AI is Already More Than Capable to Make You Filthy Rich

I thought it'd be interesting to start with the Salesforce CEO is saying that no more raises for people that are director level plus for the rest of the year. And Brian Halligan, the former CEO of HubSpot, tweeted this just saying that the gap between people that super AI enhanced versus not AI enhanced is growing wider and wider. Literally, here's what he said. So Brian Halligan, former CEO of HubSpot, said, I think we'll see more of this deeply AI-powered employees separate from the barely AI-powered employees regardless of level. So you see here, this is a picture of Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, saying Salesforce isn't giving direct— isn't giving raises to director level and above employees. employees this year, internal memo shows. What's interesting to me, Neil, we keep trying to talk about marketing, but everything keeps coming back to AI, partly because of me. But one of the things is this, right? So, Neil, before we would oftentimes, we would look at hiring people who had the knowledge, right? People who know what to do, right? And then these people who know what to do can tell other people what to do, and then they can hire people with them. There's still a lot of value in that, right? But the quote from this, this tweet is basically, a director who uses AI to shift the output of a 10-person team is not going to be compensated like a director. They're not going to be compensated like a director. They're going to be compensated like what, Neil? Like a team. Meaning if I can do 10 times more, 20 times more, 30 times more, I should get what? No, I should probably get double my salary, triple my salary, quadruple my salary. And so the way you and I have grown up is compensation scaled with scope, right? There's only a certain amount that each person can do. But let me tell you what I did this weekend. Like this, I saw a plan last week and our internal marketing person, very smart person, Are you looking, you want some of these mushrooms? Okay, anyway, so she comes with a plan, it's a great plan, but the plan, we don't ship the website and all this stuff until like the end of April or something like that. I'm like, wait a second. So this weekend, if you go to singlebrain.com, the website's up. Who got that website up, right? Who got everything wired up to our CMS?

Eric's pointing to himself, by the way.

Yeah, I'm pointing to myself. And so I had sent the spec over to the developers on Thursday, But then over the weekend, I'm just like, I'm still going to do it. And then, and then over the weekend, the same Slack thread, I'm like, hey guys, I got it done. And I put a winky face there, right? So my point is, not only did I get that done, I was messing around with all the cold email stuff, right? I got our voice agents up too. If you talk to our voice agent, it is super smart and it's only getting smarter. Like it's trained on all of our Gong data. It's just on your, your and my content. And so probably Sunday, were my eyes hurting like hell by the end of the night? Yes. Did I wake up with my eyes hurting like hell? Yes. But my point is, I was— me, one person was able to ship like 10 things on Sunday because I'm like, Dad's like, oh, my dad's like, are you coming back for the walk? I was like, Dad, I'm going to come back next week. So going back this weekend. But my point is this thing over here, like I was telling my team this week, we did all hands, right? I was like, guys, like, I was like, Neil, if you automate yourself, are you going to make more or less money?

More money.

Exactly. And I was like, guys, guys, answer. Like how much more do you think you're going to make? Double, triple, quadruple, whatever. And that's the point I made for everyone. I was like, guys, I'm like, guys, I'm going to show you how to do this. I'm going to show you how to work like this. I'm going to keep making videos for you. We have to all work like this because if we don't work like this, what's going to happen is you're going to get memos like this where he's saying, oh, we're not giving raises out anymore. But if you automate yourself, for sure you're going to get a raise.

But I don't think the raise thing has anything to do with AI.

I just think he's pulling— I just think Brian Halligan pulled that in. I have no— we have no context on what this memo said. But I think the premise of the overall tweet is like, The way we're going to compensate people is changing rapidly. Yeah.

Do you want to know why I think Salesforce is not giving anyone a raise based on—

Because their stock's down?

A lot.

How much down is it?

If you just look at this year today, because we're only 3 months in. I guess, I guess. Yeah, I guess.

Down 35%.

Close, 26.4%. That's a lot for, that's a lot for 3 months. This is year to date, okay? So when you think about it from that perspective, they're losing so much in a short period of time, they have to make adjustments. If you look at Atlassian, Atlassian stated they're going to cut, I believe it was 1,000 jobs or somewhere around there. On top of that, a lot of these companies have put hiring freezes. So when your stock is getting beaten, you have to figure out how you can get it to go up. One of the ways to get it to go up is you reduce expenses. You reduce expenses, then your stock goes up. If you look at companies like Salesforce, one of their biggest expenses is not just paying people more from a quote unquote salary annual perspective, it's actually restricted stock units and them giving them because that doesn't hit their Quote unquote, RSUs. Yeah, it doesn't hit their P&L statement the same way, but it is expense. I don't know. I don't know the exact terminology, but they're doing it to show better numbers. But in reality, it's still compensation. It's just diluting shareholders.

I want to talk about this mushroom in a second, but before I do, who went up 5% today because they made cuts?

I don't know.

I didn't see that. Oracle. Oracle cut 30,000 people this morning at 6 a.m. The memo was—

it was just—

it's like, as of this morning, you're getting this message. We're making a difficult decision to end your role, to terminate your role. You know, we're very grateful. We're very gracious for the hard work and dedication that you put in. Please sign a severance agreement in your DocuSign. We'll proceed from there. So 30,000 people cut this morning. Stock jumps 5%. That's Oracle. It's kind of similar to what you're talking about over here.

But we talked about this around a month ago. Do you know why Oracle made the cuts?

Data center funding.

Yes. Bingo. And unlike Microsoft, I know Oracle is a big company, but unlike Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, they don't have the same stock cash pile as some of these other big mega tech, you know, multitrillion-dollar companies. So they have no choice but to cut to pay all their debt loans.

You're not like $116 billion in profit like Google where you can just do whatever you want. But, but you know what he can do? He can fund his son's acquisition of Warner Brothers. That's what he can do.

Yeah, but that's more leverage.

I know. Yeah, I'm messing around.

And Google is not $116 billion anymore.

What is it?

On a quarterly basis. So they're growing at a fast rate, right? It's $34 billion. So they're roughly at $136 billion a year.

I'm talking about last year's numbers.

Yeah, but you know who's even bigger than them in profit? One of your favorite companies.

This can't be Microsoft.

That's public.

Microsoft?

No, who's your favorite company that's public?

Nvidia. Nvidia.

Nvidia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's my people, you know.

Nvidia right now on a quarterly basis, $42.96 billion in net income. So they're roughly at $171 billion going forward in profit.

I don't think it's being stopped, dude. I checked my Anthropic bill this morning. The last week we talked, Friday we talked, today's only Tuesday. Friday we talked about how much did you guess it was?

I guess it was gonna be around $6,000, $7,000 as of this morning.

days to edit them out. I checked, it's 7,500.

All right, cool.

So what's going to happen now? I think we're going to be paying more and more for Nvidia because here's the thing. I told you last week that I had my agents invade Slack. I'm still holding this mushroom. I'm going to tell you a story in a second. But I had the agents invade Slack. Today, this morning, I'm starting to get messages from people. He's like, hey, I want my own Alfred. I want my own. Everyone wants their own Alfred, right? I'm like, oh my God. So I started looking this morning. I was like, okay, I need to buy some Nvidia infrastructure and all this. And the thing is, if I'm going to decrease my token cost, but you know what? I'm still going to end up spending way more anyway because everyone wants it, right? It's all your— it's— I want to say they're your children, but it's all your people that you want to help. It's your tribe that you want to help, and everyone should get a token budget. So it's becoming— I'm like, oh my God. And you're seeing the same thing too.

Well, when you look at Nvidia specifically, because Claude Code and all this kind of stuff that's came out, OpenCLAW, I think Nvidia's version is NeoCLAW or something like that.

NemoCLAW.

Like the fish. Okay, cool. So So in January 2025, if you look at year over year with publicly traded companies, they look at quarter over quarter. So Jan 2025, they would compare Jan 2024 earnings. So they're at 77.94% growth. Of course, at their large numbers, growth is going to slow down. Then April 2025, growth slowed down to 69%. In July, 55%. And then what happens? Claude, with all this stuff, starts pushing. October 2025, 62%. January 2026, 73%. So Nvidia's growth is now reaccelerating because all the changes. This just tells you in business and marketing, when we're talking about AI, it's an easy way to see if there's major catalysts. And what we're seeing with agents is starting to become reality because we've all been talking about agents for a year or 2 years, but a lot of it's been—

excuse me—

yeah, pie in the sky. I was going to say bull. And now It's really becoming a reality. We are seeing people, not just companies, use agents. A lot of people can afford it because it's really cheap and it's doing stuff to make them more efficient, better, and grow faster.

Yep. So I'm going to— we're going to come back to AI. There's, there's plenty of AI to talk about. Look, by the way, look at all the topics. You see the topics that don't have my name next to them? Those are all OpenCLAW generated, by the way. I was like, let's do some classic Marketing School episodes. I'm like, give us some things that we can clip, right? But anyway, I'm holding— I've been holding this chocolate mushroom tip that Neil's given to me. It's called— what's it called, Neil?

