Hidden agenda in presidential debates, RFK's alternate debate, & preparing for video on LinkedIn/X

Did you know the hidden agenda behind the presidential debate?

No.

Well, so if you think about it, this debate was— so Trump and Biden just did a debate, okay? And this was— this happened June 27th, and it's the earliest time they've ever done a debate, 2 presidential candidates, right? And when you think about it, what happened after the debate yesterday? Mainstream media covered it. What did they say?

Funny enough, both the Democratic and Republican-based websites, right, most of them were shocked with how Biden appeared, more so with his energy, his voice level, him looking a little bit old. He was mumbling and stumbling with some of his words and sentences and some of the answers. But no matter what type of site that you read, No matter how they were politically biased, they pretty much all said the same thing on that. And then the second thing they all said was Trump lied.

Yeah. So the— if it's— so a lot of people believe that it is a setup, right? So they believe that the Democrats set this up early so then they can do a hot swap. And you've been hearing this hot swap phrase quite a bit where they swap Biden out for somebody else. It could be swapping him for Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or whatever. Or it could be a different candidate, right? Even RFK volunteered to replace Biden, right? Who knows if that's going to happen. But it makes a lot of sense because you and I both watched the debate yesterday and we're not going to even say which, you know, who we're voting for or whatever. It's just who clearly won.

So when do they typically do them? You're saying they're not this early?

No, they do them like way later, like a couple months later. So the reason to do this was to see, okay, how is he actually going to perform in front of everybody else, right? And he didn't do well. I mean, he did really poorly. The way he stumbled over his words. Trump made a new ad out of this, by the way. It was just like 90 seconds of Joe Biden stumbling through the debate.

Wait, did he really make like an ad ad?

Yeah, it's like all the stumbles, right? And then at the very end, it just says Trump 2024. I think the thing is, it's very strategic. It's like, okay, one, there's a couple of marketing angles here, right? One, they didn't let RFK participate. Those two were debating, RFK had a separate stream, and then Elon actually retweeted it. RFK had a chance to respond while Biden and Trump were going at it. I get it, he was trying to get reach, he was trying to piggyback off of the thing, but it didn't get that many views at the end of the day. By the way, I think RFK is a really interesting candidate.

He was running as an independent?

He's running as an independent because the Democrats won't give him the time of day. There's a whole conspiracy theory behind all that. I don't know enough, but RFK comes from the nephew of JFK, right? The Kennedy family. So point of all this, I was talking about this right now, is like the hidden agenda is, okay, the Democrats thought that they weren't sure if Biden would be able to perform and he didn't perform. And they're like, okay, if he doesn't perform, then we need to do something about it right now, right? And then they use the media outlets to kind of go after Biden because if they really supported Biden, do you think they would attack him?

You make a good point, but at the end of the day, so I Googled a few articles and I don't know how accurate it is because I Googled them. I Googled a few articles.

That says a lot.

Yeah, I'm not talking about Google. I'm talking about the articles themselves, right? And I Googled some articles on if Biden can be replaced by another candidate. And the main reason that I ended up Googling it had nothing to actually do with the debate, but one of my buddies said, oh, they're planning on replacing Newsom with Biden, or Biden with Newsom. And Joe Rogan also mentioned that on his podcast. I have no clue if this is real or not. It was just his buddy mentioned it. And I was like, wait, you're saying this? I don't know how much fake news this is. And when I Googled it, one of the first articles that ended up coming up pretty much said because he's the Democratic candidate, He can't just be replaced unless he steps down.

He has to step down.

Correct.

But I think there's so much pressure now from all the media outlets and how he did, and it just, it did make him look bad. Um, and so I think this was the plan all along. Hey, go do your debate right now and step down so we can, we can swap someone in because he's not going to be able to win at this point. There's just no chance.

There's always a slight chance.

And even, even if you do swap someone in, like, it's probably too late now. Um, and then the other thing too, it's how the debate is really how marketable you are at the end of the day, right?

Yes.

