How to Survive Business in 2025: Competition, AI, Burnout & Branding

All right guys, we are live. We are live from Miami and we're recording on my DJI Osmo. So, Neil is actually in my hotel room right now, guys. If you don't see the video right now, this is why you guys should subscribe to us on YouTube. We're on YouTube right now and we're at the Global Marketing Summit. And I think we're going to riff a lot today for the podcast episode and share the things we've been doing, the conversations we've been having at this event. And I think it's going to be a great time. I'm obviously in the middle of hosting this damn thing, so there's a lot of running around that I have to do. So Neil, why don't you start first because then that takes a load off of me.

Yeah, sure. Dude, one of the most interesting things and I put it on a spreadsheet based on a conversation that happened today. One of the main benefits of going to big events where people generate a lot of revenue, many of them have multiple businesses. And some of their businesses are in the same industry that yours is in, but they're not its primary focus. So for example, there was a gentleman that Eric and I know, he has a business that's a few years old and I think it's like on track for like $70 million or something like that. Then he has another business that is probably closer to 10 years old, not doing as well, but still doing decent revenue. I think maybe like $15 to $20 million. And Eric and I were sitting down with him as well as with a few other people. And Eric mentioned right away, because I started asking him questions about his business, I'm like, what do you do in revenue? And all this kind of stuff. And Eric's like, oh, are you looking to buy it? And Eric knows we're going more upstream to enterprise. I was like, no, but it could be a good fit for you. And I'm like, you guys should talk. And Eric and I are sitting here and right before we started recording, he's just like, huh, we're actually going to talk. It could be a good fit for both of us. Deals happen in person and they happen at some of the most random times. When you don't meet and mingle with people in your space, you're just not going to get as many opportunities. And it's not as effective to just send cold emails being like, hey, should we just merge? A lot of things are spontaneous.

You know, it's fascinating. So we were actually in line and then there was a multi-9-figure business person that came up to me and I just happened to introduce that person to one of our other mutual friends. And then all of a sudden, that person who runs a multi-9-figure business, she was like, hey, I've been trying to like work with you guys on this stuff. And it was a total chance introduction. I just happened to mention, hey, this is so-and-so at this company. And she knew the company. And then my friend pulled me aside afterwards. He's like, that's going to be a 7-figure-plus deal. And that is how these things happen, by hanging out with like-minded people. That's why I love doing events, even though they're a lot of work. Um, at the end of the day, I know I'm going to get everything back 10 or 100-fold back. And just not on my timeline.

It's never on your timeline. I was going a few days ago with our Brazil team. They shared a spreadsheet of all their RFPs and they break them down from inbound, like someone coming to the website, maybe ebook or search traffic, whatever it may be, it's just considered inbound. Then they break down events as a category. They break down referrals like directors or employees or other clients sending a referral. And then the 4th category is outbound. Okay. So a good chunk of the 36 were from events, and I can actually pull up the real number in real time here. But out of the 36 RFPs, if you had to guess from the events that ended up happening, how many of those events do you think were same-year events that were generating RFP?

Not many.

And the event count was 9, as you can see here, 36 total, 16 inbound, 6 sales outbound, 9 events, 5 referrals. And when I look at the events of 9, and we started going through them and seeing what the close rate was in Brazil, we're closing around 40%. Of the 9 event ones, no joke, 7 out of the 9 were from ones from the previous year or the year before that.

Yup. It takes time to do a lot of these deals. They don't happen tomorrow. And we all want it tomorrow, but it just doesn't work like that.

It never does. Yeah.

You know what's interesting too? So, I didn't know. I thought you had quit YPO already, but you're still in YPO, right?

I don't know. I paid for something. I think it's the online version or global or something. So, get this.

There's a global business summit that's happening and it's actually going to be in LA in November or something like that. And someone told me that they— so, they did this event in Dubai and they have like, I don't know, call it like 1,200 YPOers in there, right? I'm getting everyone— YPO is a leadership group worldwide. You know, a lot of business operators are in it. Um, and this is an event where you can actually pitch each other because in YPO you're not supposed to hard sell. Like even for your— so Neil's doing his talk right after this. I was like, hey Neil, we had to remove one of your slides because it was a bit too hard sell-y, right? Um, and Neil's cool with that. But point is, at this event you can hard sell, you can hard pitch. And someone said they had an agency business that they got 100 customers from it. 100.

Wow.

That's crazy. Yeah. And that's gonna be in LA in our backyard. So it's a good thing that you're still in it right now.

And then you apply to speak or pitch?

Yeah, so I'm— I actually applied for both of us already to go do a session, but then also that you can do your own session too, and I'm going to try to do my own session.

So, you just go up online, apply, and then you apply to pitch?

Yeah, yeah. So, my point is like, guys, I've been talking about these groups for a long time. Neil's still a little skeptical right now, but I think he'll come around in the next 5 to 10 years, um, because he, he needs to find a certain, you know, there's a type that he, that he likes. I'll just put it that way.

Yeah, no, if I can go and pitch to 1,200 people and they all generate a minimum of $10 million in revenue, some generate hundreds of millions, some even billions, yeah, that's great.

I'd love it. Yeah, see, there you go. See, this is the type of— this is the type of event that Neil likes. Yeah, the event that I'm doing right now, so we're in beautiful Miami, we're right— we can see the ocean right now. Um, this is why I miss Miami. But, um, this event you can't pitch, and then this event's like 185 people or so, so it's very intimate. And, um, you know, yesterday you missed the dine-around— the— sorry, not the dine-around, but the opening dinner we had a Cuban Adele sing. So, she has a really like crazy voice.

Adele?

Yeah, she was like a Cuban Adele. She's like— she was like a finalist on America's Got Talent.

But not Adele?

Not Adele, yeah. But still, we— it was worth it. And then we had a Cuban band and we had a DJ who was playing like, you know, very vibey music. Um, and the food was great and it was just like everyone chilling outside right by the water. But my point of saying all this is that the event that I put together here, and you know, I co-championed this with one of my friends, Jesse. Um, We are very focused on the learning, so I tried to bring in good speakers. And the second piece is just the networking. And so, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, Eric, can you, can you do like this, you know, crazy experience where you take someone to like, you know, the Heat arena or whatever? I'm just not interested in that. I'm just like, I'm just gonna load it with learning and good networking and that's it, and you guys can go home.

Dude, I'm with you. Um, on a side note, how's your business doing in this environment?

I think so. We were both talking about this at lunch. Neil and I were sitting with a few friends and business for me is similar to yours. I would say it's really— I would say it's slow because I feel like everyone's hesitant right now because of all the things that are going on. And I want to hear your thoughts in a second. But the other thing I would say too is that for me, lead flow has actually slowed down. It's not like our traffic has gone down, but lead flow has actually slowed down. And your lead flow is still the same, right?

No, lead flow— Are you talking about total lead flow or enterprise lead flow?

Both.

Enterprise lead flow is up, shockingly.

Okay.

Total lead flow is down. But I think enterprise— and I look at them as 2 different animals, right? Enterprise organization that's looking for a big contract for a company to help them in multiple regions. It goes back to the old saying for these types of companies, you never get fired for hiring IBM. I'm not saying my company's like IBM. We don't have that kind of trust. We haven't been around for 50 or 100 years. I don't know how old IBM is. I don't think they're 100, but they're probably quite old. But what we found is the longer we've been in market, the more RFPs we get, assuming we go to the right events like this or other ones where it's like true enterprise. And when I say true enterprise, I would say white people for us is more mid-market. True enterprise would be like CMOs, VP of marketing, where it's all company. Most of them are publicly traded. And when I look at like, I was just looking at my Brazil numbers, even though my ad agency is around 7 years old, Brazil's at least 1 year older. So it's 8. They started the Brazil agency before we even started in the United States. They had 36 RFPs last year. Our website traffic is down in Brazil, I would say around 6x roughly, I'm rounding here.

Wow.

From its peak. But a lot of our website traffic wasn't driving RFPs. It was driving the wrong type of customers. So we shift our marketing strategy from focusing on website traffic to focusing on things like interviewing the CMO of McDonald's on a podcast. Do you still do that? Yeah, we still do that. We do a lot of that and we do it globally. So the leaders—

Do you like doing it?

No. I do it. But the leaders within the different countries do quite a bit of it. And then what we'll do is we'll speak at events like this. We'll do partnerships with others. We still do create web traffic like SEO, but it's more targeted towards keywords that would be more applicable to enterprise. But again, 36 last year to this year, we're already at 18 in April and this is just in Brazil. So it's on track to well exceeding last year's. And in the United States, last year we averaged 25 RFPs in 2024. So around 2 a month in the United States. So call it in April of last year in the United States, we were around 8 or 9, I'm guessing, because we ended up at 25, but average is 2 a month. I do know for a fact in the US, we actually have matched our Brazil number in which we're exactly at 18 RFPs in the United States. But we are seeing longer times to make decisions, people more hesitant. And the way I look at the whole space is Dude, even if marketing as an industry is getting hit and people are spending less because of tariffs and all this, you know, economic crap that's happening, if there was 10,000 RFPs that are going out in a given year— I'm making up a number, but it's something massive like that— and it's shrunken down to like 9,000 in this bad economy, or 8,000, well, dude, maybe last year— I don't know my total global numbers, but let's call it sub-200. We were such a small percentage that you can still grow when things are getting bad, at least when you're small like us.

