Peer Groups Will Make You Rich With A Caveat | Ep. 3018

Dude, so I saw you last week randomly at a coffee shop and basically I had met with like someone who was in a YPO group that I'm in, right? Like a YPO forum. And she runs like a fruit company, right?

Yeah.

And so I was just thinking about this a little bit and you know how I like to talk about peer groups quite a bit, right? And so my whole statement here is peer groups will make you rich, but there's a caveat here, right? And You know, whether it's— and I'm in a lot of these different groups, right? And you— and I think this ties in well with you too, because you're very specific about what you're looking for. So peer groups work for you, but you have to understand what it is that you're looking to get out of the group, right? So for you, you want people at your level, ideally at the very least at your level or levels above you, right? Because you're looking to grow. And I think if you join these groups without having a specific objective or goal, you're— it's just going to be like you're just kind of walking around and there's no purpose to it. Right? So you have to be very intentional. Like we have a mutual friend, he's in a group, the group is all investors. And one of the people in that group, he's like a chairman of one of the largest automotive companies in the world, right? And I think if you're not intentional about these things, and so sure, you might listen to someone like me and say, oh yeah, peer groups will make you rich, because I certainly listened to that when I was starting out. But if you're not intentional and if you set a goal and you're not getting that from a group and you don't quit, that's on you at the end of the day, right?

Yeah.

And so there's different groups that I'm in right now. Most of them, like every time we're talking about business, how we're going to grow, I'm in a SaaS group, I'm in the group with, you know, Sayed, right? And I'm in these other groups, but one of the groups, there's not a lot of structure. And when we go on these retreats, like it would be mostly like partying, right? And so I'm at the age where like I got that out of my system and like, don't get me wrong, I'll enjoy a party every now and then, but that's not necessarily for me, right? So, but like it took me a year of kind of sitting through it to realize that, hey, maybe if we, if there's no objectives established with this group, that maybe it's time for me to go, right?

Yeah.

And you, to your credit, decided very quickly what peer group makes sense for you. And I think eventually you'll get into that group. You're just, you're not at that age where you can be accepted to that group yet.

Yeah, there was a peer group Eric's talking about. I wanted to get into YPO Gold.

Yeah.

And—

but Gold is for 50+ people.

Yes. And I relate more to the businesses in YPO Gold and the owners, and we're more in a similar place in life, at least from an entrepreneur standpoint. But because of my age, I was not accepted. And I tried so hard and then I was a little irritated because they told me I'm good to go. I renewed my membership for gold or what I mean, global one or whatever it's called. And then they told me after I paid like the 6 grand or 4 grand or whatever it costs, oh, sorry, you're not old enough. And I'm like, we spent 3 months having this conversation and you guys said it was okay. So like, they just—

I still think you can get in. I still think you can.

I need a network with more members in there, but I would love to because the businesses are—

Yeah. Oh, dude, the easy way is just talking to my friend and just getting a couple more of those meetings. I mean, you know, our mutual friend is married to one of the gold members in that chapter.

Oh yeah, that's right.

The helicopter.

I know who you're talking about.

They raised over a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For a business.

That would be good for— that would be a good meeting for you regardless.

Yeah, it'd be a good meeting either way.

They live nearby.

Yeah, they live nearby.

Oh yeah, the home. You looked at that home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, It was too high up. You got to drive up the hill and down. But it's a beautiful home.

Great views. Do you want to know what Google's CEO said here? So there's 2 things. I have one around how product is no longer a moat. But if you were to think about Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, on the only business moat that's available today, what do you think it is?

Your brand.

This is interesting. So I thought he would say distribution or brand. He didn't because you and I would say that, right? And naturally we're marketers. We would say that. He said learning loops, the ability for you to pick something up very quickly. And if you have a team that moves very quickly, like a, like a startup, you're going to learn a lot faster because things are changing so quickly with all these new innovations. So his argument right now, the only business mode is learning loops. It's how fast you can move. So I don't know if I completely agree. I think I'm more biased towards distribution, but I can see the angle for that.

