Eric Siu and Neil Patel compare X and Threads, arguing X's focus on AI and serious discourse beats Threads' victim mentality. They discuss a study of 34,000 top performers showing early specialization limits peak performance, then cover hiring tactics like paid work assignments and back-door reference checks.
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When I go to Threads, by the way, there's a massive divide between X and Threads. When I go to X, I learn what are the latest AI engineers talking about, what are the latest research that people are publishing over here. I'm getting smarter, okay? When I log into Threads, my God, sure, you might have hundreds of millions of active users, but the first thing I get when I log in is this shouldn't exist here. There's no such thing as self-made billionaires.
There's no this.
Everyone's so lucky. This system sucks. Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, blame, right? So then now I just, I just, what I do is I just troll people on Threads. Okay, so let me give you an example here. So the, there are no self-made billionaires. Okay, what about Oprah? How about Taylor Swift, LeBron James, Michael Jordan? How about Jensen Huang, who used to scrub toilets as a kid and used to work at Denny's? How about Dyson, James Dyson, who worked on 5,200 prototypes for 14 years, supported 3 kids, supported his wife? Throughout the whole time until he finally hit it big. And then, oh yeah, there's no self-made billionaires. That's the victim mentality. And you see a lot of that on Threads. And I have no idea how it does so well because that's just an example of people just, they can't help themselves.
Dude, I'm with you. I hate the victim mentality and I see the stuff that you post on Threads. It really is entertaining for me to watch. But yeah, and I also see, I like watching those, it's like political marketing bait shows. It's not only political figures, but you'll have like a Patrick Bet-David and there'll be people all around in a circle. And then I think they have to run to a chair and they'll like ask questions and they, people just have this mentality that it's unfair and, you know, the system's rigged and it sucks for everyone else. Right. And Eric and I didn't grow up with money. It's just a lot of people. Yes, they do have bad situations and they got screwed up for it and yeah, it could impact them in the future. But that's not everyone. People take the extremes, say everyone has bad luck. It's only a few 1% that could get lucky. And this is like a lot of people just don't try.
Yeah.
And I would say the big difference is, is if I look at a lot of the people who are successful, like Eric and I just focus on marketing and we try to just hone in on one craft and do it really well. I was with my cousins the other day or this weekend, and they're telling me how their kids do volleyball, chess, debate, basketball, and the list goes on and on. And I don't blame them. My kids are in a similar aspect, chess, swimming, cheerleading, whatever it is, the list goes on and on. And I was saying, this is what's wrong with society. And they're like, what do you mean? This is great. They'll find their passion. I'm like, yeah, it's good as a kid, but I'm like, You're trying to get them to be well-rounded in everything. And if you look at the people who are successful, they're not well-rounded at everything. You just have to be really, really good at one thing and that's it. You just have to help your child find that one thing and just let them double down on that. And it's okay if they're not good at everything. To be successful in whatever, you just have to find your passion and just double down on it and do trial and error because people don't grow up being like, I want to be a doctor, and then you just become a doctor.
Dude, Did I send you the research? I think I sent you the research. This is for your— I don't think you opened it because I was thinking what you're thinking. I'm not a parent, right? You're obviously a parent. And so, the research basically says that when you have the child specialize at a young age, they get really good but they cap out at like age 14 or whatever versus when you let them do a bunch of different things and they end up much more well-rounded in their mid-20s or so. So, I thought what you were thinking but I sent you that research because—
Yeah.
I didn't know you were going to bring this up, but it's actually very relevant to what you're talking about right now. It might actually change your mind. There's data.
Yeah, no, but I don't believe you should have them well-rounded. I think when they're younger, at this age, my kids are much younger than some of my cousin's kids.
How old are they?
My kids aren't yet— some of them are in high school and some are in college. But they have this notion of you make them well-rounded. I believe you let kids try whatever they want and you just let them keep going when they're younger. But the moment they start getting older, like high school, they need to start doubling down on what they're good at and not try to be well-rounded at everything because you're not going to build a successful career being well-rounded.
Oh dude. Okay. So I know this is not a parenting podcast, but guys, I have to share this with you. So Neil, I'm going to share this with you right now.
