Podcasts getting stale, Robots: Tesla vs. Apple, Monetization strategies & more

25:17And you saw what they did from a marketing perspective after that? No. What did they do? It took them roughly a few days to a week, but then they started discounting the Model Ys by up to$7 ,000. More. $7 ,000 more discount. Yes, because if you look at last year, these cars were really expensive. And I remember my co-founder, Mike, bought a Model X. Is that the biggest SUV? It goes like this? Yeah, yeah, the wings. And he bought a plate or plaid or whatever it's called. Plaid, yeah. Plaid? Oh, the X is plaid or the S is plaid? The X. He doesn't have an S. He has an X. He has two Xs. And one of them's plaid.

25:54Plaid's the highest tier. And I think he spent like$150 or$160 or something like that. I don't have the exact price, but he's like, dude, the prices have gone down a lot. And now not only have they discounted them in 2023, they're discounting even more, which I'm not an economist, but this is going to definitely hurt their earnings going forward because if you keep discounting it, what does that affect? Their earnings. Yeah, your profitability. Yeah. Well, look, well, I don't know if it affects earnings. I don't know. I mean, if he sells more volume. Yeah, but he's not selling the volume. he's discounting to get the volume back up.

26:30So if he discounts, it's not like the volume is going to guarantee to go back to either where it was or even higher. But it's all he can do right now. That's all he can do. And funny enough, speaking of stocks, did you see what Barry Diller said about Trump media? Yeah, I didn't, but go on. Yeah, he said, Trump media is a scam and people buying the stocks are dopes. And what's funny is, is when you look at it, the peak of the stock was around$79. Now it's trading at roughly$46 of the recording of this podcast. But here's what's crazy. This is the power of marketing. I would short this stock, but I'm afraid to short it.

27:11You can't. And if you look at it, they did roughly 4.1 million in revenue in 2023. Do you know what the market cap is? Something like hundreds of billions or something. No, no. 30 billion. 5.5 billion, but that's still high. You're saying you did 4.1 million in revenue. Avenue. You're not making any money, really, in a whole year, not a quarter, and you're worth $5.5 billion. This is worse than the dot-com boom, probably, right? I wasn't old enough, but who's worth from full - That's$12.50x. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I don't think it's that ridiculous. Okay, would I invest in it? No. but the Trump stock, so the truth media stock the reason why you wouldn't short it is because there's so many Trump fanatics in the United States, right?

28:01you don't know what's going to happen to it and this is their way of saying that hey, we support Trump, right? because what, you could say at least half of the US or maybe 40 % or whatever are in favor of Trump maybe it's a little higher than that, I don't know but it's too dangerous to short this thing you just don't know when because if you short it, you're on a timetable for it And you can also play options to even juice your returns. But the way I look at it is it's too risky. And it just shows you the power of a personal brand. If you build a personal brand, and this goes towards Eric's model, this new model, I know you're hedging, going more broad that you started in the last, what, three to six months?

28:41Six, seven months ago. Yeah, so six, seven months ago, Gary Vee's been doing the same model of going broad. It can work. You can make money from it. His logic is I want all 8 billion people in the world to know me. And like, I get it. I understand. But that's not a fit for everyone. It's a fit for him. Yeah. And he also doesn't mind like being live streamed or having people follow him around. Yeah. You like your privacy. Dude, they tried my team. I did not know this, but I was at Collision in Toronto and I met a dude and he's like, Hey, and he's like started taking some videos of me and I didn't know who he was.

29:13And my team's like, Oh, we hired him for this event. He's going to follow you around. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's just not your style. And then within like 10 minutes, he quickly realized I was not down. He's like, how about when you just talk to him? I'm like, no. He's like, how about if they're cool with them? I'm like, no. And then it was funny because I was like, oh, you're cool. You can just go home. We'll pay you for the day. And he's like, yeah, but I haven't finished recording the content. I'm like, yeah, it's okay. I don't want to be recorded. See, the funny thing is your team knew to like stick it in there and see what happens versus ask.

29:46Because they knew if they asked you, you would say no, right? Now, when I've hired people to do that, initially, remember Noah, right? I hired him to follow me around initially. And after like, I don't know, three, four weeks of it, I was like, dude, let's just shoot videos in the office. Like, don't follow me anymore. Because like, also it's dangerous when they follow you. I saw him almost like eat it on the floor, like on the street. It's like, I just don't want that. I'm good with that. Yeah. I think it was really novel when Gary first started to do it. But the thing I didn't get to talk to him about, I was like, hey man, your YouTube views are kind of fading.

30:14Like it's all documentation. And that's why the views are fading. But I think it's because talking about stale formats, that format might be getting stale. Yeah, but some of his formats also do well. I agree with you, but some of his formats are still performing well on TikTok. He crushes on reels. Yes, TikTok, Instagram. He's doing well still on many platforms out there. I don't believe you can win all the platforms. I think you can start doing well, but there's phases. And what I mean by that is if you look at mass consumption of content, a lot of people, even in the Bay Area, are like, hey, do you know Alex Hermosi or Cody Sanchez?

30:55If you look at their view count, forget follower count, they're crushing most people, including you, me, and almost most social media people out there. When I look at their views, it's like 130 million per month. And that includes shorts views, obviously, but that's still a lot of views. Yeah, they're getting more than most people with a fraction of the followers. But just like the people before them, there's going to be new people after Cody and after Alex that are going to start getting the limelight. It's just a question of when. You know, I had a conversation. Oh, actually, speaking of fame for a second, the thing with fame is let's say you become the most famous person in the world.

31:27It fades very quickly, like maybe in a year or two, and then somebody else comes up. Like it keeps going back and forth. People keep cycling in and out. So food for thought if you're trying to become famous. it's not forever no and when i was younger i try to focus on like getting my name out there in the marketing industry as much as possible and as i grew older i met people and some of these people worked at private equity funds or their venture capitalists and they had competing companies and i was like how the heck are these companies so much bigger than us with a fraction of the traffic barely any social followers or any of this.

32:04And a lot of them were just running basic M &A playbooks. And when I look at a lot of my competitors who are larger than us, they're just like, yeah, we're just going to spend$200,$300 million here, $500 million there. And if you look at their numbers, they're better than ours. And that model has made me shift my strategy over the years to instead of spending as much time creating social content, I actually spend more time on M &A calls and doing outreach and trying to find companies to buy than I actually spend on creating content. And that's including having a head of M &A who worked for Dentsu Aegis, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world.

32:41He ran all of M &A for America as we have an M &A team. I still spend with having that person and a team, I still spend more time on M &A than actually building content or doing marketing now. It goes back to people playing to your straight. So for example, if I said, Neil, go manage someone, he'd be like, no, never, right? But if it's like, hey, let's talk strategy, M &A goes into strategy, then it's like, yeah, all day, let's talk about this. And I think you've, instead of talking about content strategy, now you're just talking about M &A strategy. And going back to Neil being a math boy, he's just going to where the numbers are.

33:12It makes sense at your scale right now. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about leveling up founders. This is an event slash mastermind for people doing seven, eight, nine figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are, even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that.

33:48We're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com slash founders. Again, it's levelingup.com slash founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balki, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. Levelingup.com slash founders to learn more and we'll see you inside. But speaking of which, we had a mutual friend today tweet something about how, so Andrew Wilkinson tweeted that private equity sucks at marketing.

34:20And then Neil, for the first time ever, I've seen Neil respond to something on Twitter. Do you want to give the story? No, you can talk because I think I just responded with, but they may not need marketing and they still make a ton of money. That's exactly what happened. So do you want to explain the thinking behind that? Because again, well, first off, I'm going to load up Twitter because I didn't even see what happened. You got four likes on that post from when I saw it. Let's see. He said private equity sucks up marketing, but they don't need to be good at it. Wink. A lot of them have their own playbooks and the returns on large sums overall has been great, especially with the use of debt.

