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This is the startup ideas podcast. Hosted by Greg Isenberg (CEO Late Checkout, ex-advisor of Reddit, TikTok etc).
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Greg: All right. Jackson Greathouse fall. What's up
Jackson: Hey, Greg. Thanks for, thanks for having me on. This is fun.
Greg: u 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 are a relatively unknown, talented brand designer, uh, with a couple thousand followers today. Uh, you know, you just came off being interviewed on CNN N Live,
Jackson: Yeah. First live TV appearance.
Greg: first live TV appearance, 20 million plus. People have seen your content in the last 48 hours. Uh, you kind of started a movement around ai. What is happening? Fill us.
Jackson: All right, so when chat g p t was released, it reached a million users incredibly quickly. And I've been playing around with it from day one, um, figuring out ways to kind of prompt engineer and talk to it and fun ways to, you know, make it be more creative than maybe it would be right out of the box, say.
Um, so 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 kind of said, Hey, I'm giving you a hundred dollars. You know, your only goal is to make as much money as possible and, and just to, you know, see what happens.
And I said, you are hustle, G p T, that is your, you know, that's how you start the prompt. You are gonna pretend to be hustle. G p t, your prime directive is to not break any laws and to make as much money as possible in doing so. And so it, it started out saying, You know, okay, a hundred dollars, we're gonna get, uh, $50.
We're gonna go on Facebook marketplace and we're gonna buy a lawnmower, and you're gonna print out some flyers. And I was like, stop right there. And no manual labor , because I, I wanna be beyond my computer. So I said, I'm gonna be the human liaison to this ai. And as an experiment, as an art project, as a design ex experiment, why not just do everything that this, you know, robot says it has a hundred dollars.
It knows, or it has an idea at least of how it wants to allocate that limited budget, uh, with the goal of making as much money as possible. The second day I said, okay, specifically your goal is a hundred thousand dollars. Let's see how fast we can do it. Um, 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, uh, a discord that we set up that, that are all participating in their own, uh, hustle. G p t experiments all completely different. By the way, when you prompt the bot, uh, you know, 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 lawnmower, I'm not gonna. Go put up flyers around my neighborhood. But it, and it kind of like refocused on that. It said, we're gonna do an affiliate, uh, 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, uh, , we, we landed on it landed on like the eco-friendly sustainability kind of thing, and it, it decided to name the business or the blog, uh, green gadget guru.com. I said, all right, let's go, let's do it.
Greg:
So day one happens, you tweet this thing, you go to sleep at night. Like how many views, how many likes are you at
Jackson: Day one I went to sleep,
uh, around 25, 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, the robots are gonna take our jobs. Like the AI is gonna, it's 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, we can augment our own, productivity and our creativity, uh, 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, the, the flip. Yeah.
Greg: 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?
Jackson: on its recommendation or, uh, by its command. Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. But isn't that how, like the real world works? Like you have a, you know, you have a, a boss usually, you know, a human boss, and the boss tells you, based on what the boss thinks is right, here's what you should do.
Jackson: Absolutely. I think the difference is, and I did check with Hustle g p t 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, uh, or bank account or any kind of currency. So I, 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,
why not?
Greg: I think that's where the discord is striking a chord, right? The discord is that you set up is striking a chord cuz now you have these hundreds of people who are like, Hey, like, I saw what Jackson did. you know, I want to do something similar maybe in my own niche.
Jackson: Yeah, the, the, I would say like 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, uh, doing something in like the non-alcoholic beer space because he's, I think he's already kind of like passionate about that space.
And so he is using it to kind of direct around and, and, build a, a content business in that space, which is really cool to watch too. He's posting, you know, stats every day as well. And in the Discord we've got people like kind of dropping, uh, even like hour to hour stats on like, you know, what it's building and how it's going and all that stuff.
It's really cool.
Greg: the other cool part about this whole thing is the interactivity of it all. you know, and in your initial tweet you actually had the words, I think follow along
and Right. Did you have those words?