That's at least my belief. Because if I look at most of the successful entrepreneurs, they're not well-rounded and world-class at everything.
Yeah. Okay. So let me, let me go through this. So this is a massive new study on peak performance because we're talking about peak performance, guys. You got to have peak performance for marketing. I'm going to tie it together there. So A massive new study on peak performance included 34,000 international top performers. Okay, so you have Nobel laureates, renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world's best chess players. Okay, all the things you're talking about. It shows early specialization is a trap and the road to greatness is long and varied. So when you look at this over here, so early years, right? So the blue dotted line over here is just below, and then world-class is the The yellow one, okay? Are you following so far, Neil?
Yes.
Okay. So, if we say world-class, so early years, maybe you have extensive multidisciplinary practice, gradual early progress. So, this is saying you're doing a lot of different things. And then, when you're in your 20s or so, I guess, you're world-class and you're consistent across fields versus if you're in the blue line over here, maybe you're very high performance, okay? In the blue dotted line, it says intensive discipline-specific practice, Accelerated early progress, and then what ends up happening in your 20s or so is you actually end up just below. Kind of interesting.
So I look at this graph as a little bit different, or I would've done the scenario in a little bit different way. Okay, and there's 2 things to note if you go back to the graph. The first thing is, is I believe when kids are really young, and this is just my personal opinion, you don't try to make them world-class at anything. You try to let them just explore and learn what they like and don't like. When they start getting older, think high school, you want to have them start focusing and doubling down on what they're really passionate about and get really good at that one or two things and just double down on that. And the reason I say that is when you just focus on what you're really good at, then you'll end up doing much better in life because you don't need to be great at everything. Now, when I say this, I don't believe a kid knows what they really love And when they're like 2 years old, 3 years old, 4 years old, and be like, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. They may have those ideas, but it could end up changing. And a great example of this is I was taking my kids back yesterday to the hotel room. My son was saying, Daddy, thank you for looking up on your phone all the animal facts when we were driving back to the hotel. He's like, when I grow older, I'm going to discover— I'm going to be a scientist and discover animals on different planets. Okay? Like, that's what he's saying. My wife was really proud. And you know where my head went? It was like, well, unless it makes money, I don't really care. I know that sounds bad, but that's really where my head goes. And that gets into the second thing. When they look at here, human performance, I evaluate human performance, and this is very skewed, and I know most people are going to hate me for this and think this is wrong. I'm optimizing for my kids to try to do well financially. That's That is what I consider performance. I don't think my kids have it in them to be an NBA star or athlete. I don't have the genetics. My, and when I say that, I'm not saying my kids can't learn to be a better basketball player, but they're not going to have the height based on my height and my wife's height. I don't see my kids being 6'5, et cetera.
You know Muggsy Bogues? He was 5'3 and played in the NBA.
Sure, but that's very rare.
I know, I'm just messing around. Keep going.
Make your point. So I optimize for what I believe is important, and I believe that people need to make money and enough of it to be comfortable because life gets more and more expensive and harder. And that to me is performance. And when you try to be great at everything, just like my kids go to a school where, no joke, probably half of my kids' class, their parents went to Harvard or Stanford or Yale. And when you look at them financially, it doesn't mean financial success, but they're well-rounded. I'm not saying they don't do well financially. I'm just saying that doesn't necessarily guarantee anything. Being really good at one thing and doubling down on it for a career or a business, like how Eric and I chose marketing, I think you're going to be much better off from a financial aspect versus if you try to be well-rounded.
Maybe we can speak from experience here because I I'll share 2 things. So, you know, did you watch that movie, The Learning Machine, which was basically Google DeepMind? So the CEO of DeepMind is this guy, Denis Habibi. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but very smart guy, has done very well for himself. And so he was actually a chess prodigy at like age 9 or 10, and he was playing against a guy who was 30, 35 years old, and they actually had like a 10-hour chess session, okay, a 10-hour match. And at the end of it, he just decided to give up. He could have continued to make it a draw, but he just decided to give up. Because he realized how much a waste of human intelligence that was just to be sitting in there and playing those matches for such a long time. He's like, there has to be something else to build. I think through chess he learned that, right? But I think he was very specialized for chess. Now, what I actually specialized in as a child was I was really good at video games, but I played a lot of different video games and I specialized in a lot. And so I didn't specialize. I played a lot of different video games and I got good at a lot of them, but I wanted to play the video game of life. And to me, that's marketing is a video game. Business is the ultimate game ultimately, right? So, but I didn't learn that until my 20s. And so I think we probably look at it the same way. You might look at it a little differently and some people might disagree with you on, hey, like, you know, financial success matters. But you know, that's your KPI, that's fine. But all that to say is I just think this is an interesting study on 34,000 people and you guys take with it what you will, those of you that have kids, This wasn't meant to be advice on children, but it's just how we think about it.
