OpenAI Just Made a Desperate $200M Investment

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil break down OpenAI's $200M acquisition of TBPN and whether owning media is actually worth it for AI giants. They unpack Neil's co-branded conference playbook in Canada, why Anthropic's shipping velocity is crushing OpenAI, the rise of "world intelligence" agents inside companies, and why Neil's switching corporate spend from Amex to Ramp. Plus an honest look at credit card perks, points strategy, and when cash back beats miles. Key takeaways ◾Owning media isn't always worth it, even at $200M ◾Anthropic's shipping velocity is winning mind share ◾Every company now wants its own "world intelligence" agent Chapters (00:00) OpenAI buys TBPN for $200M (01:31) Why owning media properties isn't always smart (02:03) Neil's co-branded conference playbook (05:13) Breaking down the TBPN deal economics (06:42) OpenAI's code red vs Anthropic (07:46) The Open Claude loophole explained (09:03) Anthropic and Google's shipping as marketing (09:32) ClickFlow AI SEO break (10:05) World intelligence and Single Brain (11:30) Ramp, Glass, and internal AI agents (12:30) Why Neil's company is leaving Amex (14:01) Amex Black Card perks breakdown (16:08) Ramp vs Brex and shipping velocity (16:48) Centurion travel benefits (17:46) Cash back vs points strategy (20:16) Why you need a points dealer

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 00

  So, they paid $200 million for this podcast. I'm opening up the post right now on Instagram.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I didn't know it was $200 million. I saw the post, because the post I saw when they did the announcement, they didn't disclose the price.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  What did you think it was?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I had no idea.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, anyway, the key thing here is I'm not gonna pull it up, but, um, so $200 million. And the thinking here is that, we can talk about this. OpenAI, they get a lot of press written about them, right? Not all of it's good press right now, especially that New York Times article, right? So the thinking here is like, Andreessen Horowitz has said that, you know, they want to own the media. They want to own what's being said about them. So I think this is what OpenAI is trying to do. And for Sam Altman, it's probably like, okay, it's $200 million. It's probably a drop in the bucket versus all the other stuff that they have going on. So he probably let the transaction through. Now, so they have to turn off all their ads now. This podcast, last year, did $5 million with 11 employees. This year, it has like a $30 million run rate. That being said, so now it's gonna be their distribution channel or whatever.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  You know, you could argue it's a distraction, but maybe they have somewhat like a VP that's managing it. What do you think about this transaction?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  So, they already have so many eyeballs, I think it's a waste, but that's just my two cents. Also owned by them, I think your guests are gonna end up changing too, and who's gonna want to be on it and not be on it. For example, why would Zuck want to continually be on a podcast owned by OpenAI? That's just my two cents. Maybe I'm wrong. You and I are both media companies in of ourselves, right? Because we have audiences. I find that media having eyeballs is really valuable, but owning the properties isn't always the best. And you know, like you know, we we throw conferences all throughout the world and our own events. So we just came uh back from Canada. And I was doing an event in Toronto.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  And I think our event is called Full Circle. I should know this, but I don't know.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  I showed up. I didn't even know we were having an event. But dude, I'm speaking sometimes like four times a week where it's just so hard to keep track.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  It's just like.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Dude, you you went from no speaking to full speaking.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  It's more than last year. It's just ridiculous.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I think this week alone, I gave five speeches.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Wow, including uh li- uh online?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  No, not including.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  All in person?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  All in person. This is it's starting. It's becoming so much that like, I didn't even know we were throwing our own event.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  I know we throw our own event, but it's usually partnered with the Canadian Marketing Association.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  And this time, they're just like, we want to throw our own event, like an NP digital event. So what our team did, which I thought was really smart, there's a conference, a social media conference that I was speaking at the next day called Social Next. And I spoke at their Calgary event. I spoke at their Toronto event yesterday. They had really good ratings and feedback from me. Um, the founder of it said, he's just like, hey, guess what? His name's Mike. He's like, did you know you were a highest rated speaker? He's like, oh, you know, pretty much for the whole event. People were ecstatic for you, right? Or he is the whole event or the whole year for all their events? So he's ecstatic. And I didn't know that we partnered with him to throw our own event. And uh, they sold tickets to it. I think they sold a hundred and eighty tickets at five hundred bucks a pop.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  We also put money out of our uh pockets, because we normally spend, call it twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars. Uh, this is in Canadian dollars, by the way, uh for on both ends, ticket prices and how much we spend. So let's call it, you know, I don't know how much the event did in profit, but my guess is it broke even based on everything I can see with the food and everything.