The $100M Marketing Strategy In An AI World

0:00All right, guys, we got Eric on the show today. One of the top marketing podcasts, right? it yeah thanks for having me absolutely man I've been following you for a bit now appreciate it and you're at the stage of business where you're actually acquiring others now right correct so that's a whole new yeah part of the business yeah I actually um so single grain which is my agency I bought it when I was 26 years old and you know I brokered a deal that way and then you know three years ago or so we bought two other agencies and then right now we're an LOI with another one so we're letter of intent trying to buy one in Asia right now.

0:30And what's the thought process behind acquiring these? Yeah. So most people don't know that agencies are actually like, I come from tech, right? And I used to poop on agencies because it's not scalable. It's such a people focused business, whatever. You can't sell it for much money, but most people don't know this. If you get an agency, let's say to$5 million in profit, you can actually sell it for maybe 10X on the profit or 15X or 20X in some cases, right? I've actually seen some sell for 20x. So let's say you, simple numbers, 5 million in profit times 10 is$50 million, right? That's a good exit.

1:06That's not like a small exit. It could be$100 million or so, right? And so what you might do is you can either sell it at that point, or you might take your 5 million profit agency and then build a platform. And what that means is you're going to go out there and acquire other agencies and maybe buy 1 million in profit here, 1 million profit. People like to call it EBITDA, whatever, right? And then maybe you get it to$20 million in EBITDA. Maybe you can sell it for 20x on that or maybe like a higher multiple, right? But you're now selling it for like$400 million or$500 million or so. So it's like an arbitrage game that you're playing.

1:38Interesting. And you can play that game if you want. Or it doesn't cost you a lot of money to start up an agency. Maybe you get it to$500K a year in profit. That's a great business for you. Maybe a million a year in profit. That's great for you, right? There's nothing wrong with that. And so you can decide to play this game for 10, 20, 30 years or so. or you can play it just to cash flow and have a nice life. But, you know, there's not a lot of CapEx up front. And, you know, at the end of the day, it can become something really big because the total addressable market is very big for agencies.

2:06That's cool, yeah, because there's some huge agencies, right? Yeah. I mean, there's Dentsu, there's WPP, there's Omnicom. These are multi-billion dollar companies. And then, like, you have the Accentures of the world that have done, like, I think this year they've done, is it maybe a couple billion dollars or maybe 900 million? That's a pretty significant difference. but a lot of money they've done in generative AI, right? And they're like a consulting company. And so I think, you know, at the end of the day, if these companies can figure it out, then they've outlined a blueprint for people to follow.

2:33Wow, almost a billion just in AI. That's crazy. So that market's growing fast. You think it's a bubble though? I think short-term it's probably a bubble and then long-term it won't be a bubble. It's just like the internet back in the day. Yeah, that's how I feel too. I feel like there was so much hype, but I think there's going to be a few big players. Like obviously OpenAI is going to be crushing it. Yeah, we'll see what happens. And Elon started one too, right? XAI with Twitter's data or X's data. You have Anthropic, which I just talked about. Yeah, there's a lot of players. I mean, Google is obviously a player too.

3:02So yeah, I don't think there's going to be any, I mean, obviously Llama with Facebook. I don't think there's going to be any like one winner. I think there's going to be a lot of different players. Yeah, I'm starting to see that Llama one on Instagram DMs when I message someone, it's like their AI talking to me. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, have you seen that yet? Yeah, there's that little search bar. I don't think, I mean, I think they're kind of cheating there and calling that active users because they're just taking all the users from their apps that sometimes accidentally search in that bar. But I think we'll see much more sophisticated versions of ManyChat.

3:31People have been using ManyChat and chatbots and things like that. So yeah. Are you using AI every day? Every day, yeah. I mean, even earlier this week, and you've probably heard about it already, but Bolt.new, we're just using it to build front ends and giving it to developers and moving it forward that way. There's some cool things. I have an SEO background, but we're building these AI agents that will automatically just do a lot of the SEO tasks, like internal linking, finding content to update and all that stuff, right? Just the thankless work. And we actually had a conversation with the guy that's leading that charge at Microsoft today on the AI agent side.

