If You Are Not Working 7 Days A Week, You Will Lose

All right guys, we're live again. It's Thursday, June 4th. You know, Neil, it's one day before I'm no longer in my 30s. So, uh, yeah.

Happy early birthday.

No, no, no, it's okay. I'm not there yet. So you were there, you were there last year.

Well, happy early birthday because for me, I was gonna say I have it already. I have it in my calendar, but my calendar is not giving me, you know, the notification that it's your birthday yet. But my calendar is in PST, even though I'm in Indonesia. So that's why I'm not getting the notification.

Yeah. So Neil's recording, it's 4 AM his time right now in Jakarta. And then I'm still in LA right now. So we're going to go ahead and get started. We're coming to you live right now. And Neil, I think maybe this one's fun to start with. So I saw this, I don't know if you saw this, but Harry Stebbings did an interview with this one guy. I think he runs a company called Corgi Insurance and I haven't heard of it before, but apparently they're doing really well. And I think this guy's in his early 20s. And so one thing he said, Neil, was, if you're not working 7 days a week, you will lose.

Okay?

And I think we have our thoughts around this. Obviously, you know, we're in our 20s before, but I just want to call this out. So he says, look, this guy from Corgi Insurance, if you're not working 7 days a week, you are going to lose. Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups. The company works 7 days a week. The founder lives and sleeps in the office. He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7. 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo. Okay.

Wow.

And then today he went behind the scenes. I don't know how he got that happen, but he went behind the scenes. So they scaled to a $2.6 billion valuation in just 2 years. And so, uh, here's, here's, we'll call out some more things here and then we'll react to this. Uh, work trials repel the mediocre. So Corgis force candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. To test them out to see if they're intense. Lead from the front lines. If you can't demand 7 days while working on a yacht, so he sleeps there 3 to 4 hours. He only sleeps 3 to 4 hours a night. And then culture only means one thing, winning. And then he talks about building something world historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50 or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. I would rather measure my lifespan in victories. I think you like that, Neil.

Yeah.

So anyway, all that to say is I think we certainly had a way of thinking like this in our early 20s or so, but we've learned with age, at least I'm speaking for myself right now, that it's also a marathon, not a sprint. So you go first and then I can react.

Well, first off, I love the— people are probably going to hate me for this, but I love how we chose the winning and dying at 50. I personally wouldn't want to live to 80 and have my life be tons of failures, right? The successes— and I have failed. I know most entrepreneurs have failed one time or another. Even if your company was a success, there was times during that company that you probably had many failures. But the successes, the reaching some of your goals and then creating new ones, that keeps me going and it makes life really enjoyable for me. So I would choose dying earlier and having, you know, hitting some sort of milestone. I'm not saying I have to need to create a trillion-dollar company, but I wouldn't want to live till 80 and just always failing in life.

Let me ask you a question. So if you went back to your 18-year-old self right now, and then he looked at you right now, would he consider you a massive success or failure?

Because you said 18, it would be a success.

Okay. A 25-year-old?

Okay, 30-year-old failure.

Well, by normal measures, and we're not measuring normally right now, but I think if you look at— the reason why I asked the 18-year-old question is I would say that it just depends on— beauty's in the eye of the beholder, right? And so, for you, because you're always stretching, stretching, stretching, the goals always get bigger and bigger over time. So, I just look at it this way. I enjoy playing the game of business and I just want to play it to see how far I can go. And if it becomes really big, then great. But I also know that, Neil, you like a nice life. I don't think you would be okay living in the office and sleeping 3 to 4 hours a day, would you?

No, I really do enjoy a nice life. I could not work like this corgi guy. Does. When I was 18, I could. I'm assuming he's older than 18, but I could not do that. Like even Elon, they say, like, I think people were fundraising to put a bed in his office because he was sleeping on a couch. I can't do that.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm the same, right? So if we go down the list over here, so I don't necessarily believe that, well, actually, no, I don't know, Neil, if you're not working 7 days a week, you're going to lose. I think if you're the entrepreneur and if you're not working 7 days a week in the early days, yes, I do think you're going to lose. That I agree with, but I don't think that applies to necessarily like all your employees. That's what I would say. Yeah.