Yep. And maybe we should give our thoughts on the tariff situation right now. So let me give you my thoughts first because I know you kind of gave yours during lunch. My thoughts overall is Trump has been very consistent for the last 4 years. So he's always complained about this trade deficit, right? And he's always, you know, he wrote this book called The Art of the Deal. And his thing has always been, you go in hard with a lot of fanfare and whatever it is you're doing, and then you settle at something reasonable, right? I think the problem right now is the Chinese know that he's doing that. And, you know, in Chinese, I think I used the phrase with you before, but the phrase again is they talk about eat bitterness, right? But the phrase how you say it is ciku, right? And so I think the Chinese are trying to make a point saying, hey, like, you want to play this game with us? We'll play it longer than you.

What do you mean by eat bitterness?

Eat bitterness means they know how to take pain. That's what it really means, right? Um, so they're saying, oh, oh, okay, you want to play this art of the deal thing? Okay, we'll play it out, and we'll play it out even longer than you guys, and we can take pain for a long time. And then the problem for them— the, the problem for us, actually, for the United States— is they dictate from the top down. So whatever they dictate from the top down, the people have to listen, right? In this— in our country, it's not really like that. And so I, I think what's happening right now is they're playing a game of chicken. Um, I do— I, I still hold out hope that a deal will be done, and And most things will go back to normal. I think everything's going to come down to, for most countries where US is charging a 10% tariff on everything, that's where I think we land on everything.

Yeah. And the US, even though the president is top-down, he still has to deal with all the people underneath. I don't know how it is in China.

Yeah, you know, it's mostly just, you're going to do as we say and hopefully you trust me type of thing. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, if we go back in time, you think about World War II real quick, it was Roosevelt, right? He was president I think for 12 or 16 years and that's why the 2-term limit came in, um, and he was a really good president, I think, for the most part. And basically what happened, the, the logic here is that because he, he was president for so long, he started to build like a— it almost appeared like a monarchy, right? And so that's why the government started becoming bigger and bigger, and, um, that's why our government is so bloated today. That's one of the reasons, right? Uh, my point of saying this is that if you have a really good, you know, leader, people would prefer that leader stay in power for a long time. And I think right now, I don't know enough about China, but it seems like people are okay with it being dictated top-down.

And I'm assuming they don't have the problems that— I wouldn't say problems, but in the United States, a lot of states, I think it was like 12, are trying to sue them over tariffs. I'm assuming they don't have those things in China.

So in our country, yeah, the short answer is they don't have that problem because it's just like, no, you're gonna listen to us. Um, but here, everything— everyone's fighting each other, and that's not productive. Like, imagine if you're running a company, everyone's fighting each other. How can you get anything done?

Well, I know a lot of people who donated to both political parties on the business end in the United States, both Harris and Trump. And a lot of these corporations and individuals are really wealthy, like, uh, quite a few of them are on the Forbes list. No, I don't know Soros, uh, and I don't know anyone even close to him.

No, I mean Soros donated.

Yeah, he did. No, but I'm saying I personally know quite a few people who are wealthy on the Forbes list who donated, uh, on both sides. And the problem that people have, whether it's good or bad, Rich people don't like their businesses, and most of them are invested in business directly from what they created, or their money is in businesses through the stock market. They don't like when things start going bad, whether it's good for the long run or it's bad for the long run. They don't care. And my team and I, we were curious to see what people are concerned about the most recently. So instead of running a survey, which a lot of people do, saying like, this is, you know, people ran a survey on Trump. I don't know if you saw, they said he has the worst ratings on the economy than he ever did on first term or currently.

Right now.

Yeah, right now. We just looked at all the news sites. And if you look at the news sites, they mainly talk about the economy, terrorists, recession, jobs, people spending less, people gambling less in Las Vegas, airlines reforecasting. You don't really see them talking as much about Ukraine. You don't really see them talking much about Israel. They're focused on the economy is bad. Is this going to be recession? Are people going to be in trouble? The media, that's what they're talking about more than anything else right now. From what— when we, when we started scraping all the news sites to just quickly see what they're discussing.

Yeah. And that's what's top of mind right now. So to your point, most people, we're not wired to care about the long term. But if you can think long term, if you can wire yourself to care about the long term, like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, then you're going to be more successful than most people. But we're just not wired. We're not wired to think like You have to reframe your mind. I do believe though, let's take Trump out of the equation for a second. When Scott Bessen says maybe we do need to take some medicine to solve this can that we've been kicking down the road for a while, I do believe it needs to happen as bad as it sounds. I do think it's better for the long term. But that's just my 2 cents.

Yeah, but business is suffering right now and people are suffering. The question is what are they going to do? What is the right solution? People don't really— when you think about long-term, majority of the people barely have any money in their bank account.

Yeah, I mean, I think most people have less than a month saved. Like, most people can't even take out like $1,000 or $2,000 if they need to.

Correct. So when you look at it from that perspective, they don't care. Yeah, they don't care because they won't be able to survive. And I'm not saying we shouldn't think about long-term. The tricky balance is, is for people in power, how do you solve long-term problems while not creating Much short-term pain.

And that's beyond our pay grade, but that is a deep question, right? It's like, how do you solve that while not putting people— not putting the economy into a recession? Which I actually believe we're in a recession right now.

Me too. And you saw how they reported that— was it Bessent and Musk heated battles at the White House, or was it Musk and someone else?

Navarro. Musk and Navarro.

Peter Navarro. No, no, no, no, recently it was someone else.

Bessent and Elon?

I think it may have been Bessent and Elon. It was supposedly— they were reporting on CNBC yesterday how they're having heated battles. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I don't sure it wasn't Navarro. It was Elon and someone else. They were just disagreeing with certain policies.

Yeah, I mean, if you're Elon, you definitely don't want tariffs at all.

Yeah, it doesn't help.

Yeah, I mean, it just puts insane pressure on. But anyway, going back to the event real quick, so, um, did you get the goodie bag?

No, I didn't even register.

Okay, so you should get the goodie bag. The goodie bag, it's a very nice bag, okay? But inside this goodie bag— I have a point to all this. I'm going to show you on camera right now. So we have a 30-pack of AG1. Okay, so AG1. And then, um, we were just having lunch with, uh, Nick Shackelford from Brez, right? This, this, this can does $44 million a year, and this year they're gonna do, uh, $70-something, I think. I don't know if that's public, but, um, the $44 is public. That's all I know. The, the— I don't know about the projection, so that's your fault. But anyway, um, my bad, Nick.

But either way, you're growing great, so that can't be a bad thing to have out there.

Remember Ian Blair? Laundry Sauce. Yeah, Laundry Sauce. Okay, these are premium laundry detergents. And so Why am I bringing this up right now? I am bringing up the gifts from my goodie bag, our goodie bag, the YPO Global Marketing Summit, because the team told me basically a month or maybe six weeks ago that we're lacking in the goodie bag. So I quickly reached out to Nick. I was like, "Hey, can you hook up a bunch of cans?" And then I was like, "Hey, Ian." I saw him in Vegas. I was like, "Dude, can you hook up like you know these these laundry sauce things, these pods?" And then Cat, I was like, "Hey, last minute, can you hook these up?" She's like, "No problem." She's gonna send us like a big-ass one that had like you know a little like I don't know a container as well. And my point of saying this is that even the relationship I have with Neil, we've known each other for what, 14 years, 15 years? All this stuff takes years to manifest. I've known Ian for 9 years. Nick, I've known for like 5 years or something like that. Kat, maybe 3, 4 years or something like that. You can't call these in last minute. These are all— and these are actual friendships. And all of the people speaking, they're all my friends, right? And, um, that's my point. Like, it's— you can build your network however you want to build it. So Neil's built it in a certain way, I built it a certain way, but what's core is that you have You have to build your network no matter if you're introverted or extroverted.

So, speaking of this event, how many of the 180 people percentage-wise, how many of them do you think are direct competitors to you and I?

30%. I have the number.

Okay, so 30%.

Yeah.

Do you like networking with your competition?

I do.

Why?

Because it's— at least when you're in person, you're not trying to kill each other. You do— you start talking about other things and you start to figure out other angles to help each other. Even in— without going too much into your detail, but you have an angle in mind, um, for something that you do. And, you know, I would just argue that maybe they're like a pseudo-competitor, right? Yeah. Um, but there's always different ways to do business. It's not just like, oh, he's a complete competitor, I hate this person, unless they're an ass, right? There's only one competitor that I don't like. Everyone else I like. The only competitor I don't like, it's because they're an ass.

