AI Isn't A Threat... Your Laziness Is

All right, guys, we're going live. It's another episode of Marketing School. It's 4 AM where Neil is. It is 7 AM where I am in Florida. And I'm here in Florida for a founders retreat. We're in Palm Beach right now, actually, Neil. The hotel I'm in, let's just say it is a ripoff for what it is. I'm not going to name the hotel, but it's a nice hotel.

Wait, you're in the Surfside? Is that what it's called?

No, no, no, no. I'm in Palm Beach. Surfside is where Surfside is. That's north of Miami. But we're here for a retreat. You know, some of our mutual friends are here, like, you know, Saya, Genevieve, a couple other people, Al, Al Don, Quilt Guy. And so, yeah, it's David Hensel. I think you met him as well. So yeah, it's a good group of people. We've been doing this retreat since 2018 or so. So we actually did a fun reflection. So Actually, Syed was the one that, you know, planned this out. So, it's been amazing. And, you know, he had us do a YPO exercise actually. And I'll kind of talk about the retreat. You can ask questions around it. We'll talk about AI as well. We'll talk about marketing. I'll reveal what I can without revealing any confidential information. And we could talk about the retreat first. There's some other stuff to talk about this week, but—

Let's first go to the exercise that Syed had you guys do.

Yeah. So, the exercise was And this will be fun if you do it. You're not the type of person to do this, but it'll be fun if you do it. Okay. So, and I don't think he was actually the type of person to do this exercise before either. So it's called Then, Now, and Later. So you basically reflect on 10 years ago and then— so 10 years ago, like, what were you doing? Where were you in your life? Like, how are things going overall? Am I making sense so far?

Yeah.

Okay. When you look at now, it's like, okay, how are things going now? Like, you're 40, I'm 39 years old. We're around the same age. Like, you know, is our life— did it turn out the way we expected it to be? How's it going now? We're married, we're with kids, right? And all that. Then you do 10 years out, like what's going to be happening in 10 years, right? Are you doing like $2 billion in revenue, $3 billion in revenue, whatever, right? And so, it was really interesting because, you know, some people shared a lot of pictures and I realized mine didn't have any pictures in it. And so, everyone had reflected on their pictures because you just look at your Apple Photos, right? And I looked at mine. You know what's interesting, Neil? 10 years ago, you, Yaniv, and I were speaking at his conference. And at the time, you know, yeah, um, there's a lot of things that were going really well, um, I think in all our lives, but I think things were going really well at that time. I'm not going to go into details, um, whether it's on the personal side, whether it's on the business side as well. I think we're all on the very right track and, uh, we just never knew where life would take us, right? Um, I'll just leave it at that right now without revealing anything. So I thought that was a great exercise because people really got to Reflect. And the one thing I'll share with you, and then we can talk more about the retreat itself because, you know, literally I'm supposed to be playing tennis right now, but I'm, you know, we're recording podcasts. So that's how committed we are to you guys. So, you know, Walter, who's a really smart marketer, very good with copywriting, I don't think you've ever met him before. But, you know, he has, you know, an amazing family, amazing kids. And this is public already. So this I can reveal.

He did.

He's been recording these short-form clips and posting to Instagram. One of them got 21 million views. I got to send it to you. One's really funny. And the other ones were like he's playing his kid basketball and his kid ends up beating him, right? Like, this is where like the son surpasses the father. But he always makes sure to integrate his family and everything with everything. And like faith is first, family is second, right? That type of stuff. And so anyway, it just proves to you that, you know, despite you being like 40 years old, 45 years old or whatever it is exactly, you can still play whatever game you want to play. And he proved to his kids that Daddy can get lots of social media views. They're like calling him like, oh, you don't know anything about this. You need to have a good hook. He's like, bro, like, are you serious? Like, I'm a marketer, right? So I thought that was really fun. And then a lot of NBA players, a lot of basketball players actually reached out to him after he put up that video. Everyone's like, man, that really brought me back. And so all that to say is like that. I think the lesson for everyone here is like the then, now, later is a fun exercise. The other piece is If you can somehow, if you have kids, if you can do social media and really participate in your kids' lives and try to bring them along with you, I think that's the ultimate reward. And I can see that with him.

