Gemini Vs ChatGPT | The Empire Strikes Back

So I want to talk about ChatGPT versus Gemini. The Empire Strikes Back. So do you want to know how the Empire strikes back here?

No, because I have no idea what this is other than a Star Wars reference.

Yes. Okay, so check this out. When you look at this graph over here— oh my God, I got a time limit over here. Okay, so ChatGPT versus Gemini, The Empire Strikes Back. So ChatGPT, you could look at as the young upstart, right? And then Gemini is the Empire, right? Like Darth Vader and all that. So you look at a Google trend graph over here, it shows that ChatGPT has been very popular for a very long time. They're the young upstart. And then when you look at Gemini, which is the empire owned by Google, when Nano Banana launched, Gemini's users shot up like crazy, right? And so I thought this would be a great way to start. When you look at it, when Nano Banana launched, it is the best image model by far.

Yes.

And when you launch, Google has so many amazing products within it. And sometimes when they just launch something and they launch it relatively well, They launched it within Gemini app and you can see a little banana in there. That's why Gemini's users shot up. I think it was over 13 million or so, and it was already a highly ranked app. So it's really hard to get a highly ranked app even higher.

Yeah, when I look at Google and Gemini, I think there's a good chance they may win the AI race. The reason being is they have access to a lot of data, and if you look at their products, at least their recent releases, they've been amazing. I do think Google has one problem though, and it goes, it comes down to marketing. You can release a good product, you're gaining traction with your existing user base, but we were at the HubSpot Inbound event, most people had no clue about the product and never heard about it.

Mm-hmm.

And most of the people in the room should be using it. I look at Google as releasing great products is going to help you gain more traction, But it doesn't mean you're going to win. They actually need to start doing marketing and explain things in layman's terms and really work on adoption for non-hardcore users, I would say.

Google is actually a really good example of having all the distribution, or literally all the distribution, Android, Chrome, all these things, right?

Gmail.

Search, yeah, everything. YouTube, right?

YouTube.

Yeah, but they do such a poor job of marketing their own stuff. So it just goes, this is actually a case in point where it's like, oh, All the distribution doesn't matter in the world if you don't know how to bring awareness. And the other thing is, do you remember back in the day, Steve Jobs tried, he wanted in one of his ads to promote a bunch of different features, right? His ad leader was like, I'm not going to do that. So what he did with Steve Jobs in the room, he crumpled up a piece of paper and he threw it at Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs caught it, right? And then he crumpled up 5 pieces of paper, he threw it all at Steve Jobs and Steve caught none of them. He's like, that's an example of multiple different messages and you only want one message with your ads. And when I think the problem is Google has so many different things, I think maybe every month or so there's a massive launch, right? And maybe you have 12 big marketable moments a year. You can't have too many because it starts to get too crazy and people start to forget.

Yeah. Did you, on a side note, did you watch the Apple launch video a few days ago?

I didn't, but I got the new iPhone. I just ordered a new iPhone today.

Which one did you pick?

I got the silver iPhone 17 Pro. What'd you get?

I got the, uh, black iPhone 17 Air. I think it's—

You got the Air?

Yeah, I got the Air.

The reason I didn't get the Air is because I'm like, it, it, it seems like, uh, what you want to go for, like the second generation of the Air, because the first one's not going to be that good. 'Cause I think the battery life's a lot less and the camera—

No, battery life's the same as the Pro.

Why don't you try it first? Hey, hey, why don't we try it? No, no, the website has the reviews and they always say it's like that, but it always ends up being like half the battery life.

Apple's been pretty decent at predicting their battery lives.

It looks— I will say the Air looks beautiful, and I don't like how the 17 Pro looks, but I was like weighing the two, and then I was looking at what are all these other tech people picking, right? So I'm sure when I see your Air, I'll be like, damn, I really want that. There's a black one?

There's a black one for the Air. And Apple has done a good job, even going back to features, what you talked about in their launch video, they do talk about, hey, What is it called? In their launch video, they do talk about how specific features— like, they're not— when Apple talks about their iPhone Air or their Pro, they're not highlighting 50 things, but at the very end slide, they'll show like an overview and they list a lot of the features or some of the new cool stuff that makes it amazing. But generally in their videos, they do focus on one feature. Um, at a time, and they try to make it simple so that way people are more likely to buy. But with the Pro, the new one, did you see the viral Instagram video on the new Pro?

No.

Dude, someone just took an iPhone 15, not a 16. They just took the camera, expanded it to here, and moved these 2 dots, and they're like, you now got an iPhone.

Do you have a 15? This is a 15.

This is a 16.

Oh wow.

But they should— they just expanded end of this part and be like, now you got an iPhone 17 Pro.

We'll see. I mean, I like the longer battery life and it's like faster charging and all that. I know the Air is slower charging, so I think it's more beautiful. I think I'll buy it for the next round, so we'll see how it goes. And I don't want the orange one because I don't want to draw attention either.

Do you use your battery life right now?

Yeah, it actually drains it pretty quickly. And this is a 15 Pro.

But it's 2 years old now.

This is 2 years old.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I get a new one every single year Not because of the features for one reason.

No, you didn't get a long— you didn't get a new one for a long time. You had a piece of crap for a very long time.

But recently for the last like 3, 4 years, I've been getting a new one every year.

Why? Well, I get a new one because I get it for free. Why do you get a new one?

I buy a new one because I want the battery life.

Oh, okay. Well, there you go.

Yeah, because even if it says 27 hours, after you use it for a year, it starts degrading.

Yeah, you know what? And you know what? I don't know if you do this because you're OCD, right? I wash my phone every day. Do you wash your phone?

Not every day, maybe every like 3, 4 days.

You know what's dirtier than your toilet?

Uh-huh.

Yeah, that's right. I wash it every day.

Every 3, 4 days.

Yeah. And then what happens is this charger starts to mess up. And so I have to use the side charger.

I use the MagSafe. I have a little case that you put it in and it just kills all the germs. Oh, okay.

Oh, you do that every day? Do you scan it with the purple light after?

No, I have never tried scanning with purple light. I clean the phone a few times a week, right? Hence I said like 3, 4 days. But the case thing, I probably use it maybe 2, 3 times a week. I should be putting it in every day. I just don't. It could be because the one I have, it doesn't charge the phone. But if it charged the phone, I would use it at nighttime.

So, okay, I just asked ChatGPT. I said, is it better to wash my phone or UV light it? And so this is kind of going on a tangent. We can come back to this. And I want to come back to Apple story real quick with Steve Wozniak. But Um, basically best practice is combination is ideal. Use a microfiber cloth or alcohol wipe to clean dirt, oils, then UV light for added germ kill. If you only choose one for appearance and hygiene, wipe with alcohol solution. For convenience and reducing wear, UV sanitizer. Yeah. So it's basically what you do actually.

Yeah. And the reason I ended up doing that is it just helps keep my phone clean and I don't clean it because of the toilet thing. I clean it because I want my screen to be, not have tons of prints. It just bothers me. Yeah, 'cause you're OCD, dude.

Speaking of which, so the Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, so he actually responded on Reddit. I don't know if you saw this one, but he basically sold all of his wealth. So he gave all of his Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. He says, I have no idea how much I have, but after speaking for 20 years, it might be like $10 million plus a couple homes. So that is his entire net worth right now. It's not like he's, filthy rich and worth like, he could be worth $3 trillion if he just held onto his shares. But yeah, he earns money from his labor and pays something like 55% combined tax on it. He says he's the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness, which is smiles minus frowns. I like that. Smile minus frowns is happiness. I developed these philosophies when I was 18 to 20 years old and I never sold out. So even though he's the co-founder of Apple, he just did things on his own terms and everyone has their own definition of happiness. But I thought that was interesting.

Yeah, whatever works for each individual. I don't think there is a right or wrong way. I have a friend, you know him, and he once told me, I think like, to be happy, all you need to make is like $80-something thousand a year. I forgot what the exact amount is.

$70,000.

And it probably changes over time with inflation. So I don't know what it is in today's world.

You're right. You're right. 10 years ago, no, no. When I first started in the workforce, it was $70,000. It was a Lifehacker blog post. So now it's probably $80,000, $85,000, $90,000.

Yeah, something like that, right? Let's call it, you can even round up to $100,000. And this person still believes that, and they'd rather take pictures and travel the world and experience what they want. You know who it is at this point, versus going and make more money. And do I think that's a right or wrong approach? I think for them, that is the right approach because they're genuinely happy. They don't have kids. They're not married. They don't care for any of that. They just want to travel to new nature-related places. and take beautiful pictures and that's like their, you know, zen moment. And it's like, keep doing what you love to do. I wanna ask you something.

So personally, would you rather have relational wealth or financial wealth at the end of your life? What's more important?

