AI, Ethics & Growth: What Businesses Must Know

So dude, everyone's been talking about how AI is going to revolutionize marketing. You and I already agree that it's here to stay, but I started looking at our organization and I'm curious on your organization as well. And I've been talking to a lot of other founders and CMOs. When I talk to people about like, oh, how AI has impacted your marketing, everyone talks about, you know, how it's, change things in a really cool way. And I agree, AI is amazing technology. But when I ask them how it's changed their headcount or their organizational structure, I almost always hear crickets in which no one's really changed anything due to AI. I'm not saying that won't be the case a year or 2 or 5 years from now. I'm just saying right now there's this tendency for everyone to talk about how AI has changed a lot of things in marketing. But when you ask them how they've changed their organizational structure, at least related to marketing, or how they do marketing, um, other than helping with quote unquote efficiencies, very few people have good responses.

I believe that. And the reason I, I believe that, and, and maybe this will go into, there's, I think there's a couple of sides to this. There's a lot of variables, but I think especially if you're talking to a big company, it's a big company CMO, you don't want to rock the boat too much because the CMO tenure is the lowest it's ever been, right?

Yeah.

So you don't want to be the one causing problems. You want stability, especially if you have a family and stuff, right? So there, that's one angle of it. The second thing is I just had a conversation this week with a couple founders behind the scenes. And you talk— you and I talk to founders all the time. And so I was sitting in a private room. There's like 7 of us on that Zoom call, right? We do a check-in every like couple months or so. So the first person's like, yep, you guys don't want to adopt AI? Okay, boom, $6 million in payroll gone. Right? And then the other one is like, you know, I really like the idea from one of our other mutual friends.

Yeah.

Where he had like a, an organization that's focused on cutting. They get bonus on cutting people and finding efficiencies everywhere.

Bonus on cutting or cutting with efficiencies?

Cutting efficiencies. And also they get bonus on cutting people. So finding efficiencies with AI. And so when you have the founders in an organization, they're going to try to push the pace very quickly and very aggressively because they're incentivized to just make sure that they're doing the right thing by the company. And, and I think when it's a CMO that you're talking about, or like we're talk— talking about marketing leaders, they might not wanna rock the boat as much, especially if it's a big company. Cuz when you're a big company, you wanna protect more than you wanna push the pace as aggressively, unless you were talking about technology like a Google or Nvidia. Yeah. Yeah.

Dude, so my team has been using AI to write emails for a while. They use human intervention as well, but they use AI, uh, combined with humans and they've been doing this for a while. So I was talking to one of my presidents on my small and medium business division. Her name's Sarah. So Sarah, you know, just like any other B2B company, she relies on leads. More leads she gets, more they call, or portion want to— they'll call, portion get ahold of. The ones they get ahold of, if they're qualified, they pitch, and a portion of them end up closing. It's that simple. So my team was telling me, or Sarah was telling me on the phone, A few weeks ago, uh, and this is the one I made a change. She's like, yeah, some things have just been a little bit slower. Some things have been a little bit better, but just generally speaking, some things have just been hurting us lately. I'm like, like what? She's like, email just doesn't convert as well for us these days. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, we're sending out emails. Our email list is big, but we're not getting as many DCs, which, you know, short for discovery calls, uh, as you know. And I was like, okay. I'm like, what are we getting? She's just like, you know, for a while it's been duds where we're averaging 3 and our— we have a copywriter on staff that's leveraging AI. So then I'm like, you know what? Let me just go and rewrite these emails. So now my team sends me the emails that we're going to send out to generate more discovery calls, not leads, but a lead that turns into a phone call and that it's turning into a phone call because we know it fits, it's the right type of company from the industry to the revenue size to the marketing budget. And Sarah was telling me we're getting like around 3. And I get a text, no joke this morning, from Salo who runs Marketverse. He's like, by the way, your emails generated 8 discovery calls today. Great job. This is triple the average. Technically it's not triple because 3 3 to 8, but it's more than double. He's like, using the same learnings from your last email, we refactored the ones on Monday and we tripled the results as well. So we'll adjust accordingly. He's like, will you send— we'll send you next week's, okay? And I said, yes, send me next week's and I'll modify the emails. So he sends it to me and the email he sends me, I'll read it to you. Where is it? And it wasn't bad, but his email was lengthy. It was like subject line is either A, you're missing 73% of search traffic, or B, the new SEO Search Everywhere optimization. Both of those we've talked about. I'm like, eh, it's not that you can't talk about the same stuff over and over again, it usually just doesn't convert as well. And it goes, most marketers still chase visibility on Google, but this channel accounts for less than 1/3 of total daily search activity. While Google sees 13.7 billion searches every day, platforms like Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, and TikTok collectively host over 37.1 billion. That means 73% of users find their information outside of Google and you need to capture their attention on all platforms. Any links capture all attention on all platforms? I'm guessing that's going to a landing page. Then he shows a chart which just shows the number of searches per platform. And then he's just like, it's an approach we call Search Everywhere Optimization and helps our clients secure visibility in a world that's no longer Google-first. This strategy works so well that Google gave us Agency Excellence Award for it. And it's why we're recognized in the Campaign Global Agency of the Year Awards for the 2nd consecutive year. Top brands like Sony, blah, blah, blah, listing logos already on board. And now you can try too. And then there's a link. It says, let's discuss your Search Everywhere Optimization strategy and fill your visible gaps. We've reserved some available times to chat, so simply pick one or select another date on our calendar here. And he has calendar buttons. No pressure. If you like what you hear, we can work together. If not, take insights and run with them. Cheers, Neil Patel. And then they have a PS. So I rewrote it and I changed it up and I just put subject, this is why SEO doesn't work. There's no subject B, that was just my subject. And it took me less than 5 minutes to write this email. And I said, everyone knows SEO drives more traffic, but have you noticed that your revenue doesn't go up as your traffic goes up? This is because people focus on traffic-rich keywords, which tend to be 1, 2, or 3-word phrases. But look at the conversion rate from a visitor to customer based on keyword length. And I have a chart that shows the average conversion rate for a visitor from organic search based on, or, technically search traffic, doesn't have to be organic, based on keyword length, it's organic and paid. And then I say, as you can see, 6 to 7 word phrases convert at roughly 10.7x more times than 1 word keywords. In essence, SEO works, but only if you target the right keywords, the ones that convert. So let's stop wasting time. Click here, and that'll be a link to book a call. We'll analyze your site and determine the right keywords to target to generate revenue. Cheers, Neil Patel. P.S., you have nothing to lose. You don't have to commit anything. Just book a call to learn how you should be doing SEO in order to generate revenue. And there'll be a link in there. It's just shorter, simpler, and more direct.

And are you tying this in with the AI piece that you started with?

Uh, yes. In which I removed the AI and I just wrote it myself.

So they use AI for the initial one, and then you wrote this, that second one again?

They use AI combined with humans.

AI combined with your writing style or AI combined with just AI assisted?

They take AI, they train it on my tonality because I have so much public content.

Yeah.

They have AI spit out content based on data they feed AI because we have tons of data and charts.

Yeah.

And then a human goes in and modifies it on our team. That is a copywriter, not just any marketer, but a copywriter.

Yeah, you do. By the way, on the AI piece real quick, I started testing this yesterday. So you want to know how you can instantly get the best AI prompts? How? Okay, so basically You, you write a prompt, you could dictate out a prompt using like Super Whisper or something. Just talk it out, right? And it talks it out and then it writes it out. And so ChatGPT, you'll say, hey, improve this prompt, right? Like whatever you just said. So it'll spit something out, doesn't matter. Then you go over to Grok or some other LLM or Claude and do the same thing. So you just put the same thing, say, make this prompt better, right? Then you pit them against each other. So you take the Claude output and then you put it over to ChatGPT. It's, hey, that's not that good. Claude said this, this seems to be better. And then it makes the prompt way better and you do the same thing on the other one. And I'm like, whoa, this is incredible because we do a lot of prompting, right?

Yeah.

Like there's a lot of prompts with our workflows and everything. And most of the prompts you and I would write as humans just aren't that good. But when you do it at that level and when they compete with each other, for some reason they take it to another level, right? It's almost like human competition. So I think that that's just a little thing to add in there. But I do agree. It's hard to replace the human element because also at the same time though, like, you know your audience and we've, we've, we, we know copywriting pretty well. We know human psychology pretty well. Yes.

We also know our business really well cuz we've been doing it so long.

Yeah.

And this is where I think experience really does matter. You can feed anything you want into AI and you can tell it to learn from 10, 15, 20 years of history.

Mm-hmm.

And I do think it's actually very helpful and it can help guide you. But individual experience that you have in a field, especially if you're good at what you do within that field, I think it's very hard to replace that, but it's not hard to replace the people who have very little to no experience.

You know what's interesting? So I agree with that. But on the flip side, Aaron Levy's Boxes Aaron Levy tweeted this this week, and I didn't think about this, and I'm pretty sure you haven't either. I'm giving you discredit too. So, so, so if you think about it, you and I have worked in the workforce without AI, but all the kids in college right now are using the crap— like, I would use the crap out of AI. I would cheat on everything, right?

Yeah.

