The end of podcasts, Robots: Tesla vs. Apple, Monetization strategies & more

All right, everyone. So Gary Vee called Neil a— we'll tell you in a little bit. But we're testing this out. We're testing a new format. It's going to be 90 minutes. We're going to go 90 minutes hard. Neil and I, I don't even think we've had a conversation for 90 minutes before. Yes, we have. An hour and a half.

No, we've had conversations over 90 minutes.

Like 80, 70 to 80 minutes. I don't think 90 minutes.

Depends what we're talking about. Are you talking about business or your personal life?

No. No. No is the answer. So we're going to try out this new format because it's all about experimentation. And I have, I mean, We can just start it off with this because I actually think as it relates to us changing this format a little bit and experimenting, even the podcast interview format is becoming really stale. And I actually ran a Twitter thread the other day and I said, are interview podcasts getting stale? Yes or no? What percent of people you think put no versus yes?

Probably maybe majority put yes and I would say maybe 60%. But whether people will say it's stale or not, if you look at your social stats, podcast interviewing has probably 10x your social stats.

Yes. So here's what I'll say. It was 82%, maybe now it's 77% or so, said yes.

That it's stale.

That it's stale, yeah. And it's interesting because I was just talking to— I did a podcast interview this week and Marie Forleo, she was like, yeah, that's actually— yeah, I can see the interview podcast becoming stale because she was just on a podcast where she did Cooking. So, someone invited her to come cook and they did like a show and it was like 2-3 hours of cooking, right? And Gary, as an example, he does 12-hour streams of him just working, right?

12-hour streams?

Because he's working all day. He's in the office, right? There's people coming in. It's like a muted stream and there's actually 100 people watching at a time. It's not a lot right now, but coworking is becoming a thing. So, people are trying different formats. I was talking with Brad over here from recordeditpodcast.com and You know, we're talking about having an entrepreneur poker stream, right? It's not exactly interview one, but imagine you can see everyone's hole cards, you have different interesting conversations. So I think the formats are going to evolve very soon, and I'm just trying to experiment right now.

But when I look at what you're doing on social media, you're pretty much replicating the interview style. And I'm not saying you're copying anyone. You've actually been doing this for a very long time with Leveling Up.

11 years.

11 years. Wow, that's a long time. And if you look at your social content, last 30 days, last 60 days, relevant today, even though people are saying it's old, it's played out, your stats, would you agree with this, they're at least 10x better? No joke, at least 10x better than before.

Way higher. I mean, 12 million views in 30 days. It wasn't even close to that before.

So more than 10. So you weren't even at a million, you probably were close to 100,000 or 200,000, correct?

Yeah, 200,000 to 300,000 or something like that overall. This is across all socials. But Neil makes a good point. So, when you think about trends, I typically like to get on it. Like if I see something start to trend downwards, I'm going to try to make adjustments, right? Because by the time we wait until maybe it's 25% down, 30% down, we're already like a little late. So, I'm just trying to get ahead of it right now to experiment.

I don't think interviews are stale or old. I think the content in the interviews is the problem and that could be stale or old. Explain.

I agree with you, but explain.

So if you look at a lot of the people that are on podcasts, people try to get well-known individuals, Gary Vee, Marie Forleo, Cody Sanchez, Alex Hormozi, Laszlo Hormozi, et cetera. People are going after big name people with huge followings and they continually interview. When they interview, they're asking the typical same questions over and over again. I used to do 2 to 3 podcast interviews per day of people inviting me on their shows. We've cut it back and we typically now focus on like the bigger ones.

And what do you think about the questions they ask you 90% of the time?

So, and funny enough, I was actually going to get to that. Majority of the time, call it maybe 70 to 80%, it's not 90, but 70+ percent of the time, the questions are around the same type of things. For example, What can people do with AI right now? What's new with SEO? How— what's 3 takeaways a business can do to really grow? And I'm giving generic type questions, but those are the type of questions that I'm being asked. And most of them are on those topics. So if one person asks like, what's new in SEO right now? Another person may ask like, what's an SEO tactic that companies can start leveraging if they're just getting started? Or someone else may ask, How do you grow your social media following? Like they're asking the same basic questions over and over again. It may not be the same exact question, but they're all similar. And that's the problem. If I look at my interviews that do the best, it's not necessarily that I plan on having them do the best or whatnot. It's the people interviewing me are asking really unique questions that most people wouldn't have asked before.

Yep. And I had this conversation with David Perell, the writing guy on Twitter, and he made a good point. Do you think, Neil, it's harder in a podcast situation for the hosts or for the guests?

I actually think it's harder for the hosts than the guests.

Why is that?

You have to do tons of research and you have to come up with really amazing questions that A, they haven't been asked before, but B, people really want to know that from the guests. So you either have to not just do your research, on the guest and what they're good at. You have to look at all the old podcast interviews that they've done, articles that they publish. Then you also have to start polling and talking to people who want to listen to that interview before it's even recorded and find out from them on, hey, what do you want to know from this person that you've never heard them talk about before? And someone who does a good job of this is Sam Parr. I've seen on Twitter, I don't listen to all the episodes for My First Million, And you know, I used to think that it was an interview podcast because they interview Syed. They interview me until this week, and when Eric's like, "No, they don't really do interviews," and I was like, "Oh cool, I learned something new." I'm not trying to diss them or anything. I think they do amazing job. Their content's great. I more so follow Sam on Twitter than the actor on X over a podcast because it's easier for me to consume whenever I'm on the go, and. I see him posting on X, hey, I'm going to interview this guest. What are some things you want to know that you would ask them or they've never talked about before? He takes the time not to only do the research, but to find out from people what they really want to know and what they're curious about that individual.

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's the— when you're watching something, hopefully when you're watching a podcast, you're looking for moments where you feel enlightened, where you're getting an idea. a light bulb that goes off. If you're asking the same questions, light bulb doesn't go off, and then no wonder why people drop off so much. And so, Neil's absolutely right. It's— as someone that's been interviewing people for over 11 years, it's a huge pain in the butt to do a good job. Like, sometimes I spend hours watching podcasts of them or— and then trying to figure out my own angle. It's a lot of work. It's exhausting.

But that's why you're getting 12 million views from all your social profiles. And I don't mean this in a bad way. I actually look at this as a really good thing. You don't have tons of followers compared to a lot of other people on social media, yet your view counts are through the roof, right? A, it shows that followers aren't everything. And I know Adam Mosseri posted a Threads message about that the other day, which we can go over later on. But more so, your content's hitting. It's going viral because the people who are watching are engaging and they're very engaged, which means the research that you've done and the questions you're asking are resonating with a lot of people.

Well, so we should talk about this real quick and then maybe we can move over to the Adam thing and then we should also talk about what Gary called you. But this is basically the social graph versus the interest graph. And so, the social graph back in the day, it used to be all about the number of followers that you have. Twitter to an extent, it still is about the amount of followers that you have, but it's still there's a little bit about how good the content is. But YouTube now, TikTok, Instagram, it is just about how good is the content, and your stuff will take off. To Neil's point, I might have, I don't know, 300,000 followers or so spread across my socials. It's not a lot. But now that it's more about the interest graph, whatever people are interested in, it just means it's more about the merit of the video versus the number of followers that someone has.

And what Eric's talking about, interests, social networks have changed to a discovery network. They look at what content you engage with on a regular basis. And then when they have content that's similar, even from people you don't follow, but it has a super high engagement rate, they're more likely to show it to you because they know you'll engage with it. They don't care if you follow that person or not. They know if they show you engaging content and you follow that person, I mean, and you consume the content, you're more likely to stick on that social network for longer.

Funny enough, and this is actually, well, this is more ironic, but sometimes you just don't know what takes off. I keep talking about how social media is a slot machine when you're posting reels. And Neil and I were talking about, Neil was talking about how Tesla's a crap car, and then I was saying how I like Tesla. And then that video actually did a lot better than our other videos. And funny enough, Neil actually ended up buying a Tesla after that.

I still don't think it's a great car. It's not comfortable, but the technology is good.

He's voting with his wallet. That tells you guys everything.

They're giving discounts right now. Yeah, I like the price savings. And I actually think they're really good cars for safety. Which is really important for me because of kids. And the self-driving technology is amazing. When I say they're not good cars, I'm only talking about one thing, the comfort in the car, like the actual seat isn't as comfortable as a seat like in a Mercedes or something like that. That's just what I've experienced. Other than that, they're good cars. That's my only gripe with them.

All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now, what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly, and you can At least with the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video. Have you seen how much Reddit and Quora are flying after the latest Google update?

Yes, but you also know Google is buying data from them, those providers. I know Reddit for sure.

$60 million a year for Reddit.

I think they're buying data from Quora too. Google strikes deal with, is it Quora?

We have this chart. While Neil pulls this up, I have this chart on my screen, so, and we'll pull it up on YouTube. If you guys sub to us on YouTube, Marketing School, But you can see after the update, there's a blue graph over here, Reddit just flying. And then Quora is also maybe like a quarter of the size or maybe a third of the size. But fact of the matter is when you search things, you can see a lot of Reddit answers, a lot of Quora answers. And I think that's going to— you know what's interesting, Neil? We have people, prospects hitting us up now that want to optimize for Reddit to optimize for Google. And I'm just like, wait, what? Have you seen that?

I have not seen that, but we don't get inquiries for that. It doesn't look like, or at least I can't find here, Google buying data from Quora. But Reddit for sure we know of because they talked about that before the IPO. You know, they are flying. If you look at what's happening a lot with search, it's turning into a question and answer game largely because of AI. We're seeing a lot of patterns of people using ChatGPT asking a question and getting an answer. And they're expecting the same thing from Google. It's changing search patterns and behavior from what we're seeing. And why wouldn't Quora and Reddit fly in those scenarios?

Have you met Jim Yu from BrightEdge?

No.

Okay, so I was hanging out with him last week in Austin. So we had a little dinner thing. And BrightEdge, just so those of you that don't know, it's enterprise SEO software. And I think they do north of $100 million ARR, was a pretty significant company. And he was sharing some data with me. So he's like, look, We're seeing a lot more data that indicates if we're seeing more queries with SGE in there. And so what we're seeing is if you actually want to rank for SGE, to your point, Neil, if you want to rank for SGE, you're trying to answer more queries and you're trying to answer more long-tail keywords. And we're just going to see more and more of that. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Share more data. So he's going to share more data with me and then we'll talk about it on this podcast if you guys subscribe to us on YouTube.