Cocoa Mound or something?

I don't know. Cocoa Rooms or something. Choco Rooms. Choco Rooms. Yeah.

Okay. Wait, why is it a chocolate mushroom tip? It's just a mushroom, no?

We'll leave it at that. We'll leave it for other people's imagination. So, I'm holding this over here. Neil, I don't know if I've been forwarding you this stuff, but you see from a lot of doctors and they're like, oh, you know, so-and-so microplastics, like the toilet paper that you use to wipe your butt. Microplastics, forever PFAS, forever chemicals. And what the Bounty tissue that you use to wipe your hands, like the paper towels, right? All PFAS, right? And they're getting tons and tons of views. Like, you see everyone in the comments are like, I guess I can't buy that anymore. And you know what happens immediately? I go to Amazon, whatever they recommend, I go to Amazon right after and I just order a bunch of new like bamboo toilet paper and things like that. So, I'm just like negative marketing does work. And these scientists that I don't think they're doing this on purpose, but they're helping all these other companies grow. And so, what does that have to do with this chocolate mushroom tip over here?

I'm curious.

So, so my point is, you talk about anything, anything like this. Oh, it's like the packaging, microplastics, it's dangerous for you, right? You can't eat it anymore. Or dairy, you can't have it anymore. I'm like, okay, I want to— I don't want to buy it anymore, right? It's like negative marketing. And this is, this is aside, like I asked Neela to bring this down because it tastes really good. But we get so much marketing around what we can't have anymore. I think at a certain point, it's just like whatever. If you can do the super organic alternative, you end up doing very well, which is why the toilet paper brand I ended up buying. Real. So I bought this new toilet paper and I bought these new paper towels. Amazon Basics now has bamboo toilet paper too. So number one, negative marketing works. But number two, sometimes you don't give a damn because it tastes so good. So that's right. Yep.

And the way I look at marketing, one of my kids was telling me the other day that we were at a gas station, so we're driving back from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and they wanted some chocolate. And I was like, you can pick one thing from the gas station. Just don't make it too bad, right? Like try to be somewhat health cautious.

How do they know what that means?

They know. They know like what's healthy, what's not, like carrots, broccoli, or hummus. And you know, they know eating just a big bar of chocolate candy is really bad, but eating a smaller bar of chocolate is still bad, but not as bad because it's just, you know, not as much fats and all that kind of stuff. And my daughter turns to me and they say, well, if we're going to eat something bad, might as well eat something that's really tasty and bad because You know, if we're gonna eat something that's unhealthy, I'd rather enjoy it the most. And I'm already gonna eat a dinner with vegetables. And she's telling me this. So she's just like, I want what I want. Is that okay? And I said, sure. It just can't be like a really big size. Like, you know, like the king size and stuff like that. And when you think about it from a marketing angle, some things are bad for you. It's okay. And a prime example of this is chocolate candy. If you're going to eat chocolate candy, you like it, might as well eat the good stuff. Like, why would you eat the Kraft chocolate candy? Like, what, it's not as bad for you? Who cares? Just eat it.

That's why when I go bad, it's called— my friend taught me this. She calls them fatter days. So on Saturdays, I do fatter day and I'll get like not one double burger trip, but I get a triple burger, Noah, and I add pastrami to it and I get another one on top.

Seriously?

Yeah, that's like 1,500 calories, but it's okay.

So you do it every Saturday?

Either. So, I either do that for Friday or I do the Erewhon breakfast steak breakfast burrito. And then, I also get like the chocolate toffee pistachios. So, I get 2 cans of those.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

I tend to—

What do you do?

None of that. I tend to just be a garbage disposal and eat whatever my kids have leftover.

Oh, okay. So, you have junk food every day then? Like a little bit?

Not much every day. Like if I had to put it in a calorie perspective of how much food that I'm eating that's junk, maybe like 50 to 100 calories max.

Yeah.

So it's not much, but the way I look at it, it's like when I came down here, you were just like, dude, no mushrooms? I was like, what do you want? So I just went upstairs and I got you more than the mushrooms because my kids have so many, you know, like snack food items in the house. It was like, cool, I get you whatever you want.

You don't do like the fruit snacks anymore anyway.

So I do. Those are healthier versions.

Got it.

And then we also have fruit snacks, but next time I'll have to bring fruit snacks. They tend to be no food coloring, so we don't do like you know, food coloring or any of that crappy stuff. They are unhealthy for you, but you can read the ingredients and understand what they are.

So we'll go back to marketing. So Neil, let me ask you this. What do you think the highest paying customer acquisition job is today?

Highest paying customer acquisition job in marketing? So I'll let you give— I'm assuming you're not talking about like a CMO.

You're talking about like specifically like an individual contributor.

I would either go someone who's running paid or someone who is running SEO.

Okay, so interestingly enough, it's neither of those. So this is where we can react to what Kevin O'Leary said. So Kevin O'Leary thinks that the highest paying job right now is customer acquisition on social media. So he's like, I used to pay these guys $48,000 a year. Now I'm paying them $250 grand a year because you can measure their work based on customer acquisition every week. Most of them are contractors. They make half a million dollars a year because they know how to make content, turn it into a 59-second ad on social and acquire 200 customers. These people in their early 20s are so valuable right now. If you know how to use your phone, somebody wants to hire you. So I would say caveat here is it's organic social, but I think it converts. They also will convert to paid as well and handle that, that side of the funnel.

But obviously, you know, Kevin is more consumer focused and all that personal brand and he's looking at it from an affiliate model in which I'm assuming his compensation is based on the results they drive based on how it sounds because he used to pay $40,000.

Knowing how he does deals probably.

Yeah, yeah, I can see him being more performance based. In almost all companies we work with, organic social is not the highest paid person from an individual contributor standpoint. Typically for large corporations, the budget's going to Google and Meta. If you don't believe me, just look at their stock prices. You can see how they're getting the lion's share of the marketing dollars and people tend to get paid the most to manage where the money's going.

Yeah. So I tend to agree with that. I mean, also we're biased because that's what we see with our businesses, but It's not, no, it's not just with our businesses.

You see it with your clients too. And I see it with my clients.

I know, but it's the data that we have and we get, but—

Yes.

It's what's in front of us, right? So—

It's what's in front of us. But I would say we see most marketing data, like we see a lot of offline data. You see offline data. It doesn't matter if you and I don't offer all the services. We work with so many enterprises and just corporations. We see data in different sectors and in different fields and what companies are spending to a lot of different agencies. But the highest paid role is typically the people managing the money, if you're not talking about C-level roles like a CMO.

So you just mentioned Meta, by the way. So Meta just dropped something. I don't know if you heard about this, but they dropped something bigger and supposedly more dangerous than what OpenAI has ever built. So Meta dropped an AI called Tribe V2. It's basically a digital copy of your brain. So here's what it does, Neil. So they trained it on 1,000 hours of brain scans from 700 people lying inside MRI machines. It doesn't read your thoughts. It does something worse. It knows what's going to make you feel something before you even feel it. Think about that for a second. If an AI already knows which image, which sound, which word is going to hit your dopamine, you don't need to read someone's mind. You just build the perfect trap. So the whole idea with this is that this— they don't have to guess what will keep you glued to a screen anymore. They can just rehearse it and they already have all the data, right? So they can just make whatever they want now. And they'll probably make this available to their advertisers too, to get their advertisers to continue to spend more and more. Yeah.

And dude, have you been getting hit up by— I always mess up their name— Manus or Mantis? Manus.

Yeah.

Manus. Is it Manus or Mantis? Manus. Manus. I think there's a biotech company called Mantis Biotech or something like that. AI, right?

Probably right.

But either way, I've been getting hit up a lot by their team and they're just like, hey, we're looking to pay creators to push, you know, Manus. Facebook bought us and we can do a lot of the stuff OpenCLAW does. You don't need to be a developer. We'd love for you to create content on this kind of stuff. It's just interesting to see how Meta has so much reach and they're still going after influencer marketing for this stuff. And the first thing that when I was talking to them, I was like, why don't you guys just run ads on your own platform? It'll be easier and you'll meet— hit a lot more people than if you're just going and leveraging this influencer stuff. And I honestly don't think the influencer stuff is that effective because you have to label it as paid. The moment you put that disclosure in there in the beginning, dude, every time we look at stats from it, the drop-off is just ridiculous. Now, it doesn't mean influencer marketing isn't profitable and it can't work. It just doesn't scale to the way that paid— no, yeah, that paid works. And even like organic SEO or GEO works. But it's more so, remember that startup? Was it Cluey? It was a Korean founder. I think it was from like Stanford or something like that. Bright kid.

Dropped out, yeah.

Ended up creating Clue.ly. And I think there were some articles that the revenue numbers, he eventually admitted that his revenue numbers weren't really the revenue numbers.

Dude, he's like full-on influencer now on Instagram. Do you see his stuff?