I think you know the answer to that. And financial wealth is useless at the end of your life.

Okay, how about now? Relational wealth versus financial wealth?

It's a little bit different because I'm 40 and I have kids and I'm married. So I would pick relational wealth.

But how about 10 years ago?

It would just be pure financial.

Yeah. So the reason I bring this up is 'cause I've been filling out this 5-minute journal probably for over 10, 12 years or so. So every day I write what I'm grateful for. I've noticed probably over the last 5, 10 years or so, it used to be things that I'd be grateful for every morning that I write this in. But then now it's always people. I'm always listing people every single day. I actually list you guys sometimes too. So yeah, I'm just constantly listing people. And then as we get older, you realize in your 20s, maybe it's all about go, go, go, money, money, money, money, money. But then you realize all the money in the world's not going to help you if you don't have anybody to share it with.

I don't know if it's about the 20s or 30s or 40s. I think it's different for every person. And here's why. You could be right on the stat or the number or the age range, but I think you and I are bad examples to ask because we have enough money to genuinely live a very comfortable life. We have money. You agree with that statement? If another COVID happens and everything gets shut down, we have enough savings to ride it out.

We'll be fine.

Yeah. Yeah. So when I pick relational wealth, that is, it's a skewed answer because I already have enough to be comfortable. And I believe you already have enough to be comfortable as well. So I think that changes our opinions compared to other people.

You're right. We're biased 'cause we live the lives that we live, right? But I would also say that I remember reading, you know, Morgan Housel, he wrote a book called The Psychology of Money basically. And one time there was someone who wasn't wealthy or anything, but he pointed at a billionaire and said, I have something that they don't. I have enough, right? And so there's a lot of people we know that do modestly well. They do pretty well, right? But let's just say they make, you know, $80,000, $100,000 a year, which is like, it's decent, right? But they're not driven by money or anything. They just said they're really happy with their relationship with their family and their friends, right? And I see a lot of people, especially with my family like that. And I'm sure you see the same thing too. So even though you and I might be biased, I think once you can get, I think, Once you can get to the point where you're a little, I think they're a little bit older, all these people, it's like, yeah.

But also comfortable. If you look at most of the people in your family, they all do decently well. They're comfortable.

They do decent, but I wouldn't say they're like, I think a lot of them are, I would say they're middle class, right? Which is okay. And some of them are actually struggling a little bit too, but they're still happy with hanging out with their family and seeing their nieces and nephews all the time.

Yes. But if they were not able to afford groceries and put enough food on the table, I think—

Oh yeah. Well then at a certain point, yes. You have to focus on providing for yourself and for your family. But once Once you get the baseline, to your point, the $75K, $80K, $100K or whatever, I think chasing relational wealth is the thing. And I think we've been taught, I think I've been taught wrongly because Chinese culture is focused so much on money growing up. I don't know how you were taught, but like at least I used to hear my parents talking about money all the time. You get a little older and you get a baseline level of success, you're like, yeah, it's not about the money.

So my parents are really interesting. They'll ask me typically when they come over, I see 'em at least a few times a month, You know, we were sick recently, but— Once a week? Yeah. If I'm not sick or anything, the kids aren't sick, once a week, try to be respectful because they're older, so we don't want to get them sick. When we see them, my parents will usually ask, how's business? All right. If I say business is good, their usual response, not always, but typical response is something like, you should spend more time with your family. You work too much. You need to see your sister more, see us more. Better relationships with family, you know, work isn't everything.

They're not wrong.

But if I say business is bad—

Yeah, work on the business.

Their typical response is, you need to work more, you know, but don't stress out too much. We want you to be happy. All will be okay. You know, you can always come move back with us if you lose everything. So it goes into like really doom and gloom. And it's like—

So you've optimized it more to say, oh, business is not that good. So they tell you to work more?

No, I just tell them the truth. Like if they say what's happening, I tell them. I'm like, business is— this has been a terrible year for business. We're okay, but it's been a terrible year. And they're like, don't stress. They're like, just keep in mind that you're okay. And my parents, you know, try to look at the light of things and they'll tell me, yes, they say, you know, Work hard, but I've been telling them business is bad for over a year at this point. So they don't push too much more on working hard. They try to push more on don't stress out, everything's okay. You have enough money. If you don't, you can come live with us for free and you can have our house. Like they're really chill about it. And they're just like ruining your health isn't worth making more money.

That's interesting. Yeah. I think my parents probably more edge towards the relational side. Even my dad yesterday was like, you know, you haven't been to China for a very long time. Maybe you should go to China and find a wife.

I'm like—

anyway, we can continue on here. You can pick the next one.

Let's see. Let's talk about— there was an interesting article on Chatopitik. It was Chatopitik. Chatopitik.com? I'm messing up the name.

Chatoptic.

ChatOptic. Thank you, Eric. I so butchered that one. I'm like, ChatOptic. Yeah, I'm like, oh dude, I just butchered that one. Sorry, ChatOptic. Okay, so they had an interesting article and a study. It was SEO does not equal GEO. Only 62% overlap between Google ranking and ChatGPT visibility. So they're saying if you rank on Google 62% of the time, you're going to see that visibility on ChatGPT. And the other 38% of the time you will not. I still look at SEO and GEO very similar, but I agree. But it's the same goes that like saying, if you rank on Google, you're going to rank on Bing. We all know that's not necessarily true because they have different algorithms. Sure, there's a lot of similar results on the first page for the same keywords, but not always. And I genuinely believe that no platform is going to show identical results, because if they do, there was no point in using them. Like if you use Bing and it's identical to Google, then why would you? You have to differentiate somehow. You're going to have a little bit of different algorithms. But even then, going back to your study, when it comes to Gemini, I have another one here. Did you know, and Search Engine Land published this, 95% of all ChatGPT users visit Google, 14% of Google users visit ChatGPT?

That's the one I wanted to call out. Yeah, that's been shared quite a bit. So it does basically reinforce that right now, at least Google is still very much king. It is the empire.

It is, but no one wants to talk about it. And yet you look at their revenue and their profitability, they're doing phenomenal. And here's the thing, and this is just my opinion, if I look at the recent AI releases that Google has done versus ChatGPT, I would say in the last 3, 4 months, Google has done a better job.

Yeah, V03. Yeah, well, Nano Banana, like those are things I can speak to. I will say ChatGPT, to their credit, to OpenAI, they've done a better— at least they have more of like a launch figured out with their new products like ChatGPT-5. They had all these things pushed out and that was cool marketing. It's just the products didn't deliver. So if they combined the way they did marketing with Gemini's features or Google's features, that would be the best mix.

And I would rephrase it, and I know you mean the same thing here. When I say rephrase it, I would say Google releasing the features they are, but launch like Apple.

Yes. Launch like Apple. Yeah, 'cause OpenAI copies Apple.

Yeah, and I say Apple does a better job than OpenAI of creating hype and awareness and how they record the videos and stuff like that.

And to be fair though, like Google does their I/O event every year and that kind of is Apple-esque. They probably just need to do more of it.

Yeah, but they should do specific videos just for the launch. Like you go to Apple's website and I'll go to the homepage of Google. Or type in any search for like, watch our in real time, the new launch of, you know, Google's X, Y, Z.

You know what they need? They probably, and they probably have this already, but they need product marketers because the problem with these things is like Google Nano Banana, like you didn't know where to find it and how to access it in the beginning, right? VO3, it's like, where do I go to search for this stuff? And if it gets too confusing, people are just going to drop out. Like it's, if you think of it as like a funnel, there's too much drop-off.

Would you agree with the statement that you and I know more about most Google news because we keep up with the industry sites? Did you know I learned about Nano Banana first from, uh, what is it called?

Twitter?

Uh, X.

X, yeah.

And I saw all the examples on X and I clicked, I'm like, what the heck is this?

Yes. X did the marketing for them.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And the reason it went viral is because people were showcasing what they did with it. I'm like, this is cool. Who created this? How much did they raise? And then I'm like, okay, this is Google.

Yeah.

I'm like, no wonder it's so good.

Yeah, it's insane. And like, you know, what I constantly struggle with is like, man, should you and I be spending the time to learn this? So where I've landed on this, I'm curious to know where you've landed, is I'll play around with it a little bit just to understand how it works, but I'm not going to go too deep. I need to know enough to be dangerous. But the thing is, as much as I want to obsess and dive into everything, it's not the best use of my time. How do you look at it?

Very similar. I probably play around with it a little bit or quite a bit less than you. So with their new features, uh, VO3, I've probably played around with it max 2, 3 hours, uh, over all the months it's been around. Nano Banana, maybe 30 minutes max.

