Elon Musk: Live Events Are The Only Remaining Luxury

I can't— the button should go live, but I'll wait. Yeah, waiting. So we're live officially. Okay, sending data. Okay. Oh, it's— there we go. There we go. I see us. Oh, this is cool. Let's see how this goes. Oh, this is great. Okay. All right, we're starting, Neil.

Okay, let me hit record on the cameras and stuff.

So guys, those of you that can see us right now, we're about to go live because we figured we spent all this time and effort and You know, hey, is the car ready? What's this guy? By the way, we start recording—

Uh, I have like 2 seconds. What's up? When will we be done?

He has 0 seconds. He has 0 seconds, motherfucker. All right, guys, just, uh, okay, those of you guys coming in, tell us where you're coming from right now.

Okay, replace him.

We're about to start, uh, recording officially.

How much? How much is it? $10,000. Wow, everything's so expensive. Alright, replace it.

Alright, here we go. Officially live?

Officially live. Alright, bye.

Alright.

We're officially live.

Neil's too busy, Neil's talking on the phone.

Well, I got— I only have one car. I'm trying to pick up my second car right now.

Comes in 5 minutes late to his own—

No, it's the Bentley. We're getting it serviced right now.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

If you knew how much a stupid fuel change costs, oh my god.

How much is it?

Uh, they quoted $3,000-something.

What?

Fuel change, replacing wipers and other bullcrap stuff. And then he calls me right now because I'm like, is it ready? Because we only have one car. He's just like, oh, the rear brake pads need to be changed. And I was like, how much is it?

Yeah.

And he's like, you're lucky it's not just the rotors, it's just the brake pads. $1,700. I mean, just for the brake pads.

That's how they get you. All right, we're gonna get started officially. So did you know that Elon Musk said this? So Elon Musk, the only remaining luxury. Did you see the interview he did with one of your, the Indian billionaire?

Mukesh Ambani?

No, no. I forgot. Namath. Have you heard of this guy? So he did an interview with Elon and then Elon was just saying that if we're looking at a world where you're going to have products doing all the work, then live events are the only remaining luxury. Argument is that live events are going to become even more expensive, which is interesting to me because I've done these live events over the last few years and people still keep asking me right now because I didn't do it this year. People are like, Eric, when's the live event coming back? Eric, when's the live event coming back?

Right.

And then we talked about how—

Oh, not live, like in person.

In-person events. Yeah. So live events are the only remaining luxury. And I believe that to be true because even though you used to be more of a hermit, you're out there more engaging with people, talking with people, and you're even doing your own events now, things like that. So I've always liked doing these things, even though I do my own events. Yeah, you do your own events. When you speak at a conference, you do like a mini event.

Conference.

Yeah, but even conferences do. So your thing is like a mini event, right? But I'm just saying, like, even the YPO one, that's like a regular event, but like a big conference too. I've always enjoyed these things, and, and, uh, I feel like you have too.

I, I enjoy them, um, when I know some of the people. Events aren't effective, but like when you have a few people to talk to that you know It becomes fun because not only do you have the event and you're meeting people, you also can do dinners after or hang out. It's just like when we do these in-person podcast recordings. Financially, is it worth our time? No. But what's your—

We get to hang out, we get to eat after.

That's right.

And we get to catch up with each other. We get to hear Noah's stories too.

Yes. Noah always has amazing stories. If you get to know Noah, he has a very, very interesting life.

Check it out, bikinisports.com.

Is that your site?

Yeah, bikinisports.com. Okay.

Yeah, so, uh, but just generally speaking, he's, uh, the businesses. But yeah, we gotta catch up. We gotta find out who's doing what. Um, I get to push everyone and try to convince them to get married.

Yeah.

I try to convince Eric. I try to convince Noah. One day you guys will listen to me.

Yeah, maybe.

Um, but yeah. Yeah, I would say in-person events are good.

Like, I'm thinking at some point, I don't know if it's next year, but the year after, I'll probably bring mine back and then we'll see where it goes. I guarantee you if we did, I don't want to do the work, nor do you want to do the work. But if someone wanted to do the work for a marketing school conference and make it big, I guarantee you it would probably do well. But I just don't want to do it because we have to focus on our businesses. So that is no good. I'll tell you that much. And even you talk about this podcast, which we can go into too. So you were just talking to a sponsor. I'm talking to one next week actually, one event that we usually speak at, right? And finally, I hope if we get that deal done, then we don't need to worry because I'm talking to other podcast sponsors right now as well. It's just not worth it. I realized, and then I look at all these contracts. It's too much work. And it's just like, it's a 3-year lock-in. And then, you know, we're going to take this revenue split and then you— it has to be exclusive and this and that. I'm just like, no, how about we just work with one of those? And then we take these influencer deals, these one-off deals where it's like, you know, $25,000 a pop or whatever. And that's great. Now, am I saying that's easy? Everyone's gonna get that initially? No. But we've been doing this podcast for like eight for eight years or so, and you keep going. Usually something good will happen from it.

Dude, I agree. On a side note, speaking about marketing, did I ever show you this?

No. What is this?

I think this is the old one, but I'm trying a new marketing format.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did I ever show you this?

Neil is showing me he he last week Neil started doing a podcast.

A podcast.

What is it?

It was just— we just sat down in a room and we just recorded our conversation.

That's still a podcast.

Sure, but we're not gonna publish it as a podcast. We'll just publish the video format.

I think you should publish everything. Like Spotify, right? Like everything, podcasts. Where are you guys sitting, by the way?

Where are we sitting?

Yeah, where are you here? They're in LA?

Same studio that I currently use. It was free.

So they had to come up to LA? Because I know some of them are—

Oh yeah, they came to LA.

Okay.

And I did— we used the same studio, it was free.

So you're gonna do it like, what, once a month? What's the deal?

Some of the people on my team want to do it once a week. That is gonna be very tough. Yeah, but I enjoyed it because people that I work with—

You actually dressed up in that video.

No, I didn't. Look, I'm wearing yoga pants. They're gray yoga pants.

Oh, you are?

Yeah.

Those aren't the Laurel pants?

No, they're gray yoga pants for like $50.

Okay, continue, continue. Well, hold on, before you continue. So just so everyone knows, Neil in that video has 2 of his team members, marketing. They're just having a conversation about marketing. Was it like a 90-minute video? What is that?

An hour. We tried to keep it an hour.

So it's an hour conversation. You probably hang out with them afterwards too, right?

Yes. Yeah. Got to do lunch and got to talk shop. But the reason I enjoyed it was I have so many coworkers and colleagues. A lot of them have worked with me for so many years. I know them really well, but we don't talk as often. And I know a lot of these people really well because when we started, we were much smaller. Smaller in headcount size. So for me, I'm just having a conversation with them about work and seeing what they think and how things are going, and it's just being recorded.

Yeah. And the other thing too is, one, you build a deeper relationship besides— because when you're remote, transactional, it's much more, hey, how's this going right now? Where's this going right now? Are we going to close this deal or whatever? But when you're talking to them, you start to understand more about their families, what their interests are, and things like that. Because we just did an annual planning, or we call it 3-year planning now. We just did it yesterday. We had a couple of people fly in and, you know, it's much more different because you meet them in person and it becomes a relationship, not a transaction. And then, you know, during dinner, you know, we get to know each other a lot better. But I actually wish we still had more time to hang out with each other because it was just like they flew in. It was like business all day, had dinner, had dinner the night before, and that was it. And now they're flying home today.

You mentioned You mentioned that you're meeting up for annual planning, but you mentioned time. What's the difference? You actually do 3 years worth of planning, or is it just annual planning?

So there's a— you're not gonna read this book, but there's a book called The 3-HAG, right?

Okay.

So BHAG, you know what a BHAG is?

Uh-uh.

Okay, Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

Okay, I know that one.

3-HAG is the 3-year highly achievable goal, okay? So the reason— remember when Jeff Bezos was like, hey, like whatever you see us building now, it's taken us 3 years to get here. So whatever we're working on now, it's gonna be 3 years. Brian Dice actually posted this too. They don't do annual planning, they do 3-year planning as well. And so the point of the 3HAG is you plan out 12 quarters in advance. You might have the next 4 quarters, the next year, that's probably a little more crystallized versus like it's a little— but now for me, what I'm looking to do is I'm holding each person accountable. Hey, you said you're gonna hit this number this quarter, you said you're gonna do these things. I'm just looking at, hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? That way I don't need to worry about 20 different things per person.

I'm still a little bit confused. So when you think about the big, hairy, audacious goals, don't ever get achieved in the first 12 months or first year.

That's like the first 10 to 25 years.

Yeah. So then you're running on this model of what is called 3-year highly achievable goal or something like that.

Yeah.