Yeah, I've never done the— what is it called? Then, now, later. But I've done something similar. And I actually do something similar, not every single day, but multiple times a week. Where I think about all the mistakes I've made from 24 years ago when I started as an entrepreneur to even 10 years ago or 5 years ago. And I break down what I would do differently to be much further off 10, 15 years from now.

Okay. So do you want to reveal anything? Sure.

So some of the big lessons that I've learned over the years And I'll start really broad and then I'll get really specific. The first big lesson that I learned was from an investor named Tony Conrad, and Tony Conrad was one of my early investors. He's a legend. I think he was on the board of WordPress, which is Automattic, right? The parent company is Automattic. He sold a company, I believe, to Yahoo. He sold a company to AOL. He is also— was also invested. He's a— he is an investor, but he's done well as an investor. I think he's been like Uber, Peloton, you know, Blue Bottle Coffee, and the list goes on and on and on. And I remember Tony Conrad used to always tell me, you need a big TAM, you need a big TAM, and would just shove it down our throat. Okay. And I remember some of my earlier companies I believed were companies. Like for example, when we started Crazy Egg, it was a heat map tool and it would just show you where people click, where they don't. And Tony would always say, you know, like, hey, you need a big TAM. You don't want to just build a feature or two. And when you look at that product, at least the original version, it was just a feature. It wasn't pure web analytics, and back then there was a lot of detailed web analytics companies out there, including Google bought Urchin. Urchin ended up turning into Google Analytics, and they ended up making it free. But one little feature isn't a product, and the bigger the market you go after, for example, when you think about market, most people think about quantity of people that it's applicable to. That's one version of TAM. Example of that is toilet paper. Another example is CRM and being Salesforce. It's not applicable to everyone, but the people who it is applicable to can spend a lot of money on it and it's worth a lot of money for them. So from a dollar perspective, both toilet paper and CRM are big markets and you can make billions and billions of dollars doing anything that's big. If you go after a niche, it's really hard to make money because the riches are not in niches. They're after really small markets. No matter how much energy you spend marketing, it's roughly the same effort. And I remember speaking on a panel with Rich Barton, the Zillow founder, Expedia founder. I don't know what else he did. I think Glassdoor was his as well.

Yeah.

And I remember Rich saying, if you're going to whatever market you go after, it's pretty much the same effort, right? So if you're going after a niche versus a really big broad market, it's pretty much the same effort from a marketing perspective. And the analogy that he used is the energy it takes, and this is a baseball analogy, the energy it takes to hit a single versus a double or triple or a home run is the same energy. You're still going up to the plate, You're still swinging and giving it your all, so might as well go for a home run each and every single time. And I personally agreed with it, and that taught me to stop building niches— businesses in niches, because all marketers are like, riches are in the niches, and it's just a big misconception. So that was the first big lesson that I learned, but it took me probably 12, 13 years to really understand and figure that out. A little bit too long.

So what Neil is saying in business is absolutely right. The same energy goes into a business. You might as well go for a home run. But in physics, in actual baseball, it does take a little more energy to hit a home run than a single.

Yes.

So just wanted to flag that. But you know what's interesting, Neil? So I guess I'll reveal where I'm staying because there are some lessons around where I'm staying right now, I think from a marketing standpoint and a supply and demand standpoint. So we're staying at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. So You know, famous hotel, been around for a while. This is this Flagler family, I think, owns a lot of the properties around here. It's not a cheap hotel. So why is it that the hotels are—

Wait, what's not cheap? What's the cost?

So, I mean, it's public, but it's— so for the room that I'm in right now, I'll tell you the room I'm in and then I'll tell you the cost. I think this is like a 300-square-foot room. Okay. Like, look, don't get me wrong. It's a, you know, it's a nice room. Like, look, they put Icelandic water in here and like you did, they put like, they give you these pellegrino water, right? For free?

Or do you gotta pay for the water?

It's free.

It's free.