And even right now, I think both you and I work 7 days a week still. Do we work as hard on weekends? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think it really varies on what we're doing, but sometimes we're working on some projects and we just want to crank it out. But I would say typically we work the hardest Monday through Thursday. I would say my Fridays aren't as hard as, you know, Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. And I would say my Saturdays and Sundays are definitely more chill than even Fridays. And yeah, it also is, what do you want from life? Like, I started in marketing because I accidentally landed on it. I wasn't intentionally trying to be in marketing. And when I started—

You were trying to make money.

I was just trying to make money. And, you know, I had my own website. I did marketing for it. The website got a lot of traffic. I didn't make any money. I was taking a speech class while I was in high school, but it was a nighttime college class. And I give a speech on how Google's algorithm works and how to get traffic. It was a random topic that no one in the class really cared for except one person. And that one person worked at a company that was looking to hire someone like me. They were paying me over $1,000 an hour for consulting. It was a flat fee, but the amount of hours that it took, it was over $1,000 an hour. I was ecstatic. And then from there they gave me a $5,000 a month contract and I was 16. So I was like, huh, I can end up having a nice life. But the problem with the nice life is once you start buying things like nice homes or nice cars, it's never ending and you continually want nicer cars, nicer homes. After a while, I don't know how much nicer of a home you can end up getting, at least for me. The cars, yes, I can definitely get nicer cars, but I don't care for it. The home, the only reason I spend, and I know people say it's a really bad investment, and if people knew what I spent on construction of my home, building it, et cetera, they'd probably say—

You've said it in public before. Yeah.

So call it, I'm in it 30, 31, 32. It's somewhere around there because of construction costs. I don't know the exact number, but I definitely know I spent more than 30. I definitely know I spent less than 32. And that's without finishing the backyard. So let's call it, it'll end up being $33 or $34 million. From a money standpoint, it is extreme waste. And my house isn't big, or it depends what you consider big, but people consider mansions, I think they're defined at 10,000 square feet or more. I'm living on 7,000 square feet. The biggest cost for my house was actually the land. Outside of the land is the structure and whatever faucet you pick or furniture or whatever it may be. But I look at it as the house makes life super convenient, especially if you have a family. It just makes your life so much easier and more relaxing and enjoyable. So I like that because for me, it makes me work in a happier place because I work from home and it makes me more productive. But other than the house, I don't think I would spend money on anything other thing that would be that crazy an expense. Like clothes, I think they're a waste. I've spent my money on that. Cars, I really think they're a waste. I have a Tesla Model Y, as you know, the seats suck, but the click, type in your address and click and it just drives you, amazing feature.

You know what's funny? Neil keeps talking about how the Tesla Model Y, the seats suck, but I'm just like, well, you have the money to upgrade the seats, so why don't you just upgrade the seats?

It becomes a safety hazard. So when you have a car, it's tested. When you start changing parts or rate— you know, when people like lower a car or raise a car, it messes up the sensors for when someone hits a bumper.

You know what I'll say? You know, my back hurts too, right? So I just put one of these things in the back too, so it feels really good, right? So why can't you just have some of these modifications for your back and just make it better? But anyway, I— we digress right now. So I want to call out some other things here, and then we can move on from this, this topic. But yes, I do think you have to— it's up to you. It's not what Neil's saying, what this corgi guy's saying, or what I'm saying as well. You have to decide what's important to you in your life. And I applaud this guy. I think Neil applauds this guy too. This guy's name's Nico. Like, if that's what you want in your life right now and you're going for a trillion-dollar outcome, more power to you. We support you for it, right? So let's go through it. Like, here's some things that I do like about what he's saying. So, you know, check this out. I do like the fact that he built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7. Because here's the thing, Neil, if you have a 24/7 office, guess what? It's in San Francisco. Who's going to be doing deals at the office? You can bet the best VCs, the best people, the best investors, the best founders, they're going to be in that office. And also you're going to have some of the most cracked out talent. I think this is a nice way to actually get talent. So I think that's really smart. The second piece over here, and I don't know how much you guys do this, but we used to do this quite a bit where work trials repel the mediocre. So Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a filter, a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock watchers. So here's what I'll say about that. I like paid work trials. I'm not saying I want people to come into an office over the weekend, but I think even though it's expensive to do a work trial, it's more expensive to hire a bad employee. And so I, I, this just reminds me that I need to get back to it. Like, are you guys still doing paid work trials? You guys are, right?

Yeah, we've always been doing them. We think it's one of the best ways to figure out if someone's good or not. Paid work trials don't work for all positions though. So if you're hired, let's say in marketing, you're hiring someone to do SEO, a paid work trial isn't too hard to figure out if someone's good or not. If you're looking for a managerial role, let's say a managing director of a certain region or division, You can kind of get a sense if you like the person over a paid work trial over the weekend, but it's still not going to give you enough insights if the person's going to work or not.