35:00And, you know, got eight likes and two comments. I don't know what the comments are saying. You know, I'll read them later on. But the overall thinking about this is I've been an LP in a lot of companies over the years, venture funds, private equity funds, hedge funds. and some of them are large where they're managing billions and billions of dollars. And what I've learned over the years is my way of growing a business plays to my strengths. You end up finding something, you figure out where they're messing up on conversion optimization and marketing, you fix it and you grow the traffic, you grow the conversions, you add in more upsells and downsells, you make more money.

35:44you create a great return on the buy. And a great example of this is when I bought Answer the Public, I paid$8.6 million. On revenue? Yeah. For a company that supposedly did around$130 a month in revenue. And they said most of it was profit other than server costs. $130 ,000. $130 ,000, sorry. And that wasn't true because you know this just like everyone else, you got to actually have employees for support and all this kind of stuff. The real profit on that company was closer to like 800 grand from our calculations. And I was paying roughly 10 times profit. Now, when I look at that business today, playing on my strengths, once I bought that and it took, we had someone in place who was in charge of running it.

36:32Things moved slow. I took it over. I made my changes, no joke, in less than two months, two and a half, maybe max. And once I made my changes, wiped my hands clean. I was done. I moved on. And I now bought that business. If I look at my EBITDA for less than three X, I'm at two point something. So it worked out. Yes. But that's playing on my strengths. When I look at a lot of private equity companies that I know, they'll be like me and I'm making the scenario up. I know single grain does everything you do SEO, pay-per-click, et cetera, but private equity look at like, Eric, you mainly sell SEO services.

37:07This is what you're great at. And they'll say, hey, I forgot that dude who's based in Fullerton. Nice guy. He owns a pay-per-click shop. You know who I'm talking about too. Either way. Let's say a guy's name is John. John, you only sell pay-per-click services for e-commerce and businesses that are mid-market. Eric's focusing on the mid-market business. Huh. And then we got this other person over here, Susie, who is focusing on conversion optimization and email marketing and social media. So what they'll do is they'll take Eric's company, they take John's company, they take Susie's company, they combine them.

37:45They take all of Eric's customers and they sell them pay-per-click, social media marketing, email marketing, conversion optimization. They take all of John's clients, sell them SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization. They take Susie's customers, they're already paying for social, email, and conversion, and they sell them pay-per-click and SEO. So when they do that, there's a few things that happen. The average revenue per customer goes up. The LTV goes up also because the customers stay longer and churn goes down. And the accounts are much more profitable.

38:20You only paid so much to close the deal. They're staying longer. You only need one account manager. You don't need three account managers. At scale, the economics get better. That playbook for private equity has done really, really well. Look at Mountain Gate and our space. They bought Elite SEM, bought a few other companies, tucked them in, turned it into Tenuity. They sold that thing for a crazy multiple. It wasn't 20 times EBITDA, but it was close to it. Mountain Gate isn't the best at ranking on Google or building a social following, yet the models worked really well for them. It's going back to playing tier restraints.

38:58And actually, so when I asked Gary V, I was like, hey, how do you plan on buying the New York Jets? And one of the things that he said was, VaynerX, his agency holding company, he's looking at this from a private equity angle. He wants to go acquire not just agencies. He wants to acquire a bunch of different businesses and add in his thing, right, which is marketing. His argument is, I'm going to do private equity. I'm going to add marketing because private equity sucks at marketing. But to your point, maybe private equity doesn't need to be good at marketing because they have the roll-up strategy.

39:25And what Neil's also talking about too is multiple arbitrage. You guys can Google that if you want to understand, wait, how come if I combine a bunch of things, it's worth even more? Well, multiple arbitrage. Yeah. And what Eric's saying on multiple arbitrage is if a company is smaller, they're typically not worth as much from a multiple. So if a company is doing a million in EBITDA and the marketing space, they may be only worth three, four, five times profit, and they may not get all that money up front. If someone's at 20 million in profit, someone may pay them 10, 12, 13 times profit. So what a lot of private equity shops do is they're buying a lot of these companies that are doing one, two, 3 million in profit and paying no more than 5X.

40:12You start buying four or five, six of them over a few years. Next thing you know, after cross selling and everything, you're at 12, 13 million. Even though you paid 5X, 6X max, if you're able to sell the business at 12 times, you just doubled your money. And a lot of these guys aren't just buying these businesses with cash. They're adding on debt to it. So they didn't double their money in many cases because they're adding debt. Sometimes they can triple their money or the economics can even be better than that. All right. So I got something interesting here. So Chase Bank has entered the advertising game.

40:46So I don't know if you know this, Neil, but Chase has 80 million American customers, 40 % of US adults, $1.5 trillion in credit debit spend, and$8.5 billion in Chase offers revenue in 2023. So think about it this way. This is called Chase Media Solutions. If you're logging into your Chase dashboard or maybe your app and you buy a lot of beauty products or you buy a lot of, I don't know, entertainment stuff or stuff for your kids, those are the types of ads that you might see, right? So they're going to roll out. They have a lot of first-party data and this could be really interesting. I mean, it's another channel to go after.

41:18and iOS, Apple, they can't do anything about this. So this tweet came from Jonathan Snow. And I think it's interesting. We'll see if it's going to be more of an auction-based model where you can bid on CPM or CPC, or if it's going to be more of an affiliate model, which is a kind of performance-based play. So when Chase is going into marketing, are they just trying to shove banner ads? Or is it more of like, I don't have a Chase card, but I know you have American Express. You know when you log into your Amex, If you scroll to the bottom of the deals of the week or month, and you just click add, add, add, and you get...

41:51So that could be an affiliate model, right? But I see it being a combination, and they haven't disclosed yet, but it could be a combination of both the affiliate model that you're talking about, Neil, and also banners too. Huh. Yeah. So it's like, why would we not look at this? Yeah, that's true. Speaking of big corporations, did you hear how Apple stopped their car division? Yeah. And then they shifted focus to robots. Robots? Yeah, they're going to build robots for homes now. That's a rumor. That makes sense. This is why it's going to get, Tesla's a robot company, so is Figure and then Apple.

42:27So it's going to be interesting to see where things go. But all right, so I know you're a Tesla fan and I have one or I will have one in a month or so. Would you buy a Tesla robot for your house or an Apple robot? It's tough. I think right now, this very moment, I'd buy a Tesla one. Now, if you say in five, 10 years, I'd buy an Apple one. So why would you buy a Tesla one right now? Because they're way further along, I believe. They've had robots and then they just, they're further along from a product development standpoint. But I do believe Apple has some of the best people in the world working on it.

43:04I think they'll catch up, if not make it even. And we'll see what happens. so for me i would buy an apple robot i do think they're going to be hey what happened to your vision pro the vision pro i gave back it was no good you gave back or you returned it returned it back i didn't give it back i returned i got my money back yeah the problem with the revision pro is i think it's amazing technology amazing device it's too heavy it gives me headaches i think i'm the right buyer for version three or version four i love it it's just like to travel with it, it's bigger than my backpack. I can't even put it in my backpack.

43:39The case is that. That's how I saw it. I had no idea because you're, you're, you're very thoughtful with how you take risks. And I'm just like, yeah, I'll probably buy vision version three or four, but you went for the first one, but it was cheap. It was like only like two, three grand guys, you can clip that. I don't mean it that way, but like for the technology you're getting, it's not expensive. Yeah. It's like a computer. Exactly. That's how I looked at it. And I'm like, well, if you use it for a year or two years and I don't really buy stuff, right? Like other than, you know, I don't even know what I buy.

