10 Marketing Tools We’d Still Pay $1,000/Month For

So Neil, I had my OpenClaw audit our podcast.

Okay.

And then it basically used the YouTube API and the X API. You know what it did? So now we have a column here for the hook, okay? And we also have a— so we do trade-offs too, where we go back and forth as well. So what I basically did was I connected the YouTube API. I was like, use the YouTube API. I want you to analyze our channel and show us what we're doing well and what we're not doing well. And I also want you to compare it to the Diary of a CEO podcast. The Modern Wisdom Podcast and TVPN.

Okay.

And it's like, okay, so you guys don't open with any hooks. You guys just kind of go right into it. And then you and Neil need to alternate more in terms of kicking it off. And then your classics do well too. So you should bring the classics back. So there's hooks for the classics over here as well. So we're going to try that format today because AI has slowly been making my content better in terms of getting more views. We'll just kick it off that way. So So let's just kick off on one. So, you know, I've been doing some research on these, more on these clippers. So one company is paying $650 grand a month just to make short clips, and that's the marketing budget, okay? So basically this guy Clavicular, have you heard of this guy?

No.

Apparently he's been blowing up. So, you know, this dude over here, apparently he's like a security guard a few years ago, and then he's been blowing up on short form. And so—

He's a clipper now, I'm assuming?

Well, he has clippers. He has like, he's paying $650 grand for clippers. So to run the campaign, so more than 1,500 clippers work for him, nearly 70,000 clips a month. So you just go back to like the Andrew Tate strategy, right? Where they're just going hard on clips.

I'm confused here. So he's a security guard or was a security guard?

Was a security guard. And he's still young, very young in his 20s or whatever. But that's how a lot of these kids are generating a ton of views. And I've been working with more and more of these kids and I'm happy to share my experience as well because there's good and bad things.

But before we go, Into your experience working with the kids, he's this, the ex-security guard is spending $650,000 a month. Is he a consulting company where he's selling the clips to other people and doing it for companies?

Or is he just a streamer?

Okay. So what does he stream or how's he monetizing other than streaming and maybe sponsors?

I think it's just that. I think that's how a lot of these streamers make money. Well, here's, here's what I'm, I'm, I haven't really researched as much. Like IShowSpeed, for example, these people, like they do have a lot of money for their age. And I'm just like, how is it that like it's this Adin Ross person? Like how do they make all money, right? I have to imagine a lot of sponsorships, they probably drive a lot of them to a community or some type of course as well. That's what I think.

I think we talked about IShowSpeed on the podcast. I told you I was doing lunch or something with someone like, yeah, IShowSpeed makes $100 million a year. I'm like, no, nowhere near there. Because MrBeast doesn't make as much per video as people thought. And he shares some of the— he did a guessing game on X. But when you're looking at The Clippers. I think it's good. I think people, and you and I talked about this in our last week recording session, people should focus on taking these marketing tactics and applying it to businesses like software companies or AI companies or consumer companies. You won't get as many views, but your conversion from viewer to revenue will be much higher.

I just, I use, I run Grok on this one. I use Grok because Grok is pretty much pretty on top of the trends. So Clavicular's name is Brayden Peters. Okay, so he's 20 years old, streamer. He's a looksmaxxing influencer, whatever that means. I think looksmaxxing—

here, looks—

so look up looksmaxxing and then look up retardmaxxing, because Mark Andreessen has been talking about retardmaxxing. Did I send you that video?

Looksmaxxing influencers are social media creators who promote the practice of looksmaxxing, a term originated from male-focused internet subcultures like incels that refer to taking extreme measures to maximize one's physical attractiveness. Okay, these influencers These influencers, primarily on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Kick, focus on optimizing facial structure, body composition, and grooming to achieve conventionally attractive or chiseled appearance. What's the other one you want me to look up?

Retardmaxxing. So we're using the R word. Let me tell you why. So as Neil looks it up, so Mark Andreessen was the one that brought me onto this. So Mark Andreessen's been watching this guy and this guy just talks about how to be a man. And the whole idea behind retardmaxxing is just like, if you're gonna go approach a woman and talk to them, don't even think about it, just go. If you're going to think about like what you're just thinking about like starting a business, so don't even think about it, just go. Everything's just go. And so what does it say?

So I'm not going to say the term, but it advocates overcoming overthinking, perfectionism, analysis paralysis, kind of like the stuff you're talking about. It just is like, stop overthinking things, just go and do it.

And I think for the most part in our lives, we have been like that. I think so. When it comes to entrepreneurship, just go, just start. Yes.

I thought you meant you and I overthink it. I'm like, do we really overthink it? No, no, no.

I think just go for the most part. Don't wait, don't tell me, just go, right?

But sometimes we go too much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That causes more problems, but it works more often than not. Like, by the way, when people look at that, it's like, that's your greatest strength. That's also your greatest weakness too. Just keep in mind, whatever your greatest strength is, there's a double-edged sword. So let me tell you how he makes his money, Neil. So he's publicly showing about $80,000 to $100,000 a month from donations from KCIP alone, Kick Creator Incentive Program. In January, he made $110 grand with over 90% coming straight from KCIP. And then he says during his MOG World Order subathon, I guess that was a stream, he was pulling in roughly $20 grand per day. Okay, $20 grand per day, that's $600 grand a month, right?

Yeah.

And then he has a paid community, I called it, he has a paid community course. So Clavicular's Clan, Formula Clavicular System. He sells monthly access to his self-improvement looks-maxing program for about $50 a month. This is recurring stream on top of streaming. And then he has sponsorships. Young LA affiliate links, YouTube earnings. So yeah, it kind of makes sense.

That makes sense.

Yeah. And here's the thing, like, I do think in a sense, you know, people used to say, okay, paid media used to mean Google Ads. It does in a sense, but now part of it, I also feel like paid media is, this is kind of in a sense you're doing paid media, right? It's more or less you're trying to buy these organic views. And so that's kind of what the system is today. Bless you.

Thank you.

But let me show you this. Bless you again. Okay, so look, this is the same, so paid media in 2026. So now the concept, Neil, is how are you buying more tokens? Okay, so a part of it is sure, you're paying clippers. So if you're paying 1,500 editors to edit and post 70,000 pieces of content, but I also think at the same time, it might mean also buying tokens from like a ChatGPT or buying tokens from Anthropic as well because you need people to, to maybe edit your clips at more volume and you can generate more AI clips as well. So I think what's going to happen is you're going to be doing this clipping thing, but you're also going to be paying for a lot more tokens because you're spending so much on these clips. So I think that's a piece of it.

Yep. All right, let's go with the next one. 10 marketing AI tools we'd pay for even if they cost $1,000 a month.

Okay, here's the hook. So you got to go with the hook, Neil. Read it again.

All right. If these 10 AI tools cost $1,000 a month each, We'd still pay for all of them. Here's why.

Okay, Claude, because I already pay $8,000 a month for myself. So, all right, and let me tell you why we should justify each one. So the reason for that is I'm able to do so much more with less. Some examples here. One, literally yesterday, Neil, I took my X thread and I said, hey, take this X thread and then use the image model and make it into like these slides, and then I can repurpose it for YouTube. Okay, so anything that's design-bound now, I can generate instantly. Okay, I'm going to show you something else real quick, Neil. So I'm going to— Neil can see my screen. Those of you that are watching on YouTube, you should subscribe to us on YouTube. But I have the ability now, Neil, check this out here. I'm going to pull this up.

So look at this.

You see this site? Uh, this is API for SEO. This is ClickFlow.

Okay.

This landing page. Okay. This is all about the API for SEO.

Okay.

So you can see there's code. How does it work? The different use cases, the different, All this stuff, right? So this landing page, what do you think? Not that bad?

The landing page is not bad.

Okay.

It's a great start. You'll have to make some adjustments, but this is great to start with.

Yeah, and then by the way, it's like I can use it on like a call too. I said to make it like a deck too, right? So if I press, usually if I'm on, yeah, okay, every time I press space, it's like a deck, okay?

Yeah.

So this is deployed to a website right now. So my point of saying this is that Neil, what I just showed Neil, I was at the gym this morning. I said, hey, I want to use my design. I'm talking to my phone right now. I want to use my design.md file for ClickFlow and I want to make a landing page dedicated API for SEO, pull the documents from the ClickFlow documents right now and go ahead and spin it up. I want a dark version and I want a light version as well. Go ahead and do it.

And then it does it in a few minutes.

Yeah, that's, that to me, that's end to end. And so for me, this used to take weeks to even get a mockup done. Now you can do it a lot faster. Now it's like 90% there. Yeah.

The one thing I would adjust on that homepage, and you already know this, the headline. I don't like how it crossed it off because you want it to make sense where they crossed out words and you don't read those words. Or if you do—

I agree with that. You know why? When you have the cross out, it makes people think, well, what did you cross out exactly? It kind of, there's some distortion there. You want it to get to the point. Yeah.

