This Made Me Stop Using Amex Credit Cards

How OpenAI paid $200 million for an 18-month-old podcast. So TBPN, which people thought it was Tech Bros Podcast Network, I thought it was that the whole time, but apparently it's called something else. So they paid $200 million for this podcast. I don't wanna— I'm opening up the post right now on Instagram.

I didn't know it was $200 million. I saw the post because the post I saw when they did the announcement, they didn't disclose the price.

What did you think it was?

I had no idea.

Yeah. So anyway, the key thing here is I'm not going to pull it up, but so $200 million. And the thinking here is that we can talk about this. OpenAI, they get a lot of press written about them, right? Not all of it's good press right now, especially that New York Times article, right? So the thinking here is like Andreessen Horowitz has said that, you know, they want to own the media. They want to own what's being said about them. So I think this is what OpenAI is trying to do. And for Sam Altman, it's probably like, okay, it's $200 million. It's probably a drop in the bucket versus all the other stuff that they have going on. So he probably let the transaction through. Now, so they have to turn off all their ads now. This podcast last year did $5 million with the 11 employees. This year it has like a $30 million run rate. That being said, so now it's going to be their distribution channel or whatever. You know, you can argue it's a distraction, but maybe they have somewhat like a VP that's managing it. What do you think about this transaction?

So they already have so many eyeballs. I think it's a waste, but that's just my 2 cents. Also owned by them, I think your guests are going to end up changing too and who's going to want to be on it and not be on it. For example, why would Zuck want to continually be on a podcast owned by OpenAI. That's just my 2 cents. Maybe I'm wrong. You and I are both media companies in and of ourselves, right? Because we have audiences. I find that media, having eyeballs is really valuable, but owning the properties isn't always the best. And, you know, like, you know, we throw conferences all throughout the world and our own events. So we just came back from Canada and I was doing an event in Toronto and I think our event is called Full Circle. I should know this, but I don't know that.

Unbelievable.

I showed up. I didn't even know we were having an event, but dude, I'm speaking sometimes like 4 times a week where it's just so hard to keep track. It's just like—

You went from no speaking to full speaking.

More than last year. It's just ridiculous. I think this week alone I gave 5 speeches.

Wow. Including online?

No, not including online.

All in person?

All in person. It's becoming so much that like, I didn't even know we were throwing our own event. I know we throw our own event, but it's usually partnered with the Canadian Marketing Association. And this time they're just like, we want to throw our own event, like an NP Digital event. So what our team did, which I thought was really smart, there's a conference, a social media conference that I was speaking at the next day called Social Next. And I spoke at their Calgary event. I spoke at their Toronto event yesterday. They had really good ratings and feedback from me. The founder of it said, he's just like, hey, guess what? His name's Mike. He's like, did you know you were our highest rated speaker? He's like, of, you know, pretty much for the whole event, people were ecstatic for you. I think it was the whole event or the whole year for all their events. So he's ecstatic. And I didn't know that we partnered with him to throw our own event. And they sold tickets to it. I think they sold 180 tickets at $500 a pop. We also put money out of our pockets because we normally spend, call it $20,000, $25,000. This is in Canadian dollars, by the way, for on both ends, ticket prices and how much we spend. So let's call it, you know, I don't know how much the event did in profit, but my guess is it broke even based on everything I can see with the food and everything.

Which they usually do, by the way. Yeah.

So I was talking to my team how we'd end up doing this. I'm like, don't tell me we're getting in the conference business. And they said, no, we're not getting in conference business. SocialNex runs it for us. It's our branded event and they handle everything. It's for them to make profit or for them to lose money. We of course help them because we don't want them to lose money.

And for the leads to go to you.

Exactly. And for events, usually you end up losing money for the first few years and most people don't realize it, but If you do a really good job, you can eventually make money. They're really happy. They want to work with us more. And I was like, yeah, we should roll this out on the West Coast of Canada too, because this conference organizer does both the East and the West Coast. And then I was like, we should do this in a lot of countries. So instead of us owning the conference, we don't want to own the conference. And I think my team made the right decision, but we're getting access to the media and the eyeballs. And it's kind of like ours because we're You're co-branded. It's co-branded, but we don't have to deal with the logistics, the food or anything. And yes, eventually they'll make great profit from it. We don't care for the profit because that's not our core business. I don't think the money is in running media companies. That's so smart.

That's actually something a lot of people should do. Because there's a lot of these conference businesses that are hungry for distribution audience and they just want to make money. Whereas you just want the leads.

Yeah, we just want the leads.

To make more money, to be honest. Correct.

Because we believe our business model is better than running a conference.