I'm actually the same as you. It's not that long on these. Yeah, I probably spent a lot of hours on MCPs, but, or like Cursor and all that, but not on these things. Yeah, so it's the same. But like, I remember I workshopped this with ChatGPT. I was like, man, I really want to play with these things, but is this the highest leverage thing I can do? And it knows what I'm focused on with my business. It's like, no, the highest leverage thing for you is to know enough about these to hire the right people to run these things.

So speaking of leverage, you have an interesting topic here I saw. I don't know the title, but it was something related to books, reading a lot or something can make you less Where is that? Where was that?

You, I, I knew you would like that one.

Where is it?

Dude, I have so many topics this week.

I know. I saw your sheet. I'm like, do I even put in topics at this point?

Yeah. I was like, I was like, he might not put in anything this morning.

Yeah. Where you have something here about books. Uh, do you see it?

No.

Dude, you have like so many topics. I'm trying to find it.

Can I talk about one, one thing that's better than orgasms?

Uh, sure. Okay.

Don't worry. You'll like this one. This is from, so It's actually, so Mohnish Pabrai says that this is 1,000 times better than Netflix. And so he basically said that this is like an orgasm. You're having an orgasm every hour. He's like, you don't need free time. This is better than free time. Do you know what it is?

No.

It's business. So he did an episode with The Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett, that podcast. And if you think about it, the times you spend on your business, time I spend on my business, a lot of, yes, there's a lot of stress with it, but you feel like you're playing a video game all the time. There's so much, When I, I'll be honest with you, when I'm watching Netflix, when I'm watching anime or something, I, I start to think about business and I start to think about how useless I am on the, on the couch.

But video games, you don't?

No, not video, 'cause business is the video game now. It's so fun. And am I having an orgasm every hour? I don't know if I'm having an orgasm every hour, but I feel like it's so fun. And I know similarly enough to you, you've called me before and you told me this, that when you close a really big deal, you get really excited, right?

Yeah.

And so I'm not saying you're having orgasm or anything, but I do feel like this is 1,000 times better than Netflix. And that's why we were okay with the suffering that we have to go through to run a business.

The ups and downs make it more enjoyable.

Yeah.

As crazy as that may sound.

Yeah.

I like the downs cuz I've had years in business where things are just going really good.

Yeah.

And I get lazy and I feel like I'm not as having as much fun.

Yeah. It's, uh, it, I think as men, like sometimes you can say, okay, we're masochists or whatever, but it, it, we're okay suffering. We're okay taking the pain because we know the pain makes us more resilient and it makes us stronger. I'm not saying physical pain, but there's a lot of mental pain and anguish that goes with this, right? Like we're not construction, like, We're not on the oil rigs or anything. I think that's way more physical pain that I don't think you can take it, or I don't think I can take it for sure. But I think we're talking about mental pain that we have to— the anguish we have to deal through. Business is such a fun journey, and I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I do agree with Mohnish that it's for sure better than Netflix. And at least I'm excited every hour or most hours.

Yeah, no, I think business has been really fun and I also like the downs because for me it gives me purpose and it makes the ups even better. But I found the book topic here. Here's the title of it, How Reading Books Can Stop You from Getting Rich. So you put this in. I'm curious because you already know my opinion on this.

Yeah. So, you know, I think there tends, because there are so many podcasts available and so many books available, and don't get me wrong, I'm the first proponent to read books and I've read a lot of books, right? And then I was in a meeting the other day, he's like, man, you've read so many books, right? But all of the books in the matter, in the world won't matter if you overread. What ultimately matters, for example, let me give you an example. So let's say I'm practicing tennis, okay? So I can read all the books. There's a great book called The Inner Game of Tennis, great philosophy. How the hell—

Did you read it?

No, I didn't. I have the book sitting at home, but I have people, so many people have mentioned it, so I'll go ahead and buy these books, right? A lot of these books I haven't read in my home, right? I use them as reference. If I got this from Syed, if 2+ people tell me to buy it or I hear it, I'm just going to buy it, right? So, but in tennis, Just because you read a book, are you going to know how to return a serve? Are you going to know how to serve? You're going to have to pick up the patterns. Or just like if you're doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you're going to have to know if you're in— if you're getting destroyed in a certain position, you're going to have to learn how to adapt to that, right? You don't learn that unless you're actually in the trenches, in business, in sales. You don't learn sales just by reading books. So I'm not saying don't read these things. I'm not saying don't buy a course or whatever to get the baseline knowledge, but you still have to get there in the trenches. And I think the problem is A lot of people right now, they're listening to all these podcasts and like maybe you're listening to this podcast too much and maybe you just need to go out there and do. I think there's a happy medium between the two. And so I think there is a situation where if you read too many books, it's going to stop you from getting rich because you've stopped— you keep— it's mental masturbation. You keep learning these things, but you're not doing.

Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think reading is good and you should read to some extent, but you already know my opinion on reading too many books and listening to too many podcasts.

Yeah. I mean, to Neil's credit, actually, since I've known you, you've never talked about a book. You just talk about doing. It's just doing. And to your credit, like you'll start new things and you'll make a lot of mistakes and I'll make a lot of mistakes when I start new things, but that's how you actually learn. You learn by failing.

For me, at least. Other people may learn from books.

For me too. I think with anybody, you learn by failing. Right?

Yeah.

There's not one person that doesn't learn by failing.

Yeah. And I have read some other, some books that have taught me some interesting lessons, but generally my problem with reading isn't that reading's not good. A lot of it is philosophical. And when you want to try to go do something in real life, it doesn't work out the way that the book ends up telling you.

Dude, I will say though, I read a lot more philosophy now or philosophical quotes and I save a lot more things into my bookmarks. Because when you, you look at Marcus Aurelius, for example, dude, okay, Richest guy in the world. He was the emperor of Rome and he had to deal with wars. He had to deal with politicians. He had to deal with people trying to get in his way and all that. And all he wrote was his diary, his meditations, right? His philosophies. And I think a lot of philosophies, they stand the test of time and they're so general, right? It's not like they're prescribing anything. So I think philosophies help keep people grounded and then eventually you establish your own philosophies.

Yeah. Yeah. On a random note, you have something else in here that Silicon Valley bet the fun moments.

Yeah.

What is this? Like when they went all in on a company?

Yeah, so even, so when you look at a venture firm like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, for example, these are some of the largest venture firms in the world, right? So a lot of people don't know that Andreessen Horowitz bet 17% of their fund on Skype back in the day. So Skype was bought by Microsoft for $8 billion, and then I think they just sunsetted it. Sequoia bet 15% of their fund on WhatsApp. Thrive Capital bet 20% of their fund on Stripe. And then GV team, I think Google Ventures team maybe?

Skype was bought by eBay. Andreessen bought it out from eBay, sold it to Microsoft.

Dude, I didn't even know that.

Yeah.

And then Google Ventures team bet 22% of their fund in Uber. And then Founders Fund just bet 70% of their fund into Cognition. And they also bet 30% of the last growth fund into Enduro. So all that to say is, even with venture capital, sometimes if you have conviction on something, you have to swing hard. And investing, sometimes they say it's not about the number of bets that you make, it's about the slugging percentage. It's how hard are you going to hit when you know that you have something? Just like you're all in on your business, I'm all in on my business. So Even these bet-the-fund moments or bet-the-company moments happen with funds.

Yeah, I figured it happened with funds because if you look at some of the returns, they're really outsized for how much money the fund has. So you can assume that they put in a much bigger chunk of their fund into it. An interesting thing that I know that a lot of funds do is when they know that they have the Andrills or whatever it may be, They'll put in whatever they can from the fund into that company. You have to remember most of these funds have LPs, it's not their own money. So there's limitations on how much they can actually put into one deal. Sometimes they may try to get approvals or whatnot so they can go more aggressive. But what's interesting is, is when they have a deal that they really love and they want to put more money, a lot of times they'll reach out to their LPs and say, we think this is a great deal. This is why, you know, we are putting as much as we can. We have more to allocate. Who wants to throw in more? And they won't take carry or anything like that from it or management fees. And the investors love it because they can just allocate more money. And here's another thing that people don't talk about when these funds are investing. Let's say if you raise a billion-dollar fund and you have someone who gives you $200 million and they're your marquee investor, $100 million, and they're your marquee investor, anchor investor for that fund. A lot of them will have a deal saying, I'm your anchor investor. I give you $200 out of a billion. You need to also deploy $200 more million of my money without carry and without management fees.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And I don't think the Sequoias and the Thieles—

They probably don't do that.

They don't have to end up dealing with it.

Because they're, they're already well known.

Yeah, they're already well known and they're pretty much grade AA++, whatever you want to call it, funds. But it's some of the other ones that are smaller, up and coming, like $400 million, $500 million, even a billion. A lot of 'em have to do deals with their LPs and allocate more money without taking any of the upside.