But I don't mind the cross out. It's just more so if you read it without the cross out, it doesn't make sense.

Number 2.

Tool number 2, HighLevel. So here's why I love this AI tool, especially if you're a local business. If you're a local business right now, think about it. Like let's say I own an HVAC or roofing company or a plumbing company. Let's actually use plumbing. I have people calling me, I'm running ads, and what ends up happening? You get leads, very few people follow up, very few people book appointment. And you lose a lot just in that layer. So sure, it can help you with all your ads and stuff like that, but what I really love about HighLevel is specific— there's a lot of great features, but what I really love, especially for local businesses, it has an AI assistant that screens the call, converses with someone, books it, schedules appointment based on your availability and when people can get it and what works for them. And now you don't have to follow up with leads and it works really well.

You've tried it?

Yes.

So it's like a discovery call and like what, how complex can it get?

It can get pretty complex depending on how you train it. And when you say I tried it, not for myself 'cause I don't actually own a local business, but yes, we have customers in the local space and it's really cool.

Cool, great.

But it comes down to, it's like, what do you feed in? I think this is the biggest problem with AI. If you don't feed in the right stuff, your outputs are just crap, no matter what tools you're using. And I think that's a mistake that most companies make. But yeah, that would be tool number 2. And especially for smaller businesses, you know, when you think about $1,000 a month, how much more would you spend hiring a person to do that?

My thing alone, I mean, before a year ago, that you're probably talking about, if you're talking about offshore, you're probably talking about at least $50,000, $60,000. And if you're talking about onshore, probably like we're talking about, you know, $120,000, $150,000, $180,000 depending on experience. Sure.

And even for, For something simple like having HighLevel answer your calls, how much do you think that would cost a human?

I think a good human that can also route it and also record everything, I think that good human's worth $120 to $150. Yeah, yeah. And then if it's nearshore, offshore, maybe a little less, but yes.

Yes.

Yeah. So my next one's going to be Higgsfield. The reason I like Higgsfield is, so Higgsfield, it does, you know, just ad creation, video creation, things like that, right? And so look, these are just ads that we've made for a telecoms company. And they really like these, right? And so look, it's just their motion graphics, whatever. We generate a ton of statics as well. So we took the Higgsfield MCP and we hooked it into our GitHub repo, and that's now allowing us to, from a sales standpoint, we can crank out— I'll be like, hey, Neil, you work for Mountain Valley Spring. Here's a bunch of ads for you over here. Let me know if you want to talk. And then maybe my follow-up is, here's 10 more ads for you. Let me know if you want to talk. Hey, your competitor made ads like this. They've been running them for a while. Let me know if you want to talk. You just keep hitting them with new ads over and over. And so this will work for a while, I think, before the rest of the world catches on. So I think in terms of generating new pipeline, in terms of generating new ads, because a lot of the people we talk to, you've seen this as well, is when they come to us, it's like, oh, the bottleneck for us to scaling right now is more creative. It's more creative or it's more emails. It's more creative, it's more emails, whatever it is exactly. Higgsfield has been pretty good for it, especially now that there's an MCP. You can ask your OpenClaw or your Hermes agent or whatever to just say, hey, Look at Neil Patel's NP Digital's ads over here. I want similar versions for them, only the ones that are longest running, assuming that Neil's not a dumb dumb and he's not just keeping bad ads running because the longest ads running are usually the ones that are performing.

Yeah. So number 4, and this one is a free tool, but I would pay $1,000 a month for it. YouTube has something now where they can make your videos and they've had this for a little bit, but we don't see most companies or creators leverage this. They can make your content adjustable to multiple languages.

Oh yeah.

And very few people use it. We're seeing good traffic gains from this, from the regions we've been testing it in. It's free, so it doesn't cost $1,000, but I genuinely would pay $1,000 a month for that feature. I just wish they did more languages, but I believe they're going to keep adding more and more.

Dude, I've seen my Instagram Reels in Hindi before.

It was great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you listened to your stuff in Hindi?

I haven't seen myself in Hindi, but people have sent me my content in Portuguese because I have quite a bit of a Brazilian audience. Portuguese, yeah.

And I was like, oh cool, like they're screenshotting And they're like, your voice isn't that bad.

It's not for— I'm like, no, I didn't really create it. They did it for you.

Number 4, xAPI. So what—

Number 5.

Number 5?

You went first.

Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. Number 5, xAPI. So the reason I like xAPI now, what they did, Neil, is they've decreased the cost to read a tweet. It used to be a lot more expensive. Now it costs, I think it costs a lot more to, if you want to post something using the API with a link to it, because they don't want to decrease their reach. Okay. I think it's like a fraction of a penny now, Neil, to read something. And so what I can do, for example, yesterday, I'm looking for more like AI founders in Europe for my AI Global Summit for YPO, right? Even though I said I wouldn't do anymore. So anyway, my point is, I'm like, okay, I want you to find a bunch of tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 speakers, list all of them, and then it crafted the messaging and it was about to send them through my X account. But the whole idea here is, You want to hire paid media people, you want to hire these creative people over here. I wanted to hire, you know what happened? These clippers, once I found out Forbes did like a piece on the clipping company, you know what I did? I reached out to the clipping company. I said, hey, I want to poach all their people, find all the people over here. And then I want to reach out to every single one of them. I have 3 of the kids now that I'm talking, I'm trialing 3 of the kids. They're all kids like 18, 20 years old. Like one of them I was talking to yesterday on the phone, he was at his mom's. I could hear his mom in the background, right?

Oh wow.

And I'm like, Anyway, all that to say is the X API is extremely powerful now. And what I also do with it, I was like, hey, OpenClaw, pull from all the latest stuff in AI marketing right now, and then just decide based on what our goals are and what I've been working on, how this fits into what we're doing, how high leverage it should be. Should we be doing it? Because the smartest people are posting on X. So the X API, they've made it even cheaper now. I'd be paying over $1,000 a month for it. Yeah.

The next one on my end, I think this is number 6. is Crazy Egg released a personalization feature, or Hiten did, and—

Still you two.

Yeah, technically it's just him, but yeah.

Okay.

When, with the personalization feature, what ends up happening is, is they have tons of A/B testing data and learnings over the years on what works and what doesn't. You pop in a URL, it'll create variations of any of your pages based on what converts better and what doesn't.

Nice, that's good. So what is Crazy Egg focused on now? Personalization?

Personalization, A/B testing. They released analytics recently too.

Yep.

But a lot of that stuff.

Just for context, Crazy Egg used to be Neil and Hiten's tool. It was more of a heat mapping tool. Now they've done a lot more. It seems like Hiten's very AI-pilled now, so he's adding a lot to it.

Yes.

So that's cool. Number 7, yeah? So number 7, I'm going to, if you go to ClickFlow, we actually have an API for it and we're coming out with a free version for it. So I think there needs to be an API for content creation. It doesn't even have to be ClickFlow. I think there needs to be an API for SEO in general. So the ability to be able to, through a command line interface or to be able to have your agents just say, okay, here's all the rankings you have right now using the Ubersuggest API.

Okay. Yeah.

And then based on that, you should be creating this content over here and you should be updating this content over here. You should be thinking about internal linking. To have an API that the agents can access, I think is really important. And so I think really any marketing tool that has an API right now, I just use that one as an example because I was just showing Neil an example of a landing page I made from it.

Cool. Number 8, AnswerThePublic. It helps you get a lot more AI traffic. It's really simple. It ends up telling you all the long-tail variations that people are searching in AI platforms and LLMs, which is the new type of keywords. People aren't searching head terms like they used to. It's all people typing in sentences. And the cool part is, is it'll automatically create the content for you. You then go in and modify and adjust it and add in the EEAT. It'll add in the images, it'll automatically publish to your Webflow, Shopify, WordPress, whatever system you are. So you don't even have to do any of that. It'll do the content calendars, create tons of content for you. You can do it in different languages and automatically publish once you approve it.

So just full disclosure for everyone, the last 2 tools are both Neil's and ours. So we just want to disclose that. So anyway, number 9, last from my end, Hermes. We name ours Hermes because I have the Hermes Paris logo on mine in Slack. So Hermes is a— it's basically, it's an open source agent. It's very similar to OpenCLAW, but it's more reliable from what I've seen. So the problem with my OpenCLAW right now is I've made it a Ferrari that has too much on it. So imagine you stack like a bunch of luggage on it. So I keep adding more and more to it. So it's become this monstrosity. And also Ferrari's not a very practical car to drive because you can't really put your groceries in it. You can't really have your family drive in it either. And it probably scratches all the time. I wouldn't know. I don't have a Ferrari, but bless you, Noah. And so I would say that Hermes is actually way more reliable. It's very fast. And the beauty of Hermes is that it learns as it— the more you work with it, the better it gets over time because it's constantly adding skill.md files to it over and over. So I think having a Hermes also be the brain that manages my OpenCLAW fleet is very helpful. And what I'm even testing right now is having a Hermes fleet. And so I would for sure pay over $1,000 a month for this.