I can see the angle. I think you need people who can adapt and learn super fast. If you don't, it crushes your business. If you do, you can do much better, but still you need a brand and it's really hard to build a brand like Air Jordan. You know, like you look at what Michael Jordan's done with shoes and Nike, that product's really popular. Most people who I see with Nike, Nike's struggling right now as an organization. People still buy the Air Jordan shoes. Very strong brand. I think Nike has a strong brand too, but they're getting their butts kicked by Vuori and Lululemon or Alo. I don't know which one of those brands, but a handful of them. And why? Because they've innovated more on athleisure wear than Nike has, which Nike should have done because that's their category.

By the way, do you buy— do you still buy Nikes? I don't buy Nikes anymore.

Dude, the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, Zegna, I believe they're called Second Skin.

Do you buy that from the mall?

You can get it from the mall. I just go to Zegna.

Oh, it's the Z-E-G-N-A, right?

Yeah. On Rodeo. I'm probably saying the name wrong, but it's on Rodeo Drive.

Yeah. I don't even know how to pronounce it. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Did you see that Houzz dropped the report? So the attribution software, so they dropped the report. They did 640 incrementally— incrementality tests over 18 months, $14 million in spend analyzed. So their findings here is that Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns is wrong. So they're saying that Advantage Shopping campaign. So these are the AI-driven campaigns on Meta. They win early, 9% better at midpoint, but manual campaigns destroyed them long term, right? So manual campaigns deliver $12 more revenue per $100 spent by the end, right? So basically, as of right now, it's saying that based on the tests that they've run, manual wins over the long term. But even though Meta tries to push Advantage Plus, it's not the case. So this is actually an example of right now, at least, AI losing in a situation like this.

We've seen AI lose quite a bit because AI also hallucinates. I was talking to a friend that is in a research company and they do a lot of marketing research, specifically just marketing research for organizations. When I say AI hallucinates, they use Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT. They pretty much use all the main solutions out there. I forgot which one it was. They were using it to help them do research for a specific category related to marketing. And straight up, the AI made up data. And then when it asked them about it, it hallucinated and would not admit that it actually made it up. Yeah, it wouldn't want to admit that it was just wrong. And I was like, well, that sucks.

Yeah, makes sense. But by the way, because we're kind of talking about brand and partnerships here, did you know that you can transform your— you can transfer your— you can transform— sorry, you can transform your credit card points into crypto now?

Really?

Yeah. So Chase has done a partnership with Coinbase. So now you can take your Chase points and then just move it over and transfer it over Into crypto.

I wish Amex had, like, bless you.

Bless you. Wow.

I have a lot, like millions of Amex points.

Oh, too bad you can't transfer it over to Chase. But I think eventually this will become more of a common thing. And then why would I not just move it over to crypto?

Yeah, we like— I don't care for the points, but my wife likes using it for like gifts.

Oh, that's a bad use of points.

It is, but it makes her happy. Yeah, we don't really use it for travel because the problem with using points for travel is like they restrict when you transfer to airline, which is the best, one of the better uses of points. A lot of times the main routes that I had to fly for speaking or meetings, it's just not as convenient because they want me to take connections or versus a direct flight, or they'll gimme different days and times that will make me miss the meeting. And then also when I travel for work, it's usually—

Do you book it yourself?

No, my assistant books it.

Yeah. The thing is you need someone that's a points expert. So I had a points expert I talked to, so he's just, he's just doing it all for me. I was like, it's like you have all these points. Okay, I'll just do it all for you, blah, blah, blah. And you pay him like $200. So yeah, but he's an expert with points. Yeah, there's a lot of these people out there like this. But here's what it says. The JPMorgan and Coinbase deal is wild, especially the credit card point redemption. So I'll start with the credit card points here. So transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points, you get a 1-to-1 redemption ratio, meaning that 100 points equals $1 redemption value, right? So if I can move that into Solana, you know, Ethereum, whatever, great. You have a direct bank-to-wallet connection through JPMorgan Secure API. Chase customers will be able to seamlessly link their bank accounts to Coinbase wallets, meaning that people are going to gamble more beginning this fall. fall, the ability to use Chase credit cards on Coinbase.