Yeah, I think managerial is kind of more nebulous and bubbly versus like, do you know how to actually do the work or not, whether it's paid media, SEO, AEO, whatever it is exactly. And so lifespan versus victory, I think that's interesting. Leading from— I do think we should lead from the front lines. Look, even though Neil's been working for a very long time, I think 24 years in business, I think I've been in the business for about 13 years or so, we do try to lead by example. And even though Neil likes to say, oh, I don't have much going on or whatever, no, but Neil still works really hard right now and he does try to lead by example. Same thing for me. Any other thing here that sticks out? Oh, reject the comfort of quiet quitting. If you're operating in a hypergrowth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, You're quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility. Okay, I don't agree with that part, but to each his own. Good?

Yeah, there's a lot of companies that were built where most of the employees did not work Saturday and Sunday. I'm not saying working Saturday and Sunday is terrible. I've seen it work extremely well. You and I do it, but I do believe some people, not all, some people need a recharge.

Yep. I agree with that. I mean, I would say the vast majority of people cannot sleep 4 hours. That's actually, I don't know if you know this, Neil, because I'm a sleep nerd, but there is a group of people that can only sleep 4 hours and it's like a specialized gene where it basically, they can just keep going. Quick break. If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads and have personalized landing pages to convert your customers at a much higher rate on LinkedIn, check out Karat. That's K-A-R-A-T. Karrrot allows you to do things that LinkedIn Ads does not allow you to do right now. Check it out. There are publicly traded companies such as Semrush and Sitecore that are using this right now, and you can use this to get ahead because if you don't use this, it will take you weeks, if not even a little longer than that, to make these ads because again, you cannot do this on LinkedIn. So again, go to www.karrrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side. So I want to show you something on over here because we're talking about employees right now. So check this out, Neil. Don't worry, Neil, I'll carry this because it's 4 AM over there. So AI is creating a new class of super IC. So an IC is an individual contributor. So the era of 10x engineers, PMs, product managers, designers, AEs is over. We are now in the age of the 50x employee, okay? So it's essentially a reset. Anyone can unlock a massive Can unlock massive career benefits by leaning into AI. So check this out. This is from Cursor. So when you look at the output gap is widening, we see P90 developers. So I think that's percentile. So 90th percentile developers pulling farther away from median developers in absolute lines of code added per week. So P50 means you're in the percentile of 50. P90 means you're top 90 percentile. So if you look at this over here, you can see over time, like The P90s are getting higher and higher over time, and then versus the P50. So it's never been more expensive to be average. And then sure, we're looking at developers right now, but I think you can apply this to really anything across the board. And I know lines of code is just one metric, but I mean, come on.

Well, when I put it in a marketing perspective, because I've seen this a lot where everyone talks about the 10x employee, the 50x employee, the 100x employee, I have not seen A-players become 100x, 50x, or even anywhere near 10x better from leveraging AI, at least in the marketing realm yet. I'm not saying it doesn't make them better. I just have not seen the magnitude of an A player becoming 50x or anywhere near there better. Forget even 50x, like 5x. I haven't seen an A player even go 5x better from just leveraging AI.

So I'll give you a response to that in a second after, after this chart over here. So P99 devs, so these are basically top Top 1% produce 46x more lines than median dev. I predict this comes to every function. In my opinion, many top performers will be constrained by the old system, couldn't design, code, lacked organization. AI gives them these powers. That's exactly what I wanted to cover. So Neil, I would just say that, for example, we have someone on the sales team right now that just came from paid media, similar to your guy, came from paid media, now on the sales team, right? He would've had to wait weeks to get a landing page up because he wants to run ChatGPT ads, right? So he basically got his mockups, the ad mockups ready. He got the landing page up and he deployed the landing page as well. That would've taken weeks before, right? So I think what AI gives you and me, Neil, is powers that we didn't have before where we wouldn't have to wait a long time to deploy certain things. And I think in that respect, it makes me stronger because every job is just a list of responsibilities. So it enables me to do more with less, right? And so I think, I do think it's going to come to fruition at some point. I think you will see it, Neil. I just think it's happening like, you know, case by case right now. It's one area.