Dude, you speaking of investing just kind of reminded me of the economy, the economic situation. So just a fun question for you, 2 questions for you. What are the odds, 0 through 100%, that you think we're going into recession or already in a recession? Probability?

I don't know because I don't know how a recession is defined anymore. Okay. Because sometimes they would say, oh, 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. Well, we've had that. And then they say we're not in a recession. I'm not trying to point fingers at them and saying they're changing the goalposts or anything like that. I'm not So I don't know how a recession is defined.

Yeah. Okay. So you pass on the first question.

I pass on the first question.

Second question is probability-wise, 0 to 100%, what are the odds that you think maybe in the next 6 to 12 months or so that the stock market will crash?

I was just listening to an interview on this a few days ago, and it was from one of the big hedge funds out there, and they made a really good point. They're looking at like over a, You know, the index of all the publicly traded companies, and they're looking at the average price-to-earnings ratio and the overall health of most companies' profitability. And I think the number, don't quote me on this, is something like most of these companies on average, when you average around, are worth around like 14 times profit, which to me is very reasonable. I'm not saying the market won't crash, But a lot of the valuations you're seeing in the public markets to me are very reasonable.

It's interesting because the reason I bring this up, I was watching a video with— I talk about George Gammon, so he listens to this podcast. Shout out to George Gammon. Check out his YouTube channel. So he had a video he just released recently on the jobs report obviously being revised down. And I think in his video it showed the Ford P/E ratio was the highest it's ever been, right? Whereas you're saying— Yeah. So he mentioned that. But so he— this is interesting because he said, He thinks 85% chance of recession, but he only thinks 20% chance of the stock market crashing. Why? Because we're in an era where just the government's going to— the Fed's going to prop things up, right? And so he's thinking 20% chance, 85% chance recession, 20% chance the market crashes. And not financial advice, guys, but I thought it was just interesting coming from him.

Yeah, I believe in the old Buffett philosophy, whether the stock market crashes or not, if these companies are doing 13, 14, 10 times profit, and it's healthy, steady companies. 10 times profit, you know, if that's your PE ratio, that's really healthy for a large corporation. Even 14, especially if you have like recurring income and it's very predictable and you're growing at a nice clip. I look at that as like whether the stock market crashed and these stocks went down, as long as the business performs really well, I don't really care why I look at it, you know? And if it starts going down and crashing, cool. It creates opportunity to buy more.

Do you know what percent of Berkshire Hathaway they used to hold in cash before in the past?

If I had to guess, way less than 10%.

13%. What do you think it is now?

Okay, so I was wrong. Right now, I don't know, 40%-ish?

27%. But point is, this is the most cash that Buffett's ever held. It's about $300 billion or so.

Yeah.

So he just, you know, he kind of just waiting to, 'cause there's a lot of stuff right now is, is might be like a little, stock market is all-time highs right now, I think, right? Or near all-time highs.

Yeah.

Everything's pretty high right now. Pretty much all-time highs. Anyway, I just But there's a lot of growth.

A lot of corporations are making a ton of money right now. And when you look at the market and people talking about crash, a lot of the up movement has been from tech. If you go outside of tech, a lot of the companies like, okay, let's look at—

Outside Mag 7?

Yeah. If you just look at outside technology, like period. Okay. Like if I go to like, let's look at a company like Target. All right, if I look at Target stock over the last 5 years, it's down. If I look at year-to-date, it's down 34%. Their PE ratio is 10.5. And if you look at— oh, Google just shifted Google Finance. Let's go back to the classic view. If you look at their annual income, right, it's pretty much flat last 3 years. The stock could go up or down for a lot of variety of reasons, but like overall, Pretty healthy business. You know, their net income in 2025 compared to 2024 is down 1.14%. Like, you have stability. Am I saying this is the right time to buy that stock or not? Should the stock crash or not? That, I don't know any of that. But what I do know is a lot of these companies that are publicly traded have really healthy financials. And the economy right now with tariffs and all that kind of stuff, it's impacting consumers. To what extent? I don't know. Different reports say different things, but these companies are still performing decently well, at least not from a stock price perspective, but from a financial perspective when you look at their numbers.

Yeah. So we'll see what happens in the next 6, 12 months or so. We're not economists here. I thought it would just be interesting to talk about. But did you see that Tim Soulo did a post here from Ahrefs on how traffic from ChatGPT is slowing down?

So I saw that.

As of August 2025, ChatGPT, 0.21%. of a website's traffic. I think that's what it's saying. Google is 41.12%. I think this is search share. I think that's what it is.

I think it's from people using the Ahrefs analytics.

Yeah, website traffic share. So you see, oh, this is talking about the growth rate. So month over month growth comparison, you can see what's happening here. So Google is in the blue and then ChatGPT is in the green. So he's saying it's decelerating.

Yes. I believe, I don't know how many, what's their sample size? Did you say like 40,000 or something?

50,000. And just to clarify here, this is website traffic share. So this is clicks coming to your website. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think you're going to start seeing ups and downs and there's not going to be consistency, just like there is with algorithm changes. And these people will try to monetize and that can make it even harder. But at the end of the day, if you can get AI to cite you, we're seeing more revenue and conversions and that should be your goal. Don't worry about it from a month-to-month perspective, but that data is really interesting that Tim shared.

What, just, just out of curiosity, what percentage of your blog now, because our blogs used to be more informational content than more bottom of funnel, call it, you know, I don't know, 50, 60, 70% is more top of funnel informational. And then now it's kind of shifted more towards bottom of funnel, more transactional. What's that percentage breakdown for you today?

I don't know the percentage breakdown. I do know we focus more on bottom of funnel than top of funnel.

Yeah, it's like significantly more.

But we still do focus on top of funnel, just not as much as we used to. I do not know what the percentage is. And we look at a lot of this stuff. It's hard for us as a business to measure what is more effective or not. And the reason being is our business at NP Digital has really shifted over the years. We started, I would say similar to the current Single Grain. I could be wrong. I don't know what your average client spend is, but let's call it $100,000 to a few hundred thousand a year.

Yeah.

Right? We started there and because we shifted to enterprise, it really skews everything because how you get leads, what's responsible for the leads, the way you get leads, the way you get included in RFPs, the way you close business, it's all changed. So the marketing has also changed with it. And like when we look at our blog, I don't know what your numbers are today, but I do remember years ago was the biggest driver of your revenue for new clients.

And same for you. Back in the day.

Exactly.

Yeah. And today it's shifted actually today too. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think it's even 10%. Yeah.

For you guys, there's no way it can even be 10%. Wow. Massive. Ours used to be, I would say 80% of our leads came from the blog back in the day. Now it's got to be probably like, I don't know, call it 30-ish percent, something like that.

I'm not looking at the leads though. I'm looking at just revenue.

Yeah.

So I don't know what portion of the leads come from the blog, but it's still a good chunk. The problem with my business is, is we win or die by the deal. In other words, the deal is so large. If we close a deal, it's like, hooray, this is awesome. We did a good job. If we lose a deal, it hurts really bad.

If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karat, 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 and we'll see you on the other side. Can we talk about how agencies are struggling right now too? Because for whatever reason, that day when you called me earlier this week, multiple people that day from multiple agencies. So there's, there's a guy that we know Mutual friend of ours. I thought they were doing, call it $20 million or so. And when I asked them how they were doing, they've decelerated, call it down to like $5.7. And granted, this is not his main business anymore. I think you know who I'm talking about. I'm not going to name names, but—

I met him in Miami.

Yeah.

And then that was the one that I told him to merge with you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And I was like, but that's a pretty significant deceleration from $20 million.

He was never at $20 million.

Yeah.

I'm not saying he's lying. I don't think he actually was at 20. He's never told me he was at 20. I think the miscommunication there.

Even if he was at 20.

But yes, he has—

I did hear at least 14 before, you know what I mean? I heard that number before.

Yeah.

Right. So, but down to 5.7 and I'm like, okay, interesting. And then we, you and I, you actually sent 2 people over. I'm just like, man, a lot of these people are struggling right now. And then that same day, an M&A firm was like, hey, are you buying anything right now? I was like, hey, You're reaching out right now, like, are a lot of agencies struggling? He's like, yeah, they are.

So. Did you end up, are you going to do a deal with them though?

I'm going to talk to that guy. So that's—

You haven't talked to him yet?

No, I have talked to him. I've talked to him and then now he's put a data room together and it looks like we might do something. So I'll give you a nice Christmas gift if we do something. I'll give you a nice Christmas gift anyway.

You can just buy me a free water.

Okay, I'll buy you a free water. That sounds good. From Air One. It'll be a nice one.

No, no, that's the paid water. I said free.

