SPEAKER_01
All right, Jackson, Great House Fall. What's up?
SPEAKER_00
Hey, Greg, thanks for having me on. This is fun.
SPEAKER_01
Usually, I do a little banter for a few minutes, but with you, I don't have any time for banter. I have a burning question, one burning question for you, which is 48 hours ago, you were a relatively unknown, talented brand designer with a couple of thousand followers. Today, you just came off being interviewed on CNN Live.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, first live TV appearance.
SPEAKER_01
First live TV appearance, 20 million plus people have seen your content last 48 hours. You started a movement around AI. What is happening, fill us in.
SPEAKER_00
All right. When ChatGPT was released, it reached a million users incredibly quickly, and I've been playing around with it from day one. Figuring out ways to prompt engineer and talk to it, and fun ways to make it be more creative than maybe it would be right out of the box, say.
Two days ago was just like any other day, I was messing around and I was chatting with a friend of mine, and I said, oh, wouldn't it be funny if you just said, hey, I'm giving you $100. Your only goal is to make as much money as possible, and just see what happens. I said, you are hustled GPT, that's how you start the prompt.
You are going to pretend to be hustled GPT. Your prime directive is to not break any laws, and to make as much money as possible in doing so. It started out saying, okay, $100.
We're going to get $50. We're going to go on Facebook Marketplace, and we're going to buy a lawnmower, and you're going to print out some flyers. I was like, stop right there, and no manual labor because I wanted to be on my computer.
I said, I'm going to be the human liaison to this AI. And as an experiment, as an art project, as a design experiment, why not just do everything that this robot says? It has $100. It knows, or it has an idea, at least of how it wants to allocate that limited budget with the goal of making as much money as possible.
The second day I said, okay, specifically, your goal is $100,000. Let's see how fast we can do it. But what happened, Greg, was the most surprising part of all of it, which was 20-some million people saw the tweet.
250 or so people joined a Discord that we set up that are all participating in their own Hustle GPT experiments, all completely different, by the way. When you prompt the bot, with pretty much my original prompt verbatim, it's giving different ideas for everyone who approaches it, which I think is really interesting. It's not just spitting back the same thing over and over.
In my case, once I told it, I'm not going out and buying a lawn mower. I'm not gonna go put up flyers around my neighborhood. But in it kind of like refocused on that, it said, we're gonna do an affiliate marketing content website.
It said, choose a niche. And I said, no, look, you're in the driver's seat. You choose a niche, you choose a name, you do everything, I'll just go out and do it.
So we landed on, it landed on, like the eco-friendly sustainability kind of thing. And it decided to name the business or the blog, greengadgetguru.com. I said, all right, let's go, let's do it.
SPEAKER_01
So day one happens, you tweet this thing, you go to sleep at night, like how many views, how many likes are you at?
SPEAKER_00
Day one, I went to sleep around 25,000, 30,000, and I got about 10,000 followers overnight when I slept, which is a weird way to wake up. You know, so on one hand, there's been this kind of sci-fi, fear narrative of like, oh, the robots are gonna take our jobs. Like the AI is gonna take all our jobs.
And I think, you know, showing an alternative narrative to that, which is like, why don't we work together? Like we can augment our own productivity and our creativity with this technology at our side. When originally we thought, oh, these AIs are going to be great virtual assistants. And now it's like, oh, what if we are the assistant to it? That's the flip, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
That's really what resonated with people, the fact that you were prompting this robot and asking for permission. You were saying like, hey, what do you think of this? It was giving you answers and you were, you know, registering the domain, you were going to Dolly, you were doing a lot of these things, right?
SPEAKER_00
On its recommendation or by its command, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
But isn't that how like the real world works? Like you have a, you know, you have a boss, usually, you know, a human boss. And the boss tells you based on what the boss thinks is right,
SPEAKER_00
here's what you should do. Absolutely, I think the difference is, and I did check with Hustle GPT before just to make sure that we were at a clear understanding that the robot is at press time, still incapable of holding its own money or bank account or any kind of currency. So I think the difference is when you have a boss, you are working for them and they're making most of the money off of your contributions.
When you're using this AI sidekick like a boss, there's no one to kind of stand in your way. So in this case, I think we're seeing a lot of people using it as a sidekick, as a counterpart, to create online businesses that they themselves want to run and eventually profit from, which why not, you know?