Yeah. And going back to the topic that we're talking about on social media, Adam Mosseri, who heads up Instagram and Threads posted this. Follower count matters less than view and like counts. I understand why people focus so much on follower counts. They're prominent and easy to find. But if you actually want to get a sense of how relevant an account is, look at their how many likes, look at their how many likes, sounds a little bad. Look at their how many likes they get per post and how many views per reel instead. In other words, what he's saying is, They don't care about follower count. They care about engagement. If you have 100 followers and all of them engage, which is extremely rare because not everyone logs into the app every single day and uses it, what ends up happening is they're like, wow, everyone's watching the video. They all commented, they all liked and shared, assuming it's not manipulated. That thing will go viral and they'll show it to everyone.

That's kind of crazy. I mean, it's not crazy. It's— that's par for the course. Again, it's more of a— it's more of an interest-based graph now. And the engagements and the likes and the views are just signals for interest at the end of the day.

Straight up. I really do believe that that's the way social media is going to be for a very long time. Showing people based on who they follow is irrelevant because if people produce crap content— and what I've seen is I don't have any hard data on this. But what I've seen is a lot of people who have a lot of followers, Take things for granted and they don't try as hard to create amazing content as the people who are out there hustling and grinding it out to just get, you know, the first 1,000 followers.

I think that's the good thing about TikTok. It forced people to innovate. It forced these social companies to innovate and move towards more of an interest graph. But it also continues to force people to innovate on their content formats because, you know, when people start to see the engagement dip, everyone has good analytics. They can decide if they want to change things up. Now, speaking of numbers, let's go back to what Gary Vee called you. So I basically was telling him, look, you know, you and I, we've had these talks before about is it worth it to create large audience TAM, total addressable market content. So like, if I'm talking about dating, we're talking about relationships, for example, we get a lot more views, right? Versus like marketing.

Yeah.

Now, you know, I see myself, the stuff that I do is more hedging. So I have the Leveling Up and then I have this, right? So it's hedging both. This one's niche, that one goes wide, right? Anyway, So, what Gary—

To go back, I actually think you go more wide than niche because if you look at your social content, it's more wide.

My social content on Twitter, for example, this week, did you see? Oh, we should talk about this too. We'll put a bookmark in this. But I started writing 500 words a day and I'll explain what that means. Yeah, but it's all business.

Good job.

I used to have this— we used to do this back in the day, just at least 500 a day, at least like a couple thousand a week. But I'll come back to that in a moment and we should talk about your writing habit. So, I was like, hey Gary, so what do you think about this? You know, Neil and I debate about this sometimes. And he's like, well, you know, Neil's a math boy, and I'm a brand guy. And so the new book that he wrote, Day Trading Attention, it's, it's a purple color instead of, you know, the mix between red and blue is purple, right? So that's why it's purple. Because what his point is, like, it's a mix of brand and math at the end of the day. And that's how you get good results. But yeah, what's your reaction?

I agree with him on that. And he is spot on. I love math. If you look at most of the companies I've created, they're data and analytics companies.

I look at all your posts.

Yes, most of my posts have all data in it. You know, when I was in high school, I excelled at math and stats, did really well in those subjects. You're a good Indian. What was that?

I said you're a good Indian.

I'm a good Indian. I did exceptionally well in math. I was taking college-level math classes when I started high school and towards the end of junior high as well. But it's how I do marketing. And I do agree there's value in brands. Just look at Nike, Tesla, American Express, and the list goes on and on. That is not my strength. My strength is really data and numbers and doing performance marketing. If you look at my ad agency, NP Digital, we're a performance marketing shop. We're not a branding shop. Funny enough, if you look at Gary's agency, and I'm not saying he doesn't do anything in the performance marketing, he does more brand-related stuff.

That's true actually.

And if you look at, he probably does some performance.

Mm-hmm.

And we also do some brand stuff. We've done TV commercials.

Yeah.

We've done a lot of different things like that as well. But at the end of the day, I think people play on their strengths and there's no right or wrong way. I do agree with what he's saying, which the ideal formula is branding combined with data and it's somewhere mixed in the middle. But if you look at business, Just in general, there's no right or wrong way to necessarily run a business. You got to figure out what works for you. And I'll give you a prime example of this. If you look at Nike, they do a lot of stuff that's brand related, and it's crushed it for them. How do you put a number on paying Michael Jordan, you know, to represent your shoe brand?

Did you see Air?

I saw Air.

It was a great movie. So good.

And on the flip side, You know, how do you not just say, I'm spending X dollars per click, here's my cost per click, I need 100 clicks, that equals 5 conversions, 5 conversions are worth this, this is my LTV. There's no right or wrong answer. And although that's worked for Nike, I know a lot of players in the private equity space that have bought companies literally for billions of dollars and they've made 4, 5, 6, 7x selling it and they're not necessarily great at marketing They're really good at enterprise sales. They have their old school playbook and it works. And again, what I'm getting at is Nike's approach isn't right or wrong. You know, Vista Equity's approach isn't right or wrong. And Vista Equity is one of the largest private equity firms out there.

Big shot, yeah.

You got to figure out what works for you as an entrepreneur. And if you look at me and you, we do marketing really different and we run our businesses really different. Neither approach is right or wrong. It's just we adapt to our own styles.

Actually, so you know what's interesting? The side point here is that the founder's DNA does permeate throughout the entire organization.

Yes.

So how Gary is, how you are, how I am with my organization, I'm probably a little more purple than you two are. I would say I'm kind of a mix. I feel like more, more on the brand side. But anyway, Point is, even with your health too, just if we take a little tangent here, there's no right or wrong. Like everybody, literally everybody is different. What you're allergic to is different than what I'm allergic to. So just food for thought for everyone. What else did you have?

But dude, going back to health, you've been having insomnia.

I have.

You haven't been able to sleep for how many days now?

Well, no, no. So yesterday I was on 0 hours of sleep. Last night I slept 5 hours. Yeah, that's— oh, this is—

I hope you sleep more tonight.

Thank you. Um, this is what happens when you also over-optimize. So you can take this lesson and bring it over to marketing too. And so I was telling Brad from Record Edit Podcasts, um, that we— that I was talking to a sleep coach right before this that YPO uses, right? And I was telling him my scores from like 2 weeks ago because they're like really good. My HRV is really high and my heart rate's low, right? And he's like, dude, your score— I've never seen scores like this.

Well, let's back up. What's this HRE?

HRV is like your heart rate variability. So, you want that to be higher, right? The higher that score is, the healthier you are. That kind of is an indicator of your stress, right? Now, by the way, this is not a science podcast, guys. We're just talking about this. It's a conversation. So, your heart rate, you want that to be lower, right? Like a good heart rate, you know, for a guy is like 40, maybe 50 or so, something like that. Mine's like 39, right? 2 weeks ago. I'm assuming unless you're working out or something like that. Yeah, when you're working out, it's going to be a lot higher. But point being, he's like, look, your scores are amazing. And I was telling Brad, it's because I spend so much time optimizing my sleep. I've optimized it to the point where I believe that because I optimize it, I deserve good sleep, right? And what happened 2 weeks ago was that I heard a loud like crack in my room, right? And I woke up and I was like, what if I can't sleep anymore? And then that vicious cycle continues and you can't sleep anymore. And yesterday though, here's the solution to it. Um, I used an app called Insight Timer, which is a former client, and they— there's a sleep story. And so you— my mind doesn't focus on trying to sleep anymore. It just focuses on the story. And the story's so boring and so soothing that I just fall asleep. So that's a lesson for you. It's to take your mind off of trying to over— you can, you can over-optimize things. Just like, let me, let me tie this back to marketing. It's when you try to measure everything.

Yeah. Yes.

And that is not good because it's analysis paralysis.

So I got a text from my wife early this morning, 7:31, because my wife was still in bed. I'm like, why the heck is she still in bed? She's like, dude, William, who's my son, was awake from 1 AM to 4 AM last night in our bed.

Doing what?

In our bed.

Did you not notice him or something?

I noticed that he came in there. I didn't realize it was that long. I just went back to sleep. I'm just going back to the sleep thing. I don't really have sleeping issues. Like anything that happens like that, or if I'm on a plane, I just fall right asleep.

No, you're good about— actually, no, we've, we've flown together before. Yeah. You're— Yeah.

I'm really good at sleep.

When you saw me, when you took that picture of me when I was knocked out. Yeah. I needed to take something to fall asleep. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, hopefully you can get back to normal. I don't know how many hours you normally sleep.

8, 7 to 8. Yeah.

I'm around 8.

Yeah. So here's a, here's another one over here. Do you, I mean, look, you've got a couple, you go.

Yeah. So funny enough, we were talking about Teslas earlier today and the other day. Dude, did you see their Q1 earnings?

Uh, yeah, it tanked.

It tanked. They missed deliveries. It was one of the worst quarters that they had in 4 years. It was Tesla quarterly deliveries declined for the first time in nearly 4 years. And you saw what they did from a marketing perspective after that?

No, what did they do?

It took them roughly a few days to a week, but then they started discounting the Model Ys by $7,000, up to $7,000.

More. $7,000 more discount.

Yes, because if you look at last year, these cars were really expensive. And I remember my co-founder Mike bought a Model X. Is that the biggest?

The one that goes like this?

Yeah, yeah, the wings. And he bought a Plaid or Plaid or whatever it's called.

Plaid, yeah.

Plaid.

Oh, the X is Plaid or the S is Plaid?

The X. He doesn't have an S. He has an X. He has 2 Xs. And one of them's Plaid.

Plaid's the highest tier.

And I think he spent like $150,000 or $160,000 or something like that. I don't have the exact price. But he's like, dude, the prices have gone down a lot. And now not only have they discounted them in 2023, they're discounting even more, which I'm not an economist, but this is gonna definitely hurt their earnings going forward. Because if you keep discounting it, what does that affect?

Their earnings?

Yeah, your profitability.

Yep. Well, look, well, I don't know if it affects earnings. I don't know. I mean, if he sells more volume.

Yeah, but He's not selling the volume. He's discounting to get the volume back up. So if he discounts, it's not like the volume is going to guarantee to go back to either where it was or even higher.

But it's all he could do right now.

That's all he can do. And funny enough, speaking of stocks, did you see what Barry Diller said about Trump Media?