Yeah, and then the last tool, because Google ended up rolling this into Gemini, is Gemini. But you all know about Nano Banana and all the things that they've done for image and video creation. What I found that works really well in marketing, and this would cost way more money to hire a company to do, is to have a scripted video. Like, do you remember those old D2C style videos that people would put on Facebook and put a storyline and pay a company like Harmon Brothers, you know, like the Squatty Potty videos and stuff. You can do those, they still work. We don't see too many people doing them because the problem is, is when you create them, they're a big hit or miss and you don't know if they're going to be a hit. And then you're like, man, I just burned $50 grand, $100 grand on this and it was a miss.

Yeah.

So then you do it like 5 or 6 times or 10 times and you create a hit, but you may have burned $500,000 to $1 million. Now with Gemini, You can burn like $1,000 and get your hit and have tons of variations, and all you have to do is just come up with the script. The problem we're seeing is people don't want to do it because it takes time to script, but the scripting is the least expensive part. The video creation used to be the most expensive part. Now you can just do it with AI, and Gemini does a great job, and it's pennies on the dollar.

Dude, can I give you— here, let me give you a bonus here. This is 11, okay? So check this out. Remember I was just talking about Ferrari versus Camry agents? So my X post yesterday. Okay, this is ChatGPT Images 2.0. I think it's better than Nano Banana. So what I'm showing on the screen over here is you have a Ferrari on the left side. It has a bunch of stuff added to the top of it, like long context, guardrails, code, all this stuff, right? And then you have a fleet of Camrys. Toyota Camry is very reliable. I used to have a Lexus, which is a Toyota, right? Very reliable. So you go down the list over here. Look, come on, look at that. You have all this bolt. The temptation is you bolt everything onto one agent, You get a Ferrari agent. It's expensive, it's beautiful, and it's impractical. Great demo, fragile operations, right? Then the business failure mode shows up, right? And then you have this context jam over here. And then what you need is a Camry model for SEO briefs, for CRM cleanup. You want each agent to do its own thing. And so my point of all this, look at this, dude, this is pretty good. It— all I did, Neil, was I took from a tweet that I wrote and then I said, use ChatGPT Images 2.0. It cranked it out. And so my point of saying this too is that To Neil's point, if you're going to do a script, you still have to go with it back and forth and say, ask me clarifying questions, and then it can make the best script for you. And then ideally you're probably posting scripts that have worked well for you in the past to give it more context to make it even better. But—

And just as a heads up, make sure you're not using stuff that can get you sued.

Yes. Yes. Right. Because I can make a YouTube video for this one. Yes. I can't make an ad for this.

No, the Ferrari example, I think you'll get in trouble. Ferrari or Depending on how it's used.

Well, you mean for the ad?

Uh, correct.

Yes. Yeah. For, I can't use it as an ad. Just Neil's right. Uh, but I would use this in a YouTube video to describe both of them.

Totally agree. Yeah. And double-check with the lawyer whether you're using it for a YouTube video or ad, because neither Eric or I want the liability.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because every country has different laws.

It's not legal advice, guys.

This is not legal advice and run everything by a lawyer.

And we like Ferraris. We do like Ferraris.

And we like Camrys.

They're both great. I would personally prefer to drive a Camry. So, but they're both great.

You know, I've had friends pick me up in Ferraris and they're like, how cool is this? I'm like, man, it's so hard to get into your car. You have to like bend so low.

It's so low and then it's so loud and it draws all this attention. I don't want it.

Yeah. And forget even the attention. It's just an uncomfortable ride. Like it's so bumpy. I'm like, they're like, you're one with the road.

I don't want to feel every bump in the road. LA has a lot of potholes. Yeah. No. Anyway, I mean, your, your, your partner had a Ferrari before or Lambo.

Uh, Lamborghini.

We used to call him Mike Lambo. Remember that? Dude. Did we call him Mike Lambo before?

Yeah.

I don't remember. Okay, so—

It was the guys from War Room who came up with that. I don't know why I'm bringing up another name. Daniel from, is it Astrology Answers?

I don't know.

I don't know why. Yeah, he used to be part of War Room.

You were in War Room like earlier before I was. So we're talking about this mastermind that Neil and I, Neil used to speak at this event. I was in this mastermind for like a year or two. So one of our late friends, Brandon Snapper, and then Yaniv and I were business partners. We were real estate business partners so we can bring the cost down. So we didn't have to pay $25,000 a year.

They charge you per business, not per person.

Well, they charge, but if you come in as partners, then it's cheaper. Yeah, $25,000 divided by 3.

Yeah, that's a lot better. I thought it was like $50,000 at one point.

No, it got up to $50,000 and then they started doing like Coachella week 1 and Coachella week 2. So they had like 2 weekends. It started getting too big. And I think that's why they had— I think with a lot of these masterminds, just if you guys ever want to do one, just understand there's a shelf life on it and you probably have to redo it again. I just found that it's a lot of work, so yeah.

All right, go for the next topic, Eric.

Okay. So let's talk about this. So by 2027, 70% of software interactions won't have a UI at all. The button is dead. So this is the whole concept here, Neil, is around designing for agents, okay? So there's this great post from this guy, Teddy Riker, and so if you think about this, there's more and more agents that are popping up. You think about Supabase, the number of deployments that are popping up, right? that's going like parabolic right now. So Salesforce did an announcement. They're like, what are they saying? Oh, we're basically going to get— they're going to get rid of the UI. Like, it's— they're not going to get rid of it more so, but they're talking about Headless 360. It's a sweeping initiative that exposes every capability in its platform as an API, MCP tool, or CLI command. So AI agents can operate the entire system without ever operating the browser, right? Even what I'm doing right now with the API for SEO thing, I think even what you're doing with your software too. I think humans are still going to need to operate a UI, like you and I are going to need to look at a UI. We still want to point and click, but I think it's going to be 80/20. So 80% is going to be more focused on the agent. 20% is still humans looking at UIs that are still— maybe these UIs are managing the agents and it's reporting on how things are going over time. So what the interaction pattern was before, Neil, over the last 20 years was you have a user, you have an interface, then you have a database, okay? Now it's you have a user, and then you have your user's agent. So it could be using Claude or Hermes or OpenCLAW. Then you have a database, right? That's where it's all going. And the key thing is, I'm not going to go through this entire article, but you have to think about whatever it is that you're building, you have to design for agents. So when we're building new websites, what are the .md files across the entire thing? Cloudflare now has a thing where it's, is your site agent ready or is it agentready.com? It'll grade your site. Their site is not even agent ready if you put their site in there. Okay.

So But with this, I think there's a few things that you guys should keep in mind. One, the status for software interactions, it's not necessarily for your website. 2, it doesn't mean that you can get rid of these buttons altogether because there are still some human use cases. It's more so the interactions will mainly be happening by agents, so the agents won't have to click on the buttons at all, but you still need the buttons there for when a human interacts. Now, that may change by 2030 or sometime by then because most things may be done by agents. But this is talking about by 2027. And remember, a lot of companies and humans don't adapt as fast as technology is.

Yeah. So I think, by the way, so Ramp, they launched their MCP and we'll just talk about one of the things you can do here in terms of designing for agents. Neil's opening his water, so that's the sound. So you want to make sure that you build feedback loops. So when Ramp launched MCP, they had a problem, observability. So they can see all the tool call volume, but they couldn't see the surrounding chat context, right? So when you're building these, when you're designing for agents, You want to make sure that there's some type of context or rationale on all these tool calls, because then you can figure out what the problems are, right? Your agents are going to run into a lot of these problems. Humans are going to call in a lot of these things. You're going to need some type of feedback tool. And that way it's going to help your agents figure out what the problems are. And so you can build on top of that, right? And then you can have this kind of self-improving loop. And so I would highly recommend reading this. It's called Designing for Agents. It's on X. Honestly, a lot of the best AI content right now is on X. People are sharing the most cutting-edge things. So I'd highly recommend that you go there.

Yeah.

That's what I would say it is. And I don't think by 2027 all this stuff is— the UI is going to be dead. I think it's going to— again, I think it's going to be an 80/20 thing. It's going to flip.

So.

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And for everyone who's listening, I know a lot of you guys work with agencies, so we thought it'd be fun to do an episode called There are 6 signs your agency is about to fire you as a client. Most agencies hide them. Here they are.

Okay. So number 1, when they start to ask about getting all their data, right? Hey, can we get all our data? Can we have all the reports?

No, this is about your agency firing you.

Your a— oh, your agency about—

okay.

Okay.

All right.

You start first. I need to think about this one.