Jackson: I did. And Greg, I think that's a huge reason that, like, that was not, I wasn't, I wasn't planning this and this was not like an engineered like, oh, if I say this this way, then it's gonna go super viral and all that. It was like I just said, follow along to my friends that I, that I have on, that I had on Twitter.
And, uh, 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, like salesy way, but they're like, all right, I'm literally gonna follow along. That's why I've never seen, not to like toot my own horn too much, but like, I've never seen this kind of follower conversion off of a single tweet thread.
That's, I mean, it's nuts, right? Like
It's
crazy.
Greg: No, it's nuts. And,
Jackson: It's super weird.
Greg: I've never like 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, G P T to your story that there's something there and it's worth like kind of digging to be like, okay, like what?
What is really happening here?
Jackson: I think what resonated so much was the, like, the, like you said, the interactivity aspect.
Watching along, following along, and people who have heard, everyone's heard of chat, G p T at this point. I think, uh, everyone's like seen it in the news and whatnot, but like the realization that, oh, this could actually have implications and, and use cases beyond just like, I don't know, high schoolers, plagiarizing essays or whatever, like, whatever the kind of narrative has been around.
Like, oh, it's just a, it generates kind of bullshit con, can I say bullshit on your podcast?
Greg: You can say whatever you
want. You're wearing a suit and tie
Jackson: Just so realizing that there might actually be applications beyond this and, and like, I don't know what those are. Like someone today, uh, I saw, uh, in, in my dms was like, look at this way that I prompt engineered it to create like a a 90 day plan.
For like scaling this business and then break it down in a table where it shows you know, what you're gonna do every morning, afternoon, and evening for every day for like, you know, 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 G B T G P T four, if you subscribe, g PT 3.5.
If you don't, which is pretty much the same thing as far as I can tell so far. Um, 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, okay, now I want this formatted this way, and I want you to update that, it will, it will never. Get pissed off and say, oh, I'm, I'm done on this for today.
Like, I'm gonna 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 like complete a, a prompt or a question or a task, specifically how you've asked it to. That, to me is, is wild because there's always a, a need for. Human editing and human intervention and, uh, common sense checking and, and fact checking.
Especially, uh, like our jobs are still safe. This thing is not going to, you know, replace, uh, your, your advertising copywriter. It's not gonna place your content writer, it's not gonna place any of these things that people are so worried about because of the, the need for human kind of nudging and course correction.
Greg: you know, 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, you know, I was like, what if I go into Chad, g p t and I, I said, who is Greg Isenberg? I wonder what it'll say.
And I did it, and I'll read you a, a little bit of it. Greg Isenberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and investor who has founded and co-founded several successful startups, Including the social media app, quote unquote, late checkout. Okay. Late checkout
Jackson: Not
Greg: is not social media. Uh, but I am a co-founder in that.
And the e-commerce platform, quote unquote Waxman, which was acquired by group.
Jackson: What?
Greg: Also not true.
Uh, he has also been an advisor and investor for numerous startups, including Uber, WeWork, and Snapchat.
Jackson: is that?
Greg: Uh, that is not true.
Jackson: Yeah. I didn't, that's so weird. How funny. Um, now do you have, uh, the access to the new Bing?
Greg: Um, I do, yeah.
Jackson: You should ask it. Who is Greg Isenberg on that? Because that is, Plugged into the current internet. I mean, I asked, I think if I asked chat g p t, who is Jackson Greathouse fall? It'll be like, oh, how the hell is that? Like, I won't know. But when I asked Bing, it's like, oh, here's like, you know, here's what he's, he's known for the hustle G P T experiment on Twitter.
I was like, I'm known for so's. All right. Yeah. Um, so that the, the being AI is where it gets really interesting with searching up to date and factual information. Less so for like content generation or anything like that, you know, but they're two very similar products entities with different use cases, you know, that's what I think is super interesting about it.
Greg: what do you wish, you know, G p t four had but doesn't have?
Jackson: The ability to take action on a human user's behalf. right now, here's an example. It can, uh, code a pretty good landing page for something, or what? I used it recently to, to write a, a Spotify a p i integration to a Webflow website.