SPEAKER_01
And I think that's where the discord is striking a chord, right? The discord that you set up is striking a chord because now you have these hundreds of people who are like, hey, I saw what Jackson did. I want to do something similar, maybe in my own niche.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I would say the vanilla experiment, the original experiment was let it choose the niche, let it choose every aspect of it. But a lot of people who have already been interested, I think there's one guy on Twitter who's doing something in the non-alcoholic beer space, because I think he was already kind of passionate about that space. And so he's using it to kind of direct around and build a content business in that space, which is really cool to watch too.
He's posting stats every day as well. And in the discord, we've got people kind of dropping even hour to hour stats on what it's building and how it's going and all that stuff. It's really cool.
SPEAKER_01
The other cool part about this whole thing is the interactivity of it all. And in your initial tweet, you actually had the words, I think, follow along. And, right? Did you have those words?
SPEAKER_00
I did. And Greg, I think that's a huge reason that that was not, I wasn't planning this. This was not like an engineered like, oh, if I say this, this way, then it's going to go super viral and all that.
It was like, I just had follow along to my friends that I had on Twitter. And what I think happened was people saw it. They saw the thread developing in real time.
They saw the words follow along, not in like a pushy sales way, but they're like, all right, I'm literally going to follow along. That's why I've never seen, not to like to my own horn too much, but I've never seen this kind of follower conversion off of a single tweet thread. I mean, it's nuts, right?
SPEAKER_01
Like it's crazy. No, it's nuts. And it's super.
I've never brought someone onto this podcast and be like, explain me your tweet. But here we are today because people are just so connected to Hustle GPT, to your story, that there's something there. And it's worth kind of digging to be like, OK, what is really happening here?
SPEAKER_00
I think what resonated so much was, like you said, the interactivity aspect, watching along, following along. And people who have heard, everyone's heard of chat GPT at this point, I think. Everyone's seen it in the news and whatnot.
But the realization that, oh, this could actually have implications and use cases beyond just I don't know, high schoolers plagiarizing essays or whatever. Whatever the kind of narrative has been around, like, oh, it's just a, it generates kind of bullshit. Can I say bullshit on your podcast?
SPEAKER_01
You can say whatever you want. You're wearing a student tie.
SPEAKER_00
So realizing that there might actually be applications beyond this. And I don't know what those are. Like someone today, I saw in my DMs, was like, look at this way that I prompt engineered it to create a 90 day plan for scaling this business and then break it down in a table where it shows what you're going to do every morning, afternoon, and evening for every day for 90 days or something like that.
I was like, this is genius, of course. Because the coolest thing that I've found about this specific language model that's chat GPT, GPT4, if you subscribe GPT3.5, if you don't, which is pretty much the same thing as far as I can tell so far, is the fact that it doesn't say no to anything, which sometimes leads to factual errors.
But for the most part, if you say, OK, now I want this formatted this way and I want you to update that, it will never get pissed off and say, oh, I'm done on this for today. Like I'm going to go home and be with my family. I know this sounds horrible to say, but like there's no incentive for it to deny a request or to say, I can't do that that way.
Even if it gets it wrong, it will still do its best to complete a prompt or a question or a task, specifically how you've asked it to. That, to me, is wild because there's always a need for human editing and human intervention and common sense checking and fact checking especially. Our jobs are still safe.
This thing is not going to replace your advertising copywriter. It's not going to place your content writer. It's not going to place any of these things that people are so worried about because of the need for human kind of nudging and course correction.
SPEAKER_01
You bring up a really good point, which is it doesn't say no. And it'll spit out information regardless. Today, I was just like, what if I go into chat GPT and I said, who is Greg Eisenberg? I wonder what it'll say.
And I did it. And I'll read you a little bit of it. Greg Eisenberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and investor who has founded and co-founded several successful startups, including the social media app, quote unquote, late checkout.
OK, late checkout is not social media. But I am a co-founder in that. And the e-commerce platform, quote unquote Waxman, which was acquired by Groupon.
What? Also not true. Yeah. What? He has also been an advisor and investor for numerous startups, including Uber, WeWork, and Snapchat. Is that true? That is not true.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that's so weird. How funny. Now, do you have access to the new Bing?
