The Art of Digital Marketing

- Strategies right now (inspiring synth music)
is influencer marketing with the combination of
the influencer has to be on your website.
So if the influencer has a related audience to your product,
their followers know about your space,
and they're interested in products or services
related to your space, and they talk about it a lot
on their stories, their posts, their videos,
and then they're on your landing pages,
it converts really well.
(light synth music)
- And so we want to acquire 12 businesses next year.
You know, ideally businesses that might integrate
with the current ecosystem, that we know we can give 'em
an instant bump, or you know, we just really like
the margin and the business, we understand it.
And even if it's non-related,
we can scale it up and get equity.
(chimes ringing)
The one thing I have been thinking is like,
one business I do want to start next year is a clothing brand.
And you know, obviously, influencers that had merch forever.
But in my mind I'm like, "This is not merch."
Like this is legit clothing.
Like the same clothes I wear.
It doesn't need to just say freaking Ryan,
whatever, you know?
Have something that's totally addressable.
Because when I wear these things,
like this is a Cuts sweater.
- Yeah.
- A lot of people who follow me wear Cuts,
'cause I wear Cuts.
And I'm like thinking,
"man, look at all these videos that I'm in."
If I've gotten over half a billion views online,
and if it just said whatever the brand is
on all these videos, that's a lot of free marketing.
Plus, now I'm actually reaching a massive TAM
because everyone needs clothes.
Like, you know, there's lots of ways to buy clothes,
and all my other products right now are very high ticket.
They're very niche.
So what do you think?
- So-
- [Neil] Don't hold back.
- Don't hold, okay.
So.
- Tell me where I'm missing.
- How many people do you have?
- On what?
- Employees?
- Oh, employees?
Across all the companies, I mean,
if you count like 1099
that you know are pretty good and stuff,
it's close to a hundred.
- You won't be able to buy
12 companies successfully next year.
So if you look at most private equity funds,
they don't try to do,
they're companies that they buy
or companies that want to do rollups,
it's hard to buy 12 companies,
because it's hard to integrate and run them all correctly.
That's why funds continue to raise more money
and go after bigger deals,
because time is the big problem with acquiring companies.
It's easy to do one a year.
Two a year is not that bad.
Once you start going more than three a year,
it starts getting hard.
I know some companies do way more than that,
but they have so many people and you know-
- What do you think about though just, I guess, on that end?
I get that if I'm like owning 100% of the company,
we got to fully run it.
- No, no.
Even when you own part of the company and other people.
- Even like a consulting for equity type deal,
you still see it as a problem?
- No, that's a little bit different,
but then you won't be able to spend much time.
I'm assuming you're buying a company,
at either 20%, 50%, a 100% percent.
You're either minority or majority.
But to do a lot of deals, assuming it's not venture,
and you're actually helping run the companies and grow 'em,
that's where it's going to start becoming-
- So I should just pick some cherries next year.
- Pick the best ones and go all in.
- Okay.
- And it's not just my take on that.
Big financial firms, that's what they tend to focus on,
because the model's been proven out
when you start acquiring 20, 30, 10, whatever companies,
it's really hard to focus and really grow 'em all.
It's not impossible,
it's just really hard and the odds are against you.
It's much easier to go find one, two, three deals
and really just help me explode and pick the right ones.
If you're taking the venture approach
and you're just putting some money in
and you're barely spending time, that's different.
You can do 12 deals, 20 deals, you can do a ton of them.
- And I think on the minority stake companies,
we were looking at it more so as consulting
for equity type deals and you know, so.
- That's not that bad.
If your team's spending some of the time, that's not bad.
- [Neil] But if we're going to run the full thing then yeah.
- Bingo.
And then going into clothing and stuff like that,
I'm with you.
It's a big market.
You're really good at real estate at least
from my perception, from everything I've seen,
you're super sound, you give great advice.
Just go buy more apartment complexes and buildings
and raise more money.
It's scalable, you're already great at it.
Is if you had a really good project tomorrow
for 20 million bucks, is it hard to raise
the down for the 20 million bucks?
- No, we can do it.
- [Guest] And you can do it quickly.
- Yeah.
- And people have bet on you,
because you're good at flipping, you're very logical,
you don't get emotional with real estate,
a lot of people do.
And I would just continually go do that.
- Just crush real estate.