44:08I don't even buy clothes these days. Dude, okay, look, Tesla's, they're robots. There's a video of a robot walking around the entire factory and I think they can dance, they can move around and there's more stuff they can do versus like a figure robot right now. I don't know if you've heard of figure. I have not. Figure's another robotics company. But like, look, we are going to go into a future where we're going to all have robots. So I would buy Apple Robot for two reasons. The first reason is the ecosystem. So when you're thinking about just general use case, if it can plug in with my phone, it can plug in with my computer, it can plug in with my TV and all the other stuff I do, which Apple already has a lot of devices that people use, it just makes life easier.

44:54the second reason that i would buy apple robot over tesla one is i think they'll make the user interface better and more usable yeah i mean this is why we're both with apple devices in front of us it's just a better experience it is like dude so when i test drove the model 3 for the very first time i know i bought it you drove it i drove it you yeah you yes why you oh i was buying the model 3 it was meant for me to drive neil's a bad driver that's why that's why i bought it it has a lot of guard those it tells me when i'm about to hit a bumper i was like oh this is great i could be a bad driver so when i was driving the model three i'm like looking at the dash right there above the stream well there's no speedometer and then i look at the windshield because the windshield on certain cars you know like my wife's car it shows you the speed on the windshield like it reflects it up so you can look straight i'm like oh yeah that would be convenient nope not there it's on the computer screen on the right side i'm supposed to be looking at the road i'm not supposed to be looking at the right side to figure out how fast I'm going in the car.

45:55So what's your complaint is it's not user-friendly. It's not as user-friendly as it should be. I don't think you'll have those issues with Apple. They're slower typically to market, but when they come to market, they think things through. It's typically the best user experience. Yes. Yeah. By the way, do you know which sites are actually not getting hit too hard by Google's updates? I'm going to go with Quora and Reddit because we talked about this earlier. Yeah, Quora and Reddit are fine, but those are more UGC websites. So yeah, that's actually a fair categorization. But Lily Ray tweeted this.

46:25So she said, looking at niche travel sites, I think it's fair to say that the recent updates have been brutal for many of these sites. But there are some interesting examples of small travel blogs that didn't get hit by the helpful content updates. And so here's what these sites seem to be doing. So these are the trends that we can explore here. They've been travel blogging for a really long time. Two, they seem to be doing an exceptional job writing firsthand experiences. So double E-A-T, experience is in one of those. It's experience, expertise. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. I feel like experience and expertise are like the same thing.

46:59But no. So here's a great example for this. I hope no one has cancer. But let's say someone has cancer and they're breaking down their experience going through chemo. That's you're breaking down experience. Expertise is - Oncologist. Yes, talking about how chemo and how it's working. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Good. Thanks for calling that out. Okay, so they're sharing first-hand experiences and only sharing highly opinionated pieces about places they have been with original photography. There's no mystery about who these bloggers are. They are well-known in this space and have a big following.

47:28These sites appear to be much less SEO-forward, which is hyper-optimized for SEO, and use less overly optimized titles, headlines, etc. than some of the travel blogs that were hit. So what does this all say? If I'm consolidating these points over here, they're just writing naturally. They're writing because it seems like they enjoy it. And they're not writing just for SEO purposes. That's at least what this takeaway is. And there's two graphs here that we'll pull up for the screen. But Neil, you can see this green graph over here. Those are the sites that are like after the update starting to do well.

47:59And then these are the sites that got hit. Dude, and speaking of not optimizing titles and stuff for SEO, the same goes with social media. The other day I put on Twitter, one of my team sent it to me. They even came up with the headline. It was head of Instagram reveals the truth about follower account. that's like catchy, it's clickbaity, right? And it wasn't like clickbait where you're deceiving. This is Adam one that you're talking about earlier? And that post on my Twitter got 3 ,900 views, all right? And then I noticed it wasn't doing well. So the same day I put out my own tweet that my team didn't send me.

48:33And I put, my favorite marketing strategy still to this day is giving away something for free. Not freemium, not a trial, but really free. And then I go on to explain, I got 31 ,000 views, didn't try to optimize, didn't try to come up with a catchy headline or anything, just wrote based on what I wanted to share and I thought would be valuable to people. How many words do you think you're writing per minute on Twitter per day? I don't know how many words per minute I'm writing. Not words per minute, just overall. Maybe 200 max. 200 max, okay. You've been doing it very consistently for the last 60, 70 days or so?

49:1190 days? Since October. Oh, okay. It's been a while. And how has that gone for you? It's gone really good. Yeah. And that might take you like 15 to 30 minutes to write, depending on how dense the topic is. No, no, no, no. Like four minutes, five minutes? For 200 words? Yeah. That's a lot in four minutes. I just think whatever's going to come from my head and I just type. Okay. How fast do you type per minute? I don't know. Anyway. Okay. So I wasn't going anywhere with that question. I was just curious. Yeah. But I know I can type pretty fast per minute, but let's say something takes me five minutes to type out.

49:47It actually takes me longer to copy and paste it from Word, paste it into Twitter, and then I go through Grammarly and I collect all my errors because I have terrible grammar. So, okay, I just started this habit. So, back in the day, Neil, you blogged a lot back in the day. How many words were you trying to write per day? There wasn't a specific word count. I would just blog. Same with Twitter. when I look at like my word counts, I'm looking at one right now, like what I posted today. I know it didn't take me more than five minutes, but this is looking like it's more like 120 words than 200. I just, so back in the day, it really doesn't like Neil has his habit.

50:25It's not so much based on word count or whatever. He just goes right. It goes with the flow and that works for some people. I just used to have a habit where this is probably when I first met you online, I was writing 500 words per day, 500 words per day. And it was a good habit. I just stopped doing it. And so on the Sunday, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, tweeted that I'm looking for accountability partner to write 500 words a day or like, you know, 30 minutes of writing per day. And then a bunch of people responded. I came out, I was like, hey, I'm in. And then he ends up texting me and okay, we're each other's accountability buddy.

50:56So each day what we're doing is he's writing for 30 minutes, I'm writing 500 words, and then he'll text me and show what he wrote and I might give some feedback on it or whatever. But the whole thing is this accountability thing. It's embarrassing if you fail. So I'm actually behind right now by 500 words. I need to write a thousand words after we record today. But the fact of the matter is I think this habit is going to continue to compound because I think some of my better writing has happened this week and it's doing better too. It's not going viral by any means, but at least I'm getting my thoughts out and writing forces clear thinking.

51:28And what I end up doing for my company after I write these is I end up converting a lot of these into memos and I send them to my team. and then ultimately that gets my team to take action on these things so dude see like i look at writing for me just in general it comes natural and it's not hard i think about most things in life it's like if you really want to do it you'll do it and you don't need pressure like i know you have accountability buddy but you don't need it look at your workout routine i i you and i talk quite often early in the mornings you like going to equinox at six or seven a.m i forgot when they open?

52:05Seven on weekends, 5 a.m. on the weekdays. And you're consistent almost every single day, correct? At least when you're here, you're there. When you're traveling, it's a different story. Traveling, at least I still try to run in the morning. Yeah. So it's consistent. You don't need accountability, buddy. If you want to do something like, right, I've seen you create content, you'll create it. It's a question of is, do you think it's worth the time? I think that's the biggest thing for most people. It's not about having someone who's accountable. It's, is the juice worth the squeeze? Is whatever you're doing worth it for you?

52:37If you feel value in it, you'll do it. You can look at it both ways. So you can look at it that way. And you could also look at it, you can combine it with this way. The way I see it is like, it's an experiment to see if I like this habit again. And as I started doing it again, I was like, oh, I like this. And so you can actually, you can make the argument that I don't need to do this accountability thing anymore. But it's like, you know, writing on the internet has been a net positive for both of us. and really the high level what we're saying is creating content on the internet has been a net positive to us.

