2026 Marketing Predictions, the #1 AI Player, What It Takes To Become Wealthy, Diddy’s Marketing

It's Christmas Eve. Neil's in Vegas. He doesn't have his microphone, but it doesn't matter. We're here to record. We're here to bring the value. It doesn't matter if someone's sick, someone's having a baby, someone's traveling. We make this podcast happen no matter what. And while we wait maybe a couple of seconds or so for people to come in, tell us where you're coming from this Christmas Eve if you're watching live right now. I can't imagine that you're watching live right now, but if you are, props to you. Thanks for your attention. And we're going to get into it. So, Neil, I thought it might make sense for us to also talk about predictions for 2026 too, because we did, we kind of did a review for the last episode. I think it's good to maybe talk about trends or predictions that we see for the next year.

Yeah. And some of them I'm already starting to see towards the, you know, November, December of 2025. And we know they're going to carry in, like one of the big things That we saw is in the agency world, there was a slowdown because of SEO. And what I mean because of SEO is the uncertainty of SEO and AI and what's going to happen. So if you look at 2024, a lot of agencies were impacted who were performing SEO. 2025 as well, to some extent, not as bad as 2024. The second half was much better. But if I look at Q4 of 2025, Honestly, a lot of companies are getting back into SEO and they're like, oh, it's not dead. It's still a valid channel and they're doubling down on it. And we saw budget cuts in 2024 for some companies, not all, of course. I'm not even talking about the majority, but a lot of people had that sentiment that AI is going to screw up SEO. And we saw issues there. We also saw issues with social media. And what I mean with social media, is people are just like, oh, organic social is not going to work the same now that they're monetizing through selling products specifically on Instagram and TikTok. You know, when you're shopping, people are just like, oh, organic social, it's not going to be as important. If they want you to monetize, they want you to monetize by selling stuff so they can end up making money. We're seeing companies go back into organic social because if you don't have that communication channel with your potential customer, You're missing out on what people feel, hear, say about your brand versus if you don't leverage that channel, people just assume whatever they want to assume. So companies want to make sure they're controlling their own narrative.

Yeah. So what I would say is in terms of predictions for 2026 on the marketing side, one thing is what Neil said, we are getting more and more people are coming back. Sometimes it's SEO, sometimes people are looking for AEO, but when we send outbound emails, there's a lot of people that respond and say, hey, we're actually looking to revisit our strategy for the next year. And so we're both seeing that right now, but I think we're also going to see, and we kind of talked about this a little bit, but more in-person events. So whether they're small events like dinners, maybe 8 to 10 people or so, or if we're talking mini events, which Neil talked about, maybe that's 10 to 30 people or so, or even larger events where 150 to 200 people or so, which I did earlier this year for the YPO Global Marketing Summit. In-person events, people always remember those. And if there's one thing people text me about randomly, it's like, hey, Eric, when are you doing another event? Hey, Eric, when are you doing another dinner? Right? And so we've both managed to, I think we're going to continue to double down on that, whether that's speaking at events. And also if I'm speaking at events, sometimes I'll try to figure out, can I throw a dinner or can we make sure that they're putting in touch with people that seem to fit our ICP? So in-person events make sense. Online events, that's just going to continue to happen. I mean, this is an online event right now. Those of you that are watching, this is why we started doing these lives again. Because it allows us to interact with you guys as well. I think we're going to see a rise in go-to-market engineers. Neil, do you guys have any go-to-market engineers on your team yet?

No, I don't know what the term go-to-market engineer is.

Yeah. I mean, it's really an engineer who understands automations and understands— even engineer might be a little bit of a too senior of a term. I was talking to Wade Foster from Zapier the other day and they do well, about 700 employees or so, maybe $400 million ARR. Go-to-market engineers are people who they understand go-to-market. So they understand marketing, they understand these automations, they understand these agentic workflows that you can build. And they go around your company figuring out how to just make your go-to-market, honestly, just your marketing more effective. And you're probably paying anywhere from $100,000 to $150,000, maybe $200,000 a year if you're in America for this type of role. I think we're gonna see a rise in the hiring of vibe coders. We're gonna see more hiring of vibe coders because These people are the ones who can help you put these agentic workflows or these agents or these MCPs together. I think one more thing before I flip it over to you, I have a couple more, but one more thing I'll say is when you look at companies like Lovable, so $200 million in ARR right now, growing 10%. I don't know if it's 10% month over month, but it's pretty fast. But I listened to a podcast recently and they're scared that they might go out of business soon because things are changing so quickly. The way they ship, because features are so easy to copy now, companies like Lovable will continue to rely maybe 90 to 95% of their efforts more on building new marketable features. So their directive is they need to ship one new marketable feature per week so they can keep up with the market 'cause everyone's just copying each other right now. I'll flip it over to you for a second.

Yeah. So you talked about go-to-market engineers. We have internally something called workflow automation engineers, which may be similar or the same thing. Same thing.

Same thing.

Yeah. We've been doing that for almost a year and a half. Now we found that to be super effective in improving efficiencies, but not as much as people think. And here's what I mean by that. People believe you can hire these workflow automation engineers and they just automate everything and then you don't need humans. We're more so seeing it where you just need less humans, right? But things still need to be double-checked. Also with AEO or ASU or whatever you want to call it, We're seeing that companies are still pushing hard on it, but if you go back a year in time, they believed, oh, this is going to overtake SEO and traditional search. Now, most companies that we talk to believe that the worlds are going to coexist, which you and I have been talking about this for a long time now, but we're now starting to see enterprise brands also believe in the vision that they're both going to coexist. And instead of saying, hey, we're going to go all in on AEO, they're saying we want to go in on AEO and we want to go in on traditional SEO and we still want to leverage other channels, but they're not seeing the growth in AEO that people predicted. I'm not talking about from a conversion standpoint. I'm talking about when you look at ChatGPT's growth rate and adoption, people had these hockey stick graphs showing that, hey, in a few years, by 2030, They'll be as powerful as Google. Exactly. And companies aren't seeing ChatGPT grow at that pace because there's a lot of third-party companies that talk about the penetration with their apps and they track app usage. It's at this moment, Gemini is growing at a faster clip than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is starting to slow down a bit. It doesn't mean that they won't be a bigger company or they won't make a lot more revenue from multiples where they're at. It's just more so companies aren't seeing a shift. Everyone's using ChatGPT and they stop using Google. So what they're doing is they're investing in both, but they're not going all in on any one platform.

Yep. One other thing I'll say, Google and ChatGPT, both of them are going to crack down more on this GEO spam, right? But like right now, a lot of it is, okay, originally you can spam Reddit. Now it's like, oh, it's, you have to make sure you're listed on Forbes or G2 or these authoritative websites. Isn't that just like guest blog posting? Um, or making sure it's a lot of it's just the SEO stuff. And even Google's team has said this is more or less SEO. And we've kind of said this on this pod, SEO has always continued to evolve and this is just an evolution of SEO. I believe, and this is happening already, if you look at your Google Search Console, Google is looking more, not just at websites, they're looking at entities. So they will look at your Search Console and say, hey, it looks like this YouTube channel is actually connected to you. And they'll look at if that YouTube channel is actually passing traffic over to you. So they know that it's not just all about websites anymore and they know they have to look at the entire graph. And with Gemini, the power of Gemini now, they have the ability to. One more thing I'll add from my side in terms of how marketing will change in 2026. This is not necessarily new to marketing, but when you look at like a Lovable, for example, or you look at a Clay, they actually give away a lot of credits and that is their form of marketing. Or when a company like our company, we wanna push more AI fluency and we go to a Zapier or a Lovable and say, hey, can we get some credits? We wanna run this through our organization. They actually like to give away those credits and they see that as a marketing cost. And so I believe when I look at the stuff we're building with ClickFlow and Carrot, we're gonna give away credits and we want a way for people to continue come back and use this stuff. And, um, you know, I think that's, that's just a, a, a part of, of playing the game now.

Dude, I, I totally agree with you. Um, and another interesting thing, when we're looking at marketing going forward, we're seeing companies really double down on community more than everything else. And the reason I say that is they're worried that the algorithms Because they've seen it from every single channel. You've seen it from Google, you've seen it from social. It becomes harder and harder to control. So they're just like, man, we really need to own our own community. But at the same token, at least in the enterprise world, I'm seeing companies go around building their community the wrong way. And here's a prime example. I won't name the brand, but we work with a company and they're just like, oh, to build a community, we're going to do more events at things like Formula 1 and the US Open. And I'm like, your average consumer is just a random person in the world. Literally, their product is applicable to most adults. Okay. So when you look at it, it's like doing parties at Formula 1 and the US Open isn't really a strong way to build community. It's a strong way to build community with the 1%. And the 1% doesn't even make up the majority of your revenue.