Which is true. Okay, so I actually pulled up the deal here. So you got Zuck's face, Alex Karp's face from Palantir, and you got Satya Nadella's, right? So deal valued at $200 million. I'm sure there's some, maybe there's some stock, I don't know. And only 11 employees, and then $5 million ad revenue in 2025, on track for $30 million. Revenue per employee, assuming $30 million in sales, is greater than Apple's. I think that's a stupid comparison to even talk about that.

Yeah. $30 million versus, Do you want to know Apple's revenues?

Billions and billions?

I think, is Apple getting close to $400 billion? Oh dude. Oh wow. What is it? Yeah, I was right. $416 billion in revenue.

Yeah, I'll take the other one. Yeah. So, okay, here's the thing. So look at this. They achieve 4,000 to 10,000 views per episode, which is not a lot. 257,000 average views per clip on X. The clips aren't marketing, the clips are the product. Okay, so average views on YouTube, 4K, which is Not much average live viewership, 7K. So the clips do really well for them, which is cool because X has a lot of you know tech folks hanging out there. So they are very much like in the middle of the the the culture, or you can call it the zeitgeist, I guess. Tech buying media is an old playbook. Microsoft plus NBC plus MSNBC equals MSNBC's Bloomberg's Bloomberg sells terminals. Robinhood acquired Market Snacks. I don't think a lot of these go anywhere, and I think in this case, sure, maybe it's a drop in the bucket. But OpenAI had just said, because it's code red right now, because Anthropic's whooping their butt, they said, we got to focus right now. We got to— we're going to— they said they're going to move over to the enterprise. I had talked to someone yesterday. This is a salesperson because we were talking about working with their company. And he said, we're on ChatGPT Enterprise right now. We were going to switch to Anthropic, which would've been like $5 million switch. But ChatGPT was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We have something coming out that's going to crush Cowork in the next month, which they probably aren't. But you can see they're losing a lot of like Deals left and right.

I believe they really are losing a ton of deals right now.

Yep. So anyway, on the topic of X, Neil, I did something.

Let's go back really quickly to OpenAI. Did you see their marketing move that they just pulled off?

What'd they do?

They already have the eyeballs. They're losing a lot of people to Claude. So what did they just announce? Cheaper pricing and integration with Claude.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The integration with, With, was it Claude Code? I think it's integrated with Claude Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is smart because you're being the pipes, right? And in marketing, if you can't win the mindshare, you can win a lot of people just on price. Like if your offer is just half the price or a third, a lot of people will just switch over.

Yeah, and so with OpenCLAW right now, by the way, Claude, Anthropic had shut down the, just to use the OAuth, which means that you can just use like a $200 subscription instead of paying like, $7,500 like I did last month. So they shut off the loophole now. So now a lot of people are switching over to using Codex or ChatGPT 5.4, sorry, from OpenAI.

Wait, can you break down what you're talking about with the $7,500?

So what was happening with OpenCLAW was people were using Claude for it because Claude is still the best model to use OpenCLAW with, okay? So, but there was a loophole. You could actually tie in OpenCLAW with your Claude subscription, which is only $20 or $200 a month. And Anthropic will subsidize your $200 for— it's like $5,000 to $6,000 worth of tokens, okay? So people were abusing it that way, but that was costing Anthropic too much money. So they're like, we gotta shut that down.

So they closed the loophole.

We gotta shut that down. And when they shut that down, all the entire OpenCLAW community got mad, right? And so a lot of them are moving over to OpenAI's and they're just using their subscription, which OpenAI's okay with 'cause they own—

OpenCLAW.

They own OpenCLAW, right? So, but this week Claude, This is a misstep, I think. They launched their own version of managed agents, which is like an OpenCLAW competitor. It's a piece of crap right now. It'll probably get better, but you know, it's kind of trash, so.

Yeah.

Yeah, but net-net, I think Anthropic's doing a really good job of shipping. Their high-velocity shipping is a way of marketing because they have all these like clips that they're sharing on X and they're doing well. Google does a really good job too. Google makes like a Gemma account, they have like a Nano Banana account, they have all these accounts, and they all like cross-promote each other and they get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

It's funny, no one really talks about Nano Banana anymore, but it's so great.

I love it. It's great. Yeah.

If you're not using it and you're a marketer, you're making a big mistake.

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Yeah.

And, you know, vibe-coded website or not, it drives leads, I'll tell you that much. So a couple of publicly traded multi-billion dollar companies reached out this week, and what I've learned from the AI needs from people is everyone wants AI. 2, they have no idea what they want, okay? But number 3, they want it now, okay?

Yes.

So everyone, to your point, like as you were saying earlier, so one company's like, we want to do, we're working with a large agency holding company right now, you know, we want to do 1,000 ads a month. They're too slow. We want this for ads, okay? Another company's like, oh, we want the cold outbound piece of what you do with SingleBrain because it does end-to-end workflows, builds out cold emails, everything, right? Deal Resurrector. And so I've just realized that one, everyone needs a SingleBrain and that's kind of our wedge into everything. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this because Ramp, you know, the credit card company?

