Truth About Personal Brands, $236K to Manage a CEO, LinkedIn vs. X, AI’s Biggest Shift | Ep. 3026

The next one I want to talk about is personal branding. And people talk about building a media company, a media company, you know, a company that it doesn't matter what you're selling, but Eric and I have talked about everything's turning into a media company where you need a following, you need an audience, whether it's personal or corporate. But what's interesting is we're seeing a lot more people trying to build up their personal brands or even corporate brands, But what's worked for you and I and what's worked, what works today, I would say is very different and you can't build a media company the same way that you could in the past. And again, to clarify, when I say media company, we're not talking about building your own version of CNN or Huffington Post or TechCrunch or anything like that. We're talking about you have your product or service that you're selling, but you need to build up an audience. That would be the media type company-ish thing that we're talking about to Build a community that evangelizes your product or service, the brand, pushes out there and helps you get more sales.

Yep. So I, my take on it is it's harder than it's ever been, but it's more essential than it's ever been. And the game is changing very quickly too. So if we were to start today, like just doing SEO, we'd be in trouble. But, you know, the, I look at marketing as there's always the meta, the most optimized way to play marketing right now. And then there's also each channel, there's an optimized way to play for short form, for example, and things like that. and you for what you've done with long form. So I think when people say you need to build a media company, I look at it as they're just saying you need to build distribution in some way, shape, or form because one of the only forms of moats right now is distribution. And so that's why we continue to do what we do. I wouldn't say, Neil, you necessarily enjoy creating content, nor would I say I enjoy creating content. I mean, I would say that when we hang out and we get lunch and all that, it's fun. It's like more of a reason for us to hang out.

Yes.

But that's about it.

So, dude, I, you know, I don't enjoy creating content and you're being kind about it. But my favorite part about our podcast recently has nothing to do with the recording, even though Eric and I genuinely do enjoy helping other people. It's just we have busy schedules. So it starts becoming tough to always sit down every single week and share content. Like today is my anniversary, right? Wedding anniversary. I'm sitting here creating content. Thank you. But the part that I've been enjoying about our podcast recordings of recent is we've been doing lunch after.

Yeah. And we do lunch with Noah, who's our amazing videographer. And it's fun. Like it's, you realize the joy I get from doing this is the relational wealth that you build from it long-term. So there's different types of wealth. You got relational wealth, you got monetary wealth, you got physical health, Right? And you've got your mental health. There's all these different things. And I think actually Sahil Bloom wrote a book about this, but I think it's worth thinking about these and it's not always about money, money, money, or reach, reach, reach. So there's always secondary and tertiary benefits to these things. But going back to the original topic here, what's your take on it in terms of building a media company?

I think it's more essential than ever, but I think it doesn't get you to a really large corporation. And I'll give you a great example of this. If you look at Hailey Bieber, I believe is her name, her makeup company, I forgot what it was called, but it was bought by e.l.f. Beauty.

All right.

And they got to hundreds of millions in revenue.

e.l.f.

bought it for premium. It was mainly stock. And I bet you the company will blow up now. Hailey Bieber has a big community. Her dad is one of the Baldwin brothers. I don't know which Baldwin brother. And then her husband is Justin Bieber.

Mm-hmm.

The Baldwin brothers, like Alec Baldwin. I don't know the other ones. They're great actors.

Alec Baldwin from, uh—

Yeah, I don't know all the names.

ABC, Always Be Closing. That's how I remember.

Okay.

Glengarry Glen Ross.

Yeah, but it's one of the Baldwin brothers, and the reason she'll build a bigger company now isn't because of her social audience. If you look at majority of the people who buy cosmetics, The transactions happen offline.

What e.l.f.

has that SHE didn't have is they have the relationships to get into every store and the distribution and the lines of credit to do it because it's very expensive. I think e.l.f. just financed like $600-ish billion in debt. Don't quote me on the amount, but it was something large like that. I'm pretty sure it was around $600 billion in debt for all their Sephora inventory and things like that. Let's see, e.l.f. Beauty. I'm going to look it up. Debt. Million financing Sephora. Let's see. Oh yeah, debt financing of $600 million. So that way they can go in and expand faster offline. But that's where the majority of the sales are. So you can create a media company. Like a Kardashian, Hailey Bieber, and these are extreme cases, and I'm not trying to say it in a negative way. I mean extreme cases in which they have so many followers, 99.999999% of people will never reach what they have. And even then, it's hard to get more than hundreds of millions of dollars of followers just doing it online. They, they, it's a great way to jumpstart the business, but then you need all the systems, the processes, and the fundamentals that the old school large corporations have figured out for many, many years. And that is distribution and partnerships and all these other things that don't seem sexy but drive a ton of revenue. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about Kylie Jenner, she's done amazing, or Kim Kardashian. But when you compare them to like the L'Oréals of the world, they're so tiny. And I'm not saying it in a bad way. They've built bigger businesses than you and I have built. It's just more so the L'Oréals of the world, whether you think they're sexy or not compared to the Kim Kardashians and the Hailey Biebers, They figured out the part that generates a lot of money, which is the old-school traditional stuff, which is people going into Walmart and buying.