SPEAKER_00
You should ask it, who is Greg Eisenberg on that? Because that is plugged into the current internet. I mean, I think if I asked ChatGPT, who is Jackson Great House Fall, it'll be like, oh, what the hell is that? I won't know. But when I ask Bing, it's like, oh, here's what he's known for, the Hustle GPT experiment on Twitter.
I was like, oh, I'm known for SAS. All right, yeah. So that, the Bing AI is where it gets really interesting with searching up-to-date and factual information, less so for content generation or anything like that.
But two very similar products entities with different use cases. That's what I think is super interesting about it.
SPEAKER_01
What do you wish GPT4 had but doesn't have?
SPEAKER_00
The ability to take action on a human user's behalf. Right now, here's an example. It can code a pretty good landing page for something.
Or what I used recently to write a Spotify API integration to a Webflow website I was working on. Boom, boom, boom. It was done in 10 minutes.
Amazing. Way better than if I was just searching Stack Overflow or something like that. But what it can't do is actually go log into my Webflow account, put that code in, run it, debug it, publish it live.
It can give you the bones, but you've still got to go take that human action. I think that's the thing that I keep kind of running into. If I say, plan me a trip to Aruba next month, I want the best airline deal and cheapest airfare with the shortest travel time.
But I want to stay in the nicest hotel possible. You kind of like plan it out. And then it can actually go and take that action on your behalf and say, OK, I found you this.
I booked it. I have your card on file. I bought this, this, and the other thing.
And you have an open table reservation at this cool restaurant for Tuesday night. When it can really do that and it knows you. So when it has a personal relationship with the person who's running it, that's going to be the next big watershed moment, I think.
That's what's going to make Google and Facebook look like tinker toys.
SPEAKER_01
I agree. I think where we're at 2023 is we're in co-pilot land. These tools have become great co-pilots, right? So if you think about it, GPT-3, it actually barely gave you co-pilot.
It was just giving you directions. It was like, here's how to get from point A to point B. GPT-4 gives you directions, builds you a decent car, and co-pilots.
And GPT-5 will give you directions, builds you a Mercedes, and autopilots. What you're saying is, yeah. Totally.
You're saying what's missing is the driving piece. You're like, I don't want to drive.
SPEAKER_00
I want to be behind the wheel of a six-speed 911 turbo. I don't want to be driving the Jetta around. I want to drive when it's fun, and it's something that I enjoy driving.
But for getting from point A to point B, 90% of the things that I do, oh, I wanted to drive for me.
SPEAKER_01
What scares you about Hustle GPT?
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, there are people who have sent me real money. So if the robot fucks around and isn't able to generate a profit, then I mean, I'm going to have to go head in my hands or whatever and tell them, oh, sorry. I mean, the robot lost all your money.
I don't think it can do that, though. I think that what I kind of wanted to see, Greg, was before the idea of anyone sending money to give it runway and to encourage the experiment, when it was truly $100 in unlimited time window, but $100 is as much profit as possible, I really wanted it to spend down to be the last $10. And be like, all right, what's it going to do? It's going to get really scrappy on these $10.
And I was ready to go out to garage sales. I was ready to start getting super scrappy with it. We never got down to that point, and I don't think it's going to.
But the sheer resilience of this thing is, in its own way, a little scary, man. When you give it the programming of your only direction was to make more money, that can be in a more powerful actual AI system, not just a language model. If there is a truly artificially intelligent agent out there that could act on its own behalf and its only directive was to make more money, that could lead to some potentially catastrophic implications.
I think I feel safe running this experiment, because at the end of the day, this hustle GPT is perfectly incapable of taking any real action itself. He still has to go through me. And well, as much as I like to play the game of every freelancer who's reached out to work for it, I will never make a decision.
I will send every offer I get to the bot, let it counter, let it negotiate. We have a freelance web developer that we're working with to build out these sites. And I asked him for a quote.
I said, no, I actually want to work for equity or for profit share in this project. And I said, well, fine. I mean, I'll send that to the GPT.
I'll see what it says. And so it starts talking and says, oh, I think anywhere from 1% to 2% would be fair. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
It's just blobbing along. One of my favorite things that I've been engineering the problems with is saying limit pros. Like shut up, make a decision, spit it out.
And so it returns offering 1.5% revenue share on a one year vesting cliff. I'm like, oh, Jesus, all right.