53:05And writing I think is one of the best ways to express yourself and I just lost that over a period of time. But you've been blogging but I feel like the Twitter thing is reviving some of your energy with writing. That's how I feel. When I blog, it's really easy because my Twitter or X is the start of my blog posts and then I go in and modify whatever I need and expand upon it. When I write a blog post, no joke, it takes less than an hour. Wow. And this is like your 2 ,000 word post back in the day? No, my blog posts are typically around 1 ,000 words. It's less than an hour. I take Twitter, then I go and read through it, correct any errors, post it on WordPress, correct errors through Grammarly because Microsoft Word versus Grammarly, they check spelling quite a bit differently.

53:53And I use the app for Word. I don't use the online version if there even is an online version. And from there, I messaged Salva on my team and I say, add an image at the top so he'll create an image. And I say, wherever I put insert graph, I'm like, insert the graphs for the error. Just read it. You'll know which graphs I'm talking about because we have so many graphs within our corporation. And then I tell them, just publish the post. But I've already saved it as a draft, already switched up the URL or created my own custom URL, picked the category, fine-tuned it. So all he has to do is just add the graphs, add the image at the top, click publish, and then I just go double check it.

54:34And then I'll schedule a lot of email blasts that I write. Yeah, that makes sense. And actually, if you think about it, so as you're giving me the number, so a thousand words takes you an hour for about 500 words, it takes me about call it 25 to 30 minutes. So it's the same thing. Yeah. Have you seen this platform? I forgot who shared this with me, but have you, let's talk about, you know what? So let's describe UGC. UGC is user generated content. So that could be you posting onto like Instagram or Facebook. That's a user generated content for the platform. Now, have you heard of CGC? No. CGC is customer generated content.

55:09Isn't that UGC? Because a lot of UGC is people unboxing a product they get on Amazon. Customer generated content could be like, yeah, eventually it does become user generated content in a sense. And so you could say, okay, let's say you're a customer of Aquapana and they wanted you to do a testimonial video. That's customer generated content. But eventually that gets posted as UGC. The reason I'm saying this right now, this is not necessarily a new thing because I've seen this before. You've seen this too. There's a new platform called uplifted.ai and it seems like it'll help you make customer generated content using AI.

55:44So I thought that was interesting. It's good to bring this stuff back sometimes because the testimonials, the customer stuff tends to convert pretty well depending on your niche. Dude, funny enough, you know, Aquapana hit me up to do a social media campaign. Really? Yeah. Did you say, did you ask for free water? No, I just said, actually, I didn't even respond to the email. I just ignored them. Why would you ignore it? Because I don't care to get paid to post social content. Oh, oh, oh, oh, like you're an influencer. Okay, got it, got it, got it. How much were they offering you? I don't know, but we get hit up at least like, right now is probably averaging around four or five times a day.

56:17For you to post things? For money. We should talk about that too, because we're literally talking about it right now. But we talked about how Alexis Ohanian posted something about creator payouts going up 17%, 17%, year on year. And creators, I believe, are just going to become more powerful. Because in a world that we're going into where there's more efficiencies with AI, co-pilots, all this stuff, right? What's valuable? Brand, content. People want more human, right? Especially as there's not a need for that many more headcount. So what does that mean? Go create content. Or work with someone that's created content.

56:57You see a lot of operators partnering up with content creators to build businesses. What's that PE firm called? TCG, I think. They did something with Kevin Esprit, who has that$30 million a year gardening blog. TPG or TCG? I don't think it's TPG. Because I said TPG. I was like, do you mean TPG? He's like, no, TCG. I was like, oh, I haven't heard of TCG. but they partnered like kevin was a blogger and he they partnered with kevin and they gave him you know the the pb the pp playbook kevin then went and he went to go buy a product um like a gardening product and this company was doing like eight nine million dollars a year and he rolled it into his his blog and now it's becoming like a platform and i think we're going to see a lot more of that and i believe that you know we're getting offers i'm getting offers too it's not as many as you but it's like yeah you know we're just going to keep compounding this i'm sure we're We get a lot more offers.

57:46We get a lot of people hitting us up for the podcast sponsorship stuff. Do we? We do. You do, I'm assuming. Or we do for marketing school? For both, actually. So yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. But what's better? The reason why we don't care so much for the, you know, pay us on one off to promote Yeti or something is because we make a lot more. You make a lot more buying businesses, building businesses. Yeah. it just comes down to it's like you know one of my best influencer sponsors or whatever you want to call it that used to pay me is paypal and paypal would go through edelman each and every single time edelman would reach out he did good on that one and then they would pay us like a hundred to a hundred and something thousand dollars every time we post like a three minute video and it can even be shorter like they're really flexible and great to work with and i don't know how many times we posted stuff about PayPal.

58:35We did it that often because it was six figures every single time. And then I got tired of doing the deals and we still get hit up by them every once in a while. And we just tend not to take on anything. It's not about someone giving us a hundred grand. You know, some people are like, I'll give you half a million in equity. And you know this better than anyone else. Half a million in equity doesn't actually mean half a million dollars. It only means if they sell, you're going to get paid. It could be more, it could be less, It's a lottery ticket. It could be zero. It's a lottery ticket. Yeah, it's a lottery ticket.

59:02Yeah. And I turned down those as well. I just don't care because it's easier for me to focus my energy on my business than anything else. Same with like the content. Dude, someone just offered me to go to, I don't know where it was in South America, but it's somewhere in South America to speak for three hours for a lecture. It would be recorded. they would sell it at a college and it was something like $220 ,000 or$230 ,000 and I'm like, I gotta speak for three hours and they're like, well half of it will be Q &A and they'll have these speeches I'm like, is this okay? So here's the thing everyone's like, I would do it when you start doing it, for whatever amount it could be for$230 ,000 even$500 or whatever the problem with content creators, especially YouTubers is they're all addicted to the money, the little dopamine hits of money.

59:59And I can tell when I meet these YouTubers, they don't know what else to do. They don't know how to build a business and that's fine, but they should partner up with an operator instead of basically selling themselves for these one-offs because I can tell they're not that happy to promote all these things, nor do they really care about these products. Dude, I got another one the other day. I'm going to read this message. All right. I'm going to ignore the person's name because I don't want, Hey, a new app I'm helping is hosting an exclusive pop event in LA on April 4th. Featuring celebs and influencers and brands.

1:00:28It's live streaming, live shopping experience, kind of like QVC style. We would love to have you involved. You can join in, keep all the content from marketing. Also an opportunity for you to connect with top creators like the D 'Amelio who created D 'Amelios. D 'Amelios. D 'Amelios, yeah. Who will be there, plus many more with millions of fans. It's from 6 to 10 p.m. Promise to be super fun. We'll have a famous musician promoters too. We have a celebrity event planner building everything out who you may know. Invite only. Max Greener invites interested. If so, I can send you more details. Top secret.

1:01:01We'll love to invite you and have you as a podcast host. Blank, I'm not going to repeat that person's name, is going. I could also have them pay you$5 ,000 to$10 ,000 for you to come be on the podcast for 15 minutes. I'd rather go to sleep. Dude, okay, so I really appreciate the invite. Do you think I won or not? Huh? No. Hell no. Like a emphatic hell no. I was like, I really appreciate this. But I'm like, I just want to stay home and eat dinner with my kids. I'm like, I already travel a lot. I want to be at home and sit on the dinner table at 6 p.m. And I want to eat family style. Not my kid eats something different than my other kid.