- Yeah, because eventually you can go and raise
a billion dollars, $5 billion, the 2% and 20%,
I don't know how you structure 'em,
but most funds at scale typically fall under
the two and 20, right?
2% management fees, 20% of the profits.
Yeah, like I was talking with someone today,
they run a 10 billion fund.
They're in their early sixties.
You're talking about just on management fees,
200 million a year.
Less than a hundred employees, 200 there.
Their firm makes, call it 300 to, on a bad year,
to over 500 a year in income a year.
So the founder's probably pulling in
after paying talent and all expenses,
the founder's probably pulling out on an average year,
200, $250 million.
That's a lot of money.
- That is a lot of money.
- And that's what you can end up doing with real estate.
- That is definitely something to consider.
Devoting resources to just raising capital.
- Yeah, just raise a lot of capital.
There's been a lot of people out there that I see
in the real estate world with social media,
have raised, you know, half a billion,
few hundred million, et cetera.
- Yeah. Yeah.
I had, you know, Cardone was sitting there last month,
you know, just talking about, you know,
they're at a billion dollars raised
strictly from social media and you know,
I mean, he's doing a little bit of everything too with,
you know, education and, you know,
all that stuff along with raising capital.
- I would just continue raising capital
from social media for complexes.
The money's great.
- What do you think about,
since you're really into the Wall Street
and corporate world, you know, raising capital
on social media, you know, doing it
for these smaller deals is totally fine, right?
But yeah, eventually, you know, to be at the big boy level,
you're raising Wall Street money.
Like what do you think about transitioning there
at some point?
- You'll get there.
You may already be there, but once you raise more and more
and you show a track record of doing really well,
you'll meet some funds,
and then you'll start producing ROI for them
and then they'll open up and give you more money
and then you'll get more money from Wall Street,
and then eventually when you really want the money,
then people start going to like sovereign wealth funds
and pension funds and stuff like that.
- No, that makes sense.
So what do you see as like the biggest opportunities
right now going into 2023?
I mean you're obviously diverse in corporate, real estate,
you know, marketing, like you got your pulse
on like all things business it sounds like.
What are some big opportunities you're seeing?
- The big one that I'm seeing
is people should just focus on
what they're really passionate about
and what they're good at.
Because everyone tries to do,
they see the pasture as greener on the other side, right?
They're like, "oh, the grass is always greener
on the other side."
And that's not always true.
For example, you're good at real estate.
I've done well with real estate
before when I was buying like bankrupt units
or units from the Mandarin
or people that were going bankrupt
and they just need a quick flip.
But that's not what I specialize in.
I've also lost money on real estate.
Your track record in real estate is much better than mine.
You're good at it.
I'm really good at creating technical software for B2B.
I'm just good at it, have been doing it since I was a kid,
I like it.
My track record for creating a B2B enterprise company
is pretty decent, right?
My batting average is great.
So I just stick with what I'm good at
and everyone looks for new opportunities
instead of just focusing on what they're good at.
Like I have a friend here who is a ex-Goldman Sachs guy,
lives in Summerland, which is Vegas, right?
You know that, but in case some other people don't.
And he now owns a ton of HVAC companies.
He was really good at Goldman Sachs
at doing financial engineering and he's like,
"huh, I was doing this for tech.
I don't want to do this for tech anymore.
The returns are hard.
I'm really good at operations and finance.
Let me just go do this in a boring industry."
He fell in love with HVAC and roofing and plumbing,
so home improvement stuff,
and his name's Devin and he's just like,
"I'm just going to buy up these companies."
Makes a killing.
Like literally a killing.
I'm not talking about like five, $10 million,
but like he's scaled up the organization
to do a lot of revenue with only a few million dollars
ff capital. 'cause some of these businesses,
he's buying 'em for like two, three x EBITDA,
some seller based financing, the best rest bank,
and he's putting no money down
and he's getting these businesses for free
and then he does online marketing
and runs their operation better and says,
"hey, instead of using paper for all your record keeping,
let's go digital and actually use software and all this.'
And he's growing these companies by roughly 40 to 50%
in the first year that he's acquiring 'em.
- That's amazing.
So what's your plan then for 2023?
- So for us, we have software companies,
we'll continually buying more software companies
and continuing to-
- 'Cause that your core competency?
- Yep, and then with our ad agency,
I don't run the ad agency.
I spend most of my time on the ad agency
'cause it's fun for me, working on the marketing strategy,
but it's just more international expansion.
