The Impact of AI on Marketing and Branding

You know what's interesting? I've been watching more YouTubers and I think this is a great strategy. So Alex Becker, you remember Alex Becker?

Yeah, he used to run the ads on Instagram back in the day, right?

Very funny guy, right? And he sells like an ad tracking software called Hyros now and he has a crypto channel.

Hyros is his?

Yeah, Hyros is his. I didn't know that. Okay.

I don't know, it's a good software.

Yeah, it's a good software. So he He's— Hyros is a B2B, it's a SaaS software, right? And it's helping anybody, e-commerce or info people or even SaaS people just better track your Facebook ads, for example, right?

Specifically Facebook. And typically people, because we know a lot of people who use it, we've seen it, you usually get a higher ROI. Yeah.

So that's what he promises you in the ads, right? He says, hey, if it doesn't work for you, we'll just give you your money back. It's a good offer. So his YouTube strategy, so He's got a crypto channel and every time he puts out a crypto video, it gets like hundreds of thousands of views, right? He created an Alex Becker business channel. I was like, oh, what is this? Because he's very entertaining on the crypto channel. He'll like record with his shirt off, right? And it'll be like a Lamborghini in the background. So it's kind of like a spectacle, right? And he made this business channel and I think, so all his videos, they talk about Hyros. Like he'll just inject it in there. He's like, yeah, so that's why you got to use Hyros. Like you'll find a way to like, it's like a Seinfeld email where you talk about whatever and you just inject, that's why you got to use Hyros, right? And so each of his videos get like, know, 15,000, 20,000, sometimes 100,000 views or so. And that is better than a webinar, for example, right? You're getting wider tent, but it's not as targeted, I think, as a webinar. But I do think that channel—

Better for top of funnel.

Yeah. And it starts, that channel is starting to compound. And he does talk about, hey, like, I'll show you how, you know, I hit like a $200 million net worth or whatever, you know? And so I think that's a great YouTube strategy. And I think, look, the way you and I record, it's not exactly a spectacle. It's more of like we're lecturing and we're teaching. I do think like Like we're not gonna record with our shirts off or have a Lamborghini in the background. But I do think that drives more views 'cause it gets people to talk about it. And I think that's a— he carried over his strategy in a way that works for his software. 'Cause the other thing is he, the way he creates his ads, he uses like AI ads or he'll like make a version of him like with a girl with like, you know, like anyway, we'll just leave it at that, right? But he has a lot more leeway 'cause he doesn't have to bow down, I think, to a big list of investors or a board of directors.

I think it's self-funded, right?

I do, I do think he sold a piece of it, like a good chunk of it.

Did he?

You can look it up. Yeah. But I do think he sold a chunk of it and then he does have people that he works with now, but he still gets to call the shots.

Yeah. Let's see. Hyros raises. Did he raise money? Market share requires— oh, Hyros sold for $110 million.

Yeah. But he's still, I'm sure he gets a second bite of the apple.

So. Yeah. Total fund. No, that's Hyros Health. Or is this Hyros Health?

Hyros with an S.

Yeah, I know I put Hyros, but Google AI overview says Hyros.

Yeah.

Let's see, IPOs, specializes in averaging marketing attribution. Yeah, he sold it for $110. Good for him.

Yeah. So I think it's an interesting strategy and I think we've talked about this. The reason you and I are spending more time on YouTube is because we see the power of compounding over a 5, 10-year period and How is it going for you so far with YouTube? Would you say it's above expectations, below expectations, or meets expectations for you in the last 12 months you've been pushing harder, or last 6 months?

So the last 6 months it's been going below expectations, but I think that's because of the company that was helping me before. I think I mentioned to you, Candom.

Yeah, we talked about this on the podcast.

Right, I don't know what I was paying them. I think at the end I was paying—

$25,000?

$25,000 for 8 videos. I think it was $25,800 exactly for 8 videos a month.

Yeah.

Plus some shorts. And we're doing it for a lot less and we're using some internal resources. But when I look at the numbers now, my videos that I'm recording, when I was recording a video before, call it, they were 10 to 20 minute record times, closer to 20. Now my record times are closer to 40.

Per video.

Per video.

And each one's like 25 minutes or so, 20, 25 minutes after editing.

Call it 10 to 20 minutes still, somewhere around there. A little bit of why it's taking longer is I'm not fully developing the script myself. So someone is helping me do probably 60% of the script while before 100% of the script was for me.

Because you were making a Loom before.

I still am, but I'm spending way less time. So in theory, if I actually did 100% of the script, it would actually be more efficient just thinking about it right now because my record time would go down. So I should probably go back to doing 100% of the script. But my topics are like super technical. And I believe I just saw my first video 2 days ago while I was at Disney. I was like literally watching it on the phone while in the park waiting for my kids to finish up a ride.

You didn't even tell your wife?

No, I told my wife, I'm like, I got to watch this video.

And I got to watch this thing.

Yeah. And I'm like, I got to give feedback because I wanted it out and they were going to post it this week. And I was like, dude, it's too close to July 4th. Let's just save it for next week. The editing isn't as good, but I'm like, no one cares. If that script is better, that's all that matters. And I think people put way too much time on the video production. And I do think video production is important. You need like a minimum quality, but people want to include all the bells and whistles. And it's just like all those little things for educational B2B content in most cases does not make a difference. And I would say for most educational pieces of content, including B2C, Mm-hmm. You need decent editing or good editing, but you don't need amazing editing where it's best in class and a mediocre script. I'd rather have amazing script and average editing, and I believe your videos will get way more views.

Yeah. What I'll say is, I would say mine is going according to expectations. I think it'll compound a lot more probably in the next 6 to 12 months or so. It's interesting because I look at this graph over here. So you look at it a year ago, I might have like an outlier here that that goes up crazy, but like it's starting to grow again, right?

You can see— Is that long form or shorts?

This is long form.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's starting to move up, right? And I think again, if we just keep doing this, I think the thing, I tweeted this last week, but if there's anything, and I've mentioned this before, we, I won't say we're necessarily the best marketers in the world, but I would say we're the most consistent, right? There's a lot of people right now, I look at them on YouTube, I think they're going to flame out over a period of time because they're just chasing trends.

Yes.

I think if we stay consistent to who we are, then overall, over a long period of time, you're going to win. Now, let me give you some examples. There are some people that just record this stuff on N8N workflows, for example, or the newest AI tools, right? The way I try to straddle it right now is whatever AI stuff I'm testing, but then tie it to business. That's my angle with it. And then you, for the most part, your technical topics, what are they now?

My technical topics, some of them are AI, AI related to marketing. But yeah, I would say Overall, I'm trying to get more specific towards enterprises versus just anyone who's interested in content. But if you look at my long-form views, dude, they're down 300 to 398,000 views on a monthly basis. Keep in mind, I haven't posted a video in a month.

Yeah.

So I'll start posting again.

Hit Shorts.

My Shorts is through the roof, but they've also changed how they calculate that.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stats for Shorts. So it's skewed in my opinion. But if you also look here, I haven't been publishing Shorts either. So I'll go back to publishing Shorts and long-form content. When I look at like last 90 days, like check this out, Shorts, it was way better. And when I go to long-form videos, it was way better as well. But the problem I'm facing right now is I haven't published content in a month, at least on YouTube. But that'll change literally this coming up week.

Dude, can we— okay, before we move into one of your topics, I want to talk about spectacle marketing. And so if when you look at MrBeast, his videos, they're all spectacles, right? It's like, oh, here's a $1 date versus a $500,000 date, or here's a $1 boat versus a billion-dollar boat or something like that, right? Now, you saw Cluey, right? That company, you heard of them?

That was the one where they raised quite a bit of money.

They raised from Andreessen Horowitz, right? So I watched an interview with this guy and he's a kid, literally, he's 21 years old.

The guy who like tried to do something during the Y Combinator party or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he threw like a Y Combinator, he threw a party, like a legit party, right? Where it's like 50/50 ratio invite only. And then he was getting interviewed by this guy, Brett Malinowski. And so I should talk to Brett about this at some point, but basically he's like, okay, YC, everyone throws these networking events. He's like, that's That's freaking boring, right? I want to do a party where it's a legit like 50/50 ratio guy-girl, and it wants to be— it has to be invite only because it's going to be exclusive, right? But when they first released Clue.ly, he had a video that was super high production where he was like on a date with a girl, and then you could see him wearing glasses, and then it was telling him what to say, right? And that's how Clue.ly works. It tells you what to say or tells you what to do on like a sales call, for example. Like that person saying this, okay, you should know this about this person, right? It's like a heads-up display, basically.

Hardware.

