Neil Patel and Eric Siu discuss OpenAI's ad model projecting $25 billion revenue by 2029, debate whether harsh feedback or kindness builds better systems, and argue that marketers should sell outcomes, not features, using the Super Mario power-up as a metaphor.
Chapters
So today we're going to start off by talking about why we should have kept selling courses. If you look at Eric and I, we've tried a lot of different products. You've tried courses a few times. You've— we've tried masterminds together. We've been in masterminds together as well.
Honestly, the masterminds, if it kept going, it probably would've been fine. Yeah. Yeah.
And the reason I really regret The model of stop selling courses, because I don't think courses are a good business. It's a really low TAM business, in my opinion. I think you're better off being the software that helps course creators versus being the one who's selling the course.
Or community, like school, whatever. Yeah.
Or Kajabi or whatever it may be. Right. But I think it's an amazing tripwire. And in our core business, if we sold courses, If you sold a course on YouTube marketing or B2B marketing, you wouldn't make a killing from it. Maybe you make extra 20, 30, 50 grand a month. How many of those customers paying 50 bucks, 100 bucks for the course would eventually become a customer?
A small percentage, but still it's a percentage.
A small percentage, but that small percentage adds up.
Yeah. And you should explain tripwire to everyone too.
Yeah. So Ryan Deiss back in the day used to talk about a concept like a tripwire. If you get someone to buy something for, you know, $10, $7, that's a very irresistible offer. It's much easier to then get them to go buy something more expensive.
Because at that point you've acquired a customer because they put in a little money and you have the credit card information too.
Yes. And I believe that we should have just ran with that model and continually had a tripwire. A course is an easy thing. And upsold people into services.
What's to say you can't come back to it?
I can, I just don't want to put in the effort to create courses.
Neil one time made me, I had to go to Burbank to help him record a course for some other thing. It took the entire day.
Half a day, half a day.
Oh yeah, we had to get dressed up for that too.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, but that wasn't a lot of effort and it was a good return on time. Like it is a lot of work too. I just—
It's a lot of work.
But what's to say you can't repackage a lot of the stuff that you've already done with webinars and things like that and sell it as just like bundle it together and just package it better?
Yeah, that's true. You know, I haven't talked to my co-founder about this, but if I had to do it all over again, I probably would've taken 2 different approaches. One approach would've been do something that's really cheap so then that way you can get more customers. We kind of do that with, we have an annual event that we do. It's usually called like the Future of Digital Marketing or Future of Digital Marketing and AI. And that does well for us. And then it gets more people to know our brand. But I would've done something more evergreen, like a course for the consumer side. And then I would've done a second group, let's say a mastermind just for agencies looking to grow.
Yeah.
And then it would've gave me a bigger pipe to acquire more agencies.
You know, I think what I would do instead nowadays, we were actually talking, so I was telling you pre-recording, I was at an entrepreneur poker game yesterday and there's a handful of people that have very big YouTube channels, some bestsellers, some people have like, you know, cool companies that they've sold in the past and all that. But we were just talking about some of the biggest people in the info game, right? I'm not going to name any names, but we're just saying that, you know, some of them are like the best workshop company in the world or like the best course company in the world, right? I think the problem is you start to get lumped into that and they see you as just a course person, right? But I think when you look at OpenAI or all these other companies where they're giving their courses, their AI courses away for free, or Anthropic, what's to say we can't give these things away for free and then, you know, have an ascension model in there? 'Cause you just want them on your email list anyway, right? And so I think there's, on one end it's like, okay, Tripwire, they've put in some money, they've committed some money, right?
Yeah, it's easier to upsell people once they spend some money.
But the problem is, The moment that happens again, oh, for whatever reason, right? Because there's more grifting in courses than there isn't, you're kind of seen as that, right? And so you have to have thick skin there to probably just not care as much about what people think about you. And Elon actually mentioned this, he actually thinks that caring what people think about you is actually a weakness, right? And he's like, I got rid of that early in my career. And so take that for what it is. I think if you're going to do courses, just that probably will help you a little bit.
Yeah, but you could also do it in a different way that doesn't make you seem as much as a grifter. And even if you're not promising the world, I'm not saying anyone is going to, but even if you're not promising the world, some people, as Eric mentioned, will just assume you're a grifter or you're a course creator. So it gives you a bad rep. You could give away your course for free. They pay for shipping and then you mail it to them. And then you can also give them a digital version, but they pay for the, like the actual physical papers. And you may not make any profit from it, but that's okay. The whole purpose here is just to get them to spend money on something so that way you can upsell them.
On one end though, maybe it's easier. I'll take the other side now. Maybe it is good to be a course creator. You know why? Because when you get the hate around it, more people talk about you anyway, right?
That's true.
So, you know, it is what it is because the people that really like you, they know you do a good job. Like it doesn't matter.
Yeah. So the next topic I wanted to go to, you have it in the sheet, new YouTube channel gains 200,000 subscribers and 2 million views from a single video. Yeah. Because you and I have seen so many videos go viral, but it's very rare that you actually get a subscriber from a video that goes viral.
Yeah. Okay, this is great. We can stick on YouTube for a little bit because I have some more stuff on YouTube. So this is the Cultural Tutor. So this guy on Twitter, just so you see what he looks like, it's literally like one of these like, you know, stoic, you know, like, you know.
Like the Greek gods.
Greek gods, yeah, type of thing. So his name's the Cultural Tutor. So he said this, 2 weeks ago, I released a short film on a new channel. 2 weeks later, it has hit 2 million views, 190,000 likes, 13,000 comments, and the channel has already Nearly 200,000 subs. Why? 2 reasons, both simple. Number one, the internet is sloppier than ever and everybody knows it, right? We're talking about AI slop and things like that. We've seen, you know, AI content creation is up 53% versus others. You tweeted that as well. Number 2, the message of the film. People around the world are tired of modern architecture and modern design, right? So he has basically his packaging here. This is good packaging. Look, it says the packaging for the title is How Did the World Get So Ugly, right?
Yeah.
And then basically it just talks about the modern world. And you can see here the number of comments and the number of subscribers, right? Now it's like 200,000. And so those of you that can't see this, it's an interesting idea that covers a very wide TAM. And I would say, yeah, like when you walk around now, like when you walk around LA, the architecture's not that great. But when you walk around in like Paris or London or whatever, you look at the architecture—
Beautiful.
It's beautiful, right? It's like, what happened here? It's like we're supposed to be the richest country in the world. And it's garbage, right?
Dude, yesterday I was in downtown Los Angeles. Uh-huh. Oh, great. I was having coffee with one of my friends who was in town for an event. And we're looking literally in downtown LA at 3 skyscrapers. Imagine each skyscraper is at least $100 million. Like, I don't know how tall it was.
Probably cheaper now.
To build. I'm saying to build.
Yeah.
Right? When you're talking about the land and everything, 3 skyscrapers all next to each other and they're tall. I'm not talking about like 10 stories or 20 stories.
The tower there?
Yeah, the graffiti tower. That's right. And they all had graffiti on it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I was like, what the heck is this? There goes $300 million. Yeah. How the heck do you have buildings that are like half completed, have graffiti all over them?
Yep.
And the United States, especially in a city like Los Angeles, that's so rich.
Yep. Look, I think going back to this video, it, it goes back to, so people are interested in craftsmanship, right? And so there's slop now that's being published all the time. It's like, okay, you have the coolest, you know, VO 3.1 or whatever, the best image generators, the best video generators, and people are going to get lazier and lazier with content. And so this guy was very intentional about the content he did here. And he didn't just focus on politics or rage bait or clickbait, but it was because that stuff is— people are getting tired of it. Like, people, I think people are getting more sensitized or desensitized to all this rage bait that they see in the TikToks, right? So his whole thing is just talking about how modern life is somehow chaotic and boring at the same time. And he wants to go with a different angle, but he's like, it doesn't have to be this way. So he had a different angle. So my point of saying this is that if you want 200,000 subs from one video, you spend a lot more time on the craftsmanship. You tell a different story and you have really good packaging and that's how you're going to win. Interestingly enough, Neil, I talked to someone from, that's Gujarati like you. I don't know how to pronounce it, but 23-year-old, he might help me with YouTube strategy.
Okay.
And he's like, you know, me and Neil, we're the same, 23 years old, right? We're the same. We're really good at money. We look at the finances and we're very detailed with them. I was like, yes, that you are. And so he's like, he's going to, he might help us with the Marketing School channel.
No, cool.
It's a good deal. I'm like, hey, tell me, his name's Param. I'm like, hey Param, why does our Marketing School channel suck so much? And he's like, well, to be honest with you, you guys have really good content. I'm like, well, thank you. I know we do. But he's like, you and Neil don't have time to focus on the packaging. I'm like, bingo. I'm like, I don't want to think about the ideas. I don't want to think about the packaging. He's like, I got you on the packaging. I got you on the thumbnails. And he's like, 'cause he helped the channel in India grow from like 0 to 7 million subs or something.
