The Startup Ideas Podcast - Pomp's Newsletter Business Building Strategies

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

I'm joined by investor and entrepreneur Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano. Pomp hosts The Pomp Podcast, with over 50 million downloads, and writes a daily letter read by 250,000+ investors.We talk about Pomp's approach to building resilient media properties, thinking long-term, and his best book recommendations for internet business success.►►Subscribe to my weekly newsletter for insights on community, creators and commerce. You'll also find out when new and exclusive episodes come out from Where It Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergaBOOKS POMP MENTIONEDUnreasonable hospitality by John O'LearyThe Successor by Lachlan MurdochThe 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50 CentZero to One by Peter ThielSuleiman Ollian by AnonymousHow to Get Rich by Felix DennisLosing My Virginity by Richard BransonThe Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. GordonHidden Genius by Polina MarinovaThe Outsiders by Will ThorndikeElon Musk by Walter IsaacsonUrgency by John P. KotterThe War of Art by Steven PressfieldGood Profit by Charles KochLINKS FOR THIS EPISODEProduction Team: https://podflow.comPomp on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APomplianoPomp on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/anthonypomplianoPomp's newsletter: https://pomp.substack.comSHOW NOTES0:15 - Anthony's provocative dinners for hidden beliefs01:45 - Climate change evidence not as compelling02:30 - Scarcity of unique perspectives in newsletters03:00 - Click rates over open rates for engagement03:45 - Media as repetitive software04:15 - Bay Area Times' visual newsletters05:15 - Unique Bitcoin perspective in Truth for the Commoner06:00 - Bay Area Times' rapid growth07:00 - Open rates for brand awareness, click rates for direct response08:15 - Agora's focus on ecommerce conversions10:15 - Monetization through hedge funds11:15 - Joe Rogan's podcast profitability14:00 - Bay Area Times' positive industry news15:00 - Profitability before monetization for Bay Area Times18:15 - Small teams and revenue for entrepreneurs20:15 - Small teams for greater profitability21:15 - Studying media greats like Rupert Murdoch26:15 - Podcasts for expertise sharing29:00 - Economic freedom and financial security32:00 - Impactful employment business33:00 - Small acts making the world better34:45 - Pomp's book recommendation  

It's good to see you, Anthony Pompfleano. I want to start with, what's one thing you believe that if you said out loud, you would get canceled? For content, I host dinners 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 unpopular to say in public, many more people agree with you than you realize. And so by voicing it sometimes that actually elicits the positive response and then you realize, hey, this is a hell of you helped by many people. So an easy one is climate change. It is obvious. Temperatures are changing. things are in some cases getting better and some cases 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 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 fording, 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 piggyback backing off that I was in Montreal and Montreal, you go to the grocery store and you have to bring your own back. I bought a ton of stuff. 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, 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 thinking to have independent thought. Those two things are related. Many people say, oh, critical thing is important 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, the stock price can go up. If you find a company and you're like, this company sucks, everyone thinks it's amazing. I'm going to short it at $20 a share. Well, if it rips to

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 true. 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 aligned. Sometimes they're in direct opposition. And that's what makes investing so hard. You're canceled, by the way. I'm canceled. 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 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. 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, a restaurant about financial markets, but he also talks about politics. That is a unique view on news that is being shared elsewhere in a commoditized 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 going to overlap with Politico's coverage because they're regurgitating what's happening. Truth for the commoner is going to 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 oversupply of newsletters, just regurgitating the same content. Yeah, that's not going to work in my opinion. And they're acquiring users all the same way. We use it. ConvertKit 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 specific visuals. It'll be graphics, charts, visuals around a

story, et cetera. And so it helps you retain the information. And frankly, people don't want to read a lot. They would rather just view pictures, right? It's why children like picture books. Same thing here. 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, 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 an 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 percent, because that shows me how engaged it is. 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 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 of our other media properties, we turn away advertisers all the time. I sent an email this morning. Somebody wanted to offers a ton of money for a media property as an advertiser.

