AI, LLMs, and the Skill Gap No One Talks About

My thoughts here, Neil. Everyone wants to get rich. We agree on that, right?

Yeah.

But you can't get rich without volatility. So recently this happened. We were— I was negotiating a deal with an executive to join the team, right? And it was like, you know, this person wanted equity. This person was complaining about having to make the trip up to drive to meet in person, right? Was doing the math on that and was basically Basically starting to nickel and dime a lot of things. And you should ask for what you think you deserve, right? And so what had happened was we spent weeks and I had spent thousands on legal fees, right, to get this deal done. And come, you know, let's say recently, last minute—

This is an individual.

This is an individual. And then basically what happened was this person was still wavering at the end, right? It's like, well, I feel like the job's not done here. I went to put in my notice today, blah, blah, blah. I was like, you know what? First I was like trying to convince this person to stay and then I slept on it. The next day I texted this person. And I was like, you know what, we're going to go in a different direction. I think you should stay there. And the whole thing here is like, you know, people, it's like, yes, I get that you want to be rich, but you can't get rich without volatility, right? This person was talking about stability, safety, and all that. It's like, okay, well, you know, if you want stability and safety when you invest in the S&P 500, like the reason it grows consistently like that is you're not taking a lot of risk, right? And they're right. And same thing with bonds, right? But if you want to take a lot, like a lot of risk would be like betting on altcoins, right? Which is insane risk.

Yeah.

But you get insane returns at the end of the day. And so I think, In a lot of situations, people want to be rich, but it's like everyone wants to win, but nobody wants to put in the work. They don't want to put in the effort.

And they don't want downside. Yeah. They want downside protection in which there are no losses. And I was talking to an entrepreneur who took crazy risks and put all his money. He was at JP Morgan, I believe, and he now has an AI startup that's backed by Sequoia, if I'm not mistaken. He ended up putting all his money into Nvidia and Tesla before both of them boomed.

Yep.

And a lot of people are like, oh yeah, that's great. He made a ton of money. You know, those are obvious choices. Of course Nvidia's going to keep going up. I'm like, no, he made the Nvidia bet before the AI boom and the Tesla bet before it was booming. And at that point people were saying that he was crazy for putting all his money into 2 stocks. And they're like, you should put it in the S&P. You can get great returns. Look at Nvidia over the years and Tesla. It's electric car manufacturer. Other players are going to enter. He took the risk and now he has a startup. He doesn't need a salary. He doesn't care for one. But when I meet a lot of potential employees and entrepreneurs, a lot of them want the gains, but they want to mitigate the downside. And in essence, they understand that there's downside, but they all say like, oh yeah, They're just trying to protect themselves and structure a deal where there's no downside for them. And it's just like, cool, so I take all the risks, you make all the money, whether I do bad or good. And if I do really good, you want even more money. But when I'm doing really bad, you still want to get paid market rate or above market rate.

Yeah.

What's in it for me?

Exactly. And think about it this way, the time, the years, the decades we put into business, the millions of dollars when times don't go well in the business that we have to put back into the business, when it's time, when you might even have to bankrupt the business or whatever, right? When like people don't see that type of stuff.

No.

And they— and I just, I don't understand. And this is why most people, they want to be rich, but they will never get rich because you can't handle volatility. I'm just telling you, we talked about this a couple weeks ago. We just talked about in business, you're getting used to getting kicked in the nuts or punched in the face all the time, right? That is the volatility. And if you can handle that, if you can be resilient, for sure you will become rich.

Yes, I agree. You'll become really rich. And this is just one of those things where it's just like, If you're interviewing someone and they're complaining about downside and they want tons of upside and they're not sure, I'm with you. Why hire those people? Move on.

By the way, the team saw this earlier too. It's like the team's like, dude, this person's great, right? Very AI-forward and all that. But it's like one of my people on the team said like, but is this person willing to put in the work? And the moment that per— that if someone else is asking that question, other people are asking that question, that person, like one of our core values is to be unreasonably resilient, meaning that you don't just get punched in the face. I mean, you get punched in the face, knocked out, And then you get back up, right? Yes. Over and over.

And you're willing to get punched in the face again and again and you're okay with it.

Yep. Anyway, that was, that was top of mind for me. I know we just had a pre-conversation that kind of triggered the thought around volatility.

So. Yeah, dude. And the earlier conversation Eric and I were having is one great— one way to grow your business or even your marketing is debt. So there's a lot of— I don't know, is it ClearBank is one of the lenders for advertising? Is it ClearBank?

Yeah. With a, with a C at the end. Banc with a C, right? B-A-N-C.

It's something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It was like a husband and wife couple where they'll float your advertising.

Yeah.

There's revenue-based financing companies too that look at your just overall accounts receivable.

Nathan Latka's company.

Yeah. Yeah. And in marketing, a lot of companies go that route. And Eric and I were talking before this call, I've talked to a lot of banks over the years and some of the banks that we've talked to that can help float us and and let us grow faster. Because in the marketing world that people don't realize with ad agencies, rarely, but when this happens, it costs a lot of money. Some accounts you won't win unless you're floating their media.

Mm-hmm.

Media is very expensive to float. And sometimes you get paid interest on it, sometimes you don't. And it's just funny on some banks will be like, We'll make you a personal guarantor. You guys can float the media, we'll float a little bit of it, and we'll cut off all your distributions and you can't take any of the profits. And I'm like, so what's the downside for the bank? The downside for the bank is nothing because based off of our cash flow and everything, they get their money back no matter what. What's the downside for us?

Yeah.

Oh, they just restricted the business even more and we can't grow anymore. And it's just a business now run by a bank.

You know what's crazy too? But in this situation, I bet you they can get this deal done sometimes because they, the bank has leverage, right? Meaning that in the negotiating situation, if someone desperately needs the cash, they might be able to get it through. But you don't desperately need the cash, right?

No. And I don't need it. And our cash flows are fine. And I was talking to Eric right before this and I told him, I'm like, dude, if I ever wanted cheap money, I would just take a mortgage out on my house. I have a small mortgage, but for the value of my house, you know, for what my mortgage is, You know, I think I'm 7 on— I don't know what the value that appraisal will come in, but let's call it 30. Maybe appraisal comes in lower, but I think the market rate is at least 30. You know, I can probably go up to 50% leverage and amortize over 30 years way cheaper.

But guys, again, this is volatility. You got to be able to stomach volatility. And that's what the game of business is.

Yes. And you had to be willing to do stuff that others aren't. And I look at this in marketing too. If you look at a reason why a lot of startups are so successful with their marketing is because they're doing stuff that large corporations won't do, or they're just playing the risk game where they don't want to take on any risk and the legal stopping them. And a great example of this is when you look at a lot of the AI tools for marketing, a lot of the workflow tools, not just creating creatives and running ads, but also leveraging AI to do some of the work. So you're passing in data, maybe some corporations don't want to pass in the data, then having AI systems or software call your leads and then following up with them, all the ones that humans can't get ahold of. We're starting to do a lot of things like that. That's how you see growth, but a lot of larger organizations see that as risky, but that's the advantage of a startup.

Yeah. By the way, speaking about volatility when it comes to content creation, going back to Clueless again, I was watching some of their videos, right? So they're very good at being more causing controversy with their videos, right? But their CMO, who's a 21-year-old guy, so they basically all live in a house, right? And so imagine you and I—

Wait, the whole Clueless team lives in a house?

I think the executives all live in a house and then they wake up and the office is right there and then people are there working, right? They'll sleep at like 2, 3 a.m. or whatever, wake up at like 11 a.m. and then you'll see the CEO sleeping and they'll like vlog the thing. It's like, I just woke up right now. I'm going to go find the CEO. Right. So it's like the whole thing is like a spectacle. And then you see the engineers sleeping on the couch and everything. And then maybe at like 8 AM, only one person is working.

And so it's this, it's like entertainment to me at the end of the day.

You have to have guts to do that. I would be super irritated at this age now. I probably would be okay with it at age 21, but I don't think I can stomach this at this age though.

I think you would have done it at age 21.

Yeah, 21 for sure.

But you and I, you know, I'm 40, you're 39.

39.

Yeah. Eric and I just won't do it. We're too old.

I have a family. I like my life though.

Yeah, I like my space.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm like, I can't do all this stuff.

Yeah. By the way, so I don't know if you want to pick another one here, but I had a thought here on talking about, we talked about someone selling, you know, people selling their agencies, right? So let me ask you a question. We can have a quick discussion here. Do you think agencies are a low-status business in the business world, right? So for example, you have Agency, you have like e-commerce, you have SaaS, right? Like you have crypto. Where do you think agencies fall?

You have all these AI companies.

Yeah, AI companies. Where do you think agencies fall on that stack?

Probably close to the bottom.

I think it's at the bottom.

There's a lot of other businesses, but yeah, I would say like when people look at furniture selling businesses, that's not that ugly or sexy. I think people look at agencies like selling couches, like as in a really ugly, boring business.

I actually look up to selling couches. You know, like Nebraska Furniture Company, that one gal that I think she lived to like 100 or so, and she sold the business to Warren Buffett. So yeah, I respect that.

You and I look up to it, but I don't think most people look at furniture companies as sexy.

You know, I told you, I've tested this before. I've gone to conferences where I'll lead with agency and then sometimes I'll lead with software. Whenever I say agency, the wind gets sucked out of their sails and they look to have another conversation somewhere else. This is a long time ago. And then whenever I say, oh yeah, you know, we do software, I'll test it, right? Like, oh yeah, tell me what you do. Right. And so I think a younger version of us, maybe I'm speaking about myself right now, it is low status, but I don't care now that I'm older. And also at the same time, I know it's not just agency. I know it's like you have software, I have software too.