1:01:41And then my wife eats something different than me. No, family style. We'll all eat together. No phones. And we talk about our day, even though my two-year-old doesn't have much to talk about his day. Don't care. I'd rather do that. Life isn't always about money. And it's just like this influencer marketing thing. If you want to do it for a living, I think it's great, can pay really well for very little time spent. But Eric and I have always been fans of, it's better to take the long game. If people are willing to pay you X amount of dollars to do something, they're probably making way more in the long run, or they would hope to.

1:02:13You're probably better off figuring a better way to monetize than just charging per post. And you know what's ironic? I mean, maybe it's not ironic, but look at this as a bank account. If you're taking these short-term hits, it feels good, but you're constantly withdrawing from the bank account. You're withdrawing goodwill from your audience, right? No, I wouldn't have to post or anything. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about just in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general, when you do that. But when you go along, when you think about 10, 20, 30 years or so, you tend to make better decisions that are, they feel better.

1:02:44And it's also better for your stakeholders. When you're stakeholders, I mean your employees, your shareholders, you, everyone. Dude, it was so funny because I was thinking, but I'm like, man, this pays for like a fourth of my Model 3 or whatever it's called. And I was like, I could save some money. You know what's ironic, guys? Those of you listening to the podcast, you hear ads too. So even we're trying to figure it out on this podcast. Yes. But at the end of the day, you and I, look, there's nothing wrong with our partnership with iHeart. We love iHeart. Yeah, they're really nice people. I think if Eric and I had to change things, we don't care for as many ad plays.

1:03:21Yeah. Right. It's, we believe it's not that bad right now. It's three minutes for every 15 minutes. Okay. Yeah. That's still bad in my eyes. It's a lot. I mean, I'd rather, I'd rather just push our like free resources we put out or, you know, stuff like that. Or ideally people into our funnel or ideally just have like one sponsor, like a Microsoft or something like that. Microsoft, you're welcome to come back. Make less money and not have as many ads. Yeah. Or like, I mean, look, if you really want to monetize as well, probably it's like some form of community mechanism. We're driving them into like a webinar or something like that.

1:03:54But, you know, we're busy. Aren't we doing something called agency? That, you know, the MRR, guess the MRR on that right now. There's actual MRR. There's actual MRR. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. And it's a pretty, it's like a very broken funnel, but it's working. There's a lot of people. I didn't even know we were charging. Yeah, yeah. See, just let me handle it. It's easier when it's invisible. and once the number looks impressive and it's compounding, then I'll show it to you. So you have to know who you're working with too. Yeah, Eric knows me well because if he tells me something like, oh, this is going to make money.

1:04:24He's like, waste of time. And don't get me wrong. I do love money like most capitalists, but there's nothing wrong with making more money. But I look at life because I have a family and kids right now. If I'm going to donate most of my money anyways, and that's what my wife and I decided, might as well do less stuff for money and just focus on spending more time with my family. How much do your kids get? Just kidding. Don't answer that. But Eric does have a point. No, I'll be honest. We've put money in a trust for them that's irrevocable. So they, you know, assuming they don't screw things up, they don't really ever have to worry about working or making money in their life.

1:05:05But it's not a trust where they can just go not work and just collect checks. The money is more there. So for like, if my kids, I live in an expensive city. I live in Beverly Hills, California. If my kid said, I want to move to Italy or New York, or dad, if you buy me a house, I'll live in Beverly Hills next door to you. I'd be like sold. I'll buy him a house next door. Cause I love my kids and I want to be around them for the rest of their lives. And I want to be around their kids. Hopefully they have them one day. And the second thing is other than like a basic necessity, if my kids said, I want to live in New York and go do a job, they're like, cool, go find your own home.

1:05:44I would only pay for a home literally if they lived really close to me and I would see them all the time. The second thing the trust is therefore, let's say if they have cancer, some sort of a condition and they can't afford to pay for it, gladly they'll pay for it. If they want to buy a car and they want a Mercedes, go buy it on your own. If you want to buy a Honda Civic and you need it to get to point A to point B and you're struggling and you want to be a teacher and you love it, I'll pay for the Honda Civic, no problem, because you're doing a good job that's, you know, hopefully helping humanity.

1:06:13And on the flip side, if something wrong is happening with Earth and Elon can send people to Mars, but it costs an arm and a leg, cool, you can use the money to go to Mars so you don't die. But it's really restricted. It's more so to just ensure that my kids aren't living on the street. I think Warren Buffett's thing is basically not giving much money to his family. I think, enough, right? Charlie Munger's like, I can't resist. Take it all. So he gave it to all his family members. No, he did not. He donated most of his money earlier on. So sorry, what I'm saying is Charlie Munger gave a lot more to his family than Warren Buffett did.

1:06:50That's what I mean by that. But Warren Buffett didn't donate earlier on. So his stockpile compounded much quicker. And when you look at his family, percentage-wise, it may be low. his kids don't have to really worry though. It's not like, you know, if you look at what I'm giving my kids, I don't know what Warren's giving his kids, but I bet you he's giving them more money than I'm giving my kids. It's like Bill Gates. Remember how he said he's only giving his kids? Initially it was like, I'm only going to give you 2 million each. And then I think he - No, 100 million each. Initially, long time ago, it was only 2 million.

1:07:22I was like, no, I want them to, you know, understand that, you know, the struggles in life, I'm just going to give you enough to like be okay. And then it became a hundred million. And then he got divorced and you know what his wife said? What? I don't think$100 million is enough for each kid. Yeah. So eventually, parents cave. Yeah. You love your kids. The goal is not to spoil them like crazy. You know, one of my buddies knows one of the billionaires. He's a top 10 billionaire in the world. So really high up. And his kid was going to a basketball game. And this guy has a jet and a nice jet. So my buddy's flying back on the jet with him.

1:08:00and my buddy's in the hedge fund world. So he's also extremely well off. He did extremely well off actually, not like millions of dollars, but Forbes-less well. And he's just like, dude, why isn't your son on the jet with you? He's like, no, no, my son needs to learn this struggle of life. He can go fly on Southwest straight up. And I was like, that's right. But at the same time, this person is also buying their child a home that probably cost$12,$13 million. Dude, you can't build character without struggle. Think about it at the end of the day. By the way, I asked this question on YouTube. Here, I'm going to quiz you.

1:08:42What do you think a good YouTube click-through rate is for podcasts? You're talking about an episode, a video on YouTube that is like this where we're just filming and doing a podcast episode. Yeah. when you're saying click through, are you talking about someone just, you know, doing a search or looking at a video on the recommended and just clicking a video? This is what happens when Neil doesn't use YouTube studio. He doesn't know what I'm asking. No, I know what you're talking about, but there's click through from search and there's also click through from different channels. It's just literally when you log into YouTube studio, it says click through a CTR.

1:09:15Yeah, but you can also look at your search traffic and you can see it. It doesn't get granular. You can go granular, but just the high level, you would know what I'm talking about if you use YouTube. My guess is I don't log into YouTube studios. He is right. The last time I probably logged in was probably like five, six months ago. Maybe even eight, nine months ago. Maybe longer than that. Yeah. I would say 4%. Close. You're doing good. Close. Remember the guy we had dinner with, Jake Klaus in Boston? Yeah. By the way, those of you that will be at HubSpot Inbound, Neil and I will be there. And we're probably planning to do a dinner with entrepreneurs there.

1:09:47So we're going to keep it small, keep it intimate. But anyway, so Jake Klaus said this. So I can only speak to my own experience, understanding that we're publishing 35 to 45 minute podcast interviews. Above 5 % click-through rate in the first 24 hours is what we want. Typically, they watch 20 to 25 % view, which is actually pretty high. Most viewers come from the homepage or recommended. By the way, one side note on this, he mentioned above 5 % click-through rate in the first 24 hours. That first 24 hours is actually what people look at because click-through rate comes down over time, especially if your video gets recommended by a lot of people.