For us to be a big ad agency,
we need to be in more countries.
We're only in seven right now.
We need to be in, seven main ones,
we have some small ones we're in,
but we really need to have like a base
and let's call it 50 main countries.
And I'm hoping next year we can add
at least seven, if not 13 more.
And then over the next five years
I want to get to at least 50.
- What's, I mean, what's the base
in these other countries for?
Like, I mean are they huge bases with all these people?
Or is it just like, it's just to say we're stationed here
and now we can get business?
(bell chimes)
- Most of 'em, you have to have a base
with a good amount of headcount.
So let's say like if Amazon wants a market in India,
a lot of times Amazon Corporate United States
will find someone to help 'em in India and they'll say,
"we need you to provide X, Y, and Z headcount and resources
that are dedicated into bringing Amazon into India."
They're already there now, but you get the point.
And the same goes with a lot of companies
like Heineken will be like,
"we need to have a bigger presence in Brazil.
We need you to put 20, 30 people on our campaign
that just focus on social media, paid ads, et cetera."
So if you get enough contracts, those 10, 20 people
start adding up to hundreds of people.
- So a lot of people listening are, you know,
small business entrepreneurs,
many of 'em might be under seven figures in revenue,
you know, some are seven to eight figures,
and that's, you know, probably where most people are.
You know, speaking on the paid media side
and the digital side, what are you seeing
as like the most undervalued ways to market right now?
- One of the biggest under marketed strategies right now
is influencer marketing with the combination
of the influencer has to be on your website.
So if the influencer has a related audience to your product,
their followers know about your space
and they're interested in products or services
related to your space, and they talk about it a lot
on their stories, their posts, their videos,
and then they're on your landing pages.
It converts really well.
The other strategy that we're seeing
that a lot of companies are putting more money
to next year is SEO,
because paid ads keep getting more expensive.
Ranking organically on Google,
even though it's hard and takes a lot of work,
it produces a massive ROI.
And then the third one that we're seeing companies
make a mistake on is they all spend a lot on paid ads,
just look at Google stock or Facebook stock.
I know Facebook stock is down,
but still they generate a lot of revenue through paid ads.
The big mistake that these companies make
is they don't have upsells, downsells,
multiple products to sell people.
They don't optimize for conversions, the copy,
the sequences.
And when you do that, when you generate much more revenue
from each click or each dollar spent,
you can now start spending more dollars and scale up faster.
- That makes sense.
So just being more efficient on that last one
on what you're already doing.
With the SEO portion, this is interesting because,
you know, Google is under attack right now.
You know, they've had a search monopoly
for many years, right?
And you know-
- They're still going into the future.
- Okay.
You know, because I've recently seen multiple things
about SEO and they're upcoming threats.
One being, you know, AI and this ChatGPT thing,
another being TikTok and that people
are using now TikTok for search.
- Yeah, the younger demographics.
- Yeah, what do you think about those?
- So let's first go back to, you know,
OpenAI and all their AI related products
that help you create content.
Even like the chat one that you just mentioned.
People have been creating tons of content
for SEO for ages now.
I'll give you a prime example of this.
If you search for auto insurance in the United States,
less than a hundred, less than 200,000 people a month
are searching for the term auto insurance.
That I know for a fact.
Did you know though there's over a billion webpages
on the term auto insurance in the United States?
It's crazy.
Think about how much more content there is
than people actually looking for solutions.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't more people
looking for auto insurance,
but that's just the amount of people googling
for that term each month.
There's too much content already.
So if these AI tools create 10 times more content,
it doesn't really matter.
Google is already combating tons of content
that's mediocre and they're ranking brands,
people with a lot of links,
people with a lot of social presence,
people that are omnichannel,
companies that people can trust.
Using these AI tools doesn't solve that problem.
- Okay, so you don't think that they'll spam for SEO?
- Well, they can, but Google's already dealing with that.
You already got a billion plus results
for less than 200,000 people
looking for a solution each month.
So they're already dealing with that.
There's going to be no difference on that end.
It's just companies are going to be like,
"oh, content creation's easier.
It's easier to create mediocre content," right?
You can use AI tools to help you create text-based content,
but it's not going to be at the same quality
that you're creating content right now.
- You don't think AI will become
better copywriters than humans?
- I don't know if they'll become better copywriters, maybe,
but I don't know if they'll become more creative.
