Elon Musk: Live Events Are The Only Remaining Luxury

So did you know that Elon Musk said this? So Elon Musk said that live events are 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 AI doing all the work, robotics 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 live events are so important.

Oh, not live like we're doing right now. You're actually talking about 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'm more of a introvert. I do my own events. Yeah, you do your own events at, when you speak at a conference, you do like a mini event, a 10 to 20 people.

Oh, I thought you meant like my own 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 I feel like you have too.

I enjoy 'em when I know some of the people. It's not that 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 favorite part of it?

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, but just generally speaking, he's done quite a bit of different types of businesses, but yeah, we got to catch up. We got to find out who's doing what. 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.

But yeah, I would say in-person events are good.

So I'm thinking like, I 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'd probably do well. But I just don't want to do it because we have to focus on our businesses. So the return on investment from doing an event is no good. I'll tell you that much. And even you're talking about this podcast, which we can go into too. So you were just talking to a sponsor.

Yeah.

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 realize it's too much hassle. 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 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 going to get that initially? No, but we've been doing this podcast for like 8 years or so. So if you compound for 8 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 an old one, but I'm trying a new marketing format.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So Neil's showing me, he, last week Neil started doing a podcast with his 2 team members.

Not a podcast.

What is it?

It's just, we just sat down in a room and we just recorded our conversation.

That's still a podcast.

Sure, but we're not going to 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 going to 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 going to be very tough. But I enjoyed it because I have so many 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? You can't even tell. Those aren't the Laurel pants?

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

Yeah, okay. Continue, continue. Hold on, before you continue, just so everyone knows, Neil in that video has 2 of his team members and they're just nerding out on 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. An hour conversation. You probably hang out with them afterwards too, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

And got to do lunch and got to talk shop. But the reason I enjoyed it was I have so many coworkers and colleagues and 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 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 or when you're just talking on the phone, it's much more 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 people fly in and You know, it's much more different because some of these people I haven't— I've never met yet, right? 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 that you're meeting up for annual planning, but you mentioned 3-year planning at the same time. What's, 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 going to read this book, but there's a book called The 3-Hag, right? So BHAG, you know what a BHAG is?

Uh-uh.

Okay, big hairy audacious goal.

Okay, I know that one.

And then 3HAG is the 3-year highly achievable goal, okay? So the reason is the years go by very quickly. I 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 going to 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 more vague out there. But now for me, what I'm looking to do is I'm holding each person accountable. Hey, you said you're going to hit this number this quarter. You said you're going to do these things. I'm just looking at that. 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 goal, most of them don't ever get achieved in the first 12 months or first year.

No, that's like the first 10 to 25 years. Yeah.

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

Yeah.

In your annual meeting, when you're saying you really look at 3-year and you don't do annual or Ryan Deiss'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? 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. Yeah, we did that for around 2 years and then it kind of I'm going to say 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 as useful.

So I don't like the quarterly planning from the— I'm 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 going to use it.

You're good.

You might do a modified version of it. That's all. Because it, 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.

If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, K-A-R-R-O-T, and we'll see you on the other side. Yeah, so let me tell you the number one thing I loved about this. So you take out your phone, 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 this team, where do you think the deficiencies are for me, for other people? Where do we need to get better? Like stack rank me and stack rank where do you think we're going to— 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 it went well because my objective 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. Some people, for some people it's very hard to hold them accountable. But like when you hold them accountable to one thing and you just keep pointing at that and it's one number, Yeah. That's what I was looking for, and I was looking for that commitment from everyone, and that's what we got.

Got it.

And that's what Peter Thiel did, right? Back in the day, it's just like one thing, one thing, one thing. I don't know, like going back to you, when you work with like a, who reports to you directly? Nobody?

Uh-uh, I have no direct reports.

Okay, so when you're holding, like you're working with like Michael Elixson, 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 to him 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, so.

Yeah, but for every person I have a different thing, so.

Like more examples.