No, it's not even hardware. That video seemed like it's hardware, it's actually just software right now. And then he was getting asked, are you gonna get into hardware? He's like, oh, maybe, right? Who knows what's gonna happen? But his whole thing is he always tries to do outlandish stuff. And so they made a launch video on how they're hiring 50 interns or how they're paying, like they want an army of these creator interns that they'll pay $50 an hour. And then if they hit a million views on a video, they'll bonus them $1,000, right? And then he'll hire these engineering interns and pay $200 an hour or whatever. But his whole thing is like, you have to like stand out And I do think that's a nice way to get press in the beginning. I think that's a big reason why Andreessen backed them. I do think though, if you keep doing this for the long term, you're going to burn out and you're going to— it's actually not going to compound in a positive way for you in the long term.

Yeah.

Now, don't get me wrong, who else does a good job of spectacle marketing? Trump does a good job of spectacle marketing. Elon does a good job too, right? But there's a price to pay with that is my point. There's always trade-offs to this. So I think you can grow a big audience certainly, but there's trade-offs to it versus like, Gary Vee, he's always been consistent about positivity. So it's really hard to like burn him or try to go after him for something. So trade-offs.

No matter what kind of content you create, people still do go after you. If you look at Gary Vee, a lot of people go after him. I wouldn't say as many as—

Not as many though.

Yes. As the ones who do spectacle marketing. And you just have to get good at ignoring the haters because like generally speaking, if you watch Gary's content, Someone could try to hate, but there really isn't anything to hate.

There's nothing to hate.

Yeah. And when people hate on him, it's of silly things. But if you actually look at what Gary's done as a career, he's done extremely well in multiple industries, multiple exits. He's a great entrepreneur. But I think a lot of people just hate because of jealousy more than anything else.

Yeah, it's usually an internal thing. It has nothing to do with them. And so, but I do think When you do spectacle things, you do increase a surface area of people that are watching you. And like, by the way, you know, it's not like, I mean, you've tested in the past, right? In certain situations. And so like, you've seen what the trade-offs are.

And I think you can do spectacle marketing in many different ways. You can do like the MrBeast running with different amounts of money in a backpack and not saying anything because that helps you get more reach globally, at least on some of the platforms. You can do stuff like Alex Becker. I think he used to do a lot of Lamborghini stuff. I could be wrong on the car type.

Yeah, he does a lot of make money online stuff.

Yeah. You can do stuff like Alex Hormozi where I would say he does it, he has content without his shirt on, at least in some of his videos. Or showing that he's buff or jacked. Right. There's different ways of it. But what I found is nothing beats just creating a really good product. Like look at Lovable, you know, Lovable is getting a ton of press. What kind of marketing is Lovable really doing?

Not much. It's a great product.

And I think they're at, in 6 months or something like that—

$70 million?

I think it was $60 million in ARR in like 6 months or $50 million in ARR. It was one of those figures, but it was fast growth, a lot of revenue and a low period of time. And when you look at the publicly traded stocks, the biggest companies don't do any form of this kind of marketing, spectacle marketing. They just have a really good product or service in a big TAM.

Yeah, and you know, by the way, you talked about Lovable, so I read this post from this person that works at growth there, her name's Elena, and she talks about how she's worked at all these high-growth startups before, right? But at Lovable, literally everything is built through AI, like if like prototypes are AI, like everything's done through AI, everyone's AI first, right? And they're just moving a lot faster, and she wrote out this post about the AI-native employee. And that's kind of where we want our employees to be, right? But they actually are living it. And then when she wrote about the experience, I'm like, this is where things are going. And I think this is what all founders complain about right now because they want their companies to become that. Yeah.

So I showed you before we started recording, uh, the new version of AnswerThePublic, right? It's quite a bit different than the existing one, has more features. Guess how long— and the existing one's built on Ruby on Rails.

Uh, I haven't heard that in a while.

Yeah. So they're getting rid of all of that existing technology and rebuilding it. Guess how long it's How long did it take you to launch a whole new version of a product with more features?

A month?

I wish. 2 months.

2 months.

That's still pretty fast. We have existing users, so you gotta port, right? So there's some extra work, but 2 months is pretty good.

That would've taken you like a multiple of 3 to 4x before, maybe longer.

Dude, the existing person who was running that company was just like, yeah, it'll take a year. And I was like, huh, how do we end up fixing and changing all this stuff?

1/12 the time. Oh no, no, no. 1/6. 1/6.

1/6.

1/6. Yeah.

The existing person was—

I kept thinking a month.

The existing person was really good. We just wanted to go a different direction with the product and I was like, all right, let's just run this lean. AI is here. We're going to adapt our products. Everyone is used to traditional search. We're going to revamp it all for AI. We're going to revamp it eventually. Like I was even talking to the team. I was like, when you look at marketing products, You know, and you even have Carrot for ABM.

Yeah.

But what I was telling people, I'm like, we're thinking about products wrong. And they're like, why? And I actually had a call with them this morning, today being July 4th.

They're not celebrating July 4th, are they?

These team members were in Brazil, so for them they're working.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't force anyone to work during a big holiday. But when you look at the app, Forget just our app, when you look at most marketing apps, they tend to all give you tons of data. Would you agree with this?

Yeah.

And I was like, this is wrong. And they're like, why? I'm like, we're moving in a world where people aren't really paying for the data. Even before, they weren't really paying for the data. They were using the data to get a specific outcome.

Mm-hmm.

And, or they were hoping to get a specific outcome from it.

Yeah.

Like, oh, you gimme keywords, I'm going to use this data to go create content, get more traffic. The traffic generates more sales or leads, and I generate more revenue.

Yep.

And I was like, why don't we just tie in the whole funnel or workflow and just do it for people?

Yep.

So it's like you do the research. Okay, you got the research. Ask them where they want to create content, what, for what platforms, recommend the type of format of the content. They can select which versions they prefer, create it, have them sync to their platforms, post it, collect the data, and then Figure out what's working and what's not. And then continue. And then continue.

Yeah.

And then revise what you recommend and saying, these are the topics recommended. Here are other popular ones, but these ones have not done well on your platform, so we recommend these. Can you please approve us to go create content for you automatically? Yes. Here are the outlines. Looks good. Cool. We will create it. Can we post it on these times? Yes. Approved. Automatically done. Once it starts going, then you start asking, hey, can we just create the content without sending you the outlines and without your approval? And you start eliminating steps. They may say, no, we want you to, we still want to see the outlines. Or they say, we don't need to see the outlines, but we want to see the final product before it's posted. So then you start going through this and like, cool, you can start automating a lot of marketing for corporations. It's not going to be perfect. I don't think it would be as good as having a team combined with AI. But for SMBs that barely have money, they would gladly pay $100, $200 a month for something like that instead of hiring people because they can't afford the people.

Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. You know what's interesting? So this topic, guys, we've talked about this and we'll continue to talk about this, but we see the world of marketing going into this one-click future where it's just like, hey, do you just want us to do it for you? And then you can continue to iterate on it, right?

Yes.

And so that's where I think the future of SaaS is going. Now, what's interesting to me, by the way, is what we're talking about AI, we're talking about remote work kind of a little bit too, but did you see the story about Soham Parikh? I don't know who that is. How do you pronounce his last name? This is your kind.

So Han Parekh, I don't know.

Okay, probably getting it wrong. Oh, you don't know the story about this guy?

No, I never heard of him.

Okay, so, okay, first let's finish the thread on the AI piece. But what Neil just mentioned, look, 1/6 of the time to build Carrot, by the way, I think it's probably around the same time. We're just much faster than before, right? You just, you couldn't do this before. And so that means that the expectation for talent's going to continue to get higher and your expectations have gotten higher too. And so the one thing I tell my team now, especially leadership, is guys, If there's one thing I will micromanage till I'm dead is the talent bar. I'm going to continue to raise that every single year and I will micromanage who we bring in too, because that is the one thing that I can control best. Oh, and by the way, I paid $500 for this book where they interviewed Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. In fact, I think if I were to give you this book, you'd probably read it. In fact, I will bring it after I finish it because I think you will actually read it. So it's interviews with Scott Cook from Intuit, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, I think, was it Bill Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard? Something Hewlett, right? But it's like all these people and there's like an Asian name in there too.

What's the name?

It's Company of Giants. I think it's $500.

I'll just get the books on tape.

Huh?

I'll get the books on Audible.

It's not on Audible.

Oh, it's not on Audible?

Yeah, dude, it's not in print anymore. So you can, if you go to Amazon, if you look it up, it's $500 for the book. So I'll just let you borrow it. It's a quick read. I'll buy it. No, I don't think you can buy it. Can you buy it? Try buying it right now.

What is it called?

Because see, guys, this is word of mouth. Company of Giants.

Company.

I'm going to do a book review on this too. So, and then I want to, as Neil's pulling this up, I want to talk about Soham Parekh. Do you see it? How much is it?

In the Company of Giants?

Yeah.

Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World?

Yep. How much is it?

$500. You're right. There you go.