They both had their chance. And I just saw like, you know, all the things, who knows if it's true or not, right? All the things where Biden was saying about Trump, it's like, you know, you're, you're like, you, you support Nazis and you do, and you are, um, you're a convicted felon, all these things. And then just, it just bounced off of Trump. It's just like, whatever. Right. And then, um, you know, I think someone tweeted this, it's like, if you just let Biden talk for like, you know, the entire 2 hours, Trump would have just won by default. So, so yeah. Um, it is what it is. It's sad, but it is what it is. But like, I, I think, You know, we need someone strong. So I'm not saying it's Trump, I'm just saying we need someone that's mentally there. I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it. in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

So I saw an interesting comment on social media. Someone made a clip of the debate and they said, if I talk like this, they would drug test me.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So I was cracking up when I ended up seeing that. But when I also see Biden talking and I'm in the middle, you know, I'm not one side or the other. We're both in the middle. Yeah, that's true. The first thing that hit me is I'm like, I feel bad for him. He just looks like an old, grandpa, you know? And when I say I feel bad for him, I'm like, oh, people are going to pick on him for this. I'm not saying I would vote for him or I would vote for Trump. I'm just saying they both look old. And my daughter, interestingly enough, 5 years old, okay? No joke. Right when this thing turned on, I was watching it. And she said to me, and I didn't ask her her opinion or anything. My wife and I were just watching. And she came up to me because yesterday I also got home from Dubai. So she's trying to talk to me about anything because I haven't— been our home for a while now. And she was just like, Daddy, why do both the people on TV look like they're dying?

Yeah.

Right? And this is a 5-year-old. How does a 5-year-old know who's dying or not?

A 5-year-old knows who looks old and who doesn't.

Yeah, they know. But also, it's like, for them to say that, dude, it really shows that they're just old. And she was mainly pointing at Biden. She's like, that person looks like they're gonna die first.

I'm sorry, like, there needs to be— you can say this is ageist or whatever, but I think there probably should be something type of age limit, um, for this, because you are running like the number one country in the world and, uh, you're responsible for a lot of people. You need like— you need to be mentally sharp. You need to be there, dude.

I totally agree. And also there needs to be some minimum requirements. And I'm not just talking about the presidency, but I'm talking about like these debates. I wish With AI, they can do this in real time. Why can't they just on the screen be like, false?

Real-time fact-checking?

Yes. Like, for example, I don't know that much about politics. I know very little about politics. But the moment Trump said Biden's trying to increase the tax rate 4x, I'm like, that's not possible. 4x would be more than 100%. Yeah, because the federal rate is around 37%. I'm saying around because I don't know the exact percentage, but I think it's either—

Federal is 37%.

It's 37%. All right, perfect. So 4x is not possible.

Yeah.

He's not trying to increase anything 4x. Now, you already know where I stand on taxes. I'm a capitalist and business owner. On the flip side, if the government said, Neil, and I live in the state of California, which is a high state, so I'm already paying 50%. I don't want to pay more taxes. And I feel a lot of my money for taxes goes to waste. But on the flip side, If they could actually prove to me, let's say children's education, and if they said, Neil, you're paying 50%. If you paid 60%, not 55%, but 60%, all these kids would have great health insurance, the kids who can't afford it, or majority of kids, and all kids, especially ones from inner cities, et cetera, would have great education. Genuinely, I would pay the extra 10%.

Dude, look at the Nordic countries. They pay a lot in taxes. Everything's taken care of, and these are the happiest countries in the world. There's a reason for that. And plus they do sauna and cold plunge all the time too. That helps a lot. No, no joke. I've been doing sauna and cold plunge all the time now. And after you come out of the cold plunge, I used to think it was a bunch of BS, but you feel like this body high.

Yeah.

And you're just there to crush the world, um, in a good way. You crush your competition. But here, let's go. Let's finish this off over here. So, um, I think it's messed up that they cut the independent out, RFK. I think he should have been allowed to debate because now it's showing in the polling that there's like all these betting odds. He has like a 1% chance to win. Even Kamala Harris has like a 6% chance to win, right? And then Trump's like, I don't know, like 66% or something like that.

Yeah, but if Biden resigns, from the articles I read, it states that Kamala doesn't just get slotted into the slot. The committee or whatever has to make a decision.

They decide. But I heard Naval Ravikant talk about this. He used AirChat for this, right? And he shared it to Twitter. His whole thing is like, you can't do Gavin Newsom right now because his whole state is like messed up right now, our state that we're in. Um, so it—

he—

it's too early for him. He's got to clean things up quite a bit. So it's like, okay, then who's it going to be? So, um, he listed somebody else. I don't know who they are, but this is what we know. I think we're just trying to talk about this from a marketing angle. It's whoever gets the reach and also whoever tends to show that they're competent, um, that's who's gonna win, right? And so I just think it's unfair that RFK doesn't get to play.