In your annual meeting, when you're saying you really look at 3— Dice's new annual, I'm still a little bit lost on what you mean by You're looking at a 3-year goal, but you're planning out 12 months.

Yeah. So you have, obviously, if you're going to do 3 years, you need to have the next 12 months figured out too, right? But we're just planning more long-term out. And then the high-level vision, like the mission of the company is we're the B2B marketing partner that companies never outgrow, right? And so for us, like, okay, what do we need to build out? Not just product roadmap out like 12 months in advance, or like, hey, who do we need to hire 12 months in advance? But how are we going to map things out 3 years in advance?

Yeah.

That's what it is. And we're looking at each quarter. And I don't really find— I kind of communicated this yesterday, but a lot of people run on EOS. You guys were kind of on EOS for a while too, traction?

Yeah, for around 2 years, and then it kind of— I'm not gonna say it broke.

You modified it.

Kind of just modified it. I think traction isn't that great once you scale past like $40 or $50 or something like that million in revenue.

Yeah.

It's not for us. Maybe I'm wrong, but at least for us, we found it not that great.

Not as useful. So I don't like the, like, why do you need to plan like every quarter? Like you should talk about the metrics and revisit what the annual plan is or what the 3-year plan is. But in my mind, the quarterly planning almost started to become theater for us. And so I don't like that, right? And so similar to what you said, a lot of my friends that are, that kind of similar comment to you, it's like once you get past a certain scale, it's like, yeah, EOS, you're not gonna modify version of it. That's all. 'Cause the system breaks.

Yeah, the system does break. But cool. And when you did your 3-year planning, how'd it go overall? So you're going to just— other than focusing on, hey, this is the number on your head for the quarter, I'm going to just keep on track of this.

Yeah. So let me tell you the number one thing I own. Okay. I remember I told you about the app Granola. So Granola is a note-taking app. So I literally had it on sitting the whole time I was recording. And so I have an entire transcript of the thing. And literally what I said was, because ChatGPT has memory of how I think, how I evaluate everything, how I evaluate people, teams, like how we're going, right? And I just said, okay, based on, you know, where do you think the deficiencies are for me, for other people? Where do we need to get better? What, like stack rank me, like, and stack rank where you think we're gonna, what, like what we need to do to hit our goals, right? And so that helps, that gives me more insights as well because we have this transcript now. It records all the action items, everything. Right? That's more tactical. But I would say overall, going into that was to get that 3-year Hair Audacious goal set. Because you know what happens when you guys were first starting NP Digital? It's like, it's very hard. For some people, it's very hard to hold them accountable. But when you hold them accountable to one thing and just keep pointing at that, and it's one number, that's what I was looking for. And I was looking for that commitment from everyone. And that's what we got. Peter Thiel did, right? Back in the day, it's just like one thing, one thing, one thing. I don't like going back to you when you work with like, who reports to you directly? Nobody?

I have no direct reports.

Okay, so when you're holding, like you're working with like Michael Eakson, for example, like what are you looking at primarily? What are you talking about all the time?

Sales. Okay, sales and churn. That's it. But they go hand in hand. It's what it's really going down to is what, how much revenue are we producing? Like, that's the one real thing that I talked about is like, What's our revenue growth?

Yeah. It's different for you because that is very much your operator and you can go to him while you can kind of like, you know, float around the organization type of thing.

I have a different thing. So—

Like more examples.

So for our VP of marketing or head of marketing or whatever Saulo's title is, I don't discuss leads with him or anything like that because like those basic metrics like leads and traffic, he meets up with some of the executive team. I don't know who. Who on a weekly basis or monthly basis, like how are the ads performing and stuff like that. Where I focus on Solo is what are the channels that are getting RFPs, and we already know what they are for us. How do we double them up?

Mm-hmm.

So when I look at 2023, I know we're in 2025 and about to wrap up just in the United States, right? I don't want to take international because the numbers are really skewed from a percentage-wise because we're much smaller. So the percentages are growing at an unrealistic rate because it's law of small numbers. But in the United States in 2023, we had 16 RFPs. 2024, we had 25. So it's a little bit more than a 50%.

Oh, you're doing RFP count?

Uh-huh.

Yeah, yeah, got it.

We do it per country.

Yeah.

In the United States in 2024, it was 25. So it was a little bit more than 56.5%. 56.25%, if I'm not— my math could be a little bit off. And 2025, so going to this year, the year's not over, we're at 36 exactly. So I'm like pushing the team, we need 39, 39.

Yeah.

39 gets us to 56.

Okay, yeah.

So last year we were at 56.25% growth. I'm trying to get at least 56%, so it'll be similar enough. I'll be flexible on the 0.25%, but I know, so I'm like pushing extreme.

You want it?

Yeah, I need more than that, but I'm pushing really hard on the channels that produce RFPs. I'm like, double down, let's sprint.

Yeah, you know, but my point is for everyone listening, it's, um, so you see just with Neil's examples, one solo, it's just RFPs with, with money. You might look at retention because hand in hand, right? Because Retention helps sales compound. But when you're holding someone accountable, if you're working with a leader, if you just point out one thing, like a lot of people like to say, well, I did these five different things, these ten different things. My mind, my cognitive load already starts to blow up, and I start to get really frustrated. I just one thing.

Yes, like with my even discuss revenue and profitability. I discuss cash flow with him, and that's it. Yeah, like what's the cash flow look like? And so much so, dude, I straight up get an email. Not every day because they don't send me it on the weekdays or on holidays. Monday through Friday, I get an email every single day on how cash flow balances in that email. Once a week, I get it including US and global accounts because it takes them quite a bit of time to collect all the data from all the other countries.

Yeah.

But 5 days a week, I'm getting US numbers. One day a week, I'm getting US and global numbers. Combined with global numbers.

These are on email. How many check-in— because you get check-in text messages and you get check-in emails as well regarding metrics— how many of those do you think you're getting per week in total?

Per week? Uh-huh.

Revenue, cash flow, churn.

I don't know, like—

RFPs.

20?

Content. 20. Yeah, including chat.

I would probably say 20.

And here's— so my question with 20 is how do you make sure with humans that that's consistent?

Well, I follow up with them like crazy every single week.

See, the thing with you is your memory is really good. Your memory is really good.

Yeah, I don't forget.

So they probably forget. They probably start to drop off, but you never forget.

I'm talking with one of my leaders who runs UK for us. His name is Brandon. Yeah, I know a potential customer is gonna get back to him This Friday. Today I woke up a little bit later, but I woke up at 4:16. I don't use an alarm, but I woke up at 4:16 AM. First thing when I woke up, I texted him, potential deal go. Did we close it?

You didn't even brush your teeth yet.

No, I didn't even brush my teeth. I just straight rolled out of bed, looked at the clock on my phone, sent the text on WhatsApp. Okay. I'm still in bed at this point. I literally sent the text and he sends back a message being like, he's like, my meeting is— has it, right? So he's like, few more hours and then I'll give you update.

You have like a built-in, like an AI with you that's like an auto reminder. That's what you have. You've already— you've always had that. Yeah.

Yes, because what I found early on in my career, and I started my career in marketing over anything else— I know, yes, you can call it entrepreneurship, but I really focus on marketing more than anything else early on. I learned that the more you push, the more you get done. The less you push, the less you get done. And when you push in marketing, if everyone's happy with you, you're not pushing too much. If they're really pissed at you 24/7, you're pushing too much. So I found that where they are a little irritated with me, that's when I know I'm pushing the right amount.

That's a good clip. That's a good clip for you.

And I like everyone being irritated with me just enough.

Yeah.

And just enough where they blow up at me at least once every few months.

Yeah.

Because if they don't blow up at me or in the organization, I'm not pushing hard enough.

You know, I've actually never thought about that, but how true is that? Because if I look at our last 5 years, we— the acquisitions, all that stuff, right? When I was— when everyone was really nice to me and I was very nice to everyone, things weren't getting done. But when I'm constantly nagging people and I can tell they're getting annoyed, things They're getting done, but I haven't gotten to your level. So so maybe I'm going to push it a little.

Quarter's a little long. My blowups don't happen every month. You once a month. Are you talking about per individual?

Per individual. Yeah. So ninety percent.

I would say once every two months at the latest. Maybe once a month. They're just not telling me.

Six blowups a year is the expectation.

Yes, and they'll usually text me stuff like. Like some of the executives would be like, it's not yelling at you.

It's like, hey, back off a little bit.