Yeah, but it is low status. I see it, people all the time, they look down and they think what I'm doing is just a waste of time.

I don't think you've ever cared. I used to care a lot more when I was younger.

What's interesting is if I have a conversation with people and they ask like, well, what do you do? I'm like, if I tell them like I have a boring company, which I usually tell them, not boring like Elon's company, but like a boring business. Like, oh, okay, what do you do? I'm like, dude, it's boring. We're in like 20-something countries. We have 1,000+ people.

Oh yeah, if you do that.

And then, and then I say, and they're like, what is it? I'm like, oh, it's a marketing services company, like an agency, and we have some software solutions. They don't look down upon me as much.

Well, of course.

As much.

They still a little bit. Yeah, but when you, but you're smart about that. If you go global and we're in 20 different countries and then we got some software solutions and you're very humble about it. Yeah. But if you lead with ad agency, it's like, oh, okay, I'm off to the next conversation. But most people know who you are too.

It depends what country and region, but yes, or what category. I'm talking to people like if it's entrepreneurs, sure. And I tend not to do that, but if I'm talking to someone that could be a potential customer or knows someone, I will usually go with that spiel first because it makes them more likely to refer business and think of us in a better light than if I just started off with I have an agency because they don't want to hear anything more after I say that.

I think one thing that's underrated about Neil is Neil used to go to— like, Neil, I think, I think you've been very intentional about the way you speak. Like, you used to go to Toastmasters when you were younger. But I do think you think about how you say things. It's like you don't say I, it's like we do things a certain way, right?

Yes.

And it's like we're global. Like, I do think you think about it and I think it's important that you think through how you pitch yourself to people. One thing before, before we choose one of yours, because we're talking about agencies right now, remember we talked about that one company that spent $12 million on a domain? They raised a lot of money from founders funds. So Peter Thiel, they raised from Saquon Barkley, the running back from Philadelphia Eagles. They just became an agency.

Banker?

No, they became an agency. So this is Icon. This is that the AI ads company, right? So recently someone just published what they said in Slack. It's like, hey, like we were hiring a lot of internal creatives and you don't have to use the SaaS anymore. We're just going to help you create the creatives. And everyone's like, dude, Peter Thiel and all these people invest in this money. They spent $12 million on the Icon domain and now they just became an agency. What do you think?

Did they raise more money?

No, but I, they raised a lot already. I don't think they raised more money.

How much did they raise in the first place?

I was looking at it yesterday, but I think they raised $25 million and they spent $12 million of it on a domain.

Oh, which is crazy.

Yeah, but like imagine if you spent that $12 million on really smart people to help develop your product.

You would've made way more money.

Yeah, but now you have to kind of make this pivot.

I think that's, that means something they're doing isn't working out in my opinion, because I don't see Founders Fund investing in an agency. That's goal is to automate. Maybe I'm wrong, but they try to invest in revolutionary stuff. They don't try to invest in agency type of stuff. The only time I see spending that much of your cash on a domain name is worth it is if you're rich like Dharmesh Shah. He bought the domain name, I believe it was chat.com.

Chat.com.

And he sold it to OpenAI for equity, made a killing. I don't know what he made, but I'm betting—

I think he got $16 on it.

That's what I heard.

16x? No. So he, I think you're, I think he bought that domain for like, call it 10, and then I think he sold it for like 16 in equity. I could be wrong.

At a much lower valuation. So he's probably up at least 3, 4x at this point.

They just told me they just raised another $300.

At $300. I think they did $7 or $8 billion that they just closed at $300.

Yeah. And then they're at $13 billion ARR now.

Yeah, they were $12. New York Times said they're closer to $13, and New York Times estimated that they'll, or they mentioned how they'll be probably close to $20 by the end of the year. Which is ridiculous. Now the valuation of $300 is all starting to make sense. At first I was like, man, a few billion in revenue, giving them $100, $200. I'm like, ah, this is crazy. Little do I know.

I always thought they could grow into it. I just, it wouldn't make sense for like, still our business is a better bet. So yeah.

For us, no, but we also are investing in what we know because it's lower risk. Speaking of marketing in general and agencies, Forget stock prices of Google, Meta, Amazon. I know Amazon just tanked, but when you look at their revenue, Amazon's ad business jumps 22% year over year in a bad market to $15.7 billion. I'm assuming that's quarterly. If you look at Facebook and Google, they're doing extremely well on the ad side, and the search volume on Google is up. I know they're not the talk of the town these days, but what's interesting is most agencies have actually, the ones at scale are either declining or they're flat.

Mm-hmm.

So if you look at where marketing dollars are being spent, there's a restriction or contraction on services. There is more being spent on ad dollars for the platforms. And I will post this on in the next few days. We're not really seeing startups to mid-sized companies really spending a ton on AI marketing. And when I mean AI marketing, I'm not talking about optimizing for ChatGPT or anything like that. I'm talking about you spending a ton of money on tools to automate and cut staff. We're not seeing that transition yet.

Mm-hmm.

But we are seeing companies just be more restrictive in this environment because people are just very pessimistic.

Yeah.

And it just shows that you don't have a choice but to spend on the platforms because they control the attention.

Dude, and employment data, I think today came out, it's, it's, it's, it's constantly being revised negative. And so things aren't looking as— and then people are saying in Vegas tourism is like 11% down. So I think we're starting to see some cracks.

And dude, the employment numbers were so bad. So just to give people some context here, The June previously stated numbers were 147,000, and they ended up revising it to— what was it? 14,000. And May, they just revised that as well. They originally said it was 125,000. They revised it to 19,000. So if you look here, this is a 90-plus percent correction. June was 90-plus percent. May was not as high percentage-wise, but it was still a big difference. They're both the numbers were 100,000 plus. And it's just like, how the heck is your data so off? And it's just because ADP released numbers beforehand, before the government ended up releasing the numbers, and ADP's numbers were doom and gloom. And then the market's like, oh, this could cause them to cut. And the Fed's like, no, our numbers are great. And then it's just—

Dude, they had 2 dissenters. They really— now it's up to today. Today it's 75% chance they're going to cut in September. The other day it was 45% chance, right? They got to cut. That's my opinion. It's not a political podcast, guys. But I'll tell you what's good in the political realm. Triple H is in the White House. That's what's good.

That's cool. The reason I think the government's going to have no choice is because of AI.

You mean the Fed?

Oh yeah, the Fed. Yeah, the Fed will have no choice is because with AI, I think jobs are going to get even worse. Because if you look at like the IBM, I was looking at your story on Instagram.

You see it blew up.

It blew up. I was looking at all the comments on people in HR getting Fired and replaced with AI.

Yeah.

So many of the Kaufmans were so happy and they're like, screw HR.

I didn't expect that, that the Kaufmans would be so anti-HR. Yes.

And I'm not anti-HR.

I think we see utility with HR.

There is utility with HR. It just has to be run right, just like any other organization.

I think if you're coming from an employee standpoint, if you think about HR, you're like, HR is neck— because HR is holding the line. They're usually there to fire people or put you on a PIP or whatever. So Most people, I think if you work for a company, you're not looking favorably upon HR, but if you run a company, you're, you're, there is utility with HR.

But, but this is where I really see jobs being impacted. Like when you look at marketing, we have an enterprise division, mm-hmm, which allows us to offer almost anything a corporation wants because they usually have budgets. Like when you're dealing with large corporations, they'll all say they don't have money. And yes, you gotta fight for that money, but if they want to create a Super Bowl commercial and spend $6 or $10 million just on the creative side, They can afford to do it when they're making $10 billion a year in profit. They may say again, they don't have the budget, but when you have $10 billion a year in profit, you do have money. It's a question of, do you want to end up spending it? On our SMB side of our agency, it's really hard to do things like really full-blown custom creatives because when someone's spending $10,000, $20,000 a month on ads, they don't have You know, another 10, 20 grand to just go spend on creatives every few months. But with AI, there's a lot of solutions out there. Google has amazing solutions. Some people are leveraging their technology like Arc and—

Arc Ads?

Uh-huh.

Arc Ads is pretty good.

It is pretty good.

Yeah.

And I think it's like only like $100 and something a month for like 10 creatives. I forgot the exact pricing on how it is. Don't quote me on it. But you can now offer a lot of stuff to smaller businesses that you weren't able to before, and you don't necessarily need to add Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, when you look at marketing, people are like, oh, there's going to be a ton of jobs being cut. I don't know if there's going to be a ton of jobs being cut. I think we're going to actually see a shift in which people are just getting more done with the amount of people they have and the budgets they have. I think that's what we're seeing more of than actually the cuts, but that's leading to less people being hired in the future still.

So here's a good setup for you. If you talk about the Anthropic, the, the, the how much they raised, it can lead next into my next topic, which actually covers what we're talking about right here. Yeah.

So Anthropic, and most people don't talk about Anthropic because there's this Claude.

Their LLM is Claude.

Yes. But people don't really talk about Claude that much. They talk more about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and you got Gemini and you got a few others. But I don't really hear too many people talking about Claude. I'm assuming you agree with this statement.

My entire week has been Claude, so it's a little different. Yeah. But most people are not talking about Claude, correct? It's ChatGPT.

Yes. And very few people also talk about Grok unless you're really heavily on Twitter.

If you're super team Elon, you talk about Grok a little bit, but even Perplexity is not even an LLM, like from what I see. So yeah.