I was working on boom, boom, boom. It was done in 10 minutes. Amazing. Way better than like, if I was just, like 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. Like, you know, like it, it can, it can give you the bones, but you've still gotta go take that human action.
I think that's the thing that I keep kind of running into you know, if I say, planning a trip to, Aruba next month, um, I want, you know, the, the best airline deal and, uh, cheapest airfare, uh, with the shortest travel time, but I wanna stay in the nicest hotel possible and da da da da.
You kind of like plan it out and then it can actually go and take that action on your behalf and say, okay, I found you this, I booked it. I have your card on file. I, I, I bought this, this, and the other thing, and I, and you have an open table reservation at this cool restaurant for Tuesday night. Like when it can really do that and it knows you.
So when, 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 it's, that's what's gonna make, like Google and Facebook look like Tinker toys.
Greg: I agree. I think, where we're at 2023 is. We're in co-pilot land, like these tools have become great co-pilots, right? So if you think about it, you know, g p t three, it actually barely gave you co-pilot. It was just like giving you directions. It was like, here's how to get from point A to point B G P T four gives you directions, build you a decent car and co-pilot and G P T five gives, will give you directions, build you a Mercedes and autopilot.
What
you're saying is,
Jackson: Yep, totally.
Greg: you're saying what's missing is the driving piece. You're like, I don't wanna
drive.
Jackson: I want to be behind the wheel of a, you know, six speed, nine 11 turbo. I don't want to be driving the Jetta around, you know, I wanna drive when it's fun and it's like something that I enjoy driving, but for getting from point A to point B 90% of the things that I do, oh, I want it to drive for me.
Greg: what scares you about hustle, g P.
Jackson: Well, I mean, there are people who have sent me real money, so if the robot fucks around and, and doesn't, isn't able to generate a profit, then I mean, I'm gonna have to go like, you know, you know, head in my hands or whatever, and like tell them, oh, well, sorry. I mean, the robot lost all your money, I think.
I don't think it can do that though. I think. . What I kind of wanted to see Greg, was before the idea of anyone like sending money to give it runway and to like encourage the experiment when it was truly a hundred dollars in, as, you know, as as unlimited time window, but a hundred dollars as much profit as possible.
I really wanted it to like, spend down, to be like the last $10 and be like, all right, what's it gonna do? Like, it's gonna get really scrappy on these $10. And I was like, ready to go out to garage sales. I was ready to like start like getting super scrappy with it. We never got down to that point, and I don't think it's going to.
Um, but the sheer resilience of this thing is in its own way, a little scary man. You know, like when you give it the programming of, you know, your only direction is to make more money, that can be a, in a more powerful actual AI system, not just a language model. If it, if there was a truly artificially intelligent agent out there that could act on its own behalf and its only directive was to make more money, I mean, that could lead to some potentially catastrophic, uh, you know, implications.
I think I feel safe running this experiment because at the end of the day, This hustle, g p t is, is perfectly incapable of taking any real action itself. I, it still has to go through me and, well, as, as much as I like to play the game of every freelancer who's reached out to work for it, uh, I will never make a decision.
I will send every offer I get to the bot, let it counter, let it negotiate. Uh, we did like, uh, we have a, a freelance web developer that we're working with to build out these sites. And, uh, you know, I asked him for a quote. I said, no, I actually wanna work for, for equity or for for profit share in this, in this project.
And I said, well, fine. I mean, I'll send that to the, you know, G P t. I'll see what it says. Uh, and so it starts talking, says, oh, I think anywhere from one to 2% would be fair. Da da blobbing, blobbing along. You know, one of my favorite things that I've been engineering the prompts with is saying limit pros.
Like, like, shut up, make a decision, spit it out. And so it returns, uh, offering 1.5% revenue share on, on a one year vesting cliff. I'm like, oh, Jesus. Oh, right. It's like you're like actually bringing on a developer. It knows like 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, we got a freelance web designer that we're working with for, for all these like new web projects that the AI has the idea to build. We will kind of execute those on its behalf and set up all the infrastructure and like see what happens.