I bet you that competitor is based out of Los Angeles.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, there's a lot of companies, competitors of yours in Los Angeles.

But yeah, yeah.

Um, I'm with you. I enjoy meeting up competitors. And Tim Soulo from Ahrefs and I were chilling for a bit and we were talking and he's like, do you remember that time where you said you were going to crush our company? And I'm like, yep, didn't crush it. We grew, but definitely didn't crush yours. And he was just like, yeah, we're growing as well. And we were just laughing about it. And Tim and I are friends.

Yeah.

And when we were talking about competition, whether it was on the software side or meeting other people in the agency world, the good thing is, is you get to learn a lot by being around your competitors. So for example, when I was talking to Tim, we were talking about our own growth rates and we were sharing them publicly. Because if he knows my growth rates and I know his growth rates, what are you really doing with that information that's caused you to grow faster? It really doesn't. I can't necessarily just go and copy his marketing strategies and tactics. In theory, I can, but it doesn't really yield the same results. A lot of times because someone was earlier to market or they've been doing it longer, their brand has a different type of pull. So you don't always get the same results when you copy, but it gives you an understanding of what's happening to the market when you get more data points. Plus you can wheel and deal and you can get deals done. Like I've talked to some competitors and some of the competitors are like, well, if you're not interested in these assets that you have, Do you want to sell it to us? And I'm like, oh, okay, what can I do with that money? I can redeploy it. And I'm not saying they would do a deal or not, it just strikes up conversations. So talking to your competitors, what I've seen over time, produces better results than going against your competitors and trying to create that rivalry. I do think it's different on the level of like a Google or Microsoft or Apple, but none of us at the event are anywhere near there, so it's different.

And plus the other thing is, if you're in the agency business or even just any business in general, there's so many customers to go around where you don't need to just focus on killing them. I think if you're probably in your early 20s listening to this, yeah, you might have the motivation to just want to kill your competitors. But we're a little older now and that's not our motivation anymore. You know what's funny? Neil was working with a company before and then he met another company that was a big player in the space and he told them the same thing. He's like, we're going to crush you. We're going to crush you. And this is in Miami too, a couple of years ago, remember?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that one didn't happen either.

That one didn't happen either. That company is very much the big company now.

Yeah.

The only company left standing. One of the few.

That's right. And that company, the one I said we were going to crush you, it was a company we were doing marketing for. Um, and we were blowing up extremely fast, doing really well. But the founder of that company, they were a client of ours. Uh, it's public. I'm not going to mention the name, but they did some funky illegal stuff that no one knew about. And, uh, they went to jail. Nothing related to marketing. They just did some financial embezzlement and fraud that no one could have ever guessed.

Yeah. And so, what did they say? They say, pigs get greedy, hogs get slaughtered.

That's from Mark Cuban. No, Warren Buffett. Did he say that? It's Warren Buffett. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's the phrase. That's the phrase. Good. Yeah. But look, you just got in yesterday. So, tell me, okay, you came to this thing. Why did you come to this thing? What do you see the benefit of coming to these things?

Honestly?

Yeah.

Because you told me to come too. That's about it, guys. I didn't look it up or anything.

But the cool thing is you get to hang out with the person that you've been talking to. That's an in-person connection. I think that you deepen that connection. I think that's still worth something. Um, you getting to hang out with Tim, you know, that's, that's cool.

Was the other person that you introduced me to here?

He's here.

Was he already here? He was here yesterday.

Yeah, he's speaking.

Oh, today?

Yeah, well, I don't know if he'll be here today. He should come today. I should tell you guys to hang out, but You should make that, right? That— but that connection, you would argue that it helps?

Sure, I think the connections are good. I don't think it hurts to continually have more and more connections and get to know more people.

Yeah, some of my friends got a lot of insights from you because we were both just talking about how, um, the economy is affecting our businesses. That goes back to your point again, how at these events people have alpha in areas where you might not have alpha, where they have an advantage, right? So for example, we met someone that started the first private equity firm In Venezuela. He's here, right? We have a lot— this is an international event. We have people from Singapore, Malaysia here. We have people from Mexico, um, all over the place. But so it's just so interesting, like, you— people are going to know other things, information that you don't have, and that's why you get value from events like this. So yeah.

Like I was telling people about business in Malaysia, because Malaysia is very reliant on China, and the moment China gets hit with tariffs from the US, we see companies in Malaysia not doing as well.

Yeah. Dude, let's talk about how we buy attention. Yeah.

So I think the old way, we've both bought websites before, we've both spent a lot of money on marketing, you know, perspective-wise, not compared to like a Microsoft, but for our own brands compared to most SMBs and mid-sized corporations. And back in the day, we would both buy websites for their traffic, and their reach, their Google rankings, their backlink. These days, I don't think you can buy attention like that because it's too fickle. You buy a YouTube following, does it just disappear overnight? Does the algorithm change where you can't get as much reach in the future? If you buy an Instagram handle, same issue. If you buy a site that gets a ton of Google traffic, same issue. What happens if the rankings tank? I'm not saying they're doing anything shady, but you can't control a future algorithm update or changes they want to make with AI. It doesn't mean social media is bad or SEO is bad. I'm just saying it becomes a riskier business purchase. But on the flip side, what I've seen really consistent from an attention perspective, of all the acquisitions that we've done at NP Digital, 2 of them were tool-based. One was AnswerThePublic and one was Ubersuggest. And no joke, for both those tools, almost all their traffic came from people just going directly to the site or Googling their own brand name. It wasn't for a keyword ranking for a certain brand term. It was all branded related. And I still think you should buy a lot of attention because you can use the attention to cross-sell into other products and services. But I think you have to be more picky with the attention in which it has to be really strong brand affinity because that's the attention that's harder for algorithm to kick out.

I'll tell you how I'm thinking about it right now. So actually, Sean Cannell spoke at, spoke at the, the event here. So he talked about YouTube. So he's got like 4 million subscribers across his 2 YouTube channels, which is a good chunk. That's a lot. And he has like half a billion views overall. Um, and he was talking— I mean, we both revealed our numbers. So you're spending about, about $60,000 to $70,000 a month on your content. That doesn't include, you know, maybe payroll and other things like that. I'm spending around, call it, $20,000 to $25,000 a month or so. Um, that's the cost of us creating content right now. And that's how I see us buying attention in a sense. But the other thing that we're considering testing right now— so I was just talking with, with Nick Shackelford. This is one of those, those little side conversations. But have you heard of Wop?

I haven't.

Yeah, so it's W-H-O-P. So you can basically say, hey, you put $10 grand up and they follow the Andrew Tate model. So the Andrew Tate model is you just pay a bunch of people to clip your content.

Okay.

I think this would work well for both of us. And so we've been talking with the Wop team. They're like, we're gonna do like a $500 test, like nothing, right? And then they're like, no, it's too small, you gotta spend more, you gotta spend more. I'm like, of course you're gonna say we need to spend more. So then we're like gonna up it to $2,000 for a test. And I was like, How much? Honestly, like, if I wanted to do a small test, what does it need to be? It's like 10 grand. Okay, okay, 10 grand sounds reasonable. So basically what happens is you determine how much you'll pay. You might say I'll pay $3 CPM, and then you put 10 grand up, and then people can come in and they'll start editing your content for you and clipping it and then putting onto social channels. And it's basically the Andrew Tate model where a bunch of people were clipping his content for like affiliate commissions and all that. That's the model. And that's how WAP actually was funded by Peter Thiel. Um, and, and they're, they're trying to do it like a payments arbitrage here, but, um, that's, that's the game. So I'm gonna test $10 grand, and then I'm— now I, I looks like you might test it too.

So WAP is a community where people just pretty much do the Andrew Tate model where they'll clip up your stuff and then post it everywhere?

Yeah, so it's basically a marketplace where editors can go and you can, you can basically— they can bid on your, your project, and then you can just say, hey, I'll pay $3 CPM and like get me these views. And then they— these creators, they get paid instantly to do this. And they will also be posting it to like different channels to try to get more views.

Wait, is it junk impressions or you don't know yet?

I don't know yet. But the people that I've talked about, like the way Nick has talked about it, I'm like, it seems legit enough for me to run a test. So I will report back on this $10,000 test.

Yeah. The hard part for me is I found that most marketing methods that we've tested out really struggle on the enterprise end. They're just not as effective because enterprises don't want risk.

I don't think that works for enterprise. I think that works for you and me.

For personal brands.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. So I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dude, speaking of personal brands, I was flying yesterday, my flight was delayed. So Eric sends me this video that one of a big personal brand ended up doing. And they say they have this business, whatever the business is, is related to businesses or investing or whatnot. But what's funny is, is like I went to their site and I looked at it and everything was selling info products and courses and workshops. And I was like, at the end of the day, you are what you sell. If you truly made your money from investing, you would have an investment website. If you truly made your money from courses, you would have a course website.