Uh, number 1, if If you start yelling and being mean to people in an organization and they're not as responsive to a hostile quote unquote tone of voice, we've seen that. And eventually we fire, we then go look at the contracts and stuff and we terminate people who are rude.

Number 2, I would say is if you are non-communicative, meaning that you expect the world, but then you're not communicating because it's a 2-way street, it's a relationship. And if you want the agency to help you grow, you have to help the agency help you.

Yes. Number 3, you're missing deadlines. So an agency needs you to succeed, not just on the communication end, but sometimes you are assigned tasks and you have to complete those tasks. If you're not helping the agency help you, you will struggle. An agency, no matter how good they are, will require some information and stuff from your staff and your team. It could be minimal, but if you never provide them and nothing ever happens, It's a lose-lose scenario and here's why. A, you're not going to get the results and you're going to be pissed off. B, it's not going to be fun for them to work on your project because internally they're going to be like, well, the client's not going to ever give us what we need, so we're not going to be able to execute on anything. There's going to be no results. What's the point of even doing this? People want to enjoy what they're working on and more importantly, they want to see progress. When they see progress, individuals feel more fulfilled, both on the company level and on an agency level.

So you need to make sure that you're completing your tasks. Number 4, you're unreasonable with your expectations. So I know someone, the company he works at right now, they are working, let's just say it's a SaaS company. Their CEO all the time is talking about how fast Anthropic is growing, okay? Crème de la crème, totally different businesses, but unreasonable expectations, right? That happens for agencies too.

So he wants similar type of growth to Anthropic?

Yeah, it's like, how's Anthropic growing so quickly? Why are we not growing as fast as Anthropic?

Is this a startup or a scaled business?

It's a scaled business, couple hundred million a year. Yeah, yeah. So unreasonable expectations will, to Neil's point, they'll cause the agency to burn out and they don't want their people to burn out because their people are their business. Honestly, it's, people are becoming even more important now, so.

Yeah, dude, people are becoming really, really important and if you just have unrealistic expectations, it's just Not going to end up working. Number 5, and this is one of the most comical ones that I've dealt with, and I deal with this multiple times a year, is when you're asking an agency to do something that is against your data. So if your data says this is what's working and they're showing you, and a lot of times customers argue with agencies saying, no, I want you to do it this way, and you believe it's a better way. Then why are you really paying an agency to help you out if you already know what's better? And I'm not saying you're wrong, but you hire the agency because of their expertise, or hopefully you did. And typically they should be specializing in whatever area that you're asking for help. So if you're telling them how to do the job they specialize in because you feel you know it better, they're probably going to end up terminating you. It's just a question of when.

Number 6, You ask for more work all the time, but you don't want to pay more. So you're constantly asking for more, just known as scope creep. And so what happens is it's, you expect more communication, okay? You want the world, but at the same time when the agency's like, hey, this is going to cost us more in terms of times and materials, but then you don't feel like paying it, that's going to cause an issue as well because they, the agency does have other options for the most part. And if they do have other clients that are willing to pay it for longer terms as well, and it's a better deal for them, They're going to take that.

Totally agree. All right.

So next one. So basically, Anthropic is paying $400 grand a year for an events manager, not an engineer, an events manager. So this is my good buddy Marc Andreessen retweeted this. So look at— think about it this way, okay? So you have an events lead brand. I'm pulling this up right now, okay? So Anthropic's missions, create safe, reliable AI, annual compensation for this role is listed below. So basically they're looking for someone to own the execution of brand experiences that translate Anthropic's values into physical moments. So Marc Andreessen says, when one thing becomes abundant and cheap, another thing becomes scarce and valuable. So what is becoming more abundant and cheap now? Code. Okay. I would say intelligence is becoming more abundant.

Engineering.

Engineering.

Yeah. Like actual engineers that you're hiring with an organization.

Even though we need more engineers now.

And we know, we need more good engineers.

More good engineers. Everything is we need more, but we need good.

Yes.

We need more good. That's what we need. That's good. So, but another thing becomes scarce and valuable. So what's more scarce and valuable now? Events, in-person stuff, all the stuff that like, because all the online stuff is just— by the way, I do tell my team now, the only thing I'm concerned about with the people who are really good now is actually the burnout piece. So to your point, they do definitely feel momentum. But even for me, like sometimes I just, I gotta slow it down a little bit, right? Anyway, all that to say is I think this makes sense. If they find a really good events team and they're able to put on amazing events, that's good for them because those are all marketable moments as well. And those are also good for to, to be posted to social too.

Dude, I totally agree with you. Speaking of events, you want to do an old Marketing School classic?

Yeah.

Let's do 6 ways Eric and I are leveraging in-person events in 2026. All right. So number one, when I go to conferences, I'm setting up in-person events now at conferences. So a lot of times where I'm going to speak, let's say it's in Brazil or Hong Kong or UK or whatever it may be, I'll work with the organizer to actually have a private meeting room within their event venue. And they invite the attendees, specific ones that we select, and we'll do a free lunch or, and during that lunch we'll do presentation and networking. And that's actually been working out really well for us.

That's good. What I've always done with events is I like to throw dinners around them. I think Neil's is, I'll say Neil's actually talked about this on this podcast. So use the YouTube API, use it for marketing school. He's given out his entire flow for this. He throws events that are tied to people who actually are people that are part of his ICP. They have some power in the organization as well. And it's pretty like, if it's a larger company, they're likely to move around, they'll probably think about him in the future. So even having that one touchpoint, it goes very far. I would just say that what's always worked well for me for the events that I typically am speaking at or the ones I'm doing, I always try to throw a dinner around them. Now the thing is, You want to make sure that the dinner you're throwing ideally is people that are in your ICP. Don't just throw it with a bunch of speakers, which is what I used to do in the past. That's fun, but it's not going to drive the best ROI for you.

Dude, totally. When you mentioned how I look at people who have power, Eric's speaking about decision authority, and he really nailed it when he talked about how we focus on Executives because they're likely to also get other high-paying jobs at other companies. So for example, there was this lady who worked at Oracle and one of their Latin America regions. She wanted to work with us. They had an agency of record. They gave the work to the agency of record, so we didn't get it. She moved to another company eventually. This is over a many period, year period, like probably like 5, 6 years. She went to another company eventually, wasn't able to get us in due to budgets. And the third company she went to was Thomson Reuters. She was able to get us in.

That's good.

Right? All because she heard us ages ago and she was working at a company that she wanted to work with us but wasn't able to.

Was that your number 3?

No, no, no, that was still number— oh, that was just reinforcing number 1. Like people really forget the long game of building that brand with your ideal customer because as they move around, if you do good work, they'll keep bringing you with them. Or if they like what you have to say, eventually they'll be able to test you out, just maybe not at the current company they're with.

Actually, that's very true. Steve Young's private equity firm reached out and then apparently the guy had been following both of us for many years and he had actually invited both of us to speak at a private equity conference. I'm like, I didn't hear about this. Apparently you didn't either. But the whole idea is like they want to do something now. And then he's— so the whole idea is like you want to make sure that you're Nurturing, nurturing, nurturing. And the good thing about creating content is it gets people to remember you over time. It's getting these impressions, right? So you're actually on number 3 now. So go ahead.

Number 3. So another thing that we're doing when we're doing these in-person events is setting up side events with platforms. So if I'm going to go speak in Brazil. There's a Google Brazil, right? There's a LinkedIn Brazil. We'll then say, hey, I'm in town. We would love to do an in-session event at your own corporation, call it LinkedIn or Google. Do you want to invite some of your big advertisers? We'll be there. We're going to show them how they can even get more benefit from their LinkedIn advertising or their Google advertising, so it benefits the platform. They bring in some of their top advertisers within their region. We network and it gives us access to more potential customers.

So for us typically also what we, when Neil and I, we every year we speak at the HubSpot conference. And so what happens is we'll do a session with them and there's Q&A as well. What I would say is one year I remember we did a separate session too. So it's almost like we're throwing side events for these things, right? And then HubSpot actually helped us with that. That side event that we did, I think we had 200 people show up to the room. That rated way higher than the you and I doing the Marketing School one. So that session rated a 4.97 and HubSpot's crowd is typically higher.

Wait, wait, which session?

So we remember this was in Boston, the last time we're in Boston. So last year we're in San Francisco, right? Remember the year before we're in Boston. And so we did our Marketing School session, but then after that we did a session just for Marketing School fans to come in and 200 people came in and it was very interactive and it's like, hey guys, get into groups itself, I was basically directing people, hey, get into groups, talk about the latest thing. And we picked a champion at the end, then they won like an iPad or something, right? Remember there's the Taiwanese person that walked up?

Did they even win anything?

No, they didn't. We just said, you get bragging rights, you're the champion. Yeah, we're like, yeah, right? But that scored 4.97 and we didn't have to like that. When you foster a community like that, it connects people together. That's something we should continue to do. But our talk that year, you know what it rated?

