Peer Groups Will Make You Rich (With A Caveat)

0:01Dude, so I saw you last week randomly at a coffee shop and basically I had met with someone who was in a YPO group that I'm in a YPO forum. and she runs like a fruit company, right? And so I was just thinking about this a little bit and you know how I like to talk about peer groups quite a bit, right? And so my whole statement here is peer groups will make you rich, but there's a caveat here, right? And whether it's, I'm in a lot of these different groups, right? And I think this ties in well with you too because you're very specific about what you're looking for. So peer groups work for you, but you have to understand what it is that you're looking to get out of the group, right?

0:40So for you, you want people at your level, ideally at the very least at your level or levels above you, right? Because you're looking to grow. And I think if you join these groups without having a specific objective or goal, it's just going to be like you're just kind of walking around and there's no purpose to it, right? So you have to be very intentional. Like we have a mutual friend. He's in a group. The group is all investors. And one of the people in that group, he's like a chairman of one of the largest automotive companies in the world, right? Right. And I think if you're not intentional about these things and so sure, you might listen to someone like me and say, oh, yeah, peer groups will make you rich because I certainly listened to that when I was starting out.

1:16But if you're not intentional and if you set a goal and you're not getting that from a group and you don't quit, that's on you at the end of the day. Right. Yeah. And so there's different groups that I'm in right now. Most of them, like every time we're talking about business, how we're going to grow. I'm in a SaaS group. I'm in the group with, you know, Syed. Right. And I'm in these other groups. But one of the groups, there's not a lot of structure. and when we go on these retreats, like it would be mostly like partying, right? And so I'm at the age where like, I got that out of my system and like, don't get me wrong, I'll enjoy a party every now and then, but that's not necessarily for me, right?

1:48So, but like it took me a year of kind of sitting through it to realize that, hey, maybe if there's no objectives established with this group, that maybe it's time for me to go, right? And you, to your credit, decided very quickly what peer group makes sense for you. And I think eventually you'll get into that group You're not at that age where you can be accepted to that group yet. Yeah, there was a peer group Eric's talking about. I wanted to get into YPO Gold. Yeah. But Gold is for 50 plus people. Yes. And I relate more to the businesses in YPO Gold and the owners. And we're more in a similar place in life, at least from an entrepreneur standpoint.

2:27But because of my age, I was not accepted. And I tried so hard. and then I was a little irritated because they told me I'm good to go. I renewed my membership for Global One or whatever it's called. And then they told me after I paid like the six grand or four grand or whatever it costs, oh, sorry, you're not old enough. And I'm like, we spent three months having this conversation and you guys said it was okay. I still think you can get in. I still think you can. I need to network with more members in there. Yeah. But I would love to because the businesses are... Yeah. Dude, the easy way is just talking to my friend And then just getting a couple more of those meetings.

3:03I mean, you know our mutual friend is married to one of the gold members in that chapter. Oh, yeah, that's right. The helicopter. I know what you're talking about. They raise over a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For a business. That would be a good meeting for you regardless. Yeah, it would be a good meeting either way. They live nearby. Yeah, they live nearby. Oh, yeah, you looked at that home. Yeah, it's a good home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. It was too high up. You got to drive up the hill and down. It was a beautiful home. Great views. Dude, you want to know what Google's CEO said here?

3:30So there's two things. I have one around how product is no longer a moat. But if you were to think about Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO on the only business moat that's available today, what do you think it is? Your brand. This is interesting. So I thought he would say distribution or brand. He didn't, because you and I would say that, right? And naturally we're marketers, we would say that. He said learning loops, the ability for you to pick something up very quickly. And if you have a team that moves very quickly, like a startup, you're gonna learn a lot faster because things are changing so quickly with all these new innovations.

3:58So his argument right now, The only business mode is learning loops. It's how fast you can move. So I don't know if I completely agree. I think we're more biased towards distribution, but I can see the angle for that. I can see the angle. I think you need people who can adapt and learn super fast. If you don't, it crushes your business. If you do, you can do much better, but still you need a brand and it's really hard to build a brand like Air Jordan. You know, like you look at what Michael Jordan's done with shoes and Nike, that product's really popular. Most people who I see with Nike, Nike's struggling right now as an organization.

4:33People still buy the Air Jordan shoes. Very strong brand. I think Nike has a strong brand too, but they're getting their butts kicked by Viore and Lululemon or Olo. I don't know which one of those brands, but a handful of them. And why? Because they've innovated more on athleisure wear than Nike has, which Nike should have done because that's their category. By the way, do you still buy Nikes? I don't buy Nikes anymore. Dude, the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, Xenia, I believe they're called Second Skin. Do you buy that from the mall? You can get it from the mall. I just go to Xenia. It's the Z-E-G-N-A, right?