Uh-huh.

So they do this too. They have something called Glass, I think, and it's like their world intelligence for their internal team where they can query whatever they want. And then they have this thing called Sensei. It's like a big Japanese arc, and Sensei will coach people and say, oh, you need these skills over here as you're adding this, and then everyone has their own agent, right? So we're already doing that internally, and my team is saying, one person said, I'm 40% faster. One person onboarded himself using one of these agents. He's like, it's a 9 out of 10. And someone else yesterday was complaining, he's like, hey, how do we fix this? I think I'm dependent on this thing now. So I think this is where the world's going, and I think the fact that I understand more now why Jack Dorsey was confident cutting 40% of people. So—

I also think, and you're seeing this, he cut 40% of people because they just weren't growing. So they had kind of no choice.

2 things can exist in the same world.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

I'm with you on that.

Yeah.

But by the way, you know, my company is getting off of Amex. I was shocked.

Why?

Because I have an Amex credit card.

Wait, Without you saying yes? You've been Amex hardcore your whole life.

I still have Amex.

Yeah, I know.

Personally, and for my other companies.

Okay, so explain the story.

I have no idea. They just told me the other day that we're switching. I believe it's called Ramp. What's the other? There's 2 of them.

There's Ramp and Brex. You're probably switching to Ramp. You know why? Ramp has APIs, and you can ask whatever you want. Dude, you will like this, because I'm switching us to Ramp. I said, hey, enough of this bill.com crap, okay? I'm not going to apply for bill.com API. I need an API so I can ask whatever I want, and I can control all the spending stuff if I need to. If I need to, but I don't need to.

Yeah, but our team's switching everything to Ramp. And I didn't ask why, they just said, hey, you're going to get a new credit card. Your Amex is no longer going to work. In the next 30 days, you will get a Ramp credit card.

Are you still keeping your Black Card?

That's personal.

Okay.

Why would I get rid of that? I don't know. The perks are amazing.

Explain.

The perks?

Yeah. Your perks keep getting better. That's all I know.

The fees, I think we pay $20,000 a month for the Black Amex. Me, $5,000 a month, I mean $5,000 a year. My wife's credit card, another $5,000 a year. And then the corporate cards, I have 2 other corporations that I own, that's another $5,000 each a year. So just in Amex fees, I'm not talking about, you know, like what I'm spending on the card. I'm talking about what Amex charges me for the cards on an annual basis. I believe I'm spending around $20,000.

Did they give you the, you know, the LAX airport thing where they like drive you around?

That's one of the biggest things that I use. So when I land in LAX, I don't have to go through security. Amex through the, it's called like a private shuttle or service or something like that.

Forgot what it's called.

They have it at certain airports where, you know, like when I landed from Hong Kong and I just got back from Canada, I don't use it for that. Because when you, if you're a US citizen coming back from Canada, they have immigration when you're in Canada. So you, you, you go through it. So when you land in the US, you don't have to go through customs or anything, but when I was coming from Hong Kong, right when I landed, instead of going through immigration, right when I exit the plane, right, I'm walking down off that off-ramp. There's someone there holding a sign with my name. I'm not talking about even going into the airport. I'm talking about just right when you exit off that ramp. Yeah, I got the idea. And they'd walk you down the stairs, put you in a car. They take you to a different place. There's a customs person there. If there's of course no one in line, it takes like 1 second. They get you through, a car picks me up and takes me back to my home. And guess what my cost was?

Zero.

Yes.

But that thing typically costs a lot per year. I think it was, was it like $200 grand a year or $100 grand a year?

For what?

For that service.

No, it's in the thousands per year, I believe, as a member. And then you got to pay per usage. And I have a lot of usage for free because you get usage for, you get X amount of usage for free per Black Amex card. So I have so many of them, I just cycle through them.

That's a good clip for you.

But that's one of the best perks that I get. There's another perk that I get that I've never used. I get free Equinox gym membership.

Yeah, you never go. Yeah.

I've never signed up for it.

You should just give it to me and sign me up for your family. I pay for it.

You pay for Equinox membership?

Yeah, $300 a month, $350. $350.

It's that expensive?

Yeah, because I use the one at the mall.

You guys can go to any Equinox for free. Just Eric Patel. We'll find out if I can use mine and hook it up for you, and I gladly will because I don't use it.

I'll take it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so, okay, but here's the thing we should talk about and then we can move on here. So, Ramp is interesting to me because they ship, again, it's kind of like Anthropic. They ship so quickly. Talking about Glass, they're like, here's how we got our company AI-pilled. Here's the software we use over here. You just— their velocity is so fast and nobody talks about Brex anymore. Brex sold, right? And congratulations to the—

Oh, Brex sold.

Yeah.

It was like Mastercard or one of those companies bought them.