4:07And yeah, there's some exciting stuff happening and we can't wait to see what happens in the next, I don't know, two, three years. Nice. What does Bolt.new do? I haven't heard of that one. So you've heard of Replit and Cursor? Cursor, I might have. Okay, so Cursor is like autocomplete for developers. And so when they're coding, they just move a lot faster. Replit is like, it's a more complex version of Bolt where you can just say, hey, like yesterday I built something. I was like, hey, help me build an app that allows me to upload audio files and video files and then also allow me to post in the YouTube link.

4:38And I want you to come up with five viral headlines and thumbnails for my YouTube, right? So come up with the best concepts for higher click-through rates. Wow. And it coded it all up. I was watching it code it and then it showed me the front end for it and it looked exactly like I'd want it to look. Then I might say, hey, change this over here or there might be some bugs and it'll just automatically fix the bugs. Damn. So you get like 60, 70 % there. You're basically prompting an app and it pops out an app. I got to step up my AI game. I'm only using ChatGPT. Yeah. I feel like that's grade level, right?

5:06ChatGPT is great though. I mean, it can be like a therapist. You can ask questions. I ask it to rate my workouts and everything. Really? It's great. I use this thing called My Body Tutor where I have to put in my workouts and like my diet every day. So I take a picture of the food. It's like, hey, tell me what this is and how many calories are in it. And I just cut and paste and I throw it into my body tutor. And then my tutor will be like, oh, this is great. This is whatever, right? So yeah. That's actually insane. So you could just take a picture of your food and it'll know how many calories?

5:31Yep. Yep. And it estimates what it is. It's like 95 % accurate with guessing what it is. And sometimes I just post like a blob of stuff and it still guesses it correctly. No way. Yeah. Wow, I need to look into that one. Did you see the AI chatbots, the Game of Thrones one? No, what's that? So there's one that can pretend to be the different characters. And there was one Daenerys Targaryen one, I guess. And some teenager fell in love with it. Oh, that's nuts. And then he committed suicide. I didn't know that one. How long ago was this? Yesterday or two days ago, maybe. That's crazy. Yeah. That's setting precedent.

6:02So, I mean, I think there's going to be bad stuff that happens. But also, I think the good will outweigh the bad. Because when you look at Anthropic this week, they just launched a thing called computer use. Yeah. And what that allows you to do is it's basically a human that can help you research like travel plans or Michelin restaurants or whatever. And you see it clicking around. It's basically a very nascent version of an AI agent that will actually act like a human and do work for you. Whoa. Yeah, that's cool. And so like you now have free AI employees, like very basic versions of it. Nice.

6:29I'll say business owners are a lot of money. Yep. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. so performance marketing that's seo that's paid media that's cro that's ad creative and there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with ai that's really cool you can go to singlegrain.com to learn more again at singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side crypto market's been uh it looks like it might come back i i think hopefully it rips next year we'll see yeah bitcoin's already at 68 right so and people are upset about that yeah i don't know why it's like it's close to all-time highs yeah i guess because eth is a little low but yeah we'll see next bull run might be a good one i think it will rip is that how you made a lot of your money in crypto uh yeah i mean i'd say the vast majority of my networks in business um but i think you know crypto i don't know if you played a lot you're asian you probably played a lot of games growing up yeah so did i right so it's just a way of uh gaming as an entrepreneur now so yeah yeah i remember buying crypto in like high school and if i just kept that oh man what year was that i was a junior so 2014.