The creativity is what really makes the content amazing.
And what you'll find is, yes, AI can help you
with your marketing and it may even do amazing job,
but it still needs someone to help with the brand creation.
Someone to help run the paid ads.
Someone to go out there and meet people
and build that emotional connection.
There's a lot of missing pieces that the AI can't do.
It's really part of the puzzle.
And what you'll find is companies will use AI
to do a lot of their marketing and they'll get lazy
and not do their rest.
We're already starting to see it,
and they think that they'll get the same results
which isn't true.
- Yeah, you see the data.
- [Guest] Yes.
You still need people interacting with humans
on social media.
Not just from a format of leaving a comment,
but being there trying to help 'em out.
Caring for your audience.
There's so many things that you need the AI
to catch up with, or running ads or going to a conference
and actually networking with people.
How many times have you met a lot of the people
that have invested in your programs?
I know a lot of people probably invest just over the phone,
never met you, but you go to a lot of events, correct?
And you've met a lot of people in goodwill, speaking.
- [Neil] Yep, a hundred percent.
- This all helps build that brand,
whether it's corporate or personal.
It's hard for AI to just do those things for you.
- Right.
There's always going to be a human element to brand.
- [Guest] Correct.
- That's why Nike's got to pay the LeBrons of the world
to make it more humanized.
- Bingo.
AI can't replace that.
- That makes sense.
So what about TikTok?
- TikTok, I agree, that's a big threat to Google,
but I think they have a long time
because that threat is with a really young demographic.
And we are seeing TikTok ads boom.
That is another huge opportunity.
At our ad agency, we see TikTok ads cost
roughly half them out and produce the same revenue,
let's say, if you're advertising on Facebook.
So let's say a Facebook, for every dollar you spend,
you would spend roughly 50 cents on TikTok,
but you would generate the same revenue from TikTok
as you would with Facebook for each dollar.
- Yeah, no, it just reminds me a lot of,
you know, when I hear about these guys
who got into online marketing, you know,
seven, eight years ago and they're running
YouTube ads and Facebook ads,
nobody knew what the heck was happening.
And then they just would talk about the returns being crazy.
And that's why I'm like, okay,
so what is undervalued right now?
Should I be using AI?
You know, it's now becoming this talked about topic.
Should I somehow use it into my marketing?
Should I be thinking like, hey, you know,
obviously I should run a lot of TikTok ads
based on what you're saying.
That's simple.
And then you like mentioned another thing
with the influencers and these brands
and I'm like, okay,
let's talk both sides.
Me being an influencer,
what am I worth to a big brand, right?
Like what kind of deal should I negotiate?
And then what kind of deals should I be looking to strike
with my buddies for my products?
What do you think?
- So you are more saying if you were-
- I'm on both sides.
Like I'll look to higher influencers
for my own companies. you know?
- So I look at it as like an ROI standpoint.
If it works, do everything.
Like for you, if you can be an influencer
and like I'll give you a great example.
If I'm an influencer for PayPal,
I do a lot of work with PayPal,
I'm building a great relationship with them,
potentially get bigger contracts or deals with them.
But at the same time I'll also hire influencers
for my own businesses and literally do a little bit of both.
But like all these channels
and all these options as like experimentation,
just a little bit of everything
and whatever works double down on,
whatever doesn't do less of.
- Right.
I mean, it's always testing in marketing.
- [Guest] Sadly.
- You never have the exact answer.
- [Guest] Yes.
- Yeah.
What do you think about everything happening
with Metaverse and blockchain?
Like where do you see that technology going?
- Here's the best part.
We got hit up from someone on Facebook.
They're like, "hey, would like to throw an event
on the Metaverse?"
And I'm like, you know how hard it's going to be
to get all our attendees to wear these Oculus goggles?
And they're expensive and a lot of people don't have 'em.
I'm like, "no, thank you."
The metaverse isn't that great yet.
Like do I think Facebook is doing a good job
with their current platforms
when it comes to generating ad revenue?
Sure.
They do great.
I don't think a lot of people care as much
for the metaverse as Facebook thinks.
Do I think it's going to be huge five, 10 years from now?
Sure, but I don't think in the form
that Mark Zuckerberg thinking with avatars,
what I think is going to be huge is a very different thing.
Let's say my wife and three of her friends
want to go shopping in the mall.