Yeah. But you can use Perplexity for a lot of similar things you can use ChatGPT for.

It's good for research.

Yeah. But even then, a lot of people don't talk about it and their usage is lower. But here's what's interesting. They're raising money and their revenue's growing fast at $100+ billion valuation, potentially led by Iconiq. I believe the amount was $5-ish billion.

Raised $5 billion on $170?

It was something like that. I have it written down. I just don't have the number in front of me. Oh, $5 billion. Yeah, $170.

You're right.

And when you look at that, A lot of marketers tend to forget or assume attention equals valuation. So as marketers, we look at a lot of these LLM platforms as like, oh, this is where we should focus. These are the ones that are worth the most and this is what's getting mentioned. But for marketers, there's a lot more use and you can do a lot of cool things with Claude that can actually help you become much more efficient as a marketer. But it may not be sexy from the standpoint that you can drive a lot of revenue from the aspect of generating visitors from Claude and a lot of revenue. versus ChatGPT, but there's a lot of use cases that can help you with that are still worth a lot of money that marketers tend to forget about.

Dude, so it's— I think Claude right now is making a ton of money from developers because Claude Sonnet 4 is actually used in Cursor, Windsurf, or any of these IDEs, these coding tools. That is, I think, where they're making a lot of their money. And that's why when I think about Anthropic, I think about coding. But now I'm like, oh man, marketers really need to jump on Claude agents today because they came out with Claude Code a couple of weeks ago, but they have Claude Cloud subagents now, and I'll explain that in a second, but they also have Cloud MCPs. If you have the MCPs, which allow you to talk to different applications like your HubSpot, Ahrefs MCP, dude, once I hired this, this Claude tutor, I said, hey, let's focus on Claude Code because it's a pain in the butt to set up. It's like terminals. You have to figure out how to like— I forgot how to use like DOS and all that, right? And terminal. So anyway, we spent some time setting it up this week and I got it set up like 2, 3 days ago. And To your point earlier, now as a marketer, it's not like I'm going to work less. I'm able to do way more. I'm like, hey, you're connected to my GA, my GSC, show me all the pages that are cannibalizing each other that I should be combining. Boom, it's done. It's like, oh, hey, here's where you're actually seeing a bunch of drop-off, Google Analytics, with your modal over here, you should optimize it here. And we estimate you're going to make this much money. But it understands my conversion rates and understands my LTV and everything. And here's like the top 5 things. I didn't ask it to do this.

Yeah.

But it's like, here are the top 5 CRO things you should do right now based on impact, confidence, ease. I never asked it to score it on impact. I'm like, oh, you're a CRO scientist. Okay, boom, we have something over here that's going to create an email nurture sequence, whether it's to upsell, cross-sell, or remind people or churn save and all these things, right?

Yeah.

Or you have an ABM orchestrator, and I have these things all working in tandem. And I'm like, holy crap, not only can I do these analysis really quick now, but then Now the next, the next lesson I'm going to do with my Claude tutor is, hey, how do we deploy these things to at least 90% there where I have it sitting in my WordPress drafts? I had it sitting up like, I'm just going to work a lot faster. Oh, if I want to get these, these creatives, more similar creatives connected to my ads MCPs, I can have it look at the top creatives and then make similar ones using Figma, right? You know what I did yesterday too? I used Apify, which scrapes all— I was like, hey, scrape MP Digital, scrape all these other agencies over here, see how much they're spending on ads, right? Or no, see what, where they're running ads. And then it quickly did it. Here's what they're doing on Google. Here's what they're doing on Facebook. Here's how many ads they have right now. Here's what their strategy is. I'm like, dude, does it tell you roughly how much we're spending? 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 Karat. 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. It's, it's pulled from Ahrefs. It's not— it's not— yeah, it's off. But I do think the number of ads is probably more accurate. And like Power Digital, for example, right, they like to bid on the 99% of their keywords are more like the digital marketing agency near me type of stuff, right? Yes. Which makes sense. But I'm like, okay, like, what do you do with that? Well, now I want it to make ads. If I say I can drag in my landing pages, I want you to follow these brand guidelines and use Vercel to make a version of it, I can do that. So what am I— what's my point? I can do a lot of things faster. Whoever tells me to wait, I'm not going to wait.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but that's the world that we're going into. And I'm saying like every marketer I think needs to jump on Claude agents. Doesn't matter if you're technical or not, you can set this up pretty quickly. And now all of a sudden I have all my friends, hey, who's the tutor that you use? Who's the tutor that you use? Right, dude, the $50 each time, no-brainer.

Yeah, yeah, dude, I, I'm with you. I, I think this technology has just allowed us to do so much more as marketers than we were able do before. It's not even about, you know, everyone thinks about like AI is like, how do you cut costs and save money? You and I look at it very similarly, but different to most people. It's not about cost cuts. It's about how do we move faster and execute and take more market share faster because of these tools and technology versus our competition?

How do you do more? How do you stay focused? How do you take on more risk? And that's how you become— that's how you do well in life, guys.

Yeah. So I actually have an interesting story for you related to marketing that was enlightening for me that happened with our company. Okay.

When was this?

And it was this week when I was in Colombia.

Oh, you're in Colombia?

I was in Colombia. I just got back.

Okay.

So speaking to like the top 30 CMOs who won awards for the best CMOs in Latin America, most of them work for large global enterprises, right? So for me, it was potential customers fishing with dynamite. And I didn't get paid for the event, but the event was branded. Neil Patel's going to be here. My images were everywhere, even on their name badge. They put my image on their name badge. Oh, he's like a featured— Agency name. Yeah, it wasn't our event. We didn't pay for it. It was a Forbes event.

Yeah.

And they were the ones giving out awards to the top CMOs in Latin America. People flew in from all over the world, like really large corporations that we were talking to. Almost everyone in the room worked at a public company.

Where in Colombia was this?

Bogotá.

Nice.

But it was all publicly traded organizations. And something interesting that I learned from, not necessarily the community there, I actually learned 2 things that were interesting. But one, the first thing that was interesting that I learned from one of my managing directors in LATAM. So we have this company that pays us for APAC region, all right, work. And this company that pays us for APAC, it's a large global 5,000 or 1,000 companies, one of the largest organizations. If I told— if everyone saw their logo, almost every person, consumer or B2B person, they would know who it is. Extremely large organization. And overall, they're happy with us, but they're upset with us in certain regions.

Hmm.

So, they're not happy with the work quality in certain regions because for that organization, Some of those regions, they make very little to no money from. So they may give us a budget for a random region. I'm making up a region, Pakistan or something like that. And they say, we want you to do work here for $700 a month. Okay. You know, just as good as I know, you really can't do much for marketing for $700.

You can't do anything. You can't do anything.

Yeah. It doesn't matter if you're going to have to hire people. So it's not that the parent organization or the company is disappointed, it's that Some of the people, some of their employees who work in those regions like Pakistan, will be like, we expect more from you. And then when they break down what they're looking for, my cost just for that region, labor's cheaper for like Pakistan, but we did the math on it, would be almost $5,000 a month. It's hard when you're getting paid less than $1,000 to go spend, call it $5,000. Like, we can't lose all that money.

Yeah.

So then when we talked to the parent organization, the parent organization just expanded our contract outside of APAC. So they gave us a whole new region. I was just talking about LATAM, hence I brought up LATAM because I was talking to my managing director in Latin America.

Yep.

And he's been in the ad agency world for such a long time, and I was just like talking to him. His name is Javi. I'm like, how the heck did we get more money from them? When they're not necessarily happy. He's like, Neil, you're looking at it from a very different lens. And I was like, what do you mean? Globally, they're actually happy with the results. If someone's spending X dollars and they're making Y dollars and you're more profitable than the previous agency, you're doing a good job and they're happy. But you're always going to get some people grumbling within certain territories that they wish they would get more from you. And the global company knows that you're never going to satisfy them because they're not giving you enough money for those regions. Because economically they don't make enough from those regions where they're willing to increase the budgets. So their employees within those regions are always going to complain saying the work isn't good enough. We expect more.

Because they need to look good there too.

They want to look good there. They want to do more for their country, but the parent organization's like, yes, you want to give us a— you want us to give you a budget of 10, 20, 30 grand a month for this small line of work? we would just, it would just go down the drain and we'll lose money because the market for us in that region is so small. Why would we invest it? Yes, we pay people on the ground, but we have to because we have to be a global company on their end.

Yeah.

Right. And what I ended up learning from this was if you're a global agency and you have enough offices, enough regions, you'll get the work because they don't want to work with someone who's just in one region. And I thought as an agency to keep getting more work, you have to do amazing work in every single project. And genuinely we try to, but companies are understanding that, oh, in these areas we don't expect your best work because we're not going to give you the most amount of money. And it's acceptable. You're going to get complaints from our team in those regions and they're going to rate you very poorly. We're okay with that. Yeah, I would've never assumed that or guessed that. That was the first thing I actually learned. That was the first time I understood that. It makes sense.

And I don't think you're saying don't try to do work. You should. That's which is what you just said. But you know, as long as you're, you're adding massive value to the kind of global organization, you're good to go.

You're good to go. But as a founder, I look at it very differently than some of the people on my team. As a founder, if someone's not happy, yeah, and it doesn't matter whatever region, I'm just like, how could we do better? What could we improve? Where could we use technology to be more efficient and give them more value for the money, even though they don't have a budget? And I've never really looked at things from a big global company perspective because we're not that big.