No, like I'll get text messages. I'm not going to name who, but I'll get text messages be like, hey, you need to go for a walk. Like relax, go for a walk. And yeah, it does. But I'm okay with it because I know they're pushing and they're doing what's best for the company. And I do know I push really hard. And usually most of the blowups aren't like a text message, like, go for it. Like, Neil, can you just stop? Right? They're like, you're causing too much chaos. Or like, let's say someone who's not as high, but they're high enough and they're running like a country. They're like, hey, right now is really stressful. Can we just talk about this in another week or two? I don't have enough time to get everything Everything you're looking for, you're asking for a lot. It's just not feasible. Can you just? Can we just talk about this a week later? Like at that point, I know they're really pissed at me, but they can't say F you. I'm really pissed at you, so they're being really nice about it. But cruel? I'm not trying to make people. I think that's cruel. Pissed off at me. I just know you got to push to get stuff done. And when we started our careers in marketing, like I'd be like, all right. Oh, we got on the homepage of Dig. What else? Cool. What was the conversions? What were the backlinks for it? We need another one. What's lined up for next week? And you just got, if you don't push, you become like every other corporation and you just move really slow and nothing really happens.

Yeah. It's the Shopify founder said this. So Tobi said this, it's like the founder's job is to increase the room of the temperature because natural, natural what happens, like you, the room temperature wants to come down. Right?

Yeah.

So, so your job is to keep increasing, increasing, increasing the temperature, and then sometimes dial it back a little bit, right? But probably most— more often than not, you're increasing temperature. And what's interesting to me is—

no, no, I usually don't dial it back ever. I'll dial it back by that— with that person by just not talking to them for a few days, like up to a week.

Still dialing it back?

No, but I'm still pushing hard. I just get them a week of breathing room.

Yeah.

But what I expect does not change. It still stays the same.

Yeah, but letting them go for a little bit is dialing back a little bit. You have to like, you know, you can't, you can't keep pushing on somebody.

No, I'm still pushing. So if I pushed him to do something by a certain time, even though they're pissed off at me, the invitation stays the same. I just don't follow up every 2 or 3 days. I'll follow up a week later. Yeah.

So that's what I'm like. I get what you're saying, but that's still Technically you're backing off a little bit, but then you ramp it back up. That's what I'm saying. Like, it's still mostly this, but it's down a little bit and it's back to this.

We're saying the same thing, but for anyone listening, I think when you push, you're pushing to get something done. The getting something done and deadline isn't changing. It's me following up and pestering and bothering them. That's what changes, in which I'll slow it down and then I'll ramp it back up. Because they've cooled down from me pushing and they've gone over back, but they know that they still need to hit that deadline and get what I'm looking for done by that day.

You know what's fascinating? I actually, so I, because my ChatGPT knows me so well, right? It was like, okay, like me pushing, doing everything I could in these last 5 years to bring us back, right? It's like, hey, this is, you know, you can't do that at the next level. And I'm like, What do you mean? Like, you've been doing it. You've been the same person the whole time. What do you mean this, this, there, you can't do this at the next level? This is how I am, right? But this is why sometimes the AI can be wrong. So—

Why does the AI think you can't do it at the next level?

Well, those are very short shorts though. But anyway, so, um, like we were talking about this yesterday actually. So in the, like, the leadership thing, like, I've been called a fruit fly where I'm just kind of hovering around, right? And so the argument is that the me being involved with everything causes chaos, and it does cause chaos. You can admit sometimes it causes chaos, right? You just said earlier, just chaos, right?

Yeah.

But at the same time, a little chaos, like, you know, keeps people on their toes and we keep moving along there. So that's— it's like, as long as I'm not being disrespectful, as them, we're moving in the right direction. What's wrong?

Yeah, but you're totally right. You got to keep pushing and try to go into the right direction. And some people like it and some people won't. The people that don't and can't handle it, change them out. As cutthroat as that sounds, that's how it is.

This is business, guys. And so one thing that was said to me yesterday, this is funny. So I have this topic here, but it's, it's, you know, we have to, we have to let, we have to let the cake bake, right? So founders have to let the cake bake. This is We can talk about this, and I want to get your take on it. But I'll tell you one thing, my mom used to say bake a cake, that meant something different. I mean, that meant use the restroom. But going back to founders must let the cake bake, what that actually means is you might have a lot of different initiatives, but you have to let them sit, right? You have to stop opening the oven all the time. What do you think about that?

No, I agree, and that's why I pick different problems to hop around with, because the cake doesn't bake fast enough for most initiatives.

Yep. I mean, you can— okay, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said this. Do you remember? I think it was Charlie that said it's like, or 9 different women, but it's not— baby's not going to come out like, you know, in a month.

Like— Correct. It's like when—

Having 9 babies.

Yeah. It's like when we do SEO, we know if we make changes to a website right now and do all these SEO, you know, link building, brand mentions, creating content, We know we're not going to get the results we want in 30 days. Wait 6 months, wait a year. But you can push on that one topic, let it bake, and have that team or department or person keep pushing while you go focus on something else.

Did you want to know something? So going back to the 3-year planning yesterday, so something that you probably won't do, but let me tell you what that's been helpful for. In YPO, there's this thing called a key associate form. You know, you know what a form is, right? So forms like you may with these 8 to 10 people a month. You never got involved with one, but like, that's what happens, right? So, um, turns out like forums have been very impactful for me. I started doing that since I was like 26 years old. Um, and you meet with these people, you talk about the 5% of things that you can't talk about with like your spouse or your partner. So very valuable. I learned a lot, and because I was only 26, these people were like way, way, way more experienced than I was. Um, so get this, my, um, CTO, for example, he's in a CTO key associate So I pay $3,000 a year, and he's with CTOs that are like way ahead of him, right? These are significant businesses. Same thing might happen with on the sales side. There might be like a Chief Revenue Officer forum, and everyone's like far ahead.

Yeah.

And so what's happening is these people are learning through osmosis. And for $3,000 a year, like to me, I'm like, that's worth it, right? And so that's one of the benefits I'm getting from YPO, I would say right now. And this just came out recently. And so food for thought.

Have an interesting topic here that says if you hate billionaires, you have a low IQ.

Yes, I believe that if you hate billionaires, you have a low IQ because when I log into Threads, all I see is people complaining about billionaires. It's like, well, billionaires should be taxed more. Billionaires should do this. I'm like, well, if you replace the word billionaires with like successful people who have added a lot of value, you're vilifying especially what America stands for. Right? Having agency, building your own thing, right? You're taking your potential to max, to your max potential. And I'm just like, why are we vilifying success? Why? It's like, how has anyone having a billion dollars affected you or affected me?

No.

And so to me, I'm just like, we should be celebrating it. Pointing fingers, I believe that you have low IQ because you're blaming people who have done nothing to you.

Yes.

And it's like, oh, well, they're extorting from people, they're stealing from people there. And I'm like, wait, but anybody who has worked for these billionaires voluntarily agreed to work for these people. They weren't enslaved or anything like that. And so they can quit, they can go find any other job. They're not getting paid enough. Well, that's the agreement. Like, the salary is what they agreed to, and that's what the market is paying. Should they be paying more?

Yeah, the only area I think this fails, and I get why some people hate billionaires, is Is sometimes they get they use their money to get involved when they shouldn't. So, you know, like if you look at George Soros, he's funded a lot of stuff. And in California specifically, I'm not trying to be political. I'm just telling you the facts here. He was one of the people that funded if you commit soft crimes, or I don't know if they're considered soft crimes, but if you a lot of them would be classified as petty and you don't go to jail. Like stealing stuff from a store, right? Eventually California overturned a lot of those, or some of those laws, because crime just went through the roof and people were really pissed off. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, people's homes were getting broken into all the time. It's like, oh cool, they get caught, they just get let go. And the police departments would keep complaining that we're just not allowed to keep them, they continue to let go. That's where I have an issue with Billionaires in which sometimes they get involved in stuff that they shouldn't be, and I wish the laws were pushing people away from that.

I agree with you. There's always bad actors. So I can't believe I actually had a query that— so those of you that can see this right now, so— oh damn it. So this meme over here, you can see this. So the wrong enemy is not necessarily the rich up here. This is what's happening for most people. It's like a box over here that you have the rich up top and then the non-rich, right? And it shows the rich as the enemy. Then you go to the other side You see the box is different. The left side, there's always the correct actors among the rich, among the non-rich as well. These are the people who are the— that's the enemy, right? It's not necessarily the rich or the non-rich. There's always bad actors.

Yeah, I agree. Like, if you look at Bill Gates, whether you love or hate him, his money has done a lot for the world. He's donated probably more money than anyone else, at least what they posted online. It's like You could hate him, but really a lot of his money has been used for good.

And then it's like, oh no, the philanthropy doesn't count. You should tax them more. And that's a whole other conversation. But I'm just saying over here, I think most people don't think about, hey, the right enemy is people who are bad actors. You know, in this case, I don't want to make it too political. But in this meme, it says like, or this chart is like people who use government to control you. Right. And then on the other side, it's like people who allow other people to live in I think that is what we're looking for in this world. We want other people to live in peace. We want other people to be successful. We want other people that have an equal opportunity, not necessarily—

Yeah. Let's go to vibe coding from Dharmesh, the HubSpot founder.

