Discord 125k growth hack, Eric's 1.9M view Tweet, Bryan Johnson's new company, Barbie marketing, AI's horrifying future

0:01All right, we've got a lot to cover in our reaction series for this week. The first topic we're going to touch upon is Brian Johnson. So Brian Johnson, he is this guy. He started a company a long time ago, a payments company called Braintree, and he sold it to PayPal for about$800 million. So he's done really well for himself and very good entrepreneur. And now he has launched a supplement company. And what we wanted to talk about, I'm going to first share kind of what this guy is all about now, and then we can talk about this model because we're seeing more and more people do it. So just to share some context here, those of you that are watching on YouTube, you can see this is the before and after.

0:38So Brian's on the left side, and then this is a new Brian Johnson. And you can see he's very new age on the right side over here. And if we move more muscle definition, I can't really tell from the left side image. But he's all about longevity and just making his body healthier, his insides healthier, his, you know, live longer, et cetera. Cool. So you can see his YouTube, and I think he's holding a vial of blood here, and basically 422k subs, and he's gone really hard on YouTube. So the topics are interesting. You can see this thumbnail over here, why I take 100 plus pills every day. And then the thumbnail is really good.

1:17It's like a spoonful of pills, and his face is kind of like a little bit in shock. And then he's got his anti-aging home, so it's like a$5.8 million anti-aging home. And he's clearly playing the game of YouTube really well. it's a trending topic it's got a larger total addressable market and if you look at his twitter over here he's got 136k followers and he calls himself a professional rejuvenation athlete and so he's basically look and his tweets over here health is forgotten until it's the only thing that matters and then he put in um i think my dream gf maybe my dream gf is that that's not a My dream girlfriend.

2:01Yeah, my dream girlfriend, I'm guessing. Pace of aging is less than 0.70, body inflammation, less than an average 10-year-old, perfect liver markers, blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, this guy is like all in on this stuff, right? And so it makes a lot of sense for him to launch a supplement company. Now, Neil, do you want to talk about how he's changed things up? Because he started as an entrepreneur, and now he's kind of reversing it. Yeah, so most entrepreneurs create a product and then they focus on marketing. What he's doing right now is the opposite. And Eric and I have talked about this in the past.

2:33You build attention. In essence, you're building kind of like a media company, and then you're monetizing. So what he's doing right now is building a massive audience. He's going after consumer-based topics that appeal to pretty much everyone, as long as you're an adult. If you're a kid, of course, his content isn't applicable. When you're five years old or two years old, you're not going to watch it or read it. But assuming you're an adult, it's practical, it's useful to you, and he's creating content that appeals to the masses. If you look at his Instagram thumbnails, he'll show his back posture messed up versus it straight.

3:07He'll do catchy stuff like talking about his$5.8 million home or top 1.5 % of 18-year-olds. Like he's using all these catchy images or like him with a spoonful of pills. Everyone's like, what the heck? What's happening here? And this is all causing tons of use, thousands and thousands. And then what will he do? He'll monetize it. So it's a really smart approach. A lot of people, when they're creating businesses, they first figure out the product or service. If you already know the industry you wanna be in, go grab the attention. Go create that media company, whether it's through blogging or social media or paid ads, go garner the attention.

3:45And then from there, focus on monetizing it once you've built up a massive audience that's super loyal to you. You know what I think is interesting, Neil? He's also, he's playing the game pretty well. And so it looks like in the last month or so, he's gotten 12 million views and 76 ,000 subscribers. And this is, by the way, it's a net decrease. And he's actually decreased a little bit of his output. So 44 videos published. But I think the key thing here to call it too is those of you that can see my screen, he is playing the YouTube game really well. What's really important with YouTube? At the end of the day, it comes down to number one, the idea.