Yeah. And I bet you a lot of the people or that chart and that study, when they evaluated high performance, I don't think they looked at it purely from a financial aspect.
No.
Yeah. And again, I know a lot of people aren't saying money isn't everything. I agree with that, but I want my kids to do really well financially. If they don't, then I'm like, what the heck did I teach them? Because homes, cars, and all the things that you need in life cost money.
Yeah.
And I hate to say it, getting a 9-to-5 job in most cases, if you want to live in a major city, doesn't pay for homes anymore, sadly.
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 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 over there. on the other side. Yep, dude. So, um, one thing I want to talk about, you see, you haven't seen, um, actually before we talk about, before we talk about the Netflix series I was just telling you about, so I saw Nick Mehta, who, um, he founded Gainsight, so sold to Vista, okay? And, um, so he said this, one thing I learned about recruiting, almost everyone is looking, almost every single person is looking to move up, take on more, make more money, etc. They just Take more work to get to. The corollary— the corollary, yeah, everyone on my teams were also— were always, always looking. So I needed to work to keep them. And this is interesting to me because, um, recently I told you that a person on our team basically was offered double the salary and they didn't take it. I was like, why didn't you take it? It's like, because you care about, uh, my family. And that was important to them. So I think it really is important as a leader that you're constantly talking to your team and figuring out, hey, especially if you'd be scared for them to leave, Constantly ask them, "Hey Neil, you know we really appreciate the work that you've done here. What do we need to do to keep you at Single Grain forever?" And just see what they say, right? Well, family time is important to me. This is important to me. Oh, I'm really overwhelmed right now. I could use this more support right now. It's really important to have those conversations. But and then the other thing too is I talked to someone else on my team recently, and I said, "Look, there's nothing wrong with other people looking like you should be selfish. You should be seeing what else is out there in the market. Everyone should be looking for themselves first, right?" And so. I just thought that was interesting because I don't think enough people think about, hey, like, who would I be freaking out if they left tomorrow? Or on the other side, if you're recruiting somebody, you might think about— we talked about this on the podcast, but you go to the recruit, hey, you can talk to anybody on my team over here in the office, okay? You can talk to anybody. Whoever you don't actually want them to talk to, those are the people that you should think about maybe potentially moving on from. So you should always be thinking about your talent. And I know for a fact that You know, maybe Neil's not that close to it, but someone on his team like a Mike Kamo, for example, or Gullickson, they're constantly thinking about it. Neil?
Yeah, we, I think most of our executives think about talent all the time. Talent is what makes a company. I think the difference is, is we focus on talent related to what projects and what divisions we're working on, right? So I think about talent very heavily in our SaaS products. Mike G focuses on talent and, um, what is it called? The agencies. And I would say Mike Camo focuses on talent really heavily on sales and, uh, software.
Everything comes down to talent at the end. At a certain level, all you're going to be thinking about is recruiting. And so as much as we like to talk about marketing, my head's more around recruiting nowadays. And I think about the marketing as it relates to recruiting. So, um, yeah, same.
I think you're going to have amazing marketing if you have great recruiting. I think you have amazing product if you have great recruiting. I think it all comes down to recruiting.
That's what, if you recruit the right marketers, They're going to be better than you and they're going to do the best marketing ever. So yeah, everything's related to people.