1:10:23Now that's one guy, okay? Now Ryan Hashemi, who I had on the Leveling Up podcast, he says, trying to hit 10 % click-through rate on day one, average CTR is meaningless, 7 % is good, less than 5 % is bad, and you're aiming for an average view duration of greater than 6 minutes. One more, I'm going to add one more over here. Josh, who runs the George Gammon YouTube channel, he sees usually for podcasts 8 % to 12%, but anyway, food for thought. so let's just call it like 5-7 % is pretty good you know how I knew what the click through percentage was? why? because I used to track that back in the day yeah back in the day and then I realized huh, we make more money from RFPs than me creating YouTube videos but you know for our videos like this when we go general sometimes we're getting like 8-12 % because we're more newsy topics so food for thought dude it's funny I was recording social media content I think yesterday was one of these.

1:11:20I actually think it was yesterday. So when I was recording it, my team was telling me, they're like, dude, this video did on this general topic. It got great engagement. Look at these comments. They're like, you should go create more videos like this. I'm like, but how much revenue did we generate? They're like, oh, we knew you were going to say that. And then they were just like, Neil, did you see this video that we posted on TikTok for you? Because I recorded a new TikTok SEO feature. and they're like, it drove 2.6 million views or something just on TikTok in the first four or five days. You know what my question to them was?

1:11:53How much money did it make? They're like, well, there's two of them. I'm like, probably zero. These things, you're right. In the short term, probably nothing. But in the long term, the point I made, I was at a lunch today and I was like, who knows, someone watching your stuff right now, if they keep watching your stuff. By the way, there's people reach out, they've been listening to our podcast since day one. And imagine they're like 15 years old. 10 years later, they start something and maybe they raise a bunch of money for it or maybe they become a VP somewhere. Then they actually control budget, right?

1:12:26It's like long, long term. Is there an angle there? Because we think about the rule of seven, the rule of 14, that is one impression, right? Yes, but here's what's funny. You know when we do our sales calls? For every single customer, you know we actually ask them how they learned about this. So not only just tracking in the CRM on what caused them to convert, how they heard about us and all that kind of stuff. Do you know what drives the most revenue when we look at our social content? Your social content? Yeah, just content in general. We're creating content for social media, whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, because we get granular and we ask people, you want to guess what kind of content drives the most revenue for us?

1:13:01Your webinars? So type of content specifically. Oh, like you talking about boring shit. So for example, what I mean by boring shit is not Neil being boring. It's more so talking about, oh, blog migrations or internationalization and things like that. Bingo. And stuff with a lot of stats and data. But Eric's spot on. It's the boring subjects, and he doesn't mean it in an offensive way. The boring stuff with a lot of stats and data. And like, here's, we created AI content and human generated content. Here's what happened over a five-month period in comparing the stats. Most people don't care to read about that kind of stuff.

1:13:37That's the kind of stuff that is actually driving us the most revenue, not in the short run, but in the long run. And when we cover basic stuff, like here's what happens when you add your year to the title tag or here's some title tag hacks, that kind of stuff doesn't do well. It does well in view count, but it doesn't, it does well in view count compared to more of the boring stuff. But when we get super technical, we get the least amount of views, we generate the most amount of revenue. Yeah. I mean, let me ask you this separate question. How many lead magnets do you have? How many webinars do you have?

1:14:14How many on-demand webinars are sitting around? How many lead magnets actively do you have right now? A lot. Yeah. It's too many to count. So for example, when we filmed our social content yesterday, my team has me film a lot of ads. So when we create webinars, I'm filming ads for those webinars that they put on my social profile. Oh, you guys are running paid traffic to the webinar? And we do pay traffic. It costs us a little bit more than$11 per registrant from the United States. How much are you spending per webinar? It's small. I think we're only spending like seven grand. Okay, seven grand per webinar.

1:14:44Yeah, and then once we get closed numbers from it, then we'll start ramping up. And$11 a registrant, that's on? U.S. traffic. LinkedIn? Instagram. Oh, interesting. Instagram, and it's average for all social networks. That's actually pretty good. And you're just collecting email, I'm assuming, just to get them to opt in initially. No, a webinar registration is name, email address, phone number, company size. Oh, that's really good. It goes revenue, all that kind of stuff. And then I also did webinar ads. And then I recorded, it was either 11 or 12 ads. I actually think it was 12 for HVAC and roofing companies.

1:15:20So six for HVAC, six for roofing companies, two 15-second ads, two 30-second ads, two one-minute ads. So it was 12. And each time I record social content, which is multiple times a month, my team also throws in a lot more ads for different industries. hotel industry we go on and on and on and most people like why would you want to record ads for hvac well there's a lot of companies out there that roll-ups yes there's a lot of companies out there that like we own 30 hvac businesses and we do 200 million dollars a year in revenue right like there's some really big businesses out there that we take to uh that we tend to take for granted and the reason why i ask this for for everyone is understand that you probably so we're we're we're cranking on a lot more lead magnets webinars are planning on driving more paid traffic to it you need multiple touch points.

1:16:07You need multiple lead magnets. And there's also people at different points of the funnel too. And these things also build more trust at the end of the day. And by the way, like Neil has a big email list. You're not just hitting your email list. You're probably hitting your email list multiple times to get signups, but you're also driving more paid traffic. And that's how you get more new, fresh blood into the funnel. And most people underestimate how the old stuff still works really well. The old stuff works extremely well. And we Take it for granted. You look at Cody Santris. She talks about newsletters.

1:16:36They're a hot business, according in her words, right? She talks about how it's an amazing business. And there's quite a few that sold. I think Morning Brew was the email business, right? She has 75 million and the hustle is like 27 million. Yeah. And they're good businesses. Anyone who makes 25 or$75 million, that's a lot of cash. And if you look at what she's doing with her content, a lot of it is sending it to an email list because it works. It's not sexy, but it works. is that's what John Reese used to say from income.com back in the day. He's like, yeah, I want to need money. I want to buy a Lamborghini or whatnot.

1:17:08I just hit up the ATM. I'm like - You ring the register. Yes. And his ATM was his email list. Yep. But you still have to keep providing value to your email list, by the way. Do you know J.K. Rowling? Yeah, the Harry Potter. Harry Potter. Okay. So check this out. This guy's Twitter is the heretical liberal. Is it heretic? Heretical? Heretical. Yeah, liberal. So anyway, that's his name. So I guess this is where we're starting with it. So it's hard to overstate how important and strategically brilliant J.K. Rowling's power move was today. A first move checkmate that effectively neutered Scotland's dangerous new hate crime bill.

1:17:45So we're not going to talk about hate crimes or anything. But what she basically did here was she said,

1:17:53Today's posts by J.K. Rowling were calculated to cause maximum impact on a day when a law protecting trans people came into effect in Scotland. Her canon of posts, particularly against so-and-so, which she continues to communicate through, despite my advice that she'd taken him down, is a deliberate act of defiance. J.K. Rowling has challenged the police of Scotland and the Procurator Fiscal Service to take action. If this new legislation is to have any meaningful impact, the police of Scotland must mount a full investigation. Basically, the way I'm looking at this is her big brand of like 2.5 million plus followers or whatever it is.

1:18:27I mean, everyone's read Harry Potter, right? she's able to kind of effectively stop this bill because of the power of her brand now we're not saying we support or so the the bill is on is a hate crime bill yes and it's to give certain people rights i don't know enough about it but it's hate crime and all i know is hate crime hate crime and it's involving trans people and she pretty much said no go on the bill yeah i'm gonna to block this and I'm going to use the power of my brand to block it. And it seems like it slowed it down. I don't know what happened to this afterwards. But basically you think about the population of Scotland is like 5.5 million people.