Somehow with some sort of technology,
like a contact lens,
that isn't, you know, big and sitting on your face,
you can all virtually be in a mall shopping at any store.
Nordstrom's, Macy, Chanel, you name it.
And it looks real, identically like as if
you were in that store.
And you're picking stuff, trying it on,
all happening virtually.
You can pick what you want to buy with your friends,
you're getting the social interaction,
and it's all like feels in real life,
not with avatars, but you're actually there.
It looks a hundred percent real and you're like,
"I want to buy this Chanel purse."
You check out and within an hour
it gets delivered to your house.
That's what I think it's going to be.
- Right.
And do you think like people obviously,
I think gaming will also be big in there.
- Gaming will be huge.
And it's not that the concept of the metaverse won't work,
it's just the avatars and what Mark Zuckerberg's like,
"oh, people have Zoom fatigue.
You can have your character,"
dude, I can just turn off my video camera.
Who cares?
Why do I need the avatar there for me?
Just turn off the camera.
I do so many Zoom calls where the camera's on or off,
and that's where I see it really going
is if we can replicate something that's realistic
and I can hang out with my friends
in the United Kingdom or London and I'm in Las Vegas
and it's a hundred percent real
and we're all communicating
just like if it was in real life,
and that's the key, not with some fake avatars.
I think that would be a huge hit tomorrow.
- It's like "The Matrix."
- [Guest] Yes.
- Yeah, you know, you think you're in this real place
and that that's what it is.
- That's where it needs to go.
And I think eventually it can go there.
- Yeah.
I think that's probably a while away, but-
- That's what I was saying.
Five years, probably closer to 10 years.
- Yeah.
And so what do you think about blockchain and all that?
- I think blockchain is great.
I know there's been a lot of ups and downs with crypto.
The technology is amazing.
Just imagine if someone in your family from another country,
like let's say my family in India, they want money.
Why do I have to go to a bank?
Why can't I send them money instantaneously
through, call it Bitcoin or any of these currencies
or through the blockchain, right?
So forget the value of the tokens
or the value of these coins or whatever you want to call 'em.
I think technology is just getting started
or people owning their own data.
I think a lot of this is going to be big.
It's just A, companies don't know
how to really use them yet,
and people are far from adopting 'em.
Those are two important things.
And a prime example of this is AirBnB.
The CEO, Brian went on CNBC talking about on Twitter,
did a poll, most people are like, yeah,
we want you to accept Bitcoin and integrate blockchain.
Well, the real changes that they made
that helped improve the business
were with their search listings,
because outside of Twitter, which is a little bubble,
believe it or not, on what people want,
especially when it comes to blockchain,
but outside, most people who are using Airbnb
want better listings
So they get more transparency and the people who are renting
out their homes want a better experience as well.
So that way it's a better match between potential renters
and the landlord, them.
And that's what they focus on,
and it causes the business to grow,
If Airbnb decides to take Bitcoin all of a sudden,
that's not going to make the business boom.
The experience is.
- Yeah, Bitcoin's not adding any revenue
or anything to them.
- [Guest] Exactly.
- Right, it's just more of a gimmick.
- Exactly, and that's what I'm saying is
we're far away from blockchain technology
being really relevant in businesses
because people are really far from adopting it yet.
- Right.
What do you see like it adding value to
in businesses eventually?
- Big thing is data and privacy.
I think that's going to be a big one.
The other one is I think it's going to rechange
our whole financial system.
Great example of this is we're in Vegas right now,
imagine everyone working in a casino.
Did you know a lot of people
are living paycheck to paycheck?
I forgot the stats, but it was this big amount.
And a lot of people that are getting paid,
call it minimum wage or 10, 15, $20 an hour,
a lot of 'em are the ones using payday loans
and are in debt, which sucks.
Imagine if they can start getting paid
for every minute that they worked.
You work at a casino,
by the time you're done with your shift,
you have that money on your phone and you can use it.
You don't have to pay interest for payday loans, all right?
There is a company out of the US I think the word "Day"
is in there, "DayForce" or something like that.
They're publicly traded.
They're now doing daily payments.
Crypto and blockchain is helping with some of this stuff,
but it's not fully there where everyone can do it
on the hour, on the minute.
That's the kind of stuff that's going to change this world.
- Right.
What do you think about NFTs?
- I think NFTs are great.