But guys, the value you're going to get from this, if you are a leader and you're trying to grow, I believe is multiples of this. I always look at this as, can I get a 2x multiple on it? And if you can't get a 2x multiple on this, I don't know why you're listening to this podcast, but I think it's worth it. So do you buy it?

I'm going to buy it.

Okay, let me tell you about this guy. Okay, this guy Soham. So everyone was talking about him on X this week. So many people, he was preying on YC companies. He interviews really well. He's based in India.

Okay.

What he would do is he'd get a job at like, I don't know, any company, right? And they pay him like $150,000 to $200,000 plus equity.

A Y Combinator company or any company?

mostly Y Combinator companies.

Okay.

And so because he'd interview so well, he'd get the job. And then what he would do is he would have an army of people. He had like a dev shop in India where he basically was farming the work out to other people. And so many people hired him. And one guy reported him basically saying, hey guys, there's this guy, Sohan Parekh, and he's going around Silicon Valley preying on companies. He's actually not doing work. And then all these founders started posting, oh my God, we've hired him before. Oh my God, we fired this guy before. Oh my God, this guy's actually employed with us right now. And so he actually appeared on a podcast yesterday saying like he was a, you know, he needed to make ends meet or whatever. But my point of bringing this guy up is this is a consequence of remote work, okay? Because earlier this week, one of our leaders, she worked remote before and then she went back into the office, okay? And, you know, they were like, went fully back into the office, right? And this is the agency that she worked at. And then she's like, Look, like, and we're back like remote, right? And she's like, dude, it is so hard to get things done because like you have to, even if you call me, it's not the same as I walk over to you and hey, hey, hey, how's this work over here? Oh, what are we doing over here? Or like getting aligned because there's all these silos that start to happen. And then it's until you have like everyone has a Neuralink or something and we can all just be synced up all the time. I think this is the trade-off with remote work. It's just like, it's not, it's better or it's worse. It's just you have more time to get together. And I can walk over to you and bother you, or you can walk over to me and bother me if I need something. Like, even if the good thing about you is like you'll call, but even that's not enough.

I don't think it's not the same. No, I had to ask my team on a thread because they're running an A/B test or they ran an A/B test with different modal signups. And I'm like, guys, this converts less than just sending them to the pricing page. I'm like, I've optimized the pricing page.

Yeah.

So on a thread one day, because keep in mind, At least you have to wait. They're not in person, right? This has been going on for like 2 weeks, by the way, because they were going to get back to me on data, which, you know me, I don't do well with that.

You don't do well with data?

No, I don't do well with waiting 2 weeks.

Oh no, you don't do well with waiting a day.

Yeah. So where is it? I just don't want to drag on forever. Okay. When are you guys going to fix the Uber pricing and revert back to the old stuff?

It's all green, guys. I'm looking at his screen. It's all Neil typing.

Lower lifetime cost us $50K in revenue last week, right? He's like, yes, important. And then they sent a message. I'm like, yes, important to get this fixed. Costing, let's talk. Don't get a response. This is 8:07. Question, how do we get it rolled back so we don't keep bleeding money? And I put their usernames, right?

Yeah.

10:49, nice. Okay, 11. But we can switch the easy ones first and not wait. Would be good to see. We're losing rev. Easy like this. Wednesday morning again, because I didn't get a response after 11:27 in the afternoon on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, you know, any update on timing, getting people to the pricing page? And then they finally gave it to me. But like—

How long was that interaction?

Uh, day and a half.

It's just too—

But I could have just done it in person and gotten my answer because they know in person they had to tell me a response and they couldn't just—

Like communication gets things done faster.

Yes.

Like especially if you're a leader in the company. And so I, that's where I think remote work fails and that's why I think when you look— so I'm reading this book right now called Musk's Memos, and it's all emails that were made public.

By Elon Musk?

Yeah. And then he's basically like, yep, during COVID like the decision, yep, we're going to be in office, guys. We're not going to do what other people are doing. Yep. If I need to sleep on the floor, I'm going to do that. If I need— like, it's all about communication, guys. I'm going to be working on the floor with you guys at the test line, like with the robots and everything. I know it's dangerous. I want to be there with you. And I want to prove to you that I'm— that like, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make this succeed. And you just see all the resilience that he's been through and all the pain. But this is one of those things where he knew intuitively that if they switched to remote, things would be a lot slower. And for the things that he's trying to do, you just can't do that. Yeah.

On a side note, if you're looking for a good office, do you know where Novikov is? That restaurant?

I haven't been to Novikov here.

Okay. So when I can do lunch next week, I'll take you to Novikov.

Yeah, that was great. Okay.

You haven't been or you have?

The Miami one, I went all the time, so I know the food.

We'll go next week. I'm back on Wednesday from Hong Kong.

Oh, like this one?

Wednesday morning. Yeah, I go to Hong Kong a lot, like 3, 4 times a year.

Cathay Pacific? Singapore?

No, I usually go on United. They have really good flight timing.

United?

Yeah, because I can leave like 10-something usually in the morning.

Oh, they have Starlink on United now.

They do?

Yeah.

Not on all flights, but I understand. Not on all.

I don't know yet. Yeah, you would know first.

Yeah, but either way, So Novikoff is the Standard Oil building in Beverly Hills. Hilton Highland, I believe, is the one who had a whole floor and they're moving out. It's one of the best buildings in all of Los Angeles for office space.

Okay, go on.

It's available for rent if you need it.

Are you getting one?

It's too expensive for me.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I would see, I would only split it with you so it's cheaper for me.

They have 9,000. It's the whole floor is 18.

Yeah.

They have 9,000 square feet available.

Yeah.

You can get, you can try to get half. I know someone who's getting half. Mm-hmm. You can get the other half, call it 9,000. Square feet, sixty-something thousand a month.

Wow, that's expensive.

That's expensive. Yeah, but it's like great location, high quality. You know office I prefer? What? We work. Yeah, that's what I ten grand maximize.

That's what I do. We work. Yeah, it's freaking great, and it's right next to the mall over here.

Yeah, the location's amazing.

It's amazing. Yeah, and anyway, so point is, I look, I just see a world like you saw Jamie Dimon talk about. It's like I just can't stand it anymore. Da da da, right? And I'm just. I just think a lot of this stuff is going to go back to, to in-person in office for people that are trying to be ambitious, because why would you give up that edge? Yeah. And this is what I talk about with my CTO all the time. Like, it just— our rotation, by the way, when, when with, with my mom passing, like, I wasn't able to show up to the office for, for a bit because there's so much stuff I've had to handle. Right. But I can tell, and I haven't told him this yet, so Sean, if you're listening, but I can tell we're a lot slower now just because we're not in the office and like we're not pushing each other. Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. If you don't have people who push in an organization, I think you're turning into the pusher. You are the pusher now. I don't think that was your personality a few years ago.

I've always been a pusher for myself, not others. And so what I learned with my mom's passing is to be kind but firm, right? Actually, we should ask Noah. Noah, do you feel like I, in 2017 when you first joined, I was a pusher? Okay, when do you feel like I became a pusher?

Couple years in, 2019.

2019. Okay, so 2 years in. 2 years in. Do you think there's a change now? No, I mean, you don't see me working.

I'll see you. I think there's definitely still like, you're back to more like structure, I would say. Like structured push.

I don't know what that means, but continue.

Yeah, so I think what Noah's getting at is, You're pushing and you're figuring out where to push. You're not just pushing everyone all the time randomly. I think you're being strategic on where you're pushing.

Is that what you're saying? I think if I see something wrong, I go after it, which is what you do immediately. If you see something off, you just go after it. Yeah.

That's why I still think in-person is better than virtual. It's really hard for us because our team is just so distributed and we have too many people all over.

Were you in the office in San Diego? Not often, right? Before?

No. So when we had the office in San Diego, I would go and visit every once in a while. Yeah, but I have this weird thing where if I go into office, my productivity goes away.

Interesting.

I do not do well in an office environment. I start browsing the kitchen and seeing what snacks.

I start walking around and I'm like, oh, what are people doing here?

I look at the office, I start talking to random people. I just get very unproductive. And what I found is when I used to go to the office in San Diego, I would hop in for whatever I need to, and then I'll go back to my hotel room because I used to stay at the Pendry, which was close enough. I hop back in bed. I know this sounds crazy. Put the covers over me. I would still be wearing clothes, not work clothes, but I'll switch into like PJs.

Where's the—

No, switch back into pajamas because like work clothes aren't comfortable. I would go to the office in slacks. Yeah. And when I say pajamas, it was like Lululemon shorts. They were clean, not used for like working out, but like Lululemon shorts, the same white t-shirt.

It's like what I'm wearing right now. These are my pajamas. Yeah.