Cost of doing business.

Yeah, cost of doing business, where some of these companies are in these regions because they have to be and they're not willing to spend money and they have employees and they know their employees will never be satisfied because they're not willing to give them the budget. And we're still doing better than the previous people they paid, so the results are better. Yeah, but you'll never satisfy the people because the people want a ton more money and budget. But globally, they're just like, if we just give you the money, it's flushing money down the drain because in your country the TAM is too small and we can't make money. So that was the first thing I learned, and that was eye-opening to me on how global companies look at marketing spend and in certain areas. They don't care if they get the best work because they're not willing to give you the money because it's just not worth it for them. And the regions it is worth it for them, they expect top-tier results and a high ROI and the best work ever because that's where they make their money from. The second thing that I learned from being in Colombia, and I saw this speaking in a few other regions like Hong Kong, saw this in Singapore, saw this in Brazil, and the list goes on and And marketing, a lot of us like talk about LLMs and what we're doing with LLMs. Dude, most marketers have no clue what LLMs are and what it means.

Not even an LLM?

They know what ChatGPT is, but if you say the word LLM, and the guy at Forbes told me, hey Neil, maybe we should describe what LLMs are because most people in the room don't know what it is. So I asked the audience in the room who was very, they were participating, how many of you know what an LLM is? is no one really raised their hand. Very few people, like less than 10%.

In Colombia?

In Colombia. All CMOs controlling regional, you know, or LATAM budgets. So people who aren't controlling like $100 grand, I'm talking about people who are controlling millions and millions of dollars in spend and typically monthly. And it was just interesting that they didn't know what LLMs are. But if I asked the room, has anyone used ChatGPT? Do you guys know what it is? Pretty much everyone raises their hand.

That's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting because it's the majority of people are still very surface level with this stuff, which is good. Which is your opportunity, or any of you listening to this, this is your opportunity right now to get ahead. Yeah. So continue.

And in marketing, I see the big opportunity in which they all use ChatGPT, but when I ask them, when you look at your marketing, how many of you use ChatGPT in your marketing? Almost everyone raises their hand, right? How many of you guys love it and then think it's made your business better and marketing better? Almost everyone raises their hand. How many of you guys have seen an increase in traffic or revenue or leads by using ChatGPT? And I'm getting very specific here because that's what they're mainly using, right? Or any other AI marketing tool that you're using? Literally, it's crickets and almost no one raises their hand.

Mm-hmm.

And the big issue is, is they're all— marketers tend to use AI for shiny object syndrome, doing cool things, but they don't know how to focus their efforts on crap that moves the needle.

Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a— it's a skill gap. It's becoming a wider skill gap right now. So the question is, what do people do about it? Like, it's some— a lot of people ask for training, but in my mind, I think training is one thing. But you— it goes back to how much do you want it? How curious are you at the end of the day? And so we press really hard when we talk to people now during interviews. The very first question is actually like, Like, what are you doing with AI right now? And what's the most impressive thing you built with AI? Show me the numbers. What did you do? What prompt did you use? What did you contribute yourself personally to this? Because some people like to— we talked to someone recently, they're like, oh yeah, we built all these things, blah, blah, blah. I was like, oh, this sounds great. So what did you personally contribute? He's like, oh yeah, I told someone, I told a team to do this. I was like, who else was involved? Oh, like 10 other people. I was like, so who wrote the prompts and everything? Oh yeah, the engineers did. So you didn't do anything.

Wow. Right. So I bet you they're taking a lot of credit.

Yeah. Executive type role.

That's why I only hire executives who are player coaches. Like, if you want to be a VP of marketing and you're not willing to get your hands dirty for like 80+% of your work, yeah, I don't want to work with you.

You have to get your hands dirty. I know, like, we still get our hands dirty today. We're not above that. And that goes back— like, we're down to be the janitors if we need to do that.

Yes.

Yeah. Do we want to talk about the— can we talk about the Sydney Sweeney thing real quick?

So Doodle was part of the whole meme stuff. And then before that, what was the other ones that went on? Uh, Kohl's. Was Kohl's one of them?

Kohl's?

Kohl's was one of the meme coins right before the Sydney Sweeney one.

Oh, I'm not even talking about the coins. I'm talking about the commercial. Good Genes.

It caused the stock to boom.

Yeah. So how much did they go up by again?

I forgot.

So, okay, everyone, for those that don't know, so Sydney Sweeney, um, she's— let's say she's very attractive. Uh, American Eagle, right, did this jeans commercial called Good Jeans, right? Basically saying she has good genes and they have good jeans, right? It's like kind of a joke, right? And then what happened was they got a ton of backlash. And I was laughing about this because I don't know if I sent you this the other day, but there's all these people making TikToks. It's like, this is fascist. This is like, this is pure propaganda. This is like Nazism because it's the good jeans, right? This is like celebrating, like, you know what I mean? Like they're saying it's like a super like white supremacist type of commercial.

Oh, because she's blonde?

Is she blonde? She's white, right? But it's like, it's like, what are you guys talking about?

Does she have blue eyes? I'm assuming because the head looks so white.

Dude, that's not even the point. Like, it's kind of a fun wordplay on the word jeans, right? And then the Cobra Kai guy, Johnny Lawrence, he made an ad afterward with American Eagle. He's like, I also have good jeans, right? He's like, screw all this wokeism and screw all— and I'm just like, yeah, like, the reason it popped is because a lot of Americans are people are just kind of sick of seeing this whole like just it's a good commercial and then the way the way American Eagle responded so here's what they said they did a cheeky backlash response over here and I think they did a good job with this right so sometimes when people are they're getting more views I think they're trying to capitalize on it more so it says here to whom it may concern we sincerely apologize for featuring Sydney Sweeney in our recent advertisement in hindsight we underestimated the combined impact of her blue eyes blonde hair and general hotness also we did not realize how big her boobs would be. Our marketing team has been sent to denim sensitivity training. Thank you for your feedback. Please stop emailing us.

Yes. And what happened to their stock? It went up.

It went up by how much?

It looks like it went up around 20%. There you go. I'm roughly estimating based on the power of a good ad, guys. Like, and it's still up. It started to contract a little bit, but you know what happened, right? It started getting pushed by all the meme stuff, all the Redditors.

Oh, did they?

Yeah, it started getting pushed. I don't know if there's actually the Reddit community like WallStreetBets, but CNBC was reporting that American Eagle's the next, the new meme.

Yeah.

Because there was a few right before it and they just kept piling on and they were just making a ton of cash from— because before that it was, Nextdoor is a real estate company. Nextdoor boomed. I believe it was Kohl's. And then I believe American Eagle started getting into the meme craze. And dude, this is like people's sensitivity can drive marketing in a bad way. And the perfect example of this is Jaguar, which you and I have talked about on this podcast episode. They went with the more, sensitive route with their advertising, and they went with what they felt was more political based on what they felt people wanted. But when you look at their European sales in April 2025, they faced a 97.5% drop in car sales just based on because of their advertising.

Yep.

And it was partly because of their advertising, also partly because during the same period they wanted to focus on pushing full And to give you the numbers, and this is all from AI Overview, I don't know what URL Google's pulling from, but it went from 1,961 previous sales that year or that month of that year to 49.

Yep.

And it just goes to show that leaning into what may be a smaller percentage, but they tend to be louder wants, isn't always the right move with your marketing.

Look, I think it's nice to lean into social justice and all that, especially in 2020, right? You saw all the ads like Nike, and I'm just not gonna call it the ads, but it didn't really work for them, right? And then now, now what's happening is like, look, Jaguar, Bud Light did this. And then you see that, I think a lot of people wanted that kind of social justice angle to work, at least in America. I think Americans have moved on. And that's why a lot of people, at least on Twitter, a lot of people are laughing about these ads. And then people on TikTok that are complaining about this fascism, guys, it's not fascism. It's just like, good ad at the end of the day. And you and I are both people of color. Like, I don't see it as a racist ad. Do you?

No.

Yeah. Move on. Like, it's just a good ad. Let's deal with it. I'm happy they got more reach and I'm happy they grew.

Yes. I haven't read Eric's tweet on SEO is now a fool's errand for startups. There's a lot of traffic from Google. Google search volume is going up. You may not get all the clicks to your website, but you can still generate millions and millions of dollars in revenue from SEO. So it's proven, Eric and I see it every day. We have a lot of stats and data on this. Our clients are generating a lot of revenue. It's not just our agencies, but it's a lot of people globally. And a lot of the factors in SEO, I don't know the percentage-wise, but call it 80+% are very similar to traditional SEO for AI. And there's a direct correlation. Search Engine Land had an article on this from ranking on page 1 of Google and also getting mentioned on ChatGPT. So SEO is still really valuable, but whenever we talk to companies, no matter where I go to speak, and I know it's the same for you, I haven't asked you, but I already know it's the same. Everyone only cares to talk about AI SEO and GEO, AI SEO, LLM SEO, whatever you want to end up calling it, or search everywhere optimization that we like calling it. Don't care. People want to just talk about that.

Mm-hmm.

But when you look at budgets, Even though it's one of the highest converting channels, the traffic volume is so low. The budgets are not there where people are willing to spend $1 million a year on that kind of stuff yet. Maybe over time it'll get there. The budgets are extremely tiny for this stuff where people are asking us to do stuff for like $100 grand, $200, $300 grand a year versus where they would traditionally for the, for traditional SEO have $4 or $5 million worth of budgets. I know that's a large SEO budget, but I'm talking about large corporations here. I'm not talking about, and these are publicly traded. I'm not talking about companies making millions of dollars. I'm talking about companies generating billions a year in profit. The AI SEO stuff is where you have to pivot, even though they still need the traditional SEO stuff. And if they don't do that right, they won't do well in AI SEO.

