding at this point. So I was 45 minutes west of D.C., lived in a log cabin in the woods right on Goose Creek. And I was, you know, I spent most of my

summers, either building connects, you know, the little, you know, you know, connects are Lincoln logs, Legos, or chopping wood, my house was was on a wood burning kind of fire. And so that was how we heated. So I spent a lot of my summers just chopping wood. And so that was a lot of my pre college life. Got it. And then what ultimately drove the decision? Like why choose to go to Virginia Tech? So I generally just liked architecture, I was building a ton of stuff. I wasn't kind of in the money making mindset. But my first two jobs I managed the, you know, during October in the States, we have these Halloween kind of fairs. And there was this big one locally where there's this massive slide that went down a hill, a hay slide.

And so when you go, you get in a sack and you slide down, I was the guy at the top of the slide that made sure the kids there was 10 seconds between every time they went down, so they wouldn't hit each other was my first job at like 10 bucks an hour, then it was soccer refereeing. And so I liked making money and saving. But ultimately, I love just building and construction. And so I looked at kind of who had the top programs in the country. Virginia Tech was ranked up there towards the top. So I applied and got in. But things quickly changed when I heard seniors at the school because they mix the seniors and the freshmen and architecture there. And they were going, they were looking at me going, we're graduating, we can't find jobs. and tech was, you know, battling with Cornell at the time for the number one and number two spot in the country for architecture. And I looked at, I'm thinking, why would I put myself through five years of this madness, potentially debt and not have a guaranteed good job at the end of it. And

that changed my thinking. Got it. And so when that thinking did change, you kind of went down this path of entrepreneurship and it seems like both a mindset shift, but also a mindset shift that drove changes in your action. So maybe talk a little bit about like why the mindset shift, how did that happen? Was it something you read or somebody you talked to? And then kind of what you actually put into action coming off of that mindset shift.

So freshman and sophomore years at Virginia Tech, I picked up a part-time job at West End Grill Flipping Burgers. And I had the optimization between the chicken tender fryers and there was a grill with the hamburgers. And then we did these like potato sack things with cheese on them that under a heat lamp. And I had like the shortest path possible between all three to get the meals out the quickest. And, you know, I was doing all this optimization and stuff, but ultimately like what I realized between, you know, my West End job and architecture students

who couldn't get jobs, I said, like, like, I just got to take something to my own hands. I never want to be in a position where I'm like reliant on somebody else for like income and happiness. And at that time, and even today, I correlate those two together, right? I think there's enough correlation there. So I started selling Facebook fan pages, actually. So maybe we actually share a little bit of brotherly DNA in this regard. You were ex-Facebook as well, but I was selling when the Facebook fan pages used to have long banners. It was like 300 pixels across the top and like 600 pixels long for fan pages. I would sell those custom graphics to like celebrities and I would basically cold email them and say, hey, you don't have an executive Facebook fan

page profile cover? Are you a real executive? Well, I just made that term up, but the point was it allowed me to sell these things. So I sold, uh, you know, these were, each of these were like a hundred bucks a pop. And I started selling like between 20 and 30 a month. And that started, that's kind of where my entrepreneurial bug started. I always say that, uh, there's this feeling of, uh, one excitement, but to, uh, kind of expansion of the mind when you start to see money come in from something you've built, right? Like that first check or, or that first customer, you're like, wait a second, I did X and I received Y. Like, why don't I go to X a bunch of times? So maybe talk about like, like, do you remember what that first sale actually was? Yeah. My first sale

was from a lady named Audra who ran a fan page called women oughta know. And it was a UTO. She ran her own mechanic like shop and I created her custom fan page. And I actually page 34 in the book, I put the screenshot of the invoice. It was a $700 invoice. She paid me. That was my first ever money where like, I felt like I did it myself, but then my wheels all like, I think most really good entrepreneurs are actually very lazy. So they spend a lot of time. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about the quickest way to do things so I can go back to being lazy. What that really means is the quickest way to do things. So then I could fill my time with things that I wanted to do. Right. And so I started thinking about, well, can I templatize this? Can I hire

someone on Fiverr to do it for a hundred bucks, I mark it up to 700. I started thinking about margins and my time and things like that. But that was the first moment, a $700 check from Audra. I love it. And so as you started to do this, at what point did you say, hey, look, actually, I want to write a book about my experience. Was that something you knew you always wanted to do or right out of the gate? Or did you actually kind of get further in the process and then say, now I want to write it. Well, Mr. Bone, my, I think it was 11th grade English teacher would tell you this guy, Nathan Latka has no idea how to write a thesis paper, much less has no business writing a book because I got, I think maybe a C in his English class in high school. You know,

the book was, the book was driven because publishers were putting their, their writers on my podcast and they saw the book volume that I drove because the Amazon rank shot up when I released the interview. So they pressured me to write a book because they knew I could sell. That's a whole, that was a whole different sort of animal, but like pulling forward from the fan page stuff, I realized that the way to make more money was to build software, to enable Audra to build her own Facebook fan with a drag and drop platform. So you know this world well, this was the age of Involver, Wildfire, Vitru, Buddy Media, these drag and drop fan page kind of app builders. And that's the space I played in with my first SaaS company, Heyo.com, H-E-Y-O, which, you know, we raised some venture capital for, we grew it to about $5 million in sales and I sold it in 2015 to our number one competitor called Vodago. So that's still live. Now, once I sold that, then I got into the podcasting game, which led to the book.

Got it. And so as you're doing that, like why sell the business, right? It's growing $5 million in sales. For most people, like a SaaS company would love to get to that point. Most kind of die before they ever get there. What was kind of the logic or framework you used in actually selling the business? Well, so see the way I said it, you know, we raised venture capital. I sold at 5 million sales. Your natural thought was, oh, this must've been growing. No, no, it actually wasn't growing. We had a massive year in 2012 with about a million and a half of sales. But then over time, each year, we were declining about 6% to 7% every year. And one of the biggest mistakes I made was that prime year, 2012, when Vitru, Wildfire, Buddy Media, all these guys exited for

hundreds of millions of dollars, we got a smaller offer. It's on page 243 in the book from iContact for $6.3 million. And I wanted to sell the business. I owned 60% of it. So that would put a lot of money in my bank at 21 years old. The problem was I'd raised 2 million from VCs and not a $6.5 million exit on 2 million raise was not interesting to them. So they blocked the deal from going through. And so I just kept trying to build the business, but we missed like with any company, like timing is everything. 2012 was the year of Facebook apps. We should have sold that year. We declined, hey, oh, steadily year after year after that. We passed 5 million in sales when you add up all the sales

over the life of the business, which was about four and a half, five years. I was 19 to 24 years old and then sold it in 2015. Really at a, Pop, I'd call it a discount, flash sale. I just wanted to end and move on to the next thing

because my biggest value in life at that point was not building a business. It was the opportunity cost of my time. No kids, single, can be anywhere. You got to do something bigger than a Facebook fan page builder. Yeah, I actually know some of the folks from iContact.