And then I would literally go into bed and then turn on the TV, like CNBC or pay-per-view movie, like whatever was latest and greatest out, you know? And then I would have to keep rewinding the movie because I wasn't really paying attention. Because once you watch it once in a hotel room, you got to pay for it again. And I didn't want to Pay twice, but I'd just keep rewinding so I could keep, fill up my day with the same movie. So only pay one time. And then eventually after like the 4 or 5 takes of watching would actually consume the movie.

Yeah.

Because I'd get glimpses of it each time and I would work in bed and I would find it just super productive and I get a lot done. So for me, having people virtually, I get a lot more done when they're in person. For example, Salo, who runs marketing at NPD and all of our divisions, I work with him closely. At least once or twice a year, he flies to LA and we try to get important stuff done that may be harder for us to do virtually.

How long is that?

And he'll come for a week. No joke, I'll crank out more than most of the stuff in a few hours. And we do it over a few days and he's like, yeah, let's work more together. I can't. And I'm like, cool, you go back to your hotel room. I'll go work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You like your space. Yeah.

Not even space. I can't— I don't work well with a ton of people around me. I work very well as an individual contributor.

Yeah. Well, I think the most important thing that's maybe not being communicated here is that Neil will call you and he won't wait. Right. And that's the thing, because even when you show me your text, you can tell that there's a reluctance to respond to you because it's a little scary when you're applying the pressure like that, right?

Yeah.

And people are not— I'll be honest, no offense to you or me, people aren't looking forward to our calls, right? The moment you're getting a call like that, it's like, oh shit, it's the boss, right? But like, if you're the boss and you're not doing that, that's kind of your fault. You have to be applying the pressure because nobody else is going to do it. Nobody else is incentivized as we are.

So I was shown AnswerThePublic designs today of a version that's going to be launch in 2 months. I didn't know at the beginning of my call it was going to be launched in 2 months. Keep in mind, some of these people I'm talking to, I've only talked to them like maybe like 4 or 5 times because some of them are newer to the team. So, and even if someone's been with our company for 3 years, it doesn't mean I talk to them because we have enough headcount where I— it doesn't mean they're not important. It's more so I talk to the people I need to, to get the tasks that I specifically am focused on done.

Yeah.

And when I'm talking to them, they're showing me the new designs. Like, what do you think? I tell them the tweaks. I'm like, good job. And then I'm like, I got one question for you, but I'll let you go through the rest of the design. So they go through the designs, I tell them the tweaks I want, and they're like, okay. And they're like, what's your question? I'm like, so when is this going to be launched? And then they laugh.

Yeah.

And I'm like, okay, so when's it going to be launched?

Yeah.

And they're like, we just showed you the design. We got to create the tech specs. We got to do X, Y, and Z to figure out. And then they're like, half the team is maintaining the old code. The other team is working on the new stuff. And if we do it that way, because we got to maintain the old stuff, uh, we think we can get it up in 2 months. And keep in mind, they went from, I need to break down the tech specs and everything before I give you a timeframe, to I was able to get a timeframe from them on the call. And I'm like, you already know the technology. You're already telling me you can migrate off of Ruby on Rails because you've already been successful at figuring out whatever code version. I'm not that technical.

Yeah.

Over the last 3 days and it's been working for them and it's been faster. So I said, why 2 months? And then of course, what do they do? They laugh. They're like, oh, there's so much, we got to rebuild all this. I was like, but you just said half the team is maintaining the old stuff. Why is half the team maintaining the old stuff? Well, there's bugs and stuff and you may request change. I'm like, I won't request any changes. And they're like, well, Mike may request changes. I'm like, Mike, will you request any changes? No, I'll forego any changes. I'm like, what are really the bugs? Because I had you fix a lot of the bugs. Call it 45-ish days ago, and that helped boost the revenue. And we saw maybe like a 7, 8% during the beginning of the month and middle of the month. It was going all the way up to 12, but call it 7, 8% by the end of month over month, which is still good. I'll take that. That's good growth in 30-day period. I look at going into July, I haven't checked the July numbers today being July 4th, but we are on track for 2% growth over the previous month. And I'll push it, figure out how to get it higher. But the 4th, because it's a holiday, will screw me over a little bit. And I was just like, we already fixed most of the bugs. You're telling me it'll take you 2 months to launch. If I give you back having half the team focus on the old stuff, maybe I don't get it a month, maybe I get it in 45 days. I didn't tell them that, I'm hoping for a month. So why would I, you know, want them to focus on bugs when I can just get a whole new version of a new product with more features out in 30 days? And all the bug fixes that they would've done on the old stuff would be useless because it's on old code and then they would've had to focus on the new stuff. I'm like, take the pain for 30 to 45 days and get it out there. But yes, you and I are very direct and I think it's how we get stuff done. And I think this is how I get progress. And the reason I prefer virtual, I'm not saying I want my team to be virtual. I know that's hypocritical of me. The reason I like virtual is when I'm working on a lot around a lot of people.

Yeah.

people continually come up and ask me on stuff and it's not as productive as me just focusing on what's important. And it's like, this will sound rude and I love the people I work with. I want to work on what's the most important at that time, get it done, and then move on to the next thing that's the most important in my eyes. I don't want people distracting me with other stuff.

And that's actually the highest leverage thing you can do. So the curse for my situation right now is I have to actually operate, right? I can't—

Yeah.

I would ideally prefer to be in your situation where I'm only working on the highest leverage thing for the But, you know, you have people things. There's, you know, there's a lot of my time spent on recruiting right now, which is arguably one of the highest leverage things I can do. But, you know, it is what it is. And so I think Neil has a great setup. I hope at some point Dharmesh Shah reveals what his setup looks like. But you know what's interesting? Going back to Elon's emails that he sends to his team to Tesla, SpaceX, everything, it's always the same emails. It's, guys, we need to work harder. Guys, we need to move faster. Guys, unfortunately, sorry, there's a layoff.

And thank you for working so hard, right?

It's like the same messages over and over, and occasionally there's going to be like a celebration one, but he's very consistent with these emails. And then a big thing that he does too, to your point on prioritization, is it is, you know, when you go through your framework on, wait, why is this going to take too much? Half the team spent on bugs. It's his, his Elon algorithm is, oh, how do you actually delete? How do you question all the requirements, which is what you're doing? You're actually running this, question everything, and how do you start to delete? And then you can add back later if you need to add back.

Yes.

And then you can figure out, okay, what do you actually need to accelerate? And then, then you can figure out what you want to automate, right?

Yeah.

But that, that is what you're like. It's hardcore focus and it's, it's pushing people when they need to be pushed and then it's running this Elon algorithm.

Yeah, I can see the process of really thinking things through because my team, they're like, well, one of the reasons it's going to take 2 months to release it is we got to figure out all the limits with this AI stuff because it's much more costly than the traditional search data that we provide. I say, okay, but if someone pays, don't you pretty much give them the data and most of it? They're like, yes. So I'm like, just build that and then we'll figure out the limits. And they're like, yes, but if we figure out the limits and we give too much, it can end up just being very costly. I was like, sounds good. Just roll that out and we'll figure it out and we'll deal with the cost later on.

You can figure out the pricing later.

Yeah. I'm like, so if we want to make a change, can we make it in a few days? Like, yeah. I'm like, cool. I'll eat the cost for a few days if they're wrong.

Yeah.

They're like, okay. And I'm like, yeah, let's go. Yeah.

You know what's helpful too? And I learned this kind of listening to how Michelin does marketing, you know, the tire company, right?

Yeah.

And so a big thing with what they learned, they obsess. Like if they, if one of their workers loses like a minute, right, it actually ends up leading up to like thousands of years or something like that, right? Because it goes throughout the entire company. And so when you optimize small things like this, it actually It actually fixes the entire organization. It permeates through the entire organization. Again, guys, if you're a leader in the company, your job is to keep the temperature high because inevitably, if you just think about the laws of physics, the temperature always falls back to room temperature, and that's why it's room temperature.

One interesting thing about Michelin, do you know why they created the Michelin Guide?

Yeah. To get people to actually drive more so people actually, you know, buy more tires. That's right. Yeah.

Most people don't know that Michelin, you know, guide when they're doing all these ratings, it was to get people to use their car more because yes, people have had cars for a long time, but when people first started getting cars, they didn't actually use them as much as they do today.

You know, when they started, it was still mostly a horse-driven society, but they saw the car was going to blow up. And so they, they built into the future. And then all the time when people are like, oh, we should go into— because there's a lot of tire companies like, oh, we should branch off into these. They're like, nope, we're just going to focus on tires because tires are going to be way bigger over time. And then they just focus on tires for the rest of their lives. until they died. It was 2 brothers that did it.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

It's like a French company?

French company, yeah. And then they created like the fat Michelin Man, and then the Michelin Man like eats like nails and eats like all these, eats the obstacles and it protects you from obstacles.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah.

Ah, so that was the purpose of the character.

