The 2026 Anti-Trend That Will Make Millions

Summary

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The Startup Ideas Podcast

Episode: The 2026 Anti-Trend That Will Make Millions
Host: Greg Isenberg
Guest: Jonathan Courtney
Date: October 20, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deeply into the "anti-trend" of 2026: building million-dollar businesses by doing the opposite of what’s dominating today—specifically, not following AI or hyper-digital trends, but instead creating real-world, in-person products and experiences. Greg Isenberg welcomes Jonathan Courtney, who shares his success playbook for launching and scaling offline ventures, including retreats, hands-on courses, and physical products, in a landscape overrun by AI and digital solutions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Anti-AI and In-Person Opportunity

• Main Idea: While the world rushes toward AI tools, digital content, and virtual communities, a huge, underserved market craves real-life, tactile, and in-person experiences.
• Quoting Jonathan:

  "There’s a massive opportunity...to take a look at what’s happening in the AI space, the social media space, the content space—just go the opposite way and you’re going to find that a lot of people want exactly that." [01:33]

Supporting Trends:

• Social media use has peaked and is declining among young people.
• Even digital-first entrepreneurs are craving unplugged, real connections.

2. The Shift Back to IRL (In Real Life)

• Jonathan's Pivot: Outlines how his companies started digital, but are shifting more offerings offline.
• Pricing & Demand: IRL events and certifications, though far more expensive to run, sell out faster and more easily than digital equivalents.
  • Online certification: $6,000
  • IRL version: $14,300 — sells out despite higher price.
• Quote:

  "It's so much more enjoyable to market these things because people are craving these in-person experiences..." [04:44]

3. Tactical Framework for Building Anti-Trend Startups

a. Identify Digital-First Offerings

• Observe what’s working in digital—communities, masterminds, certification courses.
• Reimagine them as memorable, immersive, in-person events or experiences.

b. The Summer Camp Example

• Jonathan created "Summer Camp"—an in-person digital marketing event (no recordings, no virtual tickets, themed with nostalgia—not "bro" culture).
• Sold $6,800 tickets, 30 spots, easiest sales ever.
• Quote:

  "We stripped out all of the virtual elements...made it an in-person only event, charged $6,800 per ticket and sold 30 tickets...the easiest 30 tickets I’ve ever sold." [10:19]

c. True Scarcity & Urgency

• Real-life events have natural limits (seats, space)—drives authentic urgency, unlike artificial scarcity tricks in software/digital.
• Campaigns can be brief and focused.

d. IRL Events as Brand Builders

• In-person events foster organic word-of-mouth, create aspirational FOMO, and serve as “proof” that your community/company is real.
• Quote:

  "It feels more legit…like, these people are obviously up to some real, real-life shit. This is not some cave dweller who's going to steal all my money." [28:58]

e. Land and Expand Strategy

• Use IRL events to upsell digital products, consulting, or SaaS tools to a motivated, high-trust segment.
• Example: ClickFunnels and Tony Robbins both use in-person events to sell (and create) loyal customers for their digital offerings.

4. How to Actually Launch an IRL Event Business

Jonathan’s Step-by-Step Playbook:

1. Pick Dates – Sets an unbreakable goal and starts momentum.
2. Find a Great Location – Prioritize places with wow factor, not standard hotel conference rooms.
3. Start Direct Outreach – DM individuals personally to secure early commitments.
4. Sell Before You Commit – "Pre-sell" by securing commitments before booking/renting major spaces (optional: get a preliminary hold).
5. Leverage Free or Low-Cost Venues – Many companies are happy to let you use their offices/space if your event is cool or aligned (WeWork, other startups, etc.).
6. Direct Message & Community Seeding – You don’t need an audience of thousands; start with your core network and their referrals.

• Quote:

  "I post something on X and I maybe get two likes or three likes and I can still get one of these events filled up..." [29:18]

5. Why Physical Products Are Back

• Physical info products (like Alex Hormozi’s $100M playbook binder, priced at $5,800) create tangible value and stand out in a world of instantly accessible but disposable digital PDFs.
• Quote:

  "Why would he print out and create a physical folder? And why would someone be stupid enough to buy it?...People crave the physical thing." [30:30]

6. It's Not About What People Want, It's About What They Need

• Most people say they want digital for convenience, but real transformation, learning, and networking happens better IRL.
• There’s an “inefficient,” inconvenient, but more valuable way—and people will pay for it.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On anti-trend timing:

  "The anti trend doesn’t work until it works." — Jonathan, [08:52]

• On filling high-ticket retreats:

  "We didn’t have any speakers, I didn’t have anything to show besides the location...and it sold out in like two days." — Jonathan, [20:49]

• On needing an audience:

  "If you’re wondering, like, do you have to have a large audience? And I am the perfect example...I have...the 100 true fans. And that’s all you need." — Jonathan, [29:18]

• On guaranteeing value:

  "We offer a full refund if you are unsatisfied by the end of your training...Never once." — Jonathan, [39:34]

• On IRL as a moat:

  "It’s not easy. And it’s a moat where, where it’s hard to, you know, come up with a moat. Now. I think IRL certainly is a moat." — Greg, [41:26]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|---------------| | 01:06 | Jonathan introduces the anti-AI "anti-trend" opportunity | | 04:44 | Profitable shift from digital to in-person events and higher pricing | | 10:19 | "Summer Camp" event example (high-ticket, easy sales) | | 13:10 | Genuine scarcity & urgency with physical events | | 17:30 | Real-life case: Rented an Italian village for a retreat | | 20:54 | Overcoming “I need an audience”—filling events with small, loyal base | | 28:58 | Why IRL events make brands more legit and aspirational | | 30:30 | Power of physical products (Hormozi example) | | 36:22 | IRL as a career-defining opportunity—“I’m sold” moment | | 39:34 | Event guarantee—promises refund, never needed |

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Actionable Takeaways

• If you want an unfair advantage in 2026, look for what’s overdone digitally and build its ambitious, in-person counterpart.
• Start with small, high-value gatherings and use them as launchpads for wider offerings.
• Don’t be deterred by lack of a huge audience—focus on true fans and personal outreach.
• In-person events and physical products can command premium prices and convert easier—because real-world scarcity, legitimacy, and immersion are differentiators digital can’t fake.
• IRL is a competitive moat because it’s logistically hard—most won’t do it at scale.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode delivers a concrete, passionate case for the "anti-AI" startup path: serve the growing market segment burned out on digital everything. IRL events, communities, and tangible products are where scrappy, creative entrepreneurs will make (and already are making) millions—even as the rest of the world automates and optimizes itself into sameness.

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For more actionable startup ideas, check out Greg’s database:
https://gregisenberg.com/30startupideas

Transcript

[A]

One of the most common questions I get is how would you make a million dollars if you were starting from scratch? I'd either create a AI startup, a GPT wrapper, build an audience, sell to that audience, or I do what Jonathan Courtney said in this episode. In this episode he talks about the anti trends. I think that there's a tremendous opportunity right now to go actually against AI and do just a lot of IRL stuff. He talks about how he rented a Italian village, how he got customers via DMs to fund it, how you don't need an audience to do this. He explains the entire playbook. I hope a lot of people listen to this episode. I hope a lot of people watch this episode. It's not as hypey as the latest AI tool, but for the people who stick around to the end, I think that they're going to have an unfair advantage for building a million dollar business in 2026. Enjoy the episode the Startup Ideas Podcast.

[B]

It's tipping time B.

[A]

Jonathan Courtney by the end of this episode, what are we going to learn?

[B]

What we are going to learn is how to use the anti trend of all of this, like AI explosion to make your business more successful.

[A]

So put it another way, you're going to teach us how to make money doing things that have the complete opposite to do with AI. The anti trend, meaning you know the complete opposite of all this AI stuff that I normally talk about.

[B]

Yeah. I think that there's a massive opportunity or lots of massive opportunities to take a look at what's happening in the AI space, the social media space, the content space, just go the opposite way and you're going to find that a lot of people want exactly that. And I mean obviously I was triggered by your tweet from today, earlier today. I guess you'll bring it up on screen but just some of the highlights from it are you showed this chart. I don't know if you want to bring that chart up on screen, but it showed that in many countries social media peaked in 2022. And it's the young people who are cutting back on social media first, which kind of shows the trend that from social, from a perspective of something as powerful as social media, a lot of younger people are starting to get off social media. And I think this trend, I mean I'm a millennial. I'm in this 35 to 44 range and myself and a lot of friends have quit social media. I'm the only social media that I'm on is X and I'm even that I'm trying to get away from. And I think there's with these trends with the AI stuff just like accelerating everything, especially around content, especially now people can just write stuff without writing, create videos without needing to create or being able to create videos. Being able to create all of this like slop or brain rot. As you said in your post, I'm seeing more and more opportunities for the opposite. And the opposite of that is you mentioned a couple of things there. Slow media, like, you know, reading long form articles again, maybe on print. But what I'm literally doing myself is over the last year I've been moving a lot of the digital elements of my company, which are very profitable and scalable because they're digital, to a much less easy to do in person version of these products. And what I'm seeing is a lot more, I'm finding it a lot more easy to market these products. I'm able to use like less, I guess, clever marketing techniques to get people to join these in person events, even though they're actually a lot more expensive. And an example of that is like, you know, one of our, we sell like certifications for learning facilitation in one of our companies, facilitator.com and for the last six years the most popular versions of those certifications have been an online version of the certification which costs $6,000. Two years ago, after Covid, I had the feeling people would want to come back in person. I had the feeling that that would also help us stand out because no one else was doing it. Everyone was still doing remote. And so we released a version of the certification which was $15,000, well, $14,300 in person. And three of those events sold out right after announcing them. And so those in person events now are essentially replacing the digital version of these events or accompanying them. Not because they are like, you know, an easier thing to run or because that's like the best way to scale, but just it's so much more enjoyable to market these things because people are craving these in person experiences versus you have to kind of like with online virtual stuff at the moment. You kind of have to, you have to really do the marketing thing. You have to do the marketing shtick to get people excited about it. And how do you like differentiate yourself from everybody else? Well, what we're saying now is we have the best in person way to do this and it's just so simple. And so our entire marketing behind our full stack facilitator program is this little like Apple like piece of Copy, which is in person. Incredible. So 50% of the marketing is dedicated to you just get to hang out with people and it's working really well.