It was in North Carolina. Ryan Alice, right? Yeah. Yeah. And before he went out to San Francisco. Yeah. Awesome. So, okay. So, and then help us understand. So once you write the book, what's that process look like? Do you just sit down one day, drink some coffee and bang out the whole book? Or is this kind of an iterative process that took, you know, months and months? So back to my point about being efficient, I was not going to do a book unless I could reverse engineer a bestseller before I even wrote a word, before I even came up with a fricking title. And so I started thinking like,

what, what makes a bestseller? Well, number one, this is kind of an ego check, but also the market responds better when you're publishing a book by a major author, major publisher, right? So I want to like random house or like one of these number one folks. And I said, well, how do I get them to say yes? So I got myself with an agent named Jim Levine. He's really the best. I mean, he published Ray Dalio's book principles. He published, you know, he's, it works with Satya Nadella at Microsoft on refresh. He does all the big books. So I was able to get him as an agent and what I did to land him as an agent because he's not, he barely takes meetings. As I pre-sold, I actually had invoices for copies of the book. And people, you might go, well, wait, what was the book titled? You know,

what was the book about? What I did is I messaged all the CEOs I had on my podcast. So I'd had about 400 at the time. I pinged them all and said, hey, I'm writing a book. It's going to be a massive bestseller. I'll put a page in there about you and your metrics and a case study about your company. if you agree to sign this invoice to buy a hundred copies at 15 bucks a piece. So there's $1,500 invoice signed and I had a stack of these. So I basically had like $30,000 in pre-sales. I took those pre-sales to my agent and he said, Oh my God, I've never had an author come to me with signed invoices on a book that doesn't even have a title yet. He then took those to about seven authors and publishers and those publishers of the 70 emailed three wanted in-person meetings in New

York, went into board meetings, had the conversation and got a book deal with Random House. And the trick with that negotiation was you want the publisher to give you an advance that's much larger than the average. The average advance today is probably three or four grand. You want to get something between like $200,000 and $800,000 because then the publisher can't ignore you. If your book flops, it's a massive write down for them. They can ignore you if it's only a $5,000 advance. You can fail. So we got a big advance. It was larger, I'll just say larger than 150 grand. And that made the publisher push for all the press and PR that I got when the book launched. And that's kind of how I started to reverse engineer a bestseller. Got it. And what

do you think is like the biggest takeaway? So those that haven't read the book, like if they go read it, what do they walk away with from like a value standpoint? Yeah. I mean, the book is really look i'm like the amazon reviews i think really are actually pretty accurate the most common comment i get is this feels like an updated four-hour work week which is look it's a big compliment i'm a big fan of tim i'm a big fan of everything he's doing and four-hour work week was massive in my childhood in terms of reading it and growing up along with rich dad poor dad but like the big takeaway is there's just a ton of screenshots in the book of like how i did things like launched my podcast on patreon and got a thousand people paying 10 bucks a month you know

the updated version of that would be like how you grew your sub stack, right? Or there's all these kinds of tools. So like, you know, how I launched and how I wrote software without having to know code using a site called TopTow. I basically put like all these like growth hacks and email scripts of how I sold my company and all this stuff in the book, how I grew the podcast to, you know, large sponsorship deals. I put it all in the book. And so people can like take out only two or three pages and get a lot of value without reading the whole thing. That's really the big takeaways. Again, how to make money without starting with a lot of capital. For sure. And the book is called How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital, which is a pretty catchy title there. And obviously, it kind of leads to this idea of, I don't think you wrote the book as a personal finance or finance education book, but that's really to some degree what you're showing people, right, is how to use their time, which is an asset, how to use a lack of capital, which some would look at as an obstacle, to your advantage and to build a sustainable business that can drive income and

multiple streams of income, right? That's right. I mean, the book for me was really an exercise in documenting what I had done between the ages of like 15 and 25, right? How I, you know, college, how I launched the company, how I raised capital, how I used the capital, how I grew sales, how I sold. But ultimately for me, I don't know if you played sports in college or guys, I don't know if you guys listen, you've played sports in college, you guys on YouTube and iTunes, but I'm extremely competitive. So like all my friends, you know, they wrote a bestselling book and this is totally the wrong reason to write a book. But I was like, I wonder if I can write a book. I wonder if I could do this. I'm like, well, how do I get leverage? And so the way I got leverage is

every time I had a podcast guest on my podcast that had a book, I would take a screenshot of their Amazon rank before I released the episode and a screenshot of the Amazon rank right the day it released. And I'd email them and say, Hey, released your episode. Love to see that it's selling books, your Amazon ranked increased by like 30,000 spots. Right. And then they sent that to their publishers and their publishers said, Oh my gosh, this guy, Nathan can sell. And that's how I, that's how I kept leverage. A lot of people go into book publishing as they try and like bag an agent to represent them on their book deal. I wanted to, again, have the leverage first, get the distribution, build the distribution channel first, and then pump the product through

it. Yeah. And I think that's kind of where the future of media is going, right. Or at least not even the future. I mean, it's basically happening now where we used to see companies build products and then go try to find their customers or find the distribution. And they would test a bunch of stuff on the distribution side after the product was built. Now what you're seeing actually is the reverse where people go build out the distribution, they build out big audiences, and then they figure out what product I want to sell this audience or kind of this, these eyeballs, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how you think about that shift and how that's changed what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. The number one thing I spent time on at

was trying to convince affiliates that our 30% cut we would give them is worth them like emailing our list about us. And I hated it because I was doing it over and over and over. But what these affiliates had done is they built great distribution channels in the form of a blog and from an email newsletter, whatever, YouTube, Twitter, you name it. I said, you know what? What's much smarter to build for my next thing, this was in 2015, is dominate, like pick a space that you love, right? and then figure out how to build a dominant distribution channel in that space. And then based off, you know, reviews on iTunes or feedback, you're getting your email replies, you'll, you'll almost fall into products. You can sell to that space that add them value,

but what's way more valuable than any product, in my opinion, again, is the distribution channel. It's the reason like we've launched, I can't, there's not one in distance here, but we've launched like a magazine for my focus now is SaaS software entrepreneurs. We launched a magazine. We have the book, we have the podcast, and all these things allow me to now sell my main thing, which is debt into SaaS companies. But the distribution has to come first, I think. Yeah. So talk about that a little bit more, right? As you started to build the distribution, you started with the podcast first, you had the book, and then maybe walk us through just kind of sequentially what you did and why you made each one of those decisions. Was it something

that you learned from kind of the past work you were doing? Or was it somebody came to you? Like, Like help us understand kind of what drove each one of those decisions. So the pod, let's start with the podcast. I sell the company in 2015, August of 2015. I launched the podcast. Biggest question. First off, like besides like the basic stuff, like what microphone do you use? Right.

By the way, I have like a home studio that costs me about 30 bucks. So these it's quick to put together. The second thing is though, how do you start getting big guests on the show? And so what I, cause I had no show. So what I did is I emailed about a hundred people I wanted on the show and basically said, Hey, I'd love to do an episode with you. we will have a million downloads by the, by, by winter, basically we're launching August. And so what they heard was we have a million downloads, but I said, we will, I have the

emails. We will have a million. That confidence allowed me to get about 10% of those interviews actually done. So I had 50 pre-recorded before I launched the show. And then I used a little bit of kind of social dynamic, I guess you'd call it to get these people to market the show. So what I said is, Hey guys, I'm picking 10 of these to go live on with on launch day. It'll be the 10 of you that first agreed to email your list about your episode And so I basically had 10 people sending out emails at about 3 million emails going out on day one for the podcast Which just shot us way up number one in the ranking you take that screenshot to get new guests And so I just kind of I call it elephant bumping

You're just connecting and you're using other people's audiences and delivering value into your audience And so that bumping got us to more than a million downloads by that winter. Today, the show has more than 10 million. And, and I look at, you know, I look at the podcast almost probably, I think maybe how native Americans looked at corn, right? It's a, it's a thing to trade. It's like bartering. It's like, you know, I have each week, seven inventories of corn, one interview a day. And you can like trade this for all kinds of things, Whether it's a keynote at the person's event that you're interviewing or an email blast. I mean, there's so many things you can trade for.