So for our VP of marketing or head of marketing or whatever Saul's title is, is we, 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, on a weekly basis or a monthly basis and they go over numbers, 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. In the United States in 2024, it was 25. So it was a little bit more than 56.25%, if I'm not— my math could be a little bit off. In 2025, So going to this year, the year's not over. We're recording this early December. We're at 36 exactly. So I'm like pushing the team. We need 39, 39. 39 gets us to 56. 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 need 56% growth. So I'm like pushing extreme—

You don't need, 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, so you see just with Neil's examples, one, solo, it's just RFPs. With Mike, it's sales primarily. You might look at retention 'cause hand in hand, right? 'Cause 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 5 different things, these 10 different things. My mind, my cognitive load already starts to blow up. up and I start to get really frustrated on just one thing.

Yes. Like with my CFO, I don't even discuss revenue and profitability. I discuss cash flow with him and that's it. 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 is going and bank 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. But 5 days a week I'm getting US numbers, 1 day a week I'm getting US combined with global numbers.

These are emails?

Just 1 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 for a week in total?

Per week?

Uh-huh. Revenue, cash flow, churn.

I don't know, like—

RFPs.

20?

Content.

20. Including text messages, correct?

Yeah, including text messages.

I'd probably say 20.

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's really good. Your memory's really good.

Yeah, I don't forget.

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

Dude, straight up, I'm talking with one of my leaders who runs UK for us. His name's Brandon. I know a potential customer is going to 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, hey, how'd that 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 hasn't even been done with them yet.

Right.

So he's like, few more hours and then I'll give you an 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 focused on marketing more than anything else early on.

Mm-hmm.

I learned that the more you push, the more you get done.

Mm-hmm.

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 this nice balance 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. And just enough where they blow up at me at least once every few months. Because if they don't blow up at me or to someone else about me 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, the acquisitions, all that stuff, right? When everyone was really nice to me and I was very nice to everyone, things weren't getting done. But when When I'm constantly nagging people and I can tell they're getting annoyed, things are getting done. But I haven't gotten to your level where there's a blowup every quarter or so. So maybe I'm going to push it a little more.

Quarter's a little long. My blowups don't happen—

Every month?

Once a month. Are you talking about per individual?

Per individual. Yeah, so 90-day cycle.

I would say once every 2 months at the latest, maybe once a month, they're just not telling you.

So 6 blowups. So if someone works with you, 6 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 texts. 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 take some time off.

But that pisses you off even more.

Uh, yeah, it does. But I'm okay with it.

Yeah.

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 a walk. It's usually like they'll get off and they're 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. Uh, you know, can we just talk about this in another week or two? Uh, I don't have enough time to get 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, fuck you, I'm really pissed at you. So they're being really nice about it. But yeah, I know that sounds a little cruel. I'm not trying to make people—

I don't 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 Digg. 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 to keep pushing because 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, The founder's job is to increase the room of the temperature because natural, what happens, the room temperature wants to come down, right?

Yeah.

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

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

That's still dialing it back.

No, but I'm still pushing hard. I just give them a week of breathing room. My deadlines and what I expect does not change. It still stays the same.

Yeah, but letting them go for a little bit is dialing them 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, my expectation stays the same. I just don't follow up every 2 or 3 days. I'll follow up a week later. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's what I'm— it's like, I get what you're saying, but that's 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 the nuance here is 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 it. So then I can go 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 good, but it's like, 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 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.

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

AI think, 'cause, well, those are very short shorts though. But anyway, so like we were talking about this yesterday actually. So in 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, me pushing on everything can cause chaos. And it does cause chaos. You can admit sometimes it causes chaos, right? You just said earlier, there's chaos, right? 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 long as we're moving in the right direction, what's wrong?

Yeah, you should never be disrespectful, 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, I can't handle it. Change them out, as cutthroat as that sounds.

That's how it is. This is business, guys. All right guys, that's it for today. Catch you later. Bye.