[A]

So. Okay, so let's unpack that so we can make it extremely tactical for people. So those tactics, people need that sauce.

[B]

They need the sauce. Yeah. Not the juice. Sorry, it's the sauce.

[A]

Yeah, they. And not the tactics either. I don't know what I was saying by saying the tactics. They need the sauce. So I'm going to. I'm going to say that from 2020 to 2022, you know, there was a rush to build. We have the best digital community.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To do xyz. Correct.

[B]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And we were in that rush as well. We were just a little bit earlier. But 2020 is where it exploded.

[A]

Right. So let's, let's talk about this. So, you know, if you wanted to become, I don't know, a day trader, there's a community for that. What else? Like if you wanted to become a.

[B]

Facilitator, just because it's our thing.

[A]

Facilitator. There's a community for that, basically. XYZ Community for that is the new app for that. There's an app for that, right? Yeah.

[B]

There's a paid community, there's a free community, et cetera.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So what you're saying is this became more competitive and very competitive. Yeah. And you're not saying that there's not opportunity here. Right.

[B]

There's still. I mean, we still broadly make more money with our online certification versus our in person certification. But I think that that's going to change within the next two years and they're going to flip.

[A]

So basically, here's the framework for this. And by the way, I think that there's literally thousand, a thousand plus $1 million ARR. Businesses.

[B]

There's. I haven't even mentioned the other one that I'm building which I want other people to steal because I don't want to do more than 1 million ARR for it and I want other people to create it. If you just remind me to talk about that one because I genuine. I, Genu. Genuinely want other people to build it.

[A]

Okay. At the end you can get that one.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. You have to wait till the end.

[A]

You have to wait till the end.

[B]

And then you just stick right to the end. Fuck.

[A]

I thought, I thought you were a YouTuber, man.

[B]

Yeah, dude, have you seen my YouTube channel? It's a disgrace. It's like. Actually, yeah, mine is also the anti trend of just everything on YouTube. Which is why it's not working well.

[A]

The anti trend doesn't work until it works. Right?

[B]

Like, exactly. I'm the thing. I'm waiting on the sidelines. I'm just, I'm like, I don't know Radiohead, when they released Kid A and everyone was like, what the hell is that piece of shit album? And then now it's like, it's a classic. That's going to be my. That's going to be my stuff.

[A]

Okay, so let's give people the framework for this. How do you get ideas from this world and sort of bring it to an irl?

[B]