Much lower than 4.97. Yeah, but it was funny on the San Francisco event, my talk was one of the highest rated.

Isn't that funny how it works?

Yeah.

So Neil and I have been speaking together for so long where sometimes he'll rate the highest, sometimes he'll rate low, sometimes I'll rate the highest, sometimes I'll rate low. Like it goes back and forth.

And it's just really random. It also depends on the event because if an event has more technical people, sometimes their expectations are extremely technical. But the struggle that Eric and I have as speakers is when we go extremely technical, you lose a lot of the audience who's not technical and then your speaker ratings just plummet.

So last year I did that, that pissed off a lot of people.

Yes.

So like, because the year before I scored pretty high, last year not so much, yeah.

Yes, and a great example of this is during our Marketing School event, Eric started bringing up MCPs and then I interjected and asked the audience who knows about MCPs, a majority of the people did not know about it.

Yep.

Some people got really mad at me for interjecting, Eric did not get upset, he knew why I was interjecting is so that that way would give him an opportunity to explain it. And then during his main presentation, who's super technical, it was great and valuable, but people had an issue that it was, I think, super technical.

Yeah, it was, it was too technical. So by the way, it did, it did drive leads for the really technical people, but just keep in mind, you have to, you have to know who's in your audience. You have to know the level. That's why when you speak at these events, by the way, you should always ask the event manager who's in the audience and what would be a home run.

Yes.

No different than like, so Neil and I are both speaking at this, the SoCom eCommerce Conference, which is free by the way, Manhattan Beach. I think May 14th, we're both speaking on that day. So if you guys want to come hang out with us, it's free. You can apply, just search for Social Commerce Summit or something like that. Continue.

I just made my promo video for that event this morning.

You made a promo video?

Yeah, they didn't ask you to make a promo video?

My promo is talking about it here.

Oh, this is twice.

So this is twice. So this is twice. Oh, you know why? You got paid more than I did. I arranged that for you too, by the way. Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah. I said, oh, Neil can't do it for that. So yeah, you gave a big discount though.

Yes.

Yeah.

So anyway, 'cause this is in my backyard.

Yes. It's easy.

Yeah.

All right.

If I had to drive, actually I still had to drive a long time, but if I had to fly—

You'd have to still get there earlier. It's Manhattan Beach. It's not easy.

Yeah. I had to leave probably 2 hours before.

Yeah. You know what I have to do? I have to do a mastermind, so I have to go, I have to get there at like 3:00 PM, 4:00 PM.

Ah, okay.

See, so you do more of those. I'll take the mastermind piece.

All right.

Yeah. Anyway, continue.

What number were we on?

I think you were on 3.

I was on, we just finished it. I think I'm on, then you went or no?

I have no idea.

Well, let's go with number 5 because we lost track. So I'll just go on the next one. One thing that I've been doing with more in-person events, if you're ever presenting, put a QR code at the end. It's an easier way to collect a lot of leads and follow up with them. Don't just follow up with them from an aspect of trying to close them. Follow up and actually try to build a relationship. Eric does actually something interesting and you should do this as your number 6. You get a list of the attendees and then your email too is pretty creative. You want to break that down?

Oh yes, yes, yes. Okay. So, oh, what the heck? Okay, I was going to show you like my cost diagram for Claude. Okay, so what I do is we typically will try to ask the conference organizers, okay, if we can get the attendee list. Usually it's a no, but when we're able to get it, we get an email list. Okay, so we get that and then we also get all the attendees. Okay, that's one piece. The second piece is to Neil's point, if you put a QR code at the end, you get all the leads. My sales team can see all the leads that come through that day and that they downloaded that thing. So what will happen is they will get an email, all the attendees will get an email saying, hey, thanks for attending the talk, or maybe thanks for registering for the talk, just so it covers everyone. And here's the link to the slides over here. And by the way, if you want to talk about marketing or if you need help in this area, this is what we do over here. It's very light. That actually does get— a lot of people are just like, when And by the way, when it comes to marketing services, it's more about timing than anything. And so when you hit enough people at the right time, they're just like, oh, by the way, yeah, I do need services. And they often forget the agencies that they talk to, right? So it's really about keeping yourself top of mind. And I'll say a bonus piece, Neil, is you want to take the raw recordings from your talk and ideally you're clipping them up. That's one piece. And ideally you're taking that long-form video because remember what, Neil, when we did a long-form video when we both spoke in Germany, That video alone, 120,000 views for long form. Not bad. It's pretty good. That's actually really good. Rest in peace SEO. That was the thing. Remember that one?

Yeah. Also a controversial topic, which helps.

Yeah. Yeah. That was it, I think.

Yeah, that's it. All right, let's go to the next topic.

So, okay, let me give you an update, Neil. So here's how I decreased basically my $7,500 a month AI token spend to zero. Or it's trending towards zero. So you can see this over here. So Neil, look at this. So you can see this month to date so far, $6,700, right? You can see the graphs over here. It's like going up to like $400 a day or whatever. And I'm not saying I'm spending the most because some people hit me up on Instagram. I'm spending $30 grand a month. Congratulations. So anyway, my point is you can see the graph starting to go down.

Okay. So what's the red versus the white?

That's just the different models. So red would be Sonnet. And then you have Opus over here as well. And then you have Opus like 4.7 and all that. So my point is, Neil, I got it down somehow. Something broke over here. Like yesterday it went up. So I'm going to have to look into that. But all I did, Neil, was I changed my model hierarchy. And so what I mean by that is I have— I paid $200 a month for Claude Max. Okay. And then I said, what's your—

Using first versus second versus third.

And then OpenAI OAuth is number 2. ChatGPT 5.5 is amazing. And then the last one is a fallback. To the, the API. And I realized what happened yesterday. What happened with my OpenCLaw is it kept screwing up. It kept calling the old API because it didn't realize that it had the CLI. So something's broken there. And so that was fixed as of this morning, actually. So that was fixed. So you do need to continue to monitor your costs. But I got this as low as— I got this to $20. So it was trending towards zero and I'm going to remove all the cron jobs. And so now it's a good deal.

That's a great deal. Here's something that I saw interesting the other day because I was talking to Heath and we're talking about Mac Studios because he has quite a few of them.

Yeah. He has like 15, right? I don't know. He has a lot. So you know what happened? Remember Thomas from SaneBox? So they interviewed him for his podcast and he's like, yeah, Heathen has 15 Mac Minis. How many do you have? I was like, I have one.

So he's been buying like Mac Studios as well, not just Minis. And I didn't know this. He was breaking it down to me. He's just like, Dude, he's like, uh, he's like, yeah, it costs a lot for, uh, memory. Like you can't even get any of these computers anytime soon. I'm like, what are you talking about? So I go to the Apple website.

Oh, nothing's available.

Nothing's available. And the memory storage is way lower than what you actually need.

I was trying to buy the 512 and then 2 weeks later it was only down to 256. Now I can only get the 96. Is the 96 even available for the memory? Uh, 96, right?

You can get 96 or 256, but your delivery time is nowhere near soon and they don't offer 512 anymore. Yeah.

So I use— so my plan is to wait for the new ones. They're going to sell out quickly, but I want to buy like 2 of the new ones. But I bought 2 of the DGX Sparks. That's why, because the Mac Minis are out. And so, Neil, to your point, the Quinn model, I think Alibaba, their open source model, almost equivalent to Opus 4.6. Opus 4.7 is out right now, but it's really good. It's really solid. And so what we talked about earlier in this podcast, my Camry fleet has to run on these DGX Sparks, and then we're also going to have open source as well. So I might just eliminate the API from, at least from my personal, but I think for my company, you're still going to have to keep paying for API because you want them to have the best models.

Yep.

Yeah. Just like you want your kids to have the best food, the best schooling, and all these things.

Yes, that is true. It all ends up adding up to being a lot of money. But yeah, dude, these computers, like I was going on the checkout, Like these things are expensive. I didn't realize how expensive these things—

It's like 16 grand for a fully loaded one.

Uh-huh. I was like, this is like a car almost.

Yeah, it's, but it's worth it. It's just a productive car, way more productive than a car.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So while, while Neil's looking for something right now, I'm going to go for the next one. Okay. So Salesforce just admitted it. Switching from per seat to usage pricing made customer spend go up 83%, Neil, 83%. So earlier we just talked about how Salesforce is going all in on APIs, CLIs, all these things, right? So Jason Lemkin, the SaaStr or the, the EchoSign guy, okay, he said they reduced their seats from 10+ to 2 human seats and 1 API seat. And yet we now pay $22,000 a year, 83% up from $12,000. Why? Our 20+ AI agents use Salesforce 100 times more. than we did a year ago. So they now have an AI VP of marketing, AI VP customer success, and run 4 third-party AI GTM agents, including Agentforce.

Is their pricing model still by seat, but it's for AI? Is that what they switched it to?

APIs, the API costs.