And I look at a lot of stuff as experiments because when you recruit, what people get wrong, and I'll give you a marketing example. So let's say if you're trying to recruit a social media marketing expert specifically for organic social, what most people do is they'll say, hey, I'm trying to recruit organic social person. I want you to tell me about your past, your past jobs. You know, why you're a good fit for this company, what you can help with, and lots of questions like that. What do you think we're doing wrong? How could we be better? You know, why isn't our social media driving sales? What do you think we can do better? And lots of all these type of generic questions. What I love about recruiting, and you should pay people for this, is I'll go to a candidate that I think is decently well past the first or second interview, And be like, okay, here's the assignment. This assignment may take you 3, 4, or 5 hours. We'll pay you X dollars for it, $200, $300, $500, whatever you want to end up doing. And I want you, let's say if it's organic social, here's your company. We are trying to create content that helps us generate engagement with our ideal customers. Here's our ideal customer profile. And eventually generate revenue. You can decide how you would end up driving someone through a funnel to generate revenue, whether selling product directly or capture a lead, whatever it may be. I want you to adjust our funnel, or I would first start, I want you to figure out the types of content that you would create, come up with ideas, then create the content that you think is the most relevant that would get engagement. And then tell us how you would push those people through that content throughout our funnel to drive revenue. Now, we are not going to give you feedback on your ideas, but I want you to also tell us why you decided to choose the ideas that you did. And, you know, if you, if you need specific tools, let us know and we will provide those tools for you. And then just have them go and do it. And then when they go and do it, whether you like the content or you don't like the content or you don't like the ideas or don't like the ideas, get on the phone with them or a video call and get an understanding of why they chose those topic ideas, why they created those type of contents. And you can test them out. Like you can do trial reels on Instagram and just see what happens, right? And hear them out because sometimes you may have these ideas on what you think works or what's best. And you may poo-poo on other people's ideas where they could be right and market conditions could have changed where you may think like, oh, that worked 10 years ago, it doesn't work now. Or, oh, that'll never work. And it actually does work because everyone's doing the opposite of what they just presented. And you can test some of those things out. You paid for it so you can end up using it and you can end up learning so much just through recruiting. And that's why I love recruiting.
Yep.
You got to give people the assignments. You can't just recruit and never give people assignments and talk because talk is cheap and a lot of people just bullshit.
Yep. We call this the working case. So it's no different than what you guys have, basically a couple hours or so, paid them $200, $300. And the thing that you're looking for here is quality of thinking. Okay. So sure, they, we want to see how they write, how they communicate. If they write and it's not coherent, okay, that's not going to work. But most importantly, it's what Neil said. It's Oftentimes they're going to come onto a Zoom call or, and just present to us. And that's where the rubber meets the road because that's where you get to really talk about strategy because that's how it's going to be working with this person. Imagine if you can't talk to this person, they can't communicate well, you guys are missing each other the whole time. It's just not going to work no matter how much experience they have or how good they are at interviewing, right? And so, um, that's where the value comes. I really find the value in the working case and the presentation and also in the backdoor reference checks, right? When that needs to happen. So.
Yeah.
Not their front door, but in the back door. So you just need to make sure that you're asking people, hey, who do you want us to— who do you not want us to talk to? So you don't put their job in jeopardy. That part's very important too. So there's an art and a science to all of this stuff. It's a game.
My favorite part is not— in marketing, the working case is just really easy because marketing has a lot of tangible deliverables. And I would highly recommend that anytime before you hire someone, unless you already know them and, you know, have worked with them in the past. But the way I end up seeing it is when you're going down this path and these people give you references, a lot of people are like, oh, I don't care to call the references. They're only going to say positive things. You know, people never put down bad references. I've actually called references firsthand and it's not because they know me or anything like that. These are random people that don't know me and they're like, yeah, I don't know why they would put me as a reference. I thought they were terrible at their job. And then I'm like, all right, cool. Sounds good. Thanks for that.
And it's like, that's bad judgment.
This bad judgment. And it's like, okay, if this person can't figure out who would say good things about them or bad things about them, and this is just common sense, what else are they going to mess up in their job?
Yep. True. Um, by the way, just, I'm just curious, what days did you give off for this holiday break?
I honestly don't know.
We have off from the 24th to the 5th.