Wow.
I was like, hey.
Must be consumer-based.
Yeah, you're right. So we'll see how it goes. But my whole thing is, I was talking at this poker game yesterday, YouTube's just changing so much. So did you see the YouTube CEO just announced that, he announced that 30% of viewers watch live on YouTube and they're gonna bet harder on live streaming. And the other thing is thumbnails now when you upload them, they're way higher quality, but they're gonna try, like you basically go live every week with the webinars. I'm like, live streaming—
Every other week, but yeah.
Every other week, yeah. But I'm like, we should be doing more of it, whether it's, Whether it's a webinar or whether it's like, you know, us having like friends come on and just shooting the shit. Honestly, that would be fun. And I do that. Like last Friday I was shooting the shit with a few, like there's 8 of us, right? And I'm just like, dude, the conversations we have are so fun and interesting. Some stuff's confidential obviously, but people are getting tired of the same stuff over and over. And when people are zigging, you gotta zag.
That's how I see it. Yeah, you should just do it with your YPO group.
I'll tell you what, I'll tell you something at lunch after. I can't tell you right now, but one more thing on the YouTube thing too. So yesterday I was talking to one popular author and YouTuber at the poker game, okay? And he ended up using the same YouTube firm you were using that was costing you like $20 to $25 a month, right?
Yeah.
And then he's like, interestingly enough, like all these other creators, they get off of that creator group, but they end up going back to them, right? And he's like, dude, they're just too expensive for what they were. And him even having so many subs and so many views, he's like, we constantly need to shuffle through YouTube, like, YouTube strategist, 'cause like, I'm like, so him being so smart, bestselling author and everything, I'm like, do you come up with your own ideas? He's like, F no, right? I don't come up with my own ideas. Like I just have the team do it. So if they suck at it, I just fire them, right? And interesting enough, one more thing. This is kind of behind the scenes.
So he has 7 million subs?
This is like another guy with like 4 or 5 million or so.
Still a lot.
Yeah. And he said one of these popular creators that we know, that everybody knows listening to this, He has insane turnover. Actually, every big creator has insane turnover with their YouTube team.
Yeah, I believe MrBeast has high turnover.
MrBeast and some other people too that we can talk about at lunch. But point is, people don't want to pay a lot for this, right? People also don't want to think about strategy, but people also want a good price. So the short-form team that I'm using right now that I'm still testing, I see the videos starting to compound and I'll interview you at some point, but it's a really good price, right? And I'm like, this is just the— what does an entrepreneur want at the end of the day? They want you to just take things off their plate or just anyway, take it off their plate, handle the strategy and come with a good price. Yes. Yeah.
We all want a good price, especially from stuff that's hard to make a direct ROI on for like branding purposes. It's like, you know, it's worth it. You know, you should spend some money, but when you have to start spending 10, 20, 30, 40 grand just on YouTube videos, it's like, yeah, do I really want to? Especially for people like you and I that can do it cheap if we just put the time in ourselves.
Dude, we're still cheap on everything. I still, as much scale as you've built over time, we still try to go cheap as possible in the very beginning, right? It's just in our blood. Okay, let me read this part on the YouTube CEO thing just to go a little more deeper and then we can, you can pick the next topic. So Matt Diggity tweeted this. So YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, Mohan, right?
I don't know.
Okay, you're fine. Mohan. Okay. Neil Mohan just dropped major platform updates that completely change how smart marketers should approach video SEO in 2025. So the biggest game changer with YouTube, let's call it in 2026, is multi-format streaming and AI-powered highlight clipping. So YouTube will now let creators broadcast in both horizontal and vertical formats simultaneously. This means that your single livestream can reach desktop viewers and mobile scrollers at the same time. good for the webinars, right? Yeah. You're now competing for visibility across 2 different search behaviors with one piece of content. According to YouTube's own stats, 30% of daily viewers now watch daily live content. That's a massive audience most business owners ignore. So I think we need to triple down on live, if I'm being honest, maybe weekly. We used to do live streaming for this too. Oh yeah, we did. I'm like, I was like, I was like, no, maybe we can bring it back, but your Wi-Fi might be poo poo here, right? So after 16 years of running SEO strategies, I can tell you that platforms which let you repurpose content efficiently always win. YouTube's new AI Clipping tool automatically turns live streams into ready-made Shorts. That's one live session becoming dozens of searchable content pieces. Start testing live content now. So what's the takeaway for you and me? Maybe we go live here, I don't know. Well, if your Wi-Fi poo-poo, maybe you're coming to my place now because I have Wi-Fi across my whole building.
Really?
It's my Wi-Fi across my whole building, yeah.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, but that means Neil has to drive his van over. But I'm just like, why are we not doing this more? You know what I've heard too? I've talked to my YouTube team about this, or my brand team. You and I, anybody, we're way different on live. Like, we're like this, okay? When I'm doing like a video, I'm stiff. I'm like reading off a teleprompter. I don't want to be there, okay? Like you, Tai Tak, I don't want to record these YouTube videos, but if I'm here, at least I get to eat lunch afterwards, right? We get to talk about interesting things, and this is my real personality.
Noah always has great stories for us.
Yeah, yeah, Noah has great stories. And like, Maya from my team said, she's like, you're way different when you're doing a webinar because it's way more fun and I'm way more relaxed, right?
Because it's not scripted.
It's not. And then when we're talking at the conference, sure, it's a little more like, at least for me, you're still, there's a little nerves because you're still talking in front of a lot of people. I always believe there's going to be a little nerves, but it's still a lot more me than like YouTube, just recording a YouTube long form. Yeah.
Next one I want to talk about is Lily Rae has something in here, the lie of AI SEO. Yes. Parentheses, GEO.
Okay. So she, this has been happening quite a bit. So let me set the tone for this. So you saw yesterday Amplitude came out with a free GEO tracking thing, right? And then someone tweeted like, there's very little amplitude and like pointed out to their stock price. It's like gone straight down and flat. It's like, there's no amplitude, right? And then someone tweeted, retweeted that and said, lack of focus kills, right? Because they're an analytics company. I kind of disagree with that, but there's a lot of like SEOs talking about, oh, you know, that it seems like this geo tracking space is just, there's unlimited TAM for it, right? There's all these VCs are putting money into it. It's like, I guess this is the new panacea, right? Geo tracking, which is that part I agree with. I think it's kind of funny. So Lily Rae tweeted this. I'm going to read it. Basically, Lily Rae is a popular SEO, I'll call her SEO practitioner influencer. And she said, I've recently seen so many questionable and misleading geo case studies, posts, and ads. As usual, this post is meant to share some truths that can hopefully help people from falling for these scams. Okay, so I'm pulling up on LinkedIn right now, but here, okay, here's what it says. So as an SEO team with mid-sized enterprise clients, it would be easy to position ourselves as AEO, GEO experts by taking credit for the visibility that many clients have enjoyed in LLM responses since the day LLMs became available to the public. There's a reason we don't. The truth is many brands automatically earned brand mentions and citations in LLMs by, wait for it, being among the best and most frequently cited brands in the space. That quote unquote knowledge was already reflected in their training data. So without reading the whole thing here, so she says, look, you know, to be clear, I absolutely do believe that you can do the work to drive additional visibility and citations in AI search. That's why we do offer their AEO service at their agency, and she stands behind the work. But I think it's important for those in our industry and the new GEO folks who just got here to be transparent about And honest that many brands mentioned in AI search appear as such simply because it's a reflection of the often 1+ year old training data used to train the LLMs that generate their names, not because of GEO magic. So basically, I think she's just saying that a lot of these people that say they can do it are claiming credit for things that they didn't do.
Yeah, because if you look at a lot of products and services, they're already mentioned in GEO or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever. And I have seen Marketers take credit for it. The proper way to do it is you track a lot of different types of prompts or variations. You end up seeing how often the company's mentioned, and then you look at the sentiment and you want to see it grow from there. So if you can influence it and grow it, it's great. It's just like SEO traffic. What's your baseline? How much can you grow over time?
Yep. Look, I think like anything in marketing in the early days, if you're just a little bit ahead of the curve, like you're going to try to claim that you can do it because everybody wants to make money, right? So whether it's GEO, AEO, whatever we want to call it, search everywhere optimization, I do, I see the sentiment of where she's coming from. You got to be honest, right? I think, you know, ultimately you got to be an honest practitioner. But I do think a lot of this stuff, like when you see this much money going, like tens of millions of dollars going into these AEO trackers, GEO trackers, something's off. And this is no different. We've talked about this, guys. This is no different than the Yellow Pages earlier in the day. You can say you're a Yellow Pages expert and then you became like a, you know, GeoCities expert or something like that. And then you became like a Google expert and now you're an AEO.
You know how Amplitude's doing it, right?
How?