And by the way, that's a party too, guys. It's like, just call it what it is. It's a party.

Yes. I'm like, this is not community building, dude. I'm like, this is—

have you been to F1? I've been to a couple F1s and it's just a straight party. Sure, those people might be hanging out. They're not there to talk business, by the way.

No, people are there to get drunk. That's pretty much every time that I've been to one of those events. Yeah. People are looking to get drunk and have fun.

Yeah. Yeah. By the way, apologies for the noise, guys. Neil's out kind of in the public right now. We had to find a spot to record, so apologize for the noise. Okay. So I want to talk about— this is kind of related. We're talking about Lovable for a second because I just mentioned them, right? So they basically said, look, in AI, if you have an AI product, I mean, a lot of people are in AI now, right? You must find product-market fit every 3 months. And I think that's interesting because SaaS back in the day, when you found product-market fit, It used to take a very long time to build up to what you have. I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was in office. I was talking to my CTO, Sean, and he showed me— Cursor gives you an end-of-year review. He used close to a billion tokens. I was like, how much more code did you write this year? He's like 10 times the level of code from before. Basically, we're writing 10 times the amount of code than before. The point of saying this is that Again, everyone's able to copy these features pretty quickly. A lot of these things, Replit versus Lovable, a lot of them, it's pretty similar. So you have to rediscover product market fit every 3 months. And I thought that was an interesting quote because you can't, I don't feel like you can sit pat anymore because you can build so much faster.

I'm not a product person, so take this with a grain of salt. I always thought product market fit was bullshit.

Oh, go on.

Here's why. People talk about how if you have product market fit, your product grows really fast. I get it. But at the same time, I see products with terrible features, usability, and I wouldn't say they have product market fit yet they still grow. And here's a prime example of this. Does your company use HubSpot or Salesforce?

HubSpot.

Okay. So if we use Salesforce for sales CRM and no joke, you know, I don't know what divisions use it, but we have some divisions that use Salesforce as a CRM. CRM. It is a terrible product. We had to hire a lot of engineers to end up making it work. But you know why they keep doing well? Because it's a pain in the butt to rip out, right? And if you look at a lot of these solutions that integrate within companies and they integrate deep, even if they have a terrible product, the cost and the pain to rip it out in many cases is, you know, more expensive than just continually paying.

That's what we call switching costs. That's why with products nowadays, I think you need to have as many integrations as possible so it's hard to rip it out.

And I believe that assuming you can figure out how to get people onboarded and integrated, but even if you don't have the best product, the switching costs really to me is more important than, look, we got this best usable product that has product market fit. Okay, Slack, great example, something with product market fit. You agree with this, right? Especially early on. Teams comes around. And they already have, they release it for free. It's not as good of a product in my opinion. We have both Teams and Slack. Why do we use it? It was free and then it was cheaper than Slack. Okay, sounds good. It's done. We use Microsoft. It's integrated into everything. All right, sounds good. Let's just leave it, whatever. It doesn't matter if people don't like it as much. That switching costs, I believe at least in bigger organizations, if that's what you're going after, is more important than product market fit. Your product has to be good enough, right? But I'm with Eric and whatever that quote is in which if you have product market fit, it doesn't mean you always have product market fit. But if you've integrated deep and it's hard and painful and expensive to remove that product and to switch, I think that's very valuable in the long run. As bad as that sounds.

You have, I believe that with product market fit, people talk about monthly recurring revenue. I look at MRV, monthly recurring value, and you have to keep bringing the value over and over. But if everyone's getting to feature parity quickly, how do you stand And so even like what you have with Ubersuggest right now, actually I saw you actually bought a tool from acquire.com. And so what I would say—

Wait, how'd you know I bought a tool from acquire.com?

Some guy tweet— the guy that sold it tweeted it and somehow it showed up on my feed. I was like, oh, okay. I know who bought that. Dude, it was dirt cheap.

Yeah.

That's exactly my point. So there's all these tools out there, ours included, yours included as well. That will help people generate content, right? There's a handful of these out there and I'm constantly like, okay, how do we stand out? So here's one way we can stand out. One, you have a services backend. Two, I have a services backend, right? Actually, that's not the same. That's both one. That's how you stand out. But on the other side of things, there's a bunch of other value add that we have. And we're constantly thinking about how can we add other integrations in there? And it can't just be a content creation thing because I've looked at some of these other ones. I've kind of tested them and signed up for their free trials and they're pretty damn good. And so what do you do to stand out? You got the— here's where the human in the loop comes back in now. So I think that's part of how you stand out.

Yeah. And it's, if you look at businesses in general, the ones who try to provide everything from top to bottom or bottom to top, whatever you want to call it, like the whole chain, they tend to be more stickier companies and it's easier to penetrate because when you look at it from a marketing perspective, okay, let's just use something that everyone can relate to, toilet paper. I know it's an ugly product, but let's just say toilet paper.

It's a great product. What are you talking about?

It's— everyone needs it. I agree with you. It is a great product. But if you look at toilet paper, if you're P&G and you're selling toilet paper, the person who uses toilet paper, right? Think about that as personal care. They also need to brush their teeth.

They need to floss.

You know, they need to take showers and use shampoo and deodorant and all this stuff. might as well sell it all and have the whole, you know, the whole control, the whole ecosystem from beginning to end, because the person who buys one of your products is the same person who should buy the other products because it's applicable to everyone. It's easier to cross-sell. It's easier to make more money when you do that versus if you're like, we're just going to be the best toilet paper provider out there. Well, I'd rather go buy toilet paper from the person who bundles it with Toilet paper, laundry detergent, and all the things I need, and I get a better deal.

I'll tell you what, I'll give you guys a little, um, a little fun book that you can read. There's a book called 7 Powers, and it's from this guy, uh, Hamilton Helmer. And the whole book is this concept of these 7 powers, these 7 strategies, okay? These, these moats that you can have. 1 is branding. 2 is process power, okay? 3 is switching costs. And I'm going to explain each of these. 4 is scale economies. 5 is cornered resources. And 6, network economies. 7 is counter positioning. So I'm going to start from the bottom. So counter positioning might be like a performance-based pricing versus retainer. So that's different than most agencies as an example. Okay. Network effects would be like a Meta, for example. The more people that use the network, the more valuable it becomes, like a Facebook or Instagram, for example, or even a YouTube. Okay. So corner resources would be an example of, let's say you own a copper mine or you own all the chips. For example, I think 97% of making these really small chips are actually, you can only do that in Taiwan, for example, these nanometer-based chips or whatever. And then switching costs, agencies. So we can talk about this for a second, but switching costs, when you do a lot of things in an agency and they sign a long-term contract with you and you're just locked in, it's okay if you do everything at a B.

You don't have to do everything at an A+, right?

Yeah. You do everything at a B. Ideally you're doing everything at an A, but it's hard. And then you have process power, like a Toyota, for example. They were everyone, every car manufacturer tried to look at Toyota back in the day. Like, how do they do it? How are they so efficient, right? I would say Tesla kind of has that with their cars. Like that's the thing that Elon's actually most proud of, the manufacturing piece. And then finally you have branding, like a Coca-Cola, right? Now, when we look at agencies, what do we have? We might have branding. Okay, you might have like a WPP or an Omnicom. There might be branding, but I think that's kind of slowly eroding. Not yet, but it's slowly over time. I think there might be process power, But I think they're switching costs for sure, which is why they can hang onto these deals for a long time or potentially counter positioning. But that's pretty rare in agency world, like a center field, for example. What do you think about this?

No, I'm with you, but it's hard to create that.

Yeah, it is very hard.

It's really hard. That's the hardest part about it.

Yep. Yep. But sometimes the hard stuff is worth it, right? But if you have an engine that's working already, you should just double down on that.

Did you hear about the Elon Cyber Cab video? I think he was talking about like the production line, like 5 seconds or 5 minutes or something crazy like that. They can start building your car soup to nuts. I don't know if that clip was AI created or not. Sounds too good to be true, but it's just like, all right, that's kind of crazy to think about.

Wait, what? They can make a car in how long?

It was like 5 minutes or something like a Cyber Cab. And what he was saying is it's more like electronics company. Manufacturing, and they've just speeded everything.

I believe it, dude. I think in a couple, maybe in 5, 10, 15 years or so, you and I— I don't know about you and I, we're not going to be the first round of this, but we're going to be flying to China in 15 minutes in a rocket.

So yeah, something like that. I've seen that.

Yeah, and that was, uh, I think it was Gwynne's her name, Shotwell. Um, she's the president of SpaceX. She said this was like 5, 10 years ago that she said this, and it's gonna happen. So all that to say is the world's going to be crazy. Um, I didn't think— speaking of moats real quick before we move on from the topic of moats, who do you think is the AI leader right now that has, uh, the best moat?

