In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Can your rates be too much? KITT is finally here, CarPlay, Saunas, and more!
Getting paid $14M to find your replacement
Hubspot ChatGPT Connector
OpenAI privacy thing is huge
Google VEO 3 doing amazing things
Chris takes a self driving car to the airport
NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.
Adding CarPlay
Gemini turning the screws on free stuff
Apple Glasses in 2026? WWDC
Sauna Power
Events: AMA, MAICON, MarketingProfs B2B
Sign up for the text line: 1-617-812-5494
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters
Speaker 1 – 00:00
Today’s episode is brought to you by NetSuite and Wix Studio.
Speaker 2 – 00:10
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
Speaker 1 – 00:18
Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall.
Speaker 3 – 00:20
I’m Christopher Penn.
Speaker 1 – 00:22
And it has just been insane. There’s the news continues to get crazier and crazier. I think the one that has just
jumped out yesterday. I wish I had more time to even dig. FTX suing Neil Patel for millions. So Neil Patel, digital
marketer, you know, most people follow him, he’s got a huge number of subscribers. But yeah, basically being sued.
Now, the article says sued for 55 million. And if you don’t FTX, this is a whole other story too. It was one of the
biggest crypto exchanges on the planet. It went bankrupt in 2022. The CEO, Sam Bankman Fried was convicted of
stealing 8 billion from customers. All kinds of stuff is going on. And now, and this is where it gets a little gray.
Speaker 1 – 00:59
I don’t know exactly what the heck is going on, but there is a pile of assets and some stuff and there’s lawyers
basically trying to like, you know, get money back, claw back what was spent. And so part of that is, you know, some
insane $55 million spent on SEO. One of the facts that came out that was amazing was one of Patel’s firms charged
$14 million to find their replacement. And after four months, they didn’t find any. Just, you know, I figure we can at
least get you 10 to 12 million to find a replacement for yourself and not do it in two months. But I, you know, so you
were the one that actually, you had some direct message, private comments. We won’t throw anybody under the bus,
but you had broken this to me and got me in the loop.
Speaker 1 – 01:46
What’s been your take on this?
Speaker 3 – 01:48
Well, so here’s the thing from the actual court filing. So we stick to the facts, the court filing in which is case
2211068 JTD. This is a court fil FTX trading debtors, meaning the folks that are trying to get money out of the
smoldering remains of svx, which is Alameda Research FTX Trading, Cottonwood Grove and West Realmshire
Services. The plaintiffs against Neil Patel, the person, Neil Patel Digital, the company, and I’m kind of a Big Deal llc,
which is another one of his companies, are the defendants in the case. The provisions are provision five. In October
2021, Blockfolio hired Patel as a marketing manager and agreed to compensate him 75k a month. And then
ultimately paying them $30.8 million from item 6 in the lawsuit.
Speaker 3 – 02:42
The tens of millions of dollars paid to Patel and his affiliates bore no reasonable relationship to the value of services
provided. For example, FTX paid 14.8 million for big deal to spend four months attempting to find another
consultant, which they never actually did. Defendants also billed the FTX Group for duplicative and exaggerated
services for which defendants received excess reasonable fees untethered to any fair market value. FTX Group
employees describe Defendants work as so sloppy and terrible performance. And many of defendants promised
services were never provided at all. So that is what is in the official court filing. You know, is that true? I mean, it’s
true enough that it’s in the lawsuit, right?
Speaker 1 – 03:22
Yeah, we don’t know what happened. Well, and I know this just opens a different door for me. And this is the kind of
stuff, you know, we’ve seen before in finance. You know, you see these kinds of things where there’s just millions of
dollars flowing around and so everybody’s kind of able to latch on and get a piece of it. And as long as you’re not
upsetting the apple cart and even if you’re delivering some value to an executive, the fact that you’re charging a
hundred times what you normally charge the rest of the world, you can do that. Like, there’s nothing against that. The
whole rest of the world is going to look at it and say you’re a pirate and a thief and all these things, but there’s no law
against getting paid, you know, insanely well, a million times beyond market.
Speaker 1 – 03:59
But yeah, this just has all the elements of a great story. We can totally see the Netflix story coming out of this
because it’s just so much money flowing around and people getting it. But so is there any lesson that we can take
away from this though?
Speaker 3 – 04:15
I mean, so here’s the thing. If you read the rest of the case and it’s an interesting read, it’s a 46 page court filing. And
again, to avoid charges of libel and slander, I just rely on what’s written in the filing. So we’re not making anything up.