Yeah. Uh, I didn't, but go on.

Yeah. He said Trump Media is a scam and people buying the stocks are dopes. And what's funny is, is when you look at it, the peak of the stock was around $79. Now it's trading at roughly $46 at the recording of this podcast. But here's what's crazy. This is the power of marketing, you know, and I'm— I would short this stock, but I'm afraid to short it.

You can't.

And if you look at it, they did roughly $4.1 million in revenue in 2023. Do you know what the market cap is?

Something a couple like Hundreds of billions or something.

No, no.

$30 billion.

$5.5 billion.

$5 billion.

But that's still high. You're saying you did $4.1 million in revenue.

Yeah.

You're not making any money really in a whole year, not a quarter. And you're worth $5.5 billion. This is worse than the dot-com boom probably, right? I wasn't old enough, but like, who's worth—

That's 1,250x.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Um, I don't think it's that ridiculous. Well, okay, would I invest in it? No. But the, the Trump stock, so the Truth Media stock, the reason why you wouldn't short it is because there's so many Trump fanatics in the United States, right? You don't know what's gonna happen to it. And this is their way of saying that, hey, we support Trump, right? Because what you could say, at least half of the US, or maybe 40% or whatever, are in favor of, of Trump. Maybe it's a little higher than that. I don't know. But it's too dangerous to short this thing. You just don't know when, like, because if you short it, you're on a timetable for it. Yes.

And you can also play options to even juice your returns. But like, the way I look at it is this, it's too risky. And it just shows you the power of a personal brand. If you build a personal brand, and this goes towards Eric's model, this new model, I know you're hedging, going more broad that you've started in the last, what, 3 to 6 months?

6, 7 months ago.

Yeah, so 6, 7 months ago, Gary Vee's been doing the same model of going broad. It can work. You can make money from it.

His logic is, I want all 8 billion people in the world to know me. And like, I get it. I understand. But that's not a fit for everyone. It's a fit for him.

Yeah, and he also doesn't mind like being livestreamed or having people follow him around.

Yeah, they like your privacy.

Dude, they tried my team. I did not know this, but I was at Collision in Toronto. And I met a dude and he's like, hey. And he's like, started taking some videos of me and I didn't know who he was. And my team's like, oh yeah, we hired him for this event. He's gonna follow you around. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.

It's just not your style.

And then within like, uh, 10 minutes, he quickly realized I was not down. He's like, how about when you just talk to him? I'm like, no. He's like, how about if they're cool with it? I'm like, no. And then it was funny cuz I was like, oh, you're cool. You, you can just go home. We'll pay you for the day. Yeah.

Yeah.

And he's like, Yeah, but I haven't finished recording the content. I'm like, yeah, it's okay. I don't want to be recorded.

See, the funny thing is your team knew to like stick it in there and see what happens versus ask, because they knew if they asked you, you would say no, right? Now, when I've hired people to do that initially, remember Noah, right? I hired him to follow me around initially. And after like, I don't know, 3, 4 weeks of it, I was like, dude, let's just shoot videos in the office. Like, don't follow me anymore. Because like, also it's dangerous when they follow you. I saw him almost like Like eat it on the floor, like on the street. It's like, I just, I just don't want that. I'm good with that. Yeah. I think it was really novel when Gary first started to do it. But the thing I didn't get to talk to him about was like, hey man, your YouTube views are kind of fading. Like it's all documentation. Um, and that's why the views are fading. But I think it's because talking about stale formats, that format might be getting stale. Yeah.

But some of his formats also do well. I agree with you, but some of his formats are still performing well on TikTok.

He crushes on Reels.

Yes. TikTok, Instagram. He's doing well. still on many platforms out there.

Yeah.

I don't believe you can win all the platforms. I think you can start doing well, but there's phases. And what I mean by that is if you look at, um, if you look at mass consumption of content, a lot of people even in the Bay Area are like, hey, do you know Alex Hormozi or Cody Sanchez? If you look at their view count, forget follower count, They're crushing most people, including you, me, and almost most social media influencers.

When I look at their views, it's like 130 million per month. That includes Shorts views, obviously, but that's still a lot of views.

Yeah, they're getting more than most people with a fraction of the followers.

Yeah.

But just like the people before them, there's going to be new people after Cody and after Alex that are going to start getting the limelight. It's just a question of when.

You know, I had a conversation— oh, actually, speaking of fame for a second, The thing with fame is, let's say you become the most famous person in the world, it fades very quickly, like maybe in a year or 2, and then somebody else comes up. Like, it keeps going back and forth. People keep cycling in and out. Um, so food for thought if you're trying to become famous. It's not forever.

No. And when I was younger, I tried to focus on like getting my name out there in the marketing industry as much as possible. And as I grew older, I met people, and some of these people worked at private equity funds or they're venture capitalists. And they had competing companies. And I was like, how the heck are these companies so much bigger than us with a fraction of the traffic, barely any social followers or any of this? And a lot of them were just running basic M&A playbooks. And when I look at a lot of my competitors who are larger than us, they're just like, yeah, we're just going to spend $200-300 million here, $500 million there. And if you look at their numbers, they're better than ours. Mm-hmm. That model has made me shift my strategy over the years to instead of spending as much time creating social content, I actually spend more time on M&A calls and doing outreach and trying to find companies to buy than I actually spend on creating content. And that's including having a head of M&A who worked for Dentsu Aegis, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He ran all of M&A for Americas and we have an M&A team. I still spend, with having that person and a team, I still spend more time on M&A than actually building content or doing marketing now.

It goes back to people playing to your strengths. So for example, if I said, Neil, go manage someone, he'd be like, no, never, right? But if it's like, hey, let's talk strategy, M&A goes into strategy, then it's like, yeah, all day, let's talk about this. And I think you've, instead of talking about content strategy, now you're just talking about M&A strategy. And going back to Neil being a math boy, he's just going to where the numbers are. It makes sense at— you know, your, your scale right now. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber, and we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed And Bulky, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more. And we'll see you inside. Speaking of which, we had a mutual friend today tweet something about how— so Andrew Wilkinson tweeted that private equity sucks at marketing. And then Neil, for the first time ever, I've seen Neil respond to something on Twitter. Do you want to give the story?

No, you could talk because I think I just responded with, yeah, but they may not need marketing and they still make a ton of money.

That's exactly what happened. So do you want to explain the thinking behind that?

Again, well, first off, I'm going to load up Twitter because I didn't even see what happened.

You got 4 likes on that post from when I saw it.

Let's see. He said private equity sucks at marketing. And I put, but they don't need to be good at it, wink. A lot of them have their own playbooks and the returns on large sums overall has been great, especially with the use of debt. And You know, got 8 likes and 2 comments. I don't know what the comments are saying. I don't, you know, I'll read them later on. But the overall thinking about this is I've been an LP in a lot of companies over the years, venture funds, private equity funds, hedge funds. And, you know, some of them are large where they're managing billions and billions of dollars. And what I've learned over the years is my way of growing a business plays to my strengths. You end up finding something, you figure out where they're messing up on conversion optimization and marketing, you buy, you fix it, and you grow the traffic, you grow the conversions, you add in more upsells and downsells, you make more money, you know, you create a great return on the buy. And a great example of this is when I bought AnswerThePublic, I paid $8.6 million.

On revenue?

Yeah, for a company that supposedly did around $130,000 a month in revenue. And they said most of it was profit other than server costs.

$130 grand.

$130 grand, sorry.

Yeah.

And that wasn't true because you know this just like everyone else, you got to actually have employees for support and all this kind of stuff. The real profit on that company was closer to like $800 grand from our calculations. And I was paying roughly 10 times profit.

Mm-hmm.

Now, when I look at that business today, playing on my strengths, once I bought that, and it took— we had someone in place who was in charge of running it, things moved slow. I took it over, I made my changes, no joke, in less than 2 months, 2 and a half maybe max. And once I made my changes, wiped my hands clean, I was done, I moved on. And I now bought that business, if I look at my EBITDA, for less than 3x, I'm at 2-point-something.

So it works out.

Yes, but that's playing on my strengths. When I look at a lot of private equity companies that I know, they'll be like, Neil— and I'm making this scenario up. I know Single Grain does everything, you do SEO, pay-per-click, etc. But private equity will look at it like, Eric, you mainly sell SEO services. This is what you're great at. And they'll say, hey, I forgot that dude who's based in Fullerton, nice guy. He owns a pay-per-click shop. You know who I'm talking about too. Either way, let's say a guy's name is John. John, you only sell pay-per-click services for e-commerce and businesses that are mid-market. Eric's focusing on the mid-market business.

Huh.

And then we got this other person over here, Susie, who is focusing on conversion optimization and email marketing and social media. So what they'll do is they'll take Eric's company, they take John's company, they take Susie's company, they combine them, They take all of Eric's customers and they sell them pay-per-click, social media marketing, email marketing, conversion optimization. They take all of John's clients, sell them SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization. They take Susie's customers, they're already paying for social, email, and conversion, and they sell them pay-per-click and SEO. When they do that, there's a few things that happen. The average revenue per customer goes up. The LTV goes up also because the customers stay longer and churn goes down, and the accounts are much more profitable. You only paid so much to close the deal. They're staying longer. You only need one account manager. You don't need 3 account managers. At scale, the economics get better. That playbook for private equity has done really, really well. Look at MountainGate and our space. They bought Elite SEM. Bought a few other companies, tucked them in, turned it into Tenuity. They sold that thing for a crazy multiple. It wasn't 20 times EBITDA, but it was close to it. MountainGate isn't the best at ranking on Google or building a social following, yet the model's worked really well for them.

It's going back to playing to your strengths. And actually, so when I asked Gary Vee, I was like, hey, how do you plan on buying the New York Jets? And one of the things that he said was VaynerX, his agency holding company, He's looking at this from a private equity angle. He wants to go acquire not just agencies, he wants to acquire a bunch of different businesses and add in his thing, right? Which is marketing. His argument is, I'm going to do private equity, I'm going to add in marketing because private equity sucks at marketing. But to your point, maybe private equity doesn't need to be good at marketing because they have the roll-up strategy. And what Neil's also talking about too is multiple arbitrage. You guys can Google that if you want to understand. Wait, how come if I combine a bunch of things, it's worth even more? Well, multiple arbitrage.