Google.

Okay, so let's check this out. So let me share my screen because we're actually remote, so I can share screen over here. Check this out. So what Neil said, okay, you can see this, right? I'm gonna make this a little bigger. Okay, so Neil, what do you see on the screen right now? You can read off what you see on the screen.

It's really tiny.

Okay. Here, I'll read it off.

Greens on the Googles and different colors for everyone else.

Okay. So what we're looking at here, those of you that can see this better, I think on YouTube you'll be able to see this better. So this is done from Battery Ventures. Okay. So VC firm. So early leaders are racing to vertically integrate. So what we're talking about, what Neil just actually mentioned is why not offer a bunch of things? If you're a marketing agency, why not offer a bunch of things? You're basically You want to control as much of the stack as you can. Okay. So Google at the application layer, they've got Gemini. Okay. They've got AI search models. They've got Gemini, Gemma infrastructure. They have Google Cloud. Okay. And then silicon, they have TPUs. So they have everything. They have their own chips. They have their own infrastructure. They have their own LLMs. They have their own applications. Microsoft is, it's like emerging. They have, you know, they have Copilot, the models they use OpenAI, right? This is a partial presence. That's why it's in yellow. Infrastructure, they have Azure, that's their cloud provider. And then silicon, they're making this right now, Maya 100. But you just go down the list over here. AWS is here, OpenAI is here, Anthropic, Cursor. The only one that's completely vertically integrated right now is Google.

Yes. Although Google does use Nvidia chips as well, but yes, they also have their own TPUs.

Yep. Which is, I mean, this is interesting to me because this is, End of year, I really recommend reading Battery Ventures or all these state of the AI and how Tomáš Tunguz had these predictions for next year, predictions last year. I think it's really nice to stay on top of these things to see where things are going. Talking to Wade the other day, you want to know what's interesting? They started this AI fluency program and I said, how many people did you have to let go that Where they weren't into this stuff. What percent of staff do you think he had to let go? 700-person org.

15, 20%?

10%. So still pretty high. Okay. So 10%. Originally their AI fluency was maybe 10% or so. Once they— he said they launched a code red and he said, look, after maybe 12 months into it, our AI fluency went from 10% to 80. Now it's at 87%. Now it's at 97% actually. And so all that to say, I was like, okay, what did you do exactly? He's like, well, we launched these hackathons. I was like, what did that look like? He's like, we basically shut the entire company off for a week. Nobody answered any tickets, nothing. And we just focused on driving AI fluency higher. I was like, how often did you do that? He's like, every 4 to 6 months or so. So I was like, okay, obviously one week is not practical for a lot of companies. And he's like, well, you can at least do 1 to 2 days and do this every 3, 4 months or so. And I'm like, okay, that's a little more practical. I don't know what the AI fluency level is for your company, but when I talked to one of our mutual friends, I was like, hey, what does it look like? And they have, let's just say they have 1,000 people or so. He's like, maybe 20%. And I just think that's unacceptable going into next year. And I've talked about it a lot. I just, now it's time to really make sure this is where the rubber meets the road.

Yeah, 20% is low. You want it much higher, but keep in mind, more important than just I wouldn't say it's more important. Just as important as fluency is how quickly they can adapt. And the reason I say this is AI is moving so quick with the different platforms doing different things. People need to be able to adapt super fast because if you're great at AI right now and you're stuck in using the same tools and you don't want to change, a year from now, a lot of them could be obsolete and you could just be doing things really inefficiently.

When did you start using the internet? What year was it? Dude, I don't know.

I was a little kid.

I had—

similar to you probably, but, um, I think we had a similar story. I was using the battery dial-up internet that was connected to the phone.

Okay. So I stole my mom's credit card to sign up for MSN and I waited for her to leave and then I moved my computer over because I didn't have the extension for the phone cord and I plugged it in, right? So this is 1995 or 1994. I was 8 or 9 years old. Um, and At that time, I couldn't fathom anybody not knowing how to use the internet. Okay. Yet at the same time, you have people that were resisting, people saying, oh, the internet's going to be a fad. Newspaper's still the way to go. These online publications, blah, blah, blah. I see this as this is how a lot of people are behaving right now. This is a fad. It's going to go away. Oh, it hallucinates. It makes mistakes, all these things. And so what we can do as leaders, if you're a leader listening to this right now, is how can you bring people along for the journey? And you can bring them to water, but you can't make them drink. And so that's why we're doing these office hours right now. We're doing these hackathons and we realized with these office hours, we made them optional. The first one didn't have that many people show up. And so my CTO was pissed, right? And so I don't know how you guys are doing it right now. You want to talk about your AI fluency program if you have one?

I have no idea how we're doing it. I know we have one, but I have no idea how we're doing it because I'm not in charge of it.

Yeah. Well, did you do that ChatGPT thing, by the way, the end of year review? Did you see what Uh-uh, I did not. Oh dude, you got to check it out. You have it on your phone, right?

Yeah, I do.

I say you're like a top 10 to 15% user.

That's what I think you are. No, really?

You think you're higher than that?

Less.

Open up your ChatGPT app on your phone and then it should have a year in review thing and then hit play. Um, but you know, look, I think all this to say is you don't—

The reason I say that is I use Gemini more than I use ChatGPT.

Oh, you do?

Okay.

Yeah, I don't know. But all I'd say is like, guys, I think speaking from 2 leaders' perspectives, I don't think we expect people to necessarily be power users, but come on, you have to help us help you at the end of the day. Because to be able to automate away the work that you don't want to do, like we were talking to one of our designers this week and he's like, dude, with the work I can do, if I can focus on this, I can do the work of, he's maybe exaggerating a little bit, about 50 or 100 people or so. And he's just, I want to automate a lot of this stuff. Our CTO is like, Why aren't you automating away this stuff? He's like, because I'm being told to do all these other things right now, which is kind of the old way of doing it. And I'm just like, dude, how do you not push back? And so all that to say is if you're within the organization too, you got to push back. If you guys are doing things an antiquated way, just say, hey, why are we doing it this way? Why don't we try this way? And try to drive— AI fluency can't just come from the top. It's got to come from the bottom too. And one more thing I'll say about Wade is I was like, hey, who's driving a lot of this right now? He's like, actually it's the people team. I was like, really? The people team is driving innovation with AI stuff. He's like, yeah. So anyway, food for thought.

Yeah. And when it comes to AI, just make sure that you're helping out your team and not just putting it on them and just being like, you're expected to know everything. Guide them, encourage them, set up internal groups. So I do know we have little pods. And the pods call it, let's say, 5 people max. They share some of the things that they're doing that are interesting every single week on a Friday for just 15 minutes. And it helps everyone learn and it becomes more of a support group. And we've really found that that improves the percentage of people using AI to really move your KPIs.

Yeah.

I'm not talking about efficiency and like, oh, you got more done in a time. Yes, that's cool and all, but what we really measure is KPIs. What are your key performance indicators? Are they going up and to the right because of AI? And we really put people in pods and we really have them focus on helping each other for their individual or division KPIs.

Dude, and by the way, if you're a founder listening to this, so one thing that really, my CTO doesn't like it when I say this, but I'm like, dude, this stuff is so easy. Like when I open up a Zapier or a Lindy and I just dictate out what I want to build and it builds the agentic workflow. Wade agrees with that when I asked him, because they have something very similar with Zapier. He's like, yeah, it's super easy. So how do you, you as a founder or a leader listening to this right now, you might be able to build these things. The challenge is you need someone to actually sit on top of and manage it. So I don't know if it's that GTM engineer or a workflow automation specialist. You need someone that's walking around the organization, just asking people and almost pestering people saying, hey, what is something you're spending a lot of time on that you're repeating every week that's taking a lot of time? And we should be thinking about every week how we can at least create some type of workflow to automate. A lot of it's not going to work. Some of it will. But to Neil's point, you don't want a lot of this stuff to be theater too, where it's just like, oh, it's just to appease the leaders to make it feel like we're using AI. That's not helpful either.

It has to be related to your KPIs. When AI first started coming off, we had a lot of people that were doing all this cool stuff. And then we fast forward 3 to 6 months, We're like, wait, we're not seeing any change.

It's theater.

Yeah, it's straight up theater.

Oh, Neil, look, I used this tool, but like, okay, what did it do?

Yes. And then it's like, look at all this cool stuff. Okay, there's no new revenue, no extra profit. Like, yep, this is cool, but it's costing us money, dude. At an actual point, no joke, I just, I started seeing costs go up because we weren't seeing revenue go up from all these initiatives. And what we were seeing is them spending a lot of money on all these AI tools. And this is like, whoa, something needs to change here.