Yeah. So I see you like the topics. The topics are useful. So Dharmesh said this. Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. On where vibe coding fails. So you and I agree, Gemini 3 is amazing. You like, we can probably build a lot of—

It's really good.

The argument is this, right? So Dharmesh uses, he's the CTO co-founder of HubSpot. He's vibe coding every single day. Now everyone's like, oh, I can just build all these things. I can vibe code and then shut down my HubSpot instance. But that's not the reality because you need someone to still maintain the backend, the code, like all this stuff. Otherwise, like for example, if you and I learn how to oil change, Just because we know how to do that, should we be doing it? Or you just went to this—

I thought about it. I actually did Google how to change oil in my Bentley when I saw the price.

Still a waste of your time. If you map out your hourly rate, it's still not worth your time.

Dude, at $3,000-something, it's a lot of money.

Okay, how long do you think it would take you to do?

No, but then I started looking at the type of oil you had to get and where. I'm like, I don't know where I'm gonna find a store to buy this. I'm like, forget this.

Exactly. So it's not worth your time. So some things are better left off for experts to do. That's why I think we're gonna see a proliferation in software, but you still need focus. And like, if you're building like this Yeti thing, you still need— they're very focused on what they're doing, right? You still need to maintain this argument ultimately. Like, that's where vibe coding fails. It's great, we're gonna see a lot more people building stuff, but for people that have companies already, you still should probably focus on your mission. That's where you're still probably gonna need like HR software, CRMs, ERPs, and things like that.

Yes. Yeah, I look at vibe coding as a It's cool. It can help you get things off the ground. But if you want to just focus on the marketing industry, most people in the marketing industry spend their time vibe coding stuff that they should— they're just wasting time they should never do in the first place. And I'll give you an example of this. I was talking with the marketing team. They have 40-something employees, good-sized company. And They were talking about how they're vibe coding tools that are going to make them more efficient on social media. And I said, what do you mean? They're like, oh, well we have content in different languages. We have different campaigns running. So we're vibe coding our content calendar, our posting schedule, the tracking of the ROI. And I was like, okay, well tracking ROI is going to be They're like, well, we'll, we'll vibe code as much as possible so we can have a homegrown solution that is more better suited for our company.

This is no different than people trying to build stuff internally like 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

And then I was like, why don't you just use Sprout Social or Hootsuite? They're like, it's not perfect. And I'm like, you building something isn't going to be perfect either way. And you could be talking about how much money you're going to save by not paying those software solutions. And you can say, hey, you didn't pay developer duties, but the people are spending their time and you're paying them a salary. And if you break it down per hour, it would have just been cheaper to pay for Hootsuite or Sprout Social.

Mm-hmm, 100%.

And when I said that, a few of the people argued with me, but the CMO of the organization, it clicked and he's like, you're right, my team's spending way too much. And if I look at our quarterly numbers, we're not growing as fast as we used to. And it could be for a lot of variables. I think it's actually the economy, but they're just like, when we look at our output, our team is using AI for a lot of stuff, but the output has increased, but none of the stuff that they're really focusing on is moving the needle when it comes to— and I'm like, yeah, because we're focusing on stuff that's related to, hey, let me build my own Hootsuite.

It's what we call perceived progress. It feels like you're doing a lot. It feels like you're impacting the But what ultimately matters, and this is what Dharmesh said, for most people, you want to spend every calorie possible on creating value for your customers. Yeah. And you can't do everything. You can't be everything to everyone. And so he said this, like, he's like, look, even with this powerful— that HubSpot replaced with Vibe-coded variant is exactly zero. Zero. The number of applications we plan to replace is also exactly zero. It's not the absence of talent that keeps us from rolling out our own presence of what we say focus. It would be silly to try to replace our HR team collab expense tracking and 100 other SaaS apps when we can just use them and buy them.

Dude, speaking of vibe coding and software, so I was in San Francisco this week, and I stayed at my sister's house. Of course, good deal. Talking because I was there for a few days. So we were talking about a lot of SaaS apps and—

Keaton's your co-founder for Crazy Egg? Uh-huh.

There's a lot of SaaS apps out there. And if you look at like Lovable, you look at Clue.ly, or is it Classy or is it Clue.ly? I think it's Clue.ly. Clue.ly. Clue.ly.

The virality one?

Uh-huh, the Korean co-founder. And if you look at a lot of the apps, they do well by making a strong premise.

Like— Keaton on everything.

You can cheat on everything, or no coding required. You can build an app or whatever app, whatever you want within five minutes. Okay? When you have such a strong premise, are skyrocketing, right? What we're seeing though is when you make a strong promise from the data we have, because I know quite a few people that work at some of these companies. When you have a strong promise, at least with with a lot of these AI companies, they're, if you show proof elements, like I have a 4.5 out of 5-star Trustpilot and here's some testimonials, or, you know, 4 out of 5 people get the results they're looking for with Lovable or Cluely or whatever it may be, you start seeing your conversions really go up. You're seeing churn being exceedingly high because it's really hard to meet expectation, but we're seeing a new world with, copywriting and people doing conversion optimization, where instead of focusing on your ideal customer, people are just saying, I want to focus broad and promise the world, and the people who aren't my ideal customer will just churn out. The ones who are, they'll stick around and pay more. It's a little bit of a different philosophy with marketing, because if you look at when we've been doing marketing since we started, you typically want to focus on your ideal customer and scale up from there. You and I have done the approach of let's just get traffic from SEO and social media on everything related, and the people who aren't a fit, they won't sign up or they'll churn out.

Yeah.

But if you look at what a lot of the new modern marketers are doing, it was what we tried back in the day in which they're just trying to get a little bit of, or not a little bit, they're trying to get a lot of everyone, and the majority will churn out and their ideal customers will stay longer.

Yeah.

Not necessarily a wrong to it. You know, I know your and I approach in which we prefer going after ideal customer, but yeah, that's what we're seeing a lot now in marketing, which people are just going after everyone and let the non-ideal customers just churn out.

So we should react to this because you mentioned the Clue.ly founder. He's only 21 years old and he put up a post. Today's the 5th, right? Yesterday on the 4th, right? So, Keep in mind, clearly they grew. They made a lot of viral content, and then they did really well. Like they pushed it to TikTok. It's like, oh my god! What app are they using?

They announced that they got to like seven million bucks or something in revenue really fast.

They never talk about their revenue anymore.

Of course, because high churn.

Yeah. So this is why you guys should talk about your revenue. But so he acts yesterday, and I want us to react to this. So he says the case for viral the case for virality. There's been a lot of noise the last month on X about attention as. Strategy and whether or not it works. As one of the front runners getting most talked about here, he's saying he gets most talked about on X. I think it's time for me to offer my thoughts. And by the way, I think he's very skilled. I think he has a, he has a lot. So he says this, pretty much every attention-first company is less than or around a year old. The relevance behind us is hyperinflated because despite being months old, we are seeing much more than some of the biggest companies. Virality, Precious time and a few big moments make a months-old startup feel in your head like we've been around for five years. Startups fail all the time, but most of them fail quietly. The key difference in that attention-first is that attention-first companies are hard to forget. So people obsess over your trajectory in a way that they would never for 99% of startups who sit behind a waitlist for two years. I'm gonna move on here. So he says, "Look, nobody's claiming that viral or even necessarily the best way." But is intellectually unserious to claim that it's not a viable way when the most— when the entire experiment has just started. This time ago, 12 months ago, I was studying for my midterms back at Columbia. Companies are built by something. So he's like, look, if you can go viral, you can sell something good much more quickly than you could in the past. But here's what I'll say, dude, this is not new. Virality happened in the last 12 months or so. You can say short form is dominant, but there's always going to be a new, new form that's coming out. And so I think virality, What are some of the most enduring companies that that are built off of virality? I can't think of one. Like we're talking about generational companies. Facebook built off of virality. Yes, you can say those products are, but I mean like going having to go viral. I'm not talking about the platforms.

Facebook went viral.

I'm not talking about the platform.

No, I'm talking about the scraping your email book and then sending out emails to. That's how Facebook really grew.

Yeah, I know, but what I'm saying here, so you know how Cluey became making this content that gets people, that's what I'm saying here. He's like, that's the case for virality. We're not talking about viral loops, we're not talking about like, you know, Hotmails, like, you know, sends to everyone or Dropbox things, right? I think we're talking about here, if I'm understanding this correctly, he's like, you got to learn how to create viral short-form content. And that's how you can—

You're talking about not product marketing, you're talking about Just straight up marketing content, viral content marketing.