I think one part where people have gotten confused, like, so I was actually watching something recently where people, like, you know, obviously MrBeast created Feastables, right? And then he partnered with Logan Paul on Lunchly. So I actually pulled up, I used Grok to pull up Prime's, which is Logan Paul's drink, right? So 2023 full year, Sales figures, 1.2 billion. Okay, so that's what Bloomberg estimated. Who knows that's real or not? 2024 full year down 112 million pounds in 2023. This is UK only, so that's a 71% year-on-year decline. Profits dropped 92% to just 312 thousand pounds. Okay, now if we look at the trailing 12 months 2025, it's reported journalist Darren Rovell. Reported 90% decline, but 42% is a verified figure. So it's going down a lot. So all that to say is creating the— making this media company, driving distribution is certainly important. I don't think it's an or thing. You have to have a good operator on your team to figure out what to do. Otherwise, it's all going to fall apart, right? And then what ends up happening is then your brand ends up getting tarnished for it, and you don't want that to happen.

Yeah, and ideally use your brand, your following, whether it's corporate or personal, to kickstart things and get the engine going. But don't forget about all the systems and the processes and boring stuff that's made a lot of these large publicly traded companies large. You need both. If you don't have both, it's really hard to succeed in today's world. Now, you don't necessarily need the media part or the personal brand. I still think you can do it the old school way. It just costs more now than it did before.

Yeah.

The personal brand side, right? Trying to create that media company or corporate brand side, it helps kickstart things.

Dude, speaking of which, did you see that PayPal is offering $236,000 to manage their CEO's brand?

No, that's it?

Yeah. So, okay, so there's a head of CEO content. It's not even SEO content, head of CEO content based in San Jose and $137,000 to $236,000 full-time job. And so I just, I think this is interesting. I think some people, a lot of people are poo-pooing on it. But I think this is necessary because at least PayPal realizes this is important.

It is hugely important. I can't name companies, but we get paid by quite a few publicly traded companies to manage the CEO's online presence. And PayPal, you know, their stock hasn't been doing well as of recent, but it's still a $66 billion company. They're still growing. And in 2024, they did $31.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $4.15 million, EBITDA of $6. $1.17 billion. So they're still massively large. And people tend to also forget Elon was one of the co-founders.

Yeah. Along with— Sacks worked there. Reid Hoffman worked there. Thiel was a co-founder.

Yeah. This is the PayPal Mafia. Yeah.

Yeah.

A firm, right? And then I forgot what he did before. I think the Yelp guys also came from there.

Maybe.

Yeah. YouTube founders came from there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of smart people come through there.

No, but what it shows is, forget the smart people come through there, it shows that Thiel and Musk were amazing at recruiting and spotting talent. That's what it shows more than anything else.

So I don't know if I told you this, but so my CTO Sean went to the SpaceX Starbase, right? And he just said it was incredibly motivating to be there because Everyone was focused on the mission. Everyone was working, helping each other. They were just walking and someone like drove by them and said, hey, do you need like a ride, like a golf cart, right? But everyone's working around the clock because when you have a mission that's so insane, you can't help but to want to work harder for the mission and to work harder for Elon because it's like they're trying to make humanity multi-planetary. That's a crazy mission, right? Or when you're trying to reduce carbon emissions of space or with Tesla, you're trying to make robotics, you're trying to make more self-driving cars. Every single mission is so big that you're naturally going to bring in the best of the best people, and the people that can't take it are going to quit, right? And so you and I don't have missions like that necessarily, but we started working on our mission a little more and we started to mold it a little bit. But I think if you can look at SpaceX, whether you love or hate Elon, you can agree that the mission is very noble and it inspires people to keep working there. Because what was PayPal's mission? Do you remember?

I don't know, maybe power every online transaction. I'm taking a guess here.

So to democratize financial services, making them accessible, convenient, and secure for everyone regardless of background or economic standing. I'm sure that might have changed in the beginning, but at least that sounded interesting back in the day because nobody solved payments back when we first started using PayPal. There's so many scams going on.

Yeah, people would send checks. I remember I would get money orders to buy stuff on eBay and mail them out. It was a pain.

I remember this is when you sold CDs.

Yeah, yeah, didn't go well at the end, but yeah.

Yeah, that's when I sold, uh, I sold gear on eBay. I sold weapons and, and, um, assuming did not go well either. No, it actually went well for me. It worked out for me.

Oh, you're not talking about like weapons like guns?

No, no, not real weapons, like in-game weapons and armor.

Thank you for that.

That's not a weapon dealer.

I thought you had like—

you're selling tactical. I'm like, this did not go well. You're gonna get You want to know what I want to call out? So earlier in this session, I talked about how people responded to my, you know, if you can't lead marketing, if you don't have at least 100,000 followers. So guess how people responded on X versus LinkedIn?

LinkedIn people must have hated on you. I didn't see it on either, by the way. X, you probably got some haters, but you probably got more people that are like, cool, this makes sense.