I haven't seen his stuff. I don't follow him. But he used to break down like influencer marketing, where it's look how much we're growing. And he was getting everyone to start mentioning him, but yet he wasn't really generating that much revenue from it. But on the flip side, I have a buddy who owns a company called Legion Athletics, the protein supplement company. They do extremely well with influencers. Their model's quite a bit different. They look for people who are diehard, you know, into lifting and sports and, you know, like organic clean products. And they pay them. They may not have the biggest following. They don't get paid as much because of their following size. That model works extremely well for them and it scales and it's profitable, but it's good product targeted with— The right influencers, not just influencers with followers. But yet when everyone wants to do influencer marketing, they just care about follower count, view count versus finding the right audience.

Dude, my agent now, when people reach out to me for the influencer stuff, they'll be like, oh, the engagement isn't what we're looking for. We want to pay on CPM. It's like, Mr. Siu will not accept anything lower than $25,000. It just keeps responding like that. And then it keeps asking for different angles. And then Mr. Siu is like, what is your new proposal for Mr. Siu? It has to be higher than $25,000. So it keeps saying like different angles.

Does it update you with all the messaging when it's negotiating?

Yeah, it's, it's, it'll like give me an end of day update saying, here's what I, here's what I'm sending back. What do you think? And here's what needs your approval as well. I'm like, this is good. Would you like this?

So I was talking with Sam from WriteSonic. He was showing me his version of it when he deals with influencers. He then gets a Telegram message and then he can end up, it'll say, we are going to counter with this. Is this approved? And he goes, yes or no. And he creates boundaries. He uses OpenClaw.

Yep.

And he's like, do you want this? And I'm like, no, I'm not interested in doing influencer deals. Even with Facebook one, when they hit me up, They're like, cool, would you be interested?

Math is.

Yeah. And I was like, I'm like, one, what are you going to pay? And then they're like, we'll get back to you. And they said, what are you looking for? And that was the 2. And I said, I actually don't care to be paid. How can you drive me more business? That's more important to me— Oh, that's good. That's good. Than you pay me. Because it's true. And this is why I don't respond to the influencer deals. I don't care for the income. I want more business.

Why don't you just have an agent that responds like that? Hey, what are you offering? Oh, actually, I don't care for that. Just send me the leads.

But it's not that simple because most of the people that hit us up for the influencer stuff, let's say it's TikTok, TikTok is doing an influencer campaign. I'm making it up because we do get hit up, but it's never TikTok reaching out to us. It is an agency on TikTok's behalf. And Meta was a little bit different because actually the Manus team hitting me up and they are part of Meta.

So, okay, this is the annoying part, but I remember I just did a deal with LinkedIn recently, right? So it was an agency that reached out, but then I got on a call and LinkedIn was there. So then I added both of those people and then I have the relationship. And then you can play like that, but you still need the human aspect. You can't just like offload it right now.

And it's hard to go through directly to the LinkedIns, not because they're LinkedIn, but you have a different issue. A LinkedIn, for them to get you in their system and then to get you paid and booked as a vendor, it's a pain. And that's why they go through agencies. So cutting out that middleman is going to be really tough, but they usually are like single track. Like, hey, just go find us influencers. It's hard to actually do a mutual.

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Once again, it's clickflow.com, and there's a free 14-day trial that you can check out. By the way, speaking of Meta, by the way, we talked about Oracle. Okay. Oracle having to cut 30,000 people as of this morning. So Meta has a playbook as well, Neal. So they cut— looks like 700 people this week, but they're planning another 15,000 or so. So Meta now requires 65% of its engineers to write 75% or more of their code using AI by mid-2026. Their scalable machine learning org has a target of 50 to 80% AI-assisted code across Messenger, WhatsApp, and Facebook. 55% of all code changes must be AI-assisted. 80% will be mid to senior engineers must adopt AI tools such as DevMate and Google Gemini. So every Meta employee now is graded on AI-driven impact in their performance review. It is now a core expectation. If you don't use AI, you don't advance. Meta is the first major tech company to formally tie promotions to AI adoption. I don't know about that, but I do know they're going to use this as more of, more of an excuse to, to cut.

I would say out of any sector, Like using AI for marketing, you should, but it's not as black and white, at least from what I've found, for compared to like coding. For coding, product design, I would say using AI, especially for coding, is much more black and white than how we would use AI as marketers. And if you look at most of these tech companies, their biggest expense isn't just payroll, it's specifically engineers, product people, and designers. within their organization.

And what Neil's really referring to here when he says it's not— it's, it's a little different.

It is.

And the simple way to look at this is coding is verifiable.

Okay?

It's just like math. You can verify it. Okay? Now, when it comes to my feeling, your feeling about this ad creative or whatever, not so much. Same thing with a copy. It's more— it's not as fluid, which is why the copy you're seeing from AI right now, you need the human in the loop to make it really good and it needs to work back and forth. You can't just let it do its thing. It hasn't quite worked out that way yet, but I think one, we mentioned this a couple of months ago, the companies that are like blaming AI for cuts, it's the ones that have, you know, overhired during, you know, the pandemic era and also the low interest rates. Right. And now that interest rates are higher, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So it affects stock prices too. So.

Well, luckily Powell says he doesn't think that we need to raise rates. He made that announcement, I think, a day ago or was it end of last week? But going back to marketing not being as black and white with AI, This morning I'm on a call and it was 8 AM PST. This guy from India is showing me how they're using AI in marketing.

Another one of those, huh?

Okay, specifically on social media, some of the best content I've ever seen produced by AI for social posts. Not only did they get the content right, quality, they got the timing right. Because if you just crank out content, but you're cranking out content on something that's played out, it's not going to do well. So they're looking at what's being talked about in the news world and marketing world and trying to figure out what should I hit on right now that'll appeal? Their engagement is roughly 7 to 8 times higher than their normal posts. And we went back quite a bit and they've been doing this for over a month. So it's like, oh, this is great. Now they're trying to make the case how this is amazing. So the first thing I do is I say, how much revenue were you generating before all of this and how much revenue you're generating right now? They didn't have the answer. So I said, all right, let's get back on a call. Within an hour. So they're like, okay, we'll be able to get the data by then or a rough directional. So, you know, they ask their data science person, their data science person says, well, we kind of track it. It's hard to track everything, but it drives less than 1% of our revenue before we started using AI. And I'm like, okay, now you're getting more engagement. What's the change now? And their sales cycle's not that long because their product sells for well under $100. I think it starts at like $19 or something like that per month. So it's quick sales cycle at that stuff and they have a free trial. And now they're just like, cool, what is— how much revenue are you generating now? Like, well, we haven't really seen an uptick, but we think the branding is going to be great for us. I'm like, but what's the revenue? They're like, they're like, our revenue is pretty much roughly flat.

And how long has it been out for?

How long have they been the product out or how long have they been doing this experiment for?

Both.

The company, I don't know how old it is. I know it's well more than 5 years old, so I think it's less than 10 years, but I know it's more than 5 years old. For this experiment, they've been running it for roughly 30 days.

Okay. Yeah. So they need a little more time, I think, too.

They need a little bit more time, but I actually don't think they need more time to figure out if it's working or not. I think they need more time to adjust their approach. Because if they tell me a visitor comes to the website, and people typically buy that day because it's a free trial, no credit card, and then if you want to end up purchasing, then it's, I believe it's $19 a month USD. Their sales cycle is really short. It's self-service. So time isn't the issue from a tracking perspective. I think time's the issue from they need to continually experiment and try to figure out how to drive conversions. But this is a prime example when a marketer is using AI and they're looking at the top of funnel numbers of engagement and being like, look at the increased engagement, 7, 8x. This is amazing. We're doing such a great job, but they're not really looking at the full funnel. And understanding that yes, you're doing more. And by the way, not only are they getting 7 to 8 times more engagement per post, they're cranking out 3 to 4 times the amount of volume per day as well. So they increase the quantity and they're getting more engagement. So total views are drastically higher, but they're not seeing a revenue increase because the issue with a lot of the content, even though it's related to marketing, like let's say if you talk about ChatGPT ads or, you know, GEO, Or I think that one of the articles was related to ChatGPT ads because they just made an announcement that they had $100 million. It's cool and all, but if it doesn't drive revenue, who cares? And I think that's a big part marketers get wrong with AI. They look at only top-of-funnel metrics, and I'm not saying you should ignore them, but you need to look at the full stack.