7:33okay so yeah i bought my first bitcoin when i was 2013. damn yeah and but but one bitcoin and i sold it when it was 2000 yeah paper hands yeah paper heads paper hands oh man you went the full route academic route right college degree and everything i did for my parents not for me though same yeah i didn't make it all the way oh you didn't yeah good for you well here's how i justified because asian mother yeah i had to provide some revenue first so i started business freshman year i think it got to like 150k and then i dropped out that's great yeah yeah so you proved yourself yeah but a lot of people want to drop out with nothing so it's like the risk to reward yeah they're not thinking it through yeah what did you major in uh history and econ whoa yeah but i did that because i wanted to play poker longer so i stayed one more year extra in high school to play poker longer oh so you were a poker player back then damn history i've never heard that major yeah no it's a total bs major because all i did was go to wikipedia the day before i needed to turn something in i just like read it and i wrote something and that was it oh that's hilarious that was before ai where you could yeah yeah yeah now you just use ai yeah i remember those five-page essays in college oh my gosh now people are writing it in minutes you think you'll get an elon musk robot uh definitely yeah but i won't be the first wave i think for that you should probably be like the second way you don't want to be the earliest adopter maybe just a sec because like who knows what all the issues are going to be so that's why i didn't get the first tesla i waited like five years yeah same here same here like 2017 or something yeah yeah around there yeah i had robbie j lu on here yesterday she's a poker player and she invests in ai companies and she said there's one company that's providing legal representation to ai because these bots are going to start getting in trouble and need to be represented isn't that crazy that's smart i have someone in my my ypo forum he actually built something that will help you like take care of small claims and stuff so i think there's gonna be a lot of like earlier this week chat gpt the chief product officer was saying that um that now you can get a one thousand dollar an hour brief written for three dollars using chat gpt and you can use the the o1 version for that and so i think we're just going to see the cost for a lot of things come down.

9:33And that also the same thing goes for marketing to that, that computer use thing I was talking about. You can now use it to, you know, just automatically port things over from your spreadsheets over to your CRM and have it do a bunch of like manual work. And that you can do with Zapier or something like that. But I just think the possibilities are just going to open up quite a bit. Yeah. I've saved a ton on legal recently because of AI. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just contracts and NDAs and all the, cause you got to pay for the contracts like hourly or that's good yeah yeah yeah you just upload and say hey like what seems off with this and i actually use it for contracts too it's like hey what uh what could what could be strengthened about this contract oh that's smart so no one can screw you over yeah yeah wow i need to start doing that yeah there's all sorts even like on a personal use just like finding good restaurants i find podcast guests on it like there's so many ways to use it yep i'm a fan i'm optimistic i know some people are like oh it's gonna take out jobs and stuff but same with the internet yeah i people will reskill and people will figure it out i think it'll be fine yeah are you implementing it heavily with your agencies yeah so we are um on one side i mean the thing i mentioned with seo we're just looking at all the jobs to be done for like paid media seo all the work we do for clients and then we're just figuring out how we can bring efficiencies or add more efficiencies and we're just building tools and some will give away for free to generate more leads and then some will just you know we'll manage it for our clients and things like that so um i think for us it's ai first.

10:56And like right now our CTO, he's just building so many products right now and I'm having more fun than I've had in a long time. Nice. I love that. 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. It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it.

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13:13How do you feel about the podcast market. There's networks right now starting up. Yeah. I think podcasts, I mean, I've been doing it for like, holy crap, 13 years, I think. I've been podcasting for 13 years. So I have two. I have marketing school and I have leveling up. And it's just a gift that keeps on giving. I mean, you've been doing it. You've seen the benefits, the people that you meet, the relationships that you create from it. I've made lifelong friends from it. I've gotten deals from it. It's just been good across the board. And now the cool thing is like, oh, a short form came on the last couple of years.

