The Truth About Personal Brands, $236K to Manage a CEO, LinkedIn vs. X, and AI’s Biggest Shift

0:02uh the next one i want to talk about is personal branding and people talk about building a media company a media company, you know, a company that it doesn't matter what you're selling, but Eric and I have talked about everything's turning into a media company where you need a following, you need an audience, whether it's personal or corporate. But what's interesting is we're seeing a lot more people trying to build up their personal brands or even corporate brands. But what's worked for you and I and what's worked, what works today, I would say is very different and you can't build a media company the same way that you could in the past.

0:38And again, to clarify, when I say media company, we're not talking about building your own version of CNN or a Huffington Post or a TechCrunch or anything like that. We're talking about you have your product or service that you're selling, but you need to build up an audience. That would be the media type company-ish thing that we're talking about to build a community that evangelize your product or service, the brand, pushes out there and helps you get more sales. Yep. So my take on it is it's harder than it's ever been, but it's more essential. than it's ever been. And the game is changing very quickly too.

1:12So if we were to start today, like just doing SEO, we'd be in trouble. But I look at marketing as there's always the meta, the most optimized way to play marketing right now. And then there's also each channel, there's an optimized way to play for short form, for example, and things like that. And you for what you've done with long form. So I think when people say you need to build a media company, I look at it as they're just saying you need to build this distribution in some way, shape or form, because the only one of the only forms of modes right now is distribution. And so that's why we continue to do what we do.

1:45I don't I wouldn't say, Neil, you necessarily enjoy creating content, nor would I say I enjoy creating content. I mean, I would say that when we hang out and we get lunch and all that, like, it's fun. It's like more of a reason for us to hang out. But that's about it. Dude, I you know, I don't enjoy creating content and you're being kind about it. But my favorite part about our podcast recently has nothing to do with the recording, even though Eric and I genuinely do enjoy helping other people. It's just we have busy schedules, so it starts becoming tough to always sit down every single week and share content.

2:23Like today is my anniversary, right? Wedding anniversary. I'm sitting here creating content. Thank you. um but the part that i've been enjoying about our podcast recordings of recent is we've been doing lunch after yeah and we do lunch with uh with noah who's our amazing videographer and it's it's fun like it's you you realize the the the joy i get from doing this is the relational uh wealth that you build from it long term so there's different types of wealth you got relational wealth you got you got monetary wealth you got physical health right um and you've got your mental health. There's all these different things.

2:57And I think actually Sahil Bloom wrote a book about this, but I think it's worth thinking about these and it's not always about money, money, money, or reach, reach, reach. So there's always secondary and tertiary benefits to these things. But going back to the original topic here, what's your take on it in terms of building a media company? I think it's more essential than ever, but I think it doesn't get you to a really large corporation and i'll give you a great example of this um if you look at uh hailey bieber i believe is her name her makeup company i forgot what it was called but it was bought by elf beauty all right and they got to hundreds of millions in revenue elf bought it for premium meals mainly stock and i bet you the company will blow up now hailey bieber has a big community her dad is uh one of the baldwin brothers i don't know which baldwin brother and then her husband is justin Bieber.

3:51The Baldwin brothers, like Alec Baldwin. I don't know the other ones. They're great actors. Alec Baldwin from, I don't know all the names. ABC, Always Be Closing. That's how I remember. Glenberry Glen Ross. Yeah. But it's one of the Baldwin brothers. And the reason she'll build a bigger company now isn't because they're a social audience. If you look at the majority of the people who buy cosmetics the transactions happen offline well elf has that she didn't have is they have the relationships to get into every store and the distribution and the lines of credit to do it because it's very expensive i think elf just uh finance like 600 ish billion dollars in debt don't quote me on the amount but it was something large like that i'm pretty sure it was around 600 in debt for all their sephora inventory and things like that um let's see elf beauty i'm gonna look it up uh debt uh million financing sephora let's see oh yeah the debt financing of 600 million dollars so that way they can go in and expand faster offline um but that's where the majority of the sales are so you can create a media company like a kardashian a hailey bieber and these are extreme cases and I'm not trying to say it in a negative way.

5:15I mean, extreme cases in which they have so many followers, 99.9999999 % of people will never reach what they have. And even then it's hard to get more than hundreds of millions of dollars of followers just doing it online. It's a great way to jumpstart the business, but then you need all the systems, the processes and the fundamentals that the old school large corporations have figured out for many, many years. And that is distribution and partnerships and all these other things that don't seem sexy, but drive a ton of revenue. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about Kylie Jenner, she's done amazing, or Kim Kardashian.

5:50But when you compare them to like the L 'Oreal's of the world, they're so tiny. And I'm not saying it in a bad way. They've built bigger businesses than you and I have built. It's just more so the L 'Oreal's of the world, whether you think they're sexy or not compared to the Kim Kardashians and the Hailey Beavers, They figured out the part that generates a lot of money, which is the old school traditional stuff, which is people going into Walmart and buying. I think one part where people have gotten confused. So I was actually watching something recently where people like, you know, obviously Mr.