4:22The idea has got to be really good. Two, the thumbnail has got to be amazing. And three, ideally, your headline invokes curiosity and controversy, right? So it's like why I take 100 plus pills. Wait, this guy takes 100 plus pills a day? What is that? I'm curious, right? And I guess it's kind of controversial too. I barely can take five or 10 pills a day. I mean, to be fair, I take like 30 a day, but it's for a whole other pieces like stuff. But like here, check this out, Neil, like this one, how I fixed my terrible posture, the thumbnail to Neil's point, it's on the left side, it shows bad posture versus good posture.

4:55And then on the bottom of it, you said my posture, you can see it says my posture nearly killed me. Now, the difference is the one with the really amazing thumbnail. The first one has 929 ,000 views versus the second one has a 40, 149 ,000 views. so like what i've realized at least this now goes into like a subsection of what he's doing the game that's being played on youtube now that we have someone that's that's a youtube strategist for us he's like look like eric you have a wealth of information but at the end of the day it's like your idea of a isn't that interesting and b your thumbnails and your headlines suck so that's just another mini lesson well speaking about thumbnails and uh youtube we have another topic that we want to discuss what the best YouTubers do when it comes to thumbnails and headlines.

5:40Yep. So I guess we kind of, we kind of, I mean, this guy's a good example of, I guess we kind of went into it already. Right. And so let's, let's use another example. And I know like we've, we talk about, or more so I talk about Mr. Beast all the time, just cause I think he's the gold standard. And I think he spends over six figures per thumbnail, something like that, or like six, six figures per video testing thumbnails. And I think that's a lot of money. and it is a lot of money but it's worked out for him because what most people get wrong is they focus all their attention on creating the best video which you should create amazing content but they focus very little of their time on youtube actually marketing it and your headlines and thumbnails will affect how many times your video is suggested because it's all about the click rate right youtube's looking at how long is your video keeping people on youtube and what people are percentage-wise clicking on your videos versus the competition.

6:36If you do well on both aspects, your video will perform much better than others. And it's easier said than done, but the way you get that done is through testing your headline quite a bit and you test your thumbnail. And if you're not doing that, you're making a big mistake. There's a lot of YouTube tools out there that allow you to test your thumbnail. Check out like TubeBuddy, VidIQ, a lot of them. I believe TubeBuddy is what we use for the A-B testing of the thumbnails or it's VidIQ. It's one of them. It's TubeBuddy for that one. Yeah. So Creator Hooks is another, it's a tool I use. And what it does is this guy, I believe his name is Jake Thomas.

7:17Each month, he will basically give you a list of thumbnails and headlines that work really well and he'll score them too so you get some ideas from the latest performing videos and look that's what matters and i was talking to a guy his name is film booth and his name his first name is ed i was talking to him over twitter the other day so he's actually listened to the the pod before but he teaches people how to grow on youtube and he's got about 400k subs and if you watch his videos he's he's not just an educator he's an edutainer and when i was talking to him he's like dude like your stuff is good but at the end of the day man like i was talking about earlier it just comes down to the idea you need to spend as much time as possible thinking about the idea and so for example i wouldn't say how to grow your seo traffic i might say something more along the lines of this helped me get 1 billion visitors and then i could talk about whatever i wanted to wrap it around that's more entertaining and that's more at least it's a little more like whoa i'm a little curious.

8:17And maybe I got a billion visitors using this black hat tactic. And then it's like, whoa, black hat tactic. That's a little controversial. And then you have an interesting headline, you have an interesting thumbnail, and you're just testing the hell out of it. And so for us, when I talk to you guys, it's like, yeah, if their thumbnails isn't like a top one or three video out of the last 10 videos in the first hour or so, they're quickly adjusting the thumbnail and they're quickly adjusting the headline. Neil and I, we don't, unfortunately, at least I'll speak for myself, we don't have, we have our resources kind of spread in different areas right now.

8:52And it isn't like YouTube's our number one game, but we're trying to play the game better so we can teach you better. Yep. And now let's talk about Twitter ghostwriters. Yep. So this is a topic we were talking about maybe earlier last week, the last seven days or so. So I was just mentioning how we're testing out ghostwriters. And one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, he started a ghostwriting service for, I believe, Twitter. He's doing it for CEOs. And you're seeing a lot of these pop up. And so earlier I just alluded to YouTube, like you've got to know how to play the game. Brian's playing the game on YouTube.