13:43And so I don't know about you, but most people now, when they like, when I'm like talking at a conference, if someone comes up to me, it's usually like, oh, I watch your shorts or I watch your YouTube or whatever. It's not like I used to blog a lot. It's not, oh, I came from your blog. Agreed. So I think like, to me, the biggest opportunity in the next 10 years with social is YouTube. But like, what do you see mostly on YouTube and the shorts and things like that? It's podcasts. And so this to me, like, this is why Mr. B said, this is OP like two years ago, right? because we can just have a conversation and there will be bites where we have something that goes viral and great.

14:16I don't know if that's going to go away because people like hearing interesting things. Yeah, and people's attention spans are so short these days. But I do think there's just, I think it's getting a little saturated now because you have, and there's nothing wrong with these people, right? But you have NFL players starting podcasts, ex-NBA players starting podcasts. You have the Hawk Tua girl starting a podcast, right? And don't get me wrong, they're probably good. They probably all have an angle, but at a certain point it's like if everyone has a podcast then what do we do almost everyone i know does to be honest yeah or if they don't they go on a lot of shows so you're already seeing them but yeah it's definitely saturated it's it's been saturated though even when i started i was late when did you start two years ago yeah so i had to make up for it with repetitions and good editors for the clips yeah you grew very quickly yeah well everyone else like you and rogan had a 10-year start so i had to catch up yeah but it's i think it's like the hardest thing to grow but the most rewarding thing it is hard i was losing tons of money at first most people probably couldn't stomach those losses the first year or two you know yeah good it's uh we can we can asians know how to take pain oh yeah not that other we specifically yeah yeah shout out to my pain growing up yeah yeah are you full asian yeah chinese yeah uh taiwanese cantonese but whatever same thing yeah yeah i'm i just found out i'm not just half chinese i'm thai filipino and chinese oh wow i took a 23 and me i don't know if i believe it though so you're full asian half my mom said she was full chinese but i guess she wasn't yeah so i'm half asian okay got half white yeah i could i was like i'm pretty sure you have some light in you yeah i wouldn't be this tall yeah yeah i was like how are you so tall yeah yeah yeah i like it out there i've been in china yeah been in thailand it's it's a different vibe man it's good it's they um it's interesting because i met someone when i was in italy um this summer and then she lives in china and then i was like Because America likes to talk about China all the time.

16:03So what do you guys do in China? She's like, we don't really talk about America. We don't care. Our lives are good. Our costs are low. And our technology is so forward. And she's a teacher, right? And she's like, yeah, I teach my kids. They're five, six years old. And they know about engineering. They know about computer science. They're pushing hard, right? And it's no wonder why they're growing so quickly. But they don't really talk about America that much, as much as we talk about them. Right. Because they just want to worry about themselves. I can definitely see it. We paint certain countries in a bad light and then you actually go there and talk to people.

16:34They're like, we don't care about you guys. Yeah, it makes sense. I understand why we would do that and understand why they wouldn't care too. What do you think of their social system, how they're going to start rewarding and punishing people for certain activities? Yeah. So some things I think... Here's the thing. Like when you look at Singapore, for example, I think, and I could be wrong here, but if you bring in drugs or something like that, like you get beaten or I think they cut your hand off or like something extreme, right? In some cases, maybe they'll even kill you, right? But how much crime do you have going on there?

17:03Or in Dubai, if you do something off, they'll just kick you out, right? We don't really have that here. So if we set up the incentive structures correctly, then people will behave properly. And so I think maybe that will be helpful. Maybe it won't. So I can't really say I have an opinion either way. Yeah, I think it's also person-based. Some parents are strict, obviously, like a lot of Asian parents are. And the kids end up either amazing or the complete opposite. Or sometimes you might have like one kid that turns out amazing. The other one turns out like terrible, but they just had different life experiences and they look at life differently, even though they had the same parents.