And so they're very experienced with AI. So when they're coming into the workforce, it's like when you hire interns or whatever. I was talking to like a YPR today. Um, he's like, yeah, it's cheap labor, but the way you sell it to them is you say, you're coming in as cheap labor right now. We're going to upskill you. We're expecting you to figure out all this stuff with AI, and then we're We're going to make it where you're uncheap labor and you're highly paid labor, right? But point is, understanding that these people coming in now are much more superpowered than people like you and me who have bad habits from, you know, the old way of working, right? But on the flip side, you and I have a lot of experience, so we know better questions to ask. So there's a trade-off on both sides.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think you and I, uh, combined with the right people, uh, who Have grown up with the technology. It's like little kids. Little kids have grown up with, uh, Alexa and all these voice search devices. Hence, when we look at the data, it shows that they search more from voice search and they think it's our cake that we type in. Like my kids ask me like, why are you typing in a question into computer? Why don't you just ask Alexa or Siri? That's what they think is normal.

Yeah.

So they're, they're like confused.

They think something wrong. How do you explain to them that the tech isn't quite there yet on the voice search devices? They, they don't— Like Alexa. Alexa sucks.

They don't believe that because for their questions that a little kid would ask, it typically answers most of the things they would want, such as what weighs more, a beluga whale or, uh, a white, a great white shark?

Oh.

These are questions my kids ask. That's how I know. So like things like that, Alexa does really well. Or like my son's newest thing is he wants a Bugatti.

What?

He's 3. I don't know where he got the idea of Bugatti for. And I was like, how about a Tesla? Um, 'cause you can buy a Tesla.

Does he also not like Elon Musk?

No, he doesn't know about any of that. I was like, how about an electric car? 'Cause electric cars, and I'm just saying Tesla, not 'cause it is a Tesla, but electric cars tend to accelerate really fast. And he was telling me, he's like, no, Teslas aren't that fast. I'm like, you don't even know how fast, uh, uh, Tesla is. So then he goes and asks, uh, it was either Alexa or Siri. And he gets the answer. And then he's just like, see, 150 miles. Bugatti goes over 200.

Dude, he even knows what a mile is at age 3. I didn't even know what a mile was.

Well, no, Alexa ends up telling you.

Okay, so he's gonna get a lot— like, your kids are gonna be way smarter. Our kids are gonna be way smarter than us. It's just how it is.

Yes, but they— if you look at the people right now that are going into the workforce that are young, and they don't have the bad habits that you and I have, They don't really have the good habits that come with AI either because they didn't grow up with it from when they're a little kid. Our kids are growing up with AI because Alexa, Siri, and all these devices already have AI integrated. And when they go to school, no joke, we've looked at some of the schools around here. They teach kids how to leverage AI and, and teach 'em. I'm not saying the schools do amazing job because it's new technology, But it's kind of crazy to think about how they will grow up in a world where it's AI first, just like it's voice search first.

Yep.

And they truly will not have the bad habits that even these college kids have right now, dude.

And then the kids after that, they're going to grow up with the world of robots. They're going to grow up with world of Neuralink where you can think and it just happens. Yeah. And so it's going to get crazier and crazier. And I think if we're learning anything right now, it's we're just getting things done a lot faster because even on the marketing side where people like to say, Oh, 80% of AI is used for content production and research, but that like most of the stuff in the workforce is content and research. Like you and I talking right now is content, right? Yes. You and I communicating on the phone with someone is, is content. So I think we're just, the rotations are gonna happen a lot faster. I mean, I, I think, um, I mentioned to you over the weekend I used O3 to, when I get these churn reports or these gross revenue retention or net revenue retention reports, you usually have to wait for that stuff, right?

Yeah.

I don't have to wait for that stuff anymore. It tells me exactly what to pull in and I pull it in and it makes it exactly what I want it to do. Where that previously, years ago, might have cost me, if I used a contractor, days or weeks, if not thousands of dollars to get done with the contractor, or you might have to have full-time headcount dedicated to it.

Dude, I agree with you. And especially when you're looking at things like cohort analysis and churn and net negative retention. When, you know, whenever I talk to marketing about this kind of stuff, they calculate, they work with developers. their numbers change depending on how, what formula people use or how they calculate, which varies business to business. I know there is a formula to calculate, but the way people look at data can be different. I find that when I ask AI and I double-check it with, you know, data scientists on our end, it tends to be more accurate and I get it quicker and I'm able to make more informed decisions in the business versus when I have a team do it, it takes way longer, costs more, and I see more inaccuracies.

Yeah. By the way, one thing I think we should talk about too, um, is how to react. Really the most important trait in business. What are the most important traits of business when you're getting attacked on all sides? Let's say it's a bad economy or like maybe one of your employees is getting sued for something.

Yeah.

Or like maybe you're getting sued for something, like whatever it is exactly. Right. And how, how you react to it in general. And so, um, we can both speak to it. What do you think? What do you think is the one word that comes to mind here?

For how to react or what do we do?

Really how to behave if you want long-term success in these situations.

Logical.

Okay. In my mind, the keyword is resilience. And so, but I, I think they kind of go hand in hand because the logical move is resilience because there's no other thing like you're, you're, you're built— businesses are problem-solving machines. And if you can't solve it and you lose your, your, your poo-poo right now, when things are hitting you, then you deserve to not get to the next level, right? You should be able to tolerate these things no matter how, like you only need to worry about what you can control. Like only worry about controlling the variables and resilience goes a long way. This is why most people can't take it when it comes to business. So when things come my way, I'm just like, yeah, okay. Lawsuit over. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, great. Oh, you, uh, okay. Got it. Oh, you're getting sued. Okay. Got it. Okay. Doesn't matter.

Right?

Oh, AI's coming. Oh, the, the, the economy sucks or whatever. Yep. Yep. Just keep going. Just keep taking it because you don't deserve to become very successful if you can't take it.

I agree with that. I was on a phone call right before we started recording. And I was talking to someone about loans in general. I had a buddy of mine who is— their business is doing okay. They got this Big call it they have monthly expenses because they put a lot of money into a home project, and you know I don't know what they put in, but let's call it around five million bucks. But the home is worth conservatively fifteen, so they're just like, "Oh, maybe I can pull a few more million." So you know I was talking to a buddy who knows a lot of hard money lenders, and you know after he said, "Yeah, I'll make a few introductions to one of my buddies." And we were all talking. And we were talking about just how life, life is. And I'm like, dude, life right now really sucks. And he's like, why? And I'm like, business is going okay. The economy's not great. We're getting kicked from a lot of different sides. Just being quite frankly, you know, you and I have—

Kicked in the nuts.

Yes. And you and I have both dealt with silly legal issues that we shouldn't have. But sometimes you just got to deal with them in business, and you got to fight them, but then you're paying legal costs, which sucks. And I was telling him, you know, at least in my situation, I'm dealing with construction on a home right now, which is eating up a ton of cash. The fires— I feel really bad for the people who lost their homes. Um, but the fires combined with the tariffs have created a new situation in construction in the city of Los Angeles. You have a lack of construction people, so now they're charging more money.

Mm-hmm.

So I gotta pay more than was budgeted. The second thing that I gotta deal with is not only did I gotta pay more than what was budgeted, but I'm paying more because of tariffs as well.

Hmm.

Tariffs aren't zero, or they weren't— I'm not saying they were always zero, but they're higher than what they were before, whether he's working or not.

You're paying at least 10% more.

At least 10% more. And realistically, for a lot of other stuff, I'm paying 20 to 30% more. At least right now. And I can't get the cost down. I'm trying to prepay and not pay any overages. And I'm like, look, I'll just send the money right now. So I'm getting hurt on all ends. And I was telling him, I'm the brokest rich person, you know, right now. And he laughed. And he's just like, you know, I've heard that a lot recently. And I'm like, I have money, but I'm tying up a lot. I'm investing a lot. I'm not taking distributions. So I'm like, I'm gonna—

Does it feel like you're cash poor?

I am cash poor right now. Like just being very transparent.

Yeah.

Because I'm dealing with construction, expanding business and buying companies. Uh-huh. Uh, and I'm not taking distributions. The company is healthy and we're profitable, but I'm using the money to grow the business even more. So I'm getting hit on all sides. I'm living off of savings. I'm investing into construction and I'm also dumping personal money into the business to make it grow faster and buy more companies. So I'm really getting hit.

Yeah.

On all sides.

Yeah.

And then I'm cash flowing things as well. Like, you know, we deal with companies and ad spend, and very rarely do we float media. But sometimes we got to float $4 or $5 million, $6 million at a time, $7, $8 million. And then if you start doing it for a handful of clients, it's not $4 or $5 million at a time, it starts getting to $10, $15, $20 million. So a lot of my cash Because we can't go to a bank and collect, uh, use bank money and pay interest. You know, our interest rate right now is, call it 3.25% plus SOFR. Um, so you're looking at, call it around 8%, um, which isn't bad, but getting paid a percentage of ad spend and then paying 8% to float someone's money means you don't make any money.

Yeah.

The economics don't work out. This is just a loss.

Yeah.

So I'm floating it, which means I'm not getting the, call it the 4.6% or whatever interest rate I get from my own bank account. And I'm floating it for the clients just to make sure we have the client. And then that means I have less cash as well. So I'm getting hit on all sides, floating money, spending more on a home and construction, uh, buying corporations and not taking distributions.