Dude, everything, like a lot of things they did were spectacles. So they started the Michelin Guide, the Michelin Man. They started like bike competitions and things like that for people like, you know, and then you had to use Michelin tires. So they created spectacles back in the day.

So Red Bull does a good job with spectacles. Yeah. I would say they're probably one of the best.

Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the guy that jumped off from like Earth, I mean, outer space, outer space to back to Earth. Yeah.

That was really cool.

Yeah. And they have the Red Bull team. They have 2 Red Bull teams in F1.

So they have 2 Red Bull teams now.

There's a Red Bull, there's, there's Red Bull and then they've always had like AlphaTauri and now it's called something else, but it's like a junior. It's like, it's, it's, you can get promoted to the Red Bull team. But those are usually like the up-and-coming drivers.

But in F1, you're saying in F1?

Yeah. There's 2 teams in F1 that are part of Red Bull.

So one is called Red Bull, the one, the other one's called something else.

Yeah.

And if you do really well, you can get promoted to the Red Bull team.

Yeah. Which actually happened. Uh, Yuki Tsunoda, who's a Japanese driver, he races next to, uh, Max Verstappen. He was promoted.

Oh.

Yeah. One guy that was, that one guy was demoted from Red Bull to the lower one. So they're both racing still right now.

Oh, okay.

Uh, Liam Lawson.

Yeah. So he got demoted.

Yeah. Did you watch the F1 movie?

I did not.

I heard it's great. Yeah, I'm gonna watch it.

I'll have to check it out. I'm waiting to watch it next year.

Oh, so you can, by the way—

So I can watch it in my home.

Speaking of cars, can we just talk about the collapse of Jaguar? What did they do? The 93% sales volume went down.

No.

You didn't read about this?

No, I didn't see it.

Did you live under a rock or something?

It wasn't posted on the sites that I read frequently, like CNBC.

Oh, right. All right. So, okay. Jaguar's April 2025 Europe sales plunged 97.5% from 1,961 units to just 49 vehicles, marking a near total collapse during this rebranding phase. BMW, Mercedes, and Audi each retained market stability, selling approximately 50,000 to 75,000 units in April 2025 across Europe. You know what?

That's what they get. And you know the marketing? Oh, we stand by it. And like, no one cares, guys.

People are over that. Enough.

Yeah.

Enough.

It's a car company.

Yeah.

Show us car stuff.

Yeah.

It's not a fashion show.

Yeah, this is reverse spectacle marketing. This is what— so you pay the price sometimes. And I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm just gonna call out too, like Bud Light, same thing.

You gotta know your core audience. And Eric and I, for the record, are not against people deciding what they want with their lives.

They can do whatever they want with their lives.

What they want with their lives.

Yeah.

And we're not saying that's bad or anything like that.

Yeah.

But what we're saying is if you have a car company, focus your marketing on creating cars.

Yeah.

It should not get to be something that's more political or something that is trendsetting or something that is more about talking to culture when it has nothing to do with your product or service. It's like we're a marketing agency. We produce stats and data about marketing. We focus on our tools. I don't go talk about cars or fashion or things that are not related or dentistry. I know that's just random topics, but that's in essence what Jaguar did. They had a fashion show with people and different outfits. If, correct me if I'm wrong, the last I recall had nothing to do with their car. And I'm like, what the heck is this? And you want to be in fashion and do that? You want to be Dolce Gabbana? Yeah, go for it. Yep. I don't care. And that probably would help you generate more sales. That makes sense to me. But if you're a car company, why are you focusing on fashion? People want to see what new car you have to release. They don't care about fashion.

You don't want to alienate your core customers. You look at your data. If you look at Bud Light or if you look at Jaguar, who, who is your core customer? What is their net worth? Who, where do they live? What kind of people are these people? You want to market to those people. When we create this content, we are marketing. We, we are trying to teach people What the marketing experiments that we're running, you're trying to give them data. You're trying to basically help people get better at marketing. And if they need help with it, great, they can work with you, right? That's just how it is.

Yes. And again, for the record to clarify, Eric and I don't discriminate in both our companies. We have, Eric has less people. I don't mean that in a bad way. So, you know, just he may not have everyone because we have quite a bit of people, 1,000-ish plus or whatever it may be. But we both hire people who, LGBTQ+.

Yeah.

Right? And they're going to have no issues with it. And some of those people are our best employees and they're great at what they do. It's more so your product is your product. Your core audience is your core audience. You got to stick with the mission. Don't derail because the moment you derail, you can lose a lot of money.

Yeah.

And Harley is a great example of this. Do you remember Harley?

Did they derail?

Uh, well, they started focusing more on their core audience and it's helped their sales from the last I checked. And this was like a year and a half ago.

When something's working, working, double down.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's no need to try to do all these cute things.

And you learn this as you get older and it doesn't mean that other people can't use your products. Like I have a good friend, he's gay, love him to death. I've known him for 14, 15 years. He has a Harley, not like the Harley you would think. Harley has quite a bit of different, what is it called? Models, right?

Mm-hmm.

But like Harley didn't alienate him. They focused their marketing on the core, you know, people call it like the 5% of the population or 2% of the population that is the majority end user that buys their product. It doesn't mean that the other people can't buy their product. You just want to focus your marketing dollars on your ideal customer profile.

Yep, 100%. By the way, I want to talk about how Meta is basically buying OpenAI right in front of us. So this you've definitely heard about. Yeah, so when he's offering, when Mark Zuckerberg's offering $100 million to $300 million comp package, like you're gonna, I don't, you know, Sam Altman talks about, oh, you know, we want missionaries versus mercenaries.

And he says, none of our good people have left. I call bull.

At the end of the day, people care about taking care of their family and themselves. And so no missionary mercenary, please. So Meta is like, The fact that they acquired Scale for $14.9 billion or like a big chunk of it, and Alexander Wang is leading this new smart— is it smart intelligence or something intelligence division? And now he has all these OpenAI people. The thing is, Meta can't afford to fall behind in this race because if their ads can be 10x better, 10x more personalized or whatever, they're going to make a lot more money. He cannot afford to lose that. And if there's anything Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has been good at, It has been buying companies, not necessarily innovating, but always buying.

He's been good at buying. WhatsApp, Instagram, WhatsApp were amazing purchases. And he doesn't buy a lot, but when he buys, you know, even Oculus, I do think that was a good company.

I think Oculus will work out over time because the glasses will work out. Yeah. And now he's partnered up with Anduro again, like Palmer Luckey. So he fired him, but then now they're friends again, right? But my point is, like, this is interesting because Meta's doubling down on where they think things should be, where they think things will be going. And he's not afraid to take these big bets. And actually, in hindsight, if you look at how much money they make a year, it's really not that big of a bet to take on like an entire market, right?

Yeah.

So I think everything— or we know that whatever company you build comes down to the people that you have. And Mark Zuckerberg is betting on that.

Yes. Going back to Jaguar, dude, if I was Tata, because Tata acquired Jaguar and Range Rover, I'd be just so pissed.

I'm sure they are.

I'd be like, I just spent $1 billion or however many billions buying a company. And this cool marketing campaign that you guys thought was cool just lost me, call it, you know, X billions of dollars. I would just be pissed.

This is where marketing could go wrong. So yeah.

Yeah.

All right. You pick one. We picked a bunch of mine.

Where was one? You had something on data from Michael Rank.

Mine's pretty good, huh? Yeah.

I was actually curious on this AI mode versus classic search data.

Yeah, I threw this in this morning. Okay, so Mike King from iPollRank. So he says this, we got some early data from SimilarWeb on user behavior in AI mode versus classic search, 100K users from May 20th, 2025 to June 19th, 2025. So although user adoption is low, only 2%, early patterns are emerging. So the disparity in referral traffic between the 2 channels is immense, but the average page views for referral traffic from AI mode is higher than that of classical search and it's climbing rapidly.

So, AMO referral gap, that we already figured. Okay. What was the other one? The page views? Does he have a page view chart for traditional? Oh, AMO, he does. Where's the other one?

Google search is in brown here. You can't even see it. It doesn't even register. So referral page views, you're getting way more in AI mode, it seems like.

So it's so low, it's not even on the graph.

Yeah, it doesn't even register. Yeah. And look, it's all the way down here, 5% percentage of searches. Resulting in external clicks. So AI mode does not yield external clicks, 5%, and then 25% from traditional Google search.

But when you're getting the page views, it's drastically more. So similar to ChatGPT where it's like when they come to your website, they're ready to buy. So the conversion data is probably going to be much higher.

Yeah, they've spent more time researching, so that makes sense.

Yes. Yeah, they've researched on platform versus researching on your website. Yeah.

So that's interesting.

Yeah. Speaking of AI, I honestly think ChatGPT has won the AI battle even though it's just started.

Okay, go on.