Okay, so I want to just say that the framework we're using is because we have three different businesses and all three. It sounds weird to say all three. Well, all three of them have digital elements that are used to be in person, then became digital because it was just so much better. And they're now moving to in person, but like almost like freshly moving from digital to in person. So I can tell you the things that are working for us. Number one, you're looking at what other people are doing in the digital only space. And for example, I ran this event in the summer called Summer Camp in August. I think I invited you to it and you didn't come. It's okay, no problem. And what I was doing is I was looking at the communities around Funnel building and around kind of digital marketing. And for me, I had the feeling if. The feeling I had is if I do an in person version of it, call it Summer camp, give it that nostalgic vibe, make it really not bro. And it's a place not just to learn marketing, but also to just hang out with people and kind of get out of your dirty cave and interact with other humans. And if I sell that idea, the idea that you're getting out and into the real world, it's a way for. It's a little bubble away from everything else that's happening. And it's also fun, which is why I called it summer camp and not revenue camp or something. And so what we did is we took something pretty boring that everyone is doing, which is sort of like a mastermind, and we stripped out all of the virtual elements of it. There's no virtual element of this mastermind. There's also no recordings of it. There's also no virtual tickets, even though people wanted virtual tickets to keep it really like aggressively in person. We just made it an in person only event, charged 6,800 per ticket and sold 30 tickets. So this was a And those were the easiest 30 tickets I've ever sold in my life for anything, even though it's a lot more expensive than maybe what the others were charging for the digital version of it. And so I ran that now two years in a row, and this is me just taking something that's out there. I know maybe I'm not helping you create this framework, but I'm just looking at what's there, what's digital and popular, and how can I turn this into something that will give people a sense of community, something that will give people, like, give people the ability to have some fun. And I also strongly believe, and this is part of the marketing as well, is that people learn better through osmosis, meaning just sitting in a room with people and just the conversations that happen during coffee breaks and all that kind of stuff. Learning through osmosis, we sell that idea that it's not just you sitting at your computer for four, four hours and then going back to what you're doing. It's complete immersion. And so this is. This was just, like, a big part of the selling point for summer camp. So we take something that exists out there, something that's maybe cold and boring, but it's working, turn that into, like, a themed event, summer camp for me. I'm also doing a winter camp and just, like, highlight why virtual is so much more inferior to everything else, and then also make it exclusively virtual.

[A]

And what do you mean by that?

[B]

Okay, make it exclusively virtual. Meaning there's no. There's no way to, like, dial in. Sorry. Make it exclusive. Exclusively in person. I didn't.

[A]

That's. I figured you meant.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Um, so the. The. The last thing. What was I about to say? It was really important.

[A]

Um, you were about to say I love you. I'm pretty sure I love you.

[B]

Oh, no, there was one really important element.

[A]

I'm in love with you.

[B]

I want to kiss you. I know there was something, um. Oh, yeah. Oh, fuck, here it is. You know, scarcity is really hard to do with a digital product. Like, there's tricks to make a digital product scarce so that there's some sense of urgency in person. Events actually have a limited amount of tickets, and so it's way easier to create a true sense of urgency and scarcity because it just is inherent to. In person. And so these things are just so much easier to build campaigns around. And so the campaigns don't need to run all year. They can just happen once. I'm. I'm closing a campaign tomorrow for our full stack Facilitator event. It was a one week campaign. We're going to sell 50% of the tickets in that one week and we don't have to think about it for another 11 months and then all the rest of the tickets sell in the last few months. Yeah, for me, in person is like, in my opinion, in my opinion, if you can do really good in person events and I'm not talking about conferences, I think conferences are generally like a money sink. Like I. Please do not think I'm talking about conferences. I'm really not. Conferences are like a completely separate thing. But if you're good at doing events and there's a guy, you know, skool, the S K O O L thing. There's a guy in one of these communities, his name is Goose G Goose, I don't know, Goose Delvani. And his thing is just jostling in person even though he's like the biggest proponent of school. And so he uses in person as a hard to compete with element of being part of his community that no one else can compete with because he's like, I'm just going to keep doing these really fun in person events the whole time. And so there's no way that people will want to be part of another similar group that doesn't provide the in person element. We also launched a new product a couple of days ago which also has this thing called Campfire where once per year we all meet up in person for five days and. And that was never naturally part of our product. So it's a virtual product which has a 12 month subscription for $6,000 and once per year we meet in person. So I'm all over the place here. I have so much more even to say about this. But yeah.

[A]

Right. So once you've built this event series of IRL community, it's funding like now go vibe, code your SaaS and now sell the SaaS to the people or sell the. It doesn't have to be a SaaS. Right. It could be just software, it could be a mobile app or whatever.

[B]

The funny thing is, this is what clickfunnels do. They run these events and the goal of these events is to fund their software that they then sell to more people at the events. And it's like this very circular thing, but they are just so goddamn good at these events. I've been to a couple of them and they're like, they were, they were like the first people. So I went to Funnel hacking live in February 2020 and then Covid happened and Funnel Hacking Live was like back immediately the next year. Still during COVID they had. They moved it to Florida so they could do it again because they knew it was just not like a good idea to do it virtually. I think a lot of people who understand in person. Tony Robbins, I mean, Tony Robbins is still doing in person, right? He's back to in person already. And it's not because that is more convenient, because it is not more convenient to do in person. It's way less convenient for me to be traveling all over the world to deliver these events. I'm traveling next week, and then I'm traveling. That is annoying. But. But it is a very hard to compete with element of a business when you have these in person events where people are coming together and they. These people also become like a very core element of the brand and they spread the word better than any marketing can do.