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Which they usually do, by the way.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  So I was talking to my team how we'd end up doing this. I'm like, don't tell me we're getting in the conference business. And they said, no, we're not getting in conference business. Social Next runs it for us. It's our branded event.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And they handle everything. It's for them to make profit or for them to lose money. We of course help them because we don't want them to lose money.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  And for the leads to go to you.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And for events, usually you end up losing money for the first few years. And most people don't realize that, but if you do a really good job, you can eventually make money. They're really happy. They want to work with us more. And I was like, yeah, we should roll this out on the west coast of Canada too. Cause this conference organizer does both the east and the west coast. And then I was like, we should do this in a lot of countries. So instead of us owning the conference, we don't want to own the conference. And I think my team made the right decision. But we're getting access to the media and the eyeballs. And it's kind of like ours because we're.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  You're co-branded.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's co-branded.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  But we don't have to deal with the logistics, the food or anything. And yes, eventually they'll make great profit from it. We don't care for the profit because that's not our core business. I don't think the money is in running media companies.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  That's so smart. That's actually something a lot of people should do. Because there's a lot of these conference businesses that are hungry for distribution, audience, and they just want to make money. Whereas you just want the lead.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just want the lead.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  To make more money, to be honest.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Correct. Because we believe our business model is better than running a conference.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is true. Okay, so I actually pulled up the, the, the deal here. So you got a Zuck's face, Alex Karp's face from Palantir, and you got Satya Nadella, right? So deal valued at 200 million. I'm sure there's some, maybe there's some stock. I don't know. And only 11 employees and then 5 million ad revenue in 2025, on track with 30 million. Revenue per employee, assuming 30 million in sales is greater than Apple's. I think that's a stupid comparison to even talk about that. Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  30 million dollars versus, uh, do you want to know what Apple's revenue is?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Billions and billions.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Uh, I think, is Apple getting close to 400?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Well, dude, oh, wow. What is it?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was right. 416 billion in revenue.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll, I'll take the other one. Yeah. So, okay, here's the thing. So, look at this. They achieved four to 10,000 views per episode, which is not a lot. 257,000 average views per clip on X. The clips aren't marketing, the clips are the product, okay? So, average views on YouTube, 4K, which is not much. Average live viewership, 7K. So, the clips do really well for them, which is cool because X has a lot of, you know, tech folks hanging out there. So, they are very much like in the middle of the culture, or you can call it the zeitgeist, I guess. Tech by media is an old playbook. Microsoft plus NBC plus MSNBC, oh, equals MSNBC's Bloomberg's. Bloomberg sells terminals, Robinhood acquired market snacks. I don't think a lot of these go anywhere. And I think in this case, sure, maybe it's a drop in the bucket.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  But OpenAI had just said, because it's code red right now, because Anthropic's whooping their butt. They said, "We gotta focus right now, we gotta, we're gonna..." They said they're gonna move it over to the enterprise. I had talked to someone yesterday, this is a salesperson, because we were talking about working with their company. And he said, "We're on ChatGPT Enterprise right now. We were gonna switch to Anthropic, which would have been like a $5 million switch. But ChatGPT was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We have something coming out that's gonna crush cowork in the next month." Which they probably aren't, but you can see they're losing a lot of like deals left and right.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I believe they really are losing a ton of deals right now.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yep. So, anyway, on the topic of X, Neil, I did something.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Let's go back really quickly to OpenAI. Did you see their marketing move that they just pulled off?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  What'd they do?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  They already have the eyeballs. They're losing a lot of people to Claude. So, what did they just announce? Cheaper pricing and integration with Claude.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the integration with, was it Claude Code? I think it's integration with Claude Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Which is smart, because you're being the pipes, right? And in marketing, if you can't win the mind share, you can win a lot of people just on price. Like, if your offer is just half the price or a third, a lot of people will just switch over.