Yeah. And by the way, let's— so I actually, I had a YouTube video that went out talking about how my costs with Anthropic tokens are skyrocketing, right? And people couldn't fathom, like, why am I spending so much? Well, To Neil's point, if you're leading a company, even if you're a marketer at a company, you should be able to figure out how much return on investment you're driving with your AI efforts. So I'll kind of explain my return on investment just from my, my, my, even with my bad short-term memory, I'll tell you right now. So $7,200 in spend, okay, in the last 31 days or so, we recouped $500 grand already in costs, in costs that I got to cut with my org just by making a little CFO thing and going back and forth with it and just being very precise on what I needed to do. And then it also providing benchmark numbers. So that's one. Okay, so that's one. The second one is when we got the Single Brain website up without me needing to wait another month, the moment I got that website up in less than 24 hours, 3 leads from it, right? And I'm just, I'm just, this is my short-term memory right now. I'm just remembering what we've done recently from it too. I went through our, I was looking at through ClickFlow, which is our AEO software, SEO software, right? And we had massive drop-off from our signup page for whatever reason. It, it pulled in our Mixpanel, our Stripe data. It looked at everything and it pulled benchmark data and it's like, hey, You should fix this. I'm like, hey, actually QA our product, go through the entire flow itself and tell me what you think is wrong and where the drop-off is, right? I took that and I sent it over to the engineer. He thought some of the data was wrong. He came up with his ideas. But then from there we actually got the fix done, you know what I mean? But these are things that actually drive more higher conversion rates and more monthly recurring revenue that I can point to. I like this, all this. But by the way, I like making all this content, these dot charts and things like that. It makes me feel good, right? But it's mostly theater if you can't prove the revenue side.

I totally agree with you. One use case we've been loving using AI for in marketing is for conversion rate optimization, but not the standard way, like a marketer saying, hey, go look at my pricing page and tell me what changes to make, or product page. We've been using AI to look at the numbers because we're global and most companies get transactions from different cities or countries. For this example, let's use countries. And credit card processors work differently in every single country. Like Adyen supposedly is better at taking your money in Europe than for corporations and certain other payment processors. Or for example, in Brazil, PayPal doesn't work as well as I think they have this payment system called Boletos. So we had AI analyze which countries have abnormally high drop-off rates From credit card, pricing page to credit card, credit card to checkout. And then we broke down the steps to see which areas are they dropping off. One could be pricing because you're not pricing in local currencies. So then we started looking at that. But AI helped us analyze and it listed in order every single country from the credit card page, like someone putting in a credit card, clicking submit and it not going through, to that had the worst conversion rates. I think Colombia was number one for us. I'm actually 99% sure Colombia was the worst for us. And then it recommended, here are the payment processors that work best for these regions. And I'm like, cool, run an experiment where we test out the payment processors for every single one of these countries with its recommended solutions to maximize your conversion rate.

So is it— are people doing the experiments for you? Like, or is the— are the agents signing up for all the things for you?

The credit card processing, we have humans sign up for that. That is really hard to do with agents because they require a lot of personal and financial details and banking details that we personally don't feel comfortable to give to agents. But the agents are analyzing which ones have the biggest drop-off, and then providing solution options. And then we go and call and we negotiate the rates, because you can get better rates than whatever the agents tell you or what AI is telling you. And then we go and test it out.

That's good. And that's, that's massive, by the way. Like, that's the type of stuff that generates when you're talking about at scale, We're talking about millions and millions of dollars.

Correct. Percentage-wise, we ran the numbers. If it was half of our best country, so if our best country is at 5%, I'm making up a number, and we can get every country to operate at least at 2.5%, we would make, call it an extra 4-ish percent in revenue, which isn't, doesn't seem like a lot, but 4% is a lot of money and most of it drops to the bottom line. And then you do a little 4% here, 2% there, another 3%. Yeah. Next thing you know, you figured out how to grow your business by 10+ percent.

And this is not even CRO now. It's just business optimization. That's what it is.

Yeah, but I look at this as CRO as well.

Well, you are optimizing rates, right? At each conversion rate, right?

Yeah, I'm optimizing conversion rate. But yeah, some of it is finance, some of it is CRO. But the reason I consider it marketing is just like how you give credit card options on a checkout, you have Apple Pay, Google Pay, which we've tested out. For B2B, Apple Pay and Google Pay does not boost conversions as much as people think. For B2C, adding Apple Pay and Google Pay, massive.

So look, this stuff is all very exciting and we like to talk about new tools and all that. Maybe, and maybe we will talk about some of these tools, but I think when it, when push comes to shove, if you're working at a company right now, just keep in mind when you're going to your leader or even your boss or the CEO of the company, you have to talk about what revenue impact you're driving with this thing. That's what we're getting at. And by the way, I want to, I want to go back to brands because we like to talk about brands a lot. But did you hear how Chamath said that brands are going to zero?

I did not see that, but I saw it in your list.

Okay, so here's his argument. I'm going to name a couple of things here. So he's like, look, you go, you look at Tesla, you know, you look at BMW. Initially BMW was like powerful brand, right? And you look at, which is still a powerful brand, but you look at Tesla, they kind of come out of nowhere. But then what happens is what you got BYD in China, what, $5,000 for a car, $10,000 for a car, right? So his argument is that products are becoming cheaper, easier and cheaper to make. And brands that keep bringing abundance are going to win. So if you continue to drive costs down, like you look at Tesla, for example, like the Model 3, like the costs are coming down, they're going to continue to win. But when you look at— when you look at a world where like all these things are just cheaper and cheaper to make and everyone's just copying each other, his arguments, it's harder to have that brand power stand the test of time. And so I think he did mention something about Louis, like LVMH, like Louis Vuitton, for example, not being able to stand the test of time. I think there's going to be a couple of those that do. But I do, I do see a world where it's just like if you have a better product, you know, you're just going to, you're just going to win out. So I don't think brands are going to go to zero by any means, but I do think it's going to become much more competitive and maybe there's not as much staying power as there was before.

So I disagree with him. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, but like if you look at BMW, okay, here's a chart from 2007 to 2024. No, because it's European traded and sometimes it's hard to pull up. Overall, they're going up and to the right. They saw a big bump from COVID It's normalizing. It's a little bit down, but overall it is up and to the right considering how old of a business that is. And most people don't know this, BMW owns one of the most iconic luxury car brands out there, which is Rolls-Royce.

I didn't know BMW owned Rolls-Royce.

Yeah, it's owned by Rolls-Royce.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

So you have a car that you have to take to the repair shop all the time.

You're talking about a Rolls-Royce? I don't own a Rolls-Royce.

I thought you did.

No.

Oh.

Yeah, I never owned a Rolls-Royce.

Oh.

Too flashy.

I know someone that does home hospice.

They probably make good money.

Well, we'll just leave it at that. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, oh, you're talking about the Nick Shirley stuff where people are just scamming and making free money.

Yeah, but I know people that— that sucks.

People do.

All right.

So if you look at like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, I think their brands have sustained time. They're iconic brands. They're old. I think they're over 100 years old. At least I think Louis LV is over 100 years. I don't know about Chanel.

Yeah.

But they're iconic brands. People look forward to them. People don't want their products mass-produced.

Dior.

And people will pay an arm and a leg for them. And the moment things, their products go cheaper, I actually think their business goes backwards. So when Chamath says, you know, brands go to zero, I don't see Michael Jordan's brand with his Jumpman logo. Michael Jordan hasn't played basketball in a long time. His shoe brand is iconic. Has nothing to do with the comfort of the shoe. It's the brand on there. And I know this firsthand because when I was at his celebrity or nonprofit golf tournament or whatever in Vegas years ago, they told me that the bigger the logo, the smaller the other people's names, because they do co-partnerships and branding, the more shoes they sell. Even if it's like with Jeter or Derek Jeter or whoever else it may be. I don't just see brands going to zero. I actually see Branding being the moat because people feel a certain way about a brand like Apple or Tesla or Nike or Louis Vuitton. And I think that is actually one of the most powerful moats because it's hard to build a strong brand.

Here, I'll simplify this for, for myself a little bit. Brands aren't going to zero because what Charlie Munger said this before, the thing that humans fight over is not necessarily greed, it's envy. Envy is the biggest driver with humans, right? It's very much a status game. So if we all have abundance, we need a way to show each other who's better. Who's, who's what?

Yes. Right?

It's all status driven.

Yes, it is status driven, dude. I drive— yes, we do have one nice car in our family. I drive around in a Honda Odyssey. And when I go around here in Beverly Hills and people see me in a Honda Odyssey, most people don't treat me as nice.

Okay.

They're kind.

What do they tell you at the valet?

At the valet, they usually tell me to pull forward and then they'll take all the other cars.

Because they think you're an Uber driver. Yeah.

And then they'll be like, are you here to pick up someone?

And I'm like, no.

And then I'm like, I'm here to get my car valeted. I have a meeting here. And then they usually will say some remark like, it's X amount of dollars. You sure you want to valet? I'm like, yeah, it's okay. I'll valet. And Eric knows I'm not the best person at parking or parallel parking.

Or driving, period.

Yeah. So then I tend to, although I do pretty well with Odyssey, Yeah, it's also the car's not fast and it doesn't—

Maybe you learn how to drive better because you have kids now.

Yeah, but either way, when I ask people in Beverly Hills, I'm like, dude, you should get an Odyssey. And people are like, are you kidding me? I won't be caught dead in that thing. I'm like, but you have kids. You're telling me you'd rather get out of your car, open up the door, have them get in and close the door versus just push a button and your doors slide open, they jump in, buckle themselves in, has a built-in vacuum where you can pick up their French fries or whatever they're eating, their candy or snacks.

And people won't do it because they're just like, It's a Honda.