Yeah, yeah, you're not you're not you're not talking about product-led growth. No, no. And so like you know Dollar Shave Club is a good one. Yeah, but we're talking about generational brand because even Dollar Shave Club it's known.

I would say there's still a strong brand.

It's just virality is cool, but it's it's very up and down. Like yeah, up and down. And like you don't like you don't know how often it's gonna hit. And here's what I'll say.

Like I Again, I don't think companies are built off of virality. I think virality helps you grow faster. The big company that's sustainable 10, 20 years from now due to virality, you have to have all the other key components there to make it work.

So he lists Donald Trump, IShowSpeed, the Kardashians, right? And he's like, this is a fundamentally different world. I'm like, no, this shit's the same. That's been around for a while, right? So with with my Sean, my CTO, he had worked with a handful of creators before working with me, and so technically we're both creators, right? But he said the difference was a lot of these creators, a lot of followers and a lot of views and things like that. But what he recognized, he realized after working with with a few of them, is like, oh, they don't actually want to grind it through to to build like a real business, right? And so I think that's nice. You can learn how to build an audience, but that's different than operating a business. So sure, you can learn how to go viral. I don't think that's the most important thing. The most important thing is figuring out how you can solve problems for your customers.

I've met a lot of people who are extremely popular on the social web, and what I found by interacting with them is the more followers, the more views they get, the more viral they go on a specific post, it's like a dopamine hit. They feel good. They also get that rush when they go down the street and people are like, oh, that's so And so, or that so-and-so, or let's try taking a picture with them. And they love it. But when it comes to— I met that are in that world— when it comes to doing things to generate revenue and building a business, it's not their passion and they don't care for it. They just want that continued, continual dopamine hit, the validation, uh-huh, versus, hey, let me grind it out. And you and I have before, when we go to conferences, Like HubSpot's inbound conference, Eric would mention to me, he would evaluate when we would do our marketing school episode.

Neil's line is always 4 times longer. Yeah.

And, uh, I've told Eric this, and what's my goal for my line size?

Zero.

Bingo. He got it right. I don't optimize for having people coming up to me to want to ask a question or take a picture. Now to clarify on this, because I don't want someone to misunderstand what I'm trying to say, I appreciate when someone wants to ask me a question and I value it and I love helping and answering their question back. Same with if someone wants to take a picture with me, I'm flattered. I'm no Tom Cruise or Kim Kardashian or anything like that, but I'm flattered. But if you look from a business The goal shouldn't be for a business to rely on and for that individual to be the head of the corporation and that individual have to go out there, talk, have people take pictures with them, and for them to respond to answers for the business to grow. To me, I look at that as not only key man syndrome, right?

Right.

That a lot of buyers are worried about, one issue, but I see a bigger issue. If the business is relying on one person, you don't really have a business in my eyes.

No, and that's absolutely right. And the other problem too is if you're chasing the views of virality, what ends up happening is you start to do things for the views and you start to not behave like yourself anymore. And we know a handful of people that do this.

Yes.

It's like, wait, that's not your core business. I think it's because they've been sucked into that world to do more for that audience.

Yeah, and don't get me wrong, you could say, hey, Taylor Swift is all about her brand. Neil, you could be about your brand that is a business. And I look at if you are that person and you're driving the revenue, yes, by definition you do have a business still going and people are paying you. But I look at that as a short-term business. I don't want to put a timeframe on a short-term business, but a business that's not relying on an individual, to me, that's a generational business. That's something that can last hundreds of years. Yeah. And you may not have that goal, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But I myself, that only lasts another 10, 20 years. I want a generational business.

I got a question for you because we're talking about generational businesses. Would you rather be rich or king? Do you want me to define this?

Yes.

Okay. So would you rather be Microsoft or SAS Institute? SAS Institute. Do you know what SAS Institute is? So I'll break it down for you. So the founders, so they started around the same time. Actually, this, let's call it SaaS Institute. They started a year before Microsoft started. I think—

Before you go into it, I don't want to cut you off, but I am. Before you even go, just for shits and giggles, I'm going to go with rich.

Okay.

Because almost always, if you ask me, unless it's unhealthy or something like that, I'm going to pick rich.

Okay. I'm going to tell you why it's, it's, you're going to pick the other one eventually. So like, We'll just go with that. And I think I might actually rather be rich than king. I think you actually might want to be king. So, okay, so let me break this down for you. So SaaS Institute was founded a year before Microsoft was founded, okay? As you know, Microsoft, when they were founded in, I think, late '70s or so, they went public pretty quickly, okay? So they started, you know, participating in public markets. Obviously, they had to, you know, you have shareholders, things like that. Bill's equity, Bill Gates' equity came down quite a bit, right? And Paul Allen, the co-founders. Now the Institute, they actually held on to their equity. They didn't raise outside funding or anything like that. They didn't go public. So I think going up to their very high points, I think Microsoft, I forgot what year this was, Microsoft got up to like $143 billion in revenue, okay? And SAS Institute was $3 billion. Now the difference is the founders Table very much, right? There wasn't anyone else. Microsoft, obviously there's way more people on the cap table, but the difference is you have a multi-trillion dollar company versus a company doing $3 billion a year in revenue. So in this case, the king is Microsoft at $143 billion, okay? And then you have $3 billion for the rich. Which one you rather be? I rather be the king. You'd rather be the king?

No, I consider that rich because you have more money.

No, no, no, but King is like you own, you're like you are better than rich.

So king means in this definition.

No, you're right. I actually had it the other way around. Rich. So yeah, king is like you own the the lion share of the equity. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want the number. I don't care if I own ten percent or one percent.

Yeah. And actually, if I if I think about it now, would I rather want like you know one percent of like a watermelon or like a hundred percent of a grape?

But but Let's look at it this way. If king means you're on top, I don't know what definition you're using. It's a little bit confusing.

King means you're in control.

Okay.

Yeah.

So like on top is you're the biggest player in the space.

You're— no, I think in this case it's you have control and then like on the cap— from a cap table standpoint and you have like you can make decisions quickly. Obviously you can have a big company today and be like Mark Zuckerberg.

I'll take rich.

You'll take— yeah, which is what you said.

Because with rich You can make yourself a king. Yeah, fair. I'll go buy a new company and I'll control my destiny.

I think, I think like, you know, let me ask you this. Down the road, would you be receptive to a capital infusion? You've talked to people before.

Yeah, I talked to people multiple times a year.

It has to make sense. That's my, my, my take on it. Like, the timing has to make sense.

I— speaking of richer king, The way I genuinely look at it for my life, because I know it's unrealistic for me to be a Microsoft, right? I'm not one. I don't think I have that skill level as an entrepreneur or marketer. But the bigger thing that's going to stop me to that size, I'm in too small of a market compared to like a Microsoft. The TAM is just too small. And if I look at my life, I've done okay. Can I make more money? Yes. Do I want more money? Yes. But I really look at a balance. I think after having kids, want billions of dollars? Yes. But I want billions of dollars with the balance when I'm older. And if you told me I could have double that at that age, but there's no balance, I wouldn't pick it because towards the end of my life, I'm not going to remember. I'm not going to die with the money. There's a certain point where billions is enough, whether I had billions or $10 billion. Like, I don't have the ambition, even if I had the money, and I don't. But if someone gave me the money and they're like, you now have enough money to go buy the Los Angeles Lakers or some sports team, it's not of interest. Dude, I get invited to games all the time. Drive to the arena. And deal with all the foot traffic and have to sit there.

Hassle.

It's a hassle. I'd rather just watch on TV.

Yep. No, I'm the same way. I'd rather stay at home today. I think your ambitions change over time. But here's the other thing. I was actually doing an exercise with ChatGPT the other day. I was like, okay, you're going with software where we're going with software. I'm like, well, I was like, I was arguing with it, right? I was like, the problem is like, you know, you look at like, don't get me wrong, these martech companies have done very well for themselves, like a Marketo in the past, right? But the problem is they are a pimple compared to like the largest software companies out there, right? So it's like, how do we make the argument here? It's like, okay, well, if you're building like the execution that you're solving, like marketing, for example, then you make the argument that you're kind of moving into like helping, you know, with headcount, for example.

Yeah.

Right? So I don't know where this ends up going, but maybe our TAM can expand.

So.

Maybe.

You said something earlier where your ambition changes as you grow older. For me, my ambition has not changed as I grow older. What's changed is what I'm willing to do to achieve the ambition. So I still have the same ambition and I want it, and that actually grows where I want more and more. I'm just not willing to grind it out as hard as I used to when I had no kids and I was in my early 20s.

But by default, Noah, doesn't that just mean He's less, he wants it less. That's a yes.

But I want more. I want more. I want to achieve more.

Yeah.