5:14Yeah. I'm probably saying the name wrong, but it's on Rodeo Drive. Yeah. I don't even know how to pronounce it. But did you see that Hal's dropped the report? So the attribution software. So they dropped the report. They did 640 incrementality tests over 18 months. $14 million in spend analyze. So their findings here is that Meta's advantage plus shopping campaigns is wrong. So they're saying that advantage shopping campaign. So these are the AI driven campaigns on Meta. They win early 9 % better at midpoint, but manual campaigns destroyed them long term. Right. So manual campaigns deliver$12 more revenue per$100 spent by the end.

5:51Right. So basically, as of right now, it's saying that based on the test that they've ran, manual wins over the long term. But even though Meta tries to push advantage plus, it's not the case. So this is actually an example of right now, at least, AI losing in a situation like this. We've seen AI lose quite a bit because AI also hallucinates. I was talking to a friend that is in a research company, and they do a lot of marketing research, specifically just marketing research for organizations. When I say AI hallucinates, they use Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT. They pretty much use all the main solutions out there.

6:25I forgot which one it was. they were using it to help them do research for a specific category related to marketing and straight up the AI made up data and then when I asked them about it it hallucinated and would not admit that it actually made it up yeah it wouldn't want to admit that it was just wrong and I was like well that sucks yeah makes sense but by the way um because we're kind of talking about brand and partnerships here did you know that you can transform your you can transfer your you can transform sorry you can transform your credit card points into crypto now really yeah so chase has done a partnership with coinbase so now you can take your chase points and then just move it over um and transfer it over into crypto i wish amex i'd like bless you bless you wow i like millions of amex points oh too bad you can't transfer it over to chase but i think eventually this will become more of a common thing and then why would i not just move it over into crypto Yeah, we like, I don't care for the points, but my wife likes using it for like gifts.

7:25Oh, that's a bad use of points. It is, but it makes her happy. We don't really use it for travel because the problem with using points for travel is like they restrict when you transfer to airline, which is the best, one of the better uses of points. A lot of times the main routes that I have to fly for speaking or meetings, it's just not as convenient because they want me to take connections versus a direct flight. or they'll give me different days and times that will make me miss the meeting. And then also when I travel over work, it's usually expense. No, my assistant books it. The thing is you need someone that's a points expert.

8:00So I had a points expert I talked to. So he's just doing it all for me. It's like, you have all these points. Okay, I'll just do it all for you, blah, blah, blah. And you pay him like$200. So yeah, but he's an expert with points. Yeah, there's a lot of these people out there like this. But here's what it says. The JP Morgan and Coinbase deal is wild, especially to credit card point redemption. So I'll start with the credit card points here. So transfer of Chase ultimate reward points, you get a one-to-one redemption ratio, meaning that 100 points equals$1 redemption value, right? So if I can move that into Solana, you know, Ethereum, whatever, great.

8:30You have a direct bank-to-wallet connection. Through JPMorgan Secure API, Chase customers will be able to seamlessly link their bank accounts to Coinbase wallets, meaning that people are going to gamble more. Beginning to follow the ability to use Chase credit cards on Coinbase. Eric's not saying crypto's gambling or not, though. Some people, like, will look at it as a casino. I look at BTC and ETH as long-term investments. But beginning this fall, you can take your Chase credit cards on Coinbase. For the first time, customers... I was going to say bless you, but that was a cough. Customers will have the ability to fund their Coinbase accounts using Chase credit cards.

9:00So we'll see what happens here. But I am glad to see how a lot of this... By the way, you look at this administration, it's like, okay, very crypto forward. All of a sudden, Triple H is this fitness guy, right? This administration is very good at marketing. I have to hand it to them. Like I haven't seen this much fanfare. I don't think ever. What is Triple H doing in the White House? He's the lead fitness guy now. I thought it was the Kennedy guy. RFK? Yeah. No, no. But Trump created a new title for Triple H. Did Triple H take steroids? For sure he took steroids. Triple H. For sure he took steroids.

9:37For sure. There's no way he didn't. Did you see the documentary? I'm Googling it right now. Let's see. Triple H steroid use. a look at allegations no you got to watch the vince mcmahon documentary on netflix it basically said everyone took it back in the day and then um but vince never told people to take it but everyone was taking it back triple h probably took it for sure like that's that's at least what i think right but um you know i've tried steroids right you have no i'm joking actually that's false the only time uh i think actually most humans have if you look at me dude i weigh 129 pounds and my arms maybe you might have taken it before i don't know no um and if someone's taking that i'm not judging or anything like that the i actually got steroids injected into me recently i had swelling in my head well that's right and i couldn't sleep and it was going on for months and my head would just hurt i would have i had a big lump on my head and uh they i didn't know that you can use steroids for this because i always thought steroids make you like jacked yeah i didn't realize there's different kinds of steroids yeah but they put steroids in my head like they injected it to get the swelling down did it come down uh it took a few times but over a month i was able to sleep again and no more headaches i had like injections two injections oh that's not bad they had to space it out okay dude check this dude i'm so motivated because i used to watch i get so excited about it like the president the president's council on physical fitness is a vehicle to get young people active and healthy how can you not like that yeah i like that and and like it's triple h like he's the chief content officer of wwe i used to watch WWE growing up all the time and I think you did too.