Yeah, what Eric's saying on multiple arbitrage is, if a company is smaller, they're typically not worth as much from a multiple. So if a company is doing $1 million in EBITDA in the marketing space, they may be only worth 3, 4, 5 times profit, and they may not get all that money upfront. If someone's at $20 million in profit, someone may pay them 10, 12, 13 times profit. So what a lot of private equity shops do is they're buying a lot of these companies that are doing $1, $2, $3 million in profit and paying no more than 5x. You start buying 4, 5, 6 of them over a few years. Next thing you know, after cross-selling and everything, you're at $12, $13 million, even though you paid 5x, 6x max. If you're able to sell the business at 12 times, You just doubled your money. And a lot of these guys aren't just buying these businesses with cash, they're adding on debt to it. So they didn't double their money in many cases because they're adding debt. Sometimes they can triple their money or the economics can even be better than that.

All right, so I got something interesting here. So Chase Bank has entered the advertising game. So I don't know if you know this, Neil, but Chase has 80 million American customers, 40% of US adults, $1.5 trillion in credit Debit spend and $8.5 billion in Chase offers revenue in 2023. So think about it this way. This is called Chase Media Solutions. If you're logging into your Chase dashboard or maybe your app and you buy a lot of beauty products or you buy a lot of, I don't know, entertainment stuff or stuff for your kids, those are the types of ads that you might see, right? So they're going to roll out— they have a lot of first-party data. And this could be— this could be really interesting. I mean, it's another channel to go after. And iOS, Apple, They can't do anything about this. So this tweet came from Jonathan Snow. And I think it's interesting. We'll see if it's going to be, you know, more of a, you know, auction-based model where you can bid on CPM or CPC, or if it's going to be more of an affiliate model, which is a kind of performance-based play.

So when Chase is going into marketing, are they just trying to shove banner ads? Or is it more of like doing what— I don't have a Chase card. But you know, I know you have American Express. You know, when you log into your Amex, if you scroll to the bottom of the like deals of the week or month, and you just click add, add, add, yeah, and you get—

so that's That could be an affiliate model, right? So, um, but I see it being a combination and they haven't disclosed yet, but it could be a combination of both the affiliate model that you're talking about, Neil, and also banners too. Huh. Yeah. So it's like, why would we not look at this? You know?

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

Speaking of big corporations, did you hear how Apple's, uh, they stopped their car division?

Yep.

And then they shifted focus to, uh, robots.

Robots?

Oh yeah, they're gonna build robots for homes now. That's a rumor.

That makes sense. This is why it's gonna get— Tesla's a robot company, so is Figure, and then Apple. Yeah, so it's gonna be interesting to see where things go.

But all right, so I know you're a Tesla fan, and I have one, or I will have one in a month or so. Would you buy a Tesla robot for your house or Apple robot?

It's tough. I think right now, this very moment, yeah, I'd buy a Tesla one. Now, if you say in 5, 10 years, I'd buy an Apple one.

So, why would you buy a Tesla one right now?

Because they're way further along, I believe. They've had robots and then they just— they're further along from a product development standpoint. Yeah. But I do believe Apple has some of the best people in the world working on it. I think they'll catch up, if not make it even. And we'll see what happens.

So for me, I would buy an Apple robot. I do think they're going to be—

Hey, what happened to your Vision Pro?

The Vision Pro I gave back. It was no good.

You gave back or you returned it?

Returned it back. I didn't give it back. I returned it. I got my money back. The problem with the Vision Pro is I think it's amazing technology, amazing device. It's too heavy. It gives me headaches. I think I'm the right buyer for version 3 or version 4. I love it. It's just like to travel with it, It's bigger than my backpack. I can't even put it in my backpack. The case is that huge.

That's how I saw it. I had no idea because you're very thoughtful with how you take risks. And I'm just like, yeah, I'll probably buy Vision version 3 or 4. But you went for the first one.

But it was cheap. It was like only like 2, 3 grand.

Guys, you can clip that.

No, no, no. I don't mean it that way. But like, for the technology you're getting, it's not expensive. Yeah.

It's like a computer. Exactly.

That's how I looked at it. And I'm like, well, if you use it for a year or 2 years, and I don't really buy stuff, right? Like other than You know, I don't even know what I buy. I don't even buy clothes these days.

Dude, okay, look, Tesla's, uh, their robots, they can— they— there's a video of a robot walking around the entire factory, and they can— I think they can dance, they can move around, and they can— there's more stuff they can do versus like a Figure robot right now. I don't know if you've heard of Figure.

I have not.

Figure's another robotics company. Um, but like, look, we are going to go into a future where we're going to all have robots.

So I would buy Apple, uh, Apple robot for 2 reasons. The first reason is the ecosystem. So when you're thinking about just general use case, if it can plug in with my phone, it can plug in with my computer, it can plug in with my TV and all the other stuff I do, which Apple already has a lot of devices that people use, it just makes life easier. The second reason that I would buy an Apple robot over a Tesla one is I think they'll make the user interface Better and more usable.

Yeah, I mean, this is why we're both with Apple devices in front of us. It's just a better experience.

It is like, dude, so when I test drove the Model 3 for the very first time, I know I bought it.

You drove it?

I drove it.

You? Yeah. You?

Yes.

Why you?

Oh, I was buying the Model 3. It was meant for me to drive.

Neil's a bad driver, that's why.

That's why I bought it. It has a lot of guardrails. It tells me when I'm about to hit a bumper. I was like, oh, this is great, I could be a bad driver. So when I was driving the Model 3, I'm like looking at the dash right there above the steering wheel. There's no speedometer. And then I look at the windshield because the windshield on certain cars, you know, like my wife's car, it shows you the speed on the windshield. Like it reflects it up so you can look straight. I'm like, oh yeah, that would be convenient. Nope, not there. It's on the computer screen on the right side. I'm supposed to be looking at the road. I'm not supposed to be looking at the right side to figure out how fast I'm going in the car.

So what's your complaint is it's not user-friendly?

It's not as user-friendly as it should be. I don't think you'll have those issues with Apple. They're slower typically to market, but when they come to market, they think things through.

It's typically the best user experience.

Yes.

Yeah. By the way, do you know which sites are actually not getting hit too hard by Google's updates?

I'm going to go with Quora and Reddit because we talked about this earlier.

Yeah, Quora and Reddit are fine, but those are more UGC websites. So yeah, that's actually a fair categorization. But Lily Ray tweeted this. So she said, looking at niche travel sites, I think it's fair to say that the recent updates have been brutal for many of these sites. But there are some interesting examples of small travel blogs that didn't get hit by the helpful content updates. And so here's what these sites seem to be doing. So these are the trends that we can explore here. They've been travel blogging for a really long time. 2, they seem to be doing an exceptional job writing firsthand experiences. So double E-A-T, experiences in one of those.

It's experience expertise, experience expertise authority.

I feel like experience and expertise are like the same thing. But—

No. So here's a great example for this. I hope no one has cancer. But let's say someone has cancer and they're breaking down their experience going through chemo. That's you breaking down experience. Expertise is—

Oncologist.

Yes, talking about how chemo and how it's working.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Good. Thanks for calling that out. Okay, so they're sharing firsthand experiences and only sharing highly opinionated pieces about places they have been with original photography. There's no mystery about who these bloggers are. They are well-known in the space and have a big following. These sites appear to be much less SEO-forward, which is like hyper-optimized for SEO, and use less overly optimized titles, headlines, etc., than some of the travel blogs that were hit. So what does this all say? If I'm consolidating these points over here, they're just writing naturally. They're writing because it seems like they enjoy it and they're not writing just for SEO purposes. That's at least what this takeaway is. And there's a— there's 2 graphs here that we'll pull up for the screen. But Neil, you can see this green graph over here. Those are the sites that are like after the update starting to do well. And then these are the sites that got hit.

Dude, and speaking of not optimizing titles and stuff for SEO, the same goes with social media. The other day I put on Twitter, one of my teams sent it to me, they even came up with the headline. It was head of Instagram reveals the truth about follower count. That's like catchy. It's clickbaity, right? And it wasn't like clickbait where you're deceiving.

This is Adam one that you're talking about? Yeah.

And that post on my Twitter got 3,900 views. All right. And then I noticed it wasn't doing well. So the same day I put out my own tweet that my team didn't send me and I put, my favorite marketing strategy still to this day is giving away something for free. Not freemium, not a trial, but really free. And then I go on to explain. They got 31,000 views, didn't try to optimize, didn't try to come up with a catchy headline or anything, just wrote based on what I wanted to share and I thought would be valuable to people.

How many hours— or sorry, how many words do you think you're writing per minute on Twitter per day?

I don't know how many words per minute I'm writing.

Not words per minute, just overall.

Maybe 200 max.

200 max, okay. So I— and you've been doing it very consistently for the last 60, 70 days or so? Uh, since October. Oh, okay. It's been a while. And how has that gone for you?

It's gone really good.

Yeah. And that might take you like 15 to 30 minutes to write depending on how dense the topic is?

No, no, no, no. Like 4 minutes, 5 minutes.

For 200 words?

Yeah.

That's a lot in 4 minutes.

I just think of whatever's gonna come from my head and I just type.

Okay. How fast do you type per minute?

I don't know.

Anyway. Okay. So I wasn't going anywhere with that question. I was just curious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, but I know I can type pretty fast per minute, but let's say something takes me 5 minutes to type out.

Yeah.

It actually takes me longer to copy and paste it from Word, paste it into Twitter, and then I go through Grammarly and I collect all my errors cuz I have terrible grammar.

Mm-hmm. So, okay. I just started this habit. So back in the day, Neil, when you, you, you blogged a lot back in the day, how many words were you trying to write per day?