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  And so, with OpenClaw right now, by the way, Claude, Anthropic had shut down the, just to use the OAuth, which means that you could just use like a $200 subscription instead of paying like $7,500 like I did last month. So, they shut off the loophole. Now, a lot of people are switching over to using Codex or ChatGPT 5.4, sorry, from OpenAI.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Wait, can you break down what you're talking about with the $7,500?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  What was happening with OpenClaw was people were using Claude for it because Claude is the still the best model to use OpenClaw with, okay? So, but there was a loophole. You could actually tie in OpenClaw with your Claude subscription, which is only $20 or $200 a month. And Anthropic will subsidize your $200 for, it's like five to six grand worth of tokens, okay? So people were abusing it that way, but that was costing Anthropic too much money. So they're like, we gotta shut that down.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  So they closed the loophole.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  We gotta shut that down, and when they shut that down, all of the entire OpenClaw community got mad, right? And so a lot of them are moving over to OpenAI's and they're just using their subscription, which OpenAI is okay with because they own.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  OpenClaw.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  They own OpenClaw, right? So, um, but this week Claude, this is a misstep, I think. They, they launched their own version of managed agents, which is like an OpenClaw competitor. It's a piece of crap right now, it'll probably get better, but um, you know, it's kind of trash, so.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  But net-net, I think Anthropic's doing a really good job of shipping. Their, their velocity, their high velocity shipping is a way of marketing. Because they have all of these like clips that they're sharing on X and they're doing well. Google does a really good job too. Google makes like a Gemma account, they have like a Nano Banana account, they have all these accounts. And they all like cross-promote each other and they get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  It's funny, no one really talks about Nano Banana anymore, but it's so great.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  I love it, it's great, yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  If you're not using it and you're a marketer, you're making a big mistake.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Quick break, I want to tell you about something that we've been building. For years at Single Grain, we've been doing SEO and content for clients. And the biggest problem is always execution. Everyone knows what to do, but doing it at scale is brutal. So we built Clickflow. It's an AI SEO product that creates content that actually sounds like your brand, not just generic AI garbage. It also helps with other areas such as internal linking, creating FAQs, and more. We use it ourselves, our clients use it, one user reported saving over 90 hours a month alone. If AI SEO matters to your business, you can try it for free for 14 days at Clickflow.com. All right, back to it. Yeah, so something I want to talk about, so I um... So Jack Dorsey wrote something about world intelligence. Okay, so I was reading this post and I was like, as I was reading this post,

• 10:50Speaker 00

  he talks about this concept of world intelligence where you have this one AI that's trained and integrated with all of your software and then your entire team can query this. And I'm reading it, I'm like, dude, we have this already. So then I write a post on how you can deploy world intelligence to X. That post gets about 500,000 views on it. And what I've realized, and I don't know what you're seeing Neil, but a lot of companies have reached out to us after that, right? They're like, and we already have, we have single brain, right? Single brain is this world intelligence. And you know, vibe coded website or not, it drives leads, I'll tell you that much. So a couple, a couple of publicly traded multi-billion dollar companies reached out this week. And what I've learned from the AI needs from people is everyone wants AI. Two, they have no idea what they want, okay? But number three, they want it now.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  So, but so everyone, to your point, like as you were saying earlier, so one company is like, we want to do, we're working with a large agency holding company right now. You know, we want to do a thousand ads a month. They're too slow, we want, we want this for ads, okay? Another company is like, oh, we want the, the cold outbound piece of what you do with single brain, because it does end to end workflows, builds out cold emails, everything, right? Deal resurrecter. And so I've just realized that, um, one, everyone needs a single brain and that's kind of our wedge into everything. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this because Ramp, you know, the, the credit card company?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  So they do this too. They have something called Glass, I think, and it's like their world intelligence for their, their internal team, where they can query whatever they want. And then they have this thing called Sensei. It's like a big like Japanese like arc. And Sensei will coach people and say, oh, you need these skills over here as you're adding this. And then everyone has their own agent, right? So we're already doing that internally and my team is saying, one person said, I'm 40% faster. One person on boarded himself using one of these agents. He's like, it's a nine out of 10. And someone else yesterday was complaining, I say, hey, hey, how do we fix this? I like, I think I'm dependent on this thing now. So I think this is where the world's going. And I think the fact that, I understand more now why Jack Dorsey was confident cutting 40% of people. So.