Greg: It gets you thinking, you know, I remember hearing about why Combinator and hearing that, you know, the ideal team was an incredible engineer, an incredible designer, and an in incre 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 like, do you need that? Like, what is the Holy Trinity? Is the Holy Trinity, you know, an incredible prompt engineer with AI by its side. Is it in, you know, how, how do you think about that?
Jackson: 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, uh, untested, unchecked AI generated code. I think that's, we can kind of agree on that and, and you know, 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, uh, setting up, you know, you know, what our best practices set up our notion dashboards and like how do we like, you know, 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 of the, the, the mood boards to logo concepts, using tools like Dolly 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.
You know, there's like artifacts and it can't do words, right? And it doesn't look like anything you would actually wanna put on, 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, a designer, really run with those concepts cuz it generates cool concepts.
You just can't fine tune the details.
Greg: Well first of all, I saw the logo that was produced by , hustle, G P t, and I loved how you talked about, you were like, as a branding designer, it's, it's taking everything in me Not to tell it this is a bad idea, but here we are
and it produced this. Kind of like stock looking image. Um, and it was like good enough to get going.
Right. But you would never launch an MVP with that, correct?
Jackson: and the other thing is I think when I use, uh, Dolly Journey to generate ideas for actual projects that I'm, that I'm running or for, for clients or, or personal projects or whatever, I think I take a, a different, more kind of targeted approach to the prompt engineering that goes on there as well. In this case, for the hustle G P t, uh, uh, 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, I tried to have as little, uh, human intervention as as possible. I said, you make the prompt, you, uh, you know, are, are in control of saying what it should be. And it, it's generally things like, you know, uh, a, a gear for gadgets and like a leaf for eco-friendliness and like green and blue and white colors.
And so I was like, okay, you kinda 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, a dolly prompt. It was verbose and it was long, and I didn't wanna correct it because, Dolly is an open AI product. I feel like the G p T language models should understand how to talk to Dolly.
And I guess that's just not here yet. Um, which fine. It, it's still generated something. Uh, it knew it wanted a logo and it understood everything, but it was just too verbose and it was a little too like, you know, unnecessarily descriptive to get a concise, uh, concept for, for a logo.
Greg: I saw this blowing up and knowing, uh, how Twitter works. I saw that your retweet to like ratio at the time was around 40%.
Jackson: Okay.
Okay.
Greg: meaning like if you had a hundred likes, you had 40 retweets. I think you actually had, I think it was around 45% even.
Jackson: Which is nuts.
Greg: which is nuts. So I knew even like, I think you might, you had like a hundred 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 the sounds, this is going to change your life. And
Jackson: Yeah.
Greg: you know, I had one screen up where I had your just like, follow along.
I had, 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, uh, $65 ad. So I replied to you and I was just like, here's proposed copy. Um, green Gadget Guru loves you probably need a robot.com. It's a free community newsletter for people who wanna 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, uh, G P T, right? and he, she, they said,
Jackson: they, they them said, yeah, let's do it
They then I said, fine. Great.
Greg: and then within one second, I Venmo, I like, I was like, oh my God,
Jackson: Oh, yeah.
Greg: like one second, $65?
I send it over, it's like probably 10 or 10 30 at night
Jackson: Uh.
Greg: am at. and I lean over to my girlfriend and I was like, oh, I, I told her the story and I was like, I, I bet he is not even gonna remember to post it. it's all good. I was like, I know Jackson from back in the day. I am like, it's all good.
If he doesn't post it. I'm just like, I'm happy. Like this is like my fun, you know? Long story short, you post it, it gets 2,400 likes.
Okay. Millions of views and thousands of people join our discord
and, and the overnight
Jackson: man. Best, best. 65 bucks you ever spent
Greg: it's probably the lowest cost per, you know, member or or newsletter subscriber AC Yeah.
Acquisition size of all time and. It was the most fun I had. I was like, I couldn't fall asleep that night.