Yeah. But the thing is, the real question is why, why do we do all these things? Right? It's like, okay, someone's in trouble. Like, yep. Gonna pay the legal fees. Um, you know, oh, do we need to, do we need to overhire right now? Yeah, we need to overhire. Cause like, it seems like, oh, the economy's starting to pick up again. It's, it's, we're, we're making bets. You're, you're making a bet on the home long-term for your family. Okay. For the businesses, why are you buying on the— cause you're expanding for the long-term. Right. Um, why are you like, everything you're doing is, is an investment at the end of the day. Most things you would, you would agree with that, right? Almost everything's an investment.

Yes. And without getting into too many details, it's not just everything is an investment, but some of the things we do and we take is because of ethics. Like when you're talking about, let's say if someone on your team is dealing with a legal battle and they shouldn't have to deal with that, but it's partly related to you, but it has nothing to do with you and it's not your fault. Um, and we had an example of this in which Um, you know, we had a falling out of someone that was working with us and the new person that's managing that division, they're in a country where the laws are murky. When I say they're in a country where the laws are murky is I'm talking about people like bribing and stuff. We won't do that. Uh, it hurts us because, you know, cops don't necessarily go to someone's house and do what they're supposed to, even if there may be hypothetically a court order, because You know, there is things like bribery that you have to potentially deal with, right? So the person's like, oh, they're probably gonna go after me. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm like, what do you mean? The company will take care of it. And she's like, or they're like, are you sure? I'm like, yeah, wouldn't all companies? Like, no, you would have to get approval. And most companies wouldn't do it. And they just say you're on your own. I'm like, oh, that's just unethical.

Yeah.

Uh, if you're getting dragged into something because of me and you're just a, uh, a bystander, it should be my problem, not your problem.

But I also think it's a long-term thing too, cuz you're building a lot of goodwill with that person, assuming that person's really good as well. Like on the ethics side, definitely you should protect them. But on the other side too, you are building a lot of goodwill.

I am.

Yeah.

And I, I know you've been in similar situations in the past and you always tell your employees you have their back.

Yep.

But even if that person isn't a rockstar, you still have their back. Goodwill is a great bonus. Just ethically, you have to do what's right.

Yeah. And I would say the majority of business people would not— I'm talking like 51% maybe are probably not thinking in this way because they're thinking about what's the quickest way, the, the, the, the way to the quickest buck. But the way to the quickest buck is actually the slowest way by doing the ethical thing, which takes longer.

Yes. And too many people are black and white, like we have to do this. If we don't do it this way, then we're, you know, then we're just putting company money at risk or whatever. And I look at a lot of these situations in business and marketing. It's not black and white. You know, like I was talking to someone the other day about branding. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk's big on branding. He has that book, right? Something about the purple or the—

Day Trading Attention.

Day Trading Attention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So purple's in the middle, red is like, I think one's, one's bragging, one's performance.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I totally agree with him on that. He's, he's done really well as a marketer. Um, you know, like I've been investing a lot in marketing lately. Um, and you have too. And a lot of people, you know, in a bad time will tell me, dude, why should even people on my team— and we're marketing agencies— like, we've been doing this for 3 to 6 months, Neil, there's no ROI. You sure you want to keep doing this? You haven't just kept doing this, you've actually increased the spend, Neil. You sure you want to do this? And I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I want to keep doing this? This is how you grow a business 5, 10 years from now. But like, it's burning a lot of cash. And I just think you can't, you know, with 80% of your marketing efforts and your money, you have to be long-term. And when you take those bets in a crappy time, like we're both getting kicked and we're feeling it.

Yeah.

That's typically when it pays off the most, but you really feel the pain when you do that.

Growth is uncomfortable in, in, in any way. And so it, it naturally, like if we're investing, yes, that's uncomfortable. If we're getting attacked on all ends, like yes, it's uncomfortable. But you learn as an entrepreneur that that's the price of admission and you have to keep paying that price every single day. It's just like going to the gym. You're just getting, when you're going to the gym, yep. It, when you work out, yeah, that's inflammation, right? You're, you're just going for inflammation every day. You're running into it. Um, yeah. And so that's what I would say. Um, by, by the way, one, one thing real quick. What do you think it is? If there's one thing that's worth micromanaging on forever, what do you think it is?

I, I don't know. Um, I myself am not a micromanager, but I'm a, a person who heavily checks in. Maybe someone would consider that micromanaging, and I typically only check in for very specific tasks that I know move, really move the needle for the business or potentially could. And I check in every day and sometimes multiple times a day to make sure shit's getting done on time. Excuse the language.

Oh, I like that. But my opinion on this one, the one thing that's worth micromanaging on forever, and I, I, I, I listened to this, I am paraphrasing from Steve Jobs. The one thing the founder has full control over is continuing to raise the bar on talent. and ruthlessly deciding who to let in because one, one really good engineer is not 10x. If we're talking 50x and 100x, Yeah. maybe even 1,000x now with things like Cursor, right? And I, I think if there's one thing that we can control, for example, like your executive team, for example, that, that's the thing that's worth micromanaging on.

Yeah.

And making sure you get the best of the best, right? Um, because then you don't have to worry about all these things. Like you only checking in on the things that maybe you can drive the most impact on. And I do think that the second thing would be, The enforcer mentality, right? Like if you can be like Neil, or actually a lot of my Indian friends are very good enforcers. I don't know why it's like that. It's just like that. Um, they're like, some are really good about checking in a very kind way. It's like, hey, how's this going?

Right.

And Neil's just like, hey, you just get a phone call from Neil at random times of the day. Yeah. Yes.

And then I text when they don't answer the phone and then I try—

You even hit the notify button when they're on sleep mode.

Yes, I do that with you too.

Have you noticed that? You've never hit— no. Because mine's on. I just— it doesn't hit me. I have no notifications on.

Yeah, but yours says sometimes do not disturb and I click notify.

Yeah, but it doesn't hit me because—

Oh, it still doesn't hit you?

No, nothing hits me. Yeah. Phone calls won't even hit me. That's why sometimes I don't pick up your call. I don't get any ring. It doesn't— it doesn't like— it's always on silent. Yeah. So when I get it, I'm just like staring at my phone. So yeah.

Oh, got it. That's a good way to deal with phone calls.

Unwanted calls. Yeah. Yeah.

So the way I see it is like if someone doesn't answer my phone call, I assume that they're on a business call. And I know the business calls usually last every 30 minutes or an hour.

So I'll call every 30 minutes. 30 minutes.

I'm like, you free? You free? Hey, did I catch you at a bad time? If you're busy with a customer, don't answer my phone call.

But then I call again in 30 minutes. You know, I think it's important too because You don't— there's a lot of people, myself included in the past. I've actually gotten better about this, but you don't wait to call. Most people are like, hey, you got time? Hey, are you free? When are you free? Oh, when can we schedule a call? You're just like, now in Slack, I just hit huddle. Like, I just hit huddle. Like, I don't even pick up my phone. I just hit huddle. Like, because when you go into Slack, you use Teams, right? So there's a little headphone button. You just hit that. Like, I don't need to wait anymore. And then they'll call me back.

Dude, but I do that in everything in life. So for example, I was texting a realtor. All right. And I kind of know the realtor and I kind of don't. And this is Tuesday night.

What does that even mean? You kind of know and you kind of don't?

I've never met them, but they're known for selling the most expensive homes in Beverly Hills. Okay, got it.

Yeah.

So I text this person, 8:26 PM Tuesday night. Hey, I'm thinking of listing my home in Beverly Hills. Hi. Okay, let me know where it is and we can discuss. Great location. Can I have a call in the AM? Okay. And then he's like, I'm like, yeah, what's a good time? I was ready to call him right then and there. But he said too quickly, can we have a call in the AM? I was like, man, this blows.

Yeah.

And he's like, what time's good? I'm like, 10 AM. He's like, great, talk then. So then I sent him all the design, the renderings. I'm like, for context, the house gets done in November. That's what it's supposed to look like. He's like, got it, thanks.

Wait, wait, you're selling the new one?

If the economy keeps going bad, yeah, I'm going to sell the new one. Right? So I'm doing it as a contingency. I'm not actually planning on listing it or selling it, but I don't know how bad things are going to get with the economy, tariffs, and all of that. And I want a worst-case backup option. Keep in mind too, at the same time, just being fully transparent, this is probably too many details.

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

construction on my home, a remodel, you're talking about, you know, I don't want to give too many deals, but let's just say, you know, a good amount of money, right? Not $1 million or $2 million or not even $5 million, like substantially more.

You just gave all the details.

Right. I didn't say the real amount though. Um, and, and I paid a decent amount for the home. So what I was trying to find out is, uh, Will the economics make sense? So for him, actually, I'll just tell the numbers and the data, you know, live. I don't think it's going to really hurt me. I bought the home for $18 million. Uh, the construction estimate is around $10 million. I haven't paid $10 million yet. So call it, I'll be in $28 million. That's a lot of money. I have debt on the house of $7 million. So will— what I'm trying to find out is if I actually put that much money in, Will the home sell for $28, $30, $35, or will it actually only sell for $20 and people won't value it? And the thing I ended up getting back from the realtor was he's just like, he's like, dude, did you end up checking out Selena Gomez's home? She just ended up spending $35 million for a 9,000 square foot, really old home, bigger lot than yours. And he's just like, if it's done right, he's like, you can get $4,000 to $5,000 a square foot. I have 7,000 square feet. So $4,000 is not break-even because then there's realtor fees and taxes to sell a home and all this kind of stuff. But when I start getting into the $5,000 or $4,500, et cetera, I start inking out profit. The only reason I was considering it, and I had a conversation with my significant other, is if I look at business right now, this is the shittiest time for us. This is also the shittiest time for anyone in the marketing world or typically business world. Would you agree with this statement?