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I also think, and you're seeing this, uh, he cut 40% of people because they just weren't growing. So they had kind of no choice.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Two things can exist in the same world.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I'm with you on that.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  By the way, you know, my company is getting off of Amex. I was shocked.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Why?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Because I have Amex credit card.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Without you saying yes? You've been Amex hardcore your whole life.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  I still have Amex.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Personally, and for my other companies.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Okay, so explain the story.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  I have no idea. They just told me the other day that we're switching, I believe it's called Ramp. It was, what's the other, there's two of them, there's Ramp.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Ramp and Brex. You're probably switching to Ramp. You know why? Ramp has APIs and you can ask whatever you, dude, you will like this because I'm switching us to Ramp. I said, hey, enough of this bill.com crap, okay? I'm not going to apply for bill.com API. I need an API so I can ask whatever I want. And I can, I can, I can control all the spending stuff if I need to, if I need to, but I don't need to.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but our team's switching everything to Ramp.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And I didn't ask why. They just said, hey, you're going to get a new credit card. Your Amex is no longer going to work. In the next thirty days, you will get a Ramp credit card.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Are you still keeping your Black card?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  That's personal.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Why would I get rid of that?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  The perks are amazing.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Explain.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  The perks?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Your perks keep getting better. That's all I know.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  The fees, I think we pay twenty thousand dollars a month for the Black Amex. Me, five thousand dollars a month, I mean, five thousand a year. My wife's credit card, another five thousand a year.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And then the corporate cards, I have two other corporations that I own. That's another five thousand each a year. So just in Amex fees, I'm not talking about, you know, like what I'm spending on the card.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I'm talking about what Amex charges me for the card on an annual basis. I believe I'm spending around twenty thousand.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Did they give you the, you know, that LAX airport thing where they like drive you around?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yes, that's one of the biggest things that I use.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  So when I land in LAX, I don't have to go through security. Amex, through the, it's called like private shuttle or service or something like that.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  They have it at certain airports where, you know, like when I landed from Hong Kong. And I just got back from Canada, but I don't use it for that because when you, if you're a US citizen coming back from Canada, they have immigration when you're in Canada.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  So you, you go through it. So when you land in the US, you don't have to go through customs or anything. But when I was coming from Hong Kong, right when I landed, instead of going through immigration. Right when I exit the plane, right, I'm walking down off that off ramp. There's someone there holding a sign with my name. I'm not talking about even going into the airport. I'm talking about just right when you.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Exit off that ramp. And they walk you down the stairs, put you in a car. They take you to a different place. There's a customs person there. If there's, of course, no one in line. It takes like one second. They get you through. A car picks me up and takes me back to my home. And guess what my cost was?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Zero.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  But that thing typically costs a lot per year. I think is, was it like 200 grand a year or 100 grand a year?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  For what?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  For that service.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  No, it's in the thousands per year, I believe, as a member. And then you got to pay per usage.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  And I have a lot of usage for free because you get usage for. You get X amount of usage for free per Black Amex card.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  So I have so many of them, I just cycle through.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Dude, that's a good clip for you.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  But that's one of the best perks that I get. There's another perk that I get that I've never used. I get free Equinox gym membership.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, you never go, yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I've never signed up for it.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  You should just give it to me and sign me up for your family. I pay for it.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  You pay for Equinox membership?