[A]

Number one, look at what other people are doing in the digital only space and what's popular and then bring it to irl. How do you actually do that? You know what I mean?

[B]

How we do it is like, we're pretty chaotic with it. So we did a. Okay, so I'll show you an example of this, the most chaotic version you can ever imagine. And this is. This is real. I mean, it's real. I'll show you the actual video of it, or I'll link you to it. If you search AJ and Smart Retreat, there's a video that says we rented an entire village. And I'll tell you the story behind how that happened. So it says we rented an entire village for. This is the thumbnail. This. Okay, let me tell you how this one came together, because this one was an absolute nightmare to put together. Okay, so first of all, Covid was just over. I knew if we did an in person event that people would just want to do it.

[A]

Wait, hold on. I didn't know you had that. That actually looks like. Sorry to interrupt here, but that. I thought that was Jim Halpert from the office on flute.

[B]

Of course, we paid for Jim Halpert from the office to come to this event. You can see this is back in 2022. So we had done like three. We had Covid. And then before COVID we also had stopped doing in person events because I was so sick of it. I still had braces here. I was so sick of doing in person events that I decided, ah, I don't want to do this anymore. Online stuff is so much easier. And so this was our first in person event in six years. So this Retreat. You asked me, how do we literally do it? Okay, here's how we literally did it. Number one, I, myself and Laura went to Italy because we heard there's this cool location. We went to this cool location and we did a small team retreat at this location. It's called a workation village in Italy. If anyone wants to ever rent this place, it's an actual entire village you can rent. It's normally rented for like weddings, I think. So I don't know the actual Italian name, but work Asian village. Rent this place out. It's actually very cool. If you ever want. So it's an entire village in Piedmont in Italy. And if you are willing to spend the money, you can rent the entire place. Meaning, like tons of buildings, all the rooms, swimming pool, like an entire forest. It's ludicrous. It's kind of. It sounds like a Mr. Beast type thing to do, but. So I found the location and then I was like, I think people in our audience want to do a retreat because I'd seen yoga retreats and I was like, I think I want to take yoga retreats and like, do it for our topic and like a wellness retreat, but do it for our topic. And so we decided to sell this facilitation retreat to our audience. And we didn't know if anyone would buy it. And so what we did is we got footage from that place, we got permission, like if we would actually sell the tickets that we could book the place. So we didn't book it yet because we didn't know if it would sell. But we like, you know, blocked the location preliminarily. And then we did a campaign around how beautiful this location is. It's a video of me walking around the location showing people what it's going to be like. I didn't have any speakers, I didn't have anything to show besides the location and that it would be fun. And so literally I announced this and people, it sold out in like two days. The tickets were like $7,800 because it was so expensive to rent out the space.

[A]

Wait, how did you sell out? Because a lot of people are going to be. How's that even possible?

[B]