17:37Yeah. That's why I liked my parents because I had the strict Asian mother, but my dad was a complete opposite. So I got to experiment both and I wouldn't want either end for my kid. I would want some middle ground. Yeah. Same here. I mean, there should always be like one tiger parent and then one that's super nice. Yeah. Yeah. You need both because if you're just a hard ass. Yeah. If you're too nice, then what happens is you end up having a kid that has no emotional resilience, and then they break whenever pressure comes. But if you're too hard, then they have no flexibility. And you see that with our friends that are having kids because they're pretty wealthy, and then they're hands off with their kids, and they're too nice.

18:10They let them do whatever. But their kids end up like… The wealthy ones, yeah, a lot of the kids end up being screw-ups. And I see this in the group that I'm in, YPO, is like an entrepreneur group, and you often will see the kids. And some kids turn out amazing because the parents are so involved. And the other kids, it's like black or white. It's either they're amazing or they're complete screw ups. Yeah. Right. There's no in between that I've seen. Yeah. Same. I can agree. You're having an event for YPO coming up. Yeah, that's it's going to be in Miami. It's the global marketing summit. So that's exciting.

18:37And that's another thing for me to do. But that's happening in April. It's on my bucket list to join that one day. Yeah. I don't meet the qualifications yet, but you will 10 million a year, right? It's 13 million a year or like 20 million valuation. Wow. Or like if you have assets under management, it's like a different, different qualification. I could probably meet the valuation one in maybe a year or two with the podcast. Yeah, then you should join. Yeah. No, I definitely want to. I've heard great things. Yeah, it's good. I think whether it's YPO or Hampton or EO, like any of these groups, it's very, like as you climb higher, the air gets thinner and it gets lonely.

19:10Yeah. And so to have people you can talk to, especially when they're from different walks and different businesses, you know, these are your people. And then the cool thing, like YPO is really good about involving your family as well. so i don't have kids or anything like that but um they're good about you know not just making it about the entrepreneur because the family like if you don't take care of your spouse first you don't and then you don't take care of your family then like your business falls apart yeah i think everything kind of coincides with each other right um so you're in hampton sampars also no i'm not i was in eo before for seven years and then ypo i think i've been in for four or five years or so but i think hampton's great yeah i've heard good things about hampton i love that podcast that's one of the shows i studied before launching mine yeah it's um i mean they they put a lot of time and effort into it yeah and not many shows can pull off virtual they're one of the few that can so that's something to be studied yeah i just like this because like that just there's different dynamics like we can go deeper and then the shots look better too so um but also this takes more work so props to you i'm yeah that's why i travel to a new city every month because virtual doesn't hit the same dude yeah like it's harder to read how much better do you see the performance virtual versus live i've only done one virtual i'm really strict on it and it's because he was banned from the us but it just from what i've studied because i study all the top shows most of them are in person like rogan yeah lex friedman yeah people just like it it feels like oh you put more time and effort into it yeah and um i'm excited about the future though these these podcasts are getting a lot of good valuations lately actually i don't know if you've been following the market well there's call me daddy all your daddy call her daddy right call me daddy i don't know why i got that like so how much was that one worth uh she sold for 60 million for 10 years or was it six years something like that 20 million a year and then rogan i think renewed or something for 200 for 10 years smartless 100 million yeah um travis kelsey 100 million yeah there's been five above 100 million this year that's amazing yeah i think you just keep going yeah because the margins are good yeah i mean we we love our podcast it's it's been great for us so yeah and you got two so yeah you ever think about starting a network like other shows no it's just like i've learned that So younger me would try to start all these different businesses because I think I can because like, wow, look at all these other people with multiple businesses.

21:19But then as you get older, you realize when you start to meet people that are like, oh, I have seven businesses, you realize that's actually not a flex. It's actually a red flag, right? Because the businesses and maybe they enjoy it. That's fine, right? But if you want a really big business, you're ideally focusing on one for a very long time. And I'm not just saying like five, 10 years. I'm talking like 20, 30 years or so. Yeah. Because it just keeps compounding, right? I met a guy, actually one of our clients, also a YPO guy, they do north of nine figures a year in revenue, and he's just been doing it for 30 years.