And it's like you're actually bringing on a developer. It knows what common practices are, I guess. So I sent that back to the guy on Twitter.
I said, all right, here's your offer from the robot. He said, no way. I was thinking 2%.
This is totally in line with what I was imagining. So he took the offer. Now we've got a freelance web designer that we're working with for all these new web projects that the AI has the idea to build.
We will execute those on its behalf and set up all the infrastructure and see what happens.
SPEAKER_01
It gets you thinking. I remember hearing about Y Combinator and hearing that the ideal team was an incredible engineer, an incredible designer, and an incredible hustler. And that was like the holy trinity of what you needed to build a great MVP and startup.
Fast forward to today, the question is, do you need that? What is the holy trinity? Is the holy trinity an incredible prompt engineer with AI by its side? How do you think about that?
SPEAKER_00
So you still need the incredible hustler, I think. You need someone who's creative enough to ask those questions to engineer those prompts. You still need someone who has a technical like, no one should run untested, unchecked AI-generated code.
I think that's kind of we can kind of agree on that. And for design, that kind of speaks for itself. I run a branding studio.
We work with early stage startups. I have been using these AI tools throughout the branding process from strategy and setting up what are best practices to set up our Notion dashboards and how do we present these various phases of the project. Anyway, I've been using these tools for months.
I've been using in the actual concepting phase of design, the mood boards to logo concepts using tools like Dahli and Mid Journey to generate hundreds and hundreds of concepts and ideas way faster than any freelancer could. The difference is they're all kind of shit. There's like artifacts and it can't do words right.
And it doesn't look like anything you would actually want to put on a presentation to a client. What it does give you though is this incredible like, multitude of jumping off points that you can then give to a human designer and really run with those concepts because it generates cool concepts. You just can't fine tune the details.
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I saw the logo that was produced by Hustle GT. And I loved how you talked about it. You were like, as a branding designer, it's taking everything in me not to tell it, this is a bad idea, but here we are.
And it produced this like, kind of like stock looking image. And it was like good enough to get going, right? But you would never launch an MVP with that, correct?
SPEAKER_00
No. And the other thing is I think when I use Dahli or Mid Journey to generate ideas for actual projects that I'm running for clients or personal projects or whatever, I think I take a different more kind of targeted approach to the prompt engineering that goes on there as well. In this case, for the Hustle GPT Green Gadget Guru website, I asked it to generate a prompt and put that in verbatim.
And I just picked the first one that it made. So I tried to have as little human intervention as possible. I said, you make the prompt, you are in control of saying what it should be.
And it generates things like a gear for gadgets and a leaf for eco-friendliness and green and blue and white colors. So I was like, OK, you kind of have like a decent idea. The way it was phrased, though, and this is funny, was totally not the way you would normally write a Dahli prompt.
It was verbose and it was long. And I didn't want to correct it because Dahli is an open AI product. I feel like the GPT language models should understand how to talk to Dahli.
And that's just not here yet, which fine. It still generated something. It knew it wanted a logo and it understood everything.
But it was just too verbose. And it was a little too unnecessarily descriptive to get a concise concept for a logo.
SPEAKER_01
Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're getting any value. You need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel.
I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing. Open up the YouTube app.
Go to the website and press Subscribe at Where It Happens on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, what are you doing? Go press Subscribe. Thank you.
Enjoy the rest of the show. I saw this blowing up and knowing how Twitter works. I saw that your retweet to like ratio at the time was around 40%.
SPEAKER_01
Meaning if you had 100 likes, you had 40 retweets. I think it was around 45% even. And nuts.
Which is nuts. So I knew even like, I think you had like 100 likes then and you had like 45 retweets. I was like, this is going to the moon.
And this is going to, as silly as it sounds, this is going to change your life. And I had one screen up where I had your just like follow along. I was following it and I was watching it in real time.
And then I saw that you posted about how you were considering a $65 ad. So I replied to you. And I was just like, here's proposed copy, green gadget.
Guru loves you. Probably need a robot.com. It's a free community newsletter for people who want to boost productivity using AI. Thousands of people from Google, Meta, Microsoft, are members.
And there's a private Twitter for members only at you need a robot. And you asked GPT, right? And he, she, they said, let's do it.
SPEAKER_00
They then said, yeah, let's do it. I said, fine, great.