So check this out. I was texting my CEO, right? And I said, where is it? Let's see. I'm trying to find it. Oh, so he's sending me sales numbers. And he's like, oh, it's really good. And I'm, I'm messing back. I'm like, only one day left. Really? That's the hard part about this month. He straight up texts, okay, what? Question mark, exclamation, exclamation. And then the next text, nonsense. And I said, because then everyone goes off, no question mark. And I told him, I agree with you. That was on the nonsense. He's like, Not sales, not CS, not paid. I'm assuming paid means the people managing the paid ads. I was like, ah. He's like, I've closed deals on December 31st on many occasions. Been a long time, but it isn't too hard. I'll be working. 2 dinners scheduled with clients already. And what he's saying is, yes, people have time off, but in certain roles, you still need to perform even during the holidays.
Yeah. So you don't know which days you have off?
Well, no, he just said it. There's certain roles that— Yeah.
For most people, which days do you— you don't know that, right? So it's interesting because I talked to one of our mutual friends. I was like, so which days do you have off? He's like, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's, New Year's Day. That's it. And I talked to my other friends. It's like exactly that. So I'm like, how did it even come to this? But anyway, that's where we are right now. So, okay. Last topic here. Are you ready? So I want to talk about the genius of Diddy's marketing that eventually led to his downfall. Okay, so Diddy is, you know, Puff Daddy, Sean Combs. And when you think about this back in the day, right, I didn't know all these things that he did. You definitely got to check out the Netflix series. But look, he has been on the face of Rolling Stone. Okay, he was the face of Sean John, which is his— I guess that was the clothing brand. Okay, Ciroc, the vodka, right? Bad Boy, which is his record label. He had the— remember the show Making the Band on MTV? You used to watch that? You watched that? I didn't watch that. Even the funeral he did for Biggie. So Notorious B.I.G., when he died, it was like this huge, like, I don't know, I wouldn't say— it's this huge celebration, okay? And what I want to say for all this is that with great power comes great responsibility, especially when you become more and more famous. And I'm not going to talk— I'm not going to spoil this for people, but check out the Netflix series. But I think what happened is you gain so much power, you start to abuse that power at the end of the day. But he had everything, right? Again, the vodka, he could break bread with any celebrities that he wanted to. Again, he was the face on— I think he was the face on Time magazine as well. He even did that song for the Godzilla movie back in the day. So I just remember growing up, we used to see him everywhere, and he used to make sure he inserted himself into all the music videos, whether he was promoting like an up-and-coming person. He was in every single music video.
He really was. He did extremely well getting his brand out there.
Yeah, well, now he's in prison.
Yeah.
Do you know how long he's in prison for?
Life?
No, not life. Just— it's actually a win for him, only 15 months.
15 months?
50. 5-0.
5-0. Okay, so a little bit more than 3 years. And he'll have good time, so it won't be 4 years.
Say that again.
So roughly 4 years, but then because of if he has good behavior, he won't actually get 4 years.
So huge victory for him. And the other thing too is with his— he had 8 lawyers fighting for him, and that basically just like a slap on the wrist for all the things that he was getting, um, that they're accusing him of. But if you watch that, um, that documentary, it's like, dude, he like— it does feel like he did a lot of those things.
So— But what did he get in trouble for? It was like sex trafficking or something crazy like that, right?
Sex trafficking, I think, is racketeering or whatever that means. Um, there's a lot of just footage and people coming, um, up and say like sexual— a lot of sexual assault, a lot of, uh, beating people up, a lot of drugging people. A lot of not paying his employees as well. And apparently, it seems like, and I'm not going to confirm this, but the death of Tupac, for example, I never knew that was actually attributed to him. And a lot of people came forward in that documentary.
You're saying he's the one who killed Tupac?
They're saying that he was the one that put up $1 million for the Crips to put a hit on him. So yeah.
Wow.
That's why you should check it out. It's really entertaining.
It's entertaining, but it's also sad. Like, I don't watch the doom and gloom of people being sex trafficked and stuff like that.
I don't know if it's a sex traffic piece, but they didn't talk about the freak-offs and all these things. But there's— I'll tell you what, there's a lot of baby oil stuff going on through those 4 episodes.
So I don't want to watch it.
We'll just leave it at that. But anything else you want to add before we hop off?
Hope you guys have a happy holidays and amazing New Year's. Eric and I wish you amazing 2026.
Yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.