21:47They build these homes, right? And I'm like, that's all it is, right? And he's like, I'm not a genius or anything like that. I just kept doing it. And then I'm reading this other book right now. I paid$112, I think, for this book. What? It's called Keep It Going from Les Schwab, right? That's the most expensive book I've ever heard. So this guy, he founded Les Schwab Tires, right? And that used to be one of the biggest tire companies in the US. And I think they're doing like 180 million a year in 1986 or so. So it's like way more money right now. And then he's just like an all shucks guy, like a cowboy.

22:17And then he's just like, I don't know what's going on. And he just kept building one store after another and just kept compounding it for a long time. And that's all he did. And then you find out like a lot of these people that have built big businesses, it's just they focus on one thing over 30 plus years. and that's how they build it into multi hundred million or multi-billion yeah just as being consistent I learned that from Fleischman he he said he got some advice when he was 20 years old buy one house a year and see where you're at in like 20 30 years and look at the appreciation on real estate in that time yeah yeah I mean houses are solid yeah just from simply buying a house I mean out here house it's like five million but I mean it used to be like you know four or five hundred K when I was growing up crazy now it's like five ten times more right so you're happy right now with your place well no I I'm renting so like yeah I uh I'm I kind of fall into the Ramit Sethi category for that, that, you know, so he's good at personal finance, but, um, I just believe that I'm only going to buy a place it like when I'm like married with kids, you know what I mean?

23:11And so, um, right now I'm just like, it's just another thing. And I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that have multiple homes. They actually regret it. Right. Cause like each home takes up headspace and it's like a job, even if you have property managers managing it, cause there's problems with it, right. There's upkeep with it. Um, what if you just put all that head space into your business and just focused on one. Right. And so like I used to be a big proponent of I'm going to do all these things, like, you know, look at me. And now I've gotten hit so hard so many times over the years that I'm just like, oh, just this.

23:39Yeah. Simplicity, man. Elon Musk has no home, no cars. Yeah. Yeah. And even with him, by the way, he's a good example. Like, sure, he has a lot of things going on, but he has really good operators running each one, like SpaceX, right? He's got Gwyneth there. Yeah. And then, you know, he's got Linda over there at X. And so he might jump around a lot and like push things, but he's not in there operating all the time. Yeah, that's true. LinkedIn ads are great, but let me give you the bad news first. The bad news is that you can't personalize the ads and you can't scale up the ads as quickly. The good news is if you're in a B2B space, you're doing account-based marketing, we have a solution for you called Carrot.