But I use it to trade. And then that, you know, built into the book. The book then built into the magazine, which we now, you know, we launched the magazine. It now ships monthly to about 10,000 CEOs. And they all pay for it. It's $29 an issue. So maybe the most expensive magazine out there these days. and then from that I learned I just listened to what entrepreneurs wanted and a lot of them said

Nathan we don't want to get diluted from VCs we really like are we have a great business with health unit economics why can't we get debt debt basically cheap debt so I said oh my gosh that's what I should start doing I should start loaning money to SaaS companies so they can keep their companies as they scale and that's what I'm doing today I think we'll deploy probably anywhere between 15 and 20 million in capital into SaaS companies over the next 12 months as debt got it and so uh i gotta ask about the magazine right that's not exactly the thing that most people would say hey let's go start a magazine given uh pretty much every magazine is either struggling or shutting down uh how did that come together so the way this came together is i so

when i did the book deal random house published on a forum that they had signed me up to do the book deal this form is also the forum that a lot of tv execs watch because they'll immediately license the right to the book if they like the title and the personality. And so I got, you guys wonder how people get reality shows. This is how it happens. I got blasted with about 30 emails from production companies the day Random House announced that they signed me to this book deal. From that, I basically picked one of these production companies to work with. They then said, you need to hire an agent. So I had WME, UTA, CAA kind of battle a bit, ended up signing with CAA. That signing allowed me to do a lot of deals, connect with a lot of

media personalities. And one of the things that I did, this would have been back when Meredith was buying time, fortune, and money. Those assets from, and now the name is totally escaping me, from the time, it's the times, whatever. Meredith bought the time, basically. And so those three assets I got in the deal, the backend deal room of, and I saw the P&Ls for fortune and money magazine and time. And I said, oh my gosh, if you build a magazine the right way, it can be massively profitable. I mean, almost 80% of Fortune's EBITDA at that time, this would have been back a year and a half ago, so 2018, came from their women's event. Not like all their events, their Forbes top, or sorry, their Fortune top women event, because each ticket was $10,000

and the minimum sponsorship was 500 grand. I mean, they were doing a lot of millions. We'll just call it a lot of millions from that. So I said, wow, there's a space to launch a magazine here after I saw these unit economics. And so we launched the magazine and the economics for us just work, right? I mean, I spend $1,500 a month putting the magazine together, which is really transcripts and visualizations of my podcast. So the content's already created. You put the magazine together. I then pay about $3 an issue to produce it and ship it domestically in the US, right? So my all in cost weighted average is like four ish bucks, we sell for 29. And then we upsell on the back end

of a $29 magazine sale, a raw data Excel version of the data we put in the magazine for founders, VCs and analysts to analyze. And so our average cart value at checkout for the magazine is actually about $78 with the upsell. And so that's why I tested it in one month, it was profitable. And I said, we got to keep building this. And that's why the map that's what continue to do the magazine today. And then obviously to get, you know, 10,000 plus people to subscribe to the magazine, uh, you're probably not calling all 10,000 people. Maybe talk a little

bit about what was like the tactical thing you did to start to really drive those subscription numbers. Yeah. So the subscription numbers on the magazine come down, you know, it's nothing too crazy, but it's like when you have this piece of paper on your desk, other people ask about it. right so you know andreessen for example you know many people there read the magazine and it would sit on their desk in their lobby on their sandhill road office other founders when they're waiting like come in they check on the receptions they sit down they'd wait they'd pick the thing up off the coffee table reading go wow if andreessen's reading this i should too they would then sign up on the spot on their phone right it's you know via the link right it's because we put the link

basically there's a call to action on the cover that says to get your copy of the magazine or so don't miss out next month go to nathlamaka.com forward slash magazine and then boom they would sign up so that was one strategy just word of mouth the second was one person at a company would grab it and then i would look them up on linkedin using clearbit data and see that they actually have you know a thousand people on their company and i'd offer to ship them a thousand a hundred as a test they would then get the hundred they like it and then they want to basically consistently order call it 40 or 50 every single month and so that's how we kind of slowly grew that and now what i'm doing this is kind of how these things leverage together is i am basically

working with airports like right now pomp is the moment where i am locking down all of my airport distribution so my book placement at the front of every airport shop my magazine placement on every magazine rack why because nobody else is buying airport placement right now no one's traveling. So I'm locking all this stuff down for the next decade right now, using the book sale through data, plus the magazine sale data, the margin data to lock these things down. Makes a, it makes a ton of sense. And it also feels like, um, you know, once you figure out one piece of it, so whether it's the podcast, the book, the magazine, uh, maybe 70, 80% of the knowledge can be ported over to the other content types. And you've got to figure out some tweaks

here and there, but would you say that that's right? Like most of it is the same thing around, making sure it's profitable unit economics and the distribution. It's just a different content type you're pushing. Yeah. So again, the hard part for most content creators is not creating the content. They love creating the content. The hard part is finding a content creator that also knows how to market and not only market, but systematize. We were talking about this before the show. What I like to do is I only record two days a month usually, but there are 15 minute episodes with a five minute break. So it's 20 minutes total for one episode to record. I'll do three an hour and I'll record from 9am to 6pm. So I'll knock out like 25 episodes in a day.

And my thinking is always if I only work that one day, right a month, how could just that audio data and the video with my guest create a bunch of other assets. And so there's a whole system where that one audio and video file then gets transcribed, then goes through a designer to go into the magazine it also by the way gets chopped up and now put on youtube it also gets chopped up and a segment gets put on the previous episode on itunes to to foreshadow it to drive you know additional like addictive habits from listeners it also goes into an amazon echo feed that's split up by search it goes into the email it goes to get latka.com via a thing called a spectrograph where audio data is put into an excel format so like that one day i now have so much leverage on

that one day, that I think is the opportunity for most content creators today is with the same time input. How can you generate 20 X, the returns 20 X, the audience with that same time input from you recording a two hour episode or me recording a 20 minute episode. For sure. Um, and let's talk a little bit about, uh, you have this SAS database and, uh, it's all over kind of your Twitter bio and stuff. And there's probably passive traffic that comes through that, but maybe talk just like what was the genesis of the idea for creating an actual database? And how do you think about that fitting into all of the other content and, and, uh, really educational materials that you're creating? Well, so the, the, the current podcast today didn't start out that way. So going back

to, again, my launch in 2015, the first question you always have is what do you name your podcast? And for me, I'm a results kind of guy. So I just looked on Google trends and I said, what's the number one most searched term for podcasts? And the answer was people just search the top podcast i'm like well heck i'll just name my podcast the top podcast it's like i get so much organic traffic just because i named it the number one search term and so now i own that term so you're laughing because you're like oh my god this is like so stupid it's like simple stupid but that was it and so what i learned was the episodes that started doing the best were not the ones with like an instagram influencer it was the ones where i was putting on a bit of a show

And what I mean by that is I would interview a founder and ask them questions that made me very uncomfortable. Like what equity do you still own of the company? What was your last run valuation? What's your churn, CAC, burn, ARPU, growth rate. And this would create very dramatic cinematic events on the podcast. And this entertainment value is actually what drove more listeners. There's a lot of very smart people. When you listen to them, to them talk, they're not entertaining. So they can't hold an audience. But if you can, if you can earn the right to educate by entertaining first, you take off. And so I started just doing this same format over and over. And eventually when I had about 500 episodes published, people were messaging me

or putting on iTunes, Nathan, you have so many shows recorded, where do I start? And I said, oh my gosh, I got to make these searchable somehow. And that's when we basically came up the spectrograph, which converts the audio file to about a thousand images. And it will know when the CEO says we passed, you know, a hundred million in revenue, it knows the CEO said a hundred million. It puts that as a data point on get latke.com, my SAS database. And if you click that data point in the database on the website, it will play the voice segment where that, that data point came from. So, so that's how that all coalesced from podcast to database. Got it. And then you take that database and you basically sell a subscription