Uh, there wasn't a specific word count. I would just blog. Same with like Twitter. When I look at like my word counts, I'm looking at one right now, like what I posted today. I know it didn't take me more than 5 minutes, but this is looking like it's more like 120 words than 200. I just—

So back in the day, it really doesn't— like Neil has his habit. It's not so much based on word count or whatever. He just goes, right? Goes with the flow. And that works for some people. I just used to have a habit where This is probably when I first met you online. I was writing 500 words per day, 500 words per day. And it was a good habit. I just stopped doing it. And so, on the Sunday, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, tweeted that, looking for accountability partner to write 500 words a day or like, you know, 30 minutes of writing per day. And then, a bunch of people responded. I came out. I was like, hey, I'm in. And then, he ends up texting me and okay, we're each other's accountability buddy. So, each day what we're doing is He's writing for 30 minutes, I'm writing 500 words. And then he'll text me and show what he wrote and I might give some feedback on it or whatever. But the whole thing is this accountability thing, it's embarrassing if you fail. So, I'm actually behind right now by 500 words. I need to write 1,000 words after we record today. But the fact of the matter is I think this habit is going to continue to compound because I think some of my better writing has happened this week and it's doing better too. It's not going viral by any means, but at least I'm getting my thoughts out. And writing forces clear thinking. And what I end up doing for my company after I write these is I end up converting a lot of these into memos and I send them to my team. And then ultimately that gets my team to take action on these things. So—

Dude, see, like I look at writing for me just in general, it comes natural and it's not hard. I think about most things in life, it's like if you really want to do it, you'll do it and you don't need pressure. Like I know you have Accountability Buddy. But you don't need it. Look at your workout routine. I, you and I talk quite often early in the mornings. You like going to Equinox at 6 or 7 AM. I forgot when they open.

7 on weekends, 5 AM on the weekdays.

And you're consistent almost every single day, correct? At least when you're here, you're there. When you're traveling, it's a different story.

But traveling, at least I still try to run in the morning. Yeah.

So it's consistent. You don't need accountability, buddy. If you want to do something like write, I've seen you create content, you'll create it. It's a question of, is, do you think it's worth the time? I think that's the biggest thing for most people. It's not about having someone who's accountable. It's, is the juice worth the squeeze? Is whatever you're doing worth it for you? If you feel value in it, you'll do it.

You can look at it both ways. So you can look at it that way. Um, and you could also look at it, you can combine it with this way. The way I see it is like, it's an experiment to see if I like this habit again. And as I started doing it again, I was like, oh, I like this. And so you can actually, you can make the argument that I don't need to do this accountability thing anymore. But it's like, you know, writing on the internet has been a net positive for both of us. And really, the high level, what we're saying is creating content on the internet has been a net positive to us.

Yeah.

And writing, I think, is one of the best ways to express yourself. And I just lost that over a period of time. But you, you kind of— you've been blogging, but I feel like the Twitter thing is reviving some of your energy with writing. That's how I feel.

When I blog, it's really easy because my Twitter Or X is the start of my blog post. And then I go in and modify whatever I need and expand upon it. Like when I write a blog post, no joke, it takes less than an hour.

Wow. And this is like your 2,000-word posts back in the day?

Uh, no, my blog posts are typically around 1,000 words. Okay. It's less than an hour.

Yeah.

I take Twitter, um, then I go and read through it.

Yeah.

Correct any errors, post it on WordPress. Yeah. Correct errors through Grammarly, cuz Microsoft Word versus Grammarly, they check spelling quite a bit differently. Mm-hmm. And I use the app for Word. I don't use the online version, if there even is an online version.

Yep.

And, uh, from there I message Saf on my team and I say, add an image at the top. So he'll create an image. And I say, wherever I put insert graph, yeah, I'm like, insert the graphs for the area. Just read it. You'll know which graphs I'm talking about because we have so many, uh, graphs within our corporation. And then I tell him Just publish the post. But I've already saved it as a draft, already switched up the URL or created my own custom URL, picked the category, fine-tuned it. So all he has to do is just add the graphs, add the image at the top, click publish, and then I just go double-check it and then I'll schedule out an email blast that I write.

Yeah, that makes sense. And actually, if you think about it, so as you're giving me the number, so 1,000 words takes you an hour. For about 500 words, it takes me about, call it 25 to 30 minutes. So it's the same thing.

Yeah.

Have you seen this platform? I forgot who shared this with me, but have you— let's talk about, you know what, so let's describe UGC. UGC is user-generated content. So that could be you posting onto like Instagram or Facebook. That's user-generated content for the platform. Now, have you heard of CGC?

No.

CGC is customer-generated content.

Isn't that UGC? Because a lot of UGC is people unboxing a product they got on Amazon or whatever.

Well, customer-generated content could be like, yeah, eventually it does become user-generated content. user-generated content in a sense. And so you could say, okay, let's say you're, you're a customer of Aquapana and they wanted you to do a testimonial video. That's customer-generated content, but eventually that gets posted as UGC. Um, the reason I'm saying this right now, this is not necessarily a new thing because I've seen this before. You've seen this too. There's a new platform called uplifted.ai and it's, it, it seems like it's, uh, it'll help you make customer-generated content using AI. So I thought that was interesting. It's good to bring this stuff back sometimes because the testimonials, the customer stuff, Tends to convert pretty well depending on your niche.

Dude, funny enough, you know, Aquapana hit me up to do a social media campaign.

Really?

Yeah.

Did you say— did you ask for free water?

No, I just said— actually, I didn't even respond to the email. I just ignored them.

Why? Why would you ignore it?

Because I don't care to get paid to post social content.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, they're like, you're an influencer paying. Okay, got it, got it, got it. How much were they offering you?

Uh, I don't know, but we get hit up at least like right now is probably averaging around 4 or 5 times a day.

For, for you to post things for money. We should talk about that too, because, well, we're literally talking about it right now. But it's— we talked about how Alexis Ohanian posted something about creator payouts going up 70%— 17, 1-7% year on year. And creators, I believe, are just going to become more powerful because in the world that we're going into where there's more efficiencies with AI copilots, all this stuff, right? What's valuable? Brand content. People want more human, right? Especially as we— there's not a need for that many more headcount. So what does that mean? Go create content, or work with someone that's creating content. You see a lot of operators partnering up with content creators to build businesses. What's that, that PE firm called? TCG, I think they did something with Kevin Espiritu, who has a $30 million a year gardening blog.

TPG or—

I don't think it's TPG. He said, because I said TPG, I was like, do you mean TPG? He's like, no, TCG. I was like, oh, I haven't heard TCG, but they partner— like, Kevin was a blogger and he— they partnered with Kevin and they gave him, you know, the, the PE playbook. Kevin then went and he went to go buy a product, um, like a gardening product, and maybe this company was doing like $8-9 million a year, and he rolled it into his, his blog. And now it's becoming like a platform. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And I believe that, you know, we're getting offers. I'm getting offers too. Not as many as you, but it's like, yeah, you know, we're just gonna keep compounding this. I'm sure we're gonna get a lot more offers. We get a lot of people hitting us up for the podcast sponsorship stuff.

Do we?

We do.

You do, I'm assuming, or we do for Marketing School?

For both, actually.

Huh.

So yeah.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. But what's better, the reason why we don't care so much for the, you know, pay us on one-off to promote Yeti or something is because we make a lot more. You make a lot more buying businesses, building businesses?

Yeah, it just comes down to, it's like, you know, one of my best influencer sponsors or whatever you want to call it that used to pay me is PayPal. And PayPal would go through Edelman each and every single time. Edelman would reach out.

You did good on that one.

And then they would pay us like $100,000 to $100,000-something every time we post like a 3-minute video. And it could even be shorter. Like they're really flexible and great to work with. And I don't know how many times we posted stuff about PayPal. We did it that often because it was 6 figures every single time. And then I got tired of doing the deals and we still get hit up by them every once in a while. And we just tend not to take on anything. It's not about someone giving us $100 grand. You know, some people are like, I'll give you half a million in equity. And you know this better than anyone else. Half a million in equity doesn't actually mean half a million dollars. It only means if they sell, You're going to get paid. It could be more, it could be less.

It's a lottery ticket. It could be zero. It's a lottery ticket.

Yeah, it's a lottery ticket. And I turned down those as well. I just don't care because it's easier for me to focus my energy on my business than anything else. It's same with like the content. Dude, someone just offered me to go to, I don't know where is it in South America, but it's somewhere in South America to speak for 3 hours for a lecture. It would be recorded, they would sell it at a college, and it was something like $220,000 or $230,000. And I'm like, I gotta speak for 3 hours? And they're like, well, half of it will be Q&A, and the other half will be speech. I'm like, is this okay?

So here's the thing, like everyone's like, I would do it, right? Here's the thing, when you start doing it for whatever amount, could be for $230,000, even, even, you know, $500 or whatever, the problem with content creators, especially YouTubers, Is they're all addicted to the money, the little dopamine hits of money. And I can tell when I meet these YouTubers, they don't know what else to do. They don't know how to build a business, and that's fine, but they should partner up with an operator instead of basically selling themselves for these one-offs because I can tell they're not that happy to promote all these things, nor do they really care about these products.

Dude, I got another one the other day. I'm going to read this message, all right? I'm going to ignore the person's name because I don't want Hey, a new app I'm helping is hosting an exclusive pop-up event in LA on April 4th featuring celebs and influencers and brands. It's live streaming, live shopping experience, kind of like QVC style. We would love to have you involved. You can join in, keep all the content for marketing. Also an opportunity for you to connect with top creators like the D'Amelio who created—

D'Amelios.

D'Amelios.

D'Amelios, yeah.

Who will be there plus many more million, with millions of fans. It's from 6 to 10 PM. Promise to be super fun. We'll have a famous musician, promoters too. We have a celebrity event planner building everything out who you may know. Invite only, max 300 invites. Interested? If so, I can send you more details. Top secret. We'd love to invite you and have you as a podcast host. Blank— I'm not going to repeat that person's name— is going. I could also have them pay you $5K to $10K for you to come, uh, be on the podcast for 15 minutes.

I'd rather go to sleep.

Dude, okay, so I really appreciate the invite. Do you think I won or not? Huh?

No, hell no. Like an emphatic hell no.

I was like, I really appreciate this, but I'm like, I just want to stay home and eat dinner with my kids. I'm like, I already travel a lot. I want to be at home and sit on the dinner table at 6 PM. And I want to eat family style, not my kid eats something different than my other kid. And then my wife eats something different than me. No, family style, we'll all eat together, no phones, and we talk about our day, even though my 2-year-old doesn't have much to talk about his day. Don't care. I'd rather do that. Life isn't always about money. And it's just like this influencer marketing thing. If you want to do it for a living, I think it's great, can pay really well for very little time spent. But Eric and I have always been fans of, it's better to take the long game. If people are willing to pay you X amount of dollars to do something, they're probably making way more in the long run, or they would hope to, you're probably better off figuring out a better way to monetize than just charging per post.