I'm just not willing to grind it out as hard because I have other responsibilities in life.

Yeah. Which means, you know, you might want it, but like the willingness has decreased.

I look at it as 20s. I never imagined creating a company that would generate more than $100 million in annual revenue. My goal at that time was to just build a company and maybe by the time I die, have $100 million liquid.

Liquid.

Okay. That was my goal. And I worked way harder back then than I do now. Now, if you tell me, hey, maybe your goal is to be worth $1 billion, I'd be like, yeah. I want to generate a have a company that generates a billion now dollars per year. So I want way more than I wanted back then, and I would say my whatever you want to call it, I call it ambition or goals, whatever you want to call it, is actually gets worse each year where I want more. Yeah, but my I'll work smarter, but I I'm not willing to grind it out and never see my kids.

You know what it is? I think we under in our twenties.

Yes, I never thought about compounding in my twenties at all, and I know people told me like, oh, if you. Invest in the stock, it goes up over time. Or if you just get going with business. When I was in my 20s, I was very short-sighted with my thinking, and maybe I am short-sighted in my 40s as well.

But maybe just short-sighted with time.

Yes. Yeah, I don't really know what it is like to compound. And we were sitting with Yaniv a while ago, and last week. Yeah, but Yaniv was talking about, you know, years in business, and I was asking him, 18 years. 18 years. That's a long time. I right now think about the 10-year mark with NP Digital. I haven't thought about 20 or 30, and I'm 2 years away from the 10-year mark.

18 years also with the same team. Look at that consistency. If you do have the same team consistency and you do it for a very long time, it's inevitable, right?

Eh, he has a good team.

Very good team.

Yeah, but if you have a shitty team and you're doing it for a long time, well, that's on you.

That's like a low IQ move, right? But going back to earlier, we're talking about like if you— the whole like billionaire thing, it's unfathomable, I think, to the vast majority of people. But I think once you get to a number and you just keep compounding it over time, we're not saying this is it. You can see it getting there, you know. And that to me is just a game, right? I think however big you can compound to is a function of your personal growth. That's kind of how I look at it as well.

Yes, but you, you, you nailed one thing. You talk about IQ. So my kids go to a school where everyone has to take an IQ and you have to hit a minimum threshold to get in. I don't know, like a 136. Okay, right.

So it's very high.

So if you don't hit 136, you don't get in. And there's some kids there, a lot of kids there who are much higher than 136.

Have you done an IQ test?

I haven't, but both my kids have because they needed it for the school. So when going through this process, IQ tests, I've met a lot of parents who have wanted their kids to go to that school and they get them to take IQ tests but they just don't qualify. Does it mean they're dumb? No. But you talk about low IQ, there's a lot of people, the majority of the people in this world, high IQ, and you can't do anything to fix it. And I've met a lot of entrepreneurs who have done really well with low IQ. I think the key is you find a business where you have an edge or you're competing with other people who aren't willing to do it. You and I know Devin Sony. He's in a space of HVACs, and there's a lot of smart people in the HVAC business. But would you agree that most of people have really high IQs don't think about starting an HVAC business?

In recent years, they've kind of piled into it. But yeah, before, no.

When they piled into it, they still don't care to start an HVAC business. They're just buying up all the people who own HVAC business, combining them, and then selling them for a higher multiple.

He actually tries to understand the business and how to the ins and outs of it.

Correct. And when I was talking to him early on. About his growth rate for some of these HVAC businesses that he buys, and then 30% when they've been flat for many years. He's like, "Dude," he's like, "The people who are running these businesses haven't tried a lot of stuff; they just haven't thought it through." And he's like, "He's like, I just started thinking it through, and I thought about the other stuff. Then I started learning their business, and that's allowed us to that's allowed him to become really in that space. But I think you can still do well." Even if you don't have a high IQ, you just got to figure out your vertical or your niche.

You know, I shared a Charlie Munger quote this morning to my stories, and the whole premise of it is like he knows many people in his life that don't necessarily have the highest IQ. They're not the smartest people, and I think he was even saying he's not necessarily smart or was very smart. He was just like, no, like the the most successful people are learning machines. Whether it's you're reading all the time, whether it's you're talking to people, which is. kind of your way of learning. They never stop learning until the very end. And he's like, the way Berkshire Hathaway was shaped was because Warren Buffett was learning all the time, right? And I haven't— if there's anything we haven't slowed down on over the years, I don't think we've slowed down on our learning. The rate of learning hasn't stopped. Maybe your working style has changed a little bit. Yes, but not the rate of learning. And that's, I think, the most important thing.

Rate of learning has not slowed down. I would say the biggest thing that has changed with our learning is we've shifted what we spend time—

Marketing tactics.

No. We used to focus so heavily on marketing tactics, and what you and I have gotten to a place in our careers in which we're like, we can just go hire the people to go focus and learn about different marketing tactics. We go spend our time on other things. So for example, I spend a lot of the last few years mergers and acquisitions, structuring deals, global integrating, and I would say You spent a lot of time on learning about AI, integrating within your business, trying to future-proof some of your systems, processes, and offerings for AI. A lot of time recruiting. Yeah, a lot of time on recruiting. I would actually say that's a bit over the last few years. Most people would probably say it's AI. I would say the number one thing that you've improved, in my opinion, is recruiting.

You know what we should talk about? We should talk about our rate of focus in the beginning. So when I first met you, you were 25, I was 24, I think. How focused do you think you were on a scale of 1 to 10 at that point?

What most people would consider or how I would judge myself?

Most people.

That's a good call because, you know, we're both harsh critics. I would say most people would— they would say we're focused from like a 30 to 50% range.

At 25?

Yes.

Okay, how about age 30?

Let's go with 30 when I was in the early 20s, 50 by the—

And then let's go all the way up to now. So 40.

40?

Yeah. 80.

Okay.

I think I was like, when I first met you, maybe it was like a 1 out of 10, 10%. Okay. And then I think maybe 30, it was like 15%. Okay. Go to 35, I think 20%.

Okay.

And this is interesting because I talked to one of my engineers who's been with us for like 8, 9 years or so. And he's like, dude, the focus in the beginning was like a 2. He's like, it's like an 8 now. I don't think it's quite an 8 now.

I think 8 out of 10.

Yeah, like 80%, right?

Okay.

And so now I'll ask you first, what do you think my focus is now percentage-wise?

I'll give you 60. Yes, somewhere around there. And the reason being is you still have 2 separate companies.

6-0, right?

That's exactly 60 out of 100.

Yeah, that's where I peg us at. You're at 80% right now, right?

Yes, and I would say my biggest flaw is it's one company internally with things that I shouldn't focus time on. And a great example of this is you mentioned, hey, have you ever thought about raising money or taking outside money? Yes, people hit me up and I talk to them, but if I was truly focused, I wouldn't even waste my time talking to them.

Yeah. Used to not respect your time. Now you respect your time a lot more. Where you get a free call with him for every course. I was like, that was really— and I was only 24 at the time. We're really young. What are you doing?

So yeah, yeah, 30-minute phone calls.

But also, you've been in business for how many years on NPD, or just overall?

Like, I think since I was 16, 24 years.

So in the very beginning, your focus was what, like, right then, like 10? So my point is, like, over time you learn to focus more, because in the beginning when we're younger—

actually, no, I would say when When I first started, my focus was probably like 60, 70 out of 100.

Okay.

My focus started getting screwed up when I started making money.

Yeah, because you like to do everything. I remember there was a period of time, I'm gonna try— you saw things going well with online education, I'm gonna do online education, I'm gonna do this affiliate thing, I'm gonna do this, right? So it dropped down quite a bit for you.

Yeah, but when people are young and starting their first business, they usually have decent focus because they can't afford to not have any focus.

That's true.

It screws up when we start making money. Like, just think about when you started focusing It's when you started making more money.

No, I never learned my lesson in the beginning. I was all over the place from the— here's the thing, once you have some money, once you think you have it figured out, you'd like, you start to get a little more, oh, I feel I can do more.

But no, but let's go back. When you jumped into Single Grain, so for context here, Eric did not create Single Grain. It was started before him. He joined as a partner. But when you first got into it, I would say you had really good focus. Started making more and more money, Like millions, that's when your focus really started changing.

So you're missing a point. So I'll give you— I'll tell you what happened here. So there's a period of time when I first took over, we dropped all the way down to one employee. Thank God we were ranking number one for the keyword digital marketing agency because we're doing all these guest posts, right?

Took over.

So when I took over, it was 2014. I actually had disengaged from the business because I read the book Let My People Go Surfing. So I disappeared from So we dropped all the way down to 1 employee.

Oh, you're talking about when you bought it?

Yeah.

Not when you first started with Susan?