They already scraped a lot of the web. So when you put in a query, they're not analyzing in real time. They'll send you a link and the analyzing progress bar will take a long time. But if you put in your email, you'll literally get a report pretty quickly.
Yeah.
So, and then for the sites that they have no data on, we've seen that we are not getting emails.
I, the reason I like Amplitude's move, whether it's a good product or not, they're, so they're an analytics product, right? And they're supposed to be, you know, working with more enterprises. Mid-market to enterprise. Now for them, it makes sense for them to— this is why we talk about giving things away for free. This makes sense for them to splinter off, give it away for free. They know there's a lot of people in the space already, but they can collect all the information and then just look for anybody that puts in their email and then enrich them to see who's product qualified and look at what they're using and then say, oh, you should be using this analytics product over here and this one over here.
No, I think it's a great move.
Hey, by the way, we'll do a reverse trial. We'll give you some, like a little bit of usage of these things every bit a month or so. And then hopefully they start to you know, expand within the account. So I don't think it's a bad move. People can poo-poo on their stock price or whatever. But, you know, this is tried and true time and time again.
Just generally speaking, if you think about the stock market, the stock market hasn't been favorable to marketing SaaS companies. And I'm not saying Amplitude's pure marketing or anything like that. It's just, it hasn't been favorable to analytics marketing type products. They just haven't done well. Majority of them haven't done well in the public markets.
Someone tweeted something this morning and it showed, it literally showed, it was talking about all these GEO things, right? These analytics things. But when you're like a system of record company, like a HubSpot or a Salesforce, your valuations tend to be higher. When you're just kind of like a little feature. Yeah, feature, your valuations tend to be a lot lower.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's what it is. Well, I want to talk about some of the hard numbers around layoffs today. So I don't know if you've seen this, but You know, earlier this week, right? We saw UPS, I think, um, 48,000 employees layoffs. Amazon up to 30,000 employees in total.
No, Amazon was, was it 13,000 or 17,000?
That was this week. But there's, there's, we're talking about, um, more recently, not even just this week. So you're right, it's a smaller number this week, but this is—
The, the 30,000 comes from the market was estimating Amazon's about to lay off 13,000, 30,000 people, and they came out with the real number and it was low.
I saw the real number. That's, you're talking about the Wall Street Journal number, right? It was like 14,000, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you got recent layoff announcement, UPS 48,000, Amazon up to 30,000. So it'll give you 17,000, right? Intel 24,000, Nestlé 16,000, Accenture we've talked about already, 11,000, Ford 11,000, Novo Nordisk 9,000, Microsoft 7,000, PwC 5,600.
Right.
So the labor market, it says the labor marketing— labor market is clearly weakening. And look, we don't have hard numbers from the Fed right now, so who knows what's happening?
ADP released numbers.
What did it say?
They're saying they're adding jobs in the last 4 weeks.
That's good. So what is happening here?
They now do weekly job reports. ADP job report adding jobs. I think it was like 30,000 or something like that, or 10,000. 4-week data, they added 14,250 jobs per week for the 4 weeks ending October 11th.
Have you seen the graph where it shows that since ChatGPT 3.5 came out, that junior job hiring is going trending downwards, whereas senior job hiring has continued to go up?
I haven't seen that data, but here's what's interesting. I was watching CNBC yesterday.
Your favorite channel.
Mm-hmm. And it was either yesterday or day before, and the Perplexity, they had an interview with the, I believe, Perplexity founder and a few others.
You should know his name, Aravind?
Something like that. But right now, all these companies, when they're doing layoffs, one of the biggest things that they're citing is they're laying off because of AI efficiencies, right? You've seen that? And CNBC is like, is it really AI efficiency? So they're at this event.
Or is it just cutting the bottom?
Yeah, they're at this event with a lot of AI people, like founders of these companies like Perplexity. They're like, we don't see AI impacting a lot of these jobs. We believe they overhired during COVID and they're just using AI as a scapegoat to cut.
Did you see the Chamath tweet yesterday?
No.
Okay, I'm not going to say, guys, it's not me saying this. I don't want to get in trouble. So Chamath tweeted this yesterday. He said, What is AI efficiency? Something around this. He's like, no, it's more so that people are cutting because of the 2021 like overhiring, but all the DEI initiatives too. He's like, that's the reality of what's happening. They're cutting these people right now under the guise of kind of what you're saying, AI efficiency, because it's easy to say that, right?
Yes. And also—
And remote work too.
And if you say AI efficiencies, like, oh, this company's becoming more efficient, they're AI forward, maybe their stock price should go up. But if they just say, hey, We overhired and we're cutting.
Yeah.
And we've had record profits.
Yeah.
Like, you look really bad.
It's a bad story to tell.
Yeah, but some of the— quite a few of the AI people on CNBC, because they were switching to different people, they're like, most of them were saying, this isn't AI efficiencies. They're like, these are just companies cutting because they overhired.
Yeah.
They're like, we're seeing people hire more because of AI, and it's just making people more efficient, but they're still hiring and they're not cutting because of AI. We haven't seen it replace tons of stuff.
I mean, we talked about this last week. I think Don't get me wrong, I think we both think the AI efficiencies are coming. They're not quite where we need it to be, right? But we do, we just said this last week, we need more, we're gonna, we're hiring more engineers, we're looking for more engineers, right?
We haven't cut a ton 'cause of AI, have you?
No.
Yeah, I'm like, I haven't seen one thing where it's just like, oh, we can do this now, we don't need tons of people. What we have done from AI is, oh, it's made our people more efficient, so we have greater output, cool. Push that forward to the customer?
I would say we're tougher now about the people on the team. And so what I mean by that is we don't want a group of has and has not, haves and have-nots, right? So if you're really good at AI, but I suck at AI, then you and I are going to be at odds, right, in the next couple of years or so. So we don't want that to happen. So we're trying to lift everyone along with us, but you can take a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? And that's something that we want to make sure that we upskill everyone at the same time. And so All that to say is with these, like, I'll give you one more thing. With these conversations you and I are having with our friends behind the scenes, other founders, right? What's happening right now? They're, what are they saying? Oh, we're way more profitable than we've ever been.
Yeah.
And they are strictly saying that they're cutting for these same reasons, right? They're able to cut the people that, they're able to confidently cut people that they weren't able to cut before. So maybe there is a little AI efficiencies there. Because behind the scenes, like they're, it's not like they, they, they take pride in cutting people. They give 'em severance and all that type of stuff, but they're, they're a lot more aggressive with cutting.
Yep. Check out this quote from, uh, this is on NBC News. This is from David Autor, a professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, right? So they're talking about the recent layoffs and people saying it's AI and straight up, it's much easier for companies to say, We are laying off because we're realizing AI-related efficiencies than to say we're laying off because we're not that profitable or bloated or facing a slowing economic environment.
Yeah.
And that's the reality. Like, you and I work with so many large companies and we're not seeing— when we work with these companies in different departments, we're not seeing AI make everything so efficient where they can just lay off 10,000+ people.
Not yet, but for sure it's coming. But not yet. Definitely not yet. But I would say that the story works out well now because the efficiencies are coming and it is a weakening labor market, or it's a weakening labor market, right? Or the economy is bad, right? So I don't know.
You saw the rate cuts yesterday, right? They did 0.25%.
Well, he was going to cut anyway. He was always going to cut. That was already priced in.
Yeah, but it changed from we're cutting 3 times this year to—
We might not cut in December.
We may not cut in December.
Yeah. Which you saw things tank after.
And the the ten year went up because it was everyone was forecasting three cuts this year, and now they're saying they're undecided for December.
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Okay.
One more thing on the efficiency thing, and then you can pick the next topic. So Ethan Mull excited this. So this is a study from Wharton, UPenn. Okay. So This Wharton study found that corporate ROI from generative AI from large-scale tracking, they found that 75% already have a positive return on investment from AI, less than a 5% negative return. Also, 40% of business leaders now use AI daily themselves, right? So basically you can see this chart over here. Well, those of you that are watching YouTube might be able to see it, but basically tier 1 enterprise, $12 billion plus annual revenue, Significantly positive ROI, right? So that is 26%. And then moderately positive ROI.
But what's the ROI coming from when you say AI? Like, what are they specifically using AI?
So it says, for example, clear financial returns or major operational improvements, right? And then moderately positive is measurable benefits, but limited or in early stages. So that's 31% on moderately positive. And then neutral ROI is 9%, which is costs and benefits roughly balanced so far.
I know you and I are on the same page. We think the technology's great. It's going to get much better over time. It's here to stay. It's going to have an impact on corporations. I just don't think most companies are really generating, at least enterprise companies are generating that much of an ROI from a lot of this AI stuff.
Right now.
Right now.
Right now.