And you know what's ironic? I mean, maybe it's not ironic, but it's— look at it. Look at this as a bank account. If you're doing— you're taking these short-term hits, it feels good, but you're constantly withdrawing from the bank account. You're withdrawing goodwill from your audience, right?

No, I wouldn't have to post or anything.

I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about just in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, when you do that, but when you go along, when you think about 10, 20, 30 years or so, You tend to make better decisions that are— they feel better and it's also better for your stakeholders. And when your stakeholders, I mean your employees, your shareholders, you, everyone.

Dude, it was so funny because I was thinking, but I'm like, man, this pays for like a fourth of my Model 3 or whatever it's called. And I was like, ah, I could save some money.

You know what's ironic, guys? Those of you listening to the podcast, you hear ads too. So even we're trying to figure it out on this podcast.

Yes. But at the end of the day, you and I— look, there's nothing wrong with our partnership with iHeart.

We love iHeart.

Yeah, they're really nice people. I think if Eric and I had to change things, we don't care for as many ad plays. Yeah, right. It's—

we believe— It's not that bad right now. It's 3 minutes for every 15 minutes.

Okay. Yeah, that's still bad in my eyes.

It's a lot. I mean, I'd rather just push our, like, free resources we put out or, you know, stuff like that.

Or ideally, people into our funnel, or ideally just have like one sponsor, like a Microsoft or something like that.

Microsoft, you're welcome to come back. Yeah.

Make less money and not have as many ads.

Yeah. Yeah. Or like, I mean, look, if you really want to monetize as well, probably it's like some form of community mechanism or driving them into like a webinar or something like that. But, you know, we're busy.

Aren't we doing something called agency?

Oh, yeah. That, you know, the MRR gets the MRR on that right now. I have no idea. There's actual MRR.

There's actual MRR?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great.

And it's a pretty— it's like a very broken funnel, but it's working. There's a lot of people—

I didn't even know we were charging. Yeah, yeah.

Wait, see, just let me handle it. It's easier when it's invisible. And once the number looks impressive and it's compounding, then I'll show it to you. Yeah. So you have to know who you're working with too.

Yeah. Eric knows me well. 'Cause if he tells me like something like, oh, this can make money.

He's like, waste of time.

And don't get me wrong, I do love money like most capitalists, but like, uh, I just— there's nothing wrong with making more money, but I look at life because I have a family and kids right now. Um, if I'm gonna donate most of my money anyways, and that's what my wife and I decided, might as well do less stuff for money and just focus on spending more time with my family.

How much do your kids get? Just kidding, don't answer that.

But Eric does have a point. No, I'll be honest. Um, We've put money in a trust for them that's irrevocable. So they, you know, assuming they don't screw things up, they don't really ever have to worry about working or making money in their life. But it's not a trust where they can just go not work and just collect checks. The money is more there. So for like, if my kids— I live in an expensive city. I live in Beverly Hills, California. If my kids said, I want to move to Italy or New York, or, Dad, if you buy me a house, I'll live in Beverly Hills next door to you, I'd be like, sold. I'll buy them a house next door because I love my kids and I want to be around them for the rest of their lives and I want to be around their kids. Hopefully they have them one day. And the second thing is, other than like a basic necessity, if my kids said, I want to live in New York and go do a job there, I'd be like, cool, go find your own home. I would only pay for a home literally if they lived really close to me and I would see them all the time. The second thing the trust is there for, let's say if they have cancer or some sort of condition and they can't afford to pay for it, gladly they'll pay for it. If they want to buy a car and they want a Mercedes, go buy it on your own. If you want to buy a Honda Civic and you need it to get to point A to point B and you're struggling and you want to be a teacher and you love it, I'll pay for the Honda Civic, no problem, because you're doing a good job that's, you know, hopefully helping humanity. And on the flip side, if something wrong is happening with Earth and Elon can send people to Mars, but it costs an arm and a leg, Cool, you can use the money to go to Mars so you don't die. But it's really restricted. It's more so to just ensure that my kids aren't living on the street.

I think Warren Buffett's thing is basically not giving much money to his family. I think, you know, enough, right? Charlie Munger's like, I can't resist, take it all. So he gave it to all his family members.

No, he did not. He donated most of his money earlier on.

He— so sorry, I'm When what I'm saying is Charlie Munger gave a lot more to his family than Warren Buffett did. That's what I mean by that.

But Warren Buffett didn't donate earlier on, so his stockpile compounded much quicker. And when you look at his family, percentage-wise, it may be low. His kids don't have to really worry though. It's not like, you know, if you look at what I'm giving my kids, I don't know what Warren's giving his kids, but I bet you he's giving them more money than I'm giving my kids. Yeah, it's like Bill Gates. Remember how he said he's only gonna give—

Initially, it was like, I'm only gonna give you $2 million each. And then I think he—

No, $100 million each.

Initially, long time ago, it was only $2 million. I was like, no, I want them to, you know, understand that, you know, the struggles in life. I'm just gonna give you enough to like be okay. And then it became $100 million.

And then he got divorced. And you know what his wife said?

What?

I don't think $100 million is enough for each kid.

Yeah. So eventually parents cave.

Yeah, you love your kids. The goal is not to spoil them like crazy. You know, one of my buddies knows one of the billionaires. He's a top 10 billionaire in the world. So really high up. And his kid was going to a baseball— basketball game. And this guy has a jet and a nice jet. So my buddy's flying back on the jet with him. And my buddy's in the hedge fund world. So he's also extremely well off. He did extremely well off, actually, not like millions of dollars, but— You know, Forbes list, uh, well, and he's just like, dude, why isn't your son on the jet with you? He's like, no, no, my son needs to learn the struggle of life. He can go fly on Southwest. Straight up. And I was like, that's right. But at the same time, this person is also buying their child a home that probably costs $12, $13 million.

Dude, you can't build character without— I mean, without struggle. You think about it at the end of the day. By the way, I asked this question on YouTube, but here, I'm going to quiz you. What do you think a good YouTube click-through rate is for podcasts?

You're talking about episode of video on YouTube that is like this where we're just filming and doing a podcast episode?

Yeah.

When you're saying click-through, are you talking about someone just, you know, doing a search or looking at a video on the recommended and just clicking a video?

This is what happens when Neil doesn't use YouTube Studio. He doesn't know what I'm asking.

No, I know what you're talking about. But there's click-through from search. And there's also click-through from different channels.

No, it's just literally when you log into YouTube Studio, it says click-through rate, CTR.

Yeah, but you can also look at your search traffic and you can see the click-through rate.

It doesn't get granular. You can go granular, but just at high level, you would know what I'm talking about if you use YouTube Studio.

My guess is I don't log into YouTube Studio. He is right. The last time I probably logged in was probably like 5, 6 months ago, maybe even—

Maybe longer than that. Yeah.

I would say 4%.

Close.

You're doing good.

Close. Remember the guy we had dinner with, Jay Clouse in Boston?

Yeah.

By the way, those of you that will be at HubSpot Inbound, Neil and I will be there and we're probably planning to do a dinner with entrepreneurs there. So, it's going to— we're going to keep it small, keep it intimate. But anyway, so Jay Clouse said this. So, I can only speak to my own experience understanding that we're publishing 35 to 45-minute podcast interviews. Above 5% click-through rate in the first 24 hours is what we want. Typically, they watch 20 to 25% view, which is Which is actually pretty high. Most viewers come from the homepage or recommended. By the way, one side note on this, he mentioned above 5% click-through rate in the first 24 hours. That first 24 hours is actually what people look at because click-through rate comes down over time.

Yeah.

Especially if your video gets recommended by a lot of people. Now, that's one guy, okay? Now, Ryan Hashemi, who I had on the Leveling Up podcast, he says, trying to hit 10% click-through rate on day 1. Average CTR is meaningless. 7% is good. Less than 5% is bad. And you're aiming for an average view duration of greater than 6 minutes. One more, I'm gonna add one more over here. Josh, who runs the George Gammon YouTube channel, he sees usually for podcasts 8 to 12%. But anyway, food for thought. So let's just call it like 5 to 7% is pretty good. Yeah.

You know how I knew what the click-through percentage was?

Why?

Because I used to track that back in the day.

Yeah, back in the day. Back in the day.

Huh, we make more money from RFPs than me creating YouTube videos.

But, but you know, for our videos like this, when we go general, sometimes we're getting like 8 to 12% because we're more general, like we're more newsy topics.

Yeah. Yeah.

So food for thought.

Dude, it's funny. I was recording social media content. I think yesterday was one of these. I think, I actually think it was yesterday. So when I was recording it, my team was telling me, they're like, dude, this video did on this general topic, it got great engagement. Look at these comments. They're like, You should go create more videos like this. I'm like, but how much revenue did we generate? They're like, oh, we knew you were going to say that. And then they were just like, Neil, did you see this video that we posted on TikTok for you? You know, 'cause I recorded a new TikTok SEO feature and they're like, it drove 2.6 million views or something in like just on TikTok in the first— That's a lot. 4 or 5 days. You know, my question to them was—

How much money did it make?

Yeah, I was like, how much money? They're like, well, there's 2 of them. I'm like, probably zero.

It's like these things, you're right, in the short term, like probably nothing. But in the long term, the point I made, I was at a lunch today and I was like, who knows? Someone watching your stuff right now, if they keep watching your stuff— by the way, there's people reach out like they've been listening to our podcast since day one. And imagine they're like 15 years old. 10 years later, they become— they start something and maybe they raise a bunch of money for it or maybe they become a VP somewhere. Then they actually control budget, right?

Yeah.

That's, it's like long, long term, is there an angle there? Because we think about the rule of 7, the rule of 14, like that is one impression, right?

Yes, but here's what's funny. You know when we do our sales calls for every single customer, you know we actually ask them how they learned about us. So not only just tracking in the CRM on what caused them to convert, how they heard about us and all that kind of stuff. Do you know what drives the most revenue when we look at our social content?

Your social content?

Yeah, just content in general. We're creating content for social media, whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, because we get granular and we ask people, You want to guess what kind of content drives the most revenue for us?

Your webinars?

So, type of content specifically.

Oh, like you talking about boring shit. So for example, what I mean by boring shit is not Neil being boring. It's more so talking about, oh, blog migrations or, you know, internationalization, things like that.