Oh, the API usage is going up instead of the seats. So they're spending less on the seats, but they're spending way more on the API.

Yeah, which you can try to optimize as much as you can. It's still going to keep going up. It's just about dampening the cost.

So he's spending more money in total.

Yeah, you're spending more money. So 83% up, like $12,000 to $22,000, right? And So I think we're going to continue to see this. Now, here's the flip side of that, Neil. Notion. Do you use Notion? You pay for Notion?

We probably pay in our company, but I don't use it.

I don't use it either, right? So here's the thing. Notion, they're all over AI, right? They're like, okay, you know, it's— they've been accelerating their AI adoption, all this stuff. They just realized they hadn't used Notion in months, even with the strong AI product enhancements, because their agents don't need Notion, right? They do need Salesforce. What do the agents They need .md files.

That's what they need.

You're okay just using Obsidian for that. Wait, is this Notion realizing or is this Jason Lemkin realizing he doesn't need Notion?

I thought you were like, Notion realized they don't need Notion.

Yeah, they're like, shut their company down.

I'm like, wow, I don't know who runs marketing there, but I would fire that person. Yeah.

So I think that's really interesting. Per seat versus usage-based. I think we're going to continue to see this change because even the API for SEO stuff, the way we're planning to do it now is, okay, freemium, you get some access and then you're going to have to pay on usage. I'm sure you're going to— you're thinking about that for your SaaS products too. Yes.

And then a lot of companies, if you look at FINN, it is for ticket resolved, which, you know, people just want— I can go both ways. I know a lot of people want to pay for outcomes.

It's hard to measure too.

It's hard to measure. I personally, as a business owner, prefer monthly costs that are fixed.

Yeah, because it's more predictable.

Very much more predictable.

Yep.

Now, if we use it a lot more, all right, I get you. You may have charging just like with emails. Like, you know how your emails is fixed, but if they, if you send out X amount more emails, you have X more contacts, you go into a higher band.

Yep.

The reason I personally like that, and you nailed it, is I like predictability in our cash flow and our accounting, our business, what we're going to generate each quarter. Like, I don't like this ambiguity of, oh, you just pay for whatever you use. Well, if you just get spammed and A lot of, you know, Fin fixes a lot of support tickets that were just spam or bullcrap. Like what, you just ended up spending thousands of extra dollars for something that wasn't needed?

It's tough. I think it's a tough job for CFOs in the next few years because they're going to— because you're an enterprise company, before you're trying to protect as much, but now it's like you have to pay on usage for the best Claude tokens, the best OpenAI tokens. I do think, you know, the agents that we're selling right now for the revenue agent side, we're basically going to charge like a base fee. There's a management fee, but also there's token overages. too. And we're probably just going to mark up whatever it is that they're spending because we don't want to hold them back. If you're getting this intelligence that could do more for you, you probably want to pay more for it. And so unless you don't want to grow as fast, so like, what are you supposed to do? Yeah. Yeah. But speaking of Fin, by the way, they launched a sales agent. Did you see that?

I did not see that.

They launched a sales agent. They're betaing it right now, but I think they're trying to charge people based on like a per lead basis. So we'll see how that goes.

And it just goes out there and tries to get you leads?

I think, I think it's more of an inbound. So, It comes to your website and then they take on those leads.

So. So they take on leads that I've already taken on myself?

Yeah.

And then they'll do the sales for you?

Yeah.

And then they charge you a percentage?

I think they'll charge you just more than $1. I think they'll make, maybe they'll say for like, I don't know, $500, $100, $50 or something like that.

So, but they'll help you close the deal? Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe they'll say, we'll just help you with self-serve. So I don't know all the details. Yeah.

I don't see it working for enterprise, but. Yeah, for self-serve, it could potentially help.

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So wait, before we get into the next one, you want to know why we're tired?

Why?

Dude, my son comes, he says 3 o'clock in the morning. I usually wake up like at 4 something, 5 at the latest, but he's like, check in on me. So my kids have this thing where like they want you to check in on them. So, I'll put them to bed and I usually do the nighttime routine. Then I surprise check in on them within like 5 minutes of putting them to bed so they know that I'm watching.

Yeah.

We have cameras in their room, not in a creepy way, but like the nanny cams to make sure they're okay. They don't just try to roam out the front door. It notifies us because you don't want your kids just trying to leave the house or do something that they're not supposed to. Or if they cry, it notifies us like something could be wrong. And my son, like at 3 AM, he's like, check up on me. So I go to his room like, hey, everything okay? And he's just like, I had a nightmare. I was so scared. And he's like shaking. So then he's like, will you lay with me, daddy, please? I'm so scared. So I just lay in his bed.

Is he in his own room?

He's in his own room. Yeah. So then I'm laying with him and I'm just like trying to fall asleep and he's like grabbing me tight and shaking.

Oh, so you don't have sleep.

So I didn't have much sleep. And then he's like, Are you gonna leave in the morning to go to the gym? And I'm like, yeah, but I'm like, you'll be okay. You'll be sleeping by then.

Yeah.

He's like, but then I won't know if you're leaving and then the monster can come in. Like, there's no monster. He's like, can we go lay in, in, uh, in your room instead? So I'm like, all right. So we go lay in my room because he's like, at least mommy will be there in the morning while you go to the gym.

Yeah.

And then he's just excited to sleep in our bed because he doesn't do it. So he can't fall asleep. And, he's waking up my wife, then she's not going to get sleep. I'm like, let's go back into your room. So then, I didn't get any sleep after pretty much 3:00 a.m.

Oh, you should have done this. Okay, here's how you solve it. Creatine, 15 to 20 grams of creatine, you're locked back in.

Me?

Yeah. When you don't get good sleep, you take 15, 20 grams, it locks you back in. It's like as if you had good sleep.

But, does it help you get good sleep when someone's pulling on your arm and not sleeping themselves?

You feel like poo-poo right now, right? If you have 15, 20 grams of creatine, you're good.

Oh, you're saying right now?

Yeah, right now.

Not when he's waking up like at 3 AM.

No, you just deal with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm like, I don't know if that'll solve it. But yeah, so if I put 15 to 20 grams, you're saying I can take a quick nap?

You don't even need a nap. You'll bring— like, I've had nights where I had bad sleep. There's nights where I didn't sleep at all, and like, zero sleep, and I took the 15, 20 grams, I was good. I made it through the day.

Oh, because it's like caffeine, right?

It's not caffeine, no. It's just It, I forgot what it is exactly, but what I've, so what people have been talking about recently with creatine is not just good for building your muscles, it's good for cognitive benefits. But because your body eats the 5 grams so quickly, um, in other areas, if you want the brain benefits, 15 to 20 grams, that's what you do. And it'll, it'll cancel out the bad sleep.

So I've been using it for brain benefits for a long time. I take it daily. I take 10 grams. I don't do 15 to 20, but I always—

I do 15 to 20. Yeah.

I didn't know it was 15 to 20.

Look at, look at, uh, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She talks about it all the time. There's, there's enough studies on this already. Yeah.

And is it 15 all at once or you space it out?

I just do it all at once. That's why I, that's why I have to pee so much when I come here.

Oh, 'cause, oh, 'cause you drink a lot of water 'cause during—

Well, no, no, I take a lot of supplements in the morning and that 15 gram, 15, 20 grams plus maybe I, I take all the other supplements. Maybe I'm taking like 50 to 60 grams of stuff. So it's a lot.

On a side note, Eric and I are not giving you creative or medical or health advice.

This is, we're giving, we're just talking to each other as friends. Okay. Next one.

None disclaimers in this podcast.

Next one. All right. So 70% of brands don't show up when an AI agent goes shopping. Yours probably doesn't either. Okay, so if we look at this over here, so I think this is a game changer, Neil. Google's design.md file is the 50x brand scaling system. So not enough people are talking about this right now. So Google just came out with— they released this. They're trying to have a new standard, like just as there's an agents.md file that agents will use, there's like these standard.md files.

Just like they used for everyone listening. Everyone remember their old AMP framework? AMP.

This is a new framework that they're trying to standardize for everyone to use. That's why they open source this format. But the example that I just gave a little earlier where I showed you my landing page, right? That was used using— here, I'm going to pull this back up again. So this is using design.md. And all I did, Neil, was I took their design.md. I went to GitHub, okay? I took their repo for this and I said, hey, I want you to make a design.md for ClickFlow for single grain. for Single Brain and for Carrot, and it has a design.md for each one. And this does look like the ClickFlow website. And so my, my whole thing is this, you know, if you and I as marketers, we want to spin up ads, we want to spin up carousels, we want to spin up landing pages, whatever it is that we want to do now, this makes it even faster, which is why I— and by the way, when you have a design.md, it also helps agents discover it as well, right? And so I think this is very big for marketers and I don't think many people are talking about it. So I think most brands are going to be behind because they aren't AI-readable yet. I think this part of it will help change that.