And I'll give you a great example of this. Yesterday when I was meeting up with a buddy, I don't think I mentioned the company name, right? Okay, great. So I was meeting up with a buddy, And they work at a Fortune 100 company. And this Fortune 100 company has a lot of employees. And we were having a serious conversation about everyone they have in marketing, everyone product, everyone engineering, and what they actually get done and all the inefficiencies because global teams do everything their own way. I was like, and we both were like, if the company cut half their staff, probably nothing would happen differently from a revenue aspect. And then we're talking about all the engineers just working on things like SEO and helping with data and analytics. And then we're talking about how much they actually ship out or changes. And I was like, for them to only do this much work, it's like the average person must be only working like an hour or 2 a day. Even with like a lot of old archaic code that could slow things down. I'm like, there's no way someone's working more than an hour or 2 a day. And they're like, exactly. They're like, a lot of these people just need to be laid off. And I'm like, I wonder how much bloat there is in the global organization.
Dude, okay, check this out. You'll like this. You like graphs. Okay, this, I think this is a Wall Street Journal graph, but so this graph over here, I'm showing Neil right now. So back in the 1900s, people were working an average of 58.5 hours per week and the yearly earnings were $15,000. Now keep in mind inflation, right? But You go all the way to like 2000 or so, or 2020, people are— the hours worked per week has gone down like 58.5 per week to 34.2. And I think it's going to continue to decrease, right? Yearly earnings have gone up to $63,000. Services industry workers per 100 total workers is 50 total workers. So bloat, okay? Bloat, right? Whereas before when you had service industry workers—
Wait, service industry workers per 100 total workers?
Yeah. So like 16 services, for the services industry, you had 16 workers per total 100 workers, right? Now you have 49, right? What So what that means here, I should pull up this graph over here. So this graph over here shows the number of people in different employment sectors, right? So back in the day, remember in 1825, farming was huge. Everyone was in farming.
Yeah. Now there's machines.
And then it got cut down. And then you had manufacturing to come up, right? 1825, manufacturing started to go up, but now it's gone down. So like farming has gone all the way down. Okay. Manufacturing has gone all the way down. It's like services have gone all the way up. What's going to happen now? This is going to go down.
In theory, time will tell, but in theory.
I'll bet you, we want to bet?
I think it depends what industry.
Yeah.
Because like if you want to talk about services for cutting, you know, lawns, yes, I think it's going to go down.
Yeah.
If you want to talk about services for, let's say—
Artwork?
Management consulting, like for executives, I don't think it's going to really go down.
No, but I think the numbers, I think we're just—
The total numbers, yes.
Yeah, total numbers are going to go down a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think certain roles, like very strategic leadership type roles, Even our role, I think there's gonna be an impact, but I don't think our teams are gonna be cut in half.
No, but I think Brian Halligan's point, so Brian actually tweeted this, I think we're gonna look back at this disruption, AI, and observe that we handled this well too. So humans always adapt, this is the point, right? So people are like, oh, you know, job losses, sure, but I will guarantee you people are working on things that they like are happier working on today, but it's gonna be even better in the coming years.
Yes. I think the big problem that you see in the corporate world is there's a lot of people getting paid and they're not doing much and they could just be getting fired and that'll create the downward jobs. I just think companies right now are really bloated. I think COVID really made a lot of companies bloated and most of them have not resized from it. Yeah, dude.
Speaking of which, you just mentioned, we talked about consultancy, right? So Look, so the big consultancies, so this, we're talking McKinsey, Bain, and BCG will probably be fine because they are CYA insurance. CYA means cover your ass, right? So they explain here, big companies typically that will hire these big firms. So CYA means if I hire you as an executive, I can just blame McKinsey or Bain, right?
Or a different example is if you're working at a company and you hire someone from McKinsey and they do a terrible job, You won't look bad to your boss if McKinsey messed up, because if you pick a no-name brand and they do bad, your boss would be like, why'd you hire this company that has no reputation, is not well known? If you hire McKinsey, they're going to be like, well, they got a great reputation.
They need to preserve more. Yes.
So they're protecting their job. That's what the CYA means.
Cover your ass. Okay. So the— so it says over here McKinsey, Bain, BCG, because they're the brand names, are probably going to be finest consultancies, right? But the rest of the consulting industry could be in trouble and stock price is already showing that, right? So you look at Accenture here, down 30%. Booz Allen, I never even heard of Booz Allen, down 52%. Capgemini down 26%. FTI Consulting, Gartner's down 50%, right? So you can see the graphs here. They're going straight down. Now, we can't— it's never that simple. You can't just say it's like AI or whatever, but maybe you can. So.
But look at McKinsey's— Accenture's revenue is still going up. Valuations are down. Revenue is not going down for all of them. Yeah. Give me another one. Capgemini.
Capgemini.
Gemini stock. Let's see. Quarterly, they're down 0.28%. So I would not say— how much has Capgemini's stock tanked in a year? They're down 30% from what I saw on the site. Oh, year to date, 7%. One year, Is, uh, 15%. What's another one? Uh, Globant. Is Globant in there? No.
Uh, Gardner. Do Gardner. Is Gardner public?
I don't think Gardner's public.
But I mean, it shows if it kind of looks like a stock price here.
Yeah. Gardner year to date, they're down 48.32%.
Wow. Okay. Try one more. One more.
Boost.
Okay.
But let's look at the revenue. Gardner's revenue up June 2025 year over year is 5.73%.
Yeah. These, so these are, we're looking at valuations here and you're looking at revenue. Yeah. Yeah.
And we just want to clarify this because just because the stock goes up or down, it doesn't mean the company's growing as fast. So for example, if I look at Walmart over a year period, their stock is up 26.35%. Okay. 26%. Their revenue is up 4.76% quarter over quarter. The previous quarter was 2.54%. So they're growing, call it roughly 5% a year. I'm just giving a higher number. When you look at their annual and look at 2025, it's 5%, but yet the stock is up 23%.
So this is interesting. So Reuters was the one that came up with this first. And the quote is, I mean, you hear this quite a bit. It's a bit exaggerated now. AI is killing consulting, right? So for example, if a company performs a project in-house, it costs around $1 million, but consulting firms like Accenture have been offering the same service for $200,000. Now with machine learning, companies can do the same job themselves for just $10,000. Will consulting become a forgotten profession in the AI era like the coachmen of the past? I don't think that's going to be the case. I think there's still going to be consulting and I think they're still going to be able to charge a premium, but probably less because if you're a CEO, it would be— you would be foolish not to say, hey, with AI, we want to get some of those efficiencies. So maybe they can price pressure them down a little bit. But I think these companies will be okay.
I would actually look at it from a different perspective. Accenture, if I look at the 1-year graph as of today, is down October 30th, 27.84%. Okay. Accenture is growing in revenue. The real issue is Accenture used to be worth roughly 30 times profit. Is a company like that supposed to be worth 30 times profit? Probably not. If you look at it now, they're worth around 20 times profit.
Hmm.
And the reality is a lot of these companies were just overvalued.
Yep. By the way, do you want to know a sneaky way to decrease your cost per clicks on your Google Ads? Go for it. So check this out.
Yes, I do want to know a sneaky way.
So looking for an injury lawyer, do not click, costs $200. So literally this is an ad for injury lawyer. It just says at the end, do not click because each click costs $200, right? And so for sure, I think it decreased the CPC, but his quality score probably comes down. So yeah, but hey, I like it.
It's sneaky, but it doesn't work.
Yeah. Well, because, because the quality score thing that we're talking about too.
Yeah.
Because Google wants you to click here. It's very short-sighted.
It may work for a day or 2 or 3 and then it's not going to work.
I think, I think it's funny though. It is funny. But did you know that Disney started, Disney has started selling black hat SEO packages?
Go for it. Yes, I did see, but explain.
You've seen this, right?
Yeah.
So this is kind of funny. It says, so you search for Disney and it says like black hat SEO packages over here and You know, people might be wondering how's this happening? Yeah.
Do you know how it's happening?
So what, from what I read, I mean, it's, there's a lot of, uh, dirty links.
Uh-huh.
Yeah. And then it gets picked up.
And then just things getting messed up and people doing stuff. But Disney isn't really selling black hat SEO packages.
It just goes to show you that like Google's always figuring things out and they're not going to be 100% accurate. Like nothing's going to be 100%, like there's no information source that's 100% accurate. Did you remember I told you about that, the guy that founded $8 billion companies? So 8 separate billion-dollar companies, Brad Jacobs.
That's the Waste Management guy, right?
Yeah. So he's done like 8 different things and—
He tends to acquire the companies.
Yeah, he tends to buy and like he tends to give a lot of equity and hire like an amazing management team. And then he kind of just moves on to the next thing. But it was interesting 'cause I was listening to a podcast he was on and He said that the CEO should be in everything. Like, they're like basically kind of what we talk about, like the fact that you think you can just hire a CEO and then just let them do their thing is not the reality because they're not going to have the same vision that you have. Right. And ultimately it's got to be you in the— the more details you're involved. For example, for you, okay, you might not be managing people, but you're in finance. Okay. You're in, you're in sales for the big deals.