Mm-hmm.

For most businesses.

Mm-hmm.

Minus like the Carvanhas where Used cars are actually more valuable because less quote unquote potential tariffs. So I was like, honey, sold the house, worst case, we may have to, I want to use the money to buy more businesses. That way I don't have to rely on the bank or anyone else.

She's gone through this so many times with you.

And she's just like, if you think it's best for the family, I support you. A home is a home. It doesn't matter where we live. And we don't live in a bad place right now. I live in a hotel condo in a 5-star hotel where you can get room service and stuff like that. So it's not like I'm not putting them in a terrible situation.

Did they open that restaurant here?

Is it what?

Did they open that restaurant here? Not yet, right?

It's almost done.

Okay.

But they do things where they cook for you and they have chefs that can cook upstairs and stuff like that. But the restaurant's almost open. 2, 3 more months, I think. Um, but going back to it, she's like, do whatever it takes. Uh, and the interesting part about my life at this point, because I'm 40.

You're 40 now?

Yeah, I turned 40 at the YPO event. Oh, you did? Speaking.

Yeah, Neil never talks about his birthday.

Yeah, I don't, because I know if I told you at that day, you would have been like, oh, hey everyone, it's Neil's birthday. That's why ice cream for free, because it's my birthday. That was my version of a cake.

Okay, okay.

Well, right. And it was free.

40. Damn, you hit the big 4-0.

Yeah. So at 40, I'm at a point in life where I can sell my home. And I have quite a few homes that I probably have one too many. Some of them are down in value. So I can't sell those. But the latest one I'm doing construction on, probably not. I can sell the homes and buy more businesses. But when you have a kid and kids, you know, my kids are like, Daddy, Daddy, we can't wait to move into the new home. We want a yard. Yeah, like they straight up say like, we want a yard. We can't wait till like—

Those core memories are worth a lot more.

Yeah, so no joke, dude. For once in my life, I was telling my wife, I'm like, I don't know if I actually want to sell the home to go buy more businesses, even when we make more. She's like, why? And I was like, dude, like, I've been to a chiropractor 3 times this week because my neck's been hurting, my back's been hurting. It's been hurting for a few weeks. It's finally starting to get better. Uh, I have elbow— I think they call it tendonitis now, where it hurts when I stretch my elbows or, you know, walk around the staircase.

We're getting old.

I have a problem with my foot that came back. It's on my heel that hurts every time I step. And sometimes I just keep limping.

Just gotta build more muscle.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So it's like, there's just things that are getting wrong. And I was just like, you know what, I actually want the memories of living in a home with our children. And I'm kind of okay not to buy as many businesses and not grow as fast. Because I'm not going to remember how much money I made or didn't make. I'm going to remember the moments that I really enjoyed with my kids.

Dude, so yes, agree with, and I think that's worth infinitely more money. And I took, so I took my, my, my mom and dad to, to Terneo over, Terneo over the weekend, which is like a resort place in the Palos Verdes, right? And that was good cuz I don't regret that. Like, sure, it was tough getting them there and everything. I had to like call 'em a car and like, you know, had to, uh, order like all this stuff, right? To just make sure everything was comfortable for them. Um, but I just look at it and it's like, I also did this. I brought this up from Reddit. It's like, what's the one thing you regret not doing with your parents? The thing to do for sure is always to bring the vlog camera and then have them talk about their lives, right? Because then you can share it with the kids in the future. So my point of saying all this is that I'm like, man, I don't regret this at all because I get all these core memories and they'll remember it to the last day. And the cool thing is this, this is a customer service thing. This ties in with marketing as well. Terranea screwed up on so many things. They dropped one of my parents on the ground, right?

Wait, what's— oh, Terranea is the resort.

Yeah, the resort.

They dropped, like, when they're picking them up?

Yeah, yeah. And so, like, basically putting them into, like, uh, like a wheelchair, for example, dropped them, right? Okay, that's a lawsuit right there. That's a lawsuit right there. Um, and then they, they screwed up, like, many times on, like, coming to pick us up. Like, um, you know, one of my parents needs a golf cart, not, not an actual car because it's hard to get into it, right? So there's just a lot of things that were just gone wrong. And what ended up happening was they basically discounted like 95% of the whole thing. I'm like, that's good on you guys. Right? Because, um, you know, one of my, my parents didn't wanna press charges or anything cuz the fall wasn't that bad at the end of the day, but they knew they could have applied pressure. Right. My point of saying all this is that, um, one, core memories are worth paying for. Second thing is, um, you know, good on the hotel. Like as, as long as you complain, like what can you do for me? Cuz they weren't gonna do anything initially, but I walked up to them. I was like, what can you do for us? And boom, 95% off.

Dude, I love that. And I'm sorry they dropped one of your parents. What did you take the vlog and start recording stuff?

I did. So I asked like a lot of core questions around like, what was the happiest moment of your life? What is, what is like the one big decision you made in your life to like just a lot of questions like, and like what's just a lot of it came from ChatGPT. Um, but I just know that I'll come back to these. Like, I, I was like 20 minutes of interviewing. It's like a podcast, right? And then like another 5 minutes interviewing again. And I know I'll come back to this in the future and bawl my eyes out when I watch those videos again. So worth it, dude.

And I, I know this is a little, uh, creepy, but I'm gonna end up doing this. You just gave me an idea. I'm gonna start recording my parents and my in-laws.

Uh-huh.

Um, and then what I'm gonna do is upload it into AI.

That's what I'm going to do too.

And then create avatars. And then when they're gone, I want to still be able to have like actual hologram voice conversations with them and interact with them.

Dude, you know what I did too? So I had both my parents, they felt— if you go to Amazon, you can buy this book where it basically has them tell their life story and everything. And they wrote it all out, right? So I have it both for my mom and my dad. And so now I have the full videos of them plus their voice, all the patterns, their mannerisms and everything. And I think 20 minutes of data is, is a lot and I'm gonna keep recording more. And I record when they're like, when we're eating and stuff too, right? Just like B-roll camera. Um, and so that is going to make exactly what we're looking for. And I'm gonna look for other data to pull too, cuz they have like a lot of like videos and stuff from the past. So.

Yeah. But th— this is cool cuz it's like, uh, my team, you know, at one point they were just like, man, this is NP Digital or Neil Patel Digital. And then it got transferred to NP Digital. Mm-hmm. They're like, what happens if something happens to you? And that's why we also transferred it to NP. I'm like, look, the team makes up the business. It's not me. Um, I'm no Ogilvy, but Ogilvy has done well without, uh, Ogilvy. Uh, again, I'm not an Ogilvy and I'm not saying I'm going to have the same success. Uh, and there's other people like Alan Rim Kaufman, right? He had a good agency. Uh, he sadly passed away years ago. He was really widely respected in the marketing realm, especially when it came to things like paid ads. Um, he got, he was sick, he passed away. Um, and the company lived on. And I'm telling my team these days, I'm like, dude, if a company is very reliant on a personal brand, with AI, technology will be good enough. Maybe not in 6 months, maybe in a year or 2 though, where you could actually record and you can interact with the AI and still make that person part of the company and seem very real without people knowing. I'm not saying you lie to people that they passed away or not, but seem very real where people can interact with their personal brands. It's like someone passes away, their Instagram page is done. Why does their Instagram page have to be done? If especially like, let's say it's Bill Gates and he, or actually he's a bad example. I would say a better example is Steve Jobs and Apple. I know timing didn't work out because of technology, But if Steve Jobs hypothetically, and I'm not trying to, you know, poke anything or say anything that can hurt anyone's feelings, but if he passed away today or 5 years from now, and technically there's enough video information of him in the past, you can in theory create a virtual Steve Jobs that can still interact and do the keynote breaking down, here's the next Apple product launch as Steve Jobs doing it with all the info there.

Yeah. On the data. By the way, when you look at, when you look at Google, when you look at Microsoft right now, when you look at Apple, Nvidia, I, I would say Nvidia's innovating. I think Google's still doing well, right? Um, Google has its new glasses coming out. I think Meta's doing a good job with their glasses as well. I think the one that's not innovating as much that will still continue to print cash for a while is probably Apple. I feel like Apple on the innovation curve is kind of going down while the other ones are, are going up, right? When it comes to this AI stuff, are you pulling up the stock?

Dude, no, check this out. I actually texted someone on this.

Okay.

Uh, here's Apple's revenue in 2022. Uh, it's $394.33 billion. So $394. What do you think their revenue is in 2024?

Higher.

$391.

Okay.

Pretty much flat for '22, '23, and '24. All 3 years have pretty much been flat years.

Now look at Nvidia.