And I think for both of our companies, we're doing both right now. Like, there's— so there's a lot of panic around, oh my God, I'm losing all this traffic, which is leading to more leads coming in, right? The panic usually causes more leads to come in. You know, I, you do have to do both. We agree on that. We do. I think we both do agree that traditional website traffic, that's going to decrease over time, but it's still very valuable right now. The reason why I call SEO for startups a fool errand right now is Jason Cohen from WP Engine. He posted this, right? So he says, all my companies started with paid ads for 22 years. Of course it costs money, but budget and messages are controllable. It's easy to A/B test and relatively easy to measure results directly. I'm not against social and SEO. It's just not automatically better, right? And that depends on the type of business that you're in. So what I said was, look, time to value takes too long with social and SEO, assuming that company plus marketing channels are starting from scratch. It just is what it is, right?

Yes.

And even though you and I are SEO background, like, you can't just say I'm going to build a brand day one or like I'm going to start ranking unless you acquire a bunch of websites at the same time. So SEO, it's, it depends. I still like it. I think you still like it as well. I don't love it as much as I did before. And I think what Someone, a guy responded to me, Travis Jameson here. And he said, you know, the counter to that, Eric, as you know, is effectively using parasite SEO to jumpstart the SEO efforts. And as he said that, I'm like, but God, that takes so much work, right? So I responded, I said, look, sure. But with so many more variables with SEO today, I tend to tread more cautiously, meaning I just rather, if I'm a startup, maybe I'd just rather not deal with it. But if I'm more established, sure, I'll deal with it.

It's also easier to get results, as you mentioned, when you're established, because you already have the authority and the brand out there and the recognition and the PR. Interesting enough, when people talk about SEO, whether it's, they think it's valuable or not, and we are established just like you, there's a company that generates around $160 billion a year in revenue. So a massive organization, not too many people generate $160 billion a year. We got hit up for them for marketing in Latin America. We're included in an RFP with 3 others. And the reason being is according to the lady that reached out to us, her boss asked ChatGPT which agencies they should hire for the region they were interested in Latin America, and we were one of the 3 that were recommended.

Because of ChatGPT ranking.

Yeah.

Yep. It's funny how that works.

And it's a $160 billion organization. You do well, it's a decent-sized contract. It can expand into $5, $10, $20 million a year. We would've never got that opportunity if it wasn't for traditional SEO.

Would you agree that going back to agencies for a little bit, that the ultimate goal is probably net dollar retention, net revenue retention, right? And what I mean by that is you're going to get a lot of clients, you're going to churn a lot, right? And so if you look at just logo churn alone, it's not enough, but mostly you're making your money from expansion. You would agree with that?

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think a lot of agencies, I think, um, as you continue to grow, you're probably looking, you want, you want to start to look at accounts that have the most potential to grow and double, triple down, quadruple down on those. Would you agree or disagree with that?

I would agree. To share how our agency works, majority of our revenue does not come from new sales. When you look at just over time, of course, if you're starting off, you're going to get your revenue from new sales, but when you're established, it ends up being where you get a contract for $100,000, $200,000, or whatever the price is, and then you expand it to $500,000 and $1 million within a year. And then after 2 years, it grows to $2, $3 million, and then it grows to $4 or $5 million over time. That's how we generate most of the revenue. It's land and expand. It's not you close a million or $5 million contract from day one. That's much more rare.

Yep, dude. So I saw you last week randomly at a coffee shop and basically I had met with like someone who was in a YPO group that I'm in, right? Like a YPO forum. And she runs like a, like a fruit company, right? And so I was just thinking about this a little bit and you know how I like to talk about peer groups quite a bit, right? And so my whole statement here is peer groups will make you rich, but there's a caveat here, right? And, you know, whether it's— and I'm in a lot of these different groups, right? And you— and I think this ties in well with you too, because you're very specific about what you're looking for. So peer groups work for you, but you have to understand what it is that you're looking to get out of the group, right? So for you, you want people at your level, ideally at the very least at your level or levels above you, right? Because you're looking to grow. And I think if you join these groups without having a specific objective or goal, You're it's just going to be like you're just kind of walking around and there's no purpose to it, right? So you have to be very intentional. Like we have a mutual friend; he's in a group. The group is all investors, and one of the the people in that group—he's like a chairman of one of the largest automotive companies in the world, right? And I think if you're not intentional about these things, and so sure, you might listen to someone like me and say, "Oh yeah, peer groups will make you rich," because I certainly listened to that when I was starting out. But if you're not intentional, and if you set a goal and you're not getting that from a group, and you don't quit, that's on you at the end of the day, right?

Yeah.

And so there's different groups that I'm in right now. Most of them, like every time we're talking about business, how we're going to grow, I'm in a SaaS group, I'm in the group with, you know, Syed, right? And I'm in these other groups. But one of the groups, there's not a lot of structure. And when we go on these retreats, like it would be mostly like partying, right? And so I'm at the age where like I got that out of my system and like, don't get me wrong, I'll enjoy a party every now and then. But that's not necessarily for me, right? So, but like it took me a year of kind of sitting through it to realize that, hey, maybe if we, if there's no objectives established with this group, that maybe it's time for me to go, right? And you, to your credit, decided very quickly what peer group makes sense for you. And I think eventually you'll get into that group. You're just, you're not at the age where you can be accepted to that group yet. 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 organization. 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.

Yeah, there was a peer group Eric's talking about. I wanted to get into YPO Gold.

Yeah. And, but Gold is for 50+ people.

Yes. And I, I relate more to the businesses in YPO Gold. And the owners, and we're more in a similar place in life, at least from an entrepreneur standpoint. But because of my age, I was not accepted. Yeah. And I tried so hard. And then I was a little irritated because they told me I'm good to go. I renewed my membership for Gold or what I mean, White, uh, Global One or whatever it's called. Uh-huh. And then they told me after I paid like the 6 grand or 4 grand or whatever it costs. Yeah. Oh, sorry, you're not old enough. And I'm like, we spent 3 months having this conversation and you guys said it was okay.

Yeah.

So like, I still think you can get in.

I still think you can.

I need to network with more members in there. Yeah. But I would love to because the businesses are—

Yeah. Oh, dude, the easy way is just talking to my friend and just getting a couple more of those meetings. You know, I mean, you know, our mutual friend is married to one of the gold members in that chapter.

Oh yeah, that's right.

The helicopter.

I know who you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They raised over $1 billion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For a business.

That would be good for— that would be a good meeting for you regardless. Yeah, it'd be a good meeting.

Either way, they live nearby.

Yeah, they live here. Yeah. The home. You looked at that home?

Yeah, it's a good home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, it was too high up. You got to drive up the hill and down, but it's a beautiful home. Yeah. Great views.

Do you want to know what Google's CEO said here? So there's 2 things. I have one around how product is no longer a moat. But if you were to think about Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, on the only business moat that's available today, what do you think it is?

Your brand.

This is interesting. So I thought he would say distribution or brand. He didn't, because you and I would say that, right? And naturally we're marketers. We would say that. He said learning loops, the ability for you to pick something up very quickly. And if you have a team that moves very quickly, like a startup, you're going to learn a lot faster because things are changing so quickly with all these new innovations. So his argument right now, the only business mode is learning loops. It's how fast you can move. So I don't know if I completely agree. I think we're more biased towards distribution, but I can see the angle for that.

I can see the angle. I think you need people who can adapt and learn super fast. If you don't, it crushes your business. If you do, you can do much better, but still you need a brand and it's really hard to build a brand like Air Jordan. You know, like you look at what Michael Jordan's done with shoes and Nike, that product's really popular. Most people who I see with Nike, Nike's struggling right now as an organization. People still buy the Air Jordan shoes. Very strong brand. I think Nike has a strong brand too, but they're getting their butts kicked by Vuori and Lululemon or Alo. I don't know which one of those brands, but a handful of them.

And why?

Because they've innovated more on athleisure wear than Nike has, which Nike should have done because that's their category.

By the way, do you buy— do you still buy Nikes? I don't buy Nikes anymore.

Dude, the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, Zegna, I believe they're called Second Skin.

Do you buy that from the mall?

You can get it from the mall. I just go to Zegna.

Oh, it's the Z-E-G-N-A, right?

Yeah. On Rodeo. I'm probably saying the name wrong, but it's on Rodeo Drive. Yeah. I don't even know how to pronounce it.

But did you see that Houzz dropped the report? So the attribution software, so they dropped the report. They did 640 incrementally— incrementality tests over 18 months, $14 million in spend analyzed. So their findings here is that Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns is wrong. So they're saying that Advantage shopping campaigns— so these are the AI-driven campaigns on Meta— they win early, 9% better at midpoint, but manual campaigns destroyed them long term, right? So manual campaigns deliver $12 more revenue per $100 spent by the end. Right. So basically, as of right now, it's saying that based on the tests that they've run, manual wins over the long term. But even though Meta tries to push Advantage+, it's not the case. So this is actually an example of right now, at least, AI losing in a situation like this.

We've seen AI lose quite a bit because it also hallucinates. I was talking to a friend that is in a research company and they do a lot of marketing research, specifically just marketing research for organizations. When I say AI hallucinates, they use Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, They pretty much use all the main solutions out there. I forgot which one it was. They were using it to help them do research for a specific category related to marketing. And straight up, the AI made up data. And then when I asked them about it, it hallucinated and would not admit that it actually made it up. Yeah. It wouldn't want to admit that it was just wrong. And I was like, well, that sucks.