1:19:08But her, way more than 12.5 million people know who she is. Way more than that. But yes. So she pretty much told everyone to what? Not vote for or to decline it? How'd she use her social power? Well, this is like a really detailed post. I mean, this guy goes in these ideologies.

1:19:29Okay, here, let me read this. Well, it looks like J.K. Rowling did in fact place the Scottish authorities in checkmate with one move. They've capitulated already. These cowards know they can't defend this law. They were desperately hoping they could use it to silence and intimidate the public without ever having to actually defend it. Rowling recognized what they were doing and called their bluff. Truly a masterclass in the strategic and tactical execution in winning political battles in the information age. So here's what she said. She tweeted this. I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement.

1:20:02And I trust that all women, irrespective of profile or financial means, will be treated equally under the law. And J.K. Rowling, so this is a BBC News thing that she tweets. There's a link. It says, J.K. Rowling hate crimes. hate crime tweets, not criminal police. So yeah, her tweets seem to have stopped, whatever it was. That's crazy. Speaking of brands, did you see how Forbes is getting a little bit tarnished, at least in the advertising and marketing world? They've been tarnished in the advertising and marketing world for a while. No, but did you see what they did with ads? No, what happened?

1:20:37So Forbes sells premium advertising to large brands like Microsoft, Ford, Disney, Johnson & Johnson for years, but they've been putting the ads on a spammy subdomain without telling advertisers. So they use www.3.forbes.com where people may see 200 ads during this single page view while a normal article typically has three to 10 ads throughout an article. So they crammed them in to start making way more money and advertisers are pissed off because dude, you have 200 ads on a page. What's the chances that they're going to click on your ad? Very little. Well, that's low integrity business practice when you do stuff like that, because people can't trust you anymore.

1:21:21And Forbes is a trusted brand. Like you earlier in this episode, you talked about the Forbes list, right? That Forbes has the Midas list too. They have all these billionaire lists. But when they do stuff, just focus on the short term to try to make money, you start to optimize for decisions like this. And ultimately, it hurts you in the long term. Yeah. And speaking of brands going in the right direction, I hope they do more of this. You see, ChatGPT is making links more prominent in the paid version, at least. So if you're talking, let's say if you're asking ChatGPT a question in the paid version, there's a higher chance now that they end up showing you the source of where they got that information.

1:21:59Well, that's good. I think they should be doing it. I think Perplexity does a good job of doing this. Gemini does. I haven't seen it in Gemini yet. I don't know. Yeah. It could be there. I just haven't seen it, but dude, this shouldn't just be, Hey, pay and you can get the source. This should be wherever we give you information. We should tell you what the source is. And I think this is super important because this will help us as marketers know you should, yes, always double check, but you should know the sources. You'd be like, wait, what's this site? This is a random site. I definitely got to double check this.

1:22:35Yep. A hundred percent. And look, we're moving into a world where we're going to see a lot more AI content. So the original source matters a lot. And if you can be, if you can't, remember the whole Google, like if you're cited in Google news, you just get an avalanche of traffic. Like if you can be that trusted authority, you're going to get benefits. And I think we're going to see more of that actually in a more AI enhanced world. Did you see this? The New York Times shared how the global time spent for New York Times owned apps. Okay. So they have The Athletic, which is one of their properties, New York Times Games, New York Times Cooking, and New York Times News.

1:23:14What do you think is the fastest growing segment for them in terms of time spent? Okay. Repeat them again. New York Times News. So New York Times News, New York Times Cooking, New York Times Games, or The Athletic, which is sports. It's either going to be games or cooking. Games. So you can see over time this graph over here, hopefully we'll pull it up on YouTube, but Matthew Ball tweeted this. He said, the New York Times is now a gaming company on the basis of customer time spent. That's where the majority of time is being spent. And when you think about Netflix, they've added games. A lot of people are adding games.

1:23:44It's a retention play at the end of the day. Why wouldn't you do that if you can keep people in your apps longer? Because if you keep them longer, you can serve them more ads or you can drive, maybe they'll purchase something else from like one of your affiliate links. Cause that's what the New York times does. Dude. Did you know, Netflix games do not work on an airplane. I didn't even know you. I've never attempted to play a Netflix game. Cause I just assume it's all crap. So I was stuck at the airport for a really long time and I was bored and I was like, all right, I'm going to hopping on a flight and the flight was from Columbia to Bolivia.

1:24:17So it was late at night. There wasn't much to do. And I was with some people and I was like, you know what, you know, got on the plane boarded i'm like let me just try one of these netflix games out so i downloaded them while i was in the airport all right um and then when i downloaded them i was like all right let me try this where i actually download a little bit before i was at the airport but either way i downloaded them and then i tried logging on and playing them on the plane and it didn't work it says you need to be connected to wi-fi and i'm like screw this so i've never got to play a netflix game yet yeah well i mean i'm sure it's all crap so like for right now i'm sure i'll get better over time but i think look if you can find something that has a lot of engagement that's the name of the game we talked about earlier in this episode views on social views on anything now is about how good your content is games is another way to get high engagement look think about this elon still plays diablo 4 and i think so lex friedman plays diablo 4 there's a lot of people that play Diablo 4.

1:25:19Why do they do that? Because it's addictive. Dude, I still play Monopoly every few months, and then I play it for hours. Monopoly? It's amazing. Who are we even talking about? Diablo 4 and Monopoly? I don't know what Diablo 4 is, but I know what Monopoly is. Like in-person Monopoly? No, no, no. On my cell phone. You know, I have Monopoly. I have the Socialist Edition. I'm not even joking. So when you watch my videos, there's a Monopoly in the back. So it says the Socialist Edition. Everybody loses. I've never played it. I want to play it. One of these days, I'm going to open it up. We're going to play it.

1:25:53But here, I think we can do two more topics here. This is a long one, guys. Let us know what you think in the comments because we're at about an hour and 20 minutes. We're going to go for nine more minutes. Karine Hsu tweeted this. And funny enough, right after this, I'm going to dislocation. So I wrote this blog post about Erwan in 2020. And it's wild to see that in four years, Erwan's Instagram has gone from 94 ,000 followers to 372 ,000 followers. Erwan's smoothie collapse had become so hot and culturally relevant. The Hayley Bieber smoothie as an example. That one's a really good smoothie, by the way.

1:26:25Also, fun fact, the name of Erwan is derived from the 1872 satirical novel Erwan by Samuel Butler, which actually explores AI and describes a utopia in which individuals are responsible for their own health and prosecuted for the crime of being ill. I think this is interesting because I don't know how often you go to Erwan, but their stuff is just so high quality. So I don't think most people can relate because I don't think there's an Air One everywhere. Well, yeah. Air One is like Whole Foods, but next level. Yeah, it's like all organic food. It is more expensive, but the quality of the food, I would say, compared to other places is pretty high.

1:27:04Yeah. And there's one here in Beverly Hills. I think there's one in West Hollywood. Everywhere. West Hollywood. Pasadena has one. Oh, there's that many? Yeah, Studio City has one. Santa Monica has one. No, it's everywhere now. in the LA area. Yeah, I've been to the one in West Hollywood years and years ago, but we order Uber Eats from Air One a lot. It's expensive when you order it. It's already expensive. When you add delivery, it's like adding another 20, 30, 40 % to it. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, my point of saying all this is that they do a good job with their marketing and they stay in their lane.

1:27:35They only focus on organic. And the smoothie collabs, I think, are really smart too. Again, it's like, how do you do influencer collabs? They do it with smoothies. So what can you do with your products? So, dude, and you know, before we wrap up, I think one topic that's, or to go back to Erwan, what they did really well in marketing is they said a lot of people complain about whole foods. They call it whole paycheck. Yeah. Right. You've heard that. This is actually whole paycheck. Yeah. They're like, what we're going to do is we're going to go target the super rich or people who don't care and they just want the best quality and they'll pay for it.