Well, we, we did a. I mean, my system for that, as always. We did a webinar to our. Like, we had a, A week of inviting people to a webinar to talk about, like, what, Like, I, I think the idea was like, take a look at our, our first in person retreat in six years or something. Um, but for people who didn't know Us, I think we had a separate name for the webinar which was like where we see facilitation going in 2022. And at that presentation I just basically told people about how much, reminded people about how much they miss in person, like for about an hour. And then at the very end I announced and we have this retreat. Obviously people are going to say, yeah, but you need an audience to do that. Actually, yes, for this particular event we needed an audience because this was a big expensive event. We had 75 people coming to it, but summer camp only has 35 people coming into it. I only have like 1000 people or 1000 to 2000 people listening to my podcast. And my podcast is the only audience for the people coming to my other in person events. And still I can fill, you know, one to two 35 people events per year and at a high ticket price. That's still a nice little business. So, okay, the facilitator.com retreat, that's a big expensive thing. It cost us like 100k to rent the village. But the thing that I did in August, like last summer, I just asked Sam Ovens if I can use his office for my summer camp. And he was like, yeah, all right, mate. And by the way, like, Sam Ovens then asked me or one of the guys from Sam Oven's company's school asked me, can we use your office? And I was like, yeah, no problem. You can just use places for free. Like, people are often very happy for you to use their places. Like we've used like for, for events. We've used the teachable offices in New York. We use like. I mean, I, maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't say this because they're like, they don't want people to know we used all these places for free. But wework always gives us space for free to do events. We are, we are very rarely even paying for event spaces because we just pitch the idea of how cool the event will be to companies and places. And they're often, especially if you're using their product, they're often like, yeah, that sounds cool. For example, if you have a school community and if you want to do an in person event and your school community is kind of fun and interesting, let's say Sam really likes the artistic one. So like, if you're doing like a painting school community or a guitar learning school community, by the way, don't let him. I don't know if he will say yes to this. This is just a thought, but there's no harm in Asking him, hey, like, we're doing an IRL event for our, our school community. Is there any chance we could use your office? Um, he'll say no 80% of the time, probably, but 20% of the time he might be interested in it. Or you could ask, like, you. There's so many places to, to get spaces. So you asked me ages ago when I went on a very big ramble. How would I actually do it? Number one for me, actually, honestly is just choosing the dates. Number two for me is finding a location. Number three for me is kind of figuring out how do I, how do I, how do I pitch this? Like, what do I even say about this? I'll give you an example. I'll give you an exact example. I have an event that doesn't have a name yet, that doesn't have a price yet, and it's only a vibe. But I know what's happening in February. So February 2026, I'm hosting an event. It's going to be an art retreat. So like an art retreat, writing retreat, painting retreat, whatever. And it's happening in February. I kind of have the location. I have to drive there and have a look at it in the next few weeks. I've already looked at one and I wasn't happy with it. Now I'm going to look at another. As soon as I like the location, it's done. First thing I'll start doing is is messaging people directly who I think might want to come to it. So that's the very first thing I'll do. So I'll try to get like four or five people with direct messaging to like, soft commit to coming to it. So that, like, let's say the place is going to cost me like $12,000 to rent, and then the tickets are $5,000. If like two or three people say yes to me, then I'm like, fuck it, I'm doing it now. At least I know I won't lose money because this location, I have to buy ours, rent. So that's the first thing for me is that I'll just choose a date so that I lock it in my mind, choose a location, then I start messaging people. And by the way, sometimes these are people I know. Like, just to give you an example, the guy who I was doing a project with two weeks ago, a guy who runs this company called Pip Decks, I asked him if he'll come, would you come to this? And he was like, yeah, I would love. I want to come to that. So I'm asking people I know as well if they want to come to these things, if it's somewhat related. And then once that's done, it's just one foot in front of the other. The cool thing is with in person events is you have a clear target. It's fill that event. Like, what do I do? Fill that event. There's no like ambiguity around, oh, maybe we need to do our branding today or maybe we need to do. No, it's fill that event. And then when you fill that event, especially for us, for example, summer camp, we, we filled summer camp. We got 35 people to come to it. Out of those 35 people, three people booked us for other consulting gigs that we offer. So at the in person event is like the best place to tell people about all the other stuff you offer. And if they like you, it's essentially a three day advertisement and teaser for the way you are. And that's one of the best ways to get like bigger ticket things if you have something else to sell. So I don't know, I'm just a huge fan of in person. Even though I kind of find it very inconvenient to do it. I love that almost no one else is doing it in the niches that I'm doing it in. And everyone's like, no, I do it virtual. Everything's virtual. It's way more convenient. I'm like, you're right. But also, I can then compete with you. I can compete in the same space in a very different way. Yeah. I'll say one last thing about in person. It feels more legit. So, okay, if somebody, and I don't mean, I don't mean generally, like, let's say you get an ad for joining one of our paid communities, AJ and Smarts, paid communities. And you're like, I want to see if these people are real. And you go on our YouTube channel and you see this video of like, you know, this crazy location that we booked with all of these people having a great time. You're going to be like, I want to be part of whatever that is. Like, these people are obviously up to some real, real life shit. This is not some cave dweller who's going to steal all my money. It's actually a real person who goes out into the real world and meets the customers. And so it's also like an aspirational thing for customers when they see what they could be part of. And then maybe the digital products are like the path towards that. So we have our. On facilitator.com, our first product that we show on the website is Full Stack Facilitator, our in person event in California that costs almost $15,000. We know that's aspirational and we know that most of our customers won't be able to buy that at first. And so they usually take a cheaper product first, which would be workshop or master, which is in virtual only. But they get exposed over and over and over to the in person option. And eventually people want to come to that and they're like, fine, I'm ready to come to that thing now. So. Yeah, but the in person thing gives sort of like a legit anchor. I know you asked me, how would I do it? I just went on a big ramble, but I think I answered, how would I do it? Date, location, kind of know what I want to do, then start talking to people about it. And then eventually I'm like, I'm ready to. I'm ready to like, either announce it on my podcast, which almost no one listens to. Again, for your audience, like, if people are looking at Greg's audience and you're like, easy for Greg to say, because when he does a tweet, like a thousand, seventeen thousand people like it. Guys, look at my X account. I am actually don't. There's. There's. Yeah, there's nothing on there. Like, if you look at me and if you're wondering, like, do you have to have a large audience? And I am the perfect example. I post something on X and I maybe get two likes or three likes and I can still get one of these events filled up. So it really. Let's see, what did I get for 5 likes for my last post? 2 likes for the second last post. I don't have an audience, but I still, like, you know, there's this concept of the 1000 true fans. Well, I have like the 100 true fans or the 10 true fans. And that's all you need, especially for in person. In person is so tangible. Fuck. You know the other thing, Greg? So events is one thing that's one element. The other thing that's so powerful. And I'm going to hold this up to the camera. You know this, right?