Yeah. Dude, one thing I want to talk about too is, I was listening to Jensen Huang talk with Joe Rogan. Okay? And I think it's worth it to talk about the secret to wealth. And it's the secret to guaranteed wealth really. So you listen to a Jensen talk, for example, he's like, 2 things you need to succeed. One, don't get fired by your board if you have a board. Okay? Second one is don't give up. And then I look at UiPath. You look at UiPath, you know how long they took to hit No. 10 years. 10 years.

UiPath's that old of a company? Yeah.

It took them 10 years to hit $1 million ARR. Figma, how long did it take them to get product market fit? I think it was like 7 or 8 years or something like that. So the key thing is really you want to stay alive long enough to get lucky. That's all it is ultimately. If you can just hang in there and keep compounding, if you're listening to this right now, you're definitely not a stupid person, right? And actually I read a book on humans today. I want to talk about that in a second too. But I think Neil and I have realized that, again, you don't necessarily need to be the smartest person in the room. I'm speaking for myself really. As long as you keep going, you will get lucky enough to hit it big. And I'm not saying you're going to be a billionaire or whatever. I don't know, but you're going to have outsized returns that your 18-year-old self would really be proud of.

But I think it's not just doing it long enough. And yes, I don't— don't get me wrong, I do think a lot of people get lucky. You just have to also have some sort of common sense, or, you know, it makes it hard if you don't.

Yeah. Okay, let's talk about this, the, the, the human laws of human— the laws of human stupidity. What— so you'll like this, you'll like this. How would you define stupidity, Neil?

Someone not having common sense. And that's why I said it in the earlier one. I'm like, dude, I see a lot of people who go after it for 10 years, and I know they'll never do well is because they just don't have common sense.

Okay. So this definition is really good. You'll like this. I didn't think of it this way. So in this book, the definition of a stupid person is someone who harms other people for no gain to theirself, or actually they're detrimental to themselves.

Okay?

And if you think about it, there's 4 different people in life.

Okay?

You have stupid people, which we just talked about. You have intelligent people. So intelligent people will produce And for others, they'll help others, but they'll also help themselves. Okay. Then you have bandits. Bandits will steal from you. Okay. So bandits will help themselves, but they'll steal from someone else. A helpless person is someone who helps others but can't help themselves. So for example, you have someone who likes to play hero ball that doesn't know how to delegate in your company, and then they burn themselves out. Okay. That's a helpless person. So of these 4 people who I mentioned, Neil, which one actually harms society the most? Is it the bandit? Is it the helpless person? Is it the stupid person? It's definitely not the intelligent person, but which one is it?

Okay. I need to slow down a little bit more.

Here, I'll slow it down. Let me, let me, because I think I spoke too fast. I'm going to give it before again. Okay. Ready? Okay. So you have 4 people in society. Okay. You have the stupid people who, again, they harm others, but they don't help themselves or they even harm themselves.

Okay.

Got that? Second one is you have the bandits. So bandits, like I steal from you to benefit myself. Okay. And then you lose. Okay? So I win, you lose. Then you have the intelligent people. The intelligent people will help themselves and they'll help other people. Okay? And then the last one is helpless people who help other people, but they don't help themselves. So which people hurt society the most?

The first one. It's because they hurt themselves and they hurt others as well.

The biggest problem though is you can't triangulate. You can't predict. With the bandit, you can predict their behavior. with a stupid person, you can't predict their behavior. The other thing with this book too is it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate or you're in a group of billionaires or deca-millionaires or whatever, there's always stupid people at every level. There's an exact fraction at every level. So it's the stupid people that hurt society, not the bandits. Because if you're in a bandit society, everyone just steals from each other. The society doesn't get better. So it's a great book.

I'll give you an example of common This is what I mean in business. I was talking to a friend who has a SaaS product, okay? And he's trying to optimize his plans and pricing to get the most conversions and generate the most revenue. So I asked him, hey, how many signups do you get on your highest plan? He said 2, 3 a day. All right. I think his highest plan is like $499 a month. It's a free trial though, right? So they don't all convert. I was like, okay. I was like, what are your total signups per day? I was trying to equate the percentage. He then made a price change and then I was trying to look at the numbers. I'm like, just send me the total amount of signups and the percentage that are choosing the highest plans and the trial conversion rate. And he's like, well, on a weekly basis, we get around 100 and something people who choose the highest plan. And I'm like, new signups, right? I'm not talking about existing customers. He's like, yeah, new trial signups. I'm like, so how do you go from 2 or 3 a day? Right? Because 2, 3 a day times 7 is not 100+ signups at the highest plan. And they're showing me data from their database. of hundreds a day. And I'm like, this is what I mean by common sense. If you as an individual can't just see there's something wrong with the data— I'm not saying you get 100+ a week or you don't. I'm not saying you get 1, 2, or 3 a day. Something is off, right? But common sense will tell you that something is off. When they send it to you and they don't question the data, this is like, oh, you lack common sense.

Got it. Anyway, I thought that was entertaining. And by the way, that book, it'll probably take you an hour to read it. So it's a really entertaining book. In fact, I'm going to bring it next time so you can read it. It's fun. You'll like it. So you know what's interesting? If you look at the— which product do you think actually saved Gemini, AKA Google?

What book saved Gemini?

Yeah. What product?

Product?

I don't know what you mean. I'll show you where I'm going with this. So when you look at the launch of Nano Banana, that's when Gemini's monthly active users grew from 350 million to 650 million by October. So this one guy, so this is Josh Woodward. He's the head of Google Labs. And he said basically once they launched Nano Banana, Their TPUs almost melted. It was getting so much usage. I think really it's not even just Nano Banana, everything that we're launching, NotebookLM, all the upgrades, they were hitting it hard on social too. They built all these separate X accounts and they were firing on all cylinders. When you look at it, Google said in October that the Gemini app's monthly active users swelled to 650 million from 350 million. You look at all the benchmarks, all these things, they are number one right now in my mind. Uh, which is what you predicted a few years ago.

So they have too much data. They have a great engineering team. I don't think that Google's gonna crush ChatGPT where they don't exist. I think they're all gonna coexist, but I do think Google will be the leader.

Yeah. AI Overviews, by the way, which uses generative AI to summarize answers to queries, has 2 billion monthly users. I don't like how they call those users. It's just, you know what I mean? But, um, OpenAI said in October that ChatGPT hit 800 million users per week. So food for thought. I think there's going to be different players in this. And I was listening to some AI people talk about this recently, but they feel like LLMs are— one of the guys was like, LLMs, they're just like gas stations. They're very commoditized. You're going to use this gas station, use this gas station, whatever.

Did I ever tell you the story of when I was at Heathen's house and it really made me realize how Gemini was going to win?

No.

I was talking to my niece.

You're talking to your niece about this? Go ahead.

Okay, so I'm sitting watching TV. We're watching Home Alone. This was like, call it a month or so. It was actually in December, early December. Okay. Sitting watching Home Alone at night, my niece Aria is sitting next to me and she's doing her homework and she's using AI and she's like, everyone does it. The teachers even know that we use AI. I was like, okay. So then I'm like, she's using Google and she's using AI mode. All right. You can call it whatever you want. I could just call it all Gemini because it's all pulling from the same source code from my understanding, right? And I was like, why don't you use ChatGPT? She's like, no one in school uses ChatGPT. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, you know, if you keep using it and you ask all these complicated questions, it cuts you off after a while. You got to pay money. And I was just like, seriously, it cuts you off? Now keep in mind, I don't realize this because I'm just on a paid plan and whatever it costs, it costs.

Yeah.

About it. She's like, we all use Google. Google's free. And it hit me and I was just like, that's right. We look at $200 or $20, whatever plan you're on, we look at that as pennies on the dollar. Google also penetrated all these schools with the Chromebooks. And now she's just like, yeah, she's like, everyone in my school uses Google. No one wants to go to their parents and ask them for $200 or $20 or whatever it costs.

Yeah.

It's like, your parents aren't going to approve it. Hey, mom and dad, I want to cheat on my homework and, and, uh, use ChatGPT. Can you pay for it? She's like, they're going to all say no. So she's like, we just use Google. She's like, it's great. It's free. You can use it as much as you want. It's like, ChatGPT doesn't work that way. You got to pay money. Google is—

Google's going to grind people down. That's what they're going to do.

But that is the future of the world, right? It can't just be her class. In San Francisco. And by the way, she's in the Bay Area, not in San Francisco, but outside the city. And I was talking to my nephew who's in high school, different school. He's like, yeah, no one uses ChatGPT. We all use Gemini. He's like, he's like, you know, ChatGPT is for you old people. Oh, I'm gonna pay for this stuff. Yeah, why would you pay when you get the same thing for free?