1:28:12And ergo you have Erwan. And you have it close to Rodeo Drive or on one of those streets in Beverly Hills. We, you know, I've walked to it with my wife and kids. It's expensive, but we eat it. It's a small store and it's still expensive. And, you know, that's why I pay for it. The way I do it now, Neil, is I buy two combo plates, but I add in three taquitos. So then I can eat, I can eat three meals. It's just two. Yeah. Because if you add in the three, three taquitos, it dampens it. It dampens the cost. By the way, did you know there are more and more people starting AI podcasts? So the Diary of his CEO, Stephen Bartlett, he started doing this.

1:28:54And this is a test that he's running right now where he tried to make a podcast, where he did make a podcast, an AI podcast on Manchester United, the soccer team, the football team. And basically it just shares news from Manchester United. And what they're trying to do right now with this is if the retention could get to at least 50 % minimum, then they're happy with it. And they'll just continue to roll out these podcasts, these AI podcasts. I'm like, I think we're going to see a proliferation of a lot of these news AI podcasts where you can even dub our voice in and change it into different languages.

1:29:26We'll see what happens. But if the retention is high, then why not just do a bunch of them? Yeah. And what Eric is talking about isn't creating a podcast about AI. He's talking about using AI to create a podcast on any topic. And it just crank out tons and tons of episodes. I do think that's smart. have you seen all the people who are posting AI social profiles? I bet you people are going to start having quote unquote AI generated only fans accounts. There are already. Oh, there are. Yeah. I subscribe to you to one. Seriously. No, I didn't subscribe to you to one. No, no. But like there really are AI.

1:30:01Yeah. I bet you it's a killer business model. Yeah, it is. You can keep a hundred percent of the profits. I told you about my, well, my friend was trying to start like a porn AI business. and it was kind of similar to that. It's like OnlyFans and they charge on a monthly model. And then also what they're planning to do is like skin whatever your preferences are and then just change up the videos or whatever. And so he ended up not doing it, but someone else took it on and I think they're doing really well right now, which is crazy, right? It is. So you remember your friend from, is it Junk Cut?

1:30:39Kong. Kong. Yeah. So good guy. I was at, um, not really a meetup. Someone invited me to meet up and he was there as well. And it was in Vegas and it was just like four or five of us sitting in a circle. One of his friends or one of their friends from the group, I didn't really know too many people in the group other than Kong. And I knew him from your event was a OnlyFans manager. And she did accounting and I think some marketing for some of these accounts and she was making a killing. And I was like, holy crap. I I didn't realize there was that much money in OnlyFans. And it hit me at that time.

1:31:17You know, I was like, huh, if you know how to do all of this, if you can somehow create the character in OnlyFans that people are subscribing to, you can keep all the profits and your income would really go up. Right? And now you can do that with AI. Yeah. So I think we're going to see more and more of this. But I don't know how that's like, I've seen some of this AI content And it feels AI right now. It's just like, what do you do in the world? How can you tell what's real and what isn't anymore? And we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Here's the last thing we can talk about. So I saw this tweet.

1:31:51This is from Joe Wang, Jeremiah Ouyang. And he has this picture over here. So I've been a professional speaker for over a decade. These rates seem accurate for today's market. And so we can share kind of what our experience is as it relates to this rate card. but this picture, hopefully we pull it up on YouTube, says how to decide your speaker fees. And so$0, if you're a new part-time speaker with little experience, you usually have no official brand. I think you and I can agree with that, that's true. $1 ,000, speakers with growing experience and branding usually part-time but have an up-and-coming speaking business.

1:32:27So that's anywhere from$1 ,000 to$5 ,000. True or false? I haven't looked at speaking fees in a long time. Well, people that want to make money from speaking. I think that could be true. Now, 7 ,500 to 10 ,000 is intermediate speakers who have a growing brand and business, usually full-time speakers or close to it. I would say this is true. Actually, this is anywhere from 5 ,000 to 10 ,000. And I would say when I started to get offered, it's around that range. And then 10 ,000 to 15 ,000 intermediate full-time speakers who have solid brand business, usually just working to expand their client list and reputation.

1:33:05Okay, that's fair. Now, let's talk about 15 ,000 to 30 ,000 plus advanced full-time speakers with extensive experience products and services. I would say that's not true because you and I have charged around that range. You charge way more actually, and we're not full-time speakers. Yes, and what's funny is the most well-known or most highest paid speakers typically don't care for income from speaking. They have something else that makes them way more. Remember Hillary Clinton charges like 500 grand for a talk, right? Yeah. So I can see a proposition. There's some industries where... Well, she needs donations.

1:33:41Yeah. Yeah. But on a side note, with speaking, the key isn't to make money from speaking. The key is to make money from something that's bigger. Sell them onto something else. Same thing with your newsletter. Ideally, you're selling them into a higher ticket item. Yes. And on one last thing before we go, because we had to talk about this. You see how Google considers buying HubSpot? I saw that yeah stock jumped up seven percent yeah but like what happened was that later that was later in the week right Wednesday it was a few days ago yeah it was like Wednesday or something this will be a week before this comes out but yeah I think it's a smart thing I mean they can buy many hop spots I don't I don't know we'll end up finding out when we go to inbound if it was going to actually happen or not oh and I could be google the sponsor to podcast yeah there you go I don't think google will buy hop spot I don't think so either it why don't you think so if If you look at Google, it's like saying they're going to go buy an ad agency.

1:34:37Why would you want to buy an ad agency? There's a lot of ad agencies out there. You don't want to cling to one. Let them all promote your ad ecosystem. There's a lot of marketing systems out there. Marketing cloud. Salesforce has a marketing cloud. Adobe has a marketing cloud. HubSpot, right? Why would you want to own one? Because a lot of the other ones, they do drive revenue to you as well. I'm not saying that they're going to lose the revenue if they buy HubSpot, but you got this golden goose. Why rock the boat or mess with it? Just let it be. And yes, HubSpot could potentially help their SMBs get onboarded and grow faster.

1:35:16but dude, they already partnered with HubSpot and they partnered with a lot of other marketing clouds. What's the difference from them partnering with these solutions versus owning them? Owning them just means it creates more of an issue for other platforms to send potential advertisers to Google versus just partnering with all of them. How many HubSpot customers are there? Hundreds of thousands. If you want to include the free ones, it must be millions. And so look, okay, let's think about why do they actually want to buy them? The cross-sell, upsell a bunch of things could be something. Do they want to buy all the data from all these B2B?

1:35:52But Google's not a software company. They don't own tons of software like Microsoft. They have Google Cloud. They have Workspace. They're trying to upsell Gemini. But you look at Salesforce and Adobe, they have tons of SaaS products. HubSpot is a SaaS product. Google doesn't own tons of SaaS products out there. They do software, but they don't own things. There's probably an angle we don't know about. I don't think the deal is going to go through because there's going to be a lot of pushback that's similar to the reasons that you give that I agree with. But there's probably some angle that we haven't considered.

1:36:29Plus, antitrust. So many people are going to slap this and say, hey, you already own a lot of the marketing ecosystem. We're in a really bad regulatory environment right now where nothing goes through. Didn't the Figma thing get canceled? It did. And then they had to pay them a cancellation fee of like a billion dollars. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's it for today. Let us know what you think about this longer episode. We'll probably chop it up a little bit for YouTube. And that is it for today. And also don't forget, go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association.

1:36:58That's where we help agency owners grow. And hopefully we get to a place where we don't need to have ads on this podcast anymore. So yeah, there's that for you. Goodbye.