Yeah. So to me, like, sure, the founders probably made out well and congratulations to them. But in my mind, Brex was ahead and then Ramp was like, oh, another one. And then Ramp kicked their butt just by shipping. And I met the founders before, really nice guys.

New York based.

I met them in Miami. So they have a house in, uh, they have houses in Miami.

Of course, because they don't want to pay state income tax.

There you go. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But no, it's a good card. I just won't switch because of the Amex perks. The biggest one is actually not The security, it's actually buying plane tickets. I get half off.

Wait, what?

Yeah. The Business Centurion, you get half off when you use points. They'll give you 50% back.

Oh, it's like it was 50% on Platinum before and then they reduced it to 35% and they like cheapened that one. But yours stays the same. I think.

I get 50% back every time.

Are you talking about you're using, just buying it on points? Yeah.

They'll gimme 50% back right away.

Yeah. For every flight, any flight.

Uh-huh.

That's, see, that's, that's good.

So when I look at the cost for the card versus how much I actually save, because I fly so much, the savings is way more than the fees that they're charging me.

Yeah, that's good. And then your, the way your points accrue, well, here's the problem. Your points would accrue from your personal spend. Yes. But your company spend was, was helping a lot with that in the past.

No, I never collected points from the corporate spend. We just do cashback.

Which is, which is good.

Because our corporate spend was high.

Yeah.

I just have so many points that I just don't use them.

So remember our late friend Brandon? So he brought this up a long time ago. Like, it's like getting cash back is better because if you're to sell your company later, you have a multiple on that cash.

I don't know about the multiple on the cash because when someone buys your company, they look at every single transaction and they can pick and choose which ones they want to accept. The reason we did cash back is there was a point where I had like 10, 11,000 or 10, 11 million Amex points and it was building really fast. I was stacking up more than a million points. And I was like, man, what am I doing with all these points? Because half the time when I travel, someone's paying for it. Actually, not even half, probably like 80 to 90% of the time I'm traveling, someone else is paying for the flight.

Yep.

So there's only so many times I'm using it. And then I fly so much, I accumulate so many airline miles that I don't even use it. Like when my wife booked the Disney cruise vacation, I was like, oh, $1,000 per ticket, one way to go from LA to Vancouver business class. I'm like, these fuel prices are causing plane tickets to be so expensive. I was like, eh, just use the United points. I didn't even care if it was a good deal or not. I just have so many points. I didn't want to pay the 4 grand personally.

Dude, I'll buy your points at a discount.

Yeah. So I don't really use them. And then I have Amex points. So I don't really use tons of those either. Yes, I do make enough money from my Amex points, booking flights and stuff like that where it's worth the fees. But majority of the time, like if I'm flying, like I flew Emirates to India right before the war, it was almost $30,000 for a round trip. I didn't pay for that, right? So it's like, and I wouldn't pay for that. I would go fly business or something that's way more cheaper.

Yeah.

But the points started accumulating. And what I found was when I started getting points, call it 10 years ago, you could redeem them and it was a really good deal. Now, because flights are so expensive, the points don't take you that far. I don't care to collect anymore. Once I'm done using all of mine, I'll cut down on my Amex cards because then I won't need as many, like the perks won't be as good. I'll keep only 3. I'll get rid of one of the corporation ones. Actually, I should do that now. I don't know why I don't. And that Outside of that, you know, I'll just get cash back for everything because the ROI is better if you just get money versus the points.

So, well, we'll end up with this. I think if you have a surplus of points, don't be an idiot like me. I remember that flight to Dubai when we flew Emirates first class. I was stupid. I could have gotten that flight for 400,000 points. Instead, I spent like 2 million or 2.2 million or something like that.

Right.

But My point is everyone needs a points dealer. So I actually have a points dealer now that all he does is focus on optimizing points. Okay. I can intro you to him. You tell me why you started—

I wish you told me before you did that. I could have told you just book it with points.

I did book it with points.

No, not points. The transfer to Emirates.

Yeah. I didn't, I think I, I think I knew about it, but I was too lazy to do it, but it cost me 1.6 million points or 1.8 million points. But my point is, if you have a points dealer, all they do is say, okay, how many points do you have? Where are you trying to go? Okay. I got it. He spends all the time doing it and you pay him what? $100 to do the work. Yeah.

But the problem now with Emirates, when you transfer points, because I booked my parents' tickets to India, when you transfer to there, a lot of times though, you'll use the points and they expect you to pay half with cash. So like the deals overall of just using points to book any type of airline, whether it's through your credit card or with the airline, they're terrible. It's not great anymore. Just take your cash.

Do you think they're terrible right now because of the war or?

No, they've been terrible for years. That's why I stopped trying to collect points. But the reason I still collect points On Amex is because I, without getting into it, my personal credit card bills aren't the lowest.

You've already made this public before.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.