Oh, that's so good.

And It really hit me at that moment. I'm like, they're going to dominate the future generations because it is free. And you know what? Just like people say Google search is amazing, people have been doing search for a long time, including Bing. Bing isn't bad. I'm assuming you agree with that, Sami. Their algorithm is actually pretty good.

Yep.

It's— yes, Google won the mindshare back in the day and they have the adoption through all the Android devices and their deal with Apple. But what's really going to help them is they have the adoption, they have the channels and the distribution, and it's free. ChatGPT needs to charge to make money. They need that cash. If they didn't, their business would be in a much worse position today, and it's already hemorrhaging money. Google is the most profitable company in the world, and they're like, $20, $200 a user per month. Who cares about this money? We already make $115, $160 billion a year. $16 billion a year in profit.

Yep.

Give this stuff away for free. It's the Teams model. I see more companies using Teams. I focus more on enterprise, but I see way more companies using Teams than Slack by far. I can't even count in comparison the difference. It's on a magnitude. And I really believe Teams won that race because it was just free. Forget if the product was better or worse, it was just free. Free, which is the best marketing play ever.

Dude, here, check this out. Speaking of which, okay, so this graph over here shows when you look at— this is total top 10 AI chatbot and tool websites in the US, November 2025. Okay, so you can see ChatGPT is number 1 here. Sure, it has 67% traffic share for the AI chatbot websites, but they've dropped 6.55% month on month. We're talking a billion monthly visits, which is still a lot, right? But Gemini, look who's coming up from the rear. Gemini here is number 2, 11.16%, but it's up 9.39%, $168 million or so. And then who else is coming up right now? Grok. All these other ones are going down right now, which is interesting to me. I don't even know what PolyBuzz is.

I don't know what PolyBuzz is either. I was talking to my co-founder Mike yesterday because we're both in— he lives in Vegas and I'm here in Vegas visiting. And we're chilling at his clubhouse or the community he lives in. We're just sitting there at the restaurant and he's— we were talking about our roadmap for one of our projects, Ants of the Public. And I told the team to not focus on integrating Perplexity and the team wanted to integrate Perplexity. It's like, oh, I'll just take another week. I'm like, dude, most people don't use Perplexity and don't care about it.

I'd rather have that week back.

Yeah. And then Mike's just like, you know, if we're going to do a number 3, because we both agree that you need ChatGPT, which is what we did first, Google, which is almost released. It'll get released sometime in January. And he's just like, it's Grok. And normally I would have said no, but I was like, I actually agree with you. And he's like, why? I'm like, because I saw a different chart than yours, but Gemini and Grok were the 2 main ones growing right now. It was not traffic-based, it was app-based. And I was just like, you know what? I'm like, I agree with you. I don't think Grok's that important right now, but if we're going to pick another one within 6 months, I would add in Grok.

Yep.

Yep.

So, and by the way, I mean, I use Grok quite a bit to have just explained a lot of the tweets that I look at. But I wanted to show one more thing real quick. This is from the same—

and as Eric's pulling that up, I want to clarify something from Eric and I's viewpoint, because I don't want anyone to assume this. When Eric and I say that we believe ChatGPT, you know, Google and Grok are the leaders, we're not saying there's no room for Claude. There's different purposes for different apps. Like Eric and I both agree that Anthropic will do extremely well when it comes to the development market and enterprise market, and they'll own a large chunk of that market. Right. But when you think about from a marketing standpoint, when people are using these tools like search, just like you use google.com, we believe the winners are going to be ChatGPT, Google, and potentially Grok. We're not giving an order, but if we did have to give an order, it would probably be Google first, ChatGPT second, then Grok third.

Yep.

All right.

So let me share this real quick. This is just saying how the marketing, the old marketing playbook doesn't work anymore. And this is from Daniel Dayan. This is from the Battery Ventures thing as well. So let me read off this. So the old SaaS 1.0 playbook for marketing is measure usage depth, gross retention, unit economics early. We're not saying that's not important, but demand gen is becoming much more metrics-driven, not volume-driven, and efficient frontier trade-offs at infrastructure layer influence the application experience. So let me explain what this means in maybe simple terms here. If you look at the the chart over here, the data over here. So AI in demand generation now is you have new data and intent signals to surface higher quality leads.

Okay.

So for example, Neil and I, we have decent traffic that comes to our website. And if you're able to enrich the ICP fit people who aren't initially hand raisers, how do you nurture these people? Okay. So how do you— maybe you reach out to them, maybe you start to generate a conversation with them based on what they're interested in, right? You can look at the social graph and how they're behaving. Agents for deeper account research and automated plays and sequences. So for example, Salesforce just bought Qualified, I think, and Qualified will do something like that. Well, they'll kind of enrich people on your site and reach out to them. Personalized engagements, right person, right message, right time. And so it's a lot of the stuff that humans just don't have the time to do at a very high level. And then you have always-on agents to qualify inbound. So I know Jason Lemkin's SaaStr, for example, they use their agents quite a bit to book sponsorships and it does well for them. And I just think we talked about go-to-market engineers. We talked about vibe coders earlier. I think this is gonna apply directly to this new marketing playbook. And those who understand AI will understand how to take advantage of these things. And I think this is just the very beginning, right? And so, you know, all these things that I've wanted to do, to be honest with you, 10 years ago or so, you're now finally able to do it. Like, you know, quickly updating your CRM, closed loss reasons and all that. Like salespeople don't like to update these things. And so I think this is why we keep You know, shouting from the top, at least I do, on why it's important to become AI fluent. But just wanted to share this piece.

And just be careful with this data that you see. If you look at what Eric's sharing on his screen, he's sharing stuff related to SaaS, which I believe you said Battery, right?

Yep.

Battery Ventures, right? They're well known in the SaaS space. But a lot of these VCs and investors do put out data and a lot of it you should take with a grain of salt. a grain of salt. Like, I remember it was either earlier this year or part of last year where BG Squared, that podcast with Brad—

Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley.

Yep, Bill Gurley. They ended up talking about how SEO is dead. Do you remember that podcast episode?

Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

And you and I were like, no, it's not dead. But a lot of people are like, look at these guys, they're super successful. If you look at Brad Gerstner, he's managing the Trump money, you know, that Trump fund where people are giving cash.

America, Invest in America, the $1,000 per kid.

Yeah, because both Ray Dalio and Michael Dell and family, they invested in that. But he's making a management fee managing that money. Smart guy, rich, but he doesn't know a lick about SEO. And I'm not saying he's not smart; he's smarter than I am. But it's context. It's like saying, oh, a president knows more than Eric and I and everything. We know quite a bit on marketing. We don't know much on politics, right? You got to look at experts and see what they're saying. Not just people who are pulling out data from their sample portfolio company and be like, look, this is how it's working. It's pretty much dead.

You know, Gary Vee used to say SEO is dying. He said this over 10 years ago or so, still around. So as long as humans are searching, still around, guys.

And Gary Vee's really smart with marketing. He's great with creative, great with social media. He's great with driving attention, but SEO has never been his strong suit. Does it mean, you know, he's right at everything? No. If you look at the marketing that I do, it's more logic-based, numbers-based, less creative-based. I think Eric would agree with this. I'm more stats and data-oriented versus, you know—

We talked about this when I spoke with Gary. I put you, like, he even put you two on different spectrums. He's more feeling and brand-based. You're more numbers-based. numbers and logic-based.

And there's no right or wrong. I've built a business doing what I've done. He's built a business doing what he's done. And forget audience size. Gary's done an amazing job. One of the better entrepreneurs.

Very strong operator.

Yeah, extremely strong operator. I would say he's an A+ entrepreneur. It's hard to find people like him. But I know people who are more successful than both of us who don't have a social following. And one of the people that I know really well is a creative person and they've done extremely well from it. And the other person I know is a SaaS guy and he's done better than both of them. Both of them are on the Forbes list. And the SaaS guy is a data-oriented guy and neither approach is right or wrong. You got to find out what works for you. You know, entrepreneurs, come in different sizes, different skill sets. You got to find your own way versus saying that everyone fits in the mold. And by no means am I saying that Gary thinks that everyone should fit into a mold or anything like that. I wholeheartedly believe that he knows that everyone has to find their own way. But I would say this one thing, what Gary's— one of the biggest strengths that he has that I think most people Let me guess. Let me guess.

Let me guess. Can I guess? Uh huh. Yeah. That he can see trends and bet on the trends. Yes.

Yes. He's so amazing at seeing trends. One of the best people that I've seen when it comes to internet-based trends by far. And it could be also non-internet-based. I haven't seen all his stuff, but internet-based trends, he's so amazing at that.