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You can personalize the ads and there's a whole host of new things that are coming. if you want to get on the wait list just go to carrot.ai again it's carrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side you still playing poker not as much um i play occasionally like with a group of entrepreneurs here but um no it's like when we throw poker things like it's like an hour to get there and all that it's like a pain in the butt with the la traffic yeah yeah i like it for networking yeah it's great like working like invite only stuff but yeah just casually i don't see what's the buy-in typically for you what's up what's the buy-in typically uh i've done like a couple like a thousand nothing crazy i never do it for money like yeah it's it's just to me that was great yeah yeah so i'm not like some of these like nick airball is coming on i think he buys into like a million sometimes oh yeah yeah yeah i'm like dude yeah that's crazy yeah yeah you give up uh gaming too i know you used to play eSports i i can't i can't play games anymore because anytime i start playing a game like i tried playing diablo 3 maybe like when i was 27 or 28 yeah um now it's and i'm just like i just kept thinking about business i i just like business is the ultimate game yeah and i think any kid that grows up playing games like all i was just like dude what am i gonna do what if i can't find a game to play in real life turns out business is the best it is a game yeah i play a little fortnight everything's a game yeah yeah yeah business is 24 7 sport but like you're keeping your keeping healthy is a game too like managing relationships is a game too like yeah we're playing a game right here right now too absolutely yeah i play a little fortnight but no like yourself while i'm playing i'm like wow i could be making money i could be doing vodka because when you're playing you're like i want to get better like i played a couple rounds of of fortnite and and sure like i i felt like i played a lot of counter-strike growing up right so like i was in a flow but i'm just like but like i'm gonna want to get good at this i don't get addicted but like but you know people talk about business being you know you gotta allocate resources right what you really need to allocate is actually your attention it's actually more about attention allocation than it is about resource allocation because your attention controls your resources at the end of the day and so the more you can shut things out from your life and the more you can hone in the better you're going to do 100 i've actually heard vcs are focusing more on the founders these days yeah whether they could lock in or not they should and then the ironic thing is vcs don't focus right because they have they need to find a bunch of different bets to go for that multi-billion dollar outcome yeah you ever dabble with raising money in that that whole space um yeah we raised money for one software company um raised a couple hundred grand and then we got it to like a couple hundred grand a year in ARR but like again coming down to focus again we're like we need to cut it because as even though it we can see it growing to probably a couple million plus a year we're just like this is not where the opportunity is so we needed to shut it down and then we made a tough call there because the thing is we could have let that stick around it's like oh I have the software I have this education thing over here I have this thing over here I have seven different things I have this senior living business over here whatever right um but what ends up happening is like i'm now in eight different places right it's cool that you're able to pivot like that though because a lot of i think that's the demise of a lot of business owners right yeah especially agency owners a lot of agency owners try to do too many things and that was me in the beginning i was like well you have this agent thing that's growing but like oh look at this person doing courses over here oh look at this person doing software over here like the grass is always greener right but the real reality is the grass is greener where you water it i love that man the one game i won't give up is chess yeah i play every day well chess is like i think that's a little different though because it like it hones like this is why i'll play poker with friends because like it's it's very strategic um and to me poker is very much like real life right like chess is like you're kind of how do you think about it it's all skill based so if you lose a game of chess there's no luck involved you lost because you messed up somewhere yeah so i like that cool i like i've never played chess so oh you never played no wow uh yeah it's poker there's some luck but there's still a lot of skill yeah long term it's skill um but it seems like chess there's no it's like short term and long term it's all skill all skill unless your opponent like luckily messes up but that's like a rare thing yeah at my level yeah because i'm top one percent oh wow no one's really messing up it's like little things yeah you've been playing for a while i've been playing for two years but i'm able to get top one percent in any industry within two years i've done it with 10 different industries yeah and it doesn't have to be like mental either i do it in basketball i do it in sports um you're tall but it's just hard work and uh i pay for access cool well chess.com like what do you do and you pay for like a coach yeah got a coach uh studied youtube youtube university baby um yeah these days you don't even need degrees in my opinion for most things i'm with you on that yeah i mean youtube is phenomenal in podcasting yeah i mean why would you get pay 40k for a degree in marketing when they could listen to your show your parents tell you to yeah well that's what worked for them yeah that was before alternative media totally uh but now my mom's like the biggest listener of the show oh well even though we used to fight every day about academics dude i'm sure you dealt with that too oh all the time but how old are you right now 27 okay 27 okay yeah so she's probably loosening up a little bit yeah yeah well i had to loosen her up too we found some middle ground now great but uh i i got a lot of asian listeners so i hope if they're listening to uh you know kind of follow this path yeah tiger mom is good yeah it's good in some ways but just academic a lot of trauma man because i was friends with asian kids in school and they were oh yeah we have our trauma but it's like the trauma is we're never good enough yeah that's the trauma even an a grade wasn't good enough oh yeah nothing's good enough but it it's good in a way right yeah no i love it now like there's that chip on my shoulder that will always stay there it's like no matter what and then if someone tries to reinforce that like you're never good enough all the trauma comes back and then you just push really hard facts right yeah or you can be weak about it and then like cry about it yeah did you get bullied too growing up uh not really i always found a way to kind of sneak into like whatever the popular group was like because i was good at games and games were cool or i was like at least semi-decent um so i somehow found my way like around like it wasn't It wasn't like I was top dog or anything, but I always found a way into these groups.