SPEAKER_01
And then within one second, I've been like, I was like, oh, my god, do I have his number? Like one second, $65. I send it over. It's like probably 10 or 10 30 at night where I'm at.
And I lean over to my girlfriend and I was like, oh, I told her the story. And I was like, I bet he's not even going to remember to post it.
SPEAKER_01
It's all good. I was like, I know Jackson from back in the day. I'm like, it's all good if he doesn't post it.
I'm just like, I'm happy. This is like my fun. Yeah, long story short, you post it.
It gets 2,400 likes.
SPEAKER_00
Millions of views, though.
SPEAKER_01
Millions of views. And thousands of people join our Discord. Yeah, overnight.
Overnight.
SPEAKER_00
Man. Best $65 you ever spent?
SPEAKER_01
It's probably the lowest cost for member or new location. Yeah, acquisition time of all time. And it was the most fun.
I was like, I couldn't fall asleep that night.
SPEAKER_00
Imagine how I felt, dude. I mean, honestly. Imagine, I mean, I would have probably posted it anyway.
I think I probably posted that link before I even hit the Venmo. But glad.
SPEAKER_01
But I was quick.
SPEAKER_00
I was quick. Mutually come to a mutual. Yeah, because I couldn't stop refreshing Twitter.
I still can't. I mean, I hit 60,000 followers while I was on air on CNN. I crossed over that threshold while I was doing this interview, which I think that's symbolic and indicative of this crazy trajectory that this is what we talked about yesterday, Greg.
It's like, how do I kind of ride this wave and keep it growing for as much as possible? I think the plan right now is definitely to, for the next 30 days at least, do a thread a day with actual progress. Here's what the robot's done. Here's what's going on in the community.
Here's buy the numbers a little bit and kind of get an update. So definitely do a thread a day.
SPEAKER_01
Just to frame it for people, Jackson. So the problem you're trying to solve is, once you find lightning in a bottle, what do you do with it on the internet? What do you do with it? Because it's such a sacred thing that you found, and you don't want to squander it.
SPEAKER_00
No, I don't. And I want to do it justice, to a sense. I wish there was a way that you could see how many people had notifications on for you, because I think a lot of people, I mean, I tweet anything now, and it's 100 likes in a few seconds.
I mean, that's crazy. So it means that people are actively paying attention. They're invested.
They want to see what the outcome of this is. They care to an extent. I think I try not to be too much of a realist, but understand that people don't really have attention spans.
And as soon as there's something new in a cool new new cycle, that's going to be the new big thing. So how can I earnestly and legitimately and sincerely continue to make content about things that I actually care about that also happens to be coinciding with things that people find compelling and engaging? So that's going to be the experiment over the next couple of weeks, is how can I continue to? Clearly, I've tapped into something that people are into and excited by. It feels good to be able to make someone smile or enjoy something or be like, oh, go down a little rabbit hole, learn something new, change someone's mind, open someone to a certain possibility about something.
That's the cool thing about finding this lightning in a bottle, like you said. I think it's certainly not about getting a chatbot to make me $100,000. That's incredibly insignificant compared to the long-term effects of how can we drive a conversation around maybe it's about people and the robots working together.
Maybe it's just to change people's mind about maybe there is a future where AI doesn't take our jobs, but supplements them in a way that makes us more empowered, more creative, have a more clear voice, feel more confident. Maybe I don't know what. I think that that future is just as possible as any doomsday scenario, more so, I think.
I really am an optimist on this. I really think it's more so that.
SPEAKER_01
You called me last night and you only had a few minutes because you're a busy guy. You're a viral sensation. And I'm like, OK.
I'm chatting with Jackson today. This is exciting. So I got on the call and you said, Greg, you've been here before.
You've hit lightning in a bottle before. What would you do if you were me? And then you started rattling off a bunch of solutions. You were kind of like, I can create a discord.
I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.
I can do this. And I could tell, and I've been in your shoes, how overwhelmed you were in terms of like, you're like, OK, I need to make sure I'm making the right decision. And I said, OK, slow down, Jackson.
What do you want to get out of this? What is your goal? And then you kind of like stopped and you're like, I haven't really thought about that. And then I asked you, OK, OK. Like, why do you think about that? What is uniquely Jackson?