You know, why can't people own their own artwork,
images, whatever you want to call it,
and actually have proof
that it's their own ownership.
And I think you're going to have that
with a lot of digital images.
And I don't think just art.
I think it's going to go much further than just art.
You're talking about it can be done for things
like any visual assets that are on your website
or anything that you're end up creating out there, right?
And the big thing with NFTs
and some of these rich media formats
that blockchain can help with, I just think again,
we're really far from it and it's just in its early phases.
- Yeah, no, a thousand percent.
I'm curious 'cause like, I believe that too.
I still believe all this stuff is very far away.
But I guess the question is as an entrepreneur is,
you know, like I have a very successful NFT project.
It was number one on open sea.
Like it- - [Guest] That's awesome.
Yeah, it's gone really well,
and despite all the FTX drama and everything,
it's remained a lot.
And so, you know, I'm looking at it and I believe that,
and to your point, real estate's my thing.
So I'm like, I know real estate and the blockchain
are going to be huge.
Like there's so much inefficiency
in a real estate transaction that happens
that blockchain can solve.
And I'm like, I know I can help create the companies
that will solve that.
And so my question is like when you're creating
a startup in tech, because tech is not necessarily my forte,
even though this NFT project has been an element of tech,
being too early becomes an issue.
I mean, in my mind I'm looking at Facebook and Meta
and I'm like, you guys got the right idea,
but like- - [Guest] It's too early.
It's way too early, right?
And so I'm like, you know, how do you navigate
the timing of a breakthrough technology?
- It's hard to time anything, right?
So you just got to pick a time and hope that-
- [Neil] Hope you're right.
- Hope you're right, or sometimes just wait it out.
- [Neil] Wait it out.
- Like I forgot what was the video player before YouTube
or the video social (bell dings)
was Veo or Vimeo,
I think it was Veo or one of those.
And they went through a lot of lawsuits and got bloody,
but they paved the way for YouTube to be next gen,
and now YouTube is a big, you know,
winner for streaming online.
- Well, you look at like these success stories
of Elon with Tesla, and you're like, you know,
he was so early and he was just like, "it's going to happen.
It's going to happen."
You know, you look at Bezos with books and Amazon
and he's just like, "I have the patience that I'm right."
- And if you have the patience,
but more importantly the money to be patient,
you're good to go.
That's the hard part, 'cause a lot of times
when you're too early, yes you have first movers advantage,
but a lot of times you need a lot of money
for the market to be ready and catch up.
- Right.
And then you mentioned data and privacy being huge
and I've seen a lot of this with blockchain
is that people are going to own their data.
And you know, Facebook and all these companies
can no longer monetize your data without paying you.
And you as an ad guy that makes sense of like,
that's something you got to be tracking a lot.
How do you see that?
- We see it becoming more and more popular.
People want to be compensated for their content.
Why shouldn't they be?
And I actually believe you're going to start seeing
much more transparency and more programs
being rolled out just thinking about
how much money Facebook is losing from influencer marketing.
Why wouldn't they want to create a system
that just connects everyone and take a big cut?
- Why is Facebook losing from influencer marketing?
Just because they're not having to do a paid ad?
- Yeah, because someone like me or you
can get paid to post something
and we collect the money directly.
Yeah, we paid promotion,
but why wouldn't Facebook want their cut
and to middleman it?
- Right, that makes sense.
- They already have all the advertisers.
The advertisers are going directly.
Might as well get a cut of that spend.
The influencers will love it
'cause then they'll get access
to a lot more companies in mass scale.
- TikTok is kind of doing that.
Like they have, I've seen it, I've never done it,
but they're like, you want to be in our creator marketplace,
whatever, and we'll connect you with brands and stuff.
So that's kind of happening.
- That's starting to happen,
but it's not a system like with Google ads
where you can just click some buttons
and pick what you want and just you're off to the races.
- What do you think will happen with YouTube
and these social media platforms
where, you know, it seems like, okay,
now everyone saw what YouTube did
with Google AdSense for influencers and creators
and now, you know, it's forcing Instagram and TikTok.
- [Guest] Yeah, they all have to do it.
- Everyone has to do it.
- Yeah, and you're going to see more of it.
And YouTube's a little bit of a different animal.
The reason YouTube's a different animal
is people use Instagram and TikTok
mainly for entertainment over education.
I know there's some education happening on these platforms,
but YouTube has a big educational audience
where people are looking to go there
to learn about anything.