When companies will integrate AI into their products, AI is here to stay. And I think there's going to be a lot of companies who leverage AI and they'll make a ton of money, billions of dollars, potentially even trillions off of it. But when you think about from a usage perspective, the consumer, no matter where you go in this world, Because I speak everywhere. Like I'm speaking out, I fly to Hong Kong in a few days. Everyone tells me, oh yeah, AI, ChatGPT. You go around the airport, you hear people talking about AI, they all talk about ChatGPT. Even when they're using the AI on Google, because I've been in conversations about this, a lot of the people in the older generations, they think Google AI is ChatGPT.

Yeah.

And ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI. Would you agree with this?

Yeah.

I think they've won the brand game. I'm not saying they'll have the best product, but they've already won and they're going to be a big company and they're here to stay and they'll control massive market share.

So there's a couple things here. In business, we call this the first mover advantage. So Coca-Cola was first, right? And so it doesn't always work like Google, Google as a search engine came way later, but first mover, sometimes it does work. In this case, ChatGPT, the reason why I'm going to give a couple of real reasons here in terms of like experiences. So they were first to market and then they had a head start like a couple of months.

Well, they weren't first mover. Google had people on there.

Yeah, but they never released like a chat interface.

Correct, they were too slow.

Yeah. So my point is with ChatGPT, what's special about it right now is it has memory where I don't need to— that is building a moat around it where I don't feel the need to switch. But the other crazy thing too is that the reasoning models are better than the other models that I've used. And so I actually, this will be interesting to you, I've been doing this since 2014 or so. So I read a book from Peter Drucker a long time ago called Managing Oneself. It's like a short 50-page thing, right? And Peter Drucker, he writes all these executive leadership books, right? The whole point in that book is, okay, you should—

He's still around or he passed away?

I think he passed, yeah. So you should be doing feedback analysis. I'm sure you think about like, what are all the big decisions you make and what happened with them, right? So I had this document from 2014. I uploaded this document to ChatGPT. I was like, hey, tell me where I'm top 1% as an entrepreneur, but also tell me where I'm bottom 1% as an entrepreneur, right? And it gives it— I use the O3 Pro model and I uploaded my thing. And so this combination is like a super assistant and it's like delegation governance. What drags it to the cellar? Taking too long to move on from people. The acquisitions that you make, the operator handoff over here, it shows the same flaw. You step away before KPIs, owner, and 90-day charter are locked. So few elite founders let gaps like this persist, right? And so it starts naming all these weaknesses. The strengths are great too. But my point of saying this is I can't do this with something else. And so they're ahead of the curve right now. And you got ChatGPT-5 coming in July. And Kieran Flanagan wrote this out. It's not just ChatGPT anymore, it's AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. We'll see about that.

All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil. agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

So they're saying it's a big—

It's a big launch. That's why they've been pushing it out, and it's coming this month. But it's a unified model that can think, reason, create, and execute across domains.

There's—

that means no more dropdown menus with numerous model names, and it's smarter than human experts, PhD level. It'll multitask for you, edit videos, transcripts, analyze data, research. It's an AI operating system. So my point is, who cares about all these features I'm talking about? They're just ahead right now.

They're ahead, they're moving fast. I do think Grok is also moving quite quickly. You like Grok? Yeah, but it's just not as good from what I've used and tested. Some people believe it is, but I—

It's fun when you see people using Grok to respond to like politicians' tweets.

Yes.

Hey Grok, is this true? And I'm like, no, this is not true. Yeah.

But for me, you know, I think the real 2 winners in this AI landscape is going to be ChatGPT.

Can you guess the second one? Google.

Yes, Google.

Yeah.

And I think Google will still control majority of the market share.

If I were to buy stocks, not financial advice, over the next 10 years, I would buy Google because they have Waymo, they have all the data that they have, they have YouTube, right? They have quantum computing coming. I would buy Microsoft just because enterprise. I would buy Nvidia. I'd buy Bitcoin. And then I had Tesla because they have robots and robotaxis. I would just sit it on those 5 and just leave it there.

And I believe Google from the articles I've read, and I could be off, maybe they're just getting more press. It looks like they're ahead on quantum computing over everyone else.

And plus, by the way, when you have Google and you have Microsoft, you have cloud, right? Because their Azure and then their Google Cloud divisions are growing. What would you buy? You said buy it and leave it there for 10 years. I would buy Google.

I would buy Facebook. I would not buy Tesla. I do believe Tesla will do really well in the future. I just believe Elon Musk's personality is getting away, is getting in the way of their financial performance. And that's going to affect people even purchasing their products. I think a lot of people, I'm not saying they're right or wrong, and I'm not saying this is my opinion, But if you just look, there's a lot of people who won't buy Teslas anymore because of all the political stuff.

Remember what you said earlier though? The product, right? I feel like the products are going to be so good that he's going to overcast over everything else. And he's, I think he, I hope, actually, I don't think he's going to change, but like—

I don't think he's going to change. That's my problem with him because you're saying I can't sell over the next 10 years.

Yeah.

Like I actually think Apple's going to be a huge winner in hardware.

Really? Okay. So, okay. So what would be the 5 things that you would buy?

Google? This is not financial advice, by the way.

Yeah, not financial advice.

Google, Facebook, or Meta, whatever you want to end up calling it, because they just control so much inventory and everything is still going very heavily social. Google, Facebook, Google, Facebook, Apple. I think from a hardware perspective, I don't think Apple's going to win the software race. If you ever looked at Apple software, it's never been revolutionary. Like, oh my God, this is the best software.

I like the ecosystem lock-in though.

The ecosystem lock-in is amazing. And what Apple does extremely well, that's better than most people and better than Tesla, their hardware is more usable. I had a Tesla car for like a month. The screen was in the middle. It's like you're driving and your speed is in the middle right. And I'm trying to look at the road. I'm like, why do I have to look at the right to see my speed of the car? Because the monitor is in the, in the middle.

Oh, for Model 3?

For Model 3.

Yeah.

That, that, that is not the most usable thing. And there's a lot of other usability issues with Teslas.

Yeah.

Like, you sit in the car for a long time, the seat, at least in a Model 3, it hurts. It is not comfortable like a Mercedes or anything like that.

It's not quite nice as like a Maybach.

Okay, even your Porsche, right? And, and, and Tesla, for being around a number of years, they haven't figured out usability really well and comfort.

But finish weight, 4 and 5.

Okay, so, um, if I had to pick 4 and 5, I would pick Microsoft. Okay. I think they just control so much of the ecosystem in B2B. Yeah. I think people are just stuck on there and they've made amazing investments over time. You know, people don't realize this. They saved Apple and they made money on Apple stock because they gave them $100 million.

Got OpenAI.

OpenAI.

Remember they bought Xbox? Wait, no, no, they didn't buy Xbox.

They didn't buy Xbox. They bought Sky. That gaming company. I thought it was a smart move.

They bought Minecraft. I think Roblox, Minecraft, Minecraft.

One of those, which has done really well. They bought the other gaming company that you play, that you hit people, that game where you hit people.

You hit people in a lot of games.

The one in Orange County. What is that called? It's big. Blizzard, Blizzard, Blizzard.

They bought Blizzard. Oh, Activision Blizzard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's owned by them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

They've— Facebook. They were one of the earlier investors in Facebook. They made a killing from that stock.

Yeah, they've done great. I'm— Satya is a pretty impressive guy. And like cloud has done really well for them too. Okay, so, okay, that's 4. What's the 5th one?

The 5th one, if I had to pick, would be Amazon.

Okay.

I don't think Amazon's doing really well in the AI world from like their cloud and AWS. Amazon has won the mindshare when it comes to just buying stuff online and how they're trying to do delivery and just get it within an hour and right away for you. And their network, they're spending more on their network for delivery than probably UPS, FedEx, and the United Postal Service is spending all combined.

Yeah.

So I think that's how you're going to get everything and it's going to be instant. But those are the companies I would bet on.

And by the way, guys, again, not financial advice, but the way Neil and I look at this is business would be number one because you can actually control the compounding of that and usually you're not going to get a better return in your business.

Yeah.

But then if we were to be safe and just leave it locked in for 10 years, we're roughly looking at things 60% similar, but it is mostly tech for both of us.

So yeah, I don't really invest outside of tech.

Yeah, but it's also because we want what we understand because I was talking to my dad yesterday.

He's like, oh, Pfizer.

I was like, tell me why you like Pfizer. He couldn't explain it, right? He's like, yeah, well, they have 5 new products coming out. I was like, tell me one of the new products. He's like, I can't, right? And I was like, okay, so why do you like— he's like, well, I tell you, I have one rule. I always sell if it goes down 30%. So I was like, okay, so you would sell Amazon and Apple if it just went down 30%? And so it's like most people— and sorry, Dad, this is— I'm just saying that most people, for the most part, they haven't really thought about their investment thesis. And this gives you a chance to think about it. Again, not financial advice, but— But we want you all to do well. So yeah.