I just said, 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, $10,000, $20,000. And so I think it's really just asking yourself, based on content audience and the business model I'm pursuing, what is my metric? Who's the best in the game? I don't know, maybe Agora. 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, did you pay? 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 size fits all and people want it to 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. They see what is possible

with this delivery channel and they want to go build bigger business. 10 years ago, we would have thought, oh, come on, the newsletter is 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 business is definitely a marketing business, right, or sales business. The first email effort that I ever did was in 2018, like five and a half years now, that I've been 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 media and 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 it with a hedge fund behind. And so the reporters are going to go do primary research and investigative reporting. They're 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 about this, you're like, okay, again, there's a 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. Barry at times specifically, did you have the idea for the visual newsletter first? And then you were like,

how do I apply that to tech business news? This was not my idea. Somebody else was like, hey, I started this newsletter. They actually reached out to my wife, Helena 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 scales. And scale means you got to do it every day.

We're going to be in your inbox every morning. You got to keep the quality. You got to figure out how to begin to monetize it. Keeps they disciplined and do those things over and over again for years without losing enthusiasm. I reached 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 was not just like, let me jump in and have a partner. Which is like a green flag from a partnership perspective. 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 days.

On the other hand, the longer you play this game, the more you realize that 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 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 wear it 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 and make sure that we're both double opting in. Kind of like marriage, right? Like, tell death do us part. In sickness or in health, like, we're in this together. And so what you end up finding was Bay 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's the founder of a company. It's a known company in his industry. Like, it's pretty legit. And 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 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 ends up being 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 Bay Area Times a few months ago and being like, okay, yeah, I see this working. I also think the name itself Bay Area Times. I was like, whoa, was this created in 2023 or 1923? The two questions everyone has this. One was it created?

And is this like a small paper in the Bay Area or is this just leveraging Bay Area? There's a bunch of tricks and tips or hacks or whatever that probably will lend itself to a higher 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 a tablespoon and a half. It tastes good, right? Who cares?

Walk me through how you want to scale Bay Area 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 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, 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 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 all sorts of stuff around data, et cetera. 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. But 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 to think about stage two of this business. 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 a thousand 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 the least people doing? Right. You're telling me you got $400 million in revenue at BuzzFeed.

You 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 costs 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, two million, five million, ten million in revenue per employee? You know, if you think about the most profitable media company on a per head count basis in the world, it's Joe Rogan's podcast, two employees, right? I thought you were going to 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% of a financial influencer. You have the POMP'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 up live podcast. He's an amazing investor. But Warren Buffett would not be Warren Buffett without all of the influential components of media and interviews. Joe Rogan's got two employees, himself. He's got two employees, 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 segues into this brilliantly.

So here's my spicy take from this tweet. I said, solopreneurs equals solo burnouts. Think you're a one man slash women army. Cool. Give it a year. You'll be so fried. You'll hire a team just to get a day off. many solopreneers will hire teams and be even more profitable and be happier than being a solo operator.

Thank. Software, employees, capital, these are all leverage points for an entrepreneur. When it comes to entrepreneurship, you can definitely have an advantage in terms of less employees. But I don't think that we are going to see very many one-person 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 solopreneur, they're like, okay, I just don't want a big team. I want a big revenue, which is much more feasible than 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 sole opener 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 roles to create leverage.

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 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 percent of financial performance in terms of profit, but do it for 20 years, it's going to make way more money. So it goes back to like, what do you want to do? And by the way, some people are literally like, 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 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 the last 50 years who did it in the legacy world. What lessons can I learn from the deal they did, the strategies 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. 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, be applied today. For example, when he went and acquired some of these less journalistic publications that were more like the tabloid type stuff, he understood eyeballs paid the bills.

He understood where the eyeballs were. It doesn't mean that you or I or anyone else should go out and buy tabloids, but you know it would 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 that they're a student of now. And you can learn of a hell a lot. going back and looking at people over time. It's so much lazier to copy people who are doing it now. The takeaway for me from the tablet is like, where is mispriced eyeballs and where is cheap eyeballs?

