"Nice" Leaders Are Fed Up

I don't know if you've seen this, Neil, but I am getting the sense that a lot of leaders are just fed up. The past couple of weeks I've been meeting with other founders. You talk to a lot of founders too. And I have one founder. This person runs a global company, and this person is one of the nice— nicest people in the world. And this person is just like, I am sick and tired. I am finding many, many dead bodies. In my organization, we paid this consulting firm tens of millions of dollars. Okay, and they generated nothing. Okay, this is consulting firm anybody would know, and they want to fire everybody. Okay, so that's one. I'll give you another one. The other one is a friend I mentioned. The first thing he said when he saw me was like, "We just fired our agency," right? That that guy, and he's like, because I'm like, "Why'd you fire the agency?" Because they're not on top of AI, and also they're not passing AI efficiencies over to us. Right? And I'm like, "So what about your team?" He's like, I'm also fed up with that too, because I feel like I've been taken advantage of. And 2 weeks ago, we did an episode, or a week ago, we did an episode where we've done so many nice things for people, and it doesn't come back to us, right? So I think where I'm going with this is people are, I think the meta now, the optimized way of playing business is, I'm getting a lot bigger sense of people are harder core now, or more hardcore. And people, the tolerance for BS has decreased a lot, especially now that we're in a very unstable environment. It's decreased a lot. So yeah.

I haven't seen too many founders fed up over employees or contractors. The biggest thing that I see on my end is founders fed up with the economy.

Like, that makes two of us here.

Yeah. It just, the economy sucks. And I'm not saying it's anyone's fault. This is not red versus blue, you know, politically. This is more so the economy just sucks, not just in the United States, but globally. And this has nothing to do with tariffs. For years globally, the economy hasn't been great and it just impacts business. And as we say in our business, it's like you're getting kicked in the balls, excuse my language, every single day. And we have beaten dog syndrome. That we now expect to be kicked, you know, in the balls. And again, excuse my language, because it's happened so many times over the last 3 years. So as good things start happening, we expect something bad to happen to make up for all, or to counteract all the good stuff that has happened.

You know what I mean? I don't know about you. I am okay being kicked in the balls. I don't know if you've seen the TikTok or the, one of these Chinese movies where the kid just keeps kicking the guy in the balls over and he just takes it, right? He just like, Balls of steel, right? So my point of all this is when you talk about being kicked in the balls as a founder, this is interesting because I talked to another friend. He has employees in the US and he has employees in China. And this is interesting. This is kind of a side note. When you incentivize, he's like, when I incentivize my American workers, okay, pay matters a lot, sure. But you also have to worry about promotions too, career pathing and compliments, right? And so I'm like, okay, so how's it with your Chinese employees? What do you think it is?

None of that.

Chinese employees, it's money. Okay. They don't care about any of the other stuff, but they do care about status, right? This is why you see like—

Really?

Oh my God. Chinese people, like, guys, I'm saying this as a Chinese person. Status is insane. I think just Asian people in general, status is a massive thing. So for example, this is why you see them posting pictures of their food all the time. or maybe if they're in a really nice car or whatever. And you see that happen, sure, in LA in some cases, right? But I would say status is, status is a much bigger thing, I think, in my opinion, based on seeing both sides, being an American and being, you know, I guess a Taiwanese or Chinese American, so. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karat, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

So all the wealthy Chinese people that I know that I'm close with, none of them show any sort of wealth. Maybe it's a different form of status, I don't know, but they don't want anyone to know who they are and they, act like that they still need to do well. Things are bad. They never say like, I'm doing okay, or things are great. There's always—

I think there's different tiers to it though. I think there's, there's tiers where that stuff all matters to you. And then when you get to a certain tier, you learn that, that, that stuff doesn't matter anymore. Like for one, you've never actually flaunted much. Right. But I think as you've gotten, you know, older or quote unquote more successful, you care about that stuff less. Right. And so, cause I actually used to care about this stuff maybe in my mid-20s or so. Um, or early 20s, because I was, I was taught to care about these things, right? Um, but I really don't care about these things. At least I think I don't.

But yeah. You and I are on the same page. I used to wear like Loro Piana pants everywhere when I speak.

Yeah, but nobody knows what Loro Piana is.

No, no, but because they're comfortable.

Yeah.

And now I'm at a point where I'm like, can I just wear Viore joggers on stage when I speak?

And— That's pushing it. See, that's pushing it, guys.

I'm really debating. I'm like, Yeah. Can I do this so that way I don't have to do, uh, even dress up anymore? I'm like, why not? You know, it would just make things easier and better.

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