You know what the thing is? You look at Warren Buffett, you look at Charlie Munger, they teach for free. They teach for fun and you can tell they're not looking to get anything from it. And that's an important thing because I don't know of any investor— like you know a lot of investors, I know a lot of investors. I don't know of any investor that needs to sell courses or masterminds and things like that.

Yeah, it's like Peter Thiel. If he was to speak at your conference, do you think he really cares for a speaking fee?

No, he would only want to do it because there's interesting people to hang out with and that's worth way more to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll take his own jet. If he's taking his own jet and that costs an arm and a leg, speaking fees aren't going to make up for that.

Well, you know what they say, if it smells funny, then what?

It usually is funny.

Yeah, or it smells fishy. That's what it is.

If it smells fishy, usually it's fishy?

Yeah, something like that. But it just, it doesn't like— the story's got to add up, right? Like, you share your struggles, I share my struggles, and it's not like everything's rosy all the time. And I don't think we try to pretend like it is, Rosie. And we just have a conversation. And by the way, you met Josh. So, Josh, he's the guy that was like, we just really enjoy it when you guys share stories. Oh, you know what one of our other friends said? So, this is in the elevator. He's like, you know, you guys have the best marketing podcast out there. I truly believe it. But you know why I think you don't get more views? I was like, why? He's like, because people are racist. I was like, I don't think that. But I think it's an interesting take.

It's an interesting take. I don't think really majority of the country is racist.

In a couple of years, I want to test making AI avatars where it's perfect, 10 out of 10, where you become a model and I become a model and the voice becomes like a sexy girl. We just have our marketing school at different types, different colors, different races, different genders, everything. And we just see which one performs better.

I think people just want to hear from us. And I think the reason we don't get the amount of views that some other podcasts do is because we tend to focus on marketing instead of focusing on things like fashion or television or politics.

That's also— okay, so you know there are some marketing creators out there like Zoe Unlimited. So she's great. She talks a lot about the brand side of things too, right? Then you have, I think it's Alex Garcia. So Alex Garcia, he has a good Instagram channel but it's highly produced marketing content where he's teaching a lot of the— when we started our very first episode, do you know what our most successful episode is?

It's probably a tactic or strategy.

Episode number 1, How to Learn Marketing. But that's a very broad type of marketing tactic topic. The way we talk about it now relates to a lot more around business operations. And that's a much smaller group.

It is. But when I saw your speech today, it hit me. I didn't say anything to you. But it hit me. We used to talk on very similar topics back in the day. And when you look at what you spoke on, it was on AI, but very specifically, it was very tactical and strategy. Would you agree with that? More so tactical, like how to get stuff done.

Yeah.

All right.

Yours has changed.

Mine's changed. I used to be very tactical. I stopped and I really mainly focus on strategy and nothing else. Mm-hmm.

I think that's better for enterprise. Correct. Yeah.

And I learned that tactical is better for SMB. Mm-hmm.

Yep. And I think this group, to your point, is more mid-market SMB level. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you have to tailor your talk to whoever it is. You have to know your audience. That's what it is.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because when you're a part of enterprise, people talk like when they talk to us about Carrot, it's like, yeah, you know, we need air coverage. What does that even mean? Like, air coverage means, oh, you just want a bunch of ads where you don't measure it. That's what air coverage is. Air coverage means you're spending money and you don't want to look at the ROI. Yep. That's what it is. And that's how they like to talk. There's a lot of enterprisey language. You just have to know who you're talking to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. One thing that I— we, we've changed on our end is we stopped trying to sell. And this has been going on for a few years, because At least in the marketing realm, I think the economy has been bad for almost 3 years. Started around mid-2022. So that was 6 months there, all of 2023, all of 2024. And we're almost in mid-2025, but we're a little bit off from that. So call it a little bit shy of 3 years. And, you know, we've gone more upstream over those 3 years. But what we found is even though we're getting more inquiries, and they may be for larger amounts of money, We found that even though a lot of the deals are for a lot more money, but that's mainly because we've been going more and more upstream. They're harder to close though in this environment. So what we found is getting in small to companies, like we try not to pitch— we still do pitch million-plus dollar deals, but there's a lot of times where we know big brands are reaching out to us and they just don't have the budget allocation that they used to. We just start doing smaller projects that are still profitable, Just to get in the door and then we expand. And I would say a large chunk of our revenue these days is expansion versus just selling someone on a big contract. And the reason being is it's tougher in this environment to close bigger contracts out of the gate.

Yeah, you have to take what you can get. And so, not only do you have to know your audience, you have to know your environment too. But going back to knowing your audience, so we have a speaker that's coming up right before you. He's bringing out a Trump impersonator. The, um, one of the, the team members came up to me and said, are you okay with that? What do you think my answer was?

Sure.

Now, my answer is sure because when you have a group of business operators, where do you think they mostly lean?

Uh, this is Florida, so I would say right.

Probably a middle to the right, right?

In Florida, not in California.

Well, these people are coming from around the world.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So most people, like, we're both in the middle, right?

Yeah.

Um, so I'd say middle to the right. And so in that case, I don't think it was going to be offensive.

So I was like, let's go.

for it, right? Because it might be really funny. We'll see what happens, right?

Um, but the impersonator could be making fun of him, and it could be both sides in which the left can get a kick out of it and the right can get a kick out of it.

And, and we'll see what happens there. But, um, you know what I wanted to— so you weren't here the other night, but we had a pre-speakers dinner. So we had a debate with someone at the table, um, and it was actually— I won't name names, but everyone was like a little flabbergasted by this. So, do you think AI is— I kind of know what your answer is going to be, but do you think AI is overhyped right now?

Yes.

Okay, I knew that was gonna be your answer. Um, so we had a debate, so everyone at the table was like, oh my God, like, you can do this and that, and then the person couldn't, couldn't justify it, right? Uh, why do you think AI is overhyped right now?

It can do a lot of cool things. It'll do even better things in the future. But when you look at How much time you have to spend to try to get a positive ROI. I'm not talking about from efficiency standpoint of cutting costs. I'm talking about in at least in marketing to incrementally grow your traffic, your conversions. It is extremely hard and it doesn't work the way most people think in which it's not a magic wand that you can wave and all of a sudden your marketing is performing a lot better.

I actually agree with that. Now let me say where I think it's not overhyped. So remember, You know when I get bit by mosquitoes, right? What happens? It becomes a giant bubble.

Yeah.

Right.

And you have a pen.

I do have a pen. It's a heat pen. But so I use ChatGPT for this. Well, so I have this thing after the COVID vaccine called the Skeeter syndrome. Whether you believe vaccine, whatever, let's leave that aside. But I have this thing called Skeeter syndrome where I get bit by mosquito, it becomes a giant like pus-filled ball. It hurts like hell right now. I went to ChatGPT cuz I, I, I did the pen before. It didn't work, right? I did all these other treatments, didn't work. ChatGPT is like, no, you have to take Zyrtec and you have to rub like cortisone on it. And then you don't rub it with a heat pen, you rub it with the ice cube. So I did that this morning and it has prevented it from becoming a giant ball. And so I'm like, is AI overhyped? I'm like, in that case, no. And then my eyes hurt like hell if I, I work from like— I'm on the screen from like 7 AM staring at a screen until like 5 PM direct. My eyes hurt like hell, right? Not when I'm at home though, for whatever reason. But then AI helped me find a solution. It's like, oh, you got to use this brooder thing and you got to go to the doctor and get this Lippy Flow. And it's like I wouldn't have known any of that stuff, right? And so with those two things, those are like personal things solving my issues. And even for a loved one, um, right now I actually helped her find a solution that was natural. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one.

I took a screenshot. You took a picture of it, of your eye thing.

He took a picture of my eye thing that I posted the stories.

I thought it was great. I was like, okay, if I, if I have— because sometimes my eyes hurt or they're dry, I'm like, I'll just ask Eric because I didn't watch your whole video.

So we have myopian gland syndrome, meaning that our eyes, when we get older— do you have LASIK?

Yeah.

Okay. So after— how long have you had it for?

Almost 10 years.

Okay, exactly. After exactly at 10 years, um, your lipids don't work correctly. And so what happens is you're— you have dry— um, your tears don't— um, they evaporate too quickly. So it becomes really dry eye and then it starts to hurt like hell. That's why— that's a temporary solution. So the thing I found using ChatGPT is you microwave it. It's like these little eye patch things with water in it. And then it heats your eyes for 8 minutes, then you're good. But it's temporary. You still have to go to eye doctor and do a Lippi flow, and that will solve the problem. But that came from ChatGPT.

I think AI is amazing for research. It's much better than what we're used to from traditional search engines. The reason being is they truly understand what the document is talking about, and they look at a lot of documents on the web, and it helps you just diagnose the problem and gives you suggestions. I don't think it always gives you accurate answers, but I think on the research end, for most industries, AI is great. Where I think AI is failing that everyone overhypes is that it can do all the jobs and tasks way better than humans. And I think that is so off. Like we just did analysis of AI versus humans for lead scoring, and I'll pull up the stat on this. Because straight up someone sent it to me on my end. When you look at this, AI did lead scoring of 83% versus humans at 68%. And this was over 9,000, I don't know how many leads it was. Oh, 9,702 leads. And it's obvious why AI can do lead scoring better because it can look at a lot of data points. But our conclusion from it wasn't that AI is better than humans, It was that you need both because where AI really fails is humans tend to lie when they fill in form fields in marketing. Like if you ask someone what your budget is, a lot of people don't really say their true budget.

And a lot of times they don't know either.

That's correct. So when people lie, what we found is humans outperform AI way more to find those leads and qualify them than AI does. But when you use a combination of both, That is the winning combination. And the reason being is just more efficient. You do a better job on all your leads and the ones that are fake, the humans of course outperform AI.

So I think we're kind of saying the same thing in different ways. Um, the way he said it was like basically there's no benefit right now. The way I see it is that I don't think it's overhyped right now. The things we can do now, I wasn't able to do like 2, 3 years ago. And so with Cursor, our— when I actually asked Sean, um, in the back of the, the room, I was like, how much faster are we now with Cursor? He's like, 10 times faster, our developers, right? Um, the Now that if I can open up Manus and it'll create a bunch of high-intent long-tail keyword phrases, and it'll scan my blog for the writer guidelines, and it'll write high-quality content at 90-95% there within 30 minutes. Or for my slides, when I didn't want to wait for designers, I had a stock image that was like a robot with an arm. I went to ChatGPT Images. I was like, "Make it into a robot." Did it right. So I'm like, I didn't have these superpowers two years ago, and I have them now. And so I think it's going to get even crazier. But to your point, it's not as good as where we think it's going to be in the future. So that's why I say we're saying the same thing. But We also have different ways of looking at things too. Yeah.

And I still think in today's world, AI has been great for us and you can use it for business efficiencies and you can use it to try to help you solve problems. It's hard to use it to directly create an impact on your revenue growth. You look at Klarna, Klarna backtracked on getting rid of a lot of their team and just replacing it with AI. And we've seen that with a lot of companies. It's just not there yet. Will it be there in the future? Good chance. No one knows for certain, but I think the chances are it'll be better, or I'm highly certain that it'll be better than what it is today. How far it gets, time will tell.

Dude, so you're gonna, you're gonna be talking in like maybe an hour or so. Okay, so Neil's gonna be on stage in an hour. So, I already went today. Um, so do we want to give a preview of what you're going to talk about? And I can talk about what I talked about as well. I think that might be a little helpful. So, I mostly talked about my— the premise of my talk was around How we can actually drive efficiencies with AI? Because I don't want this like pie in the sky thing. Like everyone's a business operator here. So I'm like, okay, how do we drive more cost efficiencies or how do we drive more output using AI? And that that's the premise of my talk. And I look at AI right now as DIY, DWI, and DFY. So done do it yourself, done with you, and done for you. And so one example, I I went through like a bunch of different things, but I look at ChatGPT images has done done. Do it yourself. You have to go back and forth. You have to help edit it. You have to keep prompting it quite a bit. Now, done with you more towards done with you is like Replit. If you want to prompt and maybe you want to make an app, maybe you want to copy Neil's website. I can take a screenshot of it and then show my writer my my my brand guidelines, and it'll make it make like merge it together and it'll deploy it for me. That's Replit, but it still goes back and forth quite a bit. And then DWI you can stop me wherever, but DWI is done with you where we created these agentic workflows using ClickFlow. So we'll find internal links that make sense on your site. We will create high quality content. We will consolidate up. Update, delete. We'll do a lot of the rote SEO, traditional SEO tasks, um, but you still need a human in the loop there. Now, more tours done with you. I did this the other night. So for dinner, we had 11 people originally for dinner. I used Genspark to make a phone call to that restaurant, and it changed the reservation from 11 to 7 people because I was just sitting on my bed working. I didn't want to do it.

Ah.

Yeah, genspark.ai. It's a China AI again.

Do you know what I do when I need to modify reservations?

You go to your assistant?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, but see, see, that's like I'm just like, if a robot can just do it— and I looked at the chat transcript, I was like, oh, I did a great job.

I usually don't have to go to my assistant. They just know in advance and they do it for me.

Yeah, well, not everybody can read your mind, you know? So yeah, but isn't that— I mean, it's— so anyway, that's how—

Your assistants can read your mind.

Yes, the greatest employees of any kind can read your mind. Yeah, yeah. Um, but that— I mean, that's the high level of my talk. I, I went through a bunch, and I'll probably post this to my YouTube too. You— I imagine you'll probably post it to your YouTube.

You— yeah, but you, you missed out on the best part So when Eric was giving a presentation, everyone was taking a picture of a chart and he's like, oh yeah, this is just some random chart created by AI.

Oh, so, okay. I generated, I used Manus actually to generate a chart that shows like the cost efficiency. It's like 80% from SEO, 80% from images, whatever. Like it looks amazing, right? And I shared it and I knew people were going to take pictures, so I let them take pictures. I was like, yeah, take pictures, guys.

Take pictures.

Yeah, it's not a real chart. And then I went to the next slide and I ended the thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm talking about my journey on how I leverage both my personal brand, built a corporate brand from it, um, and scaled up my own business and what people can learn from it. So I'm going to be discussing how I build a personal brand, my journey all the way from my very first blog that I ever created, um, all the way to my latest blog where I'm creating content, to the journey on how we eventually migrated to enterprise. to how we leverage that to grow our agency. We share some of our revenue numbers for the first 3 years, although my teams use this slide in the same, over and over again. And every single time I told them, I don't know why they don't correct it. On half the slide, it'll be like year 3, $33 point something million in revenue. And then on the other side, they'll be like $30 million. I'm like, no, it can't be 30. No one ever has even revenue numbers like that.

Hmm.

But it's just a typo that they need to fix. But nonetheless, my personal brands never generated more than $10 million a year. And then we really started scaling up after 30 because we had a COVID bump. So the COVID bump really caused our business to just explode where we started, you know, doubling and more than doubling with really large numbers. And I wouldn't say a lot of that is great execution. I really genuinely believe a lot of that was COVID. Yeah, but did you see the Apple news, how they're changing Apple Search Ads?

No.

They're now calling it Apple Ads.

They just took Search out?

I believe they just took Search out. It was either— I know they took Search out. I believe the new name is Apple Ads.

So that means they're gonna do a lot of crazy stuff.

They're gonna start monetizing everything in their ecosystem.

As they should. I mean, 10 years ago, people were talking about how when they started going to services and all these apps and they started generating all these like micro conversions off these like little apps, right? Now they're doing it ads because they're just trying to find more revenue. And they have such a large user base that it just makes sense.

I totally agree with that. I think they will continually— if you look at the ad ecosystem, Google is number 1, Meta is number 2, Amazon is number 3, and growing at an extremely rapid pace. The ad business is highly profitable. If you look at Google's business, most of profits come from ads. Waymo is not profitable. I don't care if they grow from 200,000 rides to 2 million rides in a week or even 20 million, it doesn't create the profit that, um, ads do. Because ads, someone clicks on something, it's almost pure profit. Yep.

By the way, um, we've been doing this quite a bit with, with today's, um, today's like talks overall. So you have one topic here on why we're integrating QR codes in our marketing content.

Dude, so I don't know what you guys, you know, I know you know that we use them in our webinars. It collects quite a bit of leads. We've been pushing QR codes heavily in everything. So we're now even doing it in our videos, where if you're watching a video, you can then end up scanning your QR code. I get most people watch it with their cell phones, but we don't care. Because you can't really scan a QR code from a cell phone when you're watching a video. But we're still putting QR codes on our—

A lot of people watch on TV too.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And then a lot of our consumers watch on iPads and desktops because we produce a lot of B2B content. And what's cool about it is scan the QR code, go to a blog post, learn more, go to a webinar, become a lead. But we're just tying in the loops from all the channels closer together. And the reason I say that is it's hard to drive traffic from a lot of these marketing formats. But if you start entering QR codes, you won't drive the traffic volume. But we do see lead quality being amazing from people who scan the QR codes.

Yeah, it makes sense. I think we see a lot of mid-roll ads where they just have the QR codes in there. We haven't done it. We probably should do it. But the way we look at things now is like, I think you joined for my session and talk where I just talked about splintering a lot of the features that we have and making them into funnels. And those should be QR codes leading into them. And we're just constantly rotating these things over and over. This is interesting because one of our clients is here and we just talked yesterday very briefly. He's like, dude, like they have a high LTV product, right? Let's just call it hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah.

And this is a long sales cycle too. Like it's consumers making a big decision on their lives.

Like a car.

Yeah, like a car. And, um, but even more expensive than a car. But my point is, he's like, I know you guys are trying to hit these like ROI numbers and everything, but it's like, dude, it's— that's not what matters for me. It's like, I'd rather you guys just— if we need to spend more, let's spend more. Let's be aggressive here. And if we can map out different products and features that we have with our stuff, I'm down to do it. So my point of saying this is that sometimes air coverage does make sense, and sometimes it's not about your, your ROAS or your, your, your immediate ROI. Sometimes it's about your ROI over an extended period of time because you have a high LTV thing. If you try to go for efficiencies all the time, there's a trade-off, right? That's what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, there's a huge trade-off.

Yep. And by the way, we both come from performance marketing. I think we've learned over time that like this brand stuff takes time.

So— It takes a really long time. I always say 10 years to really get your brand out there. And, you know, I was talking to my Brazil team, I shared some of the numbers earlier today. You know, 36 RFPs last year. And how's the traffic down around 6x, yet we get more RFPs? It's because we're focusing on building our brand with the right audience versus people optimizing for vanity metrics like how many visitors. Because when we were getting tons of visitors to our websites, literally 6x more, we weren't getting large corporations hitting us up. And if we did, it would be very seldom and they wouldn't want to spend a lot of money with us.

Right.

And the churn was extremely high. And as we started going upstream, when I asked my team, and this is how the conversation first came about, I was like, where do we get our RFPs from? So they started sending me spreadsheets for every region that we're in. And inbound is a portion of it. I was like, so how do the inbound ones come? And they're just like, you know, they just go to the website. And I'm like, okay, have you asked them how they heard about us? And they're just really random. Like the other day, we got a really large car company, one of the largest car companies in the world hitting us up. And the way we got included in the RFP is they emailed someone random on our team that they never worked with and said, hey, so-and-so, the name was Jessica. Hey Jessica, we want to include you guys in an RFP. What's the next steps? Like, how the heck did they get our email address? And a lot of this happens from just being in business for a very long time. And people forget that. But what Eric and I have done is just being really consistent for a very long period of time.

And I think that's what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have said this. Most people, like investing, the thing you have to do is just sit there and wait, right? But in business, you can't just sit there and wait. You have to sit, you have to wait, but you have to have, you have to take a lot of action and wait. I think the problem with most people is they want a lot of results quickly. When they don't get it, they get disappointed and they give up really quickly.

Yes, it's, it's, you got to keep pushing. You got to, there's a lot of pressure. There's external threats. There's competition. You gotta keep doing it for a long time and push hard. And I don't think most people are willing to do that. I remember with Warren Buffett, uh, was it Lehman Brothers that was collapsing and, or, uh, that had some problems? One of them he stepped in on. Was it Lehman Brothers?

I think it was Lehman Brothers. Yeah.

It's just like, do you think he wanted to go in there and temporarily be the CEO? No. Did he have a choice? Yes. But did he still do it? Yes. Because you do things that you don't want to do And that's how you get to where you want to be in life.

Dude, this is worth talking about. Okay, let's revisit the conversation around why CEO is the worst job. But CEO and founder, I think, is the worst job. But if you're co-founder, I think it's a really good job. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Okay, wait, CEO, you say, is the worst job?

I think CEO and founder is the worst job you can have because everything bubbles up to you.

Yes.

But if you're co-founder and like, let's say, CMO or CTO or something like that, I think it's more fun.

I agree with you.

This is the role that you have. Continue, because I'm— I sit in CEO and founder right now. You sit in—

I'm CEO, I'm founder, and I don't even know what my title is.

Founder and whatever title needs to happen.

Yeah, I think they labeled me as a CMO.

He's CMO, but like, you're kind of between—

I'm not even a CMO.

You're kind of between CMO and Chief Strategy Officer. That's how I see it.

Yeah, I, I, if I had to pick a real title, I would probably say I'm Evangelist.

Sure.

Co-founder and evangelist. That's probably what I do. And then I deal with crap. And when I mean crap, I'm not talking about people are bad or anything like that. I just deal with problems all day long.

But you deal with problems that I think you're mostly okay dealing with instead of— and there's— every company has people problems, but you don't have to deal with people problems.

I don't deal with as much people problems. I have to deal with Other problems that may not be easy to solve, like sometimes we deal with lawsuits. And I would say at our size, we probably have at least one lawsuit that we deal with a year. And the lawsuits could be random, like a company called Medley paid us for marketing services. They went bankrupt. So then we get letters from attorneys trying to claw back money. And we negotiated and we dealt with them. We have internal counsel. But some of those things I got to be involved with or, you know, someone trying to do some fraudulent things, not in our company, but someone trying to screw us over or whatnot, just double-check. But yeah, so some things I just got to deal with. And those are the things where it's very time sensitive, and people need pressure. So for example, in a country in Asia, someone tried screwing us over. And I had to call the lawyers, bug them, I was able to get them to go to court right away, get an injunction on that person so they can't screw with us anymore. And then boom, we can operate business as is, or hopefully we can operate business as is. And the court approved the injunction. But what I'm getting with this is I had to put pressures on the lawyer to make that happen. If I didn't, it would have happened a week or two later. And when I say pressure, talking to them probably for a few hours a day and dealing with different time zones until it happened and messaging them. And when they don't answer, message them again. And when it's 1:00 AM their time, I still call them and they don't pick up. I call the next person on their team and I keep going until I get an answer. And then I tell them, I need this done now. I just sent you money. Why isn't it done now? Like all that kind of crap I had to deal with.

I wonder, you know, I have these Indian entrepreneur friends in YPO and they are also pushers at their company. Hey, how's it going over here? Hey, how's this going?

Right?

Do you think it's a cultural thing?

Depending on the Indian type because in AJ's side, different culture, they don't push. Okay.

Oh, you know what's funny? The two Indians I know in Waipio are the same as you.

They're Gujarati. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they speak it too.

A lot of us are just like we just keep going and pushing in business, and we're never satisfied.

Yeah, and that's why I think it's a net benefit sometimes. This is a cultural thing. If you can be born into a culture like that, the resilience is kind of built in. It's like it's like a built-in toy. I don't know. But yeah. Yeah.

And then when things go bad, my co-founder was asking me that. He's like, dude. Dude, this is just so bad. And I was like, you know, I've been in business now for 24 years. And out of those 24 years, this has been my worst year I've ever been in business.

Really?

I make more money now. But the amount of problems that I'm dealing with this year are just crazy. Like, think about this, signing a cloud deal with another company who said they were going to move our tech stack over to their tech stack. The engineers don't move the tech stack to it. And they're just We want you to pay the cloud bill. I'm like, but you said that they were going to move it and they never moved it and the code network. They're like, yeah, we don't care. Even though it was free for you, we hired those engineers to do it even though they didn't do it. You need to pay your bill to us. And I'm like, but you told us when we first started talking that we'll pay you and you guys will make it happen. It's been a year and a half and you couldn't have made it happen. So why should we keep paying or not paying? Why should we keep going down this When you're never going to be able to move it over.

Yeah, what'd they say?

They're like, well, if you're not willing to keep trying, then you need to pay your bills because it's been a year and a half. And I'm like, dude, I'm not gonna go another year and a half and waste my engineers' time trying to move tech stacks.

The job wasn't done. Why would I pay you?

So then you deal with these, these battles, right? They're disputes that I call them. But I'm dealing with 3 big silly disputes. Uh, you know, some of them should have been preventable. And we're dealing with the crap economy. We're dealing with tariffs. We're now in so many countries that we're dealing with the economy of a lot of different industries. And I remember talking to my CEO. He's like, you know, I've been through the dot-com boom. I've been through 9/11. I've been through 2008, the housing crisis, COVID, of course. He's like, usually things pick back up after like 8 months after. He's like, this has been almost 3 years. And I'm like, I know.

It's pretty bad. But I, but I like it.

And my co-founder, you know, of course it impacts him, it impacts me as well. But then when things are really bad like this, and it's been one of the worst years, we're double down, we're reinvesting more than ever, which is creating more pain. And I'm like, you got to take the pain, we have no choice. This is how you climb ahead and you beat your competition when things are good.

You know what people say? So they say that bad times create strong people. And strong people create good times and good times create weak people. And then the cycle continues to repeat over and over and over. And that's what it is. And so, when I say I like it, I don't really like being in it but I know it'll make me stronger for the long term and that's why I'm okay with it.

Yes. Now, I just got to get my kids to create good times but not necessarily be weak.

The resilience has to be built in them too. Like that's a whole other thing. But so, I was having dinner with another entrepreneur a couple nights ago. And, um, they have, let's call it 700 employees. They probably do $140, $150 million a year, something like that. Um, and you know what he told me? He's actually younger than us. So he was like, he's like, look, man, like I've played this comparison game and like, you know, I thought in 2020 I started angel investing and everything. He invested most of his net worth into just angel investments, right? And he was playing the game, the status game. Um, and he's just like, dude, like And I was like, what's— he's become a lot calmer now. And he mentioned the word retire. I was like, why do you want to retire? Are you not having fun? And he was like, well, the more— what did Biggie say? Mo' money, mo' problems, right? So, the more he grows, the more stressed he gets, the more stuff he doesn't want to do and he's doing it all. And he's like, but for what, right? And so, he's just asking me. I'm like, look, the way I've always looked at it, money or not, I'm just— I enjoy the game that I'm playing right now. So, maybe you need to change the game that you're playing right now. Because I do still think that business is the best game. But to your point, mo' money, mo' problems.

Did he invest in a crypto company? He did. Yeah, he invested in—

he invested in many. No, I don't think you know who this is.

He invested in a different person.

He invested in many crypto companies.

Uh, you mentioned a friend of yours that invested in Coinbase and just made a killing.

That's another one.

Oh, that's a different guy.

Yeah, yeah.

But that—

but that goes back to what you're saying again. It's— it's like the bigger you grow, just keep in mind, like If you're doing $1 billion in revenue or even more than that, you're going to have problems to deal with there. And it's never going to be completely hands-off. Unless you're an investor. If you want to be more hands-off, you're an investor. You're super hands-off there.

But even investors, look at this economy. It's so bad that companies aren't going public as often anymore. There's not as many exits. Home sales have been the lowest since 2009. Did you see the news on that?

It's really, you know, the Miami prices are down. So Naples, you're— it's down 6% year on year. Um, and then like Miami housing is down quite a bit too. And it's, it's from the peak, I think it's down like 50% or so. And it's going to continue to, to go down. And in Miami, like, they've been building a lot of stuff in downtown, but a lot of people left. Like, I moved here 2021, I'm back home now, right? And a lot of my friends that moved here during 2021, it's like freshman year of college, everyone's having fun, the economy is ripping, everything. Everyone's back home now.

Yeah, because people like Google are like, if you work remote and you don't come to office at least 3 times a week, you may lose your job. In other words, you're gonna lose it.

Yeah. And so, and like earlier in my talk today, I talked about the whole Shopify CEO putting the standards of excellence out there saying, hey, we expect reflexive AI. And in very nice terms, like, if you don't understand this stuff, if you can figure it, like, make your job more efficient without AI, more power to you. But if you can't, like, there's the door. Yep. You asked me last time, why do I do this event for free? And I kind of mentioned that whenever I do these things, everything comes back to me 10 or 100-fold, but just on a different timeline. But I also know there's levels to these events too. So, the event that I told you about, the business summit, they actually hit me up because I did this event. And this event actually— this is the record for number of attendees and they're up 50%.

Really? Wow.

And so they're like, how did you do that? Right? And they're like, okay, can you help with this event over here? Which is that event? And then what's gonna happen is I'm gonna get you involved because you're my friend, right? And but I'm gonna get involved with that one too and, and hopefully help and see where it goes. But like, they're like, if you do something and it's clear that you're competent, other people are gonna come ask you, especially if it's groups like this. Yeah, there's level-ups to everything.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think, I think doing events is worth it. I go to a lot of events Um, next year I'll pick back up. This year was slowed down because I, I decided at the— towards the end of last year, I'm going to slow it down.

Uh, he's changed his mind very quickly.

Uh-huh. Well, the economy also started getting bad, and dude, when crap gets bad, I need to generate revenue, so I have to hit the road.

Sure, man.

I don't really have a choice. Technically, I can just sit at home and decide to make less money, but yeah, I can't mentally.

So how many days are— do you think you're gonna be gone this year and then next year?

This year, I don't think I'll be on the road for more than 150 days.

Okay.

Next year, I think I'll take it back up to call it like 200 and something.

Oh my God. Okay, so get this. So, there's an amazing guy, um, his name's Vin. He was on the Diary of a CEO podcast. He's a great conversationalist, a great, um, just a great speaker overall. Very well spoken, probably the best that I've seen. Um, so he listens to this podcast.

Hello, Vin.

He was just talking about when he used to be a professional speaker, he was out 200 days a year. His kids— I think it's just something about the kids where it felt wrong and it felt like maybe there's resentment building with the kids. He's dialed it back quite a bit now. He doesn't really do a lot of podcasts or speaking, but he has a much better relationship with the kids. I almost feel like I need to keep sending you the IRR thing. I sent Neal this picture Of, of this guy that said it doesn't matter how much additional internal rate of return that you make, um, if your kids hate you at 20. I feel like I need to keep sending that to you.

Yes, but what I've changed is I now take my kids with me on some of the trips.

Okay, okay, that's good.

So I'm trying to find a balance. That's good, that's good. So like, uh, I'm doing an event in Vegas, they're coming with me there. Um, my team was trying to see if I can do an event in Arizona in like—

Does your wife come too?

Uh, yeah, she would come as well.

Oh, that's cool.

So then I'm trying to see if If, uh, the kids would be okay taken out of school during that time.

Yeah, dude, we have a lot of friends that would just rip their kids out of school like whenever a trip's happening.

Yeah.

You can just do that, right?

That's what I want to do. I just have to make sure wife is okay with it.

I mean, the school's probably okay because you, you know, you hook up the school, right?

Yeah, we donated enough.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know what happens with these schools? It's a racket. You know, if you donate too much to the school, they don't want you to leave the school to go to a different school because you need letters. You need a— they— you're required letters of recommendations to go to the next school. So, if you're a good donor, it's really hard to get them to push to try to fight for you to leave to another school because they want the money from you.

Wow. See, there's a whole— there's a— there's like another podcast we can do on all this stuff. Um, but okay, that's interesting. So, you figured out a way around it. And of the 200 days that you're going to travel next year, how many of those days are you going to include your family?

Uh, I would say at least like 30, 40.

That's actually good. 30, 40 days. Okay, 30, 40%. Oh no, no, no, no, that's, that's less. Yeah, because you're doing 200 days. Um, so 10, 20%, uh, 15, 20%. Anyway, because the thing for Neil is when Neil travels, the same thing for me, I usually just stay in my room and I work. Um, and I don't really— like, I might go sightseeing if it's somewhere I haven't been before, but then usually I'm just I'm just comfortable ordering room service and working and watching TV. Like, it's a pretty good— like, I'm actually very happy doing that.

Yeah. So, so yesterday when I come into Miami, some guy messages me, okay? And this is a little, uh, non-PG. So this guy's messaging me, uh, this guy has a business in Los Angeles, uh, he does really well. He's like, oh, you're going to Miami? I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I just landed. And keep in mind, I landed late, so it's pretty much close to midnight at this point.

How do you know you're going to Miami?

He asked me, he's like, where are you? And because I was texting, he was texting me and I'm like, dude, I can't answer your business question over the phone. He's trying to FaceTime me. I'm like, in a flight, text me your business problem, I'll answer it. So then he's like, are you going to Ocean 11? I think it was called Ocean 8, Ocean 11. I don't know, whatever it was.

That's a movie.

That's what I thought too. And I was like, the movie with George Clooney and Brad Pitt? He's like, no, it's a— I think he said a club or gentlemen's club or something like that. And I'm like, I'm going to a different club. And he's like, what club are you going to? And I was like, the St. Regis. He's like, you mean the St. Regis Hotel? I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna go to sleep and I'm gonna sleep in Club St. Regis. And this is the best partying ever because when I travel—

Oh, Eleven! Eleven!

Is it Eleven?

So Eleven's owned by YPR.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, there you go.

I thought it was Ocean's Eleven. No, he's just joking.

It's just Eleven.

Okay, so for me, when I go to a different country, I'm traveling, my favorite thing to do isn't to go out. It's straight up binge watch my Netflix shows that I couldn't watch, you know, because a lot of random times I was in jet lag.

Yeah.

Stay in order room service. I still try to work out, although I pulled my back, so I skipped today. And then sleep in because when you have young kids, you do not get to sleep in. Again, to me, that is better than partying, going out, and it energizes me. And then I actually work way better because I'm just like recharged.

Dude, speaking of which, okay, we like traveling and all that. Okay, did you watch White Lotus season 2?

I've seen all 3 seasons.

Okay, so but season 2 is the best one, right?

I like season 1 better.

I've only seen season 2 so far, so I'm like 4 episodes in. But the way that Four Seasons marketed everything, like it basically is marketing for Four Seasons. That's how I see it, right? And but like, and over like, it's not even just— it's over 3 seasons too. So I, I think it's like the impressions that you get, the number of times people are watching this where it's like ingrained in their head that you— I want to go back to Italy now and I want to go to stay at a nice place. Like, that sticks with you.

But I don't think they're all in Four Seasons. I don't think season 1 was Four Seasons.

I don't know about season 1. I know season 2 and 3 are.

I think the hotel is called White Lotus.

No, of the first one?

I think all of them.

No, no, no, it's actually— they filmed it. I looked at— I looked this up on ChatGPT. I think all of them are actually Four Seasons. And then season 3, they actually picked a couple of other nice 5-star hotels in Thailand.

No, but I don't— during the show, I don't know if they call it Four Seasons.

No, no, no, it's actually White Lotus. Yeah, they just rebranded it. But it's like, but then once you start to look at it, it's like, what is this hotel? Like, I want to be at the White Lotus Hotel. It's like, oh, it's a Four Seasons.

Yeah.

And then you spending the extra amount of time, like you're even more invested because you spent time researching it.

Dude, so I was at a Four Seasons recently in Vegas. Okay. Check this out. So when I was at the Four Seasons—

Oh, that one on the side?

Yeah, we always go there. It's connected to the Mandalay Bay because there's no smoking. And with kids, I just don't like smoke. Like, I just refuse to do anything that is smoke-oriented because I don't like the secondhand. So they give my kid a teddy bear. She's sleeping in the car in her, uh, car seat. She hides in there a teddy bear into her buckle Which isn't the safest thing because you don't want there to be a gap. But she was sleeping peacefully and we were in like a residential area driving. Um, so I'm like, I let it be because it wasn't dangerous. Um, but yeah, dude, they like, they gave a teddy bear because they knew my kids would like teddy bears.

Mm-hmm.

When they arrived, it was close to Easter. They created an art piece cookie with different edible chocolate colors and they got to paint their own canvas. They did an Easter egg hunt with them. They did all these extra things to make the event memorable. And also, when I go down there, no joke, if I, if I arrive, the valet, they almost everyone knows my wife and my name. They know our kids. It could be because we tip them well. But yeah, you know, we don't go there that often, but call it 3 times a year. They just create really good experiences.

And the thing is, they know if they give your kids a good experience, They're going to want to go back there and they will bother you to do it. Not bother you, but they will ask you if you can go back there.

Yeah, and our kids love it. So, we keep going back there and we spend the money just because— and it's expensive. It would be cheaper to stay at a hotel with a casino because they make casino revenue from you.

Yup. So, the question I have for you is, are you seeing with most of your CEO and founder friends right now, would you say more CEOs are on a rampage right now or less?

What do you mean by rampage?

These people are on a tear to uncover any areas of inefficiency and ruthlessly cut if needed.

I'm going to rephrase it a little bit when I describe what they are. They're on a rampage, but a little bit of a different type of rampage. Some of it could be cost cutting. Some of it could be trying to drum up new business and revenue. Some of it could be trying to get strategic and figure out how to partner with other people and generate more revenue through cross-selling products, you know, from competitors or people who are in complementary businesses. They're trying to do whatever because the sentiment of the economy is so bad, they're afraid that they're just going all in. And going back to AI and cost cutting, the reason some of them are trying to figure out ways to reduce expenses is they're planning out contingencies for when things get worse because they don't know how bad it's going to get. It's been almost 3 years and they think it's going to continue for a little bit. Fed's not reducing rates at any moment right now, and tariff problems haven't been solved. They're just trying to figure out, well, if we can create efficiencies, maybe I don't have to do layoffs in a few months.

My take on the rampage piece right now— and actually, it's one of my friends that said this. He's like, I'm on a rampage right now because He had talked about one of his employees going to the gym during a call and then being late to one of the calls. And he's just been firing a lot quicker. And this is one of the nicest guys that I know. And he's just like, oh, I just let go of my head of design. I just let go of my head of product. Oh, we just fired an agency over here. I was like, dude. He's like, yeah, I'm on a rampage right now. And interestingly enough, I have someone I know. She runs a large food company that's global. And she is a very nice person. She's a global CEO. And she's like, Yeah, I'm finding a bunch of dead bodies everywhere right now. And I'm just— I want to cut everywhere. And yesterday, I met someone for the first time. She's like, oh, I'm gonna fire my entire marketing team. And so you have a lot of these really kind-looking people that it just seems like they are— maybe because to your point, we've been sitting in this crap for the last 3 years or so. I think people are becoming more battle-hardened, more battle-hardened. And I think people are willing to take less crap. And you can probably argue I've become more battle-hardened too. And I think you have too.

Yes.

In the last 3 years or so, more More hardcore, more rampagey. And that's not to say, hey, we're here to just want to cut people. I think our tolerance for BS is lower now. Our tolerance for pain is probably higher, but our tolerance for BS is lower.

And I think it's because a lot of us don't have choices. Growth has slowed down. And when growth slows down, valuations naturally decline as well. In a bad economy, valuations decline naturally as well. So when you, when you have a declining in valuation because of lower growth or negative growth, And then because of a bad economy, you're getting hit twice on the valuation end. So they have no choice but for ways to figure it out. And what I've noticed with a lot of these people, including myself, when times are good, we're much more chill. I actually travel less in a good economy than a bad economy because things are growing without me having to push hard. And I don't focus as much on meddling in the business when things are good Versus when the economy is bad, because it's like, it's working, even if it's done in a different way than I think is best. Whatever, it's working. Let them go and do it.

Dude, like I said, tough times create strong people, and then it just goes on and on until we go back to— we have— we create weak people. Good times create weak people, and that's what happens. So we get one more to do now.

And going back to the weak and strong people, I think the same person can get weak During good times, but then turn strong again during bad times and so forth and so on. I think people can also go in cycles as well where they get comfortable when times are really good.

Yeah, it's true. Like, yeah, you're right, people go in cycles. There's, there's times where you want to work, there's— you have, you have a season of work, and there's times where you don't want to work. Maybe you have kids or whatever. And then there's times like, oh, maybe you feel like working again. And actually yesterday, um, someone said to me, so they had a, a CEO took over their company, and this guy hadn't worked for like 20 years. He was a publicly traded CEO like 20 years ago, but he hasn't worked for Wow. Sailed off into the sunset, right? So they weren't sure about this guy. But turns out this guy comes in, he's a badass. It's just he didn't want to work for a while and now he's back working again and he's driving results. And this is a publicly traded company and it's that company we're talking about that you're trying to do potentially a deal with.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Oh, that guy took a sabbatical for a long time.

Yeah, this incoming CEO, this is a hired gun CEO, but he took a sabbatical for like 20 years or something like that. Call it 10 to 20 years. Maybe he was investing, maybe he was like on boards and things like that. But he already had everything he needed. But I think he felt the need to go to battle again, and maybe he's back.

Oh, I didn't know that.

That's what it is. All right, there's gonna be a Shopify ChatGPT integration.

Did you see that? Yeah.

Okay, so someone commented that Shopify is basically making e-commerce sites a relic. What do we think about that? Do we think that's true or false?

Uh, I think that's false.

I think it's short-term false, long-term true.

It depends on how, how good— yeah, and how well ChatGPT, you know, handles integration. Yeah, not just, not, not just that, because if you look at ChatGPT, I think they've done really well for image creation, and I think they've improved their research. Um, they even do stuff like videos. But if you look at how much they've evolved Like the differences in versions, I actually think, yes, there's still good improvements, but they're not as drastic as the previous versions from one to another. I think it's slowing down on the innovation end.

Yeah, we'll see. I think just we can agree that website traffic is going to go down over time. I think it's still important for websites to have traffic. I think if you're a brand or a company, you need to have a website. But I don't know if a lot of the business is going to be done on your website long term. I think it's going to decrease over time. I think it'll still be important. I wouldn't go as far as a relic, but I think it'll become less important over time.

And I would rephrase it. And I'm pretty sure Eric and I are— I'm not even pretty sure, I know we're saying the same thing. When Eric says it's not as important in the future, he's not saying that you don't need a website. He's saying that it won't drive as much of your sales from a revenue perspective.

Yes.

He's saying that you still need a website, because if you don't have a website, it's probably going to hurt your social media presence, it's going to hurt that omnichannel approach. And what you'll find is, sales are going to happen natively within different platforms. Just like how you can purchase on Instagram right now, you'll start being able to purchase on all the other social platforms like YouTube, etc. So it doesn't mean that having a website isn't as important. It's more so more important to meet your customer wherever they want to be. But you need to have a website. It's super important for your brand. If you don't have one, I bet you'll see less results from all the other channels. And the reason you have to have a website is you can control the experience. You're limited on what experience you provide on other people's platforms based on what they allow you to do.

Yeah, I think the big thing there— so you're right. The big thing there is you get to tell your own story on your website and that's why it's important.

Yes. And it's still important from a revenue perspective, but it'll just drive a lower percentage of your overall revenue compared to— like if you're running Instagram ads, why would you want to send them to your website when your conversion rate is going to drop Versus just having them buy right then and there on Instagram.

All right guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode where we recorded with the DJI Osmo. I set this up myself. We got another camera over there. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.