• 16:24Speaker 00

  300 bucks a month, 350, 350.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  It's that expensive?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Cause I use the one at the mall.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I can go to any Equinox for free.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Eric Patel.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  We'll find out if I can use mine and hook it up for you. And I gladly will, because I don't use Equinox.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Anyway, so, okay, but, but here's the thing we should talk about and then we can move on here. So Ramp is interesting to me because they ship, again, it's kind of like Anthropic. They ship so quickly. Talking about Glass, they're like, here's how we got our company AI pill. Here's the software we use over here. You just, their, their velocity is so fast and nobody talks about Brex anymore. Brex sold, right? And congratulations to the.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Oh, Brex sold?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  It was like MasterCard or one of those companies bottom.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so to me, like, sure, the, the founders probably made out well and congratulations to them. But in my mind, Brex was ahead and then Ramp was like, oh, another one?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  They kicked their butt.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Kicked their butt just by shipping. And I met the founders before, really nice guys.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  New York based.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  I met them in Miami, so they have a house in, uh, they have houses in Miami.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Cause they don't want to pay state income tax.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  There you go, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  But no, it's a good car. I just won't switch because of the Amex perks. The biggest one is actually not the security. It's actually buying plane tickets. I get half off.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Wait, what?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the business insurian, you get half off. When you use points, they'll give you fifty percent back.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Oh, it's like, it was fifty percent on Platinum before, and then they reduce it to thirty-five percent, and they like cheapen that one, but yours stays the same, I think.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  I get fifty percent back every time.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Are you talking about you're using, just buying it on points?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll give me fifty percent back right away.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, for every flight, any flight.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  That's, see, that's, that's good.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  So, when I look at the cost for the card versus how much I actually save, because I fly so much, the savings is way more than the fees that they're charging me.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's good. And then, your, the way your points accrue, well, here's the problem. Your points would accrue from your personal spend, yes, but your company spend was, was helping a lot with that in the past.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  No, I never collected points from the corporate spend, we just do cash back.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Which is, which is good.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Because our corporate spend was high.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I just have so many points.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  That I just don't use them.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  So, remember our, our late friend Brandon? So, um, he brought this up a long time ago, like, it's like, the, getting cash back is better, because if you're to sell your company later, you, you, you have a multiple on that cash.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I don't know about the multiple on the cash, because when someone buys your company, they look at every single transaction and they can pick and choose which ones they want to accept. Um, the reason we did cash back is, there was a point where I had like ten, eleven thou, or ten, eleven million Amex points, and it was building really fast, I was stacking up more than a million points a month. And I was like, man, what am I doing with all these points? Because half the time when I travel, someone's paying for it. Actually, not even half, probably like eighty to ninety percent of the time when traveling, someone else is paying for the, the flight.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  So, there's only so many times I'm using it, and then I fly so much, I accumulate so many airline miles, that I don't even use it, like when my wife booked the Disney Cruise vacation.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, a thousand dollars per ticket, one way to go from LA to Vancouver, business class? I'm like, these fuel prices are causing plane tickets to be so expensive? I was like, eh, just use the United points, I didn't even care if it was a good deal or not, I just have so many points, I didn't want to pay the four grand personally.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Dude, I'll buy you, I'll buy your points at a, at a discount.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I don't, I don't really use them.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And, and then you, I have Amex points.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  So, I don't really use tons of those either. Yes, I do make enough money from my Amex points, you know, booking flights and stuff like that where it's worth the fees. But majority of the time, like I've been flying, like I flew Emirates to India, uh, right before the war. It was almost thirty thousand dollars for a round trip. I didn't pay for that, right? So it's like, and I wouldn't pay for that. I would fly business or something that's way more cheaper. But the points started accumulating and what I found was when I started getting points, call it ten years ago. You could redeem them and it was a really good deal. Now, because flights are so expensive, the points don't take you that far. I don't care to collect anymore.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Once I'm done using all of mine, I'll cut down on my Amex cards. Cause then I won't need as many, like the perks won't be as good.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  I'll keep only three. I'll get rid of one of the corporation ones. Uh, actually I should do that now. I don't know why I don't. And then outside of that, you know, I'll just get cash back for everything because the ROI is better if you just get money versus the points.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  So, well, we'll, we'll end it with this. I think if you have a surplus of points, don't be an idiot like me. I, remember that flight to Dubai when we flew Emirates first class? I was stupid. I could have gotten that flight for four hundred thousand points. Instead, I spent like two million or two, two point two million or something like that, right? But my point is everyone needs a points dealer. So I actually have a points dealer now that all he does is focus on optimizing points. Okay, I can intro you to him.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I wish you told me before you did that. I could have told you, just book it with points.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  I did book it with points.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  No, not points, the transfer to Emirates.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, I did, I think I, I think I knew about it, but I was too lazy to do it. But it cost me one point six million points or one point eight million points. But my point is if you have a points dealer, all they do is say, okay, how many points you have? Where are you trying to go? Okay, I got it. He, he spends all the time doing it and you pay him what? A hundred dollars to do the work.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the problem now with Emirates, when you transfer points, cause I booked my parents' tickets to India. Uh, when you transfer to there, a lot of times they'll, you'll use the points and they expect you to pay half with cash. So like the deals overall of just using points to book any type of airline, whether it's because of their credit card or with the airline. They're terrible. It's not great anymore. Just take your cash.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Do you think they're terrible right now because of the war or?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  No, they've been terrible for years. That's why I stopped trying to collect points. The reason I still collect points on Amex is because I. Without getting into it, my personal credit card bills aren't the lowest.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  You've already made this public before.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.