Yeah, when I bought it. Yeah. And what happened afterwards, once I got it back in, it was like a wake-up call when the outside accountant shut it down, right?

Yeah.

And then from 2015 to 2018 or '19, very focused there. And that was a point where it's like there was actually a launchpad. And then I got unfocused again. To your point.

Yeah.

To your point. Yeah. So you're partly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think this this this lesson is helpful for everyone because it's like you ebbs and flows with focus, and we learn over time. We're just hoping that you can learn that lesson sooner. And even if you're younger right now, you're probably going to think that you can do everything. Trust me, you can't.

I remember you talking about letting your team learn and learn from their mistakes because you mentioned a book to me back then. I don't know what it's called, but there was a book.

Yeah.

And you even quoted things like that in a mistake with some hire. They lost.

It's a million dollar mistake or hundred million or something. Yeah. Yeah.

And I remember when Eric first told me about it. I'm not saying there's a right or wrong approach because I don't have a company the size of IBM, but my philosophy has always been fire. Hire the people that know this stuff. I don't have time for them to learn on my dime.

Yep, guys, that it's it applies to marketing too. Don't think you can do every channel. Don't think you can learn every channel. We're still very much SEOs.

I would say I'm less SEO than anything else.

Like I would say our Our base level skill is still SEO.

Yes, our base level skill is still SEO or GEO or AISEO, whatever you want to call it.

But we're much different now as people. Yeah.

Copy for my landing pages.

That's good.

Like for our SaaS products, I rip apart all the landing pages they send to me. I can do that shit on my iPhone. Excuse my language. I just install the Grammarly app and I just type what I'm trying to play. And I'm like, oh, does this sound good? And I can usually do the copy for a landing page, like a really important landing page, Landing page, like a home screen or the price, I can usually write the copy in like 5, 10 minutes.

I think it's SEO and conversion for you.

Yes. And then I have to think about it, but within an hour I'll have it fine-tuned because I can write the rough draft and then I keep going back and forth and then tweaking.

Yeah.

And then it's pretty good.

See, back in the day when we're like 25, 24, Neil didn't have Grammarly, so he would just Skype me and then ask me, is this good? Is this headline? Yes. Are you good there, Noah? Okay, cool. So we're talking about SEO. We might as well talk about why I think AEO is overhyped. Because if you look at the Ahrefs, Ahrefs just posted yesterday, SEO company, ChatGPT traffic is flat in November. And you look at Gemini 3, oh, they're starting to a little bit.

Are you talking about ChatGPT referral traffic or the traffic for chatgpt.com?

So on what the first one is traffic to chatgpt.com. The second piece is referral. I don't think referral traffic has changed that much. So yeah.

So when you're saying ChatGPT traffic is flat from Ahrefs, they're measuring the traffic going to chatgpt.com?

Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so what, like, I'm not saying don't do AEO. I think we get a lot of people asking us for AEO. But the thing is, I think it's not even 1% of traffic for ChatGPT. It's 0.25% of web traffic is ChatGPT. And I'm like, and I remember talking to, you know, a pretty significant company a couple of weeks ago. Like the reason is like, dude, if it's less than 1%, why on this brand new thing over here when search traffic is still 42%? We're not saying search traffic's going to remain that way forever, but I do think right now people are overallocating and the game is actually search everywhere optimization, not just like, not, not just, you know, AEO.

So yeah, if you knew the data I knew for ChatGPT, you would be shocked.

Shocked in a, Good way or bad way?

Bad way.

So like even less?

Yeah, I signed an NDA.

Okay.

It's one of the largest corporations in the world. Yeah.

And we'll just leave it at this is overhyped. Yes.

I would. I don't think it's actually overhyped. I think it's here to stay. It's very powerful. I'm not talking about just the technology. I'm also talking about it as a marketing channel. I think it's just early endings and people haven't figured out how to really monetize it.

When I say overhype, hype is like for the short term in my mind. Yeah, it's hype. It's overhyped in short term. I'm not saying it's not going to work. We said this with AI in the beginning too.

And yeah, AEO is underhyped in the long run and how few companies are focusing on it when they should. I think the revenue expectations from it in the short run are too high.

Yeah.

But I think in the long run they're underestimating it because—

Yeah.

It doesn't matter who wins. You and I know, Matt, you need to do SEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, AI SEO in the future to do well no matter which platform is going to win.

Yeah.

And I think the platforms is not going to be winner takes all. I think it's going to be multiple players owning the space for different circumstances.

Yeah.

And the best example, when I talked about the results for one of the campaigns, and I'm telling you, you would be blown away. Really be shocked. I was in this company's office, and they were asking me which one is going to win. Okay, ChatGPT or Google? And I'm like, they're both gonna end up taking. Like, I use ChatGPT. So then I asked him a question: What social network do you use? What what guess do you? If you had to pick one, what one do you think they would pick?

So like in what context?

Just generally use like every day. They I'll give you the answer. They they said Instagram. Okay.

For me it's YouTube.

Okay. And they're like oh there's a lot of social networks out there. Your social networks Instagram right? I'm like do you have a TikTok account? I do but I rarely ever log in. How often do you log in? I don't know once every month or two. Okay. Do you have a LinkedIn account? Yeah. How often do you log in? A few times a month.

Mm-hmm.

I do. How often do you log in? Maybe only once a week. All right. Do you use YouTube? Yeah, I use it every day. So I'm like, there's not one winner. You use it for different things. Do you use X? Yeah, I use X every single day. Right? So I was like, so YouTube, but in reality, are you saying that YouTube's your social network, but you use a lot of social networks? And then I start talking about use cases versus Instagram versus YouTube. And they're talking about YouTube's a little bit different because YouTube offers things like makeup tutorials that Instagram doesn't. And I was like, you sure? Really? Often I'm like, I bet you that makeup tutorial that you're looking for on YouTube is on Instagram. They're like, I don't know. So then I'm like, okay, show me something that you watch on YouTube. They show me it, and guess what? Within six minutes, I was able to find that video on Instagram. Instagram does their search with YouTube, but I tried searching for it, couldn't do it. Then ended up looking up the creator of it, had to scroll a lot, found that video from the creator to make your point, right? To make my point. And the point I was getting at to her was just like you use different social networks for different. Different things. X, she used— people will use ChatGPT and Google and Gemini and Perplexity and all these other solutions. And I really look at Gemini as Google because most people that I know don't go to Gemini directly, but a lot of their stuff is integrated into Google. I'm assuming you agree with that.

Yeah.

I believe the social networks are going to have, I mean, the AI platforms, the LLMs, A lot of different use cases from Perplexity to ChatGPT to Google, uh, and so forth, so on. Just like how people have different use cases for social networks, even though they have access to a lot of the same information and content.

So 2 things here. We should talk about some of our use cases for the different LLMs and then I, then I wanna talk about how Goldman Sachs talks about the real ROI from companies like JP Morgan, Chipotle, Target, and, and UPS. But look, so use cases. So real AI use cases I have from different LLMs. ChatGPT is my go-to because it has memory, right? And so I store everything in there. I can think strategically or remember what I talked about with, you know, processes, things like that. Okay. But what do I use Claude for, right? So Claude I use for code. Yeah. So code when I want to analyze the data we have. So I've been doing this recently this week. I was like, hey, look at all the closed won deals from HubSpot and look at all the Gong transcripts tied to that and about and using the Ahrefs MCP what keywords we should be going after. Okay, also with the closed lost deals, look at all the Gong transcripts. What are people's objections? What should we be optimizing for? Oh, also do a win-loss pattern to show me what the what like for example for our won deals we have 34 touchpoints. Okay, for our lost deals it's 60% less. It's like okay, you can't get well.

Are you basing the lost deals based on when you lose it? Because if you look at the lost deals and if you lose It early on, you're not gonna—

I don't wanna go to that. I'm making a point. So, so, so, but so going, going to— so we use Claude, we use Gemini. I use it for VO3. I use it for image generation. I use it for the Gemini Gems 'cause it can pull from YouTube. I use it for Notepad. My point is making your point too. It's like we have different use cases for these things. Um, I'm curious, what are your use cases for the different ones?

So I, I can break it down into 2 simple buckets.

Yeah.

For personal stuff, I use ChatGPT. For business stuff, I use Google.

That's easy.

Yeah, it's really easy because Google has more buy-in in business. Uh, like if I'm asking tax-related stuff or corporate structures, Google tends to give me better responses than what I get from ChatGPT. They're similar, but sometimes ChatGPT, I found this to be a little bit more inaccurate, which is too risky on those kind of things. Personal stuff, I'm asking, you know, sleeping better, neck pain, stuff like that. And I use it because of the Yeah. So then that way I don't have to keep going back and starting over.

And I like, I like Perplexity's not necessarily an LLM because it uses the other ones, but I like it for deep research. It's really good for stock research and I want different charts and things like that. And also like projections and all.