So Yeah, that's life though. Life isn't always fair.

Nope. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there, and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. Speaking of what might be fair, do you know what's happening with LinkedIn next?

No.

So LinkedIn added a For You section so you can have videos and they're testing this right now. They're doing the same thing for X as well. So we're just saying, hey, it's time to prepare to go all in on LinkedIn and X. And for us, we just repost all the stuff that we're doing. That's it. But I think whoever does that quickly is going to crush with reach. Like, do you have that enabled on your LinkedIn right now?

I don't know if I have it enabled on my LinkedIn.

I don't think you do.

But funny enough, on X—

Better be funny. Better be funny.

We did a study and we were trying to see what percentage of the content that people view is Of people they follow versus just random content on the platform. And we didn't tell people you either have to look at the For You tab or your followers, right? Because you can have either option. Uh, what percentage of the content do you think people view are from their followers on X?

On X?

Uh-huh.

Uh, very low, like single digit percent.

Close. 19%. Yeah. So double it up pretty much. Yeah. It's kind of crazy to think about. Majority of the content that people are viewing are from non-followers.

I believe. And now that the likes are private, you can— the algorithm is way more like—

People are liking everything. And I'll be honest, I've liked more stuff.

Oh, I like way more stuff now.

Yeah. And I've noticed after they made that change, a lot of my content doesn't do as well as it used to.

Really?

Yes.

Why do you think that is?

I think it's because I'm competing with other content that's getting more likes.

I think this is where storytelling, good hooks, all those things come into play.

Dude, I'm telling you, I've been testing so many good hooks. Stories. Some of them aren't good, but some of them have been going viral on the other networks like Threads and stuff like that.

Your Threads do well.

Yeah, but usually if something does well on X, it does well on all the others. And if it doesn't do well on X, it doesn't do well on any of the others.

Yeah.

I'm now starting to see some of my content that doesn't do well on X is doing well on all the other platforms. And a lot of my content on X, no matter what I'm posting, isn't getting the engagement that it should. It's like half the amount that it used to.

Your content probably does pretty good on LinkedIn. Threads, I don't know why it does well. And then X, I think it's just because a lot of it's just whatever's trending.

No, but hear me out. X has always had trending stuff, but the moment they started shifting it to, hey, your likes are hidden and people are liking whatever they want, he said roughly 10% more likes, right? I'm rounding here, but it was somewhere around there. It's not just 10% more likes, it's specific pieces of content that are getting way more than 10% of likes. It's not like my content's getting 10% more likes.

They're just showing that content more. It's not that your content sucks.

It's just— It's not that, but if you look at your content, my content, if someone likes it or doesn't like it, it doesn't look negatively on them. You agree with that statement, right?

If someone— say, repeat that again.

Okay, if you look at the content that you post and I post, the type of content, marketing content, pretty neutral. Sometimes you'll post motivational content or just general content on viral stuff like free Chick-fil-A sandwich or whatnot. But you would agree the content that you and I post doesn't swing either way, left or right, correct?

No.

Okay, and if someone likes our content, it doesn't make them look bad, correct?

No.

Okay, you agree with that?

Yes.

And if they don't like our content, also doesn't make them look bad, right?

Yeah.

But there's other pieces of content that— and let's go back to our content. This change of hiding who likes it, do you think it's going to affect how many likes we get on our content?

No, but it affects the extreme content.

Bingo. And it affects it more than 10%, because if you're seeing a 10% lift, the content is extreme content. So what does that do to the algorithm? It showcases that content more and less of content like yours or mine.

Which goes all the way back to journalism. What gets rewarded? It's the extreme stuff that gets rewarded at the end of the day.

And the moment they started doing that, when they started hiding likes, that's the moment I started seeing the drop-off in my reach.

How much reach did you lose?

Almost half.

Wow, that's a lot.

Almost half, not fully, but pretty much close to it. You're talking about I'll tweet like 10, 15 times in a row and I can't even cross 20,000 views.

Yeah.

Well, before, like if I tweeted twice or 3 times, 1 out of every 2 or 3 was doing decent. Yeah.

So yeah, anyway guys, this is where we'll end. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. Join before we start to jack up the price more and more. And the good thing is there's no contracts to it. And don't forget to rate, review, It helps us grow. Let us know what you think about this format. We put a lot of time and effort into this format, so we've been hearing great things, but give us more great things to hear. So that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.