But I don't go to the meetings. Like they had a meeting in Chicago and one in Europe where they're going all the finances.
Okay. Get my point here. Right. So, so, so Okay, we, when we talk on this podcast, it's like, okay, you're mostly involved with like, you know, driving traffic or strategy stuff or like, you know, that type of stuff, right? But there's a lot more that goes into it. Okay, you're going to tell me you're not involved with finance. You're not going to tell me—
No, no, I am. I just don't, I don't get involved in everything. And what I mean by that is I won't go to all the meetings, but even with finance, they had their meetings and I'll get the recap and I'll tell them what I want changed or adjusted or what I think is off.
Yeah.
But I don't have the time to go fly all the way to Europe to just meet with each country lead and be like, all right, what's the budgeting for next year?
So watch, you're okay. So we talk, you're involved with strategy, you're involved with like, you know, driving traffic, right? What else are you involved with? Just very high level.
I'm involved in anything that I'm involved with most things. I was, I did a client pitch earlier this week.
Uh-huh.
I follow up with the sales team to see if they followed up on what the client thought.
Yeah.
I didn't get the answer, so I texted the potential client directly.
Wow. Okay. I bet your team loved that.
I screenshotted it. I'm like, they love the presentation. I'm like, here you go.
Yeah. No joke.
I just did it myself. I'm involved with 2026 revenue forecasting. I don't forecast. I just question their forecasts and try to understand what their logic is.
Yep.
2026 profitability. So finance. I'm involved with reviewing M&A deals. I'm involved with product launches. Today I just tested the new version of Answer the Public. Technically I've been testing it every week, but like I screenshot a lot of bugs and send it to my team on WhatsApp.
Product user testing, CRO on your website.
If I get a customer complaint, I follow up with my team on what's happening. Like I got a customer complaint the other day from someone who's paying our India team. And they're asking for all this stuff. I added in the person who runs India and she sent it to the team. I followed up if they're happy.
Yeah.
And she was just like, Neil, this was closed before I was in here. They're paying us only a few hundred dollars a month and they're expecting all this stuff, which by the way is not profitable.
Yeah.
And then I followed up with them and they said they're happier now and look at all the results. Although it costs us a lot of money. When I say costs us, we made way less revenue than what we spent. But at the end of the day, is that the client's fault? No, that's our fault.
So then I have to fix this stuff. Okay. You got product stuff, you got customer success stuff, you got sales stuff as well. You got finance stuff too. You got, what else? What else you got? We're talking M&A stuff too. Okay. The projections. What else you have?
Overall brand.
Okay.
Like the client example I gave is you can't just fire the client. That's our fault. You still got to make sure people are happy because if people aren't happy, what's going to happen? Your reputation is going to be screwed. Right. Content. I'm going to go film content.
We're literally filming content right now. He's going to go film content later. You got to do a webinar every 2 weeks as well. Okay. Got to fly around, speak at conferences, networking.
I'm going to dinner today to meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are successful. Build up more relationships. Do I want to do it?
No. Face of the company, right? So my point of saying all this is that there's a lot more— like, it's very nice to say, oh, you can delegate all these things, but the reality is even though you have other people responsible, you're still jumping around. And I'm doing the same thing too. And do we necessarily like jumping around? I don't know. Like, I've been— like, my CEO told me, you're like a fruit fly. You're like, you just keep like hovering around.
Dude, that's a great analogy.
I'm like, yeah, I totally do hover around. I was like, I was like, you know, I told her yesterday, I was like, you know, I would like to be a fruit fly that hovers around the bigger poop, not the small poop. You know what I mean? Like, like you just get to bigger and bigger poop as you go on. It's just like the different, like Honda Civic, and then you go to like a Toyota Camry, you just get higher, like bigger problems, right? So yeah, absolutely. We're fruit flies. Well, at least I am.
Technically you want smaller and smaller poop.
I want big poop.
No, because I know what you're saying, but the Mercedes-Benz, thank you. The Mercedes-Benz is not a bigger poop. It's a smaller poop. The Honda Civic is a bigger poop.
Okay, fine. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You just have to reverse it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Smaller and smaller pieces of people over time.
But my point is, like, do you agree with what Brad is saying here? Yeah, the CEO should be involved in everything, right? It's like you're— okay, maybe that's the wrong way. The founder should be involved in everything.
So I think about Amplitude. They launched a free tool. You and I both tested it. At nighttime, I was sending my team screenshots of it and breaking down what they do better than us and what we do better than them and where we need to improve. Right. And a lot of us were messaging. This wasn't like, you know, 3:00 PM in the day. This was like at 6:00, 7:00 PM my time. For some of my other team members, it was like 11:00 PM.
And who's going to do it if you don't do it?
Oh yeah, they're all messaging us back and forth. Like even for them when it was like 11:00 PM, they're still messaging back and forth. When he says the founder or CEO, whatever you want to call it, should be involved in everything. They shouldn't because it should run without their involvement in everything, but it's more so they have to or else it doesn't work well or grow well.
Yes. It's not like we want to, but we have to.
Yes.
That's a better way to put it. Yeah. Okay.
'Cause I don't want to. Do you want to?
No, no. It like, I don't wanna be a fruit fly, but I kind of enjoy being a fruit fly sometimes. Yeah.
Sometimes it is fun.
Yeah.
But I just look at it overall as it's like—
It does drive chaos with the team too. Like when we're just hovering around sometimes and we hover around too much, it's like it does drive chaos and I get it, but at the same time, it's a trade-off. Like our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness too, right? If someone is over-involved with everything, they also sometimes can, right, that can cause more problems too. So, okay, last thing I'll say here on this. So Brian Halligan tweeted this. So basically this is the Jensen Huang—
Wait, but before you get into that, can we go back to one thing?
Yeah.
Do you guys do company all-hand meetings? Are you leading them?
Yeah.
Oh, okay. So you're involved in that.
Like, well, I'm like leading with the first 5 minutes of the story. Like I have to make a video on Friday saying, okay, here's how we're trending towards a vision. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're changing. Here's the things I need to do better. Here's this, right? And then, so I need to be motivational on Fridays, like a coach, right? And then when I appear at all hands, sometimes I'm a coach, sometimes I'm a, hey, we need to do this better type of thing. Do I want to do that? No. And some, some, some, some of my team watches this too. No. So yeah.
We just had an all-hands meeting today at 9:30 AM. Uh-huh.
And oh, this is not your thing.
No, I learned about it. I think it was yesterday cuz my CEO was telling me how he's like creating a deck or something for the all-hands. I didn't even know we had all-hands. So then my co-founder Mike, my CEO's also named Mike, but my co-founder Mike's like, hey, you joining the all-hands? It's starting 9:30. Here's the link if you're not, or if you want to. And then I'm like, uh, I got a podcast from 9:30 to 10:30. I was able to make the podcast shorter. So I ended the podcast, call it like a 10:08. So then I joined the all-hands for 10 minutes, showed my face, but I already know what they're going to cover. I looked at the all-hands. I think they do different ones for different regions because it's just time zone. But when I joined, maybe 380-something people. So I'm estimating here, but maybe roughly 30% of our staff were on it.
Yeah.
Right.
And you have, it's global, so you don't have everyone in the world on, obviously.
Yeah, it's too hard because it's middle of the night for certain people. But yeah, when I look at that, like that's some of the stuff that I'm not involved in. And there's countless examples of that in my organization where like, I'm not involved in every sales training, but I am involved in all divisions. I'm just not involved in Every single meeting or every little minute detail.
Totally. And your problem set changes over time as you continue to scale, right? Obviously. The thing I would say, what I learned is as much as I don't think you're a fan of like, I'll just speak for myself, having to do the all-hands, right? Communicate the message and repeat the message.
No, that's not me.
You know why I'm not a fan of it? It's because I live with myself all the time, so I know what the message is in my head, right? But people don't know what the message is. What I learned from my team, like I heard this last year, is like, hey, we could really use more of those videos from you in the all-hands because we want to hear from you because we don't know what you know. And because they're like, you see the entire battlefield. And I'm like, okay, that's fair. So I do it, I appear and, you know, I try to communicate stories because stories, they blow over well, right? Meaning that people absorb it more.
Yeah.
So I don't know what you say on those calls, but that's my positioning now. And I think it does help. And I find that The best messages need to be repeated over time because people forget. Yeah.
Yeah.
So how do you do it when you appeared for 5, 10 minutes?
Hey guys. No, I didn't say anything. You didn't?
You just showed your face.
Because people were presenting. So when we do our all-hands, there's a deck, people make their versions of the slide, it all gets compiled together and people present their part.
I bet you people would like to hear from you.
Yeah, I agree with you.
You're just not going to do it? I think you should do it.