6:19Beast created Feastables, right? And then he partnered with Logan Paul on Lunchly. So I actually pulled up, I used Grok to pull up Primes, which is Logan Paul's drink, right? So 2023 full year, sales figure is$1.2 billion. So that's what Bloomberg estimated. Who knows if that's real or not? 2024 full year, down 112 million pounds in 2023. This is UK only. So that's a 71 % year-on-year decline. Profits dropped 92 % to just 312 ,000 pounds. OK, now, if we look at the trailing 12 months, 2025, it's reported journalist Darren Roval reported 90 percent decline, but 42 percent is a verified figure. So it's going down a lot.

7:06So all that to say is creating the making this media company driving distribution is certainly important. I don't think it's or thing. You have to you have to have a good operator on your team to figure out what to do. Otherwise, it's all going to fall apart, right? And then what ends up happening is then your brand ends up getting tarnished for it, and you don't want that to happen. Yeah, and ideally, use your brand, your following, whether it's corporate or personal, to kickstart things and get the engine going. But don't forget about all the systems and the processes and boring stuff that's made a lot of these large publicly traded companies large.

7:41You need both. If you don't have both, it's really hard to succeed in today's world. Now, you don't necessarily need the media part or the personal brand. I still think you can do it the old school way. It just costs more now than it did before. The personal brand side, right? Trying to create that media company or corporate brand side, it helps kickstart things. Dude, speaking of which, did you see that PayPal is offering$236 ,000 to manage their CEO's brand? No. That's it? Yeah. So, okay. So there's a head of CEO content. It's not even SEO content. the head of CEO content based in San Jose and 137 to 236 K full-time job.

8:18And so I just, I think this is interesting. I think some people, a lot of people are poo-pooing on it, but I think this is necessary because at least PayPal realizes this is important. It is hugely important. I can't name companies, but we get paid by quite a few publicly traded companies to manage the CEO's online presence and PayPal, you know, their stock hasn't been doing well as of recent but it's still a 66 billion dollar company they're still growing and in 2024 they had 31.8 billion dollars in revenue um with a net income uh 4.15 million ebitda 6.17 billion so they're still massively large and people tend to also forget elon was one of the co-founders yeah um along with uh sax work there reid hoffman worked there teal was a co-founder.

9:11Yeah, it's the PayPal mafia. Math legend. Yeah, a firm, right? And then I forgot what he did before. I think the Yelp guys also came from there. Maybe. Yeah, YouTube founders came from there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of smart people come through there. No, but what it shows is, forget the smart people come through there. It shows that Theo and Musk were amazing at recruiting and spotting talent. That's what it shows more than anything else. So I don't know if I told you this, but so my CTO, Sean, went to the SpaceX Starbase, right? And he just said it was incredibly motivating to be there because everyone was focused on the mission.

9:52Everyone was working, helping each other. They were just walking and someone like drove by and said, hey, do you need like a ride, like a golf cart, right? But everyone's working around the clock because when you have a mission that's so insane, you can't help but to want to work harder for the mission and to work harder for Elon because it's like they're trying to make humanity multi-planetary. That's a crazy mission, right? Or when you're trying to reduce carbon emissions space with Tesla, you're trying to make robotics, you're trying to make more self-driving cars. Every single mission is so big that you're naturally going to bring in the best of the best people and the people that can't take it are going to quit, right?

10:25And so you and I don't have missions like that necessarily, but we started working on our mission a little more and we started to mold it a little bit. But I think if you can look at SpaceX, whether you love or hate Elon, you can agree that the mission is very noble and it inspires people to keep working there. Because what was PayPal's mission? You remember? When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind-the-scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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13:11There's so many scams going on. Yeah, people would send checks. I remember I would get money orders to buy stuff on eBay and mail them out. It was a pain. I remember this when you sold CDs. Yeah. Didn't go well. But yeah. Yeah. That's when I sold gear on eBay. I sold weapons. Assuming it did not go well either. No, it actually went well for me. It worked out for me. Oh, you're not talking about weapons like guns? No, no. Not real weapons. Like in-game weapons and armor. Thank you for clarifying that. That's not gear. I thought you meant like you're selling tactical. I'm like, this did not go well.

13:44You're going to get... You want to know what I want to call out? So earlier in this session, I talked about how people responded to my, you know, if you can't leave marketing, if you don't have at least$100 ,000. So guess how people responded on X versus LinkedIn. LinkedIn people must have hated on you. I didn't see it on either, by the way. X, you probably got some haters, but you probably got more people that were like, cool, this makes sense. Exactly. So the question is, are people on LinkedIn dumber than people on X? OK, so that post, again, if you don't have at least 100 ,000 followers, you don't deserve to lead marketing on X.