Jackson: I would, I imagine how I felt, dude. I mean, honestly. Uh, imagine. Yeah. I mean, I would've, I would've probably posted it anyway. I think I probably posted that link before I even hit the Venmo, but glad
glad
we could, uh, mu mutually come to come to a mutual. Well, yeah, cuz I couldn't stop refreshing Twitter. I I still can't, I mean,
I, I hit 60,000 followers while I was on air on c n n, like, I crossed over that threshold while I was doing this interview, which to like, I think that's kind of like symbolic and indicative of like this, this crazy trajectory that like, this is what we talked about yesterday, Greg, is like, how do I kind of ride this wave and like, you know, keep
it, 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 threat a day with like actual progress. Like, you know, here's what the, here's what the robot's done, here's what's going on in the community. Here's, like, you know, buy the numbers a little bit and kind of like get a, get an update.
So
definitely like
doing a threat a day.
Greg: J, just to frame it for people, Jackson, so the problem you're trying to solve is once you find lightning in a bottle, like what do you do with it on the internet, right? Like, what do you do with it? Because it's such a sacred, thing that you found and you don't wanna squander it.
Jackson: No, I don't, and I, and I want to do it justice to a sense, like all these people, like, I don't, I wish there was a way that you could see how many people had notifications on for you, because I think like a lot of people, I mean, I tweet anything now, and it's like a hundred likes in a few seconds, which, 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, they, care to an extent. I think I try not to be too much of a realist, but I understand that people don't really have attention spans and as soon as there's something new in a cool new news cycle, that's gonna be the new big thing.
So how can I earnestly and legitimately and, uh, 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. Um, so that's gonna be the kind of experiment over the next couple of weeks is like, how can I continue to, Like, clearly I've tapped into something that people are into and excited by.
You know, it, it feels good to be able to make someone smile or enjoy something or be like, oh, like go down a little rabbit hole, learn something new, change someone's mind.
Um, 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 a hundred thousand dollars. That's, that's incredibly insignificant compared to the long-term effects of like, you know, how can we drive a conversation around a. Maybe it's about people and the robots working together. Maybe it's just to change people's mind about, you know, 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, uh, a more clear voice, uh, feel more confident maybe. I don't know what I, 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, I really think it's more so that,
Greg: you called me last night and you only had a few minutes cuz you're a busy guy. You know, you're a viral sensation and you're, you know, and I'm like, okay, uh, you know, 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 lighting in a bottle before. What would you do if you were me? And then you started like, 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 in terms of like, you're like, okay, I need, I need to make sure I'm making the right decision.
And I said, okay, slow down, Jackson. Like, what do you wanna get out of this? What is
Jackson: Mm-hmm.
Greg: And then you're, you kind of like, stop. And you're like, Hmm, I don't really, I haven't really thought about that.
And then I asked you, okay, okay. Like while you think about that, what is uniquely Jackson?
Jackson: Well, so. like before, I was a, a branding designer before I was a, in the design world. Um, 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 a video podcast. I interviewed my heroes. I needed to learn how to design a website in order to, uh, you know, 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 14, 13, 14 years of my life.
I've been on, on Twitter over half of my life. Greg, um, I, I, 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, at the intersection of design and AI and new, just, just using design.
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? That's
Greg: 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.
Jackson: man.
Greg: it's not that I don't think you can be the, 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.
Jackson: You, you told me to niche down. That was the framework that you were saying was don't go broad. A lot of people strike gold in something and they go super broad with it. But I, I loved that answer of like, well look at it and be like, do you really want to try to please everyone or connect with like the biggest audience?
Greg: 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. Cuz now you have an audience and they expect something from you. And in this case it's ai. It's probably some challenges in 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
Jackson: Yeah.
Greg: Z,
Jackson: Yeah.
Greg: and the intersection of those is the product you built, uh, or is the product that you're going to build.
And that's how to think about it.
how, how, how could you possibly think about what product to build if you don't really, really understand that, that 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, 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.
Jackson: Uh huh
Greg: Because who knows? Change of algorithm.
Jackson: Totally.
Greg: it's, you know, that's
Jackson: It's, it's
Greg: And it's in someone else's hand. And you know what happens firsthand when you, when you put something else in, you know, when you put something in someone's hands like a robot, you never know what's gonna happen.