Yeah. Oh, are those your kids? Okay.

Oh, not mine. Just other kids running.

I thought they saw you and they're running at you. Okay. So as Neil, as, as, uh, well, here, I'll, I'll continue on here on— I thought this is an interesting thing that Sam Altman mentioned. So he said, Sam Altman revealed OpenAI's internal GDP Val benchmark.

Okay.

It says ChatGPT-5.2 beats you at 74% of your job. It measured how AI performs on knowledge work tasks across 40+ verticals. So the results, GPT-5.2 beats or ties expert-level knowledge Workers at 74.1 of tasks: legal analysis, PowerPoint decks, web apps, financial modeling, customer support. So his description: a coworker you can assign an hour's worth of tasks to get and get something done you prefer back 3 out of 4 times. And so 3 years ago, ChatGPT launched at basically 0% on the scale. Now it's at 74%, and that's available right now. So the crazy thing is, whether it's ChatGPT or something else now, they're able to do tasks, I think, not just for an hour, but for a couple hours at a time. So just imagine the level of tasks. Imagine you have an AI that's working on for 24 hours at a time. That's the level that we're getting to. And so I just think that's interesting. But going back to your point, just to finish off that point around how there's no right way. I think if you're listening to this and maybe you're in your teens or in your 20s or so, you might think that your way is the right way or whatever your mentor is teaching you is the right way or whatever book is teaching you is the right way. But when you start to hit your 30s, you start to realize that there is in fact no right way because how you were brought up, the experiences that you have, the way you approach things is very unique to you. And just so, like the way Neil Neil runs his business is different than how I run my business. And I've had to learn over time. Neil's had to learn over time too. And we've made a lot of mistakes. And so all that to say is it goes back to what I was saying earlier. As long as you keep going and you're in a smart way, as long as you keep going about things in a smart way, eventually you'll strike it lucky. You just got to last long enough to get lucky. That's the point.

Yeah. I'm a big believer. You just have to last long enough to get lucky as long as you have common sense.

Yeah.

If you're just stupid, it doesn't matter how much you try at this. Dude, we know someone, a mutual friend, okay? And this person enjoys traveling, right? You know who I'm talking about at this point. You know them really well. They worked for you for a bit, okay? So this person enjoys traveling and they don't work for me at the moment, but they enjoy traveling. You know who I'm talking about.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, we both love this person, and this person told me months ago, you know, I just haven't had my luck yet. And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, you know, one of my other mutual friends, they've had their break, they're a millionaire now. Look, you, you're lucky. Eric's lucky. I haven't had my break yet. And I was like, no, a lot of this isn't luck. A lot of this is Consistently pushing forward, trying hard, learning at what we suck at, and then trying to get better and then doubling down. Or if we can't get better at hiring people to fill in the gaps. And I'm like, if you look at you, you travel a lot, you'll take tons of pictures, and you say you work a lot, but you're always traveling and taking pictures. So how much can you really work? So then when they're complaining about life and how it's hard and they just need to get lucky, I don't think that person's ever going to get quote unquote lucky. Why? Because they're not putting the effort, they're not trying to learn, and they make a lot of common mistakes that they should have learned from and gotten better over the years. Now, I didn't mention this person's name because I don't want to, you know, roast them online, but I've given them this feedback in person because I care for them. And Eric knows them and he's given them feedback as well.

You've taken care of this person really well too.

Yes, I've helped them out, you know, like financially struggled, helped them out, although sometimes You shouldn't do that. Um, but you know, I don't regret any of those things. Cherish him as a friend, always will cherish him as a friend. But you're not going to get lucky if you're not willing to put in the effort and learn at improving yourselves and your skills.

Yeah.

If you're just willing to stay stagnant and you believe you know everything and you believe you're awesome and amazing at everything, and whenever you get feedback, you think that people are out for you, Like, that's playing the quote-unquote victim mentality in my mind, and those people are not going to get lucky.

Yeah, that's why I, I don't think it's that helpful for me personally to think I'm smart or anything like that. It's, it's better to think that you're not that good because you're constantly trying to get better.

Yes, Eric and I don't go around saying we're smart. We actually don't believe we're smart, not because we're trying to trick our mind so that way we learn more. We genuinely think we're smart. Eric and I could never get into Stanford or Harvard like a lot of these people. We genuinely believe we are not smart. The only reason we both believe we've done decently well, and we actually both don't believe we've done well, we both think we have a long way to go. Because when you look at a lot of other people there, we're not on the Forbes list. We weren't, you know, multi-hundred billionaires or billionaires when we were 30 years old, like the Mark Zuckerbergs or whoever it may be. The only reason we've done somewhat well is because we just keep grinding it out and we learn from our mistakes. That's it.

And I would also say, the reason people might be saying, what's the point of getting there? I just want to, just for fun, I just want to see how far I can go. I don't know what it is for you. You have different reasons maybe?

No, it's a goal.

Yeah. I just want to see. And I'm good. I'm already, I think everything else is house money right now. You never thought at age 18 you'd be where you are now. I never thought I'd be where I am now. And now I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep free rolling, enjoying my friends and family and all that. One thing I'll say, you've actually teed up a really nice topic because it's led to my experiments on Threads. So to finish off the thought here, so look, if you work smart, you work hard consistently, you're going to get lucky. Because I have a very close family friend who throughout his entire life, from all the time I've known him, has just consistently complained about his luck. You're so lucky. You're so lucky. You're so lucky. Okay? That's not what it is. That's why when I go to Threads, by the way, there's a massive divide between X and Threads. When I go to X, I learn what are the latest AI engineers talking about? What are the latest research that people are publishing over here? I'm getting smarter. When I log into Threads, my God, sure, you might have hundreds of millions of active users, but the first thing I get when I log in is this shouldn't exist here. There's no such thing as self-made billionaires.

There's no this.

Everyone's so lucky. This system sucks. Blah, blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, right? So then now I just, what I do is I just troll people on Threads. Okay? So let me give you an example here. So there are no self-made billionaires. Okay? What about Oprah? How about Taylor Swift? LeBron James? Michael Jordan? How about Jensen Huang who used to scrub toilets as a kid and used to work at Denny's? How about Dyson? James Dyson who worked on 5,200 prototypes for 14 years, supported 3 kids, supported his wife throughout the whole time until he finally hit it big. And then, oh yeah, there's no self-made billionaires. That's the victim mentality. And you see a lot of that on Threads. And I have no idea how it does so well because that's just an example of people just, they can't help themselves.

Dude, I'm with you. I hate the victim mentality. And I see the stuff that you post on Threads. It really is entertaining for me to watch. Yeah, and I also see I like watching those um it's like political marketing bait shows. It's not only political figures, but you'll have like a Patrick Bet David. Yeah, and there'll be people all around in a circle, and then I think they have to run to a chair, and they'll like ask questions, and they people just have this mentality that it's unfair. Yeah, and you know the system's rigged. Yeah, and it sucks for everyone else, right? And Eric and I didn't grow up with money. It's just no a lot of people yes they do have. bad situations and they got screwed up for it. And yeah, it could impact them, uh, in the future, but that's not everyone. People take the extreme, say everyone has bad luck, it's only a few, 1%, that could get lucky. And this is like, a lot of people just don't try.

Yeah.

And I would say the big difference is, is if I look at a lot of the people who are successful, like Eric and I just focus on marketing and we try to just hone in on one craft and do it really well. I was with my cousins the other day or this weekend, and they're telling me how their kids do volleyball, you know, chess, debate, basketball, and the list goes on and on. And and I don't blame them. My kids are in a similar aspect. You know, chess, swimming, cheerleading, whatever it is. The list goes on and on. And I was saying like, this is what's wrong with society. And they're like, what do you mean? This is great. They'll find their passion. Like yeah, it's good as a kid, but I'm like. You're trying to get them to be well-rounded in everything. And if you look at the people who are successful, they're not well-rounded at everything. You just have to be really, really good at one thing and that's it. You just have to help your child find that one thing and just let them double down on that. And it's okay if they're not good at everything. To be successful in whatever, you just have to find your passion, just double down on it and do trial and error. Because people don't grow up being like, I want to be a doctor, and then you just become a doctor.

Dude, Did I send you the research? I think I sent you the research. This is for your— I don't think you opened it because I was thinking what you're thinking. I'm not a parent, right? You're obviously a parent. And so what the research basically says that when you have the child specialize at a young age, they get really good, but they cap out at like age 14 or whatever, versus when you let them do a bunch of different things and they end up much more well-rounded in their mid-20s or so. So I thought what you were thinking, but I sent you that research because I didn't know you're going to bring this up, but it's actually very relevant to what you're talking about right now. It might actually change your mind. There's data.