model to anyone who wants to get access to all of these, what really is hard to find metrics or granular metrics for these businesses. That's exactly right. And this is like, by the way, not a popular thing. You know, we have a lot of CEOs who come on or their PR firm reaches out because we have a show doing very well. They'll say, we'd love to have our guest on, but they don't, the CEO is not prepared. And so I hit them hard and they're like, oh my gosh, PR team, don't let Nathan publish that. I shared way too much, but I'll publish it like seven times. It was so good. All right. And so this doesn't make them happy. And then they end up complaining to the press and the press writes really nasty things about what I'm doing. But ultimately, I think

the software environment overall appreciates that I've got a database of 1500 companies that are all private that share their data. A lot of people, you know, Zoom, I had Eric Wan on with Zoom 18 months prior to IPO. The data I got from him was not published. The unit economics of Zoom was not published anywhere else. So our traffic, like right when there were rumors about Zoom potentially filing their S1, the traffic on the Zoom interview shot through the roof because it was really the only source founders had direct from Eric with unit economic data. And so, you know, that's kind of why I kept doing it and how I kept building the show. Got it. And what do you do when they complain right like i've had people come on and literally call me up and say hey can

you edit this out uh yeah they're freaking out etc how do you handle that when i record with somebody and they know it's public and then they email me and moan about it i just sense total weakness i think come on like yeah you didn't sound perfect but like it was a moment when you weren't scripted. And it was the truth. And like, no, I'm not getting it out. The excuse I, and this doesn't make people happy, by the way, look, a lot of people do podcasts because they want to make friends with the person they're interviewing. I generally don't do that. In some cases, yes, but generally my responsibility is to the audience, not the guest. And so I don't edit these. And the excuse I'll use is, you know, I'm basically a one man shop with 30 contractors.

I'll just say, you know, you know, my publishing team will evaluate editing the episode, but it's unlikely they will. They never give guests control over the final version. And so, so I've never edited an episode. I've published all of them. We have a lot of cease and desist, but they don't go anywhere because again, every founder signs the waiver that says we own the rights to the audio before they schedule. Yeah. And I guess part of this too is as you, as you think about this, like are there elements that you can use the data for whether it's investing or other applications than just putting it in a database and selling a subscription to it or is it really just hey we've come up with a very kind of clever unique way to take that audio put it into a database and the

best way to monetize that is by selling those subscriptions. So that was the first piece but what I started realizing is a lot of these founders would then rely on me for benchmarking data which then they said, Nathan, can you help me with my board deck? Can you help me raise? Can you help me sell? And so I helped these companies, you know, I would, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of deals, right? Whether it's raising, selling, whatever, buying other companies over like between 2016 and 2018. And in 2018, I said, you know what, I should start doing some of these deals myself. So I started writing checks into VC funds as an LP and watching how the VC funds, analyze these companies to learn. And I realized, wow, I think the real opportunity here

is actually to create an, a new asset class. And what I mean by that is, you know, software today, you know, Salesforce really brought it in, I would say 20, 2007, eight ish, but there's now a standard set of metrics that every software company, private or public should be tracking, right? You know, obviously MRR growth, ARR growth, CAC, churn, ARPU, net expansion, like there's probably 20 key metrics. And if you have all those metrics for a large amount of companies, you can start generating a credit score for SaaS companies. And you can then loan against the credit score. Or if I don't do the loan directly, I can sell the credit score to a bank or to a VC firm who's running diligence on the company with the founder's permission.

And so this credit score, as you asked, is it just a clever way to create the podcast, to create a database? The answer is at first, yes, sure, to make money. But now what I'm doing is I'm using this massive data set. We're tracking about $20 billion in real-time revenue from private B2B SaaS companies via their Plaid connection to our tech stack. So we have direct access to their bank accounts. We generate a credit score, and then we help them raise capital really, really cheap based off the strength of their credit score. And that's how a lot of them are growing and keeping more of their companies via the old route, which was, again, raise VC, hope you own 5% when you go public. Yeah. And there's obviously a number of

companies that are starting to do this. And I think that it's incredibly clever because of your point about not only one, a new asset class, but also two, the ability to get the data, right? There was always data there for a lot of these companies. Now you can actually get it through a technological solution. What do you think the risk is? Or if you looked at this and had to play kind of devil's advocate with yourself, what is the thing that you're like, hey, here's where we could mess this up, or here's where it could actually be a negative thing to kind of counter all of those positive aspects of this. You try and study history, right? So you study milking and junk bonds. You study general just

debt and how debt is used in governments. And you just try and study debt historically. And so the critical things with any debt is you have to establish what your loss ratio is going to be, which is a bit of a trick question when you're raising capital. Because if someone asks you, with your loss ratio and you say, we haven't had any losses, they're going to say, well, your sample size isn't big enough. You should have losses. And if you say you have a one to 2% loss rate, which is generally healthy for people with large loan tape debt books, they're going to say, oh, well, you have one to 2% losses. It's not good. So you can't win answering that question. It's a bad question. That being said, what I'm trying to do is build

a structure where I can deploy capital into SaaS companies, you know, less than 60 seconds after they connect their bank account with our tech stack, because I can run the credit score very quick. So I don't need an underwriting team. I don't need a fancy office space. It's just a credit score. And when you add up all the private software companies in the world today, there's a lot of different estimations on what that total value might be worth. But you can just look at the public SaaS market, look at the Bessemer Venture Index. I mean, this is gonna be a multi-trillion, trillions and trillions of dollars here over the next 10 to 20 years, if software continues to eat the world, I want to be the guy that has the best data on software

business risk, which will make me the, hopefully the top source for debt into that space. And so I want to build, you know, a hundred, $200 billion debt portfolio into software companies over the next, call it, you know, decade, two decades. And do you ever have any aspirations to go outside of the SaaS companies, whether it's into e-commerce or other types of subscription businesses, or do you really feel like that SaaS niche is big enough and also kind of the sweet spot for you? The question I spend a lot of time asking myself is what is my unique advantage? Like what is the moat that I've built? The distribution moat that I currently have built is totally focused on software. The magazine, the database, the podcast, it's all software.

It's not the e-commerce show. It's not the e-commerce magnet. It's software. That's where I have just a massive advantage. So for the foreseeable future, I'm going to hyper focus on software. And by the way, there are so many great products for like e-commerce brands, whether it's PayPal cash, Stripe is now doing advances on your daily revenue. There are companies like ClearBank that have raised a lot of money that are doing, you know, two month, four month terms on your Facebook ad spend via your, you know, Shopify just launched Shopify money. You saw our friend Danko just joined Shopify full-time to help build that. So by the way, everyone's going to get into this space. You're just like AWS is going to start, you know,

doing more loans against AWS spend. This is going to be a very popular thing. What I'm going to try and do is loan money where two software companies, where there are no restrictions on how they spend it. You can spend it on people. You can spend it on your Facebook ad spend, or you can spend it on your AWS spend. But my goal is because I have the largest data set is that I can best price the software company's risk of default. And because of my best pricing algo, I can give them the cheapest price. And in this space, in my opinion, pump, because I'm not like a VC selling my network value, if you take my money, it's really just who can give you the cheapest capital. So I think this is a beautiful like thing to leverage for me, which is if capital is actually how you scale,

like that is the network effect as long as you have the asset of the data you can win and i do think debt into software is going to be a zero-sum game there will be one winner because whoever builds the most loan tape the fastest can get back leverage collateralize securitize the loans drive their costs down and pass savings on to founders what do you think uh when we get to that commoditized level like what does the price of capital become does it just get driven to zero like is there some point where it actually just goes to uh zero cost of capital well this is a little bit, I mean, why I've enjoyed our conversations and I'm trying to interview more people with traditional banking and find like FinTech backgrounds. I don't yet know the

direct correlation behind fiscal policy, let's just say in the United States and cost of software debt. Like all I know is that with a 0% interest rate, money is being pumped in the system like crazy, right? Water flows of it. So what does that mean for software debt? Well, what did Slack do? about three weeks ago, right? They raised, I forget, 600 million, 700 million or something at like point, I want to say it was like 0.5% interest rate, which they could choose to pay back or issue stock because the cost of capital is so cheap. So I just think the theory that I currently have, and I can be convinced of many different angles here. My current theory is if you continue to see federal balance sheets of governments across the world growing because

money's being printed like crazy, it's going to drastically undercut VC's ability to get meaningful chunks of private software companies because debt is going to be so cheap. Like that's my current thesis. So I'm keeping my pulse on getting more cheap capital. What that means is I will take my current loan tape, refinance it with a bank, sell the base, not sell. I still hold the paper, but sell the loans to a bank as collateral. And my cost of capital goes from 10%. I did this the other day from 10% down to three and a half percent, which means I can now loan profitably to bootstrap software companies at a 4% interest rate. SVB doesn't even do that sort of rate with an institutionally backed software company. They're still like four or five,