9:27But there's also a game to be played on Twitter as well. And we're going to talk about the pros and cons of doing this. And I just want to show you some results from we're kind of testing this ghostwriter over here. So if you can see my screen over here, basically what I've done is I am – this is a tweet that my ghost writers put out maybe a week ago or so, less than a week ago. And so the headline is for these two women over here. They started a company called Flowdesk. The main thing I want to call out here is this tweet, this tweet storm or tweet thread. Got about 2 million views on it. You can see it's got all the likes in the world, 5 ,500 likes, 6 ,000 bookmarks or so.

10:06And that's great and all. And it's a story. You guys keep scrolling. It's like, okay, here's what they did since then. Here's how much revenue they did. Oh my God, right? Scroll all the way back up. The hook is really catchy. I'll read it for you guys if you guys can't see. 20 million a year and 100 % bootstrap. In 2019, they were called idiots as they were building a product that has already existed. In 2023, their business is better than most VC-backed startups. So it's a really catchy intro. And by the way, I'm just reading it. I'm not calling them idiots, nor is Eric, but we're just reading the intro and the intro is super, super catchy.

10:44And by the way, good for them for bootstrapping getting to$20 million a year. Very few businesses get to$20 million a year, whether they're bootstrap or venture funded. Yep. And look, and the second part too, when you hook someone, you got to keep them hooked, right? And so the first tweet actually right after, or the second tweet, I should say, matters a lot. So it's like Martha Bittar and Rebecca Shostak founded Flowdesk in August 2019. Since then, Flowdesk has hit$20 million in revenue, has achieved year-over-year growth of 391%, has only 21 employees, 75 % of which are women. So this is all remarkable, right?

11:18And so my point of calling this out is not to say, oh, my ghostwriters or myself or anybody is a genius for doing this. I'm just saying, look, this is the game that if you sometimes you want to play to go viral, this is what you can do. Now on the flip side, like here's the positive part. And we're going to talk about the negative part as well. Sure. It got 2 million views or so. It also got me maybe 200 email subscribers or so. So that's pretty good. Right. Um, from a business standpoint now, it doesn't necessarily generate me any leads. No. Right. And so the, The only reason I would continue to do this if I were to continue to do this would be to every week have a post that goes out like this, and then it would grow the following or so.

12:03And then I would continue to post what I'm posting that's more related to my business. And that's what the gross writers themselves said. They said, look, these posts themselves, they're more intended to capture a large audience, but they're not necessarily going to generate conversions. You have to continue to tweet more about what it is that you do. And so this is still very new for me right now. I will continue to report back on how it's going. But at least for right now, I can't say there's any immediate business benefit. Besides, you know, 200 emails is pretty good. Yeah, and my big philosophy is, you know, just focus on creating like content that's super relevant to your ideal customer.

12:40you're not going to generate as many followers, views, likes, whatever you want to end up calling it. But I've just found that that creates the most revenue. There's no right or wrong strategy. That's just the route that I prefer. And I tested quite a bit. But you can test out whatever you want. And again, if you end up generating a lot of followers, great. And then if you can end up monetizing by posting other related content. Go for it. But what I found is when you post very relevant content for your industry, your followers tend to be more of your ideal customers and it generates you more revenue in the long run.