But to your point, like, yeah, if you have a choice between like some rando financial planner and Charlie Munger, the
late Charlie Munger, I would clearly be willing to overpay Charlie Munger, you know, 100x because he manages, he
managed Warren Buffett’s portfolio. So he clearly knows something, what he’s doing. But from a, a perspective of
are you getting value for what you’re providing. At the end of the day, it just comes down to being able to prove that
you did provide value.
Speaker 3 – 04:57
The big allegation in the court filing says the fees charged were untethered from the value provided. Right. So if Neil
Patel Digital had in fact blown it out of the water and delivered FTX what was promised, this wouldn’t be a lawsuit.
Speaker 1 – 05:16
Right.
Speaker 3 – 05:16
Because they could say like, hey, here’s what we did for you, here’s why we charged you so much. Not because
someone is a celebrity, but because these are the results you wanted and we agreed to it and you paid for it and here
they are. Right. So that’s always what it comes back down to is like, hey, here’s what we promised we’d give you.
Here’s what we actually gave you. If you sign the contract and we delivered on what we promised you, really there’s
no basis for a lawsuit. If you didn’t and you didn’t buy a large margin, not deliver what you promised, then, yeah,
you’re going to get sued.
Speaker 1 – 05:54
Yeah, that’s interesting. So, yeah, and we have no visible. Well, we haven’t dug deep enough to have visibility into
what the actual contract said as far as like what’s still. But I, you know, and also, of course I am not a lawyer, but
from everything I’ve seen, the court really doesn’t care if you wrote a bad deal. That’s your problem. You know, the
courts are not going to spend six months babysitting the poor decision business decisions you made. You know,
that’s not a thing. But yeah, there was also an interesting thing about, because the first article I read on was over on
Search Engine Roundtable and there was some talk about how bad it was and Neil actually said, well, you know, we
won one of your awards for this work three years ago.
Speaker 1 – 06:36
So yeah, that was, I got a kick out of that too. But you know, a lot of finger pointing and things going all right. So
yeah, I don’t know, that’s just jumped out as a bunch of fun stuff. And if anybody else has seen or heard anything, we
would love to hear more rumors or whatever else is going on with that. But yeah, onto more serious stuff, things we
can get into. There was a lot of Buzz about the HubSpot ChatGPT connector and people of course, always worrying
about privacy at the top of the complaint list. But what are you watching with this?
Speaker 3 – 07:08
There’s actually a very relevant thing going on with that. So the. Yes, HubSpot has a chat GPT connector, and
apparently it’s very good. However, the New York Times sued OpenAI because on the grounds that OpenAI’s chat
GPT was providing workarounds to paywalls and effectively circumventing protections. In the judgment issued by
the court, which is. This is the important part, the judgment issued by the court said that OpenAI must retain all chat
logs, all prompts, all results, everything, and be prepared to turn over to the court for the entire system, not just
related to the New York Times, but to the entire system. So the Court ruled that OpenAI basically has to violate all of
its privacy policies and say, you must turn over all of your data to the court. Now, whether the court has any ability to
process it, I have no idea.
Speaker 3 – 08:04
But that means that if you’re using the Chat GPT connector with your HubSpot instance and you have private and
confidential data, it is now currently required by law that OpenAI hand that to a third party. That may or may not be in
your best interest. This was a court case that. There’s even a post on the OpenAI website saying, here’s how this
affects your Account. The only OpenAI customers who are not affected by this are Chat GPT, enterprise customers,
and enterprise customers using the Zero Data Retention API, which is a special API you have to pay for. Otherwise,
every other form of OpenAI, ChatGPT services, API and web, your data is being logged, your data is being collected,
regardless of your settings, regardless of your privacy, and it is being handed to a third party.
Speaker 3 – 08:52
So if you’re going to use a connector like chat GPT for HubSpot, your HubSpot CRM data is being handed to a third
party.
Speaker 1 – 09:01
Okay, that’s not good. That’s. Nobody wants that. So your customer list is like one Google search away from
everybody else. Figure out what’s going on with it. So it’ll be interesting to see if the courts have to make that data
public or not. And of course, I’m sure it’s already been appealed and we’ll see where that goes. But, yeah, definitely
don’t presume privacy. That’s the short take on that.
Speaker 3 – 09:24
No, I mean, that is the short and long take of is this. The cloud is someone else’s computer, Right? So if you want
guaranteed privacy, your data can’t be on someone else’s computer. I mean, you would think that’s common sense,
but after 20 years of SaaS, we’ve kind of forgotten that fundamental principle. If it is confidential, it should not be on
someone else’s computer. What you should be doing is getting fluent with local AI models that you run on your
hardware and your infrastructure so that you know it’s as private as the rest of your systems.