Bingo. And stuff with a lot of stats and data. But Eric's spot on. It's the boring subjects, and he doesn't mean it in an offensive way. The boring stuff with a lot of stats and data on like, here's, we created AI content and human-generated content. Here's what happened over a 5-month period and comparing the stats. Most people don't care to read about that kind of stuff. That's the kind of stuff that is actually driving us the most revenue, not in the short run, but in the long run. And when we cover basic stuff like, here's what happens when you add your year to the title tag, or here's some title tag hacks, That kind of stuff doesn't do well. It does well in view count, but it doesn't— it does well in view count compared to more of the boring stuff. But when we get super technical, we get the least amount of views, we generate the most amount of revenue.

Yeah, I mean, let me ask you this, a separate question. How many lead magnets do you have? How many webinars do you have? How many on-demand webinars are sitting around? How many lead magnets actively do you have right now? A lot.

Yeah, it's too many to count. So for example, when we filmed our social content yesterday, my team has me film a lot of ads. So when we create webinars, I'm filming ads for those webinars that they put on my social.

So you guys are running paid traffic to the webinars?

And we do paid traffic. It costs us a little bit more than $11 per registrant from the United States.

How much are you spending per webinar?

It's small. I think we're only spending like $7,000.

Okay, $7,000 per webinar. Yeah.

And then once we get closed numbers from it, then we'll start ramping up.

And $11 a registrant, that's on—

US traffic.

LinkedIn?

Instagram.

Oh, interesting.

Instagram, and it's average for all social networks.

That's actually pretty good. So you're just collecting email, I'm assuming, just to get them to opt in initially?

No, a webinar registration is name, email address, phone number, company size.

Oh, that's really good.

It goes revenue, all that kind of stuff. And then we also like— I also, I did webinar ads. And then I recorded, it was either 11 or 12 ads. I actually think it was 12 for HVAC and roofing companies.

Yeah.

So 6 for HVAC, 6 for roofing companies, 2 15-second ads, 2 30-second ads, 2 1-minute ads. So it was 12. And each time I record social content, which is multiple times a month, my team also throws in a lot more ads for different industries, hotel industry. We go on and on and on. And most people are like, Why would you want to record ads for HVAC? Well, there's a lot of companies out there that—

HVAC roll-ups.

Yes, there's a lot of companies out there that like, we own 30 HVAC businesses and we do $200 million a year in revenue, right? Like there's some really big businesses out there that we take to— that we tend to take for granted.

And the reason why I ask this for everyone is understand that you probably— so we're cranking out a lot more lead magnets, webinars, we're planning on driving more paid traffic to it. You need multiple touchpoints, you need multiple lead magnets. And there's also people at different points in the funnel too. And these things also build more trust at the end of the day. And by the way, like Neil has a big email list. You're not just hitting your email list. You're probably hitting your email list multiple times to get signups, but you're also driving more paid traffic. And that's how you get more new fresh blood into the funnel. And most people underestimate how the old stuff still works really well.

The old stuff works extremely well and we take it for granted. You look at Codie Sanchez, she talks about newsletters. They're a hot business. According in her words, right? She talks about how it's an amazing business and there's quite a few that sold. I think Morning Brew was the email business, right?

Yeah, $75 million and The Hustle was like $27 million.

Yeah. And they're good businesses. Anyone who makes $25 or $75 million, that's a lot of cash. And if you look at what she's doing with her content, a lot of it is sending it to an email list because it works. It's not sexy, but it works. It says what John Reese used to say from income.com back in the day, He's like, yeah, when I need money and want to buy a Lamborghini or whatnot, I just hit up the ATM. I'm like—

You ring the register.

Yes. And his ATM was his email list.

Yep. But you still have to keep providing value to your email list, by the way. Do you know J.K. Rowling?

Yeah, the Harry Potter.

Harry Potter. Okay, so check this out. This guy's Twitter is @thehereticalliberal. Is it heretic? Heretical? Heretical. Yeah, liberal. So anyway, that's his name. So I guess this is where we're starting with it. So, it's hard to overstate how important And strategically brilliant, J.K. Rowling's power move was today—a first move checkmate that effectively neutered Scotland's dangerous new hate crime bill. So we're not going to talk about hate crimes or anything, but what she basically did here was she said these posts by J.K. Rowling were calculated to cause maximum impact on a day when a law protecting trans people came into effect in Scotland. Her canon of posts, particularly against so-and-so, which she continues to communicate through despite my advice that she take them down, is a deliberate act of defiance. J.K. Rowling has challenged the police of Scotland and the procurator fiscal service to take action. If this new legislation is to have any meaningful impact, the police of Scotland must mount a full investigation. Basically, the way I'm looking at this is her big brand of like 2.5 million plus followers or whatever it is— I mean, everyone's read Harry Potter, right? She's able to kind of effectively stop this bill because of the power of her brand. Now, we're not saying we support or—

So the bill is on— is a hate crime bill?

Yes.

And it's to give certain people rights?

I don't know enough about it. Okay. But it's hate crime. And all I know is hate crime, hate crime, and it's involving trans people.

And she pretty much said no-go on the bill.

Yeah, I'm gonna block this. And I'm going to use the power of my brand to block it. And it seems like it slowed it down. I don't know what happened to this afterwards. But basically, you think about the population of Scotland, it's like 5.5 million people. But her, like, it's way more than 12.5 million people know who she is.

Way more than that. But yes. So she pretty much told everyone to what, not vote for it or to decline it or—

Yeah.

How'd she use her social power?

Well, I don't— this is, this is like a really detailed post. I mean, this guy goes into these ideologies. Um, okay, here, let me read this. So, well, looks like J.K. Rowling did in fact place the Scot— the Scottish authorities in checkmate with one move. They've capitulated already. These cowards know they can't defend this law. They were desperately hoping they could use it to silence and intimidate the public without ever having to actually defend it. Rowling recognized what they were doing and called their bluff. Truly a masterclass in the strategic and tactical execution in winning political battles in the information age. So here's what she said. She tweeted this. I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women, irrespective of profile or financial means, will be treated equally under the law. And J.K. Rowling— so this is a BBC News thing that she tweets. There's a link. It says, J.K. Rowling hate crimes Hate crime tweets not criminal, police. So yeah, her tweets seem to have stopped, whatever it was.

That's crazy. Speaking of brands, did you see how Forbes is getting a little bit tarnished, at least in the advertising and marketing world?

They've been tarnished in the advertising marketing world for a while.

No, but did you see what they did with ads?

No, what happened?

So Forbes sells premium advertising to large brands like Microsoft, Ford, Disney, Johnson Johnson for years. But they've been putting the ads on a spammy subdomain without telling advertisers. So they use www3.forbes.com, where people may see 200 ads during this single page view, while a normal article typically has 3 to 10 ads throughout an article.

Oh.

So they crammed them in to start making way more money, and advertisers are pissed off because Dude, you have 200 ads on a page. What's the chances that they're going to click on your ad? Very little.

That's low integrity business practice when you do stuff like that because people can't trust you anymore. And Forbes is a trusted brand. Like you earlier in this episode, you talked about the Forbes list, right? Forbes has the Midas list too. They have all these billionaire lists. But when they do stuff just focused on the short term to try to make money, you start to optimize for decisions like this. And ultimately it hurts you in the long term. Yeah.

And speaking of brands going in the right direction, I hope they do more of this. You see ChatGPT is making links more prominent in the paid version at least. So if you're talking, let's say if you're asking ChatGPT a question in the paid version, there's a higher chance now that they end up showing you the source of where they got that information.

Well, that's good. I think they should be doing it. I think Perplexity does a good job of doing this.

Gemini does, I haven't seen it in Gemini yet. Have you?

I don't know.

Yeah, it could be there. I just haven't seen it. But dude, this shouldn't just be, hey, pay and you can get the source. This should be wherever we give you information, we should tell you what the source is. And I think this is super important because this will help us as marketers know— you should, yes, always double-check, but you should Know the sources because you'd be like, wait, what's this site? This is a random site. I definitely got to double-check this.

Yep, 100%. And look, we're moving into a world where a lot— we're going to see a lot more AI content. So the original source matters a lot. And if you can be— if you can't— you remember the, the whole Google, like, if you're cited in Google News, you just get an avalanche of traffic. Like, if you can be that trusted authority, you're going to get benefits. And, and I think we're going to see more of that actually in a more AI-enhanced world. Did you see this? The New York Times shared how the global time spent for New York Times-owned apps. Okay, so they have The Athletic, which is one of their properties, New York Times Games, New York Times Cooking, and New York Times News. What do you think is the fastest-growing segment for them in terms of time spent? Okay, repeat them again.

New York Times News?

So New York Times News, New York Times Cooking, New York Times Games or The Athletic, which is—

It's either going to be games or cooking.

Games. So you can see over time this graph over here. Hopefully we'll pull it up on YouTube. But Matthew Ball tweeted this. He said, the New York Times is now a gaming company on the basis of customer time spent. That's where the majority of time is being spent. And when you think about Netflix, they've added games. A lot of people are adding games. Yeah, it's a retention play at the end of the day. Why wouldn't you do that if you can keep people in your apps longer? Because if you keep them longer, you can serve them more ads or you can drive— maybe they'll purchase something else from you like one of your affiliate links because that's what the New York Times does.

Dude, did you know Netflix games do not work on an airplane?

I didn't even know. I've never attempted to play a Netflix game because I just assume it's all crap.

So I was stuck at the airport for a really long time and I was bored and I was like, all right, I'm hopping on a flight. And the flight was from Colombia to Bolivia. So it was late at night, there wasn't much to do, and I was with some people and I was like, you know what? You know, got on the plane, boarded. I'm like, let me just try one of these Netflix games out. So I downloaded them while I was in the airport. All right. Um, and then when I downloaded them, I was like, all right, let me try this. Or I actually downloaded a little bit before I was at the airport, but either way, I downloaded them and then I tried logging on and playing them on the plane. And it didn't work. It says, you need to be connected to Wi-Fi. And I'm like, screw this. So I've never got to play a Netflix game yet.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure it's all crap. So like for right now, I'm sure it'll get better over time. But I think, look, if you can find something that has a lot of engagement, that's the name of the game. We talked about earlier in this episode, views on social, views on anything now is about how good your content is. Games is another way to get high engagement. Look, think about this. Elon still plays Diablo 4. I think so. Lex Fridman plays Diablo 4. There's a lot of people that play Diablo 4. Why do they do that? Because it's addictive.

Dude, I still play Monopoly every like few months and then I play it for hours.