13:22Neil, did you take your daughter to go see the new Barbie yet? I have not. She's a little too young. She's four years old. She's not going to sit through it. Okay. We're going to, okay. Speaking of your daughter and also your son as well, have you seen this AI video? the pretty dystopian one where the you see the kid's identity being stolen and all that no okay i'm going to share my screen and then i'm going to also going to have the audio on as well so those you can see it um or can listen to it rather so all right neil you can see this yes not you now i can okay tell me when to pause if you have a reaction to it but here we go dude that's crazy wow

14:11um dude that's kind of crazy so here i'm gonna pause for a second before we move to the next one so do you want to repeat what you just saw yeah so what i saw is there's all these social media clips of this kid and then they took it put it in ai and they made it older parents were in a movie theater and the ai clip pretty much was saying hey mom and dad here's an older version of me ai and then starts talking okay now this is where you're gonna freak out as a parent

14:45dude it's creepy anyway so do you want to describe that part yeah so you know the older version the ai created version of their daughter is pretty much breaking down all you have to do is just take a couple of pictures and people can steal my identity, send me to jail for something I never ended up doing, take my voice and ask you for money or ruin my credit score. And she's just telling the parents, yeah, just a few pictures. You know, you may want to capture those memories and put them online, but people can use just a few pictures, literally just a handful and use it to do really damaging bad stuff, which gets scary.

15:23You know, being a father, I funny enough, I don't really post too many pictures and stuff of my children online. Not because of that, but it'll probably make me a little bit more paranoid about posting stuff online. I think the key takeaway here is just you have to protect your data. And there's just look, the deep fakes, the older, like the world is going to get pretty crazy and whatever you can protect, go ahead and do it. I mean, I don't know if I told you this yesterday, like someone stole my temporary license plate from my car yesterday. They just ripped it off. Yeah, there's just weird people, weird stuff going on in the world right now.

15:56But I think, look, that video is certainly a wake-up call. I actually had a conversation with Peter Diamandis, who's like one of the ultimate futurists in the world. He works with Tony Robbins. He works with a handful of people. He knows Elon well. And I was talking to him about AI, and he's very optimistic about it. He's just like, look, we just need to get it right in the next decade. Obviously, that's easier said than done. If we get it right in the next decade, we'll be fine. If we can't, things are going to be, we're going to be in big trouble, right? And this is a guy that's super optimistic.

16:27He thinks he can extend, humans can extend their lives to maybe 200, 300 years old. We're going to share that interview on this podcast eventually because we talk about marketing, we talk about business, but we talk about where the world's going. So that's that. But this is kind of a dovetail into that eventually, which is interesting too. Talk about AI for a second. Neil, did you read that Sergey Brin is back, one of the co-founders of Google? I did. I already saw he's back and he's focusing more on AI. So time will tell what will end up happening there. But his goal is to make sure they beat chat GPT.

17:01And he's spending a lot of time in the trenches at Google right now. Here's the key thing. And I don't think I think you and I have talked about this on the phone. But I, you know, I have a friend that we did talk about this on podcast. But again, I had a friend that was collecting his like$2 million a year paycheck. He moved somewhere else. He had a kid. He bought a new home and was just playing Call of Duty for like the last two, three years. And now he's back. He's fired his CEO that he hired during that time. He fired the president. He's like, I'm back. Right. And we had another mutual friend.

17:32They fired a couple hundred people. He's very back in the trenches. He's working seven days a week. We have another friend who's been out of his business for a while and he's fully back in it. And, you know, it's just all over the place. We're seeing people have to step back and clean things up. We're seeing a lot more discipline and it is a trend, right? It's like, and Sergei is, is kind of reinforcing it. Um, we're seeing a lot more discipline, whether it's Elon cutting 80 % of Twitter staff or Mark Zuckerberg having to cut staff, Toby from Shopify having to cut. And we're not saying that's like a really like cool thing to do to cut people, but I'm just saying we all got a little too bloated.

18:06We all got a little too lazy in the last couple of years, including the founders. And I'm glad that things are changing, right? And changing minus Apple, Apple's done a really good job of not overhiring so they didn't have to lay off at least from what I've done. Apple's like in its own class. I mean, they're still the most valuable company in the world, right? So yeah. Any thoughts on that? No, you know, a lot of times if you're really good at one thing, get back into it and focus on it and get back to your roots. If that's what caused you guys to grow, you know, there's no reason why in most cases it won't keep causing you to grow, assuming your market's big enough.

18:42I mean, you're fully in it too, right? Yeah, but I never stepped out like a lot of these people.