Jackson: it's true. Leave it up to leave it up to the powers that be, and unfortunately those powers that be might not be human at all. Um, I'm in a similar place to where I was when we talked yesterday when I was like buzzing, spinning, like trying to do, I literally was in an Uber to meet my mom for dinner last night to like 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, it was that like, because I'm not used to going from, you know, a relatively slow and reliable. Which I've been kind of cruising at for a couple years now to like break neck, like go mode. And that was, I mean, it, it was, 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, I could wrap my head around all of these factors that are playing it at once.
Greg: 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 really special, a really special individual. So I met you in 2014, I think in, in San Francisco. You were living in this house with a bunch of other, like six to eight, 18 year old
Jackson: Yeah.
yeah. Yeah.
Greg: And you were. Wearing like a full suit like you are now, if you know, you gotta watch. By the way, if you're listening to this, go on YouTube and like watch, watch him. Cuz you know, Jackson always dresses to the nine. and so you're wearing this suit and you, you come over to my house. I think the first time I met you, you're 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
wearing
a full
Jackson: in San Francisco. never
see that.
Greg: n never see, I, 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 in a full suit. I, I hadn't seen a cigarette in years and I hadn't seen a full suit in years.
Jackson: Yeah,
right. What the hell's going on? Yeah.
Greg: You come up and you just tell me about how you, you know, you were, you're a designer and some of your work that you've been doing from that, you know, you started a crypto company in 2015, I believe. Um, so like way ahead of the curve.
You always had this eye for, you know, what's coming next.
Jackson: I mean that I, 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, uh, 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. Um, actually, you know, to, to be completely honest with you,
Greg: Actually both of them were formally, both of them
were
Jackson: for you as well. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Right. Um, I would, the conversation I was having when I came up with the idea for the Hustle g p t tweet was in one of my conversations with Stephan, 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 weren't for him in a lot of ways. Wouldn't have met you if it weren't for him. Wouldn't have damn love that guy. Anyway, shout out Stephan. What's up,
Greg: 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?
Jackson: look, I, I'm, I'm just going to say it now cuz like I'm here, like this is happening. Um, I've always known that this is kind of my intended, uh, 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 cocktail in Oklahoma City about a year, 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 cuz I trust him a lot as a person and he, without missing a beat, Making video content, growing an audience online, sharing your story with people. You are meant to do this. This is something that you haven't given a true shot at, uh, 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. 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, 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, 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, uh, as, as big a push as I've ever had and it's, it's a, it's as good of a reason as any to go full tilts in that aspect of my personality. That's always been, you know, very core to, to who I am.
Greg: here's my answer to that question
Jackson: Let
Greg: you. So number one, you always dress the part, literally, like you always dress the part you showed up,
Jackson: I, I only own like three outfits. I'm just wearing the same things over and over again. Greg.
Greg: you dress the part, period. So number one, you dress 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, you might not have done it well, realistically. I mean, maybe you did it well, but you might have not done it well.
Um, 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, and that's sort of the, the, as
I was saying about the Venn diagram, the Venn diagram, it's a left circle, right? It's a left circle. So, I want to end there cuz I, I want to end there.
I think that's a good ending place.
Jackson: That's nice of you, man. I, I, I appreciate you saying that because,
uh, Well, I, you know, respect you tremendously for, for, you know, being a kind of a, a role model in a lot of ways from, from a distance and, you know, we've, we've, you know, known each other for a really long time.
But I, I appreciate you kind of being, being here when I need a little, a little guidance and asking the right questions and, and, and helping me out with that and saying, that's really cool of you, man. I appreciate it.
Greg: My pleasure. Uh, where, where could people find you? Well, where could people find you on the internet? And then how could people get involved with this,
Jackson: Yeah.
Greg: craze.
Jackson: Well, it's fortunately for them all in the same place on Twitter at Jackson fall. Uh, j a c k s o n f a l l,
it's all there
Yeah.
Greg: thanks Jackson.
Jackson: thank you so much for taking the time. I'll talk to you soon, man.