Yeah, makes sense. But by the way, because we're kind of talking about brand and partnerships here, did you know that you can transfer You can transfer your— you can transform, sorry, you can transform your credit card points into crypto now.

Really?

Yeah. So Chase has done a partnership with Coinbase. So now you can take your Chase points and then just move it over and transfer it over into crypto.

I wish Amex had, like, bless you.

Bless you. Wow.

I have a lot, like millions of Amex points.

Oh, too bad you can't transfer it over to Chase. But I think eventually this will become more of a common thing. And then why would I not just move it over to crypto?

Yeah, we, we like, I don't care for the points, but my wife likes using it for like gifts.

Oh, that's a bad use of points.

It is, but it makes her happy. Yeah. We don't really use it for travel because the problem with using points for travel is like they restrict when you transfer to airline, which is the best, one of the better uses of points. A lot of times the main routes that I had to fly for speaking or meetings, it's just not as convenient 'cause they want me to take connections or versus a direct flight, or they'll gimme different days and times that will make miss the meeting. And then also when I travel for work, it's easy. You book it yourself? No, my assistant books it. Yeah.

The thing is you need someone that's a points expert. So I had a points expert I talked to. So he's just, he's just doing it all for me. I was like, it's like you have all these points. Okay, I'll just do it all for you, blah, blah, blah. And you pay him like $200. So yeah, but he's an expert with points. Yeah. There's a lot of these people out there like this, but here's what it says. The JP Morgan and Coinbase deal is wild, especially the credit card point redemption. So I'll start with the credit card points here. So transfer of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, you get a 1-to-1 redemption ratio, meaning that 100 points equal equals $1 redemption value, right? So if I can move that into Solana, you know, Ethereum, whatever, great. You have a direct bank-to-wallet connection through JP Morgan Secure API. Chase customers will be able to seamlessly link their bank accounts to Coinbase wallets, meaning that people are going to gamble more. Beginning this fall, the ability to use Chase credit cards on Coinbase.

Eric's not saying crypto's gambling or not, though.

Some people like will look at it as a casino. I look at BTC and ETH as long-term investments. But beginning this fall, you can take your Chase credit cards on Coinbase for the first time. I was going to say bless you, but that was a cough. Customers will have the ability to fund their Coinbase accounts using Chase credit cards. So we'll see what happens here. But I am glad to see how a lot of this— by the way, you look at this administration, it's like, okay, very crypto-forward. All of a sudden, Triple H is this fitness guy, right? This administration is very good at marketing. Like, I have to hand it to them. Like, I haven't seen this much fanfare, I don't think, ever.

What is Triple H doing in the White House?

He's the— he's the lead fitness guy.

I thought it was the Kennedy guy.

RFK? Yeah. No, no, but he's— there's— he— Trump created a new title for Triple H. Did Triple H take steroids? For sure he took steroids. Triple H. For sure he took steroids. For sure. Like, they— like, there's no way they didn't.

Like, did you see the documentary? I'm Googling it right now. Let's see. Triple H steroid use, a look at allegations.

No, you got to watch the Vince McMahon documentary on Netflix. It basically said everyone took it back in the day, and then— but Vince never took it. told people to take it, but everyone was taking it back then.

So Triple H probably took it.

For sure. Like, that's, that's at least what I think, right?

But, um, you know, I've tried steroids, right?

You have?

No, I'm joking. Actually, that's false. The only time, uh, I think actually most humans have to— if you look at me, dude, I weigh 129 pounds and my arms are huge.

Maybe you might've taken it before. I don't know.

No. Um, and if someone's taken it, I'm not judging or anything like that. The— I actually got steroids injected into me recently. I had swelling in my Oh, that's right. And I couldn't sleep and it was going on for months and my head would just hurt. I would have, I had a big lump on my head and they, I didn't know that you can use steroids for this. 'Cause I always thought steroids make you like jacked. I didn't realize there's different kinds of steroids, but they put steroids in my head. Like they injected it to get the swelling down.

Did it come down?

It took a few times, but over a month I was able to sleep again and no more headaches. I had like 2 injections.

Oh, that's not bad. You had to space it out. Okay, dude, check this out. Dude, I'm so motivated because I used to watch— like, I get so excited about this. Like, the President's Council on Physical Fitness is a vehicle to get young people active and healthy. How can you not like that?

Yeah, I like that.

And like, it's Triple H. Like, he's the chief content officer of WWE. I used to watch WWE growing up all the time, and I think you did too.

Yeah, I used to watch The Rock. I think The Rock also took steroids.

The Rock, Stone Cold, for sure they all did. Yeah. Dude, The Rock's body now, he probably takes it now You think so? Yeah. Imagine, dude, what is the obesity rate in America? Like 50%, something like that. It's insane. How are we not trying to help people?

People don't want to walk and exercise.

People want the upside. They don't want the volatility. Yeah. For everything.

Just like, dude, when I was flying from Colombia to the US, a lady was complaining on how they need to make seats bigger. And I'm not judging here because some, some people have weight issues due to medical reasons that they can't control. And, uh, her kid, straight up like a, like a 13, 14-year-old fit, said to the mother, mom, we need to control your diet and we need— you need to work out more instead of like just sitting and watching TV or being lazy. I couldn't hear everything, right? And it's just like, I'm not saying that's the reason she's obese or not. That was just a conversation between her and her kid and I was just walking by them while we were boarding the plane. It was more so that I agree, people just need to be more fit or try to be more fit and we need to encourage Americans to exercise.

I mean, I'm just going to say this. I mean, there's a tweet recently about what's something that's controversial you believe that people would have all these knives pointed at you, right? And I basically responded to it and I said that this is just my belief, guys. This has nothing to do with Neil. I do I do believe that for the most part, majority of cases, if you are obese, it is self-inflicted. And I do think like the fact that the White House, the administration is trying to push this forward, it's going to help people, right? I do think it's going to help them cultivate the right habits to eat right, to move and things like that. And I think this can be fixed, right? It's okay to admit that it's some, you know, you probably have bad habits, right? It's okay. Right? Bad habits can be turned around.

Have you seen that Instagram video of a mother encouraging her son who is overweight? And he's overweight, she's making breakfast, and she's just like, yeah, do you want syrup on it? Do you want this? Do you want that? You sure you want butter? And she's like, you want whipped cream? Like, she's adding more and more stuff. And this person's overweight by probably like 150, 200 pounds.

Yeah.

And it's just like, To me, I look at that as I understand there could be medical reasons why someone could be overweight, but that is just bad parenting. And they should— the US should just use that in a marketing video. I know they probably can't legally and just be like, don't do this.

I'll tell you what, okay, let's just do this for fun and we can move on to the next topic. So in Japan, what do you think the obesity rate is?

3-4%?

4.4% for men, 2.3% for women. Okay. Now what do you think the global average obesity rate 15, 20%? 13%. You're pretty close. Now, in the United States, the obesity rate is around 40% and it's going up, right?

40%?

40%. Yeah. Wow. So, you look at this, it's like it's 10 times more on men. And so, don't tell me this is not self-inflicted. And like, it's here, right? And by the way, why does this happen? It's all culturally. And this is not like a health podcast, guys, by the way. I just want to talk about this for a second. But my mom growing up, anytime I started to gain weight, getting too fat, you're getting too fat, you're getting too fat. Hey, it looks like you need to go to Jenny Craig. I'm not saying that's a good way to parent, but that's how I grew up. And it's, it's that, that's how Asian cultures grow up. But by the way, so going back to it real quick, The Rock, he did admit to taking steroids briefly in his late teens, but denies any ongoing use. And I think, by the way, like if you, if you take it right now, you probably should deny any ongoing use. Yeah.

Yeah. And going back to—

And I'm a huge rock fan, by the way, but we should go back to marketing. I'm a huge—

yeah. But really quickly before we go back to marketing, the reason I somewhat understand the weight, I'm not talking about the obesity, my family, we experienced the opposite. So when I was growing up, my mom would say, oh, you're eating ice cream? No problem. You want to eat cereal for dinner and Lucky Charms and all this stuff, which I'm not saying is healthy, but me and my sister, we're in the 1% category in weight. And it was—

What does that mean?

We were like the skinniest.

Okay.

So, and even when my sister had kids, her kids were in the 1 percentile in weight. You don't want to be in the 1 percentile. It means you're too skinny. So my sister would like sit there and feed her kids to try to get them to eat. And literally each meal, like an hour. She'd be like, you want In-N-Out french fries? All right.

They would eat like 4 french fries. Lots of calories.

Yeah. They're like, I'm done. But genetically, Genetically, we have the opposite issue in which we tend not to eat a lot. I don't know what it is.

Yeah, you never eat.

Yeah, it's my— it's a whole family. And it's not like we try not to eat or anything. It's just never really hungry.

Look, and by the way, so I think there's edge cases, right? I think for genetically, for you, it's like you're not going to gain much weight. And genetically, for some people, they're just going to have to be overweight, right? And but I am talking about the majority of people. And if America's 40% and Japan's like 3%, come on.

Let's see. Oh, did you see ChatGPT searches were temporarily visible in Google search results?

Oh, I thought that was a news story. feature. I thought they're just gonna allow it.

Uh, Search Engine Land talks about it. TechCrunch had an article in which ChatGPT, uh, said, oh, it's, you know, it's reverted or fixed back or whatever it was. And no longer are your—

All these SEOs were celebrating on LinkedIn.