Libra plus like two or three. So again, to answer your question, I don't know the correlation between like federal fiscal policy and software debt, but I know there is some correlation and that's what I'm trying to study right now. Yeah. It's super interesting. I don't think anyone knows the exact answer, right? We kind of generally know what should happen, but just like we're seeing the stock market explode when the economic data is going bad. It makes no sense to me. What's your take on it? Why do you think it's happening? Well, so look, thankfully I'm a guy where like, I don't have to have, I don't have to give much thought to what other people think of me so i'll just say it exactly like it is this is this is never waste a good crisis

i guarantee you trump's cabinet when this thing started breaking out january february is thinking chaos is very good right trump created chaos in the 2016 election divide and conquer and it worked chaos can only be good now they can't come out and say we love a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of people because it can help get trump re-elected right so that's obviously a controversial thing to say. But what's happening, I mean, look at what's happening, right? Trump's cabinet generally is very, very wealthy. When you print money, right, it drives obviously, will eventually drive inflation. The winners of inflation, and you preach this, are asset holders. Asset prices go up. The losers are those in cash. I mean, we just saw Buffett yesterday, right? What did he do? Like the

airlines are getting a bailout. A lot of people are saying, well, you should buy equities right now based off what you think Trump's going to bail out because their equities will pump. What did Buffett do? He sold all the airlines, which just agreed to a massive bailout. What the heck's going on here? Well, remember, when money's being printed, cash is the loser, and nobody has more cash than Buffett. So he's looking at the airlines now potentially and thinking these CEOs are now going to act irrationally because they know they can never fail. They will always get bailed out. Well, the risk reward structure definitely changed or the incentives change. On top of that, the big takeaway I had from the Berkshire meeting

was he was saying all of the things that would make you think he is bullish, you know, never bet against America and all this kind of stuff. But there was two key points. One was he didn't strike in March when asset prices, you know, in the public markets went down 30%. So he didn't deploy capital. But then also two was he sold the airlines, right? So he was actually shedding assets rather than acquiring them. And what that told me was he probably thinks it's going to get worse before it gets better. I don't know if you took away the same thing. I don't study it as closely as you do, right? So I would kind of, my way of figuring out that answer would be to interview a lot of people like you. But I mean, look, generally speaking right now, I feel a bit

upset that so much money is being printed because I worked my butt off to save money over the past decade. Like I worked my butt off to spend less than I made to save money. And now with the, what's the federal balance sheet, like, like just money printed six and a half total balance sheet up to like 21, 22 or something at this point, over 104% of GDP. Like it makes me a little upset because it means every dollar I held, essentially you could argue because the balance sheet doubled is worth one half. So every dollar I worked my butt off to save is now worth 50 cents and and what's frustrating is money being printed doesn't necessarily benefit people like me that have saved money that own no assets like so the person

listening right now with no assets but you worked really hard to save three thousand dollars over the past decade great now that three grand is worth way less because prices will increase and so like you know you had you did a great interview with Jeff Booth and and you know I interviewed him as well. And like one of the things that I, you know, I learned from him is, and Preston Pish also articulated this, is you essentially right now have capitalism like happening at the top, at the bottom, which are let the small businesses fail. If they go out of business, go out of business. Oh, but here's like a PPP safety net, which will save some maybe, maybe, right? But it runs out in like a week. Then at the top, you have like these corporate bailouts. So it's like

socialism at the top and capitalism at the bottom, which is just, it's backwards. So, I mean, Andrew, I spend a lot of my, or sorry, Pump, I spend a lot of my time talking to people like you, Preston, like just anyone to try and understand when this thing actually breaks. When does this break? And are the current government officials, like if I'm Trump, I'm actually trying to drive a bigger wedge between the have and the have nots to create chaos because that's what's going to get me reelected. So that's what drives me crazy about all this is there actually, in my opinion, is very little incentive for governments to not print more money of course it's a it's a piggy bank why would you not print more if there's more

access do you have a good answer to this i mean look it's just incentives right like uh if they can print more they will print more this gives them an excuse to do it um there's a nuance here which is uh if you want to stop the short-term pain is actually the right decision right it's this weird thing where like long term it's really bad but short term like the reason why the stock market has recovered is most likely because the central bank actions right so like they've done a good job of stabilizing and then driving some recovery the question is is it sustainable right or will we see just another correction here in the coming weeks and then two is what is the right trade-off between the short-term pain versus the long-term benefit and vice versa i think a lot of

people who are complaining about the fed actions are saying look long term this is bad like we should always optimize for the long term rather than the short term obviously the people who think they've done a pretty good job are the people who want to optimize for the short term. So we'll see there. One of the things I saw you tweet, though, that was really kind of caught my eye was this idea that there's a lot of people who just got laid off, right? There's 30 million Americans that have filed for new unemployment claims the last six weeks, give or take. And now those people are sitting there saying, like, what am I going to do? And what you tweeted was basically this idea of like, hey, that side hustle you wanted to go do, like, go after it, right? Go acquire a new

skill like kind of take action maybe talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that right now and if you were one of those people who had just gotten laid off like what would you actually do on a tactical basis in order to kind of move in that direction yeah so so when I say like go do like that side hustle thing what I mean is is it comes down to like a core belief I have which is right now developers if I asked you does it develop like a code or a developer at Microsoft get paid more or less than an artist and a Brooklyn warehouse, what would your answer be? Developer. Developer, right? Everyone's going to say developers that you hear constantly headlines. We don't produce enough STEM engineers. Apple wants to hire people. Facebook wants to

hire people. They can't find them in the States. So developers are seeing just ridiculous salaries. The thing is when you look at AI and what can be coded, right? It's actually pretty easy to code like coding is just a, it's a, you're writing rules. It's actually very easy to automate rule writing. What's really, really hard to automate is creativity and empathy. The, the emotional side, you hear about these robotics companies, the hardest thing they have to like replicate is not like the physical movement of the elbow of on the robot. Cause that's easy. It's making the robot cry when the human it's talking to says something sad. And so like, I fundamentally believe that a decade from now creatives will make be making more than developers and so with that kind of

lego block of truth right i try and think about like what's not going to change right over the next decade so i think that that is going to be a truth 10 years from now and with that truth what i'm trying to articulate for people is like go into that creative thing that you feel like you have a unique ability to do and start building the distribution channels around that thing there are so many tools like substack patreon like that make this stuff so easy to get going and monetize there's no etsy shop there's no reason not to get going on it especially with free time now this this comment is not meant to say like you should try and when we're all on lockdown trying to survive and we have family members sick it's not to say you should try and

like be productive at all hours of the day but you do probably now have some free time where you're not in the office and you should double down on building some of these channels. My version of that is I'm doubling down on channels that used to cost me a lot of money to secure that I can now get really cheap because no one else is spending money in those channels. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense and complete arbitrage. One of the, one of the things that is kind of a hot topic among people, especially creating content and looking to monetize those businesses is the idea of a subscription service for podcasts. You obviously have a very popular podcast. Have you thought about creating a subscription or kind of a paid podcast? And