Exactly. So The question is, are people on LinkedIn dumber than people on X? Okay, so that post again, if you don't have at least 100,000 followers, you don't deserve to lead marketing on X. Almost every single person agreed. Okay, every single person agreed. And actually, I get my news from X, right? Behind the scenes, when I'm talking to, let's say you, or I'm talking to other CMOs, some CMOs, their company's doing, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue, right? They agreed with it as well. In fact, they said, no, you need to have even more. You need to be good at multiple channels. And even you said that yourself, right?

Yeah.

No, I go on LinkedIn. Everybody hates me. Every single person hates me, right? And so the question is, is LinkedIn dumber? That's a good question. You answer it first and then I'll go.

All right.

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

I don't think it's dumber. I think a lot of the people on LinkedIn know it, but what's happening is, is most of the people on LinkedIn are there trying to climb the corporate ladder, and they're going to go against anything that is not favorable to the employee. So you've probably posted about— actually, you did. You talked about this, about people have to go into the office, and that's going to be the new norm again, I bet you everyone on LinkedIn hated it. I don't know what percentage, but it has to be 90+% had to hate on it because there are people who had to— don't want to go into the office. Same with people who don't want to have a massive following because it's hard for them. X, you have employees on there, you have entrepreneurs similar to LinkedIn, but X is a platform where you don't really get chewed out for speaking your mind as much.

Right.

LinkedIn, you get chewed out for speaking your mind, you know, and X is also designed where if someone likes your content and you're just saying what you want, others don't know that they liked it.

Yeah. And by the way, so I don't necessarily look at it as dumber. I just look at it as different experience levels and different incentives too, right? So to your point, people commenting, when I, when I put that post up on like harsh truth, most people are, or all people are going to go back to the office. That one got, I think, 500,000 or 600,000 views on it. And everyone in there was like, no, this is rage bait, whatever. But when you look at all the people that responded, what did they do? They actually work at companies, right? So of course they're not going to say it's okay, right? And then they start fighting. And same thing, like when you talked about the people climbing the corporate ladder, they don't want to have to do more work, right? And I get it. That makes sense. Like maybe they're in a season where it's like, I don't want to have to learn this new stuff. I already work so hard. And I get it. Now, on the other side, when you look at X, to your point, you have a lot of people who are entrepreneurs, right? And, um, or entrepreneurial. And so they are actually okay with having to deal with whatever change is going to happen because X is moving so quickly. I would, I tend to think that whoever's posting on X usually is someone that's trying to take responsibility for themselves. Um, and they're willing to try the new things, right? Not saying that LinkedIn people aren't, but X people are, I would say, more, um, how would you do it? More sovereign individuals, if that makes sense. Yeah.

So, I posted something on both X and LinkedIn in the last, call it 7 to 10 days. I forget the timeline, but somewhere around there, and it was on what companies are expecting or how they're adjusting because of AI. And when we started talking to a lot of companies, we found that the biggest thing is they're expecting you to finish your work faster.

Mm-hmm.

Like, so they're reducing deadlines. So, if you had 2 months to do something because of AI, they're hoping that you can get it done in a month. I'm just making up You know, the time difference, but it could have been a month, month and a half, but they're just, they're creating shorter timelines, that's for certain. The other thing that we're seeing is they expect people to get more done with less, so less of a team, less money, they're still expecting you to get more done, and the list goes on and on. I posted it on X, I think it got like 40,000 views.

That's a lot.

And I read all the comments, and then I posted it on LinkedIn, I don't know how many views it got, I don't think as many, but if I look at my direct messages, because I can see the messages, I have so much hate of people being like, why would you post junk like this? This is useless information. And you look at it, they all work at corporations.

Yeah.

And they don't want anything out there that makes their life harder. And I bet you it's the same thing, like if someone posted stats or data on X and LinkedIn about going into an office and Hypothetically, let's say it makes you more efficient. It probably could. There's probably cases where it doesn't, but I don't have data on this, at least off the top of my head, but I can research it. And let's say I created a chart showing and citing my sources on how it makes you— I'm making up the number— you know, 31% more efficient, even though you have work commute, you know, output increases, et cetera. If I post it on X, you know, people probably love it. If I post it on LinkedIn, some people would love it. And even on X, some people would hate it. But on LinkedIn, I know people would be furious with it. And the reason being, they're like, this chart is garbage. You know, I've become way more efficient because I don't have the hour commute each way to work and I'm saving so much time and all this kind of stuff. Like people just argue for what's in their self-interest.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. That's rightfully so. So you just have to understand what audience you're hanging out with. And ironically, so on Threads, and we can jump around here, but on Threads, Threads happens to be a little more, I would say, like a different crowd than X. Let's just put it that way. Okay.

They like motivation for sure. Anything that's upbeat and cheery, like, yay, people love that.

It's funny, I wrote something on X about Elon or on LinkedIn as well. It did okay. But when I wrote about Elon on— I put the same post on Threads, it got ripped apart, right? So they're like, how could you actually believe that Elon is helpful to society or something like that, right? And that is it for today, guys. And we'll See you tomorrow.