Speaker 1 – 09:56
Okay, cool. A video was going around about Google VO3, just an amazing clip, made for your grandparents, you
know, explaining all the different frauds that are going to come in video and things that they can’t trust. But yeah, I
was blown away by the quality of this thing. I’ll have links to it in the show notes so people can watch. But yeah, it
just seems amazing as far as where we’ve gone with video. I mean, two weeks ago were talking about some stuff
that was amazing and this is, you know, yet another Quantum leap.
Speaker 3 – 10:22
Yeah, VO3 is amazing because it is the first model that does everything in one shot. So video, audio, sound, effects,
music, it all does in one shot. And everyone’s like, how did Google do this? Like, well, Google owns YouTube. What do
you think? How do you think they did this? They did this because they have the largest training data set and that
includes all. So, like other AI companies will scrape YouTube. Like they’ll use scrapers to scrape YouTube, but they
can only see the public videos. Google can see everything in the YouTube system. So all the private videos, all the
unlisted videos, and nowhere in the settings does it allow you to turn off. Google’s gonna train on your stuff, so of
course it’s gonna have access to the highest quality content.
Speaker 1 – 11:05
Okay, and this reminds, I didn’t have this on the show notes, but you had a chance to drive in a self driving car while
you were over in Arizona. And this was the same moment for me too. I was like, oh, wait a minute. This is Google
powered. They have all the Google Maps data. Like nobody, you know, Tesla can’t do this because they don’t have
access to those same maps. So do. But tell us about your Robocar ride.
Speaker 3 – 11:27
Yeah, I took away a Waymo, which is a Google company, from the hotel to the Phoenix airport. And you know, you
install the app on your phone, it’s like Uber or Lyft. A car arrives, you get you unlock the car with your phone. You say,
I guess this is my car, here I am. And it opens it up, you put your luggage in the trunk and you get in and it’s a, it was a
Jaguar with all the hardware attached to it, the LIDAR and the scanners and stuff like that. You get in and it’s literally
like right out of Knight Rider with The steering wheels going by itself and stuff like that. You can choose the. The
climate, you can choose the music. You can connect to your own Spotify playlist if it’s public, et cetera. And it was
amazing.
Speaker 3 – 12:05
It took longer because it drives the speed limit and it obeys traffic laws, so. Which at one point a fire truck came up
behind and it pulled over to the side of the road, like what you’re supposed to do according to the law. No one else
did, but it did because it was smart. So it was fantastic. No stupid air freshener, no ridiculous small chat. And I was
thinking myself from the perspective of, say, like a woman traveling alone. Safest ride ever. There’s no one else in the
car with you except you. From my perspective as someone who’s still very Covid conscious. Safest ride ever. Right?
There’s no one else in the car with you. You don’t have to wear a mask in there because there’s no one else breathing
the air except you. So I loved it.
Speaker 3 – 12:50
I can’t wait for it to come to more cities. It’s right now in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix. And they. I saw
that they’re looking at Metro Boston, like the downtown Boston, basically anything inside 95 for that, which would be
amazing. Like, I would love to be able to drive to like, the Riverside T station and just take awaymo into the rest of the
city.
Speaker 1 – 13:07
Yeah, right. And that’s. We’ve talked about to eventually being able to subscribe to a car, you know, if you’re not
driving. If you’re a telecommuter, being able to just pay X a month, that’s so much cheaper than insurance on a car
payment. It just seems like the way to get and same deal for shipping kids off to college. You know, just give them
credit on a card. It’s so much cheaper to have them take a smart ride than to have to insure them until they get out of
that. That early driving. So. All right, well, that’s cool. And yeah. So Knight Rider at work, they need some kind of
Michael Knight mode. You could switch it to where you can break the speed limit and, you know, do a few more
things.
Speaker 3 – 13:41
That’d be good. Or, you know, get permission from the late William Daniels estate to have the voice. Be the William
Daniels voice.
Speaker 1 – 13:49
Have the. Have the voice. That’s classic. That would be excellent. Oh, all right. Since we’re talking about car stuff too,
we might as well add this in. I’ve never talked about this, adding CarPlay to a vehicle. I’ve done this A couple times
now. So if you have an old wreck of a car, there’s a company called Car Paride that I’ve used where it’s kind of worst
case scenario. It’s like the old school GPS that you stick on the dashboard. You know, you can just stick this 8 inch
screen on your dash and it adds all those functions that you wish you had. If you’re really crazy, you go the extra mile
and add a backup camera. I was stupid enough to try that and it did work out well.