Monopoly?

It's amazing.

What are you even talking about? Diablo 4 and Monopoly?

I don't know what Diablo 4 is, but I know Monopoly is.

Like in-person Monopoly?

No, no, no, on my cell phone.

Oh, you know, I have Monopoly. I have, uh, The socialist edition. I'm not even joking. It's so when you watch my videos, there's a monopoly in the back, and so it says the socialist edition. Everyone, everybody loses. I've never played it. I want to play it one of these days. I'm going to open it up. We're going to we're going to play it. But here, I think we can we can do two more topics here. This is a long one, guys. Let us know what you think in the comments because we're at about an hour and twenty minutes. We're going to go for nine more nine more minutes. Karine Shu tweeted this. And funny enough, right after this, I'm going to this location. So, I wrote this blog post about Erewhon in 2020 and it's wild to see that in 4 years, Erewhon's Instagram has gone from 94,000 followers to 372,000 followers. Erewhon smoothie collabs have become so hot and culturally relevant. The Hailey Bieber smoothie as an example. That one's a really good smoothie, by the way. Also, fun fact, the name of Erewhon is derived from the 1872 Satirical novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, which actually explores AI and describes a utopia in which individuals are responsible for their own health and prosecuted for the crime of being ill. I think this is interesting because I don't know how often you go to Erewhon, but their stuff is just so high quality.

So, I don't think most people can relate because I don't think there's Erewhon everywhere.

Oh yeah, Erewhon is like Whole Foods but next level. Yeah, it's like all organic food. It is more expensive. But the quality of food, I would say, compared to other places is pretty high.

Yeah. And there's one here in Beverly Hills. I think there's one in West Hollywood.

Everywhere. West Hollywood, Pasadena has one.

Oh, there's that many?

Yeah, Studio City has one. Santa Monica has— no, it's everywhere now in the LA area.

Yeah, I've been to the one in West Hollywood years and years ago. But we order Uber Eats from Erewhon a lot.

It's expensive when you order it. It's already expensive when you add delivery. It's like adding another like 20%, 30%, 40% to it. Yeah. But anyway, my point of saying all this is that they do a good job with their marketing and they stay in their lane. They only focus on organic and the smoothie collabs I think are really smart too. It's again, it's like how do you do influencer collabs? They do it with smoothies. So, what can you do with your products?

Dude, and you know, before we wrap up, I think one topic that's— or to go back to Erewhon, What they did really well in marketing is they said, a lot of people complain about Whole Foods, they call it whole paycheck. Yeah, right. You've heard that.

This is actually whole paycheck.

Yeah, they're like, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go target the super rich or people who don't care. And they just want the best quality and they'll pay for it. And ergo, you have Erewhon. Yep. And you have it close to Rodeo Drive or on one of those streets in Beverly Hills. We've You know, I've walked to it with my wife and kids. It's expensive, but we eat it. It's a small store and it's still expensive. And, you know, that's why we pay for it.

The way I do it now, Neil, is I buy 2 combo plates, but I add in 3 taquitos. So then I can eat, I can eat 3 meals instead of just 2. Yeah. Because when you added the 3 taquitos, it dampens it. Yeah. It dampens the cost. By the way, did you know there are more and more people starting AI podcasts? So, the Darva CEO, Stephen Bartlett, he started doing this and this is a test that he's running right now where he tried to make a podcast— well, he did make a podcast, an AI podcast on Manchester United, the soccer team, the football team. And basically, it just shares news from Manchester United. And what they're trying to do right now with this is If the retention could get to at least 50% minimum, then they're happy with it. And they'll just continue to roll out these podcasts, these AI podcasts. I'm like, I think we're going to see a proliferation of a lot of these news AI podcasts, where you can even dub our voice in and change it into different languages. We'll see what happens. But if the retention is high, then why not just do a bunch of them?

Yeah. And what Eric is talking about isn't creating a podcast about AI. He's talking about using AI to create a podcast on any topic and it just cranks out tons and tons of episodes. I do think that's smart. Have you seen all the people who are posting AI social profiles? I bet you people are going to start having quote unquote AI-generated OnlyFans accounts.

There are already.

Oh, there are?

Yeah, I subscribed you to one.

Seriously?

No, I didn't subscribe you to one.

No, no, but like there really are AI. Dude, I bet you it's a killer business model.

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

You keep 100% of the profits.

I told you about, um, my— well, my friend was trying to start like a porn AI business, um, and it was kind of similar to that. It's, it's like OnlyFans, um, and they charge on a monthly model. And then also what they're planning to do is like skin whatever your preferences are and then just change up the, the videos or whatever. And so he ended up not doing it, but But someone else took it on and I think they're doing really well right now, which is crazy, right?

It is. So you remember your friend from— is it Jumpcut?

Kong.

Kong. Yeah. So good guy. I was at not really a meetup. Someone invited me to meet up and he was there as well. And it was in Vegas and it was just like 4 or 5 of us sitting in a circle. One of his friends or one of their friends from the group— I didn't really know too many people in the group other than Kong. and I knew him from your event, was an OnlyFans manager. And she did accounting and I think some marketing for some of these accounts. And she was making a killing. And I was like, holy crap, I didn't realize there was that much money in OnlyFans.

Yeah.

And it hit me at that time, you know, I was like, huh, if you know how to do all of this, if you can somehow create the character in OnlyFans that people are subscribing to, You can keep all the profits and your income would really go up, right? And now you can do that with AI.

Yeah. So I think we're going to see more and more of this. But I don't know how that's like— I've seen some of this AI content and it feels AI right now. It's just like, what do you do in the world? Like, how can you tell what's real and what isn't anymore? And, you know, we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Here's the last thing we can talk about. So I saw this tweet. This is from, uh, Joe Wang, Jeremiah Oyang, and he has this picture over here. So, I've been a professional speaker for over a decade. These rates seem accurate for today's market. And so, we can share kind of what our experience is as it relates to this rate card. But this picture, hopefully we pull it up on YouTube, says how to decide your speaker fees. And so, $0 if you're a new part-time speaker with little experience. Usually have no official brand. I think you and I can agree with that. That's true. $1,000, speakers with growing experience and branding, usually part-time but have an up-and-coming speaking business. So that's anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. True or false?

I haven't looked at speaking fees in a long time.

So people that want to make money from speaking.

Okay. All right. I think that could be true.

Now, $7,500 to $10,000 is intermediate speakers who have a growing brand and business, usually full-time speakers or close to it. I would say this is true. Actually, this is anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. And I would say when I started to get offered, it's— yeah, that sounds around that range. Yep. And then $10,000 to $15,000, intermediate full-time speakers who have solid brand business, usually just working to expand their client list and reputation. Okay, that's fair. Um, now let's talk about $15,000 to $30,000 plus, advanced full-time speakers with extensive experience, products, and services. I'll say that's not true because you and I have charged around that range. You've charged way more actually, and we're not full-time speakers.

Yes, and what's funny is the most well-known or most highest-paid speakers typically don't care for income from speaking. They have something else that makes them money.

Remember Hillary Clinton charges like $500 grand for a talk, right? Yeah.

So, I can see it for politicians. There's some industries where—

Politicians use donations. Yeah.

But on a side note, you know, with speaking, the key isn't to make money from speaking. The key is to make money from something that's bigger, sell them on to something else.

Same thing with your newsletter. Ideally, you're selling them into a higher ticket item.

Yes. And on one last thing before we go, because we had to talk about this. You see how Google considers buying HubSpot?

I saw that.

Yeah, stock jumped up 7%.

Yeah, but like what happened? Was that later? That was later in the week, right? Wednesday? It was a few days ago. Yeah, it was like Wednesday or something.

So this will be a week before this comes out, but yeah.

We'll see. I think it's a smart thing. I mean, they can buy many HubSpots. I don't know.

We'll end up finding out when we go to Inbound if it was going to actually happen or not.

Oh, then we can Google the sponsor of the podcast.

Yeah, there you go. I don't think Google will buy HubSpot.

I don't think so either.

Why don't you think so? If you look at Google, it's like saying they're going to go buy an ad agency. Why would you want to buy an ad agency? There's a lot of ad agencies out there. You don't want to cling to one. Let them all promote your ad ecosystem. There's a lot of marketing systems out there, marketing cloud. Salesforce has a marketing cloud. Adobe has a marketing cloud. HubSpot, right? Why would you want to own one? Because a lot of the other ones, they do drive revenue to you as well. I'm not saying that they're going to lose the revenue if they buy HubSpot. But you got this golden goose. Why rock the boat or mess with it? Just let it be. And yes, HubSpot could potentially help, you know, their SMBs get onboarded and grow faster. But dude, they can already—

Mm-hmm.

They already partner with HubSpot and they partner with a lot of other marketing clouds. What's the difference from them partnering with these solutions versus owning them? Owning them just means it creates more of an issue for other platforms to send potential advertisers to Google versus just partnering with all of them.

How many HubSpot customers are there?

Hundreds of thousands. If you want to include the free ones, must be millions.

Yeah. And so look, you— okay, you know, let's think about what— why do they actually want to buy them? The cross-sell, upsell a bunch of things could be something. Do they want to buy all the data from all these B2B?

But Google's not a software company. They don't own tons of software like Microsoft, at least that I can think of. I mean, they have—

they have— what do they call it? Google Cloud, right? They have Workspace. But you look at like— They could try to upsell Gemini, right?

But you look at like Salesforce and Adobe, they have tons of SaaS products. HubSpot is a SaaS product. Google doesn't own tons of SaaS products out there. They do software, but they don't own tons of SaaS.

There's probably an angle we don't know about. I don't think the deal is going to go through because of like, there's going to be a lot of pushback that's similar to the reasons that you give that I agree with. But there's probably some angle that we haven't considered.

Plus antitrust. So many people are gonna slap this and say, hey, you already own a lot of the marketing ecosystem.

Yeah, we're in a really bad regulatory environment right now where nothing goes through. Didn't the Figma thing get canceled?

It did. And then they had to pay him a cancellation fee of like something crazy.

Like a billion dollars.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's it for today. Let us know what you think about this longer episode. We'll probably chop it up a little bit for, for YouTube. And that is it for today. And also don't forget, Go to marketing school dot io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. That's where we help agency owners grow, and hopefully we get to a place where we don't need to have ads on this podcast anymore. So yeah, there's that for you. Goodbye.