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20:56I think it was the cool thing. Also not as rich as like a Sergey Brin. Yeah. I mean, look, like, you know, last couple of years, I thought the cool thing, and I'm not immune to this. Like I did this as well. the cool thing was to like try to hire someone and step out of the thing and like go work on other stuff. Right. And go work on other unprofitable projects that were kind of moonshots because the incentive was to have growth at all costs. But now the incentive is to have profit at all costs. Right. And to be very efficient with what you're doing. So the macroeconomic environment changes. And so you should adapt as well if you haven't already.

21:30So. No, totally. All right. You pick the next one. Let's talk about Barbie. You know, we've been talking about social media a lot. Let's talk about Barbie for a little bit. If you guys haven't seen the movie, it's out now. And they'd be doing some interesting stuff when it comes to marketing. All right. So I'm going to, I have my screen being shared right now. And you can see this is, this is from Adweek and it just shows the couple of things that they've done. So they have this Barbie selfie generator. And so I guess it makes something like this. And then our Airbnb's Barbie dream house. So they did a lot of collaborations with different companies.

22:05um the barbie i don't know how to pronounce this um but there's like a luggage connection collection they like partner with a luggage company and they made a little one there's a bumble x barbie so the dating app bumble and there's a lot of this barbie these barbie ads showing forever 21's barbie collection i thought they were gone but i guess they're still around and then burger king's brazil barbie themed meal did you get these for your kids yet no i try not to give my kids too much fast food yeah seed seed oils are bad dude um anyway thoughts mcdonald's french fries have no spots have you ever noticed that potatoes naturally have spots you put in some chemicals or something to get rid of them yep and you still buy them for your kids if they're really crying and we're traveling and we have no choice sure but generally speaking i try to avoid mcdonald's at all costs i don't need i don't know why chicken nuggets need so many ingredients I wonder how did Barbie perform in the box office because they did all this marketing, right?

23:03And so I think I read something about 93 million so far and this might be a little dated. So Oppenheimer opened with 33 million. That's the movie about the A-bomb. But I think I read yesterday that Barbie generated 93 million. And so I don't know if that's like a record or anything. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Barbie domestic box office blazes past projections. So it's from Collider.com, and I don't care about combined. It's expected to generate over$155 million on its three-day debut, which is enough to make it the biggest opener of the year so far. Previously, it was held by Super Mario Bros. movie, which I liked, which made$146 million in its three-day debut.

23:47Wow. And so go ahead. No, that's ridiculous. That's crazy. I don't okay so here's the thing I think Barbie did way more marketing to Super Mario Brothers and I saw sure there's like some ads and stuff for Super Mario Brothers but considering all the marketing that they did and a three-day debut is still like if this is the end-all be-all here I'm not that impressed because 155 versus 146 it's not a lot I'm more curious maybe in the first 30 days or first 60 days or so so time will tell but I think they did a good job with all these collaborations. Let's just see if it actually works out for them or not.

24:22No, totally. And they spend a lot on marketing. I've seen a lot of their ads everywhere. Super Mario Brothers, I did see a good amount of their ads as well. But I've seen more Barbie ads. It could just be based on the places that I visit and live. Yep. All right. The next one is very simple for us. Look, we've talked about the Google ad transparency tool that came out recently. Facebook has had the ad library for a while where you can search other people's ads. Facebook one's pretty good. The Google one's pretty limited, but TikTok just came out with the ad transparency tool as well. So they didn't want to be outdone.

24:54And I hope Amazon and Pinterest come out with their ad transparency tools someday as well. Dude, I think eventually all of them will end up coming out with it. I think it's great. And speaking of social media, there's a Discord growth hack that you guys should check out to get a lot of members really, really quickly as well. Here, let me share my screen. So the punchline here is this is what Andrew Tate did to – this guy basically said he copied Andrew Tate's strategy, right? Love him or hate him. And he grew his Discord server to 125 ,000 members in just four months. So this guy, Dustin Furano.