You know Cocofloss? The $15 floss that I use?

Uh-huh.

The really— yeah. So they have that in there. So they give you like nice things and all that. It's $2,200 a night for this room. Okay. For like 300 square feet.

Water view?

No water view, dude. I have like, I can see like the courtyard. Okay. Um, so that is expensive, right?

Yes.

And I thought I would get like a Four Seasons Surfside view where it's like water view. It's huge. It's super modern and all that. Now, I'm like, okay guys, like, why is this so expensive, right? And it's because it's a very legendary— it's the brand. Like, you know, you look at the people walking through, it's very— have you seen Palm Royale on Apple TV? It's all about Palm Beach.

Have you seen it? I only saw like 10 minutes of it and I couldn't keep up.

So it is literally Palm Royale where it's like people are wearing like, you know, those really nice sweaters, you know, draped over them and then like everyone's dressed really nicely. It's totally that. Like, Yaniv and I were talking about, we're like, dude, this is so Palm Royale, right? Now let me tell you this. The tennis court that we go to, we're like, the membership pre-COVID for the tennis court was $200,000. You pay $250,000 for the privilege, okay, of paying $35,000 a year. So you don't even pay $250,000 for the membership where you can sell it later. You're not buying equity, okay, for the privilege. Now, how much do you think that membership is post-COVID?

$500,000.

$700,000. You're paying $700,000 for the privilege. And don't get me wrong, it's a really nice tennis court. But that's a whole supply and demand thing. Because, you know, with breakers, People want to be associated with the brand. It's legendary and all that, right? And then the tennis court, because the supply is so low now, everyone wants to play tennis, they want to play pickleball and all this. That's how much it costs now, right? It's no different than the LA country club that you and I have talked about, right? The prices for these things, because they're scarce, just keep going up. But the difference is in LA, you can sell it, you can, you kind of get to buy equity there.

I didn't know that you could sell it at LA country club.

I don't know about LA, but the LA tennis club, my friend bought in for like $8,000, like pre-COVID, and then now it's worth like $50,000 and he could sell it.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah. So anyway, all that to say, I thought that was interesting. But, you know, there's— I think the— we did do like a lot of presentations where people were talking about their business. So usually the agenda for these things, just so everyone knows, because I think live events— we've been talking quite a bit about live events. I think this is the type of live event that people should be considering because I think it's, you know, if you're— whether you're in business or like you're working for someone, it's good to have a peer group, right? And so our agenda for this one is like tennis. Like, you know, I'll tell you the agenda today. I'll just make it simple. So it's 7 to 9 is like, you know, solo activity. So typically I'm playing tennis with Yaniv and Walter and we have a tennis coach, right? And then at 9, we typically start 9 to 12, we do exploration. So, Neil, you might be presenting on like a business problem and we maybe we go for an hour or so and we kind of go around sharing, you know, our experiences in the room. So everyone gets a problem to solve, right? And then, then we have lunch and then we go back and we do AI. iShares for about an hour or so. And then we play either pickleball, basketball, or today we're playing cricket, which is, I guess, you know, your country plays that quite a bit, right? So, we're playing cricket today at Syed's house, right? And then we're going to have dinner. And then we're basically done at 7 PM every day and you get alone time. Today, it's a little more leisure. Like, you know, we'll go like we'll hang out. But today, we get to do some massages. We go to Syed's house. But that's how it's structured. And it's like a 3-day thing. And then we try to go to like a different place every year. But I highly recommend that everyone like If you've never done events before, you want to know how to do events, you should start something like this because this is when I did the then, now, later exercise. This group was started basically 10 years ago or so, and 8 years, let's call it, and it stayed consistent and it's really fun to see how people have grown over the years. So I'll just leave it at that and I'm happy to share around the AI stuff too.

But yeah. But before we go back to you and I discussing some of the marketing lessons we've learned over the years, When you did your then, now, later, what are some things that you reflected on for the last 10 years that you did that you may have— would've done differently from a marketing aspect or a business aspect?

I'll give you one from the personal aspect first. There was a lunch we were having. It was