Okay, I'll buy you a free water. You can come to The Mandarin and give me one of their I'll give you one of my nice Korean waters.

No, no, it's okay. I don't want anything.

Yeah.

But yeah, I know. I hope you get the deal because he hit me up late at night and it was a mutual friend of mine. Another—

I have a lot of friends that are good friends who are close with him. So that's a good one.

So another Indian dude hit me up on a text thread with him and said, you guys should meet about M&A and all this kind of stuff. And I talked to him that night. And it was late because I remember getting up out of bed like at 9, 10 o'clock. There's, for some things I will do a call at any hour of the day.

Yeah.

Especially for deals. I'm like, oh, let's get up. And I'm energized. Like I don't, I don't ever drink coffee. I'm just energized naturally when it comes to deals. But I knew talking to him right then and there that this would be, I'm not saying that you should do the deal or not. I didn't do diligence. I only talked to him on the phone for maybe 15, 20 minutes. Because that business has been declining and he started going over his numbers and he started going over what his current customers pay and how you're more B2B and he's more B2C. I'm like, well, if you merge, you'll have B2C better on lockdown than you do currently. You have B2B, it'll open up the door to have a higher win rate for more customers because you'll have more of a track record. Yeah. 2, they have a good community. You know how to leverage communities and you can work out a deal with them or figure that out. 3, the deal's screaming from a financial perspective for you, right? Without getting into too much there. And then 3, you're, I wouldn't say struggling, but you're, I would actually use the word struggling. That is the right word. You're struggling to hire quick enough.

Yes.

And he has supposedly, I haven't done any digging in, really good talent.

Yeah.

Including video talent.

Mm-hmm.

And what I saw was, hey, this can help you with some video stuff for your business.

It can help across the board.

And it'll offer you new services that you probably don't excel at right now because you're not really a creative shop. No offense. Yeah.

No, no, you're right.

They don't do a ton in AI, so that's great cross-sell. And the other thing is, is what I saw is with their headcount, they don't do tons in AI. And I'm like, huh, how much more money and synergies can you create by leveraging technology? And you can probably improve the margins.

Yeah. And you only need so many account managers and stuff like that. And I was skeptical initially, I have to admit. And then once I talked and I started thinking exactly what you were thinking too, I was like, oh, this, this might potentially work. And so I have some reviewing to do this afternoon. I'll just put it that way. So yeah.

Yeah. Just when you buy it, my only advice to you is don't buy the corporation.

I won't. It's assets. I would go for assets.

Uh-huh. And then you do a DBA. Yeah. So that way you can take over the bank account.

But you should explain why you would not go do a stock deal. Why would you do it? Just so everyone knows.

Because whatever he potentially—

Let's say a lawsuit, for example.

Yeah. Liabilities. You're taking that over.

Mm-hmm. But that's a lesson for everyone too.

But you need to make sure the contracts could be assigned over. Mm-hmm. And you got to look at the contracts for that. But yeah, you would just take over everything.

Yep. Cool. Well, that's good. Just look, agencies are struggling right now, but there are situations where you can make a 1 plus 1 equals 10. The other one that you sent over, I was like, yeah, not, not, not good.

What was the other one I sent over?

You sent over.

Oh yeah, I sent over 2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other one I didn't talk to on the phone. He texted me and then I asked him his numbers on the phone and I already knew it wasn't for us, but, and he didn't try pitching it to me. I was just like, let me just do an intro to you. And like, you have, there's no—

I introduced you to him and you introduced him back to me.

No, but you introduced him to me years ago.

Yeah, I know.

But you probably don't know his latest numbers today, at least.

I knew his numbers from the past and I didn't think there would be much difference.

But it's worth having a chat because what do you have to lose? Even if it's 5 minutes.

I have 5 minutes to lose.

Okay.

I'm just kidding.

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Be 5 minutes late with the date or something like that.

Yeah. Anyway, continue.

But I have that topic in here. Marketing agencies are feeling an artificial uptick in business and we're seeing some agencies struggle. Or a lot struggle, but of the recent months, we've been hearing a lot of agencies say, oh, things are getting better for us.

For you and I, at the very least.

I don't know if things are actually getting better. So I started doing analysis from all the people who hit me up who said agencies are picking up. The biggest thing that I saw wasn't that their new business has picked up.

Forget leads.

Leads doesn't mean you're going to close more, right? Sure. If you get more leads, it is a quote unquote leading indicator, but it's not a guarantee. When most of these agencies have said the last few months have been really good, when I started diving into it, most of that uptick came from older deals that never signed and they were just ready to sign now. That's almost the majority of the growth when these agencies, the last few months have been really good. For the majority that I talked to and I had them dive into it, that's where their growth came from.

Is that what you've seen?

We saw that as well. When we look at going forward, leads are up for a lot of people, but people have not seen an increase in revenue from those net new leads coming in yet. Maybe it will, but the increase in revenue is coming from, oh, a lot of these people I pitched right when Trump announced the tariffs paused and didn't do anything. Now they're signing up with us.

I would say it's different for us. So we, we are getting a little bit of that. So again, case-by-case basis, right? We're, we're just, we're just one case, but there, there are some situations where They might have signed with somebody else and they're like, oh, the agency sucks. And they came back to us, right? We had that problem last year. So that happened a little bit. But when I look at the new logos that we brought in, they are net new from net new leads that came in like maybe like a month, 2, 3 months ago or so. And so it's a little different for us, but also it's, yeah.

See, I look at you as a very unique use case. And the reason I say this is you had operational issues that were hindering your revenue growth in the past. And you fixed some, call it in the last 6 months. So you're seeing the results of it now because of sales cycle. So your growth, I don't really look at that as growth because of a change in market conditions. I see that as pure growth because you fixed some issues with your product.

We had a major bottleneck that we fixed.

Yeah. So, and specifically you've rejiggered how you sell. And I think that's helped, but I don't look at that. And yes, that is growth and props to you for fixing it, but I don't look at that as the economy is affecting your revenue in a positive or negative way. You were wise enough to figure out the issues in the business and fixing those.

Do you think we're in a good economy right now?

No.

Yeah, me neither.

I think we're in a terrible economy. Lutnick said the other day, you're going to see crazy job growth sometime early next year or sometime next year. I hope so. Exactly. I don't know what they're saying is if it's going to come true or not, but all I can do is hope and I hope it actually goes that way.

I got someone that, I got one here that's kind of off the beaten path and we can get back on the marketing path. But I just, you know, obviously this week, you know, big thing happened with Charlie Kirk's assassination and I just thought there's, from a marketing standpoint, this is interesting to me. So this is an example of how celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination actually destroyed a business. And so what happened here was, if you can see, There's this woman here that's basically mocking his passing, right?

And she's laughing.

Yeah, she's mocking it. She's like, let's throw a prayer and let's do a prayer.

Oh wow.

She's cheering.

She's cheering for his death. That's sad.

And actually on X, you can see a lot of situations where they're showing people on TikTok.

She's actually happy someone died. Wow. That's crazy.

All over TikTok right now. It's all over Bluesky. It's all over these things, right? But so she said, Or this poster here, Dr. Jebrah Fauci. She's a doctor? No, no, no. This person posted this reveal. So this is like— this person said, after this woman posted a video celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, thousands of people on the internet found her husband's company and flooded the Yelp reviews with 1-star. It got so bad that she had to remove the video. So I'm just saying that there's a lot of these situations where people are celebrating his death right now. And the problem is on X, which is more right-leaning, they're doxxing all these people, right? So you're better off Just not posting and not engaging, or you get your— in this case, she got her husband's business in trouble.

Well, it doesn't matter what beliefs someone has politically.

You should never celebrate someone's death.

You should never celebrate someone dying, kids losing one of their parents. It's just sad.

Dude, I actually, for fun yesterday, I decided to engage with someone, one of, let's call her an acquaintance on Instagram. She posted something about like not celebrating it, right? Or like basically, Saying that doesn't support the views and like, oh, all you people that were silent before about how his, like, he had violent rhetoric are like speaking about his death. And I'm like, those are like, those can exist in the same world. You can actually agree with him and actually, you know, actually mourn his death. Right. And she was just like going off. And so I've noticed, what I've noticed is if you log on to Threads and you log on to Bluesky, which are more left-leaning, a lot of people on those platforms, and this is, They're celebrating death. And I don't like— if I disagree with you or whatever, you say things I really don't disagree with, don't agree with, that's your opinion. But we shouldn't be celebrating anybody's death. And that's how far we've gotten.

We shouldn't want anyone to die.

No.

That's sad.

No. And there's like— but it's gotten so crazy now where it's— I think the United States at least has become a lot more polarized. But the key point from this one is celebrating anybody's death and getting a lot of views is actually not a good thing. You don't want to be seen doing that.