Eric's not saying crypto's gambling or not, though.

Some people like will look at it as a casino. I look at BTC and ETH as long-term investments. But beginning this fall, you can take your Chase credit cards on Coinbase for the first time.

Customers—

I was gonna say bless you, but that was a cough. Customers will have the ability to fund their Coinbase accounts using Chase credit cards. So we'll see what happens here. But I am glad to see how a lot of this— by the way, you look at this administration, it's like, okay, very crypto-forward. All of a sudden, Triple H is this fitness guy, right? This administration is very good at marketing. Like I have to hand it to them. Like I haven't seen this much fanfare. I don't think ever.

What is Triple H doing in the White House?

He's the he's the lead fitness guy now.

I thought it was the Kennedy guy.

Rfk.

Yeah.

No, no. But he's there's he Trump created a new title for for Triple H. Triple H take steroids? For sure he took steroids. Triple H. For sure he took steroids. For sure. Like they, like, I, I, there's no way they didn't.

Like, didn't you see the documentary? I'm Googling it right now. Let's see.

Triple H steroid use, a look at allegations. No, you gotta watch the Vince McMahon documentary on Netflix. It basically said everyone took it back in the day. And then, um, but Vince never told people to take it, but everyone was taking it back in the day.

So Triple H probably took it.

For sure. Like, that's, that's at least what I think, right?

But, um, you know I've tried steroids, right?

You have?

No, I'm joking. Actually, that's false. The only time, uh, I think actually most humans have to, if you look at me, dude, I weigh 129 pounds and my arms are insane.

Maybe you might've taken it before. I don't know.

No. Um, and if someone's taken that, I'm not judging or anything like that. The, I actually got steroids injected into me recently. I had swelling in my head.

Uh-huh. Oh, that's right.

Yeah. And I couldn't sleep and it was going on for months and my head would just hurt. I would have, I had a big lump on my head and, uh, They, I didn't know that you can use steroids for this cuz I always thought steroids make you like jacked.

Yeah.

I didn't realize there's different kinds of steroids.

Yeah.

But they put steroids in my head, like they injected it to get the swelling down.

Did it come down?

Uh, it took a few times, uh, but over a month I was able to sleep again and no more headaches.

I had like injections, uh, 2 injections. Oh, that's not bad. They had to space it out.

Yeah.

Okay, dude, check this. Dude, I'm so motivated cuz I used to watch, like I get so excited about this. Look, the presi— the President's Council on Physical Fitness is a vehicle to get young people active and healthy. How can you not like that?

Yeah, I like that.

And like, it's Triple H. Like, he's the chief content officer of WWE. I used to watch WWE growing up all the time, and I think you did too.

Yeah, I used to watch The Rock.

I think The Rock also took steroids. The Rock, Stone Cold, for sure, they all did. Yeah. Dude, The Rock's body now, he probably takes it now too.

You think so?

Yeah. Imagine, dude, what is the obesity rate in America? Like 50%, something like that? It's insane. How are we not trying to help people?

Dude, people don't want to walk and exercise.

People want the upside. They don't want the volatility.

Yeah.

For everything.

Just like, dude, when I was flying from Colombia to the US, a lady was complaining on how they need to make seats bigger. And I'm not judging here because some people have weight issues due to medical reasons that they can't control. And her kid, straight up like a 13, 14-year-old fit, said to the mother, Mom, we need to control your diet and we need, you need to work out more. And instead of like just sitting and watching TV or being lazy, I, I couldn't hear everything. Right. And it's just like, I, I'm not saying that's the reason she's obese or not. That was just a conversation between her and her kid. And I was just walking by 'em while we were boarding the plane. It was more so that I agree, people just need to be more fit or try to be more fit, and we need to encourage Americans to exercise. Yeah.