No, I could do it. I just didn't know. Until last, I was, when I was driving to LA, so call like around 3 o'clock is when I found out there was all hands today. And then when I found out the time today and I was given the invite, I already had something that was scheduled a week ago for a podcast interview and I already changed it on them once. So I don't want to be the prick that changes on them twice.
Yeah.
Right. So then I was just like, but I did compromise. I got them to do a 30-minute podcast instead of an hour. And I didn't tell them, hey, we need to end this earlier. I just controlled the podcast pace. And I know you know how to do this really well too, because we've done it so often where we can make it end because there's not much more to talk about.
Yeah.
Because we can pick the talk tracks and the subjects and just make it so we have extra time or we can make it drag out. And I chose to make it end earlier so then that way I could go to the all-hands, show my face, People were talking. I didn't want to be the prick that interrupts them when they get to share the highlights of their departments or their accomplishments or their team's accomplishments. So I didn't want to interrupt, but I showed up for a little bit and I'll get the summary from either my co-founder, a few other people on the team, or the CEO. But yeah, you're right. What makes me really feel like a prick, I was in Dallas For the HighLevel event.
Yeah.
So when I was there, 2 people came up, they're high. They're like, oh, what's up? I was like, hey, what's your name? And they're like, oh, I'm so-and-so. I'm like, oh cool, what do you do? And they're like, I work for you. And I was like, oh cool. I felt really bad then. And then I was like, oh, how long? One was like 4 years. The other one I think was 2 years. Other people were also hitting me up, had to take some pictures. They came back to take pictures. Other people were trying to take pictures. So I was there for around an hour answering people's questions. Then I went around the conference to go try to find them, to try to get them coffee or something before my flight. I could not find them. I just felt like a piece of crap.
Yeah.
Because I should try to know everyone in my company, but it's really hard at our scale, right? The moment you hit, I don't know what the number is, we're 1,000 plus, call it, The moment you hit, I don't know, maybe like 400 or 500 and your teams are spread all over and you have different divisions, maybe it starts getting harder, but 1,000+ for sure, I think it's really hard to know everyone on a first name basis.
No. Dunbar's number, you can really only know 150 people at a time.
Is that what it is?
Yeah.
But I just felt really bad and I'm like, okay, I need to go hang out with these people, buy them coffee and get to know them more.
You know what I remember?
And apologize.
Maybe this will motivate you to do the like 5, 10-minute spiel each time you appear You appear in all hands. When I worked for WPromote, this is like 16, 17 years ago, whenever we did an all hands each month, the CEO would speak and like everyone was listening intently 'cause we wanted to know where we're going. And now I'm just recalling this now as I'm thinking about it, 'cause when my team told me this, I didn't think about, I didn't connect these 2 moments. I'm like, yeah, they do want to hear. And they like, even though you're not the CEO, technically you are the leader of the company, right? Not tech, you are the leader of the company.
Yeah.
And so I think when they hear where we're going, where they're going, it motivates them and excites them. And imagine all the other goodwill it creates. Other people talk about it, maybe they'll tell other people to join. So I think that that 5, 10 minutes goes a long way.
That's not the issue. I don't ever know when we have an all-hands meeting. That's your fault. That is my fault. And I think I know the reason. It's not like anyone's trying to cut me off. I'm the only one not on Microsoft.
That's also your fault.
Yeah, so we have like Outlook. I still use Gmail and I don't want to switch. So I don't have a corporate email address.
I think this 5 minutes spent every month will make you more money.
How about that? Or all hands are not monthly.
Oh, how often?
Global all hands are maybe a few times a year max.
Oh dude, even better ROI.
Yeah, I know, but they probably forget to tell me because I bet you what ends up happening is an email just goes out saying it's an all hands to everyone on the corporate email. Now technically my domain's owned by the company, so I am on a corporate email, but I'm on Gmail when everyone else— when I mean everyone else, literally everyone else is on Outlook. And there's a few people who have Gmail as well, but they have Gmail and Outlook. For me, I'm just on Gmail.
Guys, this is a Neil problem. You know who said this? This person said the storyteller is the most powerful person in the room.
Who said this? I don't know.
Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. So I think when you do it, you can report back on how well it's worked because they They continue to want me to do it even though I ask if I can stop doing it. They continue to ask me to do it. So anyway, I want to give one more thing here. So did you know that Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO's trifecta, his success trifecta, his management style trifecta, you want to know what it is?
Go for it. I know quite a bit about his management style already though.
Okay, these you probably know already, but one, most people don't know this. He doesn't do any one-on-ones with his staff, okay? Because they're already like high level, like they're all SVPs, VPs, right? He has 60 direct reports, so he doesn't believe in having a management layer. And the one that I like the most, that people on my team for sure don't like is the criticize publicly trifecta. So this is known as, sure, you praise publicly, but you also criticize publicly as well. And it's actually worked out well. And I would say that he actually has another thing that he does. Maybe we'll call this, I don't know if it's trifecta or fourfecta, whatever, right? Quadfecta. But I like what he does around the day. I think it's a daily top 5. So basically you just talk about what you're working on, but at the end of it, you talk about what trends are interesting to you. So it was like 10, 15 years ago when he noticed that a lot of people kept talking about machine learning and deep learning. And at that point he knew that they had to get into AI and that's how they're able to do that. And so we have a function of that. But Brian Halligan, former HubSpot CEO, he said, despite Jensen's astronomical success, I don't see a lot of CEOs borrowing his plays. So specifically the 60 direct reports, no one-on-ones, and criticize publicly trifecta.
Yeah, I think it also varies per company and I'm not saying that's the right way or wrong way. I think you just got to find your own style. And I'll give you another example. When I met up with my buddy, as I mentioned, he works for a Fortune 100 company. They do over $100 billion a year in revenue. $100 billion. He's not a C-level. He's not the layer below. He's the layer below that. So when you have $100+ billion in revenue, when you're 2 levels lower than the CEO, that's a lot of people.
Mm-hmm.
Right? He interacts with the CEO and the CEO interacts with a lot of people on his level. And it may not be a direct report, but he's interacting with people and sending reports to the CEO and helping with projects and other people are. That's a really hands-on CEO.
Yeah.
And I know for a fact, even though he doesn't, he may not have 60 direct reports, I don't know what the number is, he's interacting and reporting with probably 100 to 200 people in his organization at any time. And I'm like, that's hardcore.
You mean the CEO?
The CEO is.
Yeah.
Right? And I'm not saying that's the right way to run things or not run things, but even in that organization, I think they should cut 50% of their staff.
I think there's a lot to learn from that because Steve Jobs from Apple had the top 100. Usually you're going to have a top 100 to 200 people that you go to. I'm sure you have like a top 50 to 100 people that you constantly go to, right?
Not, not nowhere near 100, but we're also not as big where—
Okay. There's a top 50. Top 25?
Top like 30.
Yeah, but these are the people you know you can count on, right?
Correct.
And then some people cycle out of your favor sometimes too if you're not getting things quickly enough, right?
Yes, and percentage-wise, I probably interact with my more, I have more top people than like Apple because if you look at 30 people, I don't have the employee base that they have while with Apple, they may have, I don't know, 50,000, 100,000 employees, so top 100 is a very tiny percentage. And then if you look at organizations your size, you're interacting with almost everyone.
Yeah, right.
So even better than me.
No, I'm not actually. It's like there's probably, I don't know, 10 that I go to. Yeah. But what I would say is it goes back to Dunbar's number again. So Steve Jobs, top 100, right? Jensen has 60. You have 50. It's usually like it's 150. Below 150 is the number. The guy you just mentioned, it's like 150, 200 people or whatever, right?
Yeah.
And going back to your point too, When you think about Jensen's style, oh, Elon's style, right? So we did like a planning session earlier this week. This is the first time I ever ran the Elon algorithm. So just to reinforce, it's QDSSA, QDSSA, right? So whenever you have a problem in your company, you question, then you delete, then you simplify, then you speed up, and then you automate, right?
Yeah.
We tried it because the question I asked people was like, hey, what's one stupid thing you think we're doing as a company right now? And people, these are all the things people are questioning. And so we started methodically going down these things and oh my God, we started deleting so much, we started simplifying so much. We didn't even think about speeding up or automating yet because a lot of people today, they're like, oh, AI, I want to automate everything, right? But I'm telling you, like, love or hate Elon, this algorithm does a good job. Am I saying all the things we're talking about, how you do it, how I do it is the right way? We're just saying, no, this is just what works for us and it's worth experimenting with things.
Yes.
Yeah. Okay, you pick one. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil, Agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer the Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.
How ChatGPT ads will make you rich.