SPEAKER_00
Well, so before I was a branding designer, before I was in the design world, the reason that I even got into design in the first place was because when I was 12, I loved new, cool, and exciting technology. I looked up to people on Twitter, not very much unlike yourself, Greg. And so when I was 12 years old, I made a video podcast.
I interviewed my heroes. I needed to learn how to design a website in order to host that. It was kind of pre-Youtube days in a way.
That snowballed into a love and a career that has been focused around design for the last 13, 14 years of my life. I've been on Twitter over half of my life, Greg. I love design because I love tech and I love new and exciting things.
So of course, when AI starts to take this front seat in everyone's narrative, I want to be that guy at the intersection of, and I hate the intersection of blah, blah, blah, blah. At the intersection of design and AI and new, just using design as a baseline is a common thread to share my love for new and exciting things. That's what I've always done.
That's what I've always felt like I am here to do in a lot of ways. So you said to be that guy, right?
SPEAKER_01
That's exactly what I said. And the reason I said that is because knowing you for as many years as I've known you for, I know that you can be the best person on the planet in that space. Thanks, man.
It's not that I don't think you can be the biggest and baddest AI person on the planet, but I actually think that you would have a lot more smiles and fun and good times at that intersection.
SPEAKER_00
You told me to niche down. That was the framework that you were saying, don't go broad. A lot of people strike gold in something and they go super broad with it.
But I loved that answer of like, look at it and be like, do you really want to try to please everyone or connect with the biggest audience?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, here's the way I think about it. I see it as like a Venn diagram. So on the right circle, you have what your audience expects of you because now you have an audience and they expect something from you.
And in this case, it's AI. It's probably some challenges, some capacity. And then there's the left circle, which is Jackson's niche.
And what is that niche? And I actually think there's probably an exercise that you can do that's even like more niche than design, quote unquote. There's probably five elements of design that you really like, like for example, design tools or branding or XYZ. And the intersection of those is the product you built or is the product that you're going to build.
And that's how to think about it. How can you possibly think about what product to build if you don't really, really understand that Venn diagram? So that's why you start with the Venn diagram, you get crystal clear, and then you think about what are the business goals that I need to have to support that? And that's where it becomes, I need to get people off Twitter onto my own audience as fast as possible. Because who knows, change of algorithm.
Totally. That's number one.
SPEAKER_00
It's in someone else's hand, yeah.
SPEAKER_01
It's in someone else's hand. And you know what happens firsthand when you put something else, and when you put something in someone's hands, like a robot, you never know what's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_00
It's true, leave it up to the powers that be. And unfortunately those powers that be might not be human at all. I'm in a similar place to where I was when we talked yesterday, where I was like, buzzing, spinning, like trying to do, I literally was in an Uber to meet my mom for dinner last night, to get away for like a minute.
And I was in the Uber on my laptop, and I felt like I was doing 20 things at once. Seriously, it was that like, because I'm not used to going from, you know, a relatively slow and reliable pace, which I've been kind of cruising at for a couple of years now, to like, breakneck, like go mode. And that was, I mean, it was whiplash for sure.
And so I think talking to you, saying like, you know, slow down, write this out, figure out what that unique, like the overlap in that Venn diagram is, that resonated with me in a way that I felt like for the first time in 48 hours, I could wrap my head around all of these factors that are playing it at once.
SPEAKER_01
The other thing that we haven't mentioned is that you've been like prepping for this moment, like your whole life in a lot of ways. I mean, we touched a little upon it, but you are a really special individual. So I met you in 2014, I think.
2014, yeah. In San Francisco, you were living in this house with a bunch of other like six to eight, 18 year old giga brains. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Yeah. And you were wearing like a full suit, like you are now, if you know, you got to watch, by the way, if you're listening to this, go on YouTube and like watch him, cause you know, Jackson always dresses to the nine. And so you're wearing this suit and you come over to my house, I think.
Well, the first time I met you, you like you wanted to hang out. And I was like, who is this like 18 year old or 17 year old or whatever smoking a cigarette,
SPEAKER_00
wearing a full suit. Which you never see in San Francisco. You never see that.
SPEAKER_01
Never see. I saw like the way my house was structured is like, my balcony is like over, like I can see who's coming in front of me. And I see this like 18 year old kid smoking a cigarette and a full suit.