Yeah, no, but I don't believe you should have them well-rounded. I think when they're younger at this age, my kids are much younger than some of my cousin's kids.

How old are they?

My kids aren't yet. Some of them are in high school and some are in college. Yeah. But they have this notion of you make them well-rounded. I believe you let kids try whatever they want and you just let them keep going when they're younger. But the moment they start getting older, like high school, they need to start doubling down on what they're good at and not try to be well-rounded at everything because you're not going to build a successful career being well-rounded.

Oh dude. Okay. So I know this is not a parenting podcast, but guys, I have to share this with you. So Neil, I'm going to share this with you right now.

That's at least my belief. Because if I look at most of the successful entrepreneurs, they're not well-rounded and world-class at everything.

Yeah. Okay. So let me, let me go through this. So this is a massive new study on peak performance because we're talking about peak performance, guys. You got to have peak performance for marketing. I'm going to tie it together there. So a massive new study on peak performance included 34,000 international top performers. Okay? So you have Nobel laureates, renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world's best chess players. Okay? All the things you're talking about. It shows early specialization is a trap and the road to greatness is long and varied. So when you look at this over here, so early years, right? So the blue dotted line over here is just below, and then world-class is the Um, the yellow one. Okay. Are you following so far, Neil?

Yes.

Okay. So if we say world-class, so early years, maybe you have extensive multidisciplinary practice, gradual early progress. So this is saying you're doing a lot of different things. And then when you're, when you're, um, in your 20s or so, I guess you're world-class and you're consistent across fields versus, um, if you're in the blue line over here, maybe you're, you're very high performance. Okay. In the blue dotted line, it says intensive discipline-specific practice, accelerated early progress, And then what ends up happening in your 20s or so is you actually end up just below. Kind of interesting.

So I look at this graph as a little bit different, or I would have done the scenario in a little bit different way. Okay. And there's 2 things to note if you go back to the graph.

Okay. I'll go back. Here you go.

The first thing is, is I believe when kids are really young, and this is just my personal opinion, you don't try to make them world-class at anything. You try to let them just explore and learn what they like and don't like. When they start getting older, think high school, you want them to have them start focusing and doubling down on what they're really passionate about and get really good at that one or two things and just double down on that. And the reason I say that is, is when you just focus on what you're really good at, then you'll end up doing much better in life because you don't need to be great at everything. Now, when I say this, I don't believe a kid knows what they really love And when they're like two years old, three years old, four years old, and be like, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. They may have those ideas, but it could end up changing. And a great example of this is I was taking my kids back yesterday to the hotel room. My son is was saying, Daddy, thank you for looking up on your phone all the animal facts when we were driving back to the hotel. He's like, when I grow older, I'm going to discover. I'm going to be a scientist and discover. animals on different planets.

Okay?

Yeah. Like, that's what he's saying. My wife was really proud. And you know where my head went? It was like, well, unless it makes money, I don't really care. I know that sounds bad, but that's really where my head goes. And that gets into the second thing. When they look at here, human performance, I evaluate human performance, and this is very skewed. And I know most people are going to hate me for this and think this is wrong. I'm optimizing for my kids to try to do well financially. That is what I consider performance. I don't think my kids have it in them to be an NBA star or athlete. I don't have the genetics. Like, and when I say that, I'm not saying my kids can't learn to be a better basketball player, but they're not going to have the height based on my height and my wife's height. I don't see my kids being six foot five.

You know Muggsy Bogues? He was five foot three and played in the NBA.

Sure, but that's very rare.

I know. I'm just messing around. Keep going.

Make your point. Yeah. So I optimize for what I believe is important. And I believe that people need to make money and enough of it to be comfortable because life gets more and more expensive and harder. And that to me is performance. And when you try to be great at everything, just like my kids go to a school where, no joke, probably half of my kids' class, their parents went to Harvard or Stanford or Yale. And when you look at them financially, it doesn't mean financial success, but they're well-rounded. I'm not saying they don't do well financially. I'm just saying that doesn't necessarily guarantee anything. Being really good at one thing and doubling down on it for a career or a business, like how Eric and I chose marketing, I think you're going to be much better off from a financial aspect versus if you try to be well-rounded.

Maybe we can speak from experience here because I I'll share 2 things. Did you watch that movie, The Learning Machine, which was basically Google DeepMind? So the CEO of DeepMind is this guy, Denis Habibi. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but very smart guy, has done very well for himself. And so he was actually a chess prodigy at age 9 or 10. And he was playing against a guy who was 30, 35 years old. And they actually had a 10-hour chess session, a 10-hour match. And at the end of it, he just decided to give up. He could have continued to make it a draw, but he just decided to give up.

Yeah.

Because he realized how much a waste of human intelligence that was just to be sitting in there and playing those matches for such a long time. He's like, there has to be something else to build. I think through chess he learned that, right? But I think he was very specialized for chess. Now, what I actually specialized in as a child was I was really good at video games, but I played a lot of different video games. I specialized in a lot. And so I didn't specialize. I played a lot of different video games and I got good at a lot of them. But I wanted to play the video game of life. And to me, that's marketing is a video game. Business is the ultimate game ultimately, right? But I didn't learn that until my 20s. And so I think we probably look at it the same way. You might look at it a little differently and some people might disagree with you on, hey, financial success matters. But that's your KPI. That's fine. But all that to say is I just think this is an interesting study on 34,000 people. And you guys take with it what you will, those of you that have kids. This wasn't meant to be advice on children, but it's just how we think about it.

Yeah. And I bet you a lot of the people or that chart in that study, when they evaluated high performance, I don't think they looked at it purely from a financial aspect.

No. Yeah.

Yeah. And again, I know a lot of people aren't saying money isn't everything. I agree with that, but I want my kids to do really well financially. If they don't, then I'm like, what the heck did I teach them? Because homes, cars, and all the things that you need in life cost money.

Yeah.

And I hate to say it, getting a 9-to-5 job in most cases, if you want to live in a major city, doesn't pay for homes anymore, sadly.

Yep, dude. So, um, one thing I want to talk about, you see, you haven't seen, um, actually before we talk about, before we talk about the Netflix series I was just telling you about, so I saw Nick Mehta, who, um, he founded Gainsight, so sold to Vista, okay? And, um, so he said this, one thing I learned about recruiting, almost everyone is looking. Almost every single person is looking to move up, take on more, make more money, et cetera. They just take more work to get to. The corollary, corollary, yeah. Everyone on my teams were also, were always, always looking. So I needed to work to keep them. And this is interesting to me because recently I told you that a person on our team basically was offered double their salary and they didn't take it. And I was like, why didn't you take it? It's like, because you care about my family. And that was important to them. So I think it really is important as a leader that you're constantly talking to your team and figuring out, hey, Especially if you'd be scared for them to leave, constantly ask them, hey, Neil, you know, we really appreciate the work that you've done here. What do we need to do to keep you at Single Grain forever? And just see what they say, right? Well, family time is important to me. This is important to me. Oh, I'm really overwhelmed right now. I can use this more support right now. It's really important to have those conversations. But, and then the other thing too is I talked to someone else on my team recently and I said, look, there's nothing wrong with other people looking at it. Like, you should be selfish. You should be seeing what else is out there in the market. Everyone should be looking for themselves first, right? And so I just thought that was interesting because I don't think enough people think about, hey, who would I be freaking out if they left tomorrow? Or on the other side, if you're recruiting somebody, you might think about, we talked about this on the podcast, but you go to the recruit, hey, you can talk to anybody on my team over here in the office. Okay? You can talk to anybody. Whoever you don't actually want them to talk to, those are the people that you should think about maybe potentially moving on from. So you should always be thinking about your talent. And I know for a fact that Maybe Neil's not that close to it, but someone on his team like a Mike Kamo, for example, or Gullickson, they're constantly thinking about it. Neil?

Yeah. I think most of our executives think about talent all the time. Talent is what makes a company. I think the difference is we focus on talent related to what projects and what divisions we're working on, right? So I think about talent very heavily in our SaaS product. Mike G focuses on talent and what is it called? The agencies. And I would say Mike Camo focuses on talent really heavily on sales and software.

Everything comes down to talent at the end. At a certain level, all you're going to be thinking about is recruiting. And so as much as we like to talk about marketing, my head's more around recruiting nowadays. And I think about the marketing as it relates to recruiting. So yeah, same.

I think you're going to have amazing marketing if you have great recruiting. I think you have amazing product if you have great recruiting. Recruiting. I think it all comes down to recruiting.

Guess what? If you recruit the right marketers, they're going to be better than you and they're going to do the best marketing ever. So yeah, everything's related to people.