For that, I've tried Grok for that and I've tried Google and ChatGPT. I found them all to be off when I'm trying to do that.

I just want it to be directionally correct.

Yeah. I want it to be 100% correct. That's the problem, because if I'm gonna make a trade based on the data, yeah, I don't want anyone setting me up.

I want it to— I want to feel like 80% good about it. But like Grok, I use Grok quite a bit. Data, I just want to know, I want to hit the button to like verify it, so I'll use that. So there's different use cases for everything. But going back, Goldman Sachs reveals real AR—

AI.

Goldman Sachs reveals real AI ROI from companies like JP Morgan, Chipotle, Target, and UPS. So we, you and I, we've been talking about like what's the— I'll start here. So let's start with JP Morgan. So they use AI to reduce headcount growth while revenue climbs. So Bank of New York, that's not that specific, but they— Bank of New York Mellon, they built 117 AI solutions with 100 digital employees. And then Rocket Mortgage implemented AI to cut loan processing time from 4 hours to 15 minutes. It's not bad. Okay, let's go to Target. They say Target. Target uses AI for forecasting across the organization. Home Depot implements AI across supply chain and stores. And then Walmart built 4 super agents for customers, employees, and advertisers. And then you have UPS, which saved 38 million liters of fuel. That's pretty hefty, right?

That's a lot.

AI processes 90% of— and then JP Hunt automated 100,000 hours of work across operations. So we're starting to see Real ROI. Chipotle, huge improvements in kitchen automation, right? So I think the the savings maybe it's not quite apparent yet, but I think we're starting to see it.

I I think we're really going to start seeing the savings going into twenty. I think companies are starting to implement it.

Yeah.

And when you look at what they're implementing, it's still a small fraction of their business. I think we're really going to start seeing it in 2027 because I know people are worried about the deteriorating job market. which in theory the CME Watch Group's predicting, what, like an 89% chance? Is it 89% that there's a Fed rate cut? See, 87.2%.

Yeah.

And I really look at it from a perspective of you're going to start seeing the impact more in 2027. I think there's also going to be new jobs created, and it's not going to be as catastrophic as people are thinking. Just like we've seen in past with history. I could not the smartest person out there, but I do believe people are going to just have to learn new skills. It's going to impact jobs. They're going to have to learn new skills and start doing new things.

Let's let's talk about this piece because on one end the the Elon podcast I heard. I could just let's just take a small detour for fun. If you were to pick two stocks right now, not financial advice guys, what would you pick?

Financial advice. My two favorites.

We did this a couple months ago.

Right now.

Google.

Google's an easy one for me. The number 2 is a toss-up for me. It would either be Microsoft or Netflix.

Okay, wow.

Netflix because I think they've really won that market when it comes to streaming content.

Warner Brothers today.

Yeah, I don't know if that's gonna go through. Yeah, but whether they buy that deal or not, I really do think mindshare from a perspective— you just stream content there and people are really hooked on it. It's a new version of TV. The reason it's a toss-up between that and Microsoft is with Microsoft, they, they really have their grip. I would actually— I'll pick Microsoft As number 2. Okay. They have their grip on the core. I don't see that going away anytime soon. The reason I am reluctant about Microsoft is their products aren't that great for a lot of them, but we tend to use them because of the bundling and the pricing. But some of their products like Teams isn't as good as Slack. Yeah. But I'm okay with it because it's a lack in Zoom.

Yeah. I would go Google number 1, because you and I know Google well. I mean, The data that they have, the gem, like they're just like they're on a rampage and terror right now. The the TPUs, all these things, right? Waymo, all these things. I would go Tesla number two because of robotics, and I think that's if if he gets it right, like Elon gets it right, that's good enough. When Elon did that interview with the the other guy, he doesn't actually hold anything. He doesn't invest. He's like, "I just like to build things and build on top of that." But he's like, "If I were to pick, it would be." Google because of how far they are with AI right now, and then his number 2 was Nvidia, which is interesting. So anyway, this leads to the final topic that we have.

You talked about Elon. I'm assuming you love it heavily because of robots and the future is going there. I just watched an interview with Boston Robotics or Boston Dynamics CEO. Boston Dynamics used to be owned by Google at one point, then it got bought by SoftBank. Now it's 80% owned by Hyundai and then 20% by— did you know when Elon— he mentioned this on CNBC— did you know when Elon's been doing the showcasing of the Tesla robot, a lot of it is powered by humans?

I didn't know that.

And did you know the Boston Dynamics versions are not powered by humans? That's okay. They're much further along.

That's okay. So I don't think it's gonna be winner-take-all, but I agree with you.

And did you know like Boston Dynamics already has tons the robots in warehouses and corporations are leading the pack. I'm not saying they're going to win. I agree with you. It's just they don't have the cachet as, let's say, Tesla does.

Yeah, I would also go Tesla too because of robotaxis, right? So robotaxis, robotics, all that stuff. So anyway, let's move to the last topic here. This is the final one. So this is— it's always good for us to talk about things where we have like a— like, oh, I might have an argument with somebody earlier this week, right? Like, I feel feel strongly about this. But my take on this is no, your job is not safe from AI. Like, so one of the debates I had was like, oh, you know, but my job is safe because I'm going to be human-to-human connection. Absolutely, I agree with that. Human-human connection is important. But would I rather take Neil with human-to-human connection or Neil with human connection plus AI? Like, it's equivalent. It's no different to me. Like, if you say, um, you're— if It's clear to me that if you don't want to learn AI, you're just saying to me, need a laptop. I don't want to come to work using the internet today. I don't want to use electricity. That is what the equivalent of, and I don't think 99% of jobs, I think, are like I'd rather pick someone with AI versus not. And one of the debates that we were having was just like, oh, but like no, you know we we have other things to focus on right now. Like so should we wait like two more years, three years? How long should we wait?

Wait, it's a terrible way to think. I think those kind of people are the ones that are going to get passed by by others and other corporations.

Yeah. And then it's kind of like, they'll kind of just throw it to the side and joke, like, offhandedly, like, as if nothing's going to happen. But again, can I work for you if I don't know how to use the internet?

Do I think you need to be the best person with AI? No. But as a human, you need to try to improve yourself in Continually learn more and get better and adapt with where the future is going.

Now, here's a question, philosophical one. How— curious how you guys are doing it at NP Digital, but what level of training are you going to do for AI for your—

I don't know. That's a question I have to ask our CEO. My co-founder and I are really different. We tend to just Just hire the people that already have good knowledge and already, already using it. Because tell people, hey, do this and do that. I want people who are bringing something to the table and be like, oh, I've been doing this cool stuff that you guys haven't even seen yet. You should check this out.

Yeah.

Because they're like self-motivated. Those are the people I'm hiring. I'm not really trying to hire people that I have to convince to use AI. AI and train them up. I'm hiring more that are good to go, and they're bringing stuff to the company and teaching our organization new ways we could be using AI that we never thought about that they're using already.

So the way I see this is we want to hire the best of the best people, right? Yes. I want to hire people that have high agency, who are biased to action. Well, the thing with me is like, it's never been easier to find the people who have the bias to action, because before it's like, you had to say, oh, what are you learning? Can you show me some case studies, whatever? Now it's just like, hey, what are you doing with AI? So what would you do for us? How much are you spending per month out of pocket? Some of the people I interview, $500 a month. Someone we talked earlier, $2,000 a month. Okay, so I'm not saying you need to spend $2,000 a month, but it's very clear, like, if we want the best of the best, then that should be one of the first things that we look at. And then one of the pushbacks that I get is like, oh well, um, how are we gonna find these people? Like, they're not available everywhere. Of course they're not. High agency, biased action People are in short supply always.

Yes, and you got to go hunt them out. They tend not to apply for jobs.

Exactly, exactly. Anyway, that's it, guys. This is our first live back. Hope we'll see you next time.

Do you want to answer one question from the live?

Yeah, sure. What is the winning formula for 2026? What's the winning formula for 2026?

There is no winning formula. Think of it as cooking spaghetti. Try new channels and experimentation. Be open-minded. Take the the spaghetti, throw it against the wall. Whatever sticks usually means it's cooked. Throw it against the wall, whatever's starting to get traction, double down on that. Whatever's not, push it off to the side and get back to it later. But you got to keep experimenting, trying new things, and you got to do it at a faster clip than you were doing it in 2025 or even 2024. Just because AI is causing people to move so fast. Look at these venture-funded companies now. People now go to $30 million or $50 million in revenue in like 5 months, 6 months.

Yeah.

That is not normal.

Yeah.

But they're assuming that, and that's all because of AI.

Yeah. All right, guys, that's it for today. Catch you later. Bye.

All right.