And I just look at like what we would use 5 to 10 years from now. And I don't look at it at the price.

We buy what we understand. We invest in what we understand.

Yes. And I agree with you on Tesla. I think the company will do really well. Now, if you said Starlink, which, 'cause it's not public, I would've picked Starlink in there.

The return's insane. Yeah.

Forget the return. I think that is the future. I would've put Starlink probably at the top.

I would do Starlink and SpaceX if we can get it. Oh, SpaceX is a little—

No, Starlink is SpaceX.

Yeah, but didn't they talk about separating it?

Uh, no, when I, uh, I didn't see that, but when I said Starlink, I actually meant SpaceX, the company.

Yeah, I would, I mean, absolutely. Like, dude, if I could do Anduril, the defense thing, I would consider it too. The Palmer Luckey one?

I, I wouldn't, and not because it's not an amazing company. I don't know much about defense.

Yeah.

Whether it's Palantir or that.

Yeah. I just don't know much about it. I don't even know what Palantir does, but, but their stock's through the roof.

Look at Peter Thiel's network.

So the thing is like, you know, Actually, Neil makes a good point, right? And then we can move on to more marketing stuff again. But Palantir, I don't understand, and it's rocketing. I do believe in stablecoins, so like USDC, and it's rocketing, right? But I don't understand it nearly as enough, one, about my business, two, about these, the main stocks that we just mentioned. We understand those a lot more because we pay for those things and we live in those ecosystems.

Yes. And normally I would have been like, Bitcoin is great, buy it too. Again, this is not financial advice, but the reason I didn't choose Bitcoin as one of them, I know you chose, If you look at the general market, when the, you know, because everyone's like, oh, if the economy or the world crashes, you have Bitcoin.

I don't believe that part.

I don't believe it anymore because when you look at the stock market and the political environment, when things go well, Bitcoin rises. When things go poorly, Bitcoin goes down.

It's not a hedge in my mind.

It's not a hedge anymore. It's owned by a lot of financial institutions that are holding it, and when things go bad, They sell off when things go well, they can buy more and it just moves with the market from what I can at least see in the more recent times. You know, 10 years ago, that's a different story than it is today.

My thesis on the Bitcoin piece is just it's going to continue to compound. The big risk is quantum computing, maybe cracking it. But yeah, we'll see what happens. But anyway, all right, you pick another one. Oh wait, how about this MrBeast SaaS decision? Do you see what— do you know what happened here?

No, I don't even know MrBeast is going to SaaS other than he Competitor of, uh, Social Blade. Social Blade.

There you go. So, okay, Social Blade is like a YouTube or like a social— it shows your social stats basically, right?

Yeah, it does it for multiple social profiles, but people mainly use it for YouTube first and then Instagram second.

So ViewStats is a product that MrBeast came up with. Interestingly enough, I met someone that was supposed to be his partner on this, but apparently it's, you know, he— so apparently I think MrBeast will partner up with you, but like you'll get a very small chunk of equity. Like 1% or something like that. But so MrBeast, he posted this to Twitter.

Really quickly, ViewStats gets 2.1 million visitors according to SimilarBlade.

SimilarWeb?

I mean, SimilarWeb, sorry, SimilarBlade.

Social Blade. Okay, so ViewStats, it's actually a great tool. I pay for it and it shows you like, it'll come up with like thumbnail ideas for you. You'll see outliers and things like that.

It's a great YouTube tool.

You want to say something?

No.

Okay. So he tweets this out. This is on June 26th, right? So not that long ago. So, hey guys, hey guys, thanks for your feedback on ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. What happened was he launched an AI thumbnail creator in the product, right? Which I don't think is a bad idea, but a bunch of YouTubers pushed back or creators pushed back saying, oh, this is, this is not good for us. This is going to take jobs, whatever. And so he's like, oh, so he removed it. And they created a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. I think this is an impulsive decision.

I think that's a bad decision.

Right after that, a bunch of people just started creating and give it away for free.

Yeah. I'm like, I would go back to the other one.

Yeah, this is reactionary, right? And so I think MrBeast is fantastic. I think this is a situation where it's like, hey, when you're in SaaS, you typically want to validate it by how people are engaging with that specific feature. And you could look at the qualitative numbers, And you could also look at the, which is the feedback from people, but you also have to look at the quantitative numbers. Yeah.

So he should just do what's best for the software. If he does what's best for the software and what's best for the end users who are paying, he will make more money and create a better software. And if he doesn't do this to please people, someone else will and start eating his lunch.

Yeah. And I think that is the thing. Like, I think it's sometimes you might apply the lens of, oh, if he If a video is loved by many people and has a lot of views, like it is important, that part's important, but you can't apply that to SaaS.

No.

Because usually like, it's like the Henry Ford thing. It's like, okay, if you ask people, they would've wanted a faster horse. Like they, people don't know what they need sometimes.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right, what's the next topic?

Well, we, what do you think about that Cloudflare pay-to-play pay-per-crawl launching? What do you think about that?

I saw it. I don't know how well it's going to work.

I think it's a terrible idea.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan of it. I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just not a fan of it.

So my take on this is if you're a big publisher getting millions and millions of visitors per month, maybe this might make sense. But if you're someone, like they power 20% of the internet, that's a lot of people, right? But most people don't have big websites and website traffic's going down over time. You might as well get crawled by everything.

Correct.

And like have a chance, a fighting chance. Because otherwise, if you turn pay-per-crawl on, you're not going to get crawled and you're going to make what, pennies?

Not just that.

Yeah.

You're then not going to get recommended by all these AI platforms, so then someone else is going to take your business.

Yep.

The crawling should be free. This shouldn't be a gatekeeper. I get why Cloudflare is doing it because they control so much of the web's traffic that they can be like, oh, this is another easy way for us to monetize. And make another way for publishers to monetize as well. But if I'm a publisher, I'm like, so I'd be— I'm happy with this model rolling out. I know that sounds bad because this means that a portion of the people aren't going to be getting crawled because they're not going to get paid. So they're not going to be happy and they'll be like, no, you're not allowed to crawl. And that makes me happy as a marketer because it just means I have less competition. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think many people are going to turn this on. I think they'll make some revenue from it. I don't think it's going to change Cloudflare's business. And by the way, I think you and I both use Cloudflare. I think it's a great company. But you actually had this—

Their stock is still doing well.

I think you had a piece—

All-time high, not all-time high. In 2021, they were higher, but for the last few years, they're at all-time highs.

I thought you had a post in here or a topic in here where it talks about about what you actually need to rank in LLMs, right?

I posted that on Twitter.

Oh, you did? Maybe it's worth talking about here.

So when you think about LLMs, I kind of had one topic in here.

Yeah, listicles.

And it's about listicles.

Yeah, just go for that.

When you think about listicles, you know, we're seeing with a lot of these LLM platforms, they're not as sophisticated as Google. I don't mean that in a bad way, When you look at Google and someone's typing in, or there's a, you get a link from someone, they know a New York Times link in theory is more valuable than a link from neilpatel.com. Just the reality, New York Times has much more authority. If your website, your company's around marketing, sure, a link from Neil Patel can be very valuable because it's a similar audience. But other outside of that, a link usually from New York Times is always going to be Neil Patel. .com. Now when you look at Google, they also know an article from New York Times is better than and more trustworthy than abcxyz.com. I'm making up a domain name, right? Because New York Times has more authority. But what we're seeing with the LLMs is if I just bombard the internet with listicles of like the best ABM software and I keep—

That's right.

Yeah, and I keep mentioning your product, product and it's on websites that have links. You don't need a lot, but enough where they're getting indexed and I bombard it and there's like, I'm creating like 20 articles a month consistently and there are other competitors, but you're always number one and you're praised the best. The LLMs are just pulling and you're getting placed way higher. From everything we're seeing, it is the easiest way to get the LLMs to recommend you. It's called guest posting, which is old school SEO tactic, but instead of a link, you're just having them talk about your company or technically you're guest posting. So you're just mentioning your company and you're mentioning it at the top and why it's the best. And then you're mentioning other competitors and you just bombard the internet with it and the LLMs are just pulling from it and they're saying you are the best.

Dude, I have a thesis on this, right? So, okay, here's how I think LLMs will rank you in the future. So I, when I use Genspark or Manners or any of these super agents like Perplexity Labs or Deep Research or whatever, I, they're so powerful at quickly crawling videos and crawling anything, crawling your social profile where I'm like, they will just look at a brand instead of looking at links all the time. It's very easy to tell if this brand is legit, right?

Yeah.

So if what you're saying is true, that listicles are back and you just need to bombard the internet with them and then maybe have your company at number 1 or whatever, But if you're also a strong brand yourself, like a personal brand like yourself, for example, or like use your name as the author for these, I think you get a double whammy there. You get a double plus. So I'm like, man, we should test this for like 30 days or something where it's just like every article that we put out on our blog.