Okay, so this guy, this guy, I actually know him, Marketing Max. So great guy. So he's like, I'm about to spend an ungodly amount of money on ads inside of ChatGPT. Holy cow. So ChatGPT is about to introduce ads, right? Not only that, they're about to go public for maybe a trillion dollars, right? So basically ChatGPT is about to introduce ads. You spent months telling it about your divorce, your new job search, your kids' health problems, where you vacation, what you're afraid of. OpenAI just hired 630 Meta employees, 20% of their entire company, to figure out how to turn those memories into ads. Projected revenue, $25 billion by 2029. So here's how it works. ChatGPT's new memory feature doesn't just remember what you tell it to save. It references all your past conversations automatically. Every chat, every detail, every vulnerable moment.
Even if you delete 'em?
Even if you delete 'em, yes. I remember reading about this a few months ago. Even if you delete it, they still have it.
Yeah.
This is ChatGPT, right? So where you live, your pets' names, your family members, your dietary restrictions, your career struggles, your health anxieties. So when ads roll out in 2026, That memory becomes targeting data. Ask about running shoes, it already knows you hate gyms but love hiking because you mentioned it 3 months ago. Ask for recipe ideas, it knows your kid has a peanut allergy from panicked conversations last summer, right? So the answer is yes, because Meta is now— Meta is OpenAI now, right? So what's interesting to me, I mean, this kind of gets me to want to, you know, maybe invest at that trillion-dollar valuation, maybe let it come down a little bit, right?
I'm okay on not investing in it.
So let me finish on this part real quick. We can come back to that in a moment. We can talk about that. So why we care, OpenAI wants to monetize free users via ChatGPT ads by 2026, according to reports. So this is why people, when someone, the YouTuber tells me that, oh, you can't make money on a $20 subscription, that was missing the point entirely. They have 800 million users.
So— 800 million active users weekly.
Yes. Which is a lot.
Yeah, it's a big difference in total users, by the way. 800 million active is a huge number.
So look, I'm excited to spend money on the ads here, and whenever a new channel comes out, that's when you want to go hard because it's cheap. That's like when Google first came out when we were still in high school.
Right?
Yes.
Yeah, you and I will spend an arm and a leg on it.
Yep.
Our clients will as well. What we find with ChatGPT and it's, or at least I find with it at its valuation, even if it's a trillion, let's say it goes to a trillion dollars, I look at it as like the revenue's not there yet. It'll grow into it and its price could go to $2 trillion, $3 trillion, $4 trillion.
You get a better return elsewhere.
Yeah, we get a better return elsewhere. I'd just rather park the money with myself and I can do a lot of deals where I double my money overnight.
See, that's such a good quote. I'd rather park the money with myself. That's good. See, that should be quoted. Okay, so I'm going to pick a, oh, this one, the one I mentioned earlier before you. You look like you want to pick one. You want to pick one?
No, you go for it.
So this is, so Elon said this, it's a real weakness to want to be liked, a real weakness. And I do not have that. And so this is him talking to Andrew Sorkin from New York Times. And I think it's— this is interesting because I think over time, some of the nicest people I've known that became successful CEOs or founders, they became battle-hardened. So they're still very kind, they're still very respectful, but they don't care nearly as much as they used to about being liked. I think you didn't really have this problem. You might have had a little bit of this problem in the beginning, very early in your career. I didn't know you back then, but I for sure had this problem in my early career, right? And so I do believe that But if you're going to try to build something for the long term, you have to approach things here. And this is the graph I wanted to show you, the unkind truth versus a kind lie. Do you know what the difference is?
No.
Okay, so here, check this out. I sent this to my CTO the other day. And it basically— here, I got to pull this up for you. I sent him a lot of messages. Oh my God. Well, why don't you react to the real weakness first while I pull this thing up?
So I don't know how you have been, but we're human. So naturally that affects your emotions or your feelings. You agree with that statement, right?
Yes.
And I believe to Elon, to some extent, that it can affect his feelings and emotions. Like I've seen interviews with him where he gets teary-eyed in the past. We're human beings. What I found the solution to be, I know this sounds bad, is I just try not to see it and I ignore it. Because it affects me a lot less and I just keep moving on and doing what I think is the best.
So I think you'll like this based on what you just said.
Okay.
So on one side for this graph over here, right? You have unkind truth, okay? Versus a kind lie. So let me explain what these 2 are. So unkind truth, is when I'm direct to you and you're direct to me. So in the moment you might be unkind. So for example, I don't know, you just lost the audience or like whatever. Or like you, I might tell you something that's like, oh, hey.
Or like, if you're like Eric, you're going— if I say Eric, you're going bald.
Yeah. Or I think you're getting fat, Neil.
Yeah.
Right. So like—
And keep in mind, I'm skinny and Eric has a full set of hair. So neither of these things are true, but we're just giving you examples.
But we would tell each other if we think these things, right? So unkind truth, right?
I, I wouldn't tell you if you're going bald.
You, but you would tell me if I'm getting fat?
No.
Overweight. I, I would for sure tell you.
I would not. Like you're talking about like just gaining 5 pounds?
No, like 50 pounds.
I would tell you like, hey, let's go. I wouldn't tell you, hey, you're getting fat. I would say, hey, let's go work out together.
You wouldn't say I'm getting fat, but you would say, hey Eric, I am concerned for your health.
Yes. Or, but what I would first try to say, I'm like, dude, we should work out together.
Yeah.
When are you free? And I'll just work out with you. Okay.
And then, then it becomes 100 pounds. What happens? happens?
No, no, no, I would work out with you and try to fix it without saying—
What if I don't listen and I gain another 50 pounds?
Uh, even before the 50 pounds, I would say something.
Yeah, but you would start saying things that are perhaps unkind in the moment, but it's the truth, right?
Yes, I would.
And so what happens here when you have a functional—
Even 50 pounds, I wouldn't let it get 50 pounds. If you gain like 30, 40 pounds of fat, I would be like, hey dude, we need to go to the gym together. Yeah, exactly.
So, but, or you tell me the kind line Eric, you look so good. Oh my God, so good.
Yeah.
So what happens here is in the moment, if you get away with it in a moment, but you actually end up building a dysfunctional system, so it gets worse and worse. So this is how it was when you've seen, maybe even with your companies, both of our companies, maybe in the— when at least I was just kind, I was too scared to tell the truth, too scared to tell the truth. But what happens is, so when you have extreme commitment to the truth, it makes relationships acutely dysfunctional, but systems chronically functional. So it says, it mentions Elon here, right? So an extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional, but systems chronically dysfunctional. So like the UK, for example, or they're talking about like, I'm not going to go into politics, but look, if you keep going unkind truth, it compounds over time. You build a very functional system. That's what you want to do with a company.
Yeah, I agree with that. I tend to just tell people the truth.
People don't want to hear it, but it's okay.
I think the key is when you tell them the truth. Let's use the example of Eric gaining weight. Okay? Eric has not gained weight. I would start with not being as direct and I'll try to add some finesse. And I'm like, I would say, hey Eric, I want to start eating cleaner. Can we do a challenge? You know, as a— I want a buddy system. You help me, And I'll help you. Let's try to see if we can do a challenge for a week, if we can both eat really clean and only X amount of meals and this type of food. Like, are you down? And then if he says yes, great. If he says no, I'll be like, okay, how about we try working out together with each other? You know, like every day for 7 days. Let's see if we can do like the, what is it, 30-day hard or something like that?
75 Hard.
75 Hard. I'm like, there's 75 Hard where you go crazy for Uh, 75 days when it comes to working out. Let's just try doing it for 2 weeks or a month.
Yeah.
And we'll be each responsible to each other. So I would start trying to come up with solutions instead of just being direct and just tearing you apart. And it's not that I don't have the issue of saying something to you, because like, if something's really bad for you, I will tell you. But I believe in most cases, just telling people Like you're gaining weight, it doesn't do any good. I think people need a solution or they need motivation to go and try to fix things, right? Like same with work. When someone does something that I don't like, instead of me just saying like, this product sucks, or this release sucks, or this has bugs, I go in and I document the bugs and I'll be like, hey, can we fix this? The load time's too long. People assume that nothing's loading.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, we can't. It would be too expensive. to load all this up in 2 seconds instead of 6 seconds. Okay, can we actually create a design? Because I don't want to increase cost 7x. Can we actually create a design that lets people know what they're going to get in 7 seconds or that it's loading so then that way they just don't leave? I'm a big believer that instead of just lying to people and saying everything's okay when it's not, you work with them on solving the problem.
Yeah.
Instead of just saying you suck.
You know what I do now instead of just going to them directly? But before I do that, if you started to gain weight and you saw your mom, what's the first thing she would say?
Right now? How much weight am I gaining?
As a kid, even 5 pounds, 10 pounds, or whatever.
My mom would've been happy.
Oh, 'cause she want you to— oh, okay.
Yeah, 'cause I was really skinny. I was always in the 1 percentile for weight.
What if you lose another 10 pounds, you see your mom right now, what would she say?
She would be like, you're skinny, you're not eating.