Speaker 1 – 14:25
But man, that’s a ton of work getting a wire all the way back to the back trunk. But it is insane now because my
junker of a car has this 4K rear view screen. It’s easier to drive backwards than it is forwards in the thing. And so I’m
doing that again through my father’s estate. I’ve inherited this Honda CRV and it has this, it’s insane, a postage
stamp size backup camera. So I’m gonna pull the head unit and upgrade and get everything going with that but so I
wanted to throw that out there. If anybody has any auto stories of stuff that they’ve tried to do that have worked. You
had Gemini turning the screws on free stuff. What’s going on there as far as stuff they’ve rolled out.
Speaker 3 – 15:01
Yeah. So Logan Kilpatrick kind of threw water on the party. So for a lot of folks have known the so secret that
Google’s AI Studio allows you access to unfiltered Gemini models. The the top of the line at no cost. You do have
some, you know, rate limits but for the most part it is the best free version of Gemini. And Google previously turned
off the free tier in the API so that you have to pay for use the API. And they said over the weekend we’re going to be
moving AI Studio to you to be API based which means that the free lunch is over. Which is understandable because
Gemini 2.5 Pro is a beast of a model. It consumes a tremendous amount of resources. So they were just basically
giving away pretty much almost unlimited usage of it.
Speaker 3 – 15:47
So they didn’t give a timeline. But for folks who are using AI Studio know that the days of it being a free ride are
coming to an end. As one would expect. There’s no other service like anthropics, Claude or ChatGPT’s API platform.
No other service allows you unfiltered access to the models for free. And it was only a matter of time before Google
close that door too.
Speaker 1 – 16:10
On the rumor Front gear watch apple glasses for 2026. There’s some chatter about them working on some chipsets
that would go into glasses. We’ve talked about wanting smart glasses before.
Speaker 3 – 16:19
It’s wwdc. Yesterday was the opening keynote. Today is more developer stuff and wwdc. Interestingly, AI has not
really made an appearance at the party. It is so light. Apple has almost not talked about at all. The only major thing
was their foundation models framework which will allow other apps to access the on device language models. But
that was it. Their big thing was this whole liquid glass UI change that you know, will make a shinier, more reflective,
you know, controls and stuff like that. I’m like great, more things to waste. My phone’s processing power and battery
life.
Speaker 1 – 16:56
Well and that just seems to be the classic seesaw of like they get shinier and then somebody brings it all the way
back to everything’s flat and it just continues to slide back and forth. Yeah, we’ll have to show some of those
iPhone1UIs with water and everything’s glistening just because. Just because it can. I also had to throw out. I’ve not
talked about this but for the past two years I have been doing there’s a sauna nearby and because it’s allergy season
I wanted to throw this out there. The whole rest of the family is dying of allergies and I’m doing fine because I’ve
been hitting the sauna and so I wanted to throw that out just in case anybody is suffering from allergies and wants
to talk sauna.
Speaker 1 – 17:32
You can hit me up over at the analytics for marketer Slack Group direct message me over there. Or of course you
can sign up for the marketing over coffee text line at 617-812-5494. So you just got back from Arizona and you’ve
got a bunch of other stuff coming up still. But what’s on the radar that you’re excited about?
Speaker 3 – 17:51
See, I’ve got some client presentations and things, you know, very private stuff which by the way, if you want me to
come in and do like AI talks, keynotes, half day workshops, if we do that privately, it doesn’t have to be open to the
public. So I’ve got one coming up this week, a few more on the way and then AMA American Marketing association
is going to be in August and then you know, right into fall conference season. But it is crazy busy right now. We’re
doing a lot of code development deployment things. So it’s, I’m actually happy to be in the house that I pay for and to
see the family things after. It was literally seven weeks on the road. I’m thankful for it and I had a wonderful time. But
it is also nice to be home.
Speaker 1 – 18:35
Yeah, right. You can only have so many hotel breakfasts before it just exactly like, oh.
Speaker 3 – 18:40
Look, the exact same hotel breakfast ends. Here’s the painting of the flowers, you know, in the vase, the watercolor
that is in like every hotel ever.
Speaker 1 – 18:47
All right. Yeah. Spoken as a true road warrior there. That’s going to do it for this week. So until next week. Enjoy the
coffee.
Speaker 3 – 18:53
Enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 2 – 18:55
You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspenn.com Read more from
John J. Wall at jw5150.com the marketing over coffee theme song is called Mellow G by Funkmasters and you can
find it at musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.