Oh no, I've already tested this out.

Okay, how's it going?

It works. It works? Yeah.

There you go. So I do think LLMs are not going to rank so much on links. I think links will still be important, but I think your brand is going to continually rise. And it's so easy for these things to just quickly figure out who the heck you are instead of relying on link signals.

Yes. And if you can just end up, like if you bombarded the internet with 1,000 articles talking about different variations, think about prompts people would use and you're always rated highly and talked about the best and it's thorough. It can't just be a crappy—

Make sure it's quality, guys.

Yeah, it has to be quality and it's authentic and real and they can look at other places and see similar stuff. Like, you know, I say the last part because you want to be ethical. Of course, you don't want to just badmouth the competitor. You want to be honest. It just helps you get mentioned in all the LLMs and do well. I do think eventually they will adjust and they'll put different weight on different types of websites.

Yeah, dude.

Um, and they could say they're doing that right now, but we're not seeing that. Just being honest.

But it's seeing what?

We're not seeing them put a lot more weight on different publications. We're just seeing that you just blast the web with listicles and you rank for like best ABM software and variations of that. Like, what software is— what's the best software for B2B SaaS companies to use? You know, and you just always list you in different variations of your ideal customer profile. And then you just get customers.

This is how it's been early days of SEO, guys. So, but we would just say you want to shield yourself by making sure it's quality and having a human in the loop ideally. Don't just spam.

Correct.

The short way is usually not the way.

Right.

But this is still a shorter way. By the way, did you see this post? You probably didn't, but this was from Greg Eisenberg. So he talks about how it's insane how many AI reply bots and AI faceless channels now roam on TikTok, X, and IG, and it's becoming the new normal, right? And he's saying that, look, there's one account that got 2.3 million followers pumping out motivational content, and it pulls like 500K views a video. And that's pretty significant.

That's a lot.

And so he's saying, look, we've crossed a weird territory where AI accounts can outrank most humans in followers. People form real emotions with bots. Engagement is higher on synthetic content than on authentic posts. Nobody notices or cares that it's fake. I think that works for like if you're doing like travel content or like wide TAM content, like health content, motivational content, maybe that works well.

I don't know about health. Depends on the health. Yeah.

Like you want to get it from like a legit doctor.

Yeah.

Like Andrew Huberman. Yeah, maybe not.

It depends. Unless it's like health like why you should exercise more.

But travel or like even like even generic relationship advice is what he's saying here. And so he says, look, it reminds me of the demand media era. And I don't know if he's calling it demand media, but that reminds me of eHow. And so my whole thing is, look, if everyone starts making these faceless channels and things like that, so he's like, your competition now is the agent farm that never sleeps and never misses trending audio. I don't know about that yet. I don't know how I feel about it. I don't know about yet, but this is where I kind of disagreed with it. And he's like, builders who move fast might be the biggest attention arbitrage ever. But then I was just like, we tested this with pure AI content. It just doesn't do as well. And I was looking at some of these channels, it's like most of it doesn't do that well right now. I'm all for it if it does well, but even listening to Brett Malinowski and that CEO of Clue.ly talk about it, they're like, it's just not there right now. So I think it's a little overhyped in the moment. Not saying it won't work, but this is where I think sometimes people go a little too far. What do you think?

I agree with that.

I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet.

I don't think it's a new arbitrage yet. And then go find out how easy it is to monetize this content.

Yep.

It is not easy to monetize it. The way I've seen people monetize it the most, and I'm not recommending this, is people creating— and I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with this, I'm not judging— is people creating AI content and monetizing it through OnlyFans. I've seen that.

Does it work?

Uh, from the data that some of the articles I've read, some of these people are making 8 figures a year from that.

Wow.

Because remember we did, uh, dinner in Germany?

Yeah.

With the guy, with a marketer who—

He managed real OnlyFans people.

He managed real OnlyFans people.

Yeah.

And what was his number one issue?

They were too much of a pain to work with.

Because when he started making the money, they would go off and spend the money.

They're unreliable.

And then they were unreliable and they wouldn't keep working. So then he couldn't make consistent income on his end because he was taking a percentage of the revenues. So then with AI, you don't have to deal with the person just taking a vacation. You can get them to continually produce.

You get the cut.

And then imagine someone paying you a lot of money. I don't know how OnlyFans works. But let's say there's a premium feature. I don't know if you can, like, someone can get personalized content or FaceTime or I don't know, whatever it is. And you can now have AI personalize it for that individual because your cost isn't really there and you can scale to not just 10 people or 50 people, you can scale to millions of people and you can make even more money. But I read an interesting article. I believe FaceTime is blocking nudity. Was it FaceTime that said nudity?

FaceTime?

Is it FaceTime?

Wait, wait, they block nudity?

They block nudity.

Wait, how do you block nudity on FaceTime?

Force it usually. It's not necessarily in— so it's not the app. And when people are doing nudity, is it— are they sharing like— you're single or you know people. Is it like they're FaceTiming someone else and they're like sex talking or whatever it's called? Is it called sex talking?

I don't know. Sex talking? Yeah.

So monitoring a lot of this live.

Yeah. Ah, see, no one knows his stuff here. Yeah.

No one knows his stuff.

Yeah. Anyway, well, okay. But look, I think this will proliferate in certain areas and I think it'll, it's just not there in a lot of other areas. So we won't call it an arbitrage on this podcast until we feel like it's an arbitrage and we've seen it.

Where I also think AI, not to say content farms, but AI content will help is when the quality is there. Be content, having someone who's the AI face of a corporation will be really useful.

Yeah.

Because what we face right now when we talk to a lot of companies is they don't have a person who could be the face and you struggle, they struggle to find someone and they don't want to, they're like, oh, well they could leave and there could be issues. And then when you have an AI person, it just eliminates a lot of that.

I think the model right now is you hire in-house influencers and you pay them and try to incentivize them to stay. Or you do, I do like the Clueless model. I kind of want to test this where they have 50 content interns and they hired these people, they paid them $20 to $40 per video, okay? And they get bonus if they make a video that has over a million views, they get $1,000 for that. That's a good deal.

That's good.

And his whole argument is, if you're like 18 to 21, if you're a broke college kid or whatever, you know how these algorithms work and you want to hire the people who are up-and-comers. And so you just look at your For You page or whatever and you hire these people and you get 50 of these content creators. Right. And then eventually I think what's going to happen is you're going to have like an AI spokesperson. And but I think right now, the— especially if you're creating— if you have like a consumer app, I think you can do this 50 interns thing and just see how it goes. I don't know if it'd work for us.

I don't think it works as well in B2B.

I think B2B, the best thing we can drive it to is probably our newsletter, but like not our software or not our services. Yep. Yeah. But okay, one more thing before we go, because we're on this topic right now. I don't know if you started doing this, I feel like this is something you're doing too. But this guy talked about this whole concept of GTM engineer. It's basically like, you know, you have like a person who will, you know, help with reporting on the sales side, more doing, they'll work with tools like Zapier or Clay or N8N or whatever to build these workflows. And I'm just like, we should hire AI automation interns. And so we've been, all these people, we put this job post up, just a job post, and it's all developers that are applying for it, and we just hired someone. I think we might hire 2 more, but they're all in on building these workflows, all in on making things more efficient. I'm just like, oh, this is great. And they're like, dude, we just want to learn. We just want to work harder right now. And the things that they're building are already sophisticated. And I'm just like, how do I get more? Because one of our mutual friends, he's like, he hired these 2 kids out of college and they're all in on AI. They sleep in the office.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm just like, oh, this is great.

Great. We don't have it to that extent where they sleep in the office, but, um, yes, we have a team of people that just do that.

But are we talking AI automation interns where they're like super young?

They're not interns.

Okay. These are full-timers.

They're full-timers. And their goal is to automate workflows and systems and processes and stuff that people are doing. That's— we start with mundane, boring stuff that's easy, replicatable. that has very little like ambiguity. It's more black and white. There's not really much gray. Yeah, that's the stuff that we have them focus on first because then it's more likely to succeed.

I think we're— for this team, it's going to be— we're probably gonna have AI content operators join too, which can help like chop up content or, you know, even like do a content farm if possible. But I think this is a nice way if you don't have a team like how Neil's established right now, you can have these people that are AI native and then probably have them report to someone technical and then they're just fixing things throughout your organization and maybe you're bonusing them on things fixed. How are you bonusing them right now, if at all?

I don't even know how they get paid.

All right. At a higher level.

I just know we've been doing this for more than a year.

Yeah. So I think this is great. I think it doesn't have to be N8N. It doesn't have to be like Zapier. You can figure out what you want to use. You can even use Clay for this. But I think my vision of this is this team is AI native to start with. And then eventually in the next 6 to 9 months, we want the entire team to be AI native. So Anyway, anything else from your side?

I think that's it. It was a fun session today.

All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.