And I look at a lot of stuff as experiments because when you recruit, what people get wrong, and I'll give you a marketing example. So let's say if you're trying to recruit a social media marketing expert specifically for organic social, what most people do is they'll say, hey, I'm trying to recruit organic social person. I want you to tell me about your past, your past jobs, You know, why you're a good fit for this company, what you can help with, and lots of questions like that. What do you think we're doing wrong? How could we be better? You know, why isn't our social media driving sales? What do you think we can do better? And lots of these types of generic questions. What I love about recruiting, and you should pay people for this, is I'll go to a candidate that I think is decently well past the first or second interview. And be like, okay, here's the assignment. This assignment may take you 3, 4, or 5 hours. We'll pay you X dollars for it, $200, $300, $500, whatever you want to end up doing. And I want you, let's say if it's organic social, here's your company. We are trying to create content that helps us generate engagement with our ideal customers. Here's our ideal customer profile. And eventually generate revenue. You can decide how you would end up driving someone through a funnel to generate revenue, whether selling product directly or capture a lead, whatever it may be. I want you to adjust our funnel, or I would first start. I want you to figure out the types of content that you would create, come up with ideas, then create the content that you think is the most relevant. That would get engagement, and then tell us how you would push those people through that content throughout our funnel to drive revenue. Now, we are not going to give you feedback on your ideas, but I want you to also tell us why you decided to choose the ideas that you did. And, you know, if you, if you need specific tools, let us know and we will provide those tools for you. And then just have them go and do it. And then when they go and do it, whether you like the content or you don't like the content or you don't like the ideas or don't like the ideas, get on the phone with them or a video call and get an understanding of why they chose those topic ideas, why they created those type of contents. And you can test them out. Like you can do trial reels on Instagram and just see what happens, right? And hear them out because sometimes you may have these ideas on what you think works or what's best. And you may poo-poo on other people's ideas where they could be right and market conditions could have changed where you may think like, oh, that worked 10 years ago, doesn't work now, or oh, that'll never work. And it actually does work because everyone's doing the opposite of what they just presented. And you can test some of those things out, you paid for it so you can end up using it and you can end up learning so much just through recruiting and that's why I love Recruiting.

Yeah.

You got to give people the assignments. You can't just recruit and never give people assignments and talk because talk is cheap and a lot of people just bullshit.

Yep. We call this the working case. So it's no different than what you guys have. Basically a couple hours or so, paid them $200, $300. And the thing that you're looking for here is quality of thinking. Okay. So sure, we want to see how they write, how they communicate. If they write and it's not coherent, okay, that's not going to work. But most importantly, It's what Neil said. It's oftentimes they're going to come onto a Zoom call or, and just present to us. And that's where the rubber meets the road because that's where you get to really talk about strategy because that's how it's going to be working with this person. Imagine if you can't talk to this person, they can't communicate well, you guys are missing each other the whole time. It's just not going to work no matter how much experience they have or how good they are at interviewing, right? And so that's where the value comes. I really find the value in the working case and the presentation and also in the backdoor reference checks, right? When that needs to happen. So Not their front door, but in the back door. So you just need to make sure that you're asking people, hey, who do you want us to— who do you not want us to talk to? So you don't put their job in jeopardy. That part's very important too. So there's an art and a science to all of this stuff. It's a game.

My favorite part is not in marketing. The working case is just really easy because marketing has a lot of tangible deliverables. And I would highly recommend that anytime before you hire someone, unless you already know them and And, you know, have worked with them in the past. But the way I end up seeing it is when you're going down this path and these people give you references, a lot of people are like, oh, I don't care to call the references. They're only going to say positive things. You know, people never put down bad references. I've actually called references firsthand and it's not because they know me or anything like that. These are random people that don't know me. And they're like, yeah, I don't know why they would put me as a reference. I thought they were terrible at their job. And I'm like, all right, cool. Sounds good. Thanks for that. And it's like—

That's bad judgment.

This bad judgment. And it's like, okay, if this person can't figure out who would say good things about them or bad things about them, and this is just common sense, what else are they going to mess up in their job?

Yep. True. Um, by the way, just, I'm just curious, what days did you give off for this holiday break?

I honestly don't know.

We have off from the 24th to the 5th.

So check this out. Um, I was texting my CEO, right? And I said, uh, where is it? Uh, let's see. I'm trying to find it. Oh, so he's sending me sales numbers and he's like, oh, it's really good. And I'm I'm messing back. I'm like, only one day left. Really? That's the hard part about this month. He straight up texts. Okay, what question mark exclamation exclamation and then the next text nonsense. And I said because then everyone goes off. No question mark. And I told him, I agree with you. That was on the nonsense. He's like, not sales, not CS, not paid. I'm assuming paid means the people managing the paid ads. I was like, ah. He's like, I've closed deals on December 31st on many occasions. Been a long time, but it isn't too hard. I'll be working. 2 dinners scheduled with clients already. And what he's saying is, yes, Yes, people have time off, but in certain roles, you still need to perform even during the holidays.

Yeah. So you don't know which days you have off?

Well, no, he just said it. There are certain roles that—

Yeah.

Yes.

For most people, which days, you don't know that, right? So it's interesting because I talked to one of our mutual friends. I was like, so which days do you have off? He's like, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's, New Year's Day. That's it. And I talked to my other friends. It's like exactly that. So I'm like, how did it even come to this? But anyway, that's where we are right now. So, okay, last topic here. Are you ready? So I want to talk about the genius of Diddy's marketing that eventually led to his downfall. Okay. So Diddy is, uh, you know, Puff Daddy, Sean Combs. And when you think about this back in the day, right, I didn't know all these things that you did. You definitely got to check out the Netflix series. But look, he has been on the face of Rolling Stone. Okay. He was the face of Sean John, which is his, um, I guess that was the clothing brand. Okay. Ciroc, the vodka, right? Bad Boy, which is his record label. Um, he had the— remember the show Making the Band on MTV? You used to watch that? You watch that? I didn't watch that. Um, even the funeral he did for Biggie. So Notorious B.I.G., when he died, it was like this huge, like, um, I don't know, I wouldn't say it's this huge celebration, okay? Um, and what I want to say for all this is that with great power comes great responsibility, especially when you become more and more famous. And I'm not going to talk— I'm not going to spoil this for people, but check out the Netflix series. But I think what happened is you gain so much power, you start to abuse that power at the end of the day. But he had everything, right? The— again, the vodka, um, you know, he could break bread with any celebrities that he wanted to. Again, he was the face on— I think he was the face on Time magazine as well. He even did that, that, that song for, for the Godzilla movie back in the day. So, um, I just remember growing up, we used to see him everywhere. And he used to make sure he inserted himself into all the music videos, whether he was promoting like up-and-coming person. He was in every single music video.

He really was. He did extremely well getting his brand out there.

Yeah. Well, now he's in prison.

Yeah.

Do you know how long he's in prison for?

Life?

No, not life. Just it's actually a win for him. Only 50 months.

15 months?

50. 5-0.

5-0. Okay.

So all the stuff that we're talking about.

Good time. So won't be 4 years.

Say it again.

So roughly four years, but then because of if he has good behavior, he won't actually. Yeah.

So huge victory for him. And the other thing too is with his he had eight lawyers fighting for him, and that basically just like a slap on the wrist for all the things that he was getting that they're accusing him of. But if you watch that that documentary, it's like dude, he like it does feel like he did a lot of those things.

So, but what do you get in trouble for? It's like sex trafficking or something crazy.

Sex trafficking, I think is racketeering or whatever that means. There's a lot of just footage and people coming up and say like. Sexual— a lot of sexual assault, a lot of, uh, beating people up, a lot of drugging people, um, a lot of not paying his employees as well, um, a lot of like— and apparently it seems like, and I'm not gonna confirm this, but the, the death of, uh, Tupac, for example, it like— I never knew that was actually attributed to him. And a lot of people came forward in that documentary, um.

So he's the one who killed Tupac?

They're saying that he was the one that put up $1 million for the Crips, um, to, to, to put a hit on him. Um, so yeah. Wow. That's why you should check it out. It's really entertaining.

So it's entertaining, but it's also sad. Like, I don't watch the doom and gloom of people being sex trafficked and stuff like that.

I don't know if the sex traffic piece, but they didn't talk about the, the freak-offs and all these things. But, um, there's just— there's— I'll tell you what, there's a lot of baby oil stuff going on through those 4 episodes. So, um, we'll just leave it at that. But anything else you want to add before we hop off?

Hope you guys have a happy holidays and amazing New Year's. Eric and I wish you amazing 2026.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, we'll still be recording next week too. So happy holidays, guys. Uh, and yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.