So for anyone who's listening that's an agency, this could actually be very useful to you, and here's why. Not just what Eric's talking about, but there was an agency recently who had around 40% of their revenue from AI consulting and integrating all these new types of protocols. They just sold for a 30+ times multiple of EBITDA.

30+ times?

I think it was 32 or 33 or something, 30+ times.

Wow.

Only 40% of their revenue was coming from kind of stuff. And there was some structure on the deal, but a large chunk, if not—

How much structure?

Well, majority of the money was upfront.

Okay, I understand. Great structure.

This is what I was at least told. I would assume around 70% of it upfront.

Yeah, that's great. That's a great structure, guys.

Even if 60% was upfront, it's such a good deal.

You know, it's funny. So we're close to hiring this person right now. And then he's like, yeah, the current company that they're at, they don't— the private equity firm doesn't believe in AI, right? So he's the one that's trying to push AI fluency. And yet at the same time, You have these multiples that are floating around. So look, I'll just put it to you this way. The classic playbook now is you basically take your ad variants, all the landing pages, you feed it into this design.md, you have an agent take care of it. It can make— you go from like 1 asset to 500 assets. The key thing, Neil, with this is whenever you're making this stuff, like these slides, you want consistency. And there hasn't been the ability to have good consistency, at least for me, until now. Right.

Yes. But dude, this is something that's interesting for you going back to the agency part because your agency, I don't mean this in a bad way, I mean it in a positive way because you have less headcount and because you have a smaller revenue total than larger agencies, it's easier for you to get your percentage up to like 40, 50% to some of this kind of stuff.

40, 50x.

No, 40, 50% being AI related.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, right? Because percentage-wise, it should be easier for you. And if your contracts state that and you're actually doing that work, you can go to market. You know, I'm not going to give Eric's numbers, I don't know them, but let's just use simple numbers. If, and I'm just going to use clean, easy numbers. If he's doing $10 million in revenue, $2 million in profit, and I'm not saying that's the numbers, I'm just using round numbers. You know, 30x multiple on $2 million is $60 million. And on the $60, even if they give you $40 upfront or $30 upfront, that's such amazing—

This podcast is going to make everyone into an AI agency.

Yes.

That's what you're doing right now, Neil. But no, Neil's not wrong. And here's the thing, I actually think there's an advantage to being really like for startups right now, for example, or even smaller companies because you can make the changes more swiftly. Now, that being said, There's trade-offs to it, right? But I will just say that I have said internally in my company, I was like, what a good time to be alive right now, right? What a good time to be exactly where we are right now because we can do what we want. And like, I've also said this too, in terms of AI fluency at my company, I push it so hard. There's AI fluency standup every day. I'm in that standup every day, right?

Yeah.

And I'm just like, guys, like, if you become better, great. If you quit, great, right? Like, I will take both outcomes. And so I'm like, The train has left, guys. It's left many, many, many, many times. And the analogy I also use, Neil, is like, if you and I were riding horses, do you know how long it would take for us to get to New York from LA?

New York to LA on horses?

Horseback. You and I were riding a horse together.

2 months, 3 months?

Exactly 3 months. Okay. 90 days. Okay. Now, if you and I got in a truck, a pickup truck, how long does it take for us to go from LA to New York?

Train LA to New York, 1 week.

Truck.

Oh, truck, you're saying. Like nonstop?

Yeah. You might have to stop for pee and food and all that.

3 days, 4 days?

Exactly, yes. 4 days. Okay. So, 22.5 times faster. So, the analogy I give people now, because a lot of people talk about how they work in like 2025 clock speed, right? I say, look, man, you might have been in a horse last year and you might have really strong strategic thinking and all that, but you're still on a horse right Now, if you get in a pickup truck, not only can you drive way faster, your capacity is a lot more. You can carry a much bigger load now, right? And so that's my analogy for everyone. I'm like, right guys, let's all come along, right? Let's all come along. And I want everyone to get better. And then if you quit, also good. So yeah.

All right, what's another topic? I was actually curious on this one. I don't know if this was made up by AI or this is actually true.

Which one?

Because it says these 7 prompts cut our ad spend by 52% in 60 days. Steal them. I'm like—

Oh, that's totally AI generated.

I'm like, what were the prompts? I don't know. I don't remember any.

I don't even have— so here's the thing. Let's talk about prompts for a second. I think having to remember prompts and like saving all these prompts is theater. I think it's unnecessary to have this stuff because I don't remember the prompts. You don't remember the prompts. And the agents themselves are getting much better at prompting. So really it's just about studying, doing more than anything, and you're just constantly experimenting.

But I agree with Eric, and but back in the day when you started seeing ChatGPT first come out, prompts were really important. It's not the same anymore, and the big mistake we're seeing people make now isn't really related to prompts. It's actually what data are you feeding them before you do anything else? And I'll give you an example of this with homework because I see a lot of kids these days cheating, and I was talking to some students. I was speaking at a college, and when I say cheating, they were using AI to do their homework. And they were telling me how AI does a terrible job. And I was breaking that to them. I'm like, you're thinking about it the wrong way. And I was like, why does it do a terrible job? They're like, if I ask it 10 questions, you know, 1 or 2 of them will be off. And I was like, before you actually have AI help you, are you actually telling it what to pull from, what to read, what's your test based on? And I'm like, if you tell them where to look for the answer and only look there instead 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 being right, you'll probably get 10 out of 10 right because you're giving them the exact source to pull from and you're telling them to only pull from that source and nowhere else. And I'm like, then you'll start getting all the answers right. And they're like, oh, never thought about that.

You know, I just realized something as you were talking, Neil. AI is not just— we're not really talking about intelligence amplifier because kids, there's a lot of intelligent kids. I actually think AI, IA, intelligence amplifier is now JA, JA. It's judgment amplifier because children, they don't have good judgment yet. They don't have good experience yet, right? But they might be very intelligent, but they don't have good experience. And so the people, let's say you have people on your team, they have poor judgment and they use AI. Well, if they have poor— what was that? BJ, BJ, right? Bad judgment amplifier.

Yes.

BA, right? Whatever you want to call it. So yeah. Anyway, I think that was interesting. Okay, so let's move on to this one now, okay? I have a— here, you pick one of the hooks. I was going to go with this hook. I wasn't sure if I wanted to use it.

3 roles on your marketing team that won't exist in 18 months. If you're in one of them, listen up.

Okay. The first role that won't exist in 2027 is a data analyst.

Someone who is actually just looking at spreadsheets, analyzing data, and telling you what to do with that data. And there's a few reasons, and Eric and I will name off a few of them, but one is, dude, neither Eric or I or any company wants their data lagged. We want it in real time. Why do you need a data analyst helping you look at the data that's not in real time? I'm not saying you won't have people in your data and analytics team team helping out, but you don't need someone reporting to you on the data. AI should have it right then and there, notify you when something is wrong, and then when anyone on your team, whether they're in data or in marketing or any other role, they should just be able to ask AI a question related to your data and it pulls up the answer for them. Yep.

Number 2, I would say, is the entry-level content writer, the entry-level SEO writer. I think that is something that's going to— you need someone with good judgment and good experience overall. And so someone that can just generate basic copy like eHow, remember Demand— what was it called? Was it called eHow? What was it eventually changed into?

I don't know, but I know what you're talking about. It was like that big company in LA.

Back in the day, Demand Media.

Demand Media, there you go.

So they used to generate, people used to generate a bunch of articles that were like 500 words or something like that. They would hire people in India, for example, right? And just crank out a bunch of these for the game SEO. Nowadays, you already have generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude that can generate basic content for you. So I think entry-level content creators or writers, I think what's going to happen is you're going to have, you want a single human editor instead, those are going to be hired more. Those are going to be in more demand than just the entry-level content writers.

Yes. The last one I would say is marketers, especially on the entry level, where jack of all trades will not be as needed. Specialists will do way better in today's role than jack of all trades, because when you specialize, you have really amazing domain expertise, or you should, and you should be better at things like strategy or the nuances where sometimes AI will miss or get wrong. I, we look at an organization as a pyramid flipped upside down. You have more people at, on the higher levels and mid-levels, and you have less people at the bottom. And a lot of the people are in the mid and higher levels. Sure, some of them will be jack of all trades, but the majority of them will be like extreme specialists who are A players at one specific thing.

Dude, so we should talk about the levels here because you're talking about that. So there are really 4 levels when it comes to AI marketing. 90% of teams are stuck at level 1. Here's how you jump to level 3. So the 4 levels here, Number 1, level 1, unacceptable.

Okay.

90% are unacceptable. Sorry. Number 2—

But describe each level. So what is unacceptable when you're saying unacceptable?