And I'm like, who cares if it's a Honda? And on top of that, they're like, it's a minivan. Minivans have bad branding, dude. Did I show you the Mercedes new minivan that's coming out? Is it the—

remember I showed you the one in Asia? Is this like a version of that? Oh, I showed you the Lexus one in Asia.

You showed me the Lexus one.

Yeah, which is nice.

Okay, but check this image out. I'm going to show you the Mercedes minivan.

Oh, wow. So Neil's showing me a fully decked out van by Mercedes that looks very tech forward and Look at this.

Has reclining seats.

It's like a first class flight.

31-inch screen TV.

It's a first class flight.

It's amazing.

Yeah. How much is that?

I think it starts at $80,000 and then goes up to like $100,000. Comes out sometime next year. It's electric. $100,000 and something.

Oh, you're for sure getting it.

For the features. I tried. They're not putting— you can't put your name on the list yet. It comes out next year.

I don't think they're going to sell like hotcakes. So we're not in a good economy.

No, dude. The amount of calls. So I talked to Fletcher Jones Mercedes in Newport. They have like a Sprinter division.

Don't you have a hookup there?

I do. And I was like, how do I get it at cost? So, you know, there's nothing wrong in negotiating. But they were telling me like the amount of calls they're getting for people requesting. So then I started asking the guy questions because I was just curious. I was like, who are you getting the calls from? Men or what? Actually, I first asked, are most of the people calling for this, do they have kids or they don't have kids? He's like, everyone who's called has kids.

And it's all the women calling?

And then I said, is it men Or women who are asking for this? He's like, only men. He's like, we haven't had— they haven't had one woman ask for this.

Wait, why? So I don't understand.

Okay. So I started sending this to some women or like some of my friends and they send it to their wives and I asked them to send to their wives and get their take.

Wait, you send it to women to send to their wives?

I send it to men.

Okay.

Most of my guy friends, most of my friends are guys. Almost all of them are guys. I have some female friends, but most of them are guys. And then I told them, I asked what they thought. Most of the guys thought it was legit. I told them to ask their significant other what they thought. And most of their significant others that were women said, ugly, is this a joke, or, and it's still a minivan.

What?

It was usually one of those 3 things.

Seriously?

Yes.

Why?

And then the 4th one that wasn't as popular was, why not just buy an SUV?

But I have to assume all— correct me if I'm wrong here, okay? So Neil's talking to his guy friends. I'm assuming they're all successful, okay?

Correct.

They're all entrepreneurs. Which means the Trophy, let's say they're trophy wives, they're great wives, right? They're used to nice things, right? So they probably want to have the best of the best SUV. Like, I don't know.

But this is the best of the best for a minivan in the United States.

So you would know more than I do. I don't know why they have an issue with minivans because I don't have an issue with minivans.

It's the branding. And it goes back to the Chamath thing, you know, brands go like, a lot of people won't get caught dead driving a minivan because it's a minivan. It doesn't matter if it's a Mercedes or a Rolls-Royce.

Okay, I see, I see, I see. The status behind driving a minivan is not cool. Got it.

It's not cool. It's just like, oh, this is, you know, a crappy person's car, whatever. I'm like, I don't believe that. I drive a minivan. I think there's nothing wrong with that.

But that's also because guys don't care about anything. Like, you didn't care when your 40th birthday— like, my 40th birthday is coming up. I don't care. People are like, what are you gonna do? I'm like, I don't really care, right?

You don't care?

Did you care when it was yours? You didn't even mention it during the event.

That's right. My 40th birthday was— but I did eat ice cream.

Yeah, he had double ice cream.

It was free though.

Remember that?

Yeah.

So I'm just saying guys don't care about a lot of these things, right? So we just care about practicality and utility. Which to us, it's not a status thing, but it is a status thing when we think about our technology, right? Actually, no, I just want to use it better. I just want to work better.

So— I think work better is right for some people, but for me, I want the best technology devices. I don't know why.

Well, I do too. But like, so it needs to be the newest, right? This needs to be working really well, and I need to have the best things.

Okay, but with your phone, okay, the last version of the iPhone works pretty much the same way as this one. Would you agree with that? So why do you really need the new one?

Well, first of all, I get these for free. Okay.

Some of the stuff you pay for, like the iPads and stuff.

Yeah, I do.

But why do you need the newest one when it works almost the same?

So no, this one is the same. So I haven't upgraded this one, but now I want the latest Mac Ultras because I want the memory for local infrastructure so I can run my company more.

Totally agree. And that's why I didn't ask you about the actual computers. Okay. But like sometimes the technology, cars, You want to try different cars or whatnot. Your Tesla worked fine. You ended up getting the Porsche.

I looked that up. I haven't. So here's the thing. When I lived in Miami for 2 years, I didn't have a car. All I drove was Ubers. Then when I came back, I needed a car. So that's why I have this. And then the next one will probably, depending if kids pop out or anything, I'm not saying any kids are going to pop out, but like, I would consider a minivan.

So yes, I do think to some extent as guys, I think our thing, at least for you and I, is technology. Even if it doesn't make our job more efficient, Sometimes we just want the new technology to play with it.

All of our— I would say all of our— most of our guy friends, they want the newest tech. They don't care about like wearing the nicest things anymore. We all just— all I wear is like athleisure. One more point I have to make on this before we move on. So let me ask you a question, Neil. How many families are worth over $30 million in the United States?

Guess.

Family?

Households. Households. How many households are there in the United States? Like 60 million?

I don't know.

How many households in the US? I think it's around 60. No, I'm wrong. 133 million households. Okay, so I would guess over $30 million. 5 million? 4 million?

5 million households? 4 million.

Let's go with 4 million households.

Okay.

That goes over $30 million.

Noah, how many households— there's 133 million households in the United States— are worth over $30 million? Just throw a number out there.

It's okay. 1% of that, maybe.

1% of that. So that's like 1.3 million, right?

Yes.

Okay. 600,000. It's not as big as people think. All the things that we see on Instagram— this is from Wall Street Journal.

Wow.

All the big things that we see, like the flashiness on Instagram, or whatever, it's just not true, right? It's a very small world. And then only a subset of that is worth over like $100 million or so. So it's a very small number.

That's much smaller than I thought.

Yeah.

We also live in a bubble here in LA.

This is a bubble. So yeah.

And a prime example of this is we were looking up cars because we watch Formula 1. They just did the Formula 1 Japan race. So we're watching it as a family.

Suzuki? Uh-huh. Yep.

So when we're watching the Formula 1, my wife's asking, you know, where's BMW's F1 car? I'm like, oh, they don't have one. And they're just like, they're listing out car companies and they're like, where's Bentley? My, you know, and I was like, well, Bentley's VW. She's like, really? She's like, Bentley's not its own company? I'm like, no, they don't sell that many Bentleys. And we were even talking about Rolls-Royces living here in Beverly Hills. The amount of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys you see is—

All the time.

All the time. It's a common car. But we looked up that day how many cars Rolls-Royce sells in an annual year. You want to take a guess?

Like a couple, like $100K?

Uh, 7,000.

7,000?

That's what Google said at the time.

Wow. I believe you.

Okay. How many cars does Toyota sell a year, if you had to guess?

Millions.

11 million annually. They sell so many more cars. I was telling my wife, I'm like, I know you think like Rolls-Royce is a big company. Rolls-Royce, they have motors and all, but they're different companies, right? Because the car is owned by, what is it called, BMW. The motors is owned by, I think, themselves. And I was telling her, I was like, when you sell 11 million cars in your Toyota, you have so much more money versus someone selling 7,000 of a car, even if it's $1 million a pop?

Well, it depends, right? Because let's look at Formula 1 for a second. If we actually break this down, because I haven't thought about this before. So you do have premium brands, you do have Aston Martin, you do have Ferrari as Formula 1 cars, Rolls-Royce, $5,000 to $6,000.

But you can't look at Aston Martin and what was the other one?

Ferrari?

Ferrari is FIA. It's funded by a smaller company.

Who owns Aston Martin?

Who owns Aston Martin, a Canadian billionaire.

And Rolls-Royce is not owned by BMW. Yeah, they're owned by BMW. Yeah, they're all these premium ones are owned by like a big company. VW. Yeah. Yeah.

So you know who has— Audi is VW.

You know, has multiple brands on Formula 1. Mercedes, like 4 teams have Mercedes at the end of it.

No, Mercedes is not.

No, because if you go McLaren, it's McLaren Mercedes at the end of it. And it's like, then you have Mercedes and then you have something else Mercedes. There's like a bunch of Mercedes.

But McLaren, I don't think uses all of Mercedes parts.

It doesn't, but they're just part of it. There's a brand at the end of it. So it's like they have multiple ones and I, you know, debatable, right? I think for Red Bull, genius move. Like they have 2 Red Bull teams. Like it's just, they're always out there at the forefront of these things.

Well, most of them all have 2 cars.

Yeah. What do you mean each team?

Each team has 2 cars. Red Bull has 2 cars.