what's kind of the pros and cons in your eyes of leaving it free and get as many people to listen as possible versus actually putting it behind some sort of paywall and driving that subscription revenue? This is a really good question. And again, I think you have to look at what's been done already. So, okay, let's look at podcast one, right? So that's one model, which is like, get the talent signed get a rev share agreement and then podcast one will cross promote you but also drive you ad revenue you then have companies like advertised cast and that are just pure ad base they'll say hey podcaster give us some inventory we'll fill it with ads to monetize you then have this other approach which is like let's build sort of like this network right so

like block works group is a good example now it's still kind of like well what is this going to be over the long term but generally it's a group of people that are talking about business finance crypto. They are, you know, they have, they create good content. They have nice followings. Like let's put them all together and sell ads into them. The question of the question of, could you do a Netflix model, which is don't sell ads, just make the content premium and sell it at like eight bucks a month. It's the same issue Spotify has, which is like, what do you pay Taylor Swift out of the 10 million people paying you four bucks a month if her audio tracks get downloaded three percent of the time across all total downloads that month like you have to start splitting up

that one subscription fee amongst all the talent under your umbrella and i just think pop i think that equation is a much harder equation than just selling ad inventory have you seen someone you feel like is doing this like the right way or is doing the best job than netflix for podcasts so i'm less interested in maybe the netflix for podcast i think actually it's more of the way that it could possibly work is at the individual level so like rather than you go join a platform that's selling a bunch of subscriptions and they've put a bunch of podcasts behind one single paywall it's just your podcast specifically and you go to your fans and say hey i normally release you know five to seven a week now i'm gonna release three free and i'm gonna put two

to four of them behind the paywall uh pay you know five or ten bucks a month and you'll get kind of these exclusive um either episodes or amas or kind of after the show type uh content uh to me like that would probably work i i agree with you that i'm not so much sold on like let me buy a subscription to a platform and then i get access to all of this content because i don't think the unit economics makes sense and also to the consumers aren't yet conditioned to uh pay for podcasts in general, they may pay for a one-off. Like you and I probably would, could pick five podcasts that if they went behind a paywall, I'd pay for it. Right. But I'm not going to go buy like another Spotify type, um, you know, product just for podcasts. Yeah. So to your point about

like five, it's the reason right now, Showtime is probably seeing a massive increase in subscribers because billions just came out. Like, I don't really care about any other Showtime shows, but I love billions, right? Netflix, when House of Cards is popular, I would literally relaunch my Netflix subscription, watch all the house and then cancel it because of the one episode. So like to your point, yes, but you talk about consumer conditioning. The problem I think with podcasts, at least for me right now is the consumer consumption of audio is still too dependent on hardware. And so what I mean by that is it's a lot of energy and effort to get your your iTunes audience who is used to like their phone and AirPods, right? The phone AirPods to

get them to go on to like a Patreon or a sub stack in the web browser to listen to a gated episode. So, you know, I tried this with Patreon and I got up to like, I think it was a couple hundred people paying between five and $30 a month for one gated episode per week. And, and here's what happened i'm gonna tell you what happened i lost the motivation to keep putting up a gated episode every week because a lot of people were paying but i could see the listen stats very few were actually consuming the content they were paying for so it felt weird like in theory it worked but until there's an easier way to to paywall like in itunes on the phone certain episodes i just don't think you're gonna see this model take off yeah and you see this in media right like new york

Times, Business Insider, a lot of them have realized like the best way to drive subscriptions is just ram people into the hard paywall, right? So literally you just ram it in and it's like, damn, I really want to read this one article. Fine, I'll pay you your- A dollar. Yeah, whatever it is, right? But like just ramming people into that paywall and having the content right beyond the paywall has been kind of the largest driver of subscriptions from what I understand. Absolutely. The flip side of this is if you have consumers that are conditioned to reading blog posts and a browser or written content it makes sense why sub stack

makes sense right like this is what they're programmed to do you're in a browser it's not audio it's written and this is why you're seeing so many people just scale their sub stack accounts so aggressively i think that that model works really really well you just what i wonder about is four or five years from now are we as consumers basically going to have like 50 different $10 a month things we pay for from the creators that we love? Or is there a different model that emerges? Yeah. I mean, look, it goes to the whole idea of, you know, are there going to be bundles? Are there not going to be bundles? Will I just subscribe? Like if you talk to Substack to those guys, like what they would say is I'm just going to subscribe to Nathan, right? And Nathan's

going to charge me five or 10 bucks a month and I get everything he creates, whether it's written, it's audio, it's video, it's a physical product. Anything that he does, I pay my 10 bucks a month and I get everything from him. And so maybe I end up subscribing to five people. And those are really the five people I care about the most. They may be in different industries or they may all be in one industry, but I'm subscribing to the individual and not the organization. I think we already see that. The question is, will that trend continue and how big can it get when you're asking somebody to pay for the subscription rather than just, hey, I follow you on Twitter. I follow your email list, things like that. I think you nailed it, right? What I

think a lot about the reason I've built distribution channels is not to sell the content per se. It is to secure eyeballs of people who love me where when I launch a new product, it takes off. I can basically drop a new book tomorrow and have it hit a bestseller list. Like what is that good or bad leverage? I could launch a hundred million dollar fund tomorrow and deploy that money pretty darn quickly because I have the deal flow because I have all the founder relationships already because of the podcast. So I think it's this balance of like, if you put up a paywall, how many less people see it relative to what that larger audience could do for you in the future with new products you create. And I think that's the balance. For sure. What are you excited about

moving forward? Like what in your world are you saying? You mentioned the airports and kind of going and securing those distribution channels. What else are you either working on or you're kind of saying look this is kind of step two and three for me later this year so i mean one of the things i'm trying to do a better job at is look i'm not on tiktok i can't dance but you can learn from these people look at like the sway i mean and this is going to be like great but like you look like the sway house in la okay it's basically like six of the top tiktokers one of their parents i'm sure maybe they did basically rented a house in la they all live in the same house together and they're just constantly creating content together tagging each other

and they all grow each other's followings this is like the version this is like the like the business version of this would be like a block works kind of concept or podcast one kind of concept but when you look at like how they do cross promotion which is what it is like technically defined cross from the way they do it is just so organic and so real i haven't seen a business case of that uh like executed to that degree of simplicity and just ease and kind of the non adverb you know serial like where there's no advertisements approach like i'm trying to get better at actually doing that in a in a business sense where it's not you know tiktok videos but instead business and i think there's a lot of opportunity for that like for example you know

if i i experimented last year i i rented for a weekend just to this big beautiful mansion in la and said, let me just experiment with taking a picture of the mansion to lure people in and email all the other top podcasters in my space. And we all came for two days and it was amazing. I had a little chef come in and make meals. But that one thing did more for the podcast than like 30 other tactics I tried combined. So I'm most excited about trying to figure out how to do cross collaborations with people in a non-organic way that is also very entertaining, which means you have to invite your enemies in as well. There has to be conflict this is what a lot of people don't there has to be a lot of conflict i think the one

thing that i've noticed and i think you've really nailed this is uh the media has to be unbiased the media has to go after facts the media has a very specific kind of role in society and uh most of them are held to that standard what i think the podcasters the bloggers email newsletters tweeters like all that kind of stuff. What they have realized is it's not about unbiased journalism in that world. That world is all about the entertainment, right? And I always joke with Polina, I'm like, we're entertaining. Like that is literally what we're doing. And she's like, you guys aren't like musicians. You're not whatever. And I say, no, but we are actually competing with those people because you have your AirPods in for two hours today. Are you going to

listen to music? Are you going to listen to a podcast? Are you going to listen to something else right like there's competition and rich greenfield uh came on one time and he said uh what most people confuse is like the streaming wars they think it's just the streaming platforms competing with each other he goes no they're part of a bigger picture which is it's a war of attention who can hold the uh consumers attention and it doesn't actually matter is it on youtube is it on tiktok is it on twitter is it on a podcast like there's only so many hours in a day And once you understand that entertainment actually may be a better way to do it than kind of traditional news, I think that's where you're seeing a lot of people find success.