[A]

Mm, yes, I do.

[B]

So this what I'm holding up to the camera. For anybody who's just hearing the audio version, I'm holding up a folder which is Alex Hermosi's $100 million playbooks. And so this folder, why would he print out and create a physical folder? And why would he charge $5,800 essentially for it. And why would someone be stupid enough to buy it? Well, let me tell you the unbelievable power of having a physical thing to show off, especially if you're doing any sort of info product. So we just launched a new kind of info product, like a coaching program on the 1st of October, and one of the key elements of it is, was a physical, because I saw Alex Hormozy doing it. I'll just tell you straight out, I just loved the physical element. And one of the key elements for our one was all of the materials are printed and they're in a nice box and inside the box you get like some other cool stuff. People, people want the physical thing. People are. People crave the physical thing. And people know as well inherently, and I know that if you have the thing in front of you, you're much more likely to read it than if you have like a big bunch of PDFs. And also, especially now that you can essentially generate all of that stuff on ChatGPT. And knowledge is becoming less and less valuable. The ability to have something curated for you physically, in my opinion, is becoming more and more valuable. But the other thing is it's just so much easier to pitch something to people if you can physically hold it and show them what you're talking about. It sounds really stupid, but another element of this whole anti trend is that extreme convenient access to content I think is the wrong way to go. And literally printing out these playbooks and telling you the only way to get them is in this physical format is a way to make someone like me salivate. It's a way to get someone like me to spend $5,000. I spend $5,000 only for this folder.

[A]

And to bring it all back. It's the anti AI, anti digital product, right?

[B]

What are we talking about again?

[A]

You know, just to bring it all back. Just to bring it. Just to bring it all back. And you are more likely to buy this today than you might have been.

[B]

A few years ago, because now he can say, okay, this is a perfect example. So on the day that this arrived, I was doing an event at my office and I told the audience, hey, this $100 million, blah, blah, playbook thing is arriving. And one of the guys in the audience said, I already have it as a PDF, somebody posted it on Reddit or something. And I said, are you going to read that? He was like, probably not. And I was like, I am going to read this because it's, it's going to be sitting on my desk. I'm going to Be using it as a reference thing and it just feels more valuable. I feel like it's a more worthwhile thing because it's a big heavy thing of playbooks that feels like a. Feels substantial. And so even the. I also think in person events come back to that. If the goal isn't to make money, if the goal. Just stick with me for one second. If we think about what is actually better for the customer, for humans. When I'm thinking about it, I know that the in person version of what we do is the absolute best way to do what we're teaching. We're teaching facilitation, which involves a lot of improvisation, a lot of kind of scenarios that you can predict. And sure, we can teach this in an online setting and we do, but the best way to learn it is in person, even if it's inconvenient for us and inconvenient for the customers. And the best way to, for example, we launched a book in May. The best way to read that book is actually to get the physical version because it's like a little workbook. Even though that's a pain in the ass for us to create and a pain in the ass for the client because they have to wait for it to arrive. And so for us, I think in a lot of ways we're just thinking practically, not what do people want? Because people will just say, I want digital stuff and I want it to be easy. It's what do people need? So what people want is ultimate comfort and convenience. But I often feel like that's not very effective. And so now when a client, for example, is also contacting us and saying, by the way, if you're listening to this clients, I don't want you to stop doing this because this is awesome for our business. But you know, I tell you this on the calls, when a client comes to us and says, I want to have 2,000 licenses of one of your courses, I say, obviously I want to sell you this and obviously I will sell you this happily. But I would just like to tell you that the best way to spend that money would be to have an in person training, right? I just want you to know that I'm telling you that the best way would be that it's not the most convenient way, but it's the best way. And so I think the anti trend is also just related to the fact that also dude, you know with the ChatGPT stuff, right? That client at a certain point might just say to us, ah, we can find all of. We basically Generated our own course using ChatGPT and all of your content. What they cannot do is say, yeah, we've generated a new version of you and your team coming to our office and running this. That will always be hard to do.