But Red Bull has 2 teams. They have a junior team and then they have the Red Bull, um, I forgot what it's called. It used to be called AlphaTauri and now it's just like Red Bull Racing Bulls. That's what it's called now. Now. So they have 2 teams inside of the, the 2 F1 teams.

But different levels. Different.

Well, no, they're, they're like Red Bull with Verstappen is the main one, but they do have 2 teams that are, that are in F1, which is the highest level.

Is it? Yeah, you're right. 2 teams. I thought these are Oracle Red Bull Racing. Okay. And Racing Bulls. Uh, yeah, they have 2 teams. I didn't know that.

Yeah. And here's the other thing. Google sponsored McLaren. This was before McLaren started winning last year. Yeah, the end of the year before that. But I remember watching F1 and Google was meeting with them. Like, Google wasn't happy about the results. So even though you see them, like, Google is like Gemini logo and all that and Chrome logo, like, at the end of the day, even if you're advertisers, it all comes down to results. If you're not winning, they don't want to be associated with you. You know what I mean?

If you look at Ferrari, they spend so much. They have the— I think they pay Hamilton, the highest paid driver right now, and he's not winning because the car's not working the way he wants.

He's podiuming though.

He is, but he's starting to. But it took a while.

Yeah, it took a while for him to come back.

A lot of money in that quote unquote while.

Yeah. So I want to come back. I want to switch gears here and talk about the $5.5 trillion rewrite, Neil. So when you look at software, okay, it's a $0.2 trillion market. Let's just call that $200 billion.

Okay.

So Coatue did this report recently. Coatue is the, honestly, venture firm, but I think they do a lot of hedge fund. Yeah, hedge fund. That thing. Thank you for that. Coatue just put a number on what we're seeing at seed for 3 years. So software is a $0.2 trillion market. So $200 billion services as a software, $5.5 trillion. So 25x. The shift is from selling tools per seat to selling work per output. This is why the best vertical AI companies don't compete with software incumbents. They compete there. They compete with expensive service providers, BPOs, and high turnover labor. At $2,000 a month, AI agent is replacing an $80K a year agency. That's the new business model, right? So when you look at this, The $5.5 trillion rewrite over here. So from per seat to per output, 25x TAM expansion. So I think a lot of this is very early right now. I think a lot of us are still figuring this out, but we're seeing this more. This is not something new. I think we've seen this like a year ago, 2 years ago or so, but I think we're going to continue to see it because we're all kind of just figuring it out as we go. So what do you think?

Yeah, no, I'm with you. I think service as a software is a massive industry. Y Combinator just put something out, I think it was around 30 days ago where they're— they put a calling out for, for startups that are trying to automate services. So for marketing, for accounting, for—

This is like 3 months ago.

Yeah. So it was for anything out there. Sequoia and a16z has also put out stuff or letters, at least, you know, 30+ days ago that break down how they think this is a much bigger category. And they're looking for companies to fund in this.

I just think, Neil, here's what I honestly think. I think We're going to be just fine. I think we're going to be very happy with how work ends up. And I think there's going to be a lot more abundance for the world. So I'm excited about where things are going.

Same here.

So yeah, and I'm excited for us humanity long term. I'm just scared for some people short term. That's just how it is right now. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com/eric. Digital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Side note to kind of how things are expanding, Neil, I don't know if we've kind of talked about this, but so Stripe has now made it— they've provisioned agents to be able to give people access to services directly from the command line interface. So for example, now if you're in a CLI, like using a terminal or something, you can say, hey Stripe, I want you to add PostHogs, right? You can basically, you can launch anything that you want. Okay. So if you want to, here's how I'll break it down. The Stripe co-founder said this, vibe coding MenuGen was exhilarating and fun escapade as a local demo, but a bit of a painful slog as deployed real app. Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA furniture for future. These are all services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev and production deployments, team and security features, rate limits and pricing tiers. So what Stripe is doing now is when it comes to issues, So if you use they or these apps, they'll help you provision all of these. So you can do it very quickly. And guess who takes the—

who's the toll booth here? Stripe.

So Stripe will be in the middle, they'll provision all these things for you, and they'll take a piece of every transaction.

It's a great model.

But that's like, they're so fast to get ahead of this. Like, they're like, oh yeah, we're going to be out there with working with Meta and I think Shopify as well. So you can buy directly from ads. So they're going to be the toll booth there, right?

Yes.

Here, we're going to be the toll booth here. Like, oh, you guys need your agents provisioned? Don't worry, we'll help your agents find this stuff.

You still need payment processing. I don't see that going away anytime soon.

You know what domain I bought this morning, Neil? API for SEO. You know how there's data for SEO? I bought API. I was like, oh, API for— I was like on my Peloton bike and I told my agent to buy it. I was like, hey, you have the credit card, go buy API for SEO. It's like, I got it. And then once I was done writing, I checked it. It's like, I got it.

So that's much better than getting MCPs for SEO.

Yeah, yeah. I think MCPs will have their uses, but I think they're like a bit overhyped. I think APIs are where it's at because these These agents need to find these things. And I don't know if you saw this, Neil, I don't know if I put this in here, but if you look at Supabase, they've grown from like 1 million accounts to like 4.5 million. A lot of that's agents, right? And I think there's another one that just grew very quickly. It's because of agent discovery. So I'm telling you guys, we've been talking about this on the podcast, we're going to be marketing to agents. Yeah.

And I don't think it's hard for at least SEOs to adapt because you've been marketing to robots for a very long time. Like the Googlebot. It's a good point. You know, I don't even know what the Bingbot is Maybe Bingbot. Bingbot.

Yeah.

But we've been dealing with algorithms all the time, from Instagram changes out their algorithm, or Facebook, or Reddit, although Reddit is more black and white. But we've been having to deal with this for such a long time. I think SEOs are some of the most best-suited people to optimize for bots, because in this new world, you got to just keep playing the game of pleasing them.

Or they complain.

Yes.

They're either the most adaptable, either the most adaptable, dynamic people that I know, or they are the biggest whiners?

I actually don't think they're separate. I think majority of SEOs are the biggest adapters and they're great at adapting. But at the same time, a good subset of the ones, even though they're great at adapting, love whining.

How many times have I seen you cry about an algorithm shift? Never.

I probably was pissed off once or twice.

You never cry in front of me about it.

Yeah, no, I don't really worry about that kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

You just adapt.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I kind of enjoy it. But you and I Are— I would say we're both unique in a weird way in which we like the ups and downs of marketing and entrepreneurship. And in marketing with the algorithm changes, we don't like it when times are just good. We like when times are also hard because it makes the good times feel even better.

I get anxiety when times are too good. Yeah. So I like, I like it when it's crazy, which— okay, this, by the way, remember I showed you the Andreessen Horowitz interview with this guy? He was on 20 VCs. Talking about don't bring a bazooka to like a knife fight or whatever, and you want to point your bazooka at the right thing when you're building software. So just don't go build like a random ERP thing. So this guy's name is Anish Acharya. So anyway, you know the last name, I think. So he posted this on Twitter, and I thought this was good. So Andreessen Horowitz, he's a partner there, I think. And he said, this is the end of prioritization. I've been thinking about the tension between exploitation and exploration recently, mathematically best described by the multi-arm bandit problem. I have no idea what that means. You can— you can't do everything because trying something has a cost. Just as many other laws of physics are changing with AI, I think this one is about to change too. So he's basically saying that before you had to be very methodical about what you worked on. He thinks this is changing now. Okay, so for any intelligence plus execution bound work, you can imagine the cost of exploitation— trying something— is rapidly approaching zero modulo inference. I have no idea what that means. In that world, the value of exploration goes up dramatically. You can simply try more things. This is a broad, important concept that applies to thousands of trade-offs in companies and society that we previously took as immutable. It also tells you about where the value accrues in the future. Okay, so final thing I'll say here: people who can identify compelling new paths to explore will have far more value to add than people who are experts at specialized exploitation of known paths. I have a feeling this might might have even more implications for the multi-armed bandit problem in the formal mathematical sense, but that's a bit beyond my expertise. Think about a growth team that A/B tests 2 landing pages a week because each variant costs real design and engineering time. Now they test 50. Or a product team that agonizes over which feature to build next because they can only ship one. Now they can build all of them and let users decide. It's like the Monte Carlo simulation for everything, except you're not simulating, you're actually doing it. Every path gets run. Prioritization, prioritization, as we know, is obsolete. You don't pick what to do, you do all of it. The only art left is knowing which bandits are worth arming.

I totally agree. But there's one thing that I think ruins this. If you don't know how to acquire traffic or buy traffic, this new way does not work because you need enough eyeballs to test out this Monte Carlo style. Without the eyeballs, You can have 50 features, you just won't have usage on any of them. So you won't know what's working or not.