This goes back to my point earlier about creatives ruling in the future. Entertainment is very hard to codify. It is storytelling. It is like, look, and the cheap, easy one is, look, and maybe it's not cheap and easy, and maybe this is unfair to the Kardashians, but like post a nude selfie, right? Something that someone's going to talk about it. like a tiktok star it's like who broke up with who like us as like business people that wouldn't get into that world we will like discredit a lot of that but like i think the better question is like

understand why eyeballs stay attracted to that and what is the analogy of that in a business world and the most successful like business use case of that frankly you're seeing trump do this there is always an argument there's always a conflict at these daily briefings of corn it's the doctor versus the business people always like we watch football because it's the cowboys against the redskins what a lot of content creators and i'm trying to get better this don't understand is the closer you can mimic a football game where there are clearly two sides and your ability to keep the attention of the viewer is predicated on your ability to force the listener to pick a side who's your team and the second you're always going to tune in absolutely and it also is um

it's this weird thing where uh it would have been a hard to do that without lots of equipment and all this other stuff we're recording this we both probably have 23 microphones right you at least have headphones on i don't even have headphones on uh we're using zoom and we'll be the kitchens are in our background yeah exactly right and uh what ends up happening is yeah sure could it be better of course but at the same time ultimately the content rules right and as people understand that uh that the best content finds an audience um really that's all that matters right and like look at the advantage we have over uh national television or something else because actually we will have episodes that get more distribution than some of those TV shows.

Yep. I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, and, and to your point, like part of that is the nature of how the episode is delivered and that it's, it's, it's asynchronous. People can consume whenever they want versus only at 8 PM on Friday. But the other part I think is we have a real opportunity in the business world from an entertainment perspective to educate the masses, but you can't, again, you can't be smart and educate without entertaining first. Like if I was going to go down a list of things to learn, it's you go read a bunch of books from playwrights on how they create characters. Like you develop a character, you build to a climax and those are resolutions. Study that stuff first to understand how to create entertainment and then

build in the education on the flip side. And so that's where I'm spending a lot of my time thinking right now and and by the way like this is what's going to win elections it's it's all the power in the next many many decades is going to come down to who is the best in my opinion entertainer uh and after you entertain what are you selling the audience and and who who's going to buy the most of it and that's who's going to win who is the most uh unlikely person that you believe has a good chance of becoming president in the future like who's the person that everyone else would be shocked by your answer, but you actually think they've got a good chance of running and winning? The most shocking answer that I've spent actually a lot of time thinking about

would be Ivanka Trump as a Democrat. As a Democrat. Okay, explain. If I'm Trump, okay, my opinion is he's going to get reelected. He's doing a great job at creating another enemy in China. The virus is an enemy. The Democrats are an enemy. He understands this kind of polarization. I think he wins easily in 2020. Now in 2024, what's going to happen? If you think and go, okay, is he like, we have this rule and you can only have two terms and you're supposed to leave, but like Trump doesn't really follow rules. So like, does he leave or does he not leave? And you look at what, I mean, he's going to use the FDR case study where there was, you know, 12 years there. If you're Trump, the way you win this, you have to remember

Jared and Ivanka are very tight in democratic circles in New York. Trump argued why he ran as a Republican, whatever, argue that. But my point is, if I'm Trump, you always want to be setting up board games that you can't lose. Games that you can't lose, but people think you can. So people watch to see if you win or not, and you always end up winning. The way you always win in 2024 if you're Trump is you figure out a way to do what you did to the Republican Party with Ivanka to the Democratic Party. And so you essentially end up with a ticket of Donald Trump in a very controversial third year, breaking the law, rewriting the rules with his court appointed judge, you know, versus Ivanka Trump on the Democratic side. No matter what happens with

the electorate, you essentially can't lose. It's a Trump still in office. So my answer to your question, maybe Ivanka doesn't surprise people, but they would think I'd probably say she would follow her father on the republican side i think it's ivanka as a democrat so it's super interesting because uh i was just talking to somebody about um you know i actually think a female would do a fantastic job as a u.s president uh for a whole bunch of reasons but we were thinking through like who is that uh person right and what i said was i don't think it's gonna be um somebody over the age of 50 like i think the days of like super old politicians is gonna go to the wayside uh and Okay, well, who could even possibly run? And somebody threw out, you know, it's a Megyn Kelly type, but not her, right? Where you've got kind of this balance between I take no shit, but I'm also somewhat feminine. And kind of all of these different aspects around I'm intelligent, I'm thoughtful, I'm well connected, etc. And so we ultimately all settled on like, yeah, actually, Ivanka Trump is probably one of those people that's in the kind of top five. I don't think a single person would have guessed as a Democrat, though.

like to your point yeah uh mine has historically been uh the rock right because i i imagine um the rock and donald trump standing on a stage debating each other and trump doing exactly what you're talking about creating conflict and basically talking shit right and the rock just being like ha and reaching his hand over and putting on his shoulder and be like shut your candy ass up he's like he's charismatic enough uh we know that uh physical stature matters a lot right so he's taller and just like somebody like that who is so well recognized around the world we now are entering a space where like i don't think historically you could have done this but i'm waiting for somebody to actually say i'm going to be the president but not because i'm the smartest

person because i'm the best leader who's going to build the best team and so by the way when you elect me or you vote for me you're voting for here's my entire team i'm bringing with me right And it's almost like going into it saying like, you're not voting on me to make these decisions because I know I'm not the best person to make the decisions. Here is everyone I'm going to bring. And you're voting us all together. It's all of us or none of us. And I think that that message, like of the authenticity of like, I'm not the smartest person when it comes to geopolitics or healthcare or whatever. Like I have the smartest person though on my team just is a message we haven't heard before and is one that is likely to have a good chance of winning in the

future. So to your Megyn Kelly comment, I think a Kim Kardashian becomes president before Megyn Kelly does, right? Which is more in line with like your rock prediction. Like when I think of like the qualifications for president, now it has a different meaning for everyone now after what's happened with Trump. It really comes down to who has audience and name recognition first and intelligence second like i could see someone that fits the persona you just described like an andrew yang like hey i'm really good with ubi i'm really good but i'm really bad on you know how do we beat al-qaeda right so so i'm gonna have a great line you're gonna vote us all in my vp but i just think even like an andrew yang gets killed by somebody that understands how to communicate more effectively

than him in the form of entertainment um so again you want the presidency to be the smartest best leader. I just think people now think of the presidency, kind of like how you would submit a casting tape to go on Big Brother. It's how controversial can you be in two minutes, submit your casting video, hope the American people love it. And then boom, now you're president. I told a story before the podcast, but one of the most eye-opening things that I've consumed over the last year is when Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan. So, you know, admittedly, I agree with very little with bernie sanders and kind of his whole position um but i had exactly the um kind of thought of him that the media wants you to have right which is like he's kind of crazy he's

really out there he's super extreme like all of these things um and when he sat down with joe rogan uh i listened to it more so just to try to understand like how does he come to these conclusions and he was very very thoughtful he had explanations for why he was doing what he was doing he had data to back up his claims like all of these things which you didn't get from the mainstream media and it clicked for me like they want the salacious headline they want the extremes right they they need that conflict they need all of that to drive the eyeballs but if you put them in a different setting where it's not all about what's the two-minute clip and you say hey we're gonna sit down and talk for two to three hours and you're gonna explain to me in detail everything