She ain't gonna sugarcoat it. Exactly. So whenever I gained 5 pounds or whatever, my mom, the moment she sees me, she used to call me, she's like, oh, looks like someone got fat, right? And then I'll go back to her, I'm like, look who's talking, right? So we just start talking at each other. But my point is like our moms are, it's unkind truths, right? 'Cause they want the best for us, right? Now, that being said, in a corporate world, You can't. You have to have some finesse, right? So the way I do it is like, let's say I'm working with you. Instead of hitting you hard immediately, I'll say, hey, Neil, so how do you think things are going right now? Right? Oh yeah. And then I'll be like, okay, so what stories are you telling yourself right now? Well, I think I need to do this, that, and whatever. Okay, so what do you need to do to improve it? Right? So then they start to answer with their solutions and I'm not solving it for them. Now, do I have the patience for that all the time? Absolutely not. But does it work well? It does.
Yeah. And you made me think of a situation. I'm a big believer in the unkind truth, but it only depends who it's to. Like if it's a business colleague, I understand I need finesse. If it's a friend like you, I'm probably going to be a little bit more direct than I would be in a corporate environment, right?
Even Mike's a good friend of yours, Kamo. Yeah.
I'm direct with him and I'm pretty direct with you. And when I say I'm pretty direct, actually I think I'm very direct with you. I just, I wouldn't add the finesse if you were 50 pounds. I would tell you beforehand, but if the 50 pounds for some other health reasons that you can't control, because some people have weight issues.
Totally. There's always a family member.
I have family members that have weight issues and they can't control it for other reasons like thyroid or whatever it may be. I would not just tell them like, hey, something's wrong, right? You have to understand what's causing it. Like, I know some people who gain a lot of weight when they're stressed out, and I would never tell them you're gaining weight. Instead, I try to figure out why they're stressed and I try to help solve the root cause of it so they can get healthier.
Yep.
But there's certain instances, like yesterday I was dealing with my home and the construction of my home.
Even today?
Yeah, even today. And I just went off on people. I was just going off. And when I mean I was going off, like I was really going off and I was very firm. I wasn't yelling at them, but they all knew I was pissed off. And I was like, look, there's a lot of incompetence and I want to know who's causing the incompetence. An example of this, and this is a real example, they're telling me We need more budget. We need to buy more doorstops. We need another $3,500. But there was a lot of this little stuff and it added up to 60, 70 grand.
Yep.
Okay. It was literally somewhere between 60 and 70 grand. And I was like, we've had our doors for a while, right? They're like, yes. Some doors are sliding doors. You don't need doorstops for those. Some doors swing. When a door swings, you need a doorstop, right? Yes. How long have we known our doors for? So who's the person in charge of counting the doorstops? Shouldn't you just count X amount of swinging doors means X amount of doorstops? If an entry to a door is a double door and it swings, you need 2 doorstops.
Mm-hmm.
I'm like, this isn't rocket science. I'm like, why are we working with people who are incompetent when I'm getting charged a premium dollar for a luxury home? If you're building a home in Beverly Hills, one would assume it's a luxury home. I'm not trying to be a prick here. This is the reality, and you're probably charging you more because it's Beverly Hills. You agree with that statement? Trust me, I negotiated. I tried finding so many people, and a lot of people were off. Like they had another one. Oh, we hired one of the best stone people, and you know how I found that out? When we went to go pick stone, people are like. I'm like, this person's going to install it? You picked one of the most expensive and premier stone people. They're known for a meticulous, fabulous job. Oh, they missed something? Now I got to pay more because they forgot to bid it out?
For their incompetence.
Yes. Why?
Why are you getting taxed on that?
Why am I getting taxed on this? And I'm like, who on earth is missing this stuff? And I'm paying for people not only to do the project, like you have a general contractor who does it, I also pay for people to manage the whole team and the general contractors called the owner's to make sure everything goes right so that way I don't have issues.
Yeah.
So I'm like, who are we paying? Why am I paying so much money for incompetence?
And I'm like, this is ridiculous.
This would be a lesson, guys, from Neil.
Never build a custom home because it becomes a second job.
Yes. And then you know what they told me straight up? Well, with all our homes, this kind of stuff is normal and it happens every, uh, it happens.
Imagine if we told our clients that.
Yes. And I'm gonna read you something I wrote to them in an email last night. All right. This is how—
It must've been a long email.
It was a long email. I'm just gonna read you one part of it though. Um, so let's see. Uh, where is it? Uh, so look at this. I love all you guys. I try to always end with a, you know, I try to be nice. And I really do love him because I've gotten to know him for a while now, over a year. I love all you guys, but I would've never built this home if I knew it was going to be this painful. I know construction has a bad reputation of things always costing more and being delayed and constant errors, but just because the industry has a bad reputation, we shouldn't hold ourselves to those poor standards. We should be doing better.
Oh, it was a short email.
No, no, no, no.
Oh, you had a lot more. Oh, that's how you started it.
That's one paragraph of the email.
Oh, it's a long email. And this is the second part of the email.
Oh my God, I'm just going.
There's like 12 paragraphs, guys. That's what I'm looking at.
Yeah, and some parts I'm harsh, right? And I didn't end with that statement, right? Uh, I love all you guys. And then I even said after that, you guys need to talk and figure things out soon. I don't want to keep getting change orders. Change orders is something that just keeps costing you more money, but I'm getting people charging me more because it's their fault. And then I put in all caps, Please let me know what we are missing and what the right— get me a right number right away. I don't want to wait weeks anymore. This is supposed to be done months ago. And then I give examples of this stuff and a dot, dot, dot. And I'm just like, I'm just over it. And I have a right to be over it.
So what is the point you'd like to give the audience on this?
Sometimes you need to be very direct. If you're not very direct, your problems just snowball and it just costs you an arm and a leg, whether it's business or your personal life. You just create a bigger shitstorm, excuse my language, for yourself. And this is why it's very important to be direct. And this is why in business, yes, I do have some finesse, but we talked about the main key people you work with. Do you think I have any finesse with the main key people I work with on a daily basis?
Less depending on how close you are. The closer you are, the less you have. Yeah.
So I would say out of the 30 people, Uh, 15 of them probably soak up 80 to 90% of the time. With those 80, uh, 15 people, there's no finesse.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I don't want to operate my business with my best people if I have to dance around, right? Like I'd rather be direct.
And then sometimes they blow up and will be direct with me and pissed off at something I did and they have a right to be. And I like it that way.
Yeah, and I apologize, dude. By the way, like yesterday we're like debating and arguing things, right? I don't think there's anything wrong with that, 'cause to me an argument is just you're making points, right? And sometimes I'll be wrong and sometimes—
No, no, no, argument is progression. That's how you look at it and I look at it.
Yeah, and argument's progression, but when you sugarcoat things, you're actually stopping progression, right? So even if you call me a fruit fly for a good reason, I love it, right? I started laughing, right? Like it's actually scary. Like if you imagine there's this, you start working for someone as an executive, you call your boss a fruit fly, I like that person. Yeah, but most people think that's like a scary thing, but I love it, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's great. So I think our point of all this, this goes all the way back to wanting to be liked. And if you want to go far in business, you should care less and less about it. Because as I've progressed in my career, I've worked for a couple people, a couple startups, right? You've worked maybe as like a janitor or something in your teens, right? So you haven't worked for many people, right? But I've seen the progression. The ones that want to be liked, They don't go very far. The CEOs that I've actually feared a little more, they went very far. That's what I would say. Yeah. And so I'm like, now that we kind of see it from the other side as founders, it's like, okay, it might be in the moment, it's like people might fear you a little more, but the ones that go far with you, they're going to respect you long-term a lot more because you had the courage to make decisions.
Totally agree.
Yeah. Okay. Last thing before we go here.
What's Big Mario Marketing?
Okay. Okay. We'll talk about Big Mario Marketing. I think you've seen this graphic before. So, okay, check this out. You play Mario, right?
Super Mario Brothers?
Yeah, Super Mario. Remember, like, you know, when he eats like the flower and he can throw fireballs? Yeah.
Remember that?
Okay, so guys, this is a graphic of Mario here. He's eating a fireball, right? Or he's eating the flower that gives him the fireballs. So big Mario marketing is number one rule of marketing. Nobody cares about your product. They care about themselves. So this is not what you sell, right? So you don't sell the flower. This is a potential customer. You sell the outcome, the customer who can do awesome things.
Yes.
So they don't care about your amazing flower. They care if you can do amazing things, right? So this guy literally dropped the best marketing lesson you'll ever see. So your customer, little marketing, not as powerful, needs help. Your product, an item Mario can use. The result, big Mario shooting fireballs and kicking everyone's ass. And actually that was my favorite power-up. It wasn't even like the cape that he, where he can fly. I just wanted to throw fireballs.
Oh, cool. Yeah.
Anyway, that's big, that's big Mario marketing.
I love it.
All right guys, that is it for today. It's time for us to go to lunch. We'll see you tomorrow.
Bye.