Just generally, ethically, you should not want someone to die. Yeah.

And by the way, people say like he's had this hateful rhetoric or whatever. He was just talking. I don't know if you've seen his videos, but he was just speaking his views and he was very convincing as he did it. But even though he would— he's a hardcore Christian, right? Even if he would disagree with you being gay, for example, he would say, hey, we can still agree on other things and he'd be respectful about it. Right. And so anyway, I don't want to go too far and deep into this, but I think it's just sad, a sad state of things because when I saw it happen, man, I was like, dude, Like immediately I was like, this is going to cause a lot of problems and it already is.

So. People should just be respectful of others and not wish ill will against others. That's at least what we were taught when we were little kids. Yeah.

But what, like what we're being taught now is a lot different. So anyway, we can move on to another one.

Have you ever seen Roger Federer's speech on winning? I just saw it for the first time yesterday.

What got you to watch it now?

It was just random on Instagram and someone sent it to me. Like, you know, like the messages, I check the messages in case there's any leads in there. One of my buddies sent it to me. It was a great speech. I did not know that he only played 1,526 games. That's a lot. He won almost 80% of them. But when you look at the points in each game—

54%.

54%. And there's 2 key takeaways that I got from the speech. To win, you don't have to win by a lot. Winning by a little is still winning. And that just shows how competitive it is. And it is like that in business. But doing things 1% better, 2% better, 3%, 4% better can make a huge difference. He has tons of trophies, right? He's one of the leaders when it comes to trophy count.

He was one of the big 3, Djokovic and Nadal and him.

Yeah. Although the young players are now starting to come up.

Alcaraz and Sinner.

Yeah. And the other thing that he said in his speech that really resonated with me is you got to control your emotions. Like when you are doing something, you got to go all in 110% and try to win. But the moment you lose and you messed up, that's okay. Move on. Don't let it bother you as hard as it may seem. And then go on to winning the next point. And if you lose that one, It's okay. Learn from it, move on, and go try to win the next point and just take it one stroke at a time or one hit at a time. I don't know the tennis vernacular, but you know better than me. I don't play the game. But I really did love his speech. I thought it was a great perspective on how you can be great and what 4% really does when it comes to winning, being 4% better.

Yeah. So, you know, Howard Marks from Oaktree, right?

Okay.

And so when you look at his fund over time, he's not saying they're the highest performing, they're just a little above average, but they're a little above average for a very long period of time. If you're just above average for let's say 10, 20+ years or so, you're actually a top 4% fund, right? So you don't need to be that much better than the other people. And so I think what's kind of the reason why you disconnected the two is that Roger Federer is basically saying, as long as you're consistent, you can manage your emotions and you play Consistently for a long period of time, you're gonna do just fine.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. And I always forget his name—the Lacoste one, the tall guy. Nokovic? Is it Nokovic? Jokovic. Jokovic is deep, right?

The Serbian one. Serbian one.

Yeah. He yeah, I always know because he's sponsored by Lacoste. He wears that everywhere. Does he?

Billboards everywhere for him.

But he says something similar, like he's just like. You can't dread on when you lose. What makes a winner so great is they're able to control their emotions and bounce back. The one thing that I like about him from a marketing standpoint is he has a really funny personality. I don't know if you've seen like the clips of him.

Oh yeah, he's funny. Yeah.

He's funny. And he is a marketing dream for an apparel company because his personality really shines and he's entertaining in a good way. Which I think will help sell more clothes.

Dude, I mean, speak, because we're talking about sports people right now. Did you watch the America's Team documentary on Netflix? I told you to watch it, remember?

America's Team? You told me to watch the Dallas Cowboys one.

That's what it's, Dallas Cowboys is America's Team.

Okay. I haven't watched it yet.

So I just want to talk about some business and marketing lessons from Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Cowboys America's Team. And so one, you know how Jerry Jones made his money?

You told me, but so I want you to go with this so I can get your clip.

So this is not gonna be a good clip, so I don't need, I'll just explain it. But just so everyone knows, Jerry Jones, he actually had a bunch of odd jobs coming out of Arkansas college. So they actually won a national championship, but his dream was always to own a football team. I actually didn't know that. So he would like sell insurance, he'd be like a door-to-door salesman. He'd be selling all these random things, right? He could, he actually couldn't figure things out. By age 28, he was trying to buy the Chargers at the time. And he actually went to the mafia, this mafia guy, to get money. The mafia guy's like, okay, I'll give you money, right? And his dad's like, dude, what are you doing? Like, what if you can't pay the bill? And his dad's like, is that— dad basically convinces him to not do that deal. At a certain point, he ends up betting everything. I think he reaches out to his father-in-law, like he scrounges up all the money he has, maybe borrows some money too. $800,000 at the time. I think this was in the late '70s, maybe early '70s, something like that. or maybe '60s, he bets all of his money on one oil drill, one oil well. Okay. That $800,000 becomes $100 million. At the time, $100 million is worth way more, hundreds of millions of dollars today, right?

Yeah.

That's how he gets his money, right? But the key thing as you look through his, the, so Dallas Cowboys won 3 championships in the '90s. They were the team of the '90s. He would not be afraid to try new things. He bet it all. Okay. He was the, he's known as the gambler. He also betted on a college coach that had never been in the NFL before, Jimmy Johnson. Okay. He also, he traded away his number one player, Herschel Walker. So Herschel Walker's a legendary running back, right? And he got 5 major, I think 5 first-round draft picks for that, right? So he basically, that is a gamble too. And so if you look at the Dallas Cowboys over time, I think they're worth like $13 billion now or something like that if you look it up. But he constantly He did very unconventional things. So he's still the GM of the company or the Dallas Cowboys for better or worse today.

$12.5 billion. $12.5 billion. Okay. Close enough.

But Jerry Jones is, I think he's in his 80s now or whatever, but he's still the GM of the company. There's no other owner who's the GM of the company or the team. The other thing too is this one's fun. This will be the last thing. But back in the day for the NFL, Coca-Cola was like the main drink, right? They had all these, Reebok was the main sneaker, right? He partnered up with Phil Knight and he partnered up with Pepsi and he got rid of all the Coca-Cola stuff. And so, but when you're part of the team, the league back then, one of the owners, you're supposed to fall in line and everyone's supposed to push Reebok, everyone's supposed to push Coca-Cola. He's like, screw that, I need to make more revenue. And that's how he got more revenue to do the things that he wanted to do.

Dude, that's crazy to think about. But yeah, I'll have to watch it.

No, you have to watch it. You'll love it.

He's a good businessman the way he's cornered all like the food stores and stalls within the NFL stadiums. And I think he partnered with the Los Angeles Rams for some of that kind of stuff. The owner there, Stan— Stanley, what's his name?

Kroenke. Kroenke, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Between both of those people, it looks like they've been really good at figuring out how to make more money from all the NFL teams.

Well, all his stuff, like it's a spectacle, right? It's like the largest screen in the NFL and then it's like America's team or America's cheerleaders.

And I think they have this roof So God could watch or something?

Yeah.

Is that the slogan or something like that?

I think that was the old stadium. This stadium also has an open one too, but maybe you can look it up real quick. But the other thing too is he, back in the day, he created shows. So there's like the Michael Irvin Show. He would create shows like other spectacles for his players and it was always a marketing thing.

So the saying is Texas Stadium has a hole in the roof so God can watch his favorite team plays.

Yeah.

Refers to the actual hole in the roof of the former Dallas Cowboys home stadium, which is, you're right, it's a former one.

Dude, and you know where he got all this marketing prowess from? His dad.

What does his dad do?

His dad used to run a grocery store. So his dad used to run a grocery store, and he was— the way he got people to come to the grocery store was he would have like singers at the grocery store.

Wait, his dad or him?

His dad.

Okay.

His dad had the grocery store. So he would look at his dad make a spectacle out of everything. And that's how Jerry Jones made a spectacle out of everything. Biggest screen, America's team, you know, these lawsuits, the NFL owners sued him to try to get his team. Because they didn't like the fact that he was doing things on his own. So it worked out for him. Yeah. Worked out perfectly. But point here is that you gotta, you gotta have the guts to go with it and to do things unconventionally for a very long time. And that's how he got to where he is by being authentically him.

It's worked. Sometimes you just gotta be you. It doesn't always work, but it works in—

I think it works the best long-term if you're just you.

So yeah. All right.

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

Let's see, you're seeing there's one here that's interesting, and this is from Ross Hudgens, who we both know. LinkedIn posts are seeing a surge in SEO traffic.

Yeah.

So they're just ranking higher, I'm guessing, is what he's saying.