11:10Yeah, I used to watch The Rock. I think The Rock also took steroids. For sure they all did. Yeah. Did The Rock's body now? He probably takes it now too. You think so? Yeah. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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13:19Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. Imagine, dude, what is the obesity rate in America? Like 50 % something like that it's good marketing how are we not trying to help people people don't want to walk and exercise people on the upside they don't want the volatility yeah for everything just like dude when i was flying from columbia to the u.s a lady was complaining on how they need to make um seats bigger and i'm not judging here because some people have weight issues due to medical reasons that they can't control. And her kid, straight up like a 13, 14 year old fit, said to the mother, mom, we need to control your diet and you need to work out more.

14:11Instead of like just sitting and watching TV or being lazy, I couldn't hear everything. And it's just like, I'm not saying that's the reason she's obese or not. That was just a conversation between her and her kid and I was just walking by him while we were boarding the plane. It was more so that I agree people just need to be more fit or try to be more fit and we need to encourage Americans to exercise. I mean I'm just going to say this. I mean so there's a tweet recently about what's something that's controversial you believe that people would have all these knives pointing at you right and I basically responded it and I said that this is just my belief guys this has nothing to do with Neil.

14:49I do believe that for the most part majority of cases, if you are obese, it is self-inflicted. And I do think like the fact that the White House, the administration is trying to push this forward, it's going to help people, right? I do think it's going to help them cultivate the right habits to eat right, to move and things like that. And I think this can be fixed, right? It's okay to admit that it's some, you know, you probably have bad habits, right? It's okay, right? Bad habits can be turned around. Have you seen that Instagram video of a mother encouraging her son who is overweight? And he's overweight.

15:26She's making breakfast. And she's just like, yeah, do you want syrup on it? Do you want this? Do you want that? You sure? You want butter? And she's, you want whipped cream? Like she's adding more and more stuff. And this person's overweight by probably like 150, 200 pounds. Yeah. And this is like, to me, I look at that as I understand there could be medical reasons why someone could be overweight, but that is just bad parenting. And the US should just use that in a marketing video. I know they probably can't legally and just be like, don't do this. I'll tell you what. Okay, let's just do this for fun and we can move on to the next topic.

15:59So in Japan, what do you think the obesity rate is? Three, 4%. 4.4 % for men, 2.3 % for women. Okay, now what do you think the global average obesity rate is? 15, 20%. 13%, you're pretty close. now in the United States the obesity rate is around 40 % and it's going up 40 % 40 % yeah wow so you look at this it's it's like it's 10 times more on on men and so don't tell me this is not self-inflicted and like it it's here right and by the way why does this happen it's all culturally and this is not like a a health podcast guys by the way I just want to talk about this for a second but my mom growing up anytime I started to gain weight getting too fat you're getting too fat you're getting too fat hey it looks like you need to go to jenny crainer so i'm not saying that's a good way to parent but that that's how i grew up and i it's it's that that's how asian cultures grow up but by the way so going back to it real quick the rock um he did admit to taking steroids briefly in his late teens but denies any ongoing use and i think by the way like if you if you take it right now you probably should deny any ongoing use so yeah and and i'm a huge rock fan by the way but we should go back to more i'm a huge yeah but really quickly before we go back to marketing the reason I somewhat understand the weight, I'm not talking about the obesity, my family, we experienced the opposite.

17:16So when I was growing up, my mom would say, oh, you're eating ice cream? No problem. You want to eat cereal for dinner and Lucky Charms and all this stuff, which I'm not saying is healthy, but me and my sister were in the 1 % category in weight. And it wasn't - What does that mean? We were like the skinniest. Okay. So, and even when my sister had kids, her kids were in the one percentile in weight. You don't want to be in the one percentile. It means you're too skinny. So my sister would like sit there and feed her kids to try to get them to eat. And literally each meal, like an hour. She'd be like, you want in an hour of French fries?

17:49All right. They would eat like four French fries. Lots of calories. Yeah. They're like, I'm done. But genetically, we have the opposite issue in which we tend not to eat a lot. I don't know what it is. Yeah. You never eat. Yeah. It's a whole family. And it's not like we try not to eat or anything. It's just never really hungry. Look, and by the way, so I think there's edge cases, right? I think genetically for you, it's like you're not going to gain much weight. And genetically for some people, they're just going to have to be overweight. Right. But I am talking about the majority of people. And if America is 40 percent and Japan is like 3 percent, come on.

18:18Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, rate, subscribe. And we'll see you tomorrow.