And YouTube has a big upper hand
because if you look at how people watch YouTube videos,
it's them doing a search query
and then finding videos which allow ads
to be much better targeted
than they would on Instagram or TikTok
or some of the other platforms.
- Hmm, that makes sense.
Yeah, YouTube would have the strongest ads you would think.
- Yeah, because you can end up seeing
what people are doing based on behavior,
just like you can with TikTok and Instagram,
but you also have keyword data as well.
- What do you think Elon will do with Twitter
to get it up to these levels?
Because Twitter don't pay anybody.
- He's going to have to redo a new,
make the product a lot better and add in more features.
- Yeah.
He wants to create like that super app.
- Yes, like the WeChat in Asia - [Neil] Like WeChat.
where it does payments and everything,
and I'm not saying he can't do it.
I would never bet against Elon, but it's not going to be easy.
- Is that, who do you, okay,
this is my final question for you.
Who do you think is like,
as somebody who's been around all these different companies,
you've met CEOs, you've met, you know, very smart people.
Who are some of the top people entrepreneurs
in the world that you see today?
- Elon, of course, is one of 'em.
I think Jack Dorsey
from block. - [Neil] They changed, right?
- Yeah, Block and to Twitter.
He's really good.
Even though people hate on Mark Zuckerberg,
he's a really smart entrepreneur.
Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.
He's an exceptionally well and is really bright.
The CEO of AirBnB, I love him,
because he knows how to stay in his lane.
He's the founder, Brian.
He knows how to stay in his lane
and he optimizes for experience
and just tries to delight everyone.
Bill Gates, I think he is an amazing entrepreneur
and what he's going to do with power and energy
and a lot of the things he's-
I got to know the conspiracy theories,
why is he buying all the farm land?
What's he doing?
- I have no idea.
Now some of these guys that try to stay away
from their political views and stuff like that,
but if you're just talking about entrepreneurship, right,
some of these guys are some of
the best entrepreneurs of our time.
- Yeah, no, a thousand percent.
Actually, this reminded me, speaking of entrepreneurs,
I don't know if you can mention it,
but you said you guys were managing FTX's stuff.
How was it working, did you ever work with SBF?
Like what was the fallout from that?
Was it as crazy as it seemed?
- So when you're an outside contractor,
you don't deal with as much of the internal stuff.
I'm assuming, that happened, and keep in mind
when companies are worth billions and billions of dollars,
they have a lot of layers,
so you end up usually just dealing with employees.
Like, I've never met Sam in person.
A lot of it is like phone calls.
And he was the CEO.
In marketing, you're dealing with the COO, CMOs,
VP of marketings, director of marketings, et cetera.
- Right.
Yeah.
Interesting times with them, man, it's crazy.
- This is just crazy.
I could be wrong on this,
I don't know what's going to happen, but if I had to bet,
and I bet on this before Sam got arrested,
I bet you someone's going to go to jail for a very long time.
Because here's the thing,
when it comes to the political system
and you got these senators and governors,
when rich people get burned, right,
people look at it as like, "oh, they're rich.
They already have a ton of money, they're okay."
When people, the masses get burned,
and it's a lot of their life savings
and it's a ton of people,
they're going to go to all their politicians
and be like, "I lost my money.
I'm pissed."
Going out with the pitch fork
and someone's got to end up getting fried for it.
I'm not saying when rich people lose money,
you know, people aren't getting hung and going to jail,
but people have less sympathy,
even I have less sympathy for 'em.
It's just like, "oh you put a million dollars into something
and you lost it."
Oh, you still got 10 million, you're still okay."
But when someone has a hundred thousand dollars
and that was their life savings
and they got kids and family,
like those people are struggling, right?
It's really hard on 'em.
The person who still has $9 million,
their life still isn't that bad.
I'm not trying to talk crap, but that's just the reality,
And a lot of people whose life savings or majority
of their wealth were in these platforms, it sucks.
Yes, they're going to struggle, but also their family,
their kids, they're going to struggle.
And I think someone's going to go to jail for it.
Could be wrong though.
- Yeah, no, I agree.
That's what people want to see anyways.
But dude, it's been a pleasure having you on the show, man.
I appreciate you coming out.
I didn't know you were in Vegas,
so we'll definitely have to do some more stuff, man.
Appreciate you. - [Guest] Yeah, same.