Yeah, so Ross Hudgens here, so he's saying LinkedIn posts are seeing a surge in SEO traffic. This is a trend to watch. It feels like this could be a start of a Reddit, Quora-type social acceleration trend and a reason to invest in organic social. So you can see here, ChatGPT referral traffic drops 52%, but then this down here, this is, I think, traffic to LinkedIn and it's going up. And, you know, LinkedIn used to be more private, now it's a little more open. And so it's something to watch out for.

I wonder how much of ChatGPT's traffic comes from Google.

That's a good question.

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Can't rely on that one forever.

Yeah. But anyway, that's a pattern that's worth checking out. We're not saying that we're seeing anything. I thought it would just be interesting to call out.

Yeah. You have another one interesting here. I didn't read the— this is from Matt Diggity, Google rankings versus AI citations.

Yeah. So Google rankings versus AI citations from Matt Diggity here. So ChatGPT pulled in 55.2 billion visits by June 2025. That's an 80% jump in a single year via your favorite site, Search Engine Land. Sure, search engines still get 34 times more traffic, but that gap is closing fast, which means one thing: your content has to work for both Google rankings and AI citations. So here's the split, and we can talk about this. Google takes shots, short queries like car insurance UK or best shoes, best red shoes or whatever, and runs them through dozens of ranking factors such as backlinks, relevance, authority, technical SEO. For AI, AI deals with long conversational prompts. It doesn't filter as deeply. It leans more on co-citations than traditional links. So he's basically saying, look, many old tactics still work for AI systems, but here's what works for both. So for you and I both know this already, but writing an FAQ section, what is, how-to questions, right? That's going to help. Add 2 to 3 sentence summaries at the top of every article explaining the main point. Include your business name, address, phone number. So NAP. Back in the day, guys, NAP. And then break complex topics into 1-2 sentence factual statements that AI can easily extract and then cover 5 to 7 related subtopics within each main article instead of creating separate pages. So these are the baseline things that you can do to do well in both.

Yeah. An interesting thing that we're seeing AI pull from when people ask questions about like the best X, the best Y, whatever it may be, like best credit card, best For best credit card for college students, best electric car. Dude, they're just pulling from what we, we've seen a huge trend on ChatGPT where they just pull from random sites. Forget authority. It could be written by like joetheplumber.com. There's nothing wrong with plumbers. They're your millionaire next door. Amazing businesses, by the way. And ChatGPT will pull it and index it. And I don't think they're looking as much as context like EAT. And I do believe that's going to change in the future. Yeah.

Probably within the next 12 months, to be honest.

Because we've seen some players in different verticals because we scrape a lot of the different queries on OpenAI through their API. And no joke, they're just pulling from random websites that just do list-based articles ranking products or services or sites. And the people who just guest post a ton are doing really well. But, you know, Google went through this, they eventually realized that not all websites are equal. And they filtered out the junk.

Yeah, eventually, like people are trying to game it right now, they'll figure it out and then they'll— it's always like a cat and mouse game. That's what it is. And Google's always been ahead. By the way, you actually tweeted this one. This— I want to give you the shout out for this one, but 98% of people aren't getting an ROI from AI due to this. And you basically did a quick study on MCPs. So most people you're saying do not get an ROI from AI, but people who use MCPs do. So you can go on it.

People who use— I have a tweet somewhere on there, but people who end up using MCP. So think of it as like an AI for— or API for AI. And what it allows you to do is connect different platforms together or software solutions together so that way the AI can actually do stuff to help you get a lot more work done.

It's honestly still like an API to me.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is. At least that's the way I look at it. I know technically it's not, but I really do view it as a API, and the numbers were not using MCPs. Think of it as like an API for AI, as Eric mentioned as well. 96% are not getting ROI. For the ones who are using it, which is a much smaller sample size, roughly 2% are—

You got 4% each year using MCPs.

Not seeing ROI. Oh yeah, 4% using. Of the 4%, 61% are seeing ROI and 2% are not, which is kind of crazy to think about. And then when you look at, oh yeah, this is for— This is reversed. Yes, reversed.

Yeah. So look, I think Neil's main point here is if you're using an MCP, like most people aren't seeing an ROI from AI, but if you're using MCP, you're far likelier to see, 61%, you're likely to see an ROI. Those 2%, I'm sorry guys, you just probably just need to do some training on it and you'll probably see an ROI.

Yep. Yep. It's kind of crazy to think about and it's just like, People are using AI and they believe using ChatGPT or Nano Banana is going to get you ROI. If you're using the wrong strategy, it's just AI is cool and it doesn't do anything for me from a financial aspect.

You know what's interesting? So Alex Lieberman, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, tweeted this too. So if you're to go to Fortune 500 executives right now, and I'm sure you and I have talked to some, but the AI bar for Fortune 500 executives, if you talk to an executive If they see they're seeing an ROI from AI right now, most of what he's seeing at least is the leverage they're gaining from AI right now is only AI meeting recordings and summaries. So the bar is extremely low right now. And interestingly enough, and I think you've seen this too, you and I, like, I know I'm speaking to like an older group of CEOs next month, and the guy I was talking to is like, dude, this group has no idea what to do, and you need to whip them into shape or whatever. And I'm sure you've already done this for organizations too this year too.

Yeah.

What are you seeing?

What we're seeing is we're seeing the same thing. It doesn't matter if it's run by older people or younger people or who the executives are. It's all very similar. And corporations, big or small, they all claim that they use AI, but they don't understand what is a good bar, what is a bad bar, How to actually use it to get an ROI. Is it actually creating time savings or people just spinning their wheels? The biggest thing we see when we talk to large organizations like Fortune 500, Global 10,000, whatever you want to end up calling it, they're actually seeing an increase in expense due to AI.

Mm-hmm.

They're buying all this stuff for AI and they haven't figured out how it's going to help them save money. Or make money. Yep. But they're reading how it's going to solve all these problems and they can't figure that part out yet.

I saw Mark Cuban on the TBPN podcast. I think it's Tech Bros Podcast Network, TBPN. And he was just like, dude, in my 20s, like I was trying to get everyone to get a PC and they're like, no, I have my assistant, I have this, right? He's like, the gold rush right now, if you're in your teens, is to get people on to help businesses get on the AI train. But my question for you is, what age did you start using the internet at? Because I remember for me, I stole my mom's credit card when I was about 8 years old and I signed up for MSN. When did you start using it?

I don't know what age, but it was really maybe like somewhere between 9 and 12 years old if I had to guess. So probably before 12, but I would say 9, 10, or 11.

Roughly around the same age, right? And so—

It was a dial-up modem.

Yeah, that's what I had.

People couldn't use the phone when I was on the internet.

Yeah, same for me. And so I didn't buy an extension, so I had to— I waited for my mom to leave and I would move because my computer desk had wheels on it. So I move it over to the phone thing, plug it in, and once she got home, I'd like unplug it and then move it back. That's what I did for the longest time. But my point is, most people don't know what to do with this right now. And especially if you're younger right now, this is your opportunity. If you really try to understand one business and then try to optimize that business for AI, you saw Sierra, they raised like a bunch of money and they're just building agents. I think there's another company.

I didn't actually see that. They raised a lot.

Yeah, hundreds of millions. There's another company that just started recently with Kushner, Josh Kushner. They're like almost like an AI services company too. Yeah, so they're AI services company and they raised like $200, I think, just like this week.

Yeah, Josh is well connected. He's done well with Thrive. Yeah, he's a killer.

So yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, all that to say, go ahead.

Yeah, but I look at, AI is similar to any business tool that you have available at your toolkit. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it. I genuinely do believe it's here to stay. I think businesses just focus on the wrong thing and they look at, they have shiny object syndrome instead of just focusing on what's going to drive ROI. Dude, the other day someone asked me about this podcast. They're like, you record a podcast with Eric? I'm like, They're like, how many years have you been doing it? And I was like, I don't know, maybe 5 to 10 years, somewhere around that range. 9 years.

9 years? Yeah.

Okay, so it's a long time. I knew it was more than 5, but I knew we didn't hit 10 yet or we would've celebrated on the podcast.

I don't think we would've celebrated. I think I'm likely just forget it. You wouldn't even know.

I thought we would've been like, we hit 10 years and then we're done.

Okay, we like 1,000 episodes, 2,000 episodes, 3,000. We just keep going.

But I was telling them, they're just like, you know, they're like, okay. They're like, what's your ROI from the podcast? I'm like, honestly, I think it's negative. Like genuinely speaking, I actually think the ROI—

On pure dollars.

On pure dollars, which is all that matters, right? At the end of the day, for me, the way my brain works.

Continue, continue.