I mean, I'm just going to say this. I mean, there's a tweet recently about what's something that's controversial you believe that people would have all these knives pointing at you. Right. And I basically responded to it and I said that this is just, just my belief, guys. This has nothing to do with Neil. I do believe that for the most part, majority of cases, if you are obese, it is self-inflicted. And I do think like the fact that the White House, this administration is trying to push this forward, it's going to help people. Right. I do think it's going to help them cultivate the right habits to eat right, to move And things like that. And I think this can be fixed, right? It's okay to admit that it's some, you know, you probably have bad habits, right? It's okay, right? Bad habits can be turned around.

Have you seen that Instagram video of a mother encouraging her son who is overweight? And he's overweight, she's making breakfast, and she's just like, yeah, do you want syrup on it? Do you want this? Do you want that? You sure you want butter? And she's like, you want whipped cream? Like she's adding more and more stuff. And this person's overweight by probably like 150 200 pounds.

Yeah.

And it's just like, to me, I look at that as I understand there could be medical reasons why someone could be overweight, but that is just bad parenting. And they should— the US should just use that in a marketing video. I know they probably can't legally and just be like, don't do this.

I'll tell you what. Okay, let's just do this for fun and we can move on to the next topic. So in Japan, what do you think the obesity rate is?

3, 4%.

4.4% for men, 2.3% for women.

Okay.

Now what do you think the global average obesity rate is?

15, 20%?

13%. You're pretty close. Now in the United States, the obesity rate is around 40% and it's going up, right?

40%?

40%. Yeah.

Wow.

So, so you look at this, it, it's, it's like, it's 10 times more on, on, on men. And so don't tell me this is not self-inflicted. Like, it, it, it's here, right? And by the way, why does this happen? It's all culturally. And this is not like a, a, a health podcast, guys, by the way. I just wanna talk this for a second, but my mom growing up, anytime I started to gain weight, getting too fat, you're getting too fat, you're getting too fat. Hey, it looks like you need to go to Jenny Craig. I'm not saying that's a good way to pair it, but that, that's how I grew up. And I, it's, it's, it's that, that's how Asian cultures grow up. But by the way, so going back to it real quick, The Rock, um, he did admit to taking steroids briefly in his late teens, but denies any ongoing use. And I think, by the way, like if you, if you take it right now, you probably should deny any ongoing use.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And going back—

And I'm a huge rock fan, by the way, but we should go back to marketing.

I'm a huge— yeah. But really quickly before we go back to marketing, the reason I somewhat understand the weight, I'm not talking about the obesity, my family, we experienced the opposite. So when I was growing up, my mom would say, oh, you're eating ice cream? No problem. You want to eat cereal for dinner and Lucky Charms and all this stuff, which I'm not saying is healthy, but me and my sister were in the 1% category in weight. And it was—

what does that mean?

We were like the skinniest.

Okay.

So, and even when my sister had kids, her kids were in the 1 percentile in weight. You don't want to be in the 1 percentile. It means you're too skinny. So my sister would like sit there and feed her kids to try to get them to eat. And literally each meal, like an hour.

Yeah.

She'd be like, you want In-N-Out french fries? All right.

They would eat like 4 french fries. Lots of calories.

Yeah. They're like, I'm done.

Yeah.

Um, but genetically We have the opposite issue in which we tend not to eat a lot. I don't know what it is.

Yeah, you never eat.

Yeah, it's my— it's a whole family. And it's not like we try not to eat or anything. It's just never really hungry.

Look, by the way, so I think there's edge cases, right? I think for genetically for you, it's like you're not going to gain much weight. And genetically for some people, they're just going to have to be overweight.

Right.

But I am talking about the majority of people. And if America is 40% and Japan's like 3%, come on. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.