I agree. But before I look at Nvidia, what do you think has happened to Apple stock in the last 3 years?

Grown.

By how much?

50%.

2022. I'm just picking a middle point, like around June, $140-ish. Uh-huh. Right now, $211. So call it $210.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

So, so 50%.

That's 50%.

Yeah. 50%.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like 50% with flat revenue.

Uh-huh.

And profit hasn't drastically increased or anything.

And plus they lost that lawsuit to Epic.

Yes, but they're trying to still fight them. And but going back to, you wanted me to look up Nvidia, by the way, that was the silliest thing I ever did. You know, I believed Nvidia wouldn't keep going up and I thought it was the right time.

I could have told you just leave it there for 5 more years.

I was just really dumb on that one. You don't call them all. You know, but you look at—

Well, you trade, it's a little different.

But you, you look at Nvidia, oh my God, you know, it's skyrocketed. Um, but what do you want to look at, their numbers?

No, just how much, um, the revenue growth last 3 years. Yeah, the blue revenue growth, right?

Annual 2023, $26 billion. What do you think 2025 is? Their, their years end at different cycles. Annual? Uh-huh. 26, 125. Uh, in 2020— in 2023, they had $26 billion in total.

Yeah.

2025, what did they do for the whole year?

I'm saying 5x.

Uh, yeah, $130.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's kind of crazy. Yeah, that's spot on. They do more profit right now if you just look at net income, not EBITDA, because net income is true cash flow. They do their net income of $72 billion Which is more than what they did in revenue in 2024. I'm talking about profit. Drop it to the bottom line after paying interest payments and all that kind of stuff. $72 billion.

You know what we should talk about? So, uh, uh, so Microsoft just cut 7,000 people because AI is that damn good, right? And I, I saw someone on LinkedIn post yesterday, we should unionize. I'm like, like what? Like we, so anyway, that, that, that aside, but I think what's worth bringing up is these private CEO conversations around AI and their people, right? So I, I kind of just mentioned earlier I was on a call And then everyone's like, you know, one person's building AI technology, let's just say in the fitness space, right? Um, one person took from another, another idea where it's like, oh, they have an AI enforcer team where it's like, let's find AI efficiencies, but let's also bonus people on cutting other people, right? Which is, you know, it is what it is.

Yeah.

Um, and then the other one's like, he's like, huh, you don't want to go with AI? Okay, gone. Right. So $6 million in payroll cut. That's annual payroll, right? Um, and so I think it's, it's just, that's an example. I, I think it's worth us bringing up some, some stories. Um, and we're not gonna name names or anything, but I, the, the reality is that it's either you shape up or you ship out. Yes.

But going back to the Microsoft example, when they laid people off, they typically lay off bottom performers and people from divisions that aren't making money.

Mm-hmm.

AI is definitely gonna impact roles in corporations. That's a given. Uh, but companies at the same time tend to use whatever excuse they can to cut. And a lot of the— one of the most common excuses that large corporations have used over the years is bad economy. When the economy gets bad, they're like, oh, things aren't going well. We need to cut. And if you look at a lot of the big tech companies during the last few economic downturns, whether you want to call them recessions or not, but just when people are feeling the pain. They're making more revenue and more profit and their balance sheets are massive and they're doing stock buybacks. It's what they say to be, to make, you know, to use as an excuse for it to be acceptable for them to just cut.

When we talk to people behind the scenes now, I'm, I'm kind of speaking for both of us right now. I don't even know how it is for you, but it is like, let's not necessarily add more headcount. I'm, we're not looking to decrease headcount, but let's not necessarily add headcount. That's kind of the word things are right now. Eventually, I think in the next 1 to 2 years or so, it's more so, okay, who's gonna need to go? Um, but that, that's where we sit right now. And so what, what kind of blows my mind right now when I'm, cuz I'm talking to a lot of COO candidates or GM candidates right now, when I ask them, like when, when I start the conversation, usually it's, it's how did you prepare for this conversation? I love that question. Right. Um, it just shows how much research in them. The second one is, so what are you doing with AI right now? Oh yeah. You know, not, not really much right now. I'm kind of waiting to see what happens. It's like, oh yeah, you're just done right there. Um, but one of my favorite questions, by the way, is tell me about a time when you worked your hardest. Some people have answered me in the past, 40 hours a week. And I'm not saying you need to work 80 hours a week, but like when you tell me the hardest you've ever worked is 40 hours a week, done.

Yeah.

So, so, and, and then it's like, so how many hours was it? Like some people are like 100, 120 hours. I'm like, oh, please don't, don't, don't do that here. Like, I love that. But, um, these questions tell so much. Anyway, I digress a little bit. Let's, let's bring it back to the, the conversations, the AI piece.

Yeah. Um, but before we go to the, there's one interview, uh, that I ended up doing, like call it a few months ago.

Uh-huh.

Where I was interviewing a product marketer. So someone whose job is to market a product, market new features. Um, you know, in marketing people only think about driving traffic, but when you have more features, how can you market them to existing customers to generate more revenue and adoption? And they were telling me how they're using AI to come up with sketches and ideas and campaigns. And I was like, oh cool, for what? They're like, oh, for a friend's project and some side projects. And they're telling me all these examples they're doing. This is over Zoom. And I was like, oh cool, do you mind showing me some of the stuff? And I'm like, here, you can screen share. And they paused for a little bit. They couldn't end up sharing anything. They had, they couldn't come up with an excuse. So I came up with an excuse from them. I'm like, oh, is it sensitive data and stuff that you can't share? They're like, yeah, yeah, it's sensitive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, Yeah, that, that doesn't work for the stuff that you were trying and testing on your own that had nothing to do with other companies. Um, and definitely didn't hire them. But I love actually having, having people show me examples when they're talking about AI and marketing. And if they can't show me examples, I don't want to hear 'em. I want to see 'em.

Yeah.

Because then I can judge how good your prompts really are and how good you are using these tools.

What Neil's actually talking about is once you start to peel the onion, 1, 2, by the 3rd time they usually, they usually broken. Right.

Yes.

So you're, you're basically, you're, uh, dressing them down, right? And just slowly. And you can tell when someone talks in very long-winded stories and whatever, I'm just like, can you show me an example? And then it quickly falls apart. And that's when I end the interview. So now I have no qualms ending the interview very early. It's like, hey man, I just wanna be very honest. Like, I think you're a great person, but this is just not the right fit here. And that's it. And I'm sure you do the same thing too.

Yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm. Actually, I usually don't cut it short.

You don't?

Usually when I do interviews, other people are on there with me. And I know this is going to sound bad and I probably shouldn't say this, but I'll just, I'll try to find a reason to turn off video.

Yeah.

And then I'll work in the background and I let someone else take over the interview.

Why don't you just say you got to go?

I could, but I don't want to hurt their feeling and I feel really bad.

Wow. At that moment, you feel like hurting someone's feelings?

Yes.

What the hell? Of all places, that's the easiest place to leave.

I know, but sometimes I don't want to say it. Like sometimes I'm con— in some instances I'm very confrontational. In other instances I'm not. Um, it's just like, dude, when we talk to other entrepreneurs, going back to your question on what are we hearing behind the scenes, most of the people that I'm talking to, we all believe in a similar concept that you said. It's like, we're not just hiring as much. We're hiring still really good, amazing A-players when we can find them. But in general, we're not hiring as much and we're just focusing on how not only can we use technology, but how can we do more with what we have? And that has nothing to do with AI just because things are bad right now. And then the second thing that we all know is when you have a decent amount of headcount, you naturally get attrition. So when people talk about how AI is going to change marketing and it can change, you know, headcount and all this kind of stuff, you don't necessarily need to fire. People naturally leave a company no matter how good you are.

You just don't replace them.

You don't replace them. And that's the example with Amazon. You look at Amazon and their fulfillment centers during COVID they boomed and then things started slowing down because the COVID rush was over.

Yeah.

So like, oh, is Amazon going to lay off a lot of people? Well, in their service centers, they look at how long someone lasted in general for a job. They're like, oh, we don't really need to do anything by this time. All these people are gonna leave. We're good. And then they look at how much they would've had to pay in severance, and then they do a math, uh, calculation of what one's cheaper.

Dude, speaking of AI, okay, you're gonna like this. Do you have a, do you have a robotic cleaner at your home?

Like a Roomba? No, I haven't found any that are good yet.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. See, see, I, I bought this when I was on a plane. Um, so, so some, some guy tweeted this, right? And then Wired reviewed it and it's like the best robotic cleaner cuz it maps out your entire home. And so I, I went to the website, Apple Pay was there. I instantly just clicked Apple Pay. $1,200 robot over here.

Is it really good?

It's arriving in like a week or two, but like it'll tackle crumbs. It'll know not to like suck away like a, like a dog or something. It knows to avoid like maybe poop, for example. Um, but you can see it knows exactly what to do and it maps everything out. It's called Matic. Yeah.

It knows to not get the toys?

Yeah. It knows not to get the toys. It struggles with Legos though.

It can do spills too?

Yeah.

Same thing or you have to switch up the—

Dude, I don't even have it yet. It's coming.

Like, like just—

Dude, you gotta let me know if it's legit. I'll let you know. This is the first time I've ever gotten something because I've never trusted like a Roomba or anything else. Like my friends love their Roombas and all that, but this is the first time in my life I'm like, saw the Wired interview, someone tweeted it, saw the Wired interview, instantly bought. And that's— this is why you never know how attribution works, because I saw a tweet and I went to Wired. How do you know where I bought from?

If you told me it was amazing right now, I would have just bought it. If you said it doesn't—

Exactly. So attribution, it's so hard to get down.

It's so hard.

Yeah.

So because I'm OCD, I have a cleaner 7 days a week.

That's why I'm saying this would be perfect. Like, you would buy like 3 of these.

My house isn't that big, but my new one—

Your new one, you're gonna buy 3 of them. Yeah. Anyway, it's called the Matic, guys. I, I'm not affiliated at all. Um, but this is interesting because Wade Foster of Zapier, he said that the real use case for AI is not replacing jobs. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about new work. Um, so he said this, he said, a common refrain is that AI will replace human jobs. I think this is a misnomer based on what we've seen at Zapier. While some AI use cases replace human tasks, Far more AI use cases are doing things humans couldn't or wouldn't do because of cost, tediousness, or time constraints. So he's like, I'm bullish on innovation in a whole host of areas that would have been considered niche in the past. I'll give you one example here. So I think a week ago I told you we have this thing where like Noah might say, okay, here are the top 3 things I got done yesterday. Here's the number one thing I got done. So we have a coach in there that's actively checking like how you're doing, right? And the thing is this, after a week of having this in there where it's like, oh, Neil, um, your number one task isn't that high leverage. Like, here's what you should do instead. And it actually looks at the last 30 days and it keeps coaching you. If you keep making the same mistake, it'll call you out in public. And then it'll do like a leaderboard at the end, like who's been consistent with it, who's scoring the highest, and who needs like the most help. And so that becomes a performance question, uh, conversation, by the way, if you're not performing that well. A week later, everyone's stuff has gotten so much better. It's like all high leverage stuff because you want your people working on high leverage stuff. And I'm like, I couldn't have done that before cuz you would've had someone like you or me needing to enforce and check. Like nobody has time for that, but now the AI does. And then I used the, the prompt I gave you earlier. I just kept refining the prompt. It's getting better and better.

It's kind of similar to something that I do manually in marketing. So what I like doing is you take our marketing team, I ask them, what do you work on just in general? What do you work on that helps us improve our goals of more leads, more revenue, more upsells, lower retention?

Mm-hmm.

And they create a list and they send it to me. Separately, I ask the manager to create a list and I say, you have all these people that work for you. What are they doing to help really improve our business? And then you can see where there's a disconnect.

Yep.

And then you start digging in where there is a disconnect. Because that usually tells you there's something wrong with either your manager or the people in those, in that role. If you trust the manager, there's usually something wrong within those roles.

Yeah.

Then you dig in with their, with the people that there's a disconnect. The manager stuff should align with the people. When it doesn't, there's something wrong and you need to dig in because there's either, either need to fix what they're doing.

Yeah.

Or train them better.

Yeah.

Um, which I would put those at the same thing, or if you can't, just replace. Um, or eliminate. It's usually one of those 3 things.

Dude, this is awesome. Okay, get this. So you take your voice in ElevenLabs, you use something like Lindy or N8N, and then what it'll do at the end of every week, let's say it calls me, hey Eric, what are the things that you're doing that are leading to help with marketing? It calls both the manager and that person and it fills it out in a spreadsheet. And then you use whatever model to just detect if it's actually high leverage and if they're aligned or not. And then you get a report on Sunday or something like that. Yeah. And then it becomes much more automated. Right.

That's true.

Yeah.

So I like it.

This is a form of new work.

Yeah.

That you like, you, you, you're probably doing this sporadically, but imagine now it's, it's on every single time. And I'm not saying you and I should be taskmasters or whatever. No. But at the end of the day, we care the most.

Yes. And I'm not trying to do this cuz I wanna fire people. I'm trying to do this to figure out if they're making—

Or micromanage or control them. Yeah. Like nobody wants to do that.

No. And I just wanna make sure people are working on stuff that helps the business grow. If not, cool. I'll help you. You were hired for a reason. I'll help you shift your priorities so then that way you're more beneficial to the company. And if you're more beneficial to the company, you're likely to do better. You're likely to get more raises and promotions. It creates a win-win.

Yeah.

And people want to be valuable.

That's a great idea. I'm, I'm actually gonna try that cuz Lindy has a phone call thing and you can use your voice. Like, so it, it stole Elon's voice and it was like that one of the, the, the things is like, what are the, the, the 5 things you accomplished this week? So it just calls everyone. You can call the entire company doing that.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, that's pretty cool. I don't know what kind of issues I'm gonna have legally from that.

But you try it on your exec team first.

My exec team, I don't even have—

No, your exec team's too good. Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't want to do it on them. By the way, speaking of exec team, I, I just want to call out, I listened to this Mark Zuckerberg interview that he did with the Stripe co-founder. The Jony Ive one was pretty good too on design, but just the management styles of Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang. So Jensen Huang's like He doesn't believe in one-on-ones. He doesn't need to do one-on-ones. He thinks best practices are a way to mediocrity. And then for Mark Zuckerberg, he doesn't believe in delegation, right? Um, and he also doesn't really believe in one-on-ones cuz he's, both these guys' executive teams are really good. But my point of saying this is that there's no right management style. But I remember I interviewed like a CEO candidate yesterday and then we had read a lot of the same management books and he was spewing a lot of this stuff to me. I'm like, bro, like I've read every, the problem with, with me is I've read everything that you've read, right? And what I've learned being a little older now at 38 is like, there's no right or wrong. Like best practices are usually a way to not, like you, you end up being like everyone else. I'm like, yeah, you gotta learn what works for you. And what I've learned is these are the things that work for me. And so Jensen might criticize publicly, right? It's just, but that's what works for him. And Neil is actually ahead of the game cuz I would always tell him about these new books I was reading and he's like, yeah, don't care. I'm just gonna do it my way. Right? And so he's, to, to Neil's credit, he's always done it his way. I've just learned a little later that I gotta do what works for me.

But go, you mentioned the Stripe founder. What does the Stripe founder do?

So the Stripe founder was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg at their user conference.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And so Zuck's like, dude, I, like, I'm gonna drop into whatever I want to drop into. And if I delegate it, that means someone else is like, no, like if everything rolls up to me as a founder, I'm gonna drop into whatever I want to drop into. And that's kind of how we are now.

Yeah.

Yeah. You've always been like that, but I'm, that's, this is how I am now.

So my favorite call with some of my executives, and we have a great relationship, so they're transparent. I'm like, oh, how's your day? How's, how's everything? And they're honest. Like, I'll tell them like, oh, it's a shit day. You know, I'm dealing with this and dealing with that. A lot of putting fires and fixing this. And, uh, some of my executive teams, I was talking to someone, they're like, oh, how's your day? They're like, dude, just sorry for getting back to you late. It's just been a shit day. A lot of problems to deal with. Excuse my language for anyone listening.

Yeah.

And I was like, do we lose any revenue? No, no, it's not that. It's just people not doing exactly what we want. The client wanted this, they did that, but they could have done A, B, or B, C, and D that would have produced even better results. And it doesn't matter that the client didn't know and didn't request it. We should be going above and beyond for our customers to get a better experience. That is how you grow agency. Because he's like, you do better than what they expect. You will then get more referrals. And he's like, I'm going to fix this if I have to, I have to fly. And I'm like, dude, you're having a baby soon. You know, I'm like, you don't need to fly. And I'm like, anything you need me to worry about? He's like, nope. He's like, move on. I was like, cool. Don't need to hear the rest. I know you'll take care of it. And typically if they weren't having a baby, I wouldn't ask the details. I would've been like, loss of any revenue? And they would've said yes or no. And if they said yes, I would've dug in. If they said If they said yes, I would have said, what can we learn from it? And how do we repeat the— avoid making this mistake again and better satisfy our customers? If they said no, I would have just been like, cool, you'll deal with it. I'm on to the next thing.

Yeah.

But the only reason I do that is I know they care about the company like me, and they'll fix things.

These are your executives.

These are my executives. And even a lot of the people on our team, they really do genuinely care about the customers.

Yeah.

Because it's not about what are you getting paid for? It's more about what is a client expecting? How can you give them everything they're expecting and more? If you just give them what they're expecting, in my opinion, some people look at that as like, we hit the KPIs, we did amazing work.

That's base level.

Exactly. I look at that as average. I'm like, the client signed up for us to accomplish X. If you accomplish X, to me, that is not you did an amazing job. That means you did an average job.

Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing, And at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.

If you do also Y and Z, that's when you did an excellent job. We should strive for achieving X as a default, but also achieving Y at least, and maybe Z if we can pull it off.

Yeah. Because that's what makes us remarkable.

Yes.

It's not remarkable to be average. And so you want to do remarkable work, right? And then by the way, today's remarkable is tomorrow's average. So you have to keep pushing the pace.

Yes.

And again, this goes back to, this is why your executive team, needs to be strong, or your founder has to keep pushing. That's how you keep things remarkable.

Yes.

Because once you disappear, I've seen this 1,000 times. The moment I try to disappear, oh my God, everything crumbles.

No, it doesn't work out.

Yeah. Yeah. You, you, I don't think you've ever tried to disappear. Like, I don't, just knowing you for 14, 15 years, you've always been involved. I don't think you've really disappeared. You know, the moments where, the moments where it hasn't worked out is like when you try to launch courses and things like that, when you had somebody else doing it and you kind of expected it to just grow. Yeah.

I, I also disappear in my own company, NP Digital. And, uh, to be very specific, we have so many different divisions and regions. I disappear on certain regions and divisions because when some of them are just doing really well and growing super fast, even in bad times, and we have regions like that right now, I tend to just not meddle. And I tend to be like, look, you may be doing things differently than I would, But if you're growing 50+% year over year on a decent baseline of numbers and your churn for your division is like 5% or something extremely low, I'm like, eh, I don't want to meddle. You have leaders who are doing really well. And then I go and just go focus on something else that needs help. But then sometimes I had to go back to the ones that were doing really well cuz maybe something changed in their government or their economy or in that division. where I had to go in and work on improving or fixing something.

I just look at this all as spinning plates, right? So you might have a lot of spinning plates and they start to become wobbly. So the moment they start to become wobbly, that's when you get involved. Yes, that's all it is. Um, here, before we move on, I got 2 more in mind here. So, um, do you do any standing one-on-ones with your exec team or whoever right now?

What do you consider standing one-on-one?

So every Monday at 8 AM, you're going to meet with me for 30 minutes, and then right after that, you're gonna meet with Noah. For 30 minutes?

Like in a group setting or individual?

Individual setting?

No, I, I haven't. Okay.

And how many standing meetings are you in overall per week? Like a group meeting, executive meeting, anything like that?

I just got added to my second one now, so it's—

So you have 2 per week? Yeah. Each one's an hour?

Uh, no, one, one is every other week, one is every week, and the one that's every week, I don't even know if I go to every week.

Okay. So the one that, the new one, I mean, how are, how long are these meetings, these 2?

10, 15 minutes.

Okay. So, and then what happens in these meetings? A quick overview of the numbers. Are we good, bad? Does that warrant another conversation? Right?

No, no overviews on any of that. I expect people to send me the decks and the information they want to talk about beforehand. Uh-huh. And I read it beforehand. It may take me 10, 15, 20 minutes. Um, and then on those meetings, I expect to discuss solutions to make the numbers go the way we want.

So quick discussion and actions.

Uh, I just discuss actions. I don't really discuss, hey, why is it down or why is it up? I said reviewed.

Yep.

This is what I think we should fix.

Yep.

And then other people throw out their ideas. Some may disagree with me and we discuss the disagreements, or if there are agreements, then a decision is made.

Yeah.

Then decision's made and then, yeah, we expect execution.

And they're not assigning any Asana task to you, right? There's no project management task. My point of saying all this is the real question is, are standing one-on-ones stupid? Now, okay, Jensen doesn't do standing one-on-ones. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do standing one-on-ones. You don't do standing one-on-ones.

But I'm not as successful as them.

Whatever. But my point is, are standing one-on-ones stupid? That's the question.

I don't know. I've never really done standing one-on-ones.

I didn't—

I never understood the purpose of them.

I'll give you my thoughts.

Do you do them?

Yeah, I do. It just, it depends on who. Like, if I'm— if there's someone that's very up-and-coming and talented, and if they're younger in their career, a standing one-on-one is helpful because it it grows them a lot and it builds them up. Right. But if someone's like an executive, not, not really. 'Cause we talk all the time anyway. I don't really need to do that. Right.

Yeah.

Um, but if I, if I, 'cause a one-on-one to me is, is coaching. It is almost like you're, you're a therapist as well. So, and I think people that are more junior, they need that. And I'm willing to bet a lot of money that your organization does do standing one-on-ones for kind of probably more mid-level to junior level. Um, right.

Uh, standing one-on-ones for more mid to junior. I honestly don't know.

Even if it's like 2 weeks or every 4 weeks or something like that, they must. Even when I worked for Wpromote, like my manager would meet with me like every, every month at least.

Yes, they do. I know our CEO meets with each the country leaders that are under him.

Yeah.

And then he meets up with the regional leaders that are under him. Yeah. And he does one-on-ones with them.

Yeah. So I, my point of saying this is that case-by-case basis, we can't say we're Jensen Huang or Mark Zuckerberg. 'Cause their teams are really, really, really elite. But even when you look at Neil's team, the exec team, like that's an elite team, right? So you want your, your elite team to just be, you wanna be talking to 'em all the time. If you're just doing one-on-ones, I don't think it's enough. Yeah. Um, now the other thing, then, then maybe we, we get some more out of this. Um, this one's funny. So I've been buying a lot of Erewhon, um, candied walnuts and I buy turkey chili as well. Um, and they give you these nice jars, right? These nice Erewhon jars. Now they charge you for these jars.

Yeah.

They charge you, it's like, uh, an escrow, like $3, right? So you have to return the jars to get money back. Now, I think California requires this or something like that, but I think this is Erewhon's sneaky way to bring customers back by having those jars and getting people— when you're gonna come back to the store, you're gonna buy something, right? Yeah. Um, so you're gonna get the money back, but you're gonna buy. And then the, the average order value at Erewhon is super high. Like, I just ordered breakfast today, but like $55, right?

So— Jeni's Ice Cream does the same thing. If you order a lot of ice cream, they give you a bag, and then if you bring it back, You can get some rebate. But speaking of clever marketing, I was talking to one of the head of marketing at Marsec. I'm probably pronouncing it right, but the shipping container company where the family's on the Forbes list. But it's you. Everyone has seen the company logo. People just don't know.

It's like a star. It's like whatever M A E R S K or something like that.

M A E R S X, I think. Yeah, yeah. M A E R S K. Sorry, K. Yeah. And it's a Danish shipping company. They're massive. You know, they do billions and billions and billions a week in revenue, or at least a billion a week in revenue, worst case. But we were talking about B to B marketing, dude. One of the most clever marketing campaigns that you know that's been around in B to B that no one talks about, even though the company is struggling now, is Intel.

Hmm.

A lot of products in B2B world, um, or in products that we all use from phones to computers and laptops, they, they had Intel chips, but no one knew it. And the sticker where it said Intel Inside, I thought was a genius marketing, uh, concept.

Yeah. 'Cause you remember that like everything was Intel Inside and that made me want it more.

Yes.

Like Nvidia in the back of the day, it was only marketed very well to gamers like myself and The GeForce, like the, the, you know what, what, what, what made it stand out? It wasn't its features. It was more so the, the design of the, um, the packaging that made me want it more, right? And then everyone started talking about it more. And what actually helped Nvidia win, by the way, was they came out with this OpenGL thing. So I used to play Quake back in the day, and Quake is a first-person shooter, right? It just made the graphics look so much better. And then it, that marketed everything. And then that's how they really started to take off. Like without that technology, um, I think they would've gone bankrupt.

So it was their launching pad was like Quake and games like that.

Yeah. Games. Um, and then that technology OpenGL, cuz that, that was just the best looking games cuz all the other games looked very pixelated, like when you're playing, but then it smoothed out like your face and everything. And then that became its marketing. Like the product actually became the marketing cuz it, it was like a ton of word of mouth cuz you can, you can start chatting in these games.

Yeah.

So, um, by the way, I mean, we kind of talk about this bad economy right now, but I will say that leads are picking up for us.

Same.

What would you be saying? Like, how much better are leads now after this China deal got done? China-US deal?

We'll be up, I think it was 6% over last month.

6%, okay.

That's not a lot for us, but 6%.

I would say for us it's a little different. I mean, because you guys have a lot of RFPs and things like that. I think for us now, so before, maybe a month or two ago, actually no, I have the Google Analytics data for this. So this is We were getting previously, let's call it, um, from Google Analytics, 800 leads a month or something like that. Then when April hit, when I looked at our GA, it dropped down to like 230 or something like that. And then it's been going down, right? I will say though, previously almost every day we would get like one really good lead and that stopped completely for, for quite a while, like maybe one per week or something like that. Um, 1 or 2 per week. Now it's back. It's like, you know, 1 or 2 per day. And I'm like, okay, it's coming back. Um, so I think the economy right now, to, to my opinion, is people are cautiously optimistic because we still need to finish off this. Hopefully we can get this, this Russia-Ukraine war done with. Hopefully we can, you know, end these wars and then inflation's coming down too. But who knows how long that's going to happen because you still have tariffs.

Yeah.

But I think the tariffs will be done with and everyone's going to be at like 10% base level. Most people will be. So I'm cautiously optimistic right now.

So I judge a lot if marketing is going to come back from local businesses. So for example, I go to a chiropractor here in Beverly Hills. The guy's name is Dr. Ash. He goes by the Chiro Guy. Okay. So let's just take his Beverly Hills office.

That's a rich office though.

Yes, exactly. But just check out this data.

Okay.

Because his people, are either local residents, or they're people who work in the area and are coming here for work. Now, 40% of his revenue is from insurance. You get in a car accident, you get hurt, a lawyer sends you to a chiropractor, he'll adjust you, he doesn't get paid. Once a case is done, he then gets paid. So this chiropractic, I think it's called lien or chiropractic on loan or whatever it is. I don't know the exact term for the industry. That part of his business hasn't been hit. 60% of his revenue comes from local people, right? And the— and going back, the reason the first part, the insurance people, like who got in car accidents, don't get— that part of his business didn't get hit, those people don't pay to actually see him. It gets paid from part of the settlement. 60% of businesses, people who work in the area or live in the area, you would agree in Beverly Hills, homes cost millions of dollars. They're not all like the TV. But there's homes that are $100+ million. There's also homes for $2-3 million. People have money in general. You agree with that statement here, right? His business is down 15%.

Over what period of time?

Just recently, like when he looks at all this economy stuff.

Before and after.

Yeah. So 15%, but you can't look at 15% on $100 million. 40% of his business is insulated from any economic activity, it's not really a good judge for the economy, but the 60% is. If he's down 15% on that 60%, it's more realistic he's down 25%. So businesses are down like his 25%. I know that's only one data point because of things like the economy, money. And I asked him, did you increase rates? Nope, haven't increased rates. He's like, it's just— he's like, I'm starting to see things pick up. But it was definitely bad when tariffs started coming out. Like, he noticed it right away of people canceling appointments and not coming the moment they introduced tariffs and stuff like that starting in April.

Yeah. So I think we need to look at the next 2, 3 months or so to see how things pan out. But the University of Michigan consumer sentiment thing, so that index was 73 in November 2024, probably because, you know, yeah, election, new election, right? New, new president. And so that was the highest sentiment for a while, right? And then April 2025 at the end was significantly lower at 52.2%. Um, 52.2, not percent, but, um, and then the final thing I'll give you here is in April 2025, the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index fell to 86, down 7.9 from March, reflecting a sharp decline in expectations for future economic conditions. But, but this is all like all these predictions, like all these people like Bloomberg, or I think JP Morgan retracted the recession statement, right? So like these things change very quickly.

I thought Jamie Dimon was talking about a recession today, or what did he say?

Um, on Bloomberg I saw that JP Morgan retracted the recession statement, not Jamie Dimon.

Uh, and it— I, I could be wrong, but either way, I don't think these big corporations want to pick political enemies because it can hurt their businesses. It's just like Trump talking about Tim Cook. Yeah, he, he said it was something online like— and I'm paraphrasing here— he had a little problem with Tim Cook.

That was today.

That was today, yeah. And it was about him creating iPhones in India. And I'm not here to tell people where to— what to do with their company or what country. That's for people who have a ton of money and are publicly traded to figure out, and politicians. But, um, I don't think people want to create enemies. Like, remember the Amazon thing? Amazon, uh—

The tariff pricing?

Yeah, the tariff pricing. Uh, what was it saying? Like, that, that lady Caroline whatever, I don't know her name. Uh, the press girl. Yeah, press girl, Caroline something.

Yeah, Levitt. I don't know, something like that.

Something like that. She was— Scott Bessen was talking about it and someone asked a question about Amazon and he just moved to the side. He's like, uh, I'll let Caroline answer that. And she's like, that's a direct like attack on the US.

And they backed out.

Right away. They're like, oh, this was never confirmed that we actually are doing this. Yeah. I'm like, no one wants to pick a fight with the government.

You know what I will say though? Like, um, So this is the, the, the only politics we'll talk about today. But I do like the, the MAGA health or the MAGA investment thing for the kids where the $1,000, because that can compound to— I think they said $300 grand or something like that if you just follow the S&P like returns. But I think that's smart because you should teach kids at a younger age how to invest. And I do like how he's bringing drug prices down 50 to 90%.

Yeah.

Right. And I do think the speech he gave, like if you put Obama's voice over it, that would have been a pretty damn good speech.

Yes.

Right. And so, like, they're like, again, it's— I think if people are doing something that's good for the people, like, credit should be due. I want to call this out, though, real quick. So again, we're not saying we support or don't support Trump, but check this out. This guy has a 100% response rate from sending $1,000 custom swords to the owners of failing companies. So check this out. It sends you— he sends you these custom swords over here with your name on it, I think. Remember I sent you a knife with your name on it? And then you remember how to give you money? Give it back to me. Yeah. You give me a dollar. You send me a dollar on PayPal. Yeah. Yeah.

Because my wife said it cuts friendships. Yeah.

So, okay. But going back to this, 100% response rate, sends $1,000 custom swords to owners of failing companies. Why does he do this? Because he's trying to buy their business. So each closed deal represents 7 figures in net profit. So he just says this note says, business is war. And I noticed you lost a battle recently. I just wanted to let you know, if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, We've got your back. 100% response rate. Go do that to the people you're about to buy. Buy them some custom swords.

That's cool.

That's 100% response rate. I just made you a lot of money.

I like it.

You're gonna do it. You're gonna do it.

Uh, no.

Come on, these are so nice. Can you buy me one?

We, we've, we've slowed down on how many companies we're buying. I think we're at this point doing 2 to 3 a year instead of trying to do one a—

Yeah, you're okay. But, and then how many do you need to look at before you make an offer?

Like Like we have a pipe, I can do 10 deals tomorrow.

Okay. Yeah. But how many do you need to look at before you make an offer?

No, no, I already have 10 deals I can close on that are good. Okay. Okay. Okay.

So you're probably gonna slow down. But just—

You can't integrate them all. Even if I had all the money in the world, my problem is, is my team can only integrate so many. And if I give them too many, there's just gonna be problems.

And you also dilute your team quite a bit too.

Yeah.

Yeah. You don't want to dilute the people. Okay, we got one more here because we started a little late. Um, I want, the last thing I wanna talk about here is how we're planning to ramp the F out of YouTube. So here's a, here's one thing I noticed. Um, you and I, we've, we've kind of changed it up and I'll let you speak to it in a moment, but I actually watched our Miami interview, or not interview, but we did an episode in Miami in my hotel room, right? And I actually watched the whole thing. I didn't mean to watch the whole thing. I just wanted to see a piece of it. I ended up watching the whole thing like it was on 1.5x. I noticed on our Marketing School podcast YouTube channel, The latest one that we just posted, the long form where we just— you and me talking— that usually our long-form videos might get like 100 to 200 views. This one got 1,000.

I was like, whoa.

And the average view duration, 10 minutes or so. I was like, well, this is really good. And what is it that we changed?

We just talked about our lives and what's happening in marketing and business and how to grow from there.

Yeah. And so I think we're just going to do more and we're just going to post the whole thing to YouTube. Even on our own personal YouTube channels, like we're both recording at Visible Audio Studios in Century City. And you're recording, when I met with them earlier this week, it was like, oh yeah, Neil records for like 4 hours at a time. Um, 6 hours at a time or whatever. 2, 2, 2, 2 to 4 hours.

Um, no, no, I pay for 4 hours. We recorded in 2.

Got it. So like same thing for me. It's like I'm probably, I was doing like 1 a week. I'm probably just gonna jack it up to like 2 hours or something like that. But, um, we're, I, I think the thing about our YouTube is that We know that the more time we put into it, the better results we get. Um, and now that we've gotten so many comments about people just letting us talk and like not wanting us to talk about politics, they said that you, you said someone wants to, if they want to listen to politics, they listen to All In. We're offended by that, guys. Okay.

I'm not offended.

I'm just kidding. I'm not really offended. Um, but anyway, anything else you want to add to that?

Uh, I'm with you. I think we're taking over a lot. Um, I use a contracting company to help out with YouTube and then we mix that with our internal. And one of the guys who runs this contracting company, which Eric knows who it is, they say, hey, long time no talk. Because I'm working with someone on his team, but this is the owner. Just want to let you know, we got your feedback on slightly heavy-handed clickbait-style hooks and confirming we're happy to tone those down on outlines moving forward. Also, please keep giving feedback and sharing experience on your— on how your experience is going. Love to continue to make sure that we're providing the best possible experience for y'all. And I responded with, I changed 2 of the videos from the last outline. So they try to gimme outlines and then, uh, like, or outlines are probably the wrong word. They'd gimme ideas and I create the outline, but they'll try to give me like, uh, bullets. And I don't really even look at the bullets. I just look at the title and then I just riff on whatever I want to riff. And I said, I changed 2 of the videos and I just literally changed the topics, made my own outlines.

Mm-hmm.

I'm like, to be more on topics I want to cover, but it's getting better. What I learned from this batch is use the topics you give and make up my own ideas for the ones I don't like and have your team just work on them. Right. Because I'll give them a script, but then they got to put the script in order and make it nice and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, and then I'm like, by the way, uh, then I actually mentioned, this was random. I was like, by the way, I keep getting an email on invoices not paid. If that's the case, let me know. I'll ping accounting, but we typically pay once every 2 weeks. Um, and then he said, this was interesting. This is a smart move to use in this economy. Yes, we usually send out invoices minimum of 7 days before they're due.

Yeah, to get paid faster.

Yeah, before their due date. And they're always due at the beginning of the month. So they start work at the beginning, he's sending them before to get paid before work even starts on their end. We typically pay after the work is done. And then we send an invoice and you get paid within 30 days. Yeah, but he wants to collect money Before he even starts doing any work.

Dude, we used to do that with Amazon back in the day when we worked with them, and they're like, okay, we're net 60, but just send us the invoices like 60 days ahead or something like that. We're like, okay, sounds good. But anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.