You know, I've worked with, with many people in the past and you have too. I would say the people who just like building purely but don't want to worry about distribution, they tend to— things tend to fall flat, right? So you have to learn how to get distribution. The other thing, actually, Neil, to your point, remember I told you, so Andrej Karpathy created Auto Research, right? Which allows you to run a lot of experiments very quickly. That's on mostly, you can say some of it's on like synthetic data, right? I created auto growth, but the challenge with auto growth is you have to run it against real marketing data. So like real ads, real emails, you have to send out volume. The problem is most of the time I can't activate that. So what I've done with my, my skill now is for most of the experiments I try, it runs auto research first. So we'll try like 150 variations and I'll test it. And only when I start to collect enough data, it'll switch over to auto growth, right? And I think that's going to be the future of how we build these.

Yeah, and if you also think about marketing in general, we've been moving to MMM and incrementality testing for a while. And those 2 things I think are really going to change 2026 for most businesses. Because with media mix modeling, most companies were not able to do it because it's just too expensive. With AI, it makes it affordable and easy for companies of any size to do it.

Yeah.

And it'll give you better understanding of what's going to work or not work before you even launch it and spend money or even drive eyeballs to it. And I think incrementality testing is huge in marketing because a lot of people would have bought your product even if you didn't, even though they clicked on the ad. And should the ad get credit? Like, I don't think so. I look at it as like they clicked on that, they were going to buy anyways. The ad got credit when it shouldn't. You need to actually figure out if you turn off your advertising, What's the difference that you're generating in revenue?

There should be a modern updated version of Crazy Egg for this.

Yes, I agree with that.

So anyway, that's, that's how we see it. I think what we can— maybe we can move to some of the classics over here. You can pick one, Neil.

3 underpriced marketing channels for Q2 2026.

By the way, all these were generated by OpenClaw. So you could go first.

All right. So channel number 1, We're seeing the social networks that no one likes talking about— Snap, Pinterest, X. I'm not talking about talking about from a political standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint. These channels, they're performing well. The ROI is still massive. And for some reason, companies don't try to run on them. And we believe that if you're going to run paid advertising, don't start first with the Metas and the Googles. Start with, especially if you're a smaller organization, start with smaller social networks because the cost is just way cheaper. They can't scale as much, but that's okay. At least you're driving in more profit for whatever spend you have.

Number 2, so I think a very underpriced marketing channel right now is GitHub. Let me tell you this. So I am basically open sourcing all of my AI skills and I'm just tossing it onto GitHub. I just threw it up yesterday. I have 250 stars on GitHub. So do I have the same amount of OpenCLaw stars? No, I don't. But 250 stars is a good amount. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep adding to that repository, that repo, and I'm going to keep upgrading it because I was using Gary Tan's from Y Combinator. I used this for the first time yesterday. It's like, hey, are you okay sharing your data with us on how you're using? I was like, oh my God, that's smart. And then afterwards, like, hey, are you making— are you using the most updated? I was like, I took that scaffolding, I added it to mine this morning and I'm just going to keep adding to it. And then I can see their usage, I can see what they're using, what they want more of and whatever. And in the future I can see marketers adding like, oh, by the way, what's your email in there too? I'm sure we can ask all those questions, but I think GitHub is going to become more and more of a marketing channel. Channel because agents are using it more and more.

Number 3, GEO. So when we look at traffic from GEO, it converts roughly 2.5 times better than email and SMS traffic. The number 2 highest converting channel, I believe, is SMS. The number 3 is email. And then I believe it gets into some paid advertising channels. GEO converts roughly 3x better than these paid ad channels. So this is massive. The cool thing about GEO versus SEO, you can actually get results in a very short period of time, call it like a few months. One of the factors that they're looking for now when they pull results is how updated is the content. So your website content is super important to be updated. They don't like pulling old outdated sites. The other thing is when you're getting brand mentions around the internet, you need to optimize not just for velocity, but recency. They're looking for how many times is a company being mentioned as of recent. If you're Coca-Cola and you've been mentioned a lot over 10, 15 years, Those articles from 10, 15 years, the AI doesn't like pulling that as much as an article that is 2, 3 months old.

All right, so let's start. Sorry, I was thinking about these earlier.

You want more?

No, no, no. Okay, I'm going to continue. So thank you. Next topic here.

Wait, they are really good.

No, I just kept calling you something. It's an inside joke in my own head. So how AI turns B players into A players. So this is the multiplier effect. So we can kind of go back and forth on this because we're seeing it happen in our organizations right now. Now, in my mind, the biggest multiplier effect is when you're able to talk to it and you're able to run multiple things in parallel. So multiple tabs doing different things. So one, you can have a tab doing conversion rate optimization for you. The other tab, you can have it doing SEO for you. The other tab, you can have it helping doing design work. You can have it ship different features for you without waiting. And so the way it turns B players into A players is the B players used to need to wait. They still need to be told what to do. That's, to my definition, that's a B player. You need to be told what to do. An A player kind of just does it. But the B player, if you tell them what to do and say, hey, you're no longer resource constrained and you can use these copilots to help you, they can do a lot more than what they used to do before. And that, in effect, is more like an A player. It's still not quite they're doing autonomously yet, but if the agents push them to work autonomously, maybe they become an A player there.

So I'm going to give you my controversial viewpoint on this. We see AI making the B players still stay B players and the A players I don't think that's controversial.

I think that's fair.

Because the A players do so much more and they're so much better. The B players are also doing more and they're so much better. But the standards have changed on what is an A and what is a B player. So what we're typically seeing is the biggest thing that is impacting is people are able to just execute faster, no matter if you're A player, B player, C player, and even lower than that. Speed is the biggest thing that we've seen. The second big thing that we've seen is it gives you the ideas on what to do and it'll surface things for you. We see it surfacing things for A players, B players, C players. It doesn't matter what level because some decisions like the credit card conversion example that I gave you, that's something that you would want an A player to take charge of and not roll it out with a B player because it's something related to finance and money and it can actually have a big impact on the brand.

You need A player judgment.

You need A-player judgment with that. Spot on.

Yeah.

And then I would say the third thing that we're really seeing with AI is it allows them to run more experiments at a faster pace to, assuming you have the traffic volume or you can buy the traffic, to figure out what is the direction that we should take our campaigns. Because people all have different ideas. Now you can just run through them much faster and figure out what actually works and then just focus and double down on what works. While before it would just take you months and months, sometimes a year to figure out What's the right path?

So to Neil's point on that one, I would recommend everyone go look for Andrej Karpathy's Auto Research, go pull that GitHub repo, and then you can literally do this yourself. You call that— maybe you're using more synthetic data and then you can combine that with my Auto Growth, which is also open source as well. I don't have a good link for you there. Just search for Eric Siu Auto Growth. You should be able to find it. But Neil, let me ask you a question here. You mentioned the B players and A players, they become more of who they are, but the multiplier effect. So an A player using this now, how much better are they? Are they 5x better, 10x better? Just throw a number out there.

We're seeing A players be like 30, 40% better.

And how about the B players?

Maybe like 50-ish percent better. We're seeing bigger lifts with B players and C players than we are with A players. This is a biased viewpoint from my perspective. Most of the A players that I know of and interact with in my organization and in other organizations have marketing, they're typically in management. We're only seeing so much efficiencies that you can provide to manager-level positions with AI versus the people who are actually doing. I do interact with the people that are doing, but I don't interact with them nearly as frequently as I do with management in organizations, even excluding mine. It's just usually I'm dealing with VPs and CMOs much more frequently than mid-level Okay, so 2 more things on this.

So you look at your organization, okay? What percent of people— so if you think of AI as 4 levels, so you have unacceptable, you have capable people with AI, you have adaptive, and then you have transformative. Transformative, they're building end-to-end workflows on their own. They don't need to be like— they're completely reinventing how to work, right? What percent of your company would you say is transformative?

Because less than 10%. Less than—

so here's the thing. When I talk to my other friends and I see this the same for mine, it's like probably less than like 2%. Yes.

Yeah. I don't know the exact percentage, but it's not high. I know it's well below 10%.

So that— I was just curious. I just want to ask you that. But I— my controversial take is I think as a leader now in an organization, it used to be you wanted to be the chief inspirer and you still definitely do. But I find myself in a weird spot now. I have to be both the cheer— the chief inspirer and the Chief fearmonger.

Okay.

So the inspirational piece, you will get your best people to perform at the highest level. That's what you want. That's a good result, right? Also, if you're the chief fearmonger, you're going to get some people to tap out. That is also an acceptable result. Okay. And so for me, it's like I've never had to do this in my career. But also the last time something big like this happened, we're both children. Okay. We didn't have to experience this change. This is the first time I've had to play both. And it's a very weird thing, but I see a lot of my friends doing it. I know you're maybe not as front-facing with it, but I just— it's like a thing that I've just been looking at. It's like It's so weird to have to do that.