Well, I was pissed. I was like, if my ChatGPT searches I pay are in Google searches, I'd be really pissed.

Well, no, it's, it's my understanding was if you hit the share button, it makes the link public, which shouldn't be a thing. No, it shouldn't be a thing. Yeah. Because maybe you want to share a private chat with your data to your team. Yes. Like, that's not something that should be public. I just started thinking about it now.

So yeah, no, no, I would have been pissed if my data was going public. Like, if I'm uploading important information like financials or whatever and having them do analysis and I share it, you know, within our company and someone just uses it, I would be pissed on that. Yep. Interesting here. So I've been publishing YouTube content. You have too. Uh-huh. I don't know if you've noticed this because a lot of your YouTube videos are—

You're looking at your videos?

RPM? My revenue per—

Milli?

My revenue from AI-related videos, when you look at it on an impression basis, is roughly 4x higher on my AI videos than non-AI videos.

I'm looking at mine right now, but that's interesting. So are you making more AI videos now?

No, I don't really care for the YouTube videos, but it just goes to show anything related to AI, companies are spending an arm and a leg on marketing, which Which means if you're a publisher, you can, or a creator, you can end up making way more ad revenue. But as a business, if you're in the AI space bidding for that audience, you're going to spend an arm and a leg right now based on this data.

Yeah. So the RPM on this one, I made a Madness video, it got 176,000 views. The RPM, so revenue per 1,000 views was $3.25, which is not that that high. I'm going to pick another one, but that one wasn't that high, but that one got a lot of views.

I don't really talk about Manus too much, but when I talk about ChatGPT or a lot of those other products out there, my ad revenue is pretty good.

Yeah. So I have one here on ChatGPT that I'm pulling up. So revenue on this one, $6.42.

So that's good.

Yeah. What is, what was the one that you saw the RPM? Do you remember?

No, because my team's the one who told me it was 4x. I don't ever check the revenue.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, your revenue numbers, I mean, our revenue numbers on this thing just goes back to funding the team. Yeah. And then on this one, ChatGPT, the right way to use ChatGPT, revenue per milli, $6.75.

Yeah, I know we're getting— what my team's told me is we're getting closer to 10 grand a month in revenue from YouTube. We're not at 10 grand yet, but we're getting closer. Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool.

Still can't pay for your costs.

No, still can't pay for the costs. Sadly, nowhere near.

How is your— do you feel that your YouTube is doing better now that you've kind of— are you getting in a groove with it? What I really I realized with mine is like, we, I need to have more control over the packaging, which means I want 4 headlines and 4 thumbnail concepts before, get the idea down first before we start. Like the editing only does so much at the end of the day. It's nice, but I think the idea matters a lot more and the packaging matters a lot more.

It's been working out really well for me. And I'll give you an example on this. You know, Nick heads up my sales I don't know if it's US or globally, but it's in some region.

Pretty sure it's globally.

And he sent me a message on Wednesday, new video on AI traffic is very good. Already sent it to a prospect. I usually don't get—

Oh cool, he sends it to prospects. That's a good idea.

Yeah, right?

Yeah.

And then I got a message from Hermosi. I should respond to him. Was a good one. And same thing.

What does it say? What did you talk about there?

The New SEO: Winning in AI's Trust, Not Just Ranking. I don't know what the rest of the title was. Thanks. Hope all is well. I just texted him back. He sent me that text on Wednesday. My bad, Alex, if you're listening.

It's okay.

But yeah, so we're not focusing on just pure views. Like, of course, if I talk about how to get rich from AI, I'm going to get more views, or in theory, I should get more views. I'm more so And optimizing for our ideal customer type. And what we found is the exact formula or the best formula is I spend, I don't know how many minutes now per video, call it 30 minutes to hour per video of scripting. AJ, who you know, spends another 5 hours taking that to get the script down even more.

For each video?

For each video on top of my time. That's a long time.

Yeah.

And then the editing, AJ's very anal on the editing. I think he does a— his team does an exceptionally good job, but the cost per hour on that is just through the roof.

I, my take on it is, so from you doing the Loom outlines, I think that's really important. But now what I'm going to integrate into that is, hey, I'm going to, it takes me like maybe anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to workshop packaging that I like. And then ChatGPT can create images, right? So for thumbnails I like, I think I think MrBeast obsesses over that. I'm like, whenever I've done that in the past, it's done well. So I'm like, I'm going to go back to doing that on top of the Loom outline to help it do even better. Because it's like, there's no reason why it's like, why does the Madison one have 176,000 views and then some of these other ones like not that much?

And the content is just as good.

Yeah, it comes out. I think some of my other content is better, right? Like you just, you feel like it's better, you know, it's better, but it comes down to the packaging.

Yes. And we do a lot of tests with headlines and we also do a test, a lot of tests with images and we go over them before we even publish the video.

Yeah.

Can we try to get somewhat of a consensus internally of which ones we want to test?

That's important. Like, I don't think we spend enough time on that internally, and so we're going to spend more time on it.

And then even with the scripting, we spend a lot of time with how are we going to get good soundbites in advance, and which ones are we going to cut and use for social before we even start recording.

You know that the other tools, so you know Manus, right? And you know, GenSpark, the other one, the other Chinese company. So they saw my Manus video and then And they like, so their CEO got on a call with me and their marketing leader got on a call with me and they're looking at trying to figure out how to sponsor this podcast or whatever, because they see that we're like, we're just nerding out on AI all the time, right? And I said, hey, I basically said we wanted a DreamHost deal, but—

Are they well-funded?

$100 million.

Oh, they're well-funded.

So decent, decent, yeah. But anyway—

They can afford the DreamHost deal.

Yeah, they can afford the DreamHost deal. But the CEO was like, smart guy, very crafty. He's like, well, you know, instead of paying you guys, how about I just like get you all these other AI people onto your podcast or whatever? I'm like, oh, very, very cheap. I'm like, but no, we're not going to do— I can get those people myself. Like, why do I need your help for that? Right. But, but it's, it just goes to show you that these, these videos will help you not only attract clients, but also potential partnerships, because there are angles to work with him other than just like a content thing. Right. And that's, that's how we're talking. So you never know where these things take you. I think a lot of people, especially in the agency world, it's like, okay, private equity, private equity will reach out to you and they'll say, okay, we're going to give you some money and then you're going to become a platform company and then you're going to go acquire other agencies and then you're going to exit, you're going to take one exit, then you're gonna take a second bite of the apple, right? And I think you've been approached by private equity before. Same for me. I've even been approached by VC for the agency.

Really? Venture capitalists?

Yeah.

I've never got that one. Actually, you know, I've got that one, but it really wasn't— the only VC call I think I had was Sequoia.

Yeah. So the question is, again, should you sell your company to private equity? And then you and I have thoughts on it. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. It's just a preference thing, but you go ahead first.

I think it depends where you are in life. Like, I don't do well with people telling me what to do.

Exactly.

So that's private equity or another type of company, or like a holding company buying me. But if it's enough money, I have my price because I'm a capitalist. You pay me enough, I'll deal with it.

The question is how long.

Yeah, there's always a price. There's always a price. We bank with a really good bank right now. So there's this bank out of Canada called CIBC. They also have a, I think their US headquarters is like Chicago or Missouri or one of these places. It's like a $50-ish billion market cap bank, USD, right? So it's not the biggest like a JP Morgan, but any company worth $50 billion, I would consider that a big company. And CIBC has been an amazing bank for us. They've backed us through thick and thin in the early days of our company and have a great relationship with a guy named Nick Deliver. I'm maybe mispronouncing his last name. He deals with private equity lending for the bank. So all the private equity funds. So I get a lot of really cool insights from him. He's not telling me anything that's confidential, of course. You know, he of course goes by the rules. And one interesting thing he's told me is, because he's met a lot of companies, he's met a lot of private equity companies because he's been doing this for a very, very long time, much older than I am. I think his kids are in college at at this point. And he's just like, your management team is one of the best management teams we've seen. Mm-hmm.

All right?

And he's like, private equity would love your management team. So Mike and I were talking the other day about private equity and why we think they're mediocre. Even though they can pay you a lot of money, if you look at their returns as an LP, you're lucky if you get Mike and I strive for more than 20% returns on our own company. And if you average it out from when we started, our returns are astronomical compared to private equity. We've had bad years as well though, just being very honest. And we're definitely not beating private equity. Well, technically private equity's not performing well in this market either, so we probably are at least keeping up with them, or maybe even the ones that invested in our peers, we're probably outperforming them right now.

Yeah.

And the reason my issue with private equity is, and Mike and I were talking about this, you, you've met some of my management team. Would you agree that they're good?

Yeah, very good. World-class.

Yes. I think I have some of the best executive leaderships in the marketing space. Mike and I, if we were doing this all over again tomorrow, we would hire them. But when you look at private equity, they look at leaders like we have are great, and that's what you need to keep scaling and growing.

Mm-hmm.

But we disagree with private equity on how companies are run because even though we think we have a great team and without them we wouldn't have built a big enough business, we don't think our team would've built a big enough business without us.

Mm-hmm.

Because we think like you as an entrepreneur.

Mm-hmm.