[A]

So I'm pretty sold on irl. I'm actually pretty sold on this as, like, being. If I was trying to make my first million dollars right now, I'd either build some GPT wrapper or I'd build this.

[B]

That's funny. They're so opposite.

[A]

Yeah, I know. Like the complete opposite. I think you're completely right, by the way. You got. You've got me thinking that I should do an event in 2026.

[B]

Dude, I didn't convince you to do this for a while.

[A]

A lot of people. Well, it's not about killing, right? It's about killing it for, like, you know, to your point, it's about, like, there's. There's people on the other side of this podcast, or there's people in my, you know, our digital community startup empire that, you know, if they actually had a day with me, like in Miami or whatever, and we actually worked on growing their business or ideating, I think it would be pretty impactful.

[B]

Huge. It's huge. The problem, I think, is, and I think you'll. The problem is, short term, you'll be a little bit annoyed that it's like, oh, I could have stayed behind my computer and all my businesses would have probably made more money while not doing that eventually. But the cumulative effect of that, doing things like that, I think has a huge positive net outcome on the business. And as I. What I believe to be true is that people would get massive value from that. Especially. I mean, you probably don't want to do this because I know it's not your thing, but if you were to do, like, if you were to charge like $15,000 for a ticket for three days with you, but then only. Only 20 people can come to it, I think that would be extremely appealing to. I mean, that would be very appealing to people in your audience. I know from people coming to my events who pay, you know, up to 15k, nobody has a fucking clue who I am. And they're really appreciative of the opportunity to do that. Um, I think it's. I think it would be pretty cool for you to do something like that. I. I don't know if you want to, but I think you should.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know about 15K, but I do know about, like, 15 million if, if I did an event, whatever price tag, it would be people, you know, people would have to look at it and be like, I got 5x10x the value.

[B]

Oh yeah. You know what I do? I do something really stupid at my event. If you look at the Full Stack Facilitator page, I and I stole this from Tony Robbins. If you scroll down to the end, see if you find it. Yeah, that's it. Scroll down to the very bottom. The bottom, the very bottom. And look at the guarantee. Look at this guarantee. Scroll up, scroll up to this. All right. Satisfaction Guarantee. We're so confident you love Full Stack Facilitator that we offer a full refund if you are unsatisfied by the end of your training. You can do the entire training and we'll give you $15,000 back if you didn't think it was worth it.

[A]

How many people actually do that though?

[B]

Never once.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Yeah, but it's that. That's the level of like for me, how important it is that it actually is worth the money.

[A]

Totally. No, I love that. I want to just wrap a bow on this. Okay, I got to know in the comment section, if I were to do an event like JC is talking about, would you be interested in comment below? The two locations I would probably do it in would be Miami, Florida during the winter or you know, the Montreal, Canada area during the winter.

[B]

I would definitely come to it. I would love to be a. I would, I would be like a participant in the audience.

[A]

Cool. I mean, I would love to have you, to be honest. That would be really cool.

[B]

Oh, I had so. I had so many more things to talk about at this anti trend. Like every, every part of your tweet is like, I kind of want you to delete it because I think that it's better that for me, I feel like I've had a really nice advantage the last year and a half while everyone else is like doing like zigging and moving in this like hardcore virtual direction and automation and everything. And I'm like, let's build these in person things quietly in the background. But I think people are going to catch on to it at some point.

[A]

Well, they are definitely now as soon as we publish this. So appreciate you coming on, appreciate you spilling the sauce and hopefully your business can continue to grow with now thousands of new competitors. But I kid, I kid. Like there's, there's so also annoying to.

[B]

Do in person events. So that's the beauty. You have to compete on people actually doing it. So there's that element.

[A]

Totally, totally. It's not easy. And it's a moat where, where it's hard to, you know, come up with a moat. Now. I think IRL certainly is a moat. So thanks for coming on. Jonathan Courtney, J.C. j. Ice cream. Jicecream, the unscheduled podcast is his podcast. Check it out.

[B]

Unscheduled CEO.

[A]

There it is. Unscheduled CEO. I'll include links where to find it and where to find him in the show notes like always. And give. Give JC some love because last few episodes on X. Yeah, give him some love. He needs some. He needs some love on social platforms and you know, let us know, let me know if you want to him to come back again for a part two of this topic.

[B]

All right, man. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[A]

You're a legend. Thanks. No, you are a legend.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

You are certainly a legend.

[B]

Ah, sure, fine. I'll take it.

[A]

I'll take it. All right, I'll catch you later. Bye.