Let me go through them first and then I'll come back. Okay. So level 1 is unacceptable. Level 2 is capable. Level 3 is adoptive and level 4 is transformative. Okay. I'm going to go through each one. Okay. These are, and then we're going to talk about how you can jump to level 3, which is adoptive. So then this is stolen from Zapier's AI fluency table. Okay. I just want to give them credit. So unacceptable is obviously unacceptable, okay? So unacceptable means that in 2026, if you say, hey, how are you using AI right now? Oh, I love using ChatGPT. Even these executives we talked to from the holdcos, oh, I'm not really into AI right now. If you want AI, I'm not your guy. Actually, this guy was a president for one of these companies, right? He's like, yeah, I'm not really into it. How are you using it right now? Oh, I'm just using it to search for things. I'm using it for recipes. It's been tremendous for that. Okay, unacceptable. Level 2, you have people that are capable. Capable now means that you are using like Claude Cowork, for example, you're using to maybe schedule things for yourself. You're using it to analyze your spreadsheets quickly. Okay. You're using for actual real work, not just at base level. Okay. So that's, by the way, this chart changes. We're talking like every month or so this changes.

Okay.

So you have unacceptable, you have capable, then you have adoptive. Which is where we want most people to go, okay? Adoptive is where you are using something, okay? And let's say you're using it to, you're inputting something into AI and you're having it do the keyword research for you, or you're having it create like 200 ads for you at the same time, okay? You basically have a human review the AI work. The human asks for something, the AI does the work, the human reviews. That is adoptive, okay? I'll give you an example. Someone on our team's done this. They created something end-to-end. It plugs in with our agent and they'll say, hey, with this agent, hey, can you spin up 200 ads based on, you know, the data over here? Literally, it can do that. That's weeks or days of work that's condensed into just this workflow. That's where we want most people to go. The only difference with transformative and adoptive is that workflow still requires a human in the loop there to constantly check it more often. Transformative means you have a closed loop where the system is improving on itself. Recursively, and you want a lot of these workflows in your company. Transformative, you're probably only going to have like maybe 1%, 2%, 3% max, maybe 5% of people that are transformative right now as I record this. That's why you want most people to get to adoptive because Neil, today's capable is tomorrow's unacceptable.

That's true. That is very true, dude. It's moving at such a fast pace. One of the biggest questions I tend to get asked by marketers right now, is how do we keep up with all of the change? And you know what I tell people? You can't keep up with all of the change and don't worry about being the first adopter to every single new platform. Wait to see what settles in a few months after launch and focus on those things that are gaining a lot of traction and look like they're going to stick around. Yeah.

I would say one, if you try to keep up, you can't. I feel like I'm behind every single day. I'm sure, you know, the people you talk to, the friends I talk to that think they're on, that we think everyone's on top of it. Nobody on top of it. Like you just figure out what you can based on the time that you're willing to allocate to it. And I would say, look, if you feel like you're very AI-pilled right now, the only concern I have for people that are very AI-pilled is the risk of burnout. You're definitely going to feel momentum, but the burnout can be really real now because you don't stop working. Because there's people on my team that work till 2 AM. I'm like, nobody told you to work till 2 AM, right? He's like, no. I'm like, then why are you doing it? He's like, because I'm having so much fun right now, right?

Yeah.

The other person's like 1 AM and he's like, I found out the ChatGPT new images model. I'm like, that's fantastic. But please, I need you guys to, you almost need to have a mental health, like I used to kind of like, we used to be like, okay, yeah, mental health policy right now. It's like, no, no, no, you really do need a mental health policy now.

You have a lot of people that you know that are entrepreneurs and I am in a similar camp as you. It's funny when I talk to my entrepreneur friends, one of the biggest problems we see in many departments, especially marketing, because you're adapting so much with AI, is actually mental health. And we're seeing become a bigger and bigger problem because people are overwhelmed. They're working too many hours and they're not taking care of the health. And people have this misconception that you just get more done by working more. If you don't get enough sleep, you'll actually be less productive. And sleeping, like I sleep 8 hours a day, sleeping a solid 8 hours a day. And again, this isn't health advice, but what I found for me and most people you actually are more productive and you get more done in the hours you are working compared if you have a lack of sleep because you have less brain fog.

I think this period right now, maybe the next 5, 10 years or so, most people will have, most companies will have some type of mental health policy where probably your tokens get shut off or something like that. But I just think, I think so. You just turn the intelligence off.

That's so good.

Yeah.

I never thought about that. Like your tokens are shut off, you're working too much.

No. But like, I think people are going to realize that, hey, like maybe this thing is intended to help us make work less overall in the long run, right? I think right now everyone's just so excited by this new technology that I think we're going to over-index over work right now. I think longer term it might decrease, right? But I also think the motivating people are always going to be the same. Like that's never changed in history.

So. Yeah, dude, it's ridiculous. But yeah, and I feel bad for people too, because it's like the people that don't work hard, I have to push to work harder. The people who are A-players, they work too hard and I actually have to push them to like—

Work less.

Work less, spend time with family.

Yeah.

And I'm like, dude, this is just a recipe for disaster for your personal relationship with your kids or your spouse or significant other. I'm like, you need to work less. And you just can never push those people. You have to push them, but you can never convince them to work less. Sometimes they'll take a vacation. I had someone tell me like, oh yeah, I'm going to now have to travel to Mexico more because of family, but don't worry, they have better internet than Cuba. I'm like, dude, I don't worry about your You work 7 days a week and you need to work less. The internet, if it's shitty, it's actually a good thing so that way you actually work less for once and you spend more time with your family.

Dude, speaking of vacations, I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so that's our recruiting day. But it's because there's like, part of the reason is like, I've never been to Mexico City, so that's where I'm going, but it's just like—

Oh, this is the trip we were talking about during lunch.

The work is nonstop.

And are you gonna stop using AI during this trip?

No.

That's not a vacation.

Do you actually go on vacation?

I'm going on a Disney cruise.

For the first time. But usually you work during your vacations.

Well, I still get to work on the Disney cruise. They have internet.

Well, we work 'cause it's fun. That's part of my vacation. But you know what? I don't have to get on all these calls. I don't have to be in all these meetings. That's the fun part.

I'll do the same stuff, so.

Yeah, so you'll still be working. You're obviously gonna spend time with your family and all that. But let's just be honest, we enjoy working and this is my time to learn more, to experiment more. That's all I'm doing.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. We get to pick one more here. So let's pick, okay, I'm going to go with this one. This one's a bit of a, like a, what do you want to say? Headliney, clickbaity one. Let's go with this one. Okay. Here.

Neil? Yeah, go for it.

So we replaced 4 people on our content team with 5 AI tools. Output went up 3x. Here's the stack. So I'm like number 1 over here.

Okay.

So we using Higgsfield, Higgsfield has been great in terms of cranking out way more ad creative or way more videos, way more UGC content. It just wasn't previously possible before. And by the way, when we say replaced, we mean augmented.

Yeah. Number 2, and we're not saying we actually only 3x the output. This is that headline that AI came out for us, but we've done tests with AnswerThePublic, that is my own tool, usually can cut down time spent on content creation by a third to a fourth. So you're saving quite a bit of time because not only does it help you find the topics, it helps you You still should keep a human in the loop. It'll help you post, it'll help you come up with the images. It pretty much does a lot of it soup to nuts, and it can do it in a lot of different languages. But still, even with that, you still need a human in the loop. And I really advise, no matter how many tools Eric and I give you, we are not advising you to take out humans from the loop for content creation. You may not need as many humans, but if you replace humans fully, your results aren't going to be as good.

Number 3, this is a big one. Google's design.md file unlocks you, especially as a marketer, because now you can have consistent designs for landing pages, for ads, for all the things that you're trying to do that you feel blocked on before. It's like, oh sure, you can use all these cool tools, Nano Banana and all that, but when you generate things and they look— your carousels look inconsistent, your landing pages look inconsistent, your ads look inconsistent, it's not that helpful, right? So you need to have some type of brand consistency. Design.md is going to help you do that and it's completely free to use.

Yeah. Number 4. Number 4, Number 4, you can either use HeyGen or you can use YouTube's tool when you're publishing content. They'll adjust your content into multiple languages, which is really great. I know some of these social media platforms are already doing it, but not all of them are doing it. And that's where HeyGen gets in there because it can just sync your lips and all that kind of stuff with whatever language you're trying to create content in.

Number 5, last but not least, you got 2 options here. You can use HeyGen's HyperFrames, which is open source as well, to create videos. Or you can use Remotion. Both are great if you want to make, let's say, a video for Answer the Public. I want to make a video for ClickFlow, for example. You can sync that with your design.md as well, and you can make these kind of 1-minute videos introducing a new product or a new feature, whatever it is that you have, and then you can then be publishing it to everything that you— then all the social channels. And so if you combine these 5 things, you're going to augment your entire content team and the good people are going to become way stronger. And it's gonna be a happier time for everyone. So guys, that is it for today. Please let us know what you think about this, this new format, new-ish format, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.