I can take that. And within the context of email and newsletters, within the context of X, within the context of Instagram, 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? Rupert 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 tangential.

They just started book publishing, like all this stuff. Entrepreneurship is the same thing. Like, you're playing a sport. And you can either be a professional or you can be an amateur. And amateurs get rolled. Did you put the work in to actually understand how to win this game? I remember sitting down with Anthony Scaramucci. There's actually a point where I was like, wow.

I went to go talk to him for the podcast. I got my two little microphones. We're going to 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, 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 newsletter's growing where are you getting those people from? How are you creating the campaigns?

What is the price model that you're using? All these different details, that's where I look to peers because reading a book about Rupert Murdoch is 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 straight up advice. Maybe it's maturity. Maybe it's just like a lack of self-awareness or like social awareness previously. But now I'll ask a lot of questions. Hey, what do you think 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 already know the answers. And one of my favorite conversations is where you're basically telling someone like, dude, let's go. You got to speed this up. And you realize they just kind of been bullshitting themselves. Right? And then they're 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. 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 10. dinner recently. Somebody was there. He owns one of the hottest movie production companies in the country. I mean, 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 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 shit 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 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 podcasts, 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 me 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 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 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 third. years and do it in a way that 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 pump letter, basically, and live off pump letter. I tried to retire two or three years ago. It lasts like a couple weeks, and then I was like already doing shit. 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 were 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 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, et cetera. I covet that time.

If I didn't have the economic freedom to be able to go do that, I think my life would be worse. I would be less happy. So that was a big goal, the freedom 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 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 short-term income 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 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 latter. What does economic freedom look like to you? What does that actually mean? When your 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, 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 setup 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 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 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 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 is 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, quote unquote return. And you're in a great spot. I think a lot of us fall into lifestyle crepe.

There's one person that has 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 to 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 a positive 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, hey, 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, your family is to enjoy it. But you've got to 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 do you want to make

and how you 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. 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 it out. 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 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. 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 sure that it is successful. In 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, Plano and I spend a lot of time there trying to think through what can we do, where is, you know, kind of leverage points 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 bill's $100. throw an extra three to five dollars 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 percent tip that literally is the difference someone being okay i got my 20 percent tip between

wow that person is so generous it's three to five bucks forget the generosity piece that person gets that extra money looks at it smiles and not to be corny but the world becomes a better place because that person is more likely to be more kind. 100%. If they did a good job, what's an 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 accrue 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 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 come back. But it's one of these things where it's good for the world. you feel good, selfish in the way that you feel good doing it. But then also it happens to be good for business over the long way. 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. That's a great one. There's a bunch on Rupert. There's also a book called the successor on Lachland Murdoch, Rupert's son that tells the story. I have a different perspective. There's a book called The 50th Law by Robert Green and 50 Cent, fantastic, about overcoming fear. Obviously, Peter Thiel's zero to one. There's a book on Suleiman Olean. Suleiman is one of the wealthiest individuals that came out of Saudi Arabia. The book is 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 would create a business for it. I've taken a lot of inspiration from that mentality. How to Get Rich. Felix Dennis, Sam Parr, told me about that one. That one was pretty good. Richard Branson's book is really good. The Rise and Fall of American Growth. That was fantastic. My wife wrote a book called Hidden Genius, No-Broner Bestseller, all about how successful people are successful. The Outsiders by Will Thorndyke talks all about decentralized management,

share buybacks, stuff like that. Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson, urgency, how he's built the businesses that he's built. Let's see. The War of Art. Have you read that? War of Art. That's a super easy one. Stephen Pressfield.

The War of Art is fantastic. I'll give you like a weird one. Good Profit by Charles Koch. Good Profits 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 something called market-based management. Coke Industries is, I think, the first or second largest private company in America.

And he like swears by this market-based management. We'll put Pomp's List in the show notes. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.