you believe why you believe it and how you're gonna execute on it you're like hey look this guy's like not an idiot right doesn't mean i necessarily switch and agree with everything he says, but it was a very different kind of way that I thought about him. And then I immediately thought, well, I bet you every candidates that way, both good and bad, because you just don't see them in that environment and have the ability to, to kind of show that intelligence. Cause it is all about, you know, kind of the headlines. As long as CNN and Fox and these math and Facebook and Google are driven by ad revenue, it will always be the salacious headline always. So we will continue to have a president in the United States that is a great entertainer above the best

intelligence until the incentive structure behind these media companies changes and they're not making money off ad revenue. By the way, this is where I think, we didn't talk a ton about this, but like this is where I think the decentralized application really comes into play. If Twitter can get off a model that is driven by, you know, quarterly reports to the stock market and Jack can really move the thing off where it says, Hey, every time someone like pump tweets and contributes content to the platform, you're awarded some form of token or, you know, a war utility value for building the network. Then there's no centralized ownership or profit motive, right? For the business. It's actually all utility driven. My opinion, that is actually what brings the world

back to a rational place where there is not a profit motive for ad dollars, but rather a utility value for the value of the network. I couldn't, uh, couldn't agree more. Um, before we wrap up here, uh, what is the most important book you've ever read other than your own? Um, man, most important. Okay. So this was one, um, this was one given to me by a gentleman named Doug Juan Arena, who was my angel investor at Hale. Okay. I was in the 90, I was 20 years old. We'd raised 500,000 bucks in angel capital on October 11th. We got this acquisition offer from Ryan Alice that I contact six and a half million dollars. It's actually fine. We got this contact, you know, from them. And, uh, my original thought was this would be great to sell the business,

but like, I can't like, and by the way, here's the letter on page two 43, six and a half million. like it's no joke from Ryan Alice, right? And I was going, this was right after the board meeting where the board said, Nathan, you can't sell. We need bigger returns. And I was just devastated. Doug Juan Arena, an early angel investor gave me this book called the four agreements, which maybe you've read. But the reason I think it's been the most impactful book for me is it's simple. It's easy to read and you find yourself nodding yes, as you read it. But like writing a book where people nod yes is is smart and it's easy because it's a page turner but where they adds another level is it it tells it in a in a way kind of um as a parable where it's a constant

good reminder you know of just four things you should always do well in your life and so like that book in that moment i just remember the sense of good feeling i had after i read it in that very stressful moment in my life was impactful and i remember to this day and i try and read them i haven't read in a while but i try and reread it once a year uh the episode i released today with bill perkins uh it was one of the two books that he recommended as well did he really yeah yeah so we're starting uh i see these trends and uh he was the first one to uh recommend it now you're the second so oh you it's a quick it's a it's a quick read it's a quick read people i think people listening are going okay when pomp puts out a book what's the what's the title gonna be that's

what everyone wants to know i i uh i have no plans of that what's the tweets i think i'm better in 280 characters you are we are pretty good at that um all right last question for you then you could ask me one question to end it uh aliens believer or non-believer um i feel like if i ever do something very important in life this 20 second answer i gave was going to be replayed back to me and i want to have it as an out so i'm going to say i believe in aliens uh because uh that's like a convenient group of people that can't fight back if i say that they cause me some sort of harm and i can use them as an enemy that has no fighting chance of winning because they have no voice so yes i believe in aliens that is

very forward thinking of you somebody listening right now is like wait a minute they outsmarted us i want to believe in aliens i love it what uh what one question do you have for me to finish up uh money keeps being printed um what is more likely to happen in the next decade uh a new breton woods where things are currencies are debased and everything's tied back to the dollar it's still the global reserve currency or uh there is uh we we we transition where it is the dollar, but the dollar is backed by Bitcoin instead of gold. So what's more likely to happen in your opinion, the next 10 years, new Bretton Woods or Bitcoin backed currency? I think there is a 0% chance or near zero. I won't say zero, but like less than 1% chance that you will see

a return to the gold standard or a dollar backed by Bitcoin. I think that those two things are very, very separate at this point. And so I'm going to kind of find the middle ground a little bit, which is I actually think that there will be some variation, a very watered down version of like a Bretton Woods, but basically some new agreement around money in the world and multiple nations are involved, that type of thing. At the same time, you will see a continued rise of kind of this alternative financial system with Bitcoin being that base unit of account. Jack Dorsey recently did an interview with Lex Friedman, who's the MIT professor, who is super into machine learning and artificial intelligence. And in it, he describes, he's like, look, the reason why I'm

so bullish on Bitcoin is because I believe the internet needs a native currency. And he talks all about like with Square, how if they want to roll a product out on the internet, they have to go jurisdiction by jurisdiction and get all of these approvals. And he's like, it's all because there's different currencies, there's different regulatory environments, all this kind of stuff. He goes, the thing is that the internet is kind of its own economy, right? And so I recently wrote a thing where Peter Zahan came on, who's kind of a global strategist, right? And he talked about demographics around the world. So you know, China's got an aging population, the US average age is lower than China's, it's better than a lot of South American countries. And

that's kind of bullish for America, very bearish for China and other places. But the one thing that he didn't talk about, but I fundamentally believe is if you take the internet or the digital world and say that is one economy, it has the youngest user base, it's the fastest growing, and it's actually the largest economy, right? And so if you can kind of separate the physical from the digital world, all of a sudden that digital economy, if you look at it from a demographic basis, it's very, very bullish. And so in that world, we're currently using the physical currencies and the fiat, not physical and like actual physical, but physical world currencies or fiat's in a digital world doesn't make much sense. And so I think that you'll have that rise,

but obviously the physical world governments and things like that aren't going to release that power. And so they're going to kind of hold on for as long as they can. And you'll have this digital world built up at the same time. And at some point, they actually are going to be the same exact size and power. And then eventually you'll see kind of Bitcoin or that digital world surpass it uh and it's just something they can't stop right i mean it's just they're playing on a different playing field um and so i think the writing's on the wall the big question is just how fast does that happen um and what are the ramifications of it happening dollars to the reserve currency or no i think the dollar will continue to be the world reserve currency until

a what we now think of as digital currency so one of my big things is like every currency is going to be digital right there'll be digital dollar digital euro digital yen digital one etc uh and then you have something like bitcoin stable coins whatever the competition is not going to be digital versus not it's going to be at the monetary policy level i think ultimately something like bitcoin wins um but i do believe that until we get a switch to like a cryptocurrency uh the dollar will remain the global reserve currency uh one military power two uh we're in such a deflationary environment the dollar continues to kind of suck in all of the value uh and then three is at the end of the day like america i don't care what country you're in everyone wants to

sell to america everyone wants to build their business in america and like that kind of american uh exceptionalism whether people like it or not uh has a lot of advantages to it and so uh unless there's like some major conflict um that ends up getting fought i just don't see the the dollar falling uh until you see that cryptocurrency or kind of a separation of state and money happening makes a lot of sense listen there's uh there's literally hundreds of billions of dollars being uh bet on all of this right so like at the end of the day what does my opinion really matter no i think i think asking the questions is really important like i'm spending a lot of my time right now trying to figure out new wells for me to consume from and so like watching how you consume

content other people consume content is something i'm actually trying to study right now because i want to expose myself to new ideas like this to broaden my thinking. So, I mean, look, this is helpful. Your podcast has been very helpful. Hopefully, this interview is valuable for your audience, Bob. For sure. Where can we send people if they want to find out more about you, the book, and a lot of the stuff that you're doing? Yeah, Twitter is the best place to chat with me, just at Nathan Latka. If you want to check out the book, you can just go to capitalistbook.com or nathanlatka.com. But again, the best way to just chat with me directly is at Nathan Latka on Twitter. Awesome, man. Well, listen, I appreciate you doing this. I think people

are going to love it and we'll have to do it again in the future. All right, Pom, thank you.