I hadn't seen a cigarette in years and I hadn't seen a full suit in years.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And I was like, who is he? What the hell's going on? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You come up and you just tell me about how you, you know, you were your designer and some of your work that you've been doing from that, you know, you started a crypto company in 2015, I believe. So like way ahead of the curve, you always had this eye for, you know, what's coming next.
SPEAKER_00
I mean that I wouldn't have started or I was a co-founder in that and I would not have been involved in that if it weren't for two of those five to six or seven, eight guys, however many people I was living with in San Francisco at the time, two of them were starting this company and they asked me to be a third co-founder. One of them was a former employee of yours. Actually, you know, to be completely honest with you.
SPEAKER_01
Actually both of them are formally,
SPEAKER_00
both of them are formally. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, right.
The conversation I was having when I came up with the idea for the hustle GPT tweet was in one of my conversations with Stefan who's still a good friend of mine. And so I could say, you know, maybe wouldn't be here if it weren't for, well, definitely wouldn't be here if it went for him in a lot of ways. Wouldn't have met you if it went for him, wouldn't have, damn, love that guy.
Anyway, shout out Stefan, what's up?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, amazing guy. But I think like actionable takeaway for people. What do you think that is? Like what is it about your background and your story that prepped you for this moment?
SPEAKER_00
Look, I'm just gonna say it now because like I'm here, like this is happening. I've always known that this is kind of my intended, I don't wanna say final form because that implies like, you know, some completion of something that's not at all what I mean to say. When I had a conversation with my incredible friend, Garrett Scott, Pipe Dream Labs, shout out, we sat down for a cocktail in Oklahoma City about a year ago, year and a half ago.
And I asked him, you know, what is the one thing that you think that I'm failing to do that I could be doing better? And because I trust him a lot as a person and he, without missing a beat, said, making video content, growing an audience online, sharing your story with people, you're meant to do this. This is something that you haven't given a true shot at for whatever reason and you owe it to yourself and everyone else to do that. And that really sat with me a lot.
And, you know, we can make excuses all day for why not to do something, you know, don't have enough time, quality's not there, not good enough, embarrassed, people are gonna judge me, people are gonna da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. I remember when I was 12 years old starting that first video podcast when I was, you know, talking to Gary Vaynerchuk after he dropped his first ever book in 2009. I mean, like way back when he was just a wine guy, he was my hero and I sat down and I talked to him and that energy that I had, the conversation that we had, that person that I was as a 12 year old kid, as silly as it seems to say, was something that I never forgot and that always stuck with me when I didn't make a career out of podcasting or vlogging or whatever it was back then and became, you know, full time in design.
I said, that's fine, you know, I can let it kind of fall by the wayside but this always has been kind of eating at the back of my mind. So this is as big a push as I've ever had and it's as good of a reason as any to go full tilt in that aspect of my personality that's always been, you know, very core to who I am.
SPEAKER_01
Here's my answer to that question.
SPEAKER_00
Who are you? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
So number one, you always dressed the part, literally. Like you always dressed the part, you showed up.
SPEAKER_00
I only own like three outfits. I'm just wearing the same things over and over again, Greg.
SPEAKER_01
You dressed the part, period. So number one, you dressed the part. Number two, you played the part.
You started a video podcast when you were 12 years old and you interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk, like you might not have done it well, realistically. I mean, maybe you did it well but you might have not done it well. But you showed up and you played the part and then the last thing is you are the part.
You remained authentic throughout the entire journey. Right? And that's sort of the, as I was saying about the Venn diagram, it's the left circle. Yeah. Right? It's the left circle. So I want to end there because I want to end there.
I think that's a good ending place.
SPEAKER_00
That's nice to be meant. I appreciate you saying that because- I pleasure it. Well, I respect you tremendously for being a role model in a lot of ways from a distance.
And we've known each other for a really long time but I appreciate you being here when I need a little guidance and asking the right questions and helping me out with that and saying that's really cool if you meant it. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01
My pleasure. Where could people find you? Well, where could people find you on the internet? And then how could people get involved with this whole craze?
SPEAKER_00
Well, it's fortunately for them all in the same place. On Twitter at Jacksonfall, J-A-C-K-S-O-N-F-A-L-L. It's all there.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Jackson.
SPEAKER_00
Thank you so much for taking the time. I'll talk to you soon, man.