30:04Impressive. That's tough as an Asian. Well done. Yes. Well, I mean, there were Asian popular groups or white popular groups, but I got along with everybody, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And my school is mainly white and yeah, no Asians in the popular group. Yeah. But I mean, you're like a tall Asian, right? Half white. Did they let you in? Nah. No? Nah. I didn't get in there, man. Sorry. I was pretty weird, to be honest, but. We're all weird. Yeah. I learned now that if you're normal, it's like a red flag to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be weird. If you're just acting like an NPC, I'm like, all right, this is weird to me.

30:36100%. Yeah. Who you got coming on the show next? So we just had Seth Godin. And so he just went out like yesterday or the day before. Today's Friday, right? Yeah. Wednesday. And then we have Anthony Pompliano. That should come out next week. Nice. And then we have, I'm going to be talking to my friend Jess Ma. So she's worth about$500 million. She's also a YPO member. She has two jets. Damn. She flies around. She actually lives in LA. her main driver is like a Lambo she's talked about all this stuff and like yeah she invests in a lot of different things she's like realized you know that she likes doing that and I think it'll be a great conversation like I don't like the fact that okay she's a woman and she's a person of color like that doesn't matter to me like what matters is like she gets shit done right I think a lot of people get caught up with like oh you know we need to meet like these like quotas and things like that like DEI yeah it's just that's just not what matters right what matters is like yes it does matter like sure you should have some diversity of thought and opinion but ideally you're looking for people based on their immutable characteristics right like what their character is and like what they've done on their merit yeah and that's why i like business because skin color race doesn't matter doesn't matter height doesn't matter yeah like if you're good at business like let's let's hang out exactly one of the tweets i liked about you uh you said there's two type of friends utility friends and friend friends yeah i agree with that yeah so like this is interesting because i was um speaking at a mastermind with my friend who so we were both speaking and and And he sold this company for$250 million.

32:00And we're just talking about it. And he's like, yeah, you know, there's one guy that's well-known. I'm not going to name any names, but he's well-known on YouTube, right? And he is all about, like, money, money, money. And he looks up to people that have a lot of money, right? And he basically worships them, right? But if you have less money than him, he treats you like you clearly have less money than him, right? So that's an example of a utility friend. Like he, he treats my friend pretty well. Yeah. Um, because like he sold his company for two 50, but he's constantly asking him, it's like, Hey, so how are things going right now?

32:31You making revenue on that thing right now? Like it's a competition. Right. So it's like, he wants something from someone now that's a utility friend, but a friend friend is like, you love them no matter what you love them for their character. Right. Like I had a friend recently, you know, reach out to me like regarding personal stuff. It's like, Hey, how are you doing? Like, how are you holding up? Like blah, blah, blah. Right. And I was like, dude, I'm good. Right. Um, but, but like the concern that's there, like, it's not about, Hey, can I get something from this guy it's like hey how is my friend doing right now i love this person no matter what and um it's really hard to come across friend friends and we're talking about it and it was interesting because he looked at me he's like he's like you're kind of a mix between the two eric he's like you're actually like a utility person until you trust someone and then once i trust someone they're like a friend friend like i love them forever right and so um i think yeah more friend friends but utility friends they also have their uses too yeah i have both i think it's important to have both some people get offended if you kind of box them in as a certain type of friend but you know i have friends that are are broke i'm not going to go to them for business advice no but like by the way like i still keep in touch with my high school friends my elementary school friends i don't know about you but like i love them for who they are it doesn't matter how much money they make and like we've grown together and like there's a role for everybody in your life yeah i mean but you were probably growing at a quicker pace than most of them i assume uh financially at least.