I don't really see, at least in our organization, we don't really have to do too much of the fear stuff. When we look at the most transformative people in AI, we've taken an approach instead of saying, hey, we need to make everyone an A-player with AI, we now look at it as that's unrealistic. It's like saying, hey, Eric, you're recruiting 50 new employees. I want you to take every single employee and take them through this training methodology and they need to all go through this practice, be onboarded in this specific way and learn how to use Cloud Code. All right? So that way they can do their job better in marketing. And then how realistic is it then 30 days later, hey everyone, OpenClaw came out. You guys all need to go through onboarding and learn how to be the best at OpenClaw. It's just not realistic in an organization. So what we found is there's— every organization has their elite tech people who are really good at adapting with times and you don't have to push them. They tend to adapt before Before you even tell them about the new products and services because they get a kick out of it and they just love doing it. With those people, we just put them in charge of figuring out how to help different departments with AI and build the tech and provide it to them and integrate the SOPs so that way people are just more efficient and we don't have to keep training these people on how to relearn a new technology or how to be amazing at everything. Instead, the AI adapts them versus having everyone to be amazing at using AI when it comes to at least marketing?

Yeah. So our philosophy on this is we want to build the bridge for everyone, but not necessarily everyone's going to want to cross it. The majority of people are going to cross the bridge, right? How you bridge that gap. The other thing is, it is within your— like, if you're a leader listening to this right now, you should absolutely— you have to build this because if you know how to do all this stuff alone, it's not enough. It's on you to teach everyone how to do it, Right? Because if everyone can spend the 20 to 40 hours over like a 60 to 90 day period to learn how to do this, everyone's a lot stronger for that. And that's good. The other thing that Neil's mentioning here, so I said earlier, we have 4 levels that we're looking for, and this is adapted from Zapier. You have unacceptable level, capable level, adaptive, and transformative. We are not looking for many people to get to transformative. That's extremely hard to find. Okay? That's like best of the best. But Neil, we want everyone to get to adaptive because Because today's capable is tomorrow's unacceptable. So if you get them to adaptive, they at least will quickly fall back to capable and then you got to get them back up to adaptive, right? That's how we see it. But I will say, Neil, there's going to— obviously, there's going to be some stragglers that don't want to adapt, right?

Yes.

And that's okay. And that's why I say those people, it's okay for them to tap out. I'm okay with that. But I think the majority of the people at my organization, they want to do it. And, you know, we've been facilitating that. And I think it's same thing for you guys.

Yeah. But I think that is, you know, every organization is going to have to figure out what works for them. And there's no right or wrong. But this stuff is just moving so fast. It's too complex to try to get everyone to adapt.

You can't. And I think it's just like, remember I told you, I did tell you this, my dad said that, you know, it took years and years for all the companies, different companies he worked at, to adapt to getting email addresses, right? So like, I just, I don't think we have the luxury of that to wait this time. It's very different. So, and to illustrate this, and then we'll cover maybe another classic topic, but the Anthropic team doesn't write code anymore. Okay, so this guy's friend got hired at Anthropic 3 weeks ago. Nobody on his team had handwritten code in 3 months. Okay, so they haven't written like anything handwritten. They run multiple agents in parallel and act more like managers than engineers. This isn't just an Anthropic thing. This applies to your organization. It applies to my organization. Now you know what I do, Neil? I send people Looms on how I'm just going through Slack on how I'm working with the different— I'm querying different things. I'm like, guys, this is how you do it. You see how easy this is? This is awesome. Look at how much time you save, right? And you know what I'm doing now? We have this thing called Gather Town where we like go around virtually talking to people and I'll just randomly hit the gong and people will hear this gong noise and I'll walk over to auditorium and I'll pull someone in and I'll start training them. So the move now, guys, is if you are just watching an agent code, you're already behind, right? You should be spinning up multiple agents and directing them. And then at the end of the day, if you're working really hard, maybe your eyes hurt. Okay, I'm not recommending that, by the way, but my eyes hurt at the end of the day. So the point of this method is not to learn to use AI to code faster. It's you are the product manager, you— the agents are your engineers, and your job is to keep them running at all times. This doesn't just apply to engineers, it applies to people across the board in knowledge work. Yep. And by the way, if you're an electrician, I might tell my kids today, if they're in high school, just go be an electrician.

Dude, electricians get paid an arm and a leg, especially in data centers right now.

It's $260K, I think, starting or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting thing that happened to me is I met up with one of my daughter's teachers in our old school. So not the current school.

What incentivized you to do that?

You had to meet up with them because parent-teachers and all that kind of stuff.

But you said old school.

In her old school. This is while she was at the old school.

Okay. I see. I see.

Not current. So this wasn't Well. And the teacher was complaining to me how people who pick up trash, like garbage people, you know, that drive the trucks and, you know, empty out the dustbins, they get paid way more than teachers. And that's not fair. And I wasn't allowed to say this. I was like, but you could go be that. And they're just like, why would anyone want to be that job? I'm like, but that's why it gets paid more money. Because people don't like to do that. And they were like, that job is beneath me. And I was like, that job's not beneath me. I would just clean entire trash.

And you have done it before.

Yeah, I used to sweep up vomit. Literally every single day I was working, I would have to like clean up vomit. They paid me extra 25 cents an hour to sweep up the vomit. It was like $6.75, no, $5.75 an hour to sweep up vomit. That was a lot of money back then.

Nothing is beneath me. I had to put expired dates. I had to put dates over expired dates when I worked for a Chinese factory.

Wait, wait, wait. So the food was expired?

The food was expired. So they had us, I was like 17 years old, that they had us putting new dates on top of the expired dates and they would pay us all cash under the table. And this is like a college in the middle of between going to college. And yeah, it was funny. And they didn't give us any air conditioning. We're like, we're in the back of the warehouse and it was freaking hot. Yeah.

Yeah. And then the teacher asked me, Like, is this fair? And I'm like, but you could choose your own profession. No one's holding a gun to your head.

Yeah. By the way, guys, what we're seeing is, again, whether it's with— we're talking about trash, or when I look at that building with all the engineers working there, like when you talk about electricians, everything's supply and demand, guys. That's all it is.

They have so many shifts.

Yeah, they're working. I hear the construction 24/7. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, let's pick one more. And this will close us out here. So you can pick one more here.

Let's see, I closed the sheet.

Oh, here, I'll pick, I'll pick. So let's go with why the best— no, no, let's go. You know, we haven't done a tools one in a while. Want to do a tools one?

I think we talked about tools indirectly all the time because we talked about AI.

Okay, fine, fine, fine. The 5 skills every marketer needs by 2027 that nobody's teaching. Okay, here, I'll start with that one.

The 5 skills?

Okay.

Yeah.

So number 1, I don't know if we want to call this a skill, but I think you as a marketer As long as your relationship with change, meaning adaptability, is good, you will be fine no matter what. I think it's the people that are unwilling to change, and I'm seeing in my org, Neil's seeing it in his org also, we're seeing this in other companies. The people that are very scared of the future right now, they're unwilling to change and they have an unhealthy relationship with change. They think they're more comfortable with things being stable when the reality is the only thing that's constant is actually change. So that's number one.

Number 2 is understanding data. Even though AI can end up breaking data down to you, in a lot of cases it's off and data is the backbone of marketing. Bad data means everything that you're doing is not going to work. So you need to focus on good data. What you need with AI, or what marketers are doing with AI going forward, is they're running a lot more experiments. You're analyzing which ones are working, which ones aren't, so that way you can figure out where to double down. If you suck at analyzing data, suck at figuring out if it's accurate, you're going to be screwed and you're just wasting your time.

Yep. Number 3 is storytelling. So if you don't know how to tell good stories, especially in a world where everyone's making the same thing, everyone's copying each other, you're not going to know how to stand out. The best storytellers, they know how to hook people in. They know how to tell a good story and they know how to make a good offer. That is the premise of how this stuff has always worked from an advertising standpoint. And that's going to become even more valuable. Like the value is standing out.

Number 4, having deep understandings of your ICP, your ideal customer profile. Everything that you're doing shouldn't be about traffic, shouldn't be be about reach. It should be about getting more of your ICPs to your website, to your app, whatever it may be, and then eventually converting. But here's the kicker. When people say they understand their ICPs, eventually businesses expand with their marketing. They release more products, they go into more countries. And even if you use countries, for example, if your ideal customer is someone who works at a big corporation in The way you would market to them in, let's say, Brazil is going to be different than you do in the United States because there's some cultural differences. So when I talk about understanding your ICP, it's not just about knowing, here's my ideal customer and who's who I'm targeting. You need to understand them culturally as well so you can figure out how to best target them no matter what country they're in.

Number 5, I was debating between another one here, but you want to— when you are working with AI, don't just use it on one screen. You have to learn how to work in Okay, when I say working in parallel, the creator of Claude Code, for example, he has 6 or 7 different agents running at the same time. That is the future of how you're going to be working. You're going to be running multiple ones. Maybe, for example, by the way, you spin something up, you want 20 articles written. Okay, they're going to create those in parallel for you. And then it'll create a strategy for you over here when it comes to CRO. And then you're going to have a go-to-market strategy over here. And then it's going to do some, some SEO work over here, some paid media work over here, some ad creative stuff over here. over here, like across the board, you're doing multiple things and your output should be a multiplier or a multiple on top of what you're able to do before.

That's it.

That is it, guys. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.