If we look at our organization, they'll tell us stuff like, oh yeah, credit for SMB, it's really hard hard to do. Mike and I are much quicker. My CEO's also named Mike. I'm talking about my co-founder, Mike Camo, at this moment. Mike Camo and I are much quicker at like, oh cool, in the next 2 hours we're just going to drop everything and we're going to go try out a lot of the tools and go figure this out ourselves and then go call up our team and be like, this is how you do it. Go and execute on it. Let me know if you need help with it and I'll redo it. Or, oh, our sales pitch is Off on this area. Oh yeah, our team, we're going to go, we're going to figure this out. Mike and I, or Mike will just sit there and be like, let's go and just figure this out and we'll go redo all of this. Or he'll just do it himself. Like, cool. Brainstorm with him. He's like, I redid the whole deck and he'll spend a day on it. What do you guys think? Where are the holes? And then like, all right, let's go get on a call with our sales team and let's work on practice pitching this.

Yeah.

And then I want you guys to roll this this out.

Yep.

Even like the software, I was talking with our team when we're trying to compete with Ahrefs and SEMrush. And I'm like, guys, you guys have been doing development for years. And if you look, we've been playing feature catch-up with Ahrefs and SEMrush. I'm just being very transparent on this, which is why they generate a lot more revenue than us. But the market's changing, even though traditional SEO generates way more revenue, everyone wants to talk about the shiny object on AI SEO. Why not let's just beat them to the market, give away more of these features for free, make it more usable, and we can actually gobble up a lot of their market share because they're really expensive compared to us. And when I got involved in Ubersuggest and ATP and pushing them every single day, and you've seen some of the text threads.

Yeah.

We're doing stuff in weeks that were taking my team 6 months to a year and I I just met up Lou, who runs product for us at Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic, and I asked her, I'm like, you've been with us since maybe the beginning of the year. I'm like, why the heck has crap been moving slow for like 5, 6 months and now it's been moving fast? And people, when we ask them this, don't always— almost always they don't have an answer. But what's really helped is Mike and I getting involved in the company and every piece that we see an issue and we just go in and change and fix, and we don't care what people say. Like, dude, the whole NP Digital website. I was like, I don't like any of it. I'm redoing it all. And my team was just like, you have to get people involved in the politics. Some people are like, I like this, I like that. And I'm like, no, forget any of this. It's my company. My company. I know there's a few people in the organization that would be upset if they weren't involved and they provide value. So I just took those 2 people because I also want their input. And I hit up my buddy Gajan who owns Spiralife.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, dude, who can I hire? CRO? I don't want to spend a lot of money. I just need homepage help copy. I can write a lot of the copy too, but I just need brainstorming. He's like, dude, I'll just do it for free for you. We'll just do the homepage. Let's crank it out next week. Let's all get on the phone. And I already sent him the points 1 through 6, what I want to focus on, what I want to remove. And then we'll go back and forth, all of us on the phone. He'll mock it up, get it designed. And then once he does a homepage. I'll finish the rest of the site with my team, but I'll mainly try to write the copy. And then our internal designers will just follow the format. We have good designers and can just carry the rest. I didn't want to spend even $2,000 on it. I figured out how to get it on Scrappy myself. Keep in mind, I'm well networked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Gajan's one of the best CRO, not just companies, but individually, he's one of the best CROs globally, right? But this is why I'm getting back to it to tie it all in. My issue with private equity is the way they run businesses is very cookie cutter. And I think, and I'm not trying to talk crap on my leadership, I think they're amazing and they do stuff way better than Micah and I at certain things. But I think that entrepreneur viewpoint and the way we run a company is also needed and very good, and you're not going to grow as fast unless you have that. So I think the real balance is you need both of those things, but the moment a company is owned by private equity, they tend to run it more like a private equity shop because their formula works for And they lack that entrepreneurship element and there's not really enough motivation to really push that entrepreneur.

And so here's my take on it. You kind of hit the nail on the head, but I don't think it's worth it, at least for me, to sell my company to private equity. Obviously there's a price for everything, right? But I don't necessarily— I'm not chasing the liquidity or anything like that. That's one piece, right? But the second piece is, to your point, they have a formula that works for them. It's like, okay, we're going to have a platform company, we're going to take on debt, we're going to take on a few turns, we're going to lever up, right? And we're going to buy some other companies. And then hopefully there's a, there's a larger multiple. But, and then their game is like, okay, well, we know what works for this. Okay, you're gonna have to cut over here. You're gonna have to run things our way. And to your point, I don't do well with somebody telling me what to do, right?

Yes.

And so I'm not gonna have fun anymore. And then we do this partly, obviously, to add value to the world and also to make money too. But we do it because it's really fun, right? And so I wouldn't like, if I don't necessarily need or want the liquidity right now and I like what I do, then why do I need to change how I'm doing things in that respect.

So I have a few questions for you before we end. One, you've gotten hit up by private equity. If you had to guess roughly how many times?

I, I, there's a lot of emails that keep popping up.

But like conversations you've had, not the emails.

Oh, probably like 3 or 4 conversations.

Like solid conversations where people are interested in buying you and you're talking to 'em and going over. If you had to name the 3 biggest reasons why you decided not to do it other than you want to control and you don't want to answer to someone, what are the 3 What are the 3 biggest reasons outside of that?

I think it's one, the control thing is it has to be number one.

No, no, I'm saying outside of control.

Yeah, but it is number one though, right? It's like, so when I think about one of the conversations that I had, it's like, okay, well, one, I'm not going to get to do things my way. That's part of control. Okay. 2, I'm not going to enjoy coming into work anymore. Okay. If that's the case, then like, why am I doing this?

So it sounds like your biggest issue on why you said no is actually just control, 'cause the other 2 are kind of related to control.

It's control, but also it's, it's, it's not a good offer either.

Okay. But even if you had a good offer, your still biggest issue is control, correct?

Yeah. It's, it's, if I don't have control, I'm not gonna have fun anymore. Yeah.

Okay. So you wanting control, can you gimme an example Can you think of one or two things that you did with the business that you were able to do because you controlled it that you wouldn't have been able to do if you had private equity backing?

The last couple years having to save this business again. If there was PE backing, we would've shut the thing down, right?

No, they would've cut costs.

Would've cut costs, but I don't think that we would've reinjected capital back into the thing.

I don't think you would've recovered.

Yeah, there would've been—

You've more than recovered and you've done well because you reinjected it and you Operated at breakeven to loss.

It was sweat equity and like monetary equity.

Yeah. You started personally putting in money and investing in Carrot and other divisions to try to not only recuperate the losses but grow the business.

And I don't think Carrot would have became a thing.

No. Yeah, that's true. They would have never let you do Carrot with— because that's reinvesting. They would have let you put your own money in. Yeah.

And so like, again, they have a formula. There's, there's no right or wrong. And I think just for you and me, we have a certain way of wanting to do things. And I think I think I would just say that when I see a lot of agency owners taking the private equity, to me it's kind of like, man, I think they could have built it bigger, but it's a form of like maybe they didn't need— they need liquidity and that's fine, right? They need it for their family and everything. But if they don't, to me it's like a form of tapping out.

Yeah. Yeah. So you and I are on a very similar page.

I don't know how to tap out, I think.

So my issue with control isn't because I have a weird feeling when someone owns a majority of a company, because I've had bad luck with investors and I've had good luck with investors as well. But the second issue is, is when someone owns the majority of the company, if I look at what we've done, this has been a bad economy for agencies. I'm assuming you agree with that. You can look at the jobs report as well.

Yeah.

And a lot of companies outside of AI are not really growing, like the Targets of the world, the Walmarts are struggling, right? I'm not talking about their stock price. If you just look at their financials, a lot of these companies are not growing like they used to. And with us when things got bad, I spent more money and I spent money when I shouldn't have to reinvest and expand globally. But now we get extremely large corporations hitting us up because we did that. But I lost a ton of money doing it. And AJ, AJ told me he had a call with you the other day. Him and I were doing a lunch meeting brainstorming our next week topics yesterday.

Yeah.

And AJ asked me if, he wasn't talking about Single Room, but he was just like, if there was another agency that wanted to do what you want to do, and go global. Why don't just a lot of 'em do 'em so they get all these RFPs? And I'm like, imagine having to burn $30+ million to do that with no investor, not knowing if it's going to work out. Yeah. And not knowing how much revenue it'll drive.

PE shop wouldn't have let you do that.

No, they wouldn't have let me do that. Yeah. And I had a few conversations with PE when we were going through the process of shopping the company. We actually went through and we had a banker and the moment they all told me I wouldn't be able to do that, and they didn't say they won't be able to, they're like, well, this would just be a discussion and we would have to look at the numbers. numbers and what pans out. And that's when I was like, ah, this ain't going to work out. To me it's a yes or no. And I'll tell you, I believe this is the future and why we should do it. And yeah, we're going to have to lose money. I don't know how much. And that wasn't acceptable. And I'm not saying they're wrong. It was just more so that didn't work out for me. And I was like, I took a bet when others probably wouldn't be able to. And I did it in a really crap economy. I know everyone says economy's strong. You can't look at the economy just based off GDP growth and the stock market going up.

Yeah.

There's a lot of other factors you have to play, but I'm assuming you would agree with me and most of our customers would agree, especially the ones that are in the AI space, which is the majority. Most of them do not say the economy is strong.

No, it's not. And the final thing I'll say here is it's already hard enough to run a business. It's even harder when you have the whims of all these other opinions. And I don't think there's anything wrong with having a board or anything like that. But if all these people start to dissent and start going in a different direction, you're not going to be able to add in your magic as an And that's just what I think, right? And so like, look, it depends for everyone. I think it's not for me, it's not for you. But if you give me like billions of dollars, sure, it's for me. So yeah. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.