Right? And they're saying, why do you do it? And I was like, I don't know. I enjoy my time with Eric and now Noah too. And, you know, they're just like, You know, we were talking about business and I'm like, yeah, sometimes people do things that have no ROI but potentially could. And people spend a lot of time on wasted stuff within an organization and they focus on either what we see as shiny object syndrome. They see something that's cool, they want to do it. Or the second thing is, is they listen to a podcast, watched a video or read a book and heard on how someone did something amazing and grew and they're like, Like, we're going to stop this. This is the new thing. This is what we're going to do. And it's like, cool, how about you go do the fundamentals that have proven to work for 90+% of businesses that you still haven't accomplished yet?

Yeah, so 2 parts to this and I'll address the podcast or my philosophy on the podcast piece. But I think one, it's not just a shiny object. People should be thinking about, yes, what drives the highest leverage? It's not even the high— it's not even just ROI things. It's what's going to drive the highest leverage ROI. That's how people should prioritize. And I think if you're going to be serious about the AI stuff, you as an executive, you should have a coach or somebody helping you understand this. I don't care how old you are. That's on the AI side. Now, on the podcast piece, interestingly enough, someone came up to me at HubSpot and was like, he's like, dude, the good— actually in the past week, I've talked to a handful of people. When I get on a call with them, it's like, dude, we cut our teeth learning through you guys. I'm like, how long have you been listening for? 7 years. He's like, one guy that we just started working with, he's like, I started listening at 19 years old. There's a lot of people that learned marketing through us.

Yeah.

That I'm just, I'm kind of shocked by that. But the other thing is, The guy I met at Inbound was like, the good thing about your podcast is it forces you and Neil to kind of sharpen your brain, right? To understand kind of what's going on with trends. And you and I study our own things around business and all that, like the business we operate. But this does, it forces us to engage in discourse and whatever discourse we're having here, it stays in our mind, right?

Yeah.

I will say we did make some money too for those good 3 years that we had with, we love you DreamHost.

Oh yeah, that's true. DreamHost paid us really well.

We're ROI positive, I think.

No, but I was looking at more like a time perspective, right? I would say the podcast is really useful for me as an individual. You know, I don't know about your business, but for me, when we're going after SMBs, the podcast hasn't been useful as we've been over the years as we moved upstream.

I would say mid-market, sometimes enterprise, they're listeners. And I would say a lot of times if they're super fans, like if, especially if the CEO listening, they want to do everything that we're talking about, right? So I would say I think it's helpful, like for example, you have your blog as a touchpoint, you have your YouTube as a touchpoint, we have this podcast.

Yeah.

To me, it's not the rule of 7 anymore, it's the rule of 21. You need more touchpoints. This is just another touchpoint. And you know what? This is interesting. We just hired a new social guy because I'm so angry about how we're doing social right now. I'm like, guys, look at our Marketing School channel, 10,000 subscribers, nothing, right? And this guy came up with all these ideas like, dude, with all the clips that we do for you and Neil, because sometimes you have really good clips, sometimes I have really good clips, right? They're like, why don't you guys just like add as collab on the Instagram? Oh yeah, duh. So there's a lot of things like we don't pay enough attention to this stuff.

No, yeah.

But I think it's just, to me it's just another touchpoint is how I see it.

Yeah, and the way I look at podcasting is this, I'm in the marketing business. Marketing is very different from enterprise than most businesses. If you're at Accenture, you can generate a lot of business not just from RFPs but from relationships, knowing the executives, going to Harvard Business School with them. In marketing, even if you know the right person or they listen to your podcast, marketing for enterprise contracts is a pure RFP game. It is not who you know. If you look at all the RFPs for most of enterprise, not just brands, but dollar amounts, they go to the holding companies, not because they know someone there. It's just a default that you just go to the large agencies and it's an RFP process. I was at a conference Somewhere in Europe, I think later last year, and I learned this from a person who worked at one of the big holding companies. They wrote a book and they started becoming consultants to agencies. And he told me something that was interesting. Oh, you told me about this.

Yeah.

Yeah. The guy's retirement at this point. And he's like, when I was in the agency world, it was old school Mad Men relationship style. And he's like, the marketing industry compared to most spaces has really moved to RFP game and they don't really give a crap about relationships as much. That's the difference. And what we found is we just get RFPs for not YouTube videos, not creating blog content. It's more so requirements that you have X amount of people in these regions. We don't want to work with 5 agencies, we just want to work with one. So you were one of the ones that we included in this pitch.

Yeah.

And that was it.

And that's the game. I think the way I look at this, and we can move on to the next topic, but the way I look at this is there's an ROI in many different areas. Now, is it the best ROI money-wise in terms of time? No, right?

Yeah.

But in a lot of other intangible areas, we talk about the relational wealth standpoint. I think keeping our minds sharp, I think that does dictate how we have conversations and how we make decisions too. And so I think it's a net positive in my mind, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. And I'm assuming you wouldn't be stupid to keep doing something that's not a net positive.

It's not that, some of it's friendships, but before, I know we only have time for one or two topics. I want to cover the Peter Thiel one on building a monopoly.

Oh, I knew you were going to bring that up.

I'm assuming this is Zero to One from his book, or is this from something else?

Yeah, so here, I'll open this up and we should pull this up on the clip. So Peter Thiel on building a monopoly. So there's 3 steps to building monopoly. You can see—

Wait, before you go, is this a new thing or is this old?

This is just a combination of, I think, his writings from the past. So this is posted this week. So you see up here, so Peter Thiel, obviously he was involved with Palantir. Palantir's crushing right now. PayPal, right? And then Founders Fund. And so 3 steps to building a monopoly. Number 1, you start small and you monopolize. What does he mean by that? Every startup begins small and every monopoly dominates a market. Focus on a very small specific niche first. It is easier to dominate a tiny market than a large one. So let's focus on this one. Here's the example. Let's talk about it. Example, PayPal initially targeted PalmPilot users, though that early attempt failed due to a poorly defined market. So those that don't know, PalmPilot was like the iPad before the iPad became a thing. I used to always want one, but turns out it was a failure. It was too early for its time.

Yeah.

Yeah. So start small and monopolize. She just basically means niche down initially.

Uh-huh. Yep. It's like do marketing for only D2C e-commerce shops and then expand into CPG and then more and more markets and more services.

Yep. Number 2 is to scale gradually. Once you dominate a niche, expand deliberately into adjacent markets. Example, Amazon began with books, then expanded to CDs, videos, software, and eventually all retail. eBay started with Beanie Baby collectors, then grew to a broader online auction marketplace. Sequencing matters. Expanding too quickly or into unrelated markets can fail. So let's use, use an example. So maybe you started more SMB initially, and then you expanded to mid-market enterprise.

What was the title for number 2?

Scale gradually.

Got it. Yeah, yeah, I would say that's right. We started SMB and then we scaled slowly into mid-market and then we slowly scaled into enterprise. And while we're doing enterprise, we scaled globally, which was very expensive, but that helped us get more enterprise.

Yep. And then last one over here is don't disrupt. So people talk about Silicon Valley disrupt, I'm disrupting this industry, this and that, right? Avoid framing your startup as a direct competitor to incumbents. True creation is not about attacking existing companies, but offering something new. Disruption can attract attention, but also unnecessary conflict. Remember we used to use Napster back in middle school? Everyone used Napster, got shut down, right? Too much attention, right? Negative attention.

PayPal grew— They're also breaking the law.

Well, yeah, that's a big one, right? But PayPal grew the overall market for payments rather than trying to directly destroy Visa. So I remember back in the day, and like we were teenagers at the time, I was trying to use PayPal. PayPal had problems all the time and they're such a niche player. And I knew everybody, we know now everyone was trying to kill them. And they didn't say they were trying to destroy Visa. They wanted to partner with Visa. So when we look at Carrot right now, we're like, oh no, we're not trying to disrupt anyone in the personalization space. We want to partner with you. And so right now we're working with all these companies to partner with them. And the last one, bonus insight. This one's counterintuitive. The last mover advantage. So people like to say the first mover advantage. So Coke used to be the first mover, right? People talk about first mover advantage. Being first is tactical, not strategic. Aim to be the last mover in the market. Make the final great development and enjoy lasting monopoly profits. So Google wasn't the first search engine. They came later and they're very much a monopoly, right? Strategy, dominate a small niche, then scale carefully towards the long-term vision. Cool. Yeah. So guys, that's how you start a monopoly. And Peter Thiel's whole thing with monopolies is you should strive to be a monopoly so you don't have as many competitors and you can get really big.

My favorite thing on one of his speeches when he talks about monopolies, like one thing that they all have in common, they have a really like strong brand. And then he goes in to say, I don't understand how you— how they build a strong bread, but it's a requirement.

Yeah.

Because like his brain just doesn't process things that way when it's—

He's like a machine.

Yeah.

I was like, all right. Yeah. Brilliant guy.

Yeah. Anyway. I don't know him, but brilliant guy.

So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.