14:20Almost every single person agreed. OK, every single person agreed. And actually, I get my news from X. Right. Behind the scenes, when I'm talking to, let's say you or I'm talking to other CMOs, some CMOs are there. There are companies doing, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue. Right. They agreed with it as well. In fact, they said, no, you need to have even more. You need to be good at multiple channels. And even you said that yourself. Right. Now, I go on LinkedIn, everybody hates me. Every single person hates me, right? And so the question is, is LinkedIn dumber? That's a good question.

14:49You answer it first and then I'll go. I don't think it's dumber. I think a lot of the people on LinkedIn know it. But what's happening is most of the people on LinkedIn are there trying to climb the corporate ladder. And they're going to go against anything that is not favorable to the employee. So you've probably posted about, actually you did, you talked about this, about people had to go into the office and that's going to be the new norm again. I bet you everyone on LinkedIn hated it. I don't know what percentage, but it has to be 90 plus percent had to hate on it because there are people who had to, don't want to go into the office.

15:25Same with people who don't want to have a massive following because it's hard for them. X, you have employees on there. You have entrepreneurs similar to LinkedIn, but X is a platform where you don't really get chewed out for speaking your mind as much, right? LinkedIn, you get chewed out for speaking your mind, you know, and X is also designed to where someone likes your content and you're just saying what you want. Others don't know that they liked it. Yeah. And by the way, so I don't necessarily look at it as dumber. I just look at it as different experience levels and different incentives too, right?

16:04So to your point, people commenting, when I put that post up on like harsh truth, most people or all people are going to go back to the office. That one got, I think, five or 600 ,000 views on it. And everyone in there was like, no, this is rage bait, whatever. But when you look at all the people that responded, what did they actually work at companies, right? So of course they're not going to say it's okay. And then they start fighting. And same thing, when you talked about the people climbing the corporate ladder, they don't want to have to do more work. And I get it. That makes sense. Maybe they're in a season where it's like, I don't want to have to learn this new stuff.

16:37I already worked so hard. And I get it. Now, on the other side, when you look at X, to your point, you have a lot of people who are entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial. And so they are actually okay with having to deal with whatever change is going to happen. because X is moving so quickly. I tend to think that whoever's posting on X usually is someone that's trying to take responsibility for themselves and they're willing to try to do things, right? Not saying that LinkedIn people aren't, but X people are, I would say, more, how would you do it? More sovereign individuals, if that makes sense. So I posted something on both X and LinkedIn in the last, call it seven to 10 days.

17:14I forget the timeline, but somewhere around there. And it was on what companies are expecting or how they're adjusting because of AI. And when we started talking to a lot of companies, we found that the biggest thing is they're expecting you to finish your work faster. So they're reducing deadlines. So if you had two months to do something because of AI, they're hoping that you can get it done in a month. I'm just making up the time difference. But it could have been a month, month and a half, but they're creating shorter timelines. That's for certain. The other thing that we're seeing is they expect people to get more done with less so less of a team less money they're still expecting you to get more done and the list goes on and on i posted it on x i think it got like 40 000 views and i read all the comments and then i posted on linkedin i don't know how many views it got i don't think as many but if i look at my direct messages because i can see the messages I have so much hate of people being like, why would you post junk like this?

18:18This is useless information. And you look at it, they all work at corporations and they don't want anything out there that makes their life harder. And I bet you it's the same thing. Like if someone posted stats or data on X and LinkedIn about going into an office and hypothetically, let's say it makes you more efficient, it probably could. There's probably cases where it doesn't, but I don't have data on this, at least off the top of my head, but I can research it. And let's say I created a chart showing and citing my sources on how it makes you, I'm making up the number, you know, 31 % more efficient, even though you have work commute, you know, output increases, et cetera.

18:57If I post it on X, you know, people probably love it. If I post it on LinkedIn, some people would love it. And even on X, some people would hate it. But on LinkedIn, I know people would be furious with it. And the reason being that like this chart is garbage. You know, I've become way more efficient because I don't have to hour commute each way to work and I'm saving so much time and all this kind of stuff. Like people just argue for what's in their self-interest. Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. It's rightfully so. So you just have to understand what audience you're hanging out with. And ironically, so on threads, and we can jump around here, but on threads, threads happens to be a little more, I would say, like a different crowd than X.

19:38Let's just put it that way. Okay. They like motivation for sure. Anything that's upbeat and cheery, like, yay, people love that. I wrote something on X about Elon or on LinkedIn as well. It did okay. But when I wrote about Elon on, I put the same post on threads. It got ripped apart. Right. So like, how could you, how could you actually believe, you know, that Elon is, is, you know, helpful to society or something like that. Right. And that is it for today, guys. And we'll see you tomorrow.

20:08Thank you.