Coding's very apparent right now, so. Yeah, coding is really apparent, but outside of coding, like specifically marketing, I just haven't seen— I've seen efficiencies. I haven't seen efficiencies in multiples. I agree with you, you can get landing pages up faster, or do keyword research faster or figure out errors on a site faster. But when you look at what someone's spending 8 hours a day on for most roles in marketing, AI is not making them 5 times more efficient or whatnot, right? There's certain tasks that it is making them more efficient in, but there's still a lot of stuff where AI isn't helping yet and time will tell what happens there. But a great example of this is I had a team member come to me the other day. And he's like, Neil, I want to do an experiment where we start cranking out AI content on your social profiles and we're going to do text-based. So I said, all right, are you talking about short form or articles? They're like mid-form. And I said, if you're going to do it, I recommend articles because a lot of these social networks are giving favoritism like X and LinkedIn if you want to start posting articles because not enough people do. They're like, no, I want to start on mid-form. I'm like, all right, go for it. You do your mid-form experiment. So they start cranking out mid-form content. I don't know what the length is, but it's not 200-300 words. It's not, you know, 1,000-2,000 words. It's somewhere in between. And they're cranking it out using AI. And I was like, all right, we can test a few of them. So we tested it out for a few days and I told them right away, it's not going to work. They're like, why? Because they showed me the content before it was posted and I tweaked it a little bit here or there, but I didn't want to tweak it too much because I wanted them to see the actual results from quote unquote AI content. And it got posted. It didn't get tons more engagement than a normal post from a view perspective or anything like that. And we reconvened and they said, hey, can you gimme another 2, 3 days? I'm going to make some tweaks. I said, no problem, I'll give you a week. So I'm like, but just keep learning and updating me with your learnings. And they asked, why don't you think it worked? And I said, The problem with AI content is if you look at what's being written, there's nothing new. You're regurgitating the same information. I'm like, that's the first thing because the way they're doing it is they're scraping to see what's worked for other people and then coming up with their own twist of that version. And I'm like, that doesn't work too well because once it's already done well on social media and a lot of people have seen it, even if you do your own version of it, it's not going to be as good or it's not going to be as exciting just because people already have seen similar stuff before. The second thing is when you look at AI-generated content, even if you have it help you fine-tune the hooks and make it a little bit more punchy or use stats and data, it still comes across as AI-written content no matter what you do. If, and this is the big if, if you've been creating content for a long time. So I've been publishing content on the internet for more than 20 years. People understand my tone of voice, my writing style, and yes, you can get AI to train to write like you, but it's still not the same if you're decent at writing, or I would say if you're good at writing. And I wouldn't say that's the biggest reason. I think number one is the biggest reason. The writing style and the way it's doing hooks is still not perfect, and it's not going to learn in a week even though they uploaded No joke, years of my content. I think they uploaded over 1,000 articles to train it. It's just still not perfect. And I think writing is part of it, but the bigger reason is it's the topics that it's picking and it's not offering something new. Well, versus if I were to create an article on LinkedIn or X, I would pick, or even a post, I would try to talk about something that's new.

So I'll kind of relate to this, and I have a cool— I have another cool chart I'll show you. So I was talking to Alex Lieberman again this week, and so he runs a company called 10X, which is an AI transformation company. And basically I was like, hey, so you have this content machine skill, tell me how it works. And he's like, I'm like, okay, well tell me what results you're seeing from this content machine skill. So basically it drives millions of impressions on X every month and also on LinkedIn. I was like, okay, well how's it doing for you in terms of driving pipeline? He's like, it's It helps me drive $100 million plus leads from LinkedIn, and that's where we get all of our pipeline from. I'm like, okay, well tell me more about this content machine skill, right? So basically, long story short, he gives me access to the skill and I've implemented it into my Hermes and I tried it again yesterday for the first time when I was bored, right? So after I got off all of my meetings for the day, let me share my screen with you. This is how it works. And then you guys can take this for yourselves. And go from there. So yesterday I have like, you can see it says, use the Content Machine to quiz me in a thread, right? And this was at 5:32 PM yesterday. And when I was asking Alex, I was like, hey, this thing interviews you, but that's really annoying. Like how long does it take to interview you? Right? And he's like, 20 minutes. And so the way Alex uses this is it interviews him and it comes up with cool angles and then it'll write the stuff out and then he can choose what to edit. But he just wants to be at the beginning part, let the middle part AI can handle, and then he handles the end, like the editing. So he's like, so this thing starts to interview me and I'm not going to go through all of it, but it's like, hey, what happened that made this a great idea worth capturing today? Right? And so then I just start talking to it back and forth. It just keeps asking me questions. There's 10 questions. And ultimately, right before this call, Neil, I talked to the social media manager from my team and he's like, whoa, this idea is really good. But to your point, Neil, it's written in such an AI way. That were like, it's such— it's so part of my language, it's so crappy the way it was written, but we know the seedling of the idea is really good. And he's like this. I was like, obviously you and me, Neil, we live with ourselves all the time because we're in our bodies, but for him it's super helpful just to get it out. So now I can run this whenever I'm on the go and then just give cool ideas in there. And then basically I'm just stealing Alex Lieberman's content machine skill, but that makes it a lot easier because Neil, you and I, I think I won't speak for you, but for me at least, because I'm so running around all the time doing random things, it's hard to just sit down sometimes and actually get this idea out. And usually it's the idea that goes really far, also written in a good way too. That's what I would say.

So this model on how Alex Lieberman is creating content is actually very similar to how I do my social content. So I get on the phone with AJ, I bring up all my ideas and what I want to talk about. He then does the same with my team because they may have some unique angles. Then AJ goes and creates a script. He mainly uses AI to help him create the script. He then goes and reads the script and modifies and tweaks it and whatever. Then he'll send it to me and then I'll go and adjust it and then boom, I will go sit down and we'll crank out like 4 or 5 of them in one sitting and just click the record button and there's a teleprompter in front of me. That model's worked out really well. The other way I found AI to work really well for me is I have a ton of ideas. I then go take the ideas, I put it into AI, and then I have it help me refine the ideas or come up with other unique angles that I'm not thinking about. So in many cases, I may have idea for SEO or creating content for specifically Google, and maybe that same framework would work for social media. So then it'll respin it and be like, hey, what about using the same framework for social media? Then I'd go in and be like, well, social media is a little bit different because more of it's video versus text and I can modify A, B, and C and make it relevant for it. But I found those 2 approaches to work really well for me. I haven't found AI from soup to nuts to work really well and get the engagement and likes that I want unless, and this is the big caveat, unless I have AI produce me content on something that's really hot. So if Google Marketing Live just happened or Google I/O just happened, right, their main event, and we start pulling in main things from I/O and just start creating content around it, it tends to do well because you're riding a wave of something that's trending, right? Similar to when you started creating Twitter articles on OpenClaw, and I don't know if you do it on Hermes or whatever else you're writing it on. If you're creating it on what's hot right now that everyone on that platform is talking about, it typically does well, even if it's AI written and people can tell.

And that's true. Let me just show you this, Neil, and then we can continue on here. So this is my X analytics in the last 12 months or so. So you can see nothing, nothing, nothing. And then obviously December happens and then I'm like, oh, okay, we're moving into a new world. Then January, I'm going to read this off. Okay, so December, 183,000 impressions. January, 267,000. February, 831,000 impressions. March, 1.4 million. And then April, 1.2 million. And then May comes, 2.3 million. And then we're in June right now. June just started. So all that to say, I think this will continue to compound. But Neil, to your point, a lot of the articles that are written right now are using skills that we have and are talking about AI transformation. Now we're talking about the single brain stuff, right? It's— and X is perfect for it because it likes that content.

Yes.

And so that's what I would say. And so anyway, all that to say is there's caveats to it, but I think the best way, if you want to produce the best content, is having something interview you. And the cool thing is, Neil, the skill that I made, the thing that interviews me, I can keep adding to it. I can keep adding in, hey, here's my voice skill over here. Hey, here's how I would go about creating LinkedIn artifacts, for example. There's all these things you can keep adding to it. Whereas I think if you're working with a person, like a human, it's still good, but I want to keep adding to it over time because I want to keep tweaking. I want to keep adding all these upgrades.

Dude, I'm with you. And it's just like, but the key right there is, and you nailed it, you're riding the wave, right? You're just following the trends that are really hot right now. That model works. People just tend not to do that. If you end up just riding the wave on what's hot, even if your content is mediocre, and I'm not saying Eric's content's mediocre, but if you were to just do it or someone listening was to do it and their content was mediocre, It would still probably do well. Like the key is just, it's better to be on it and early on a hot topic than it is to be late on a hot topic and have your writing or your post being perfect. I'd rather have a messy, not as well done post, but being early on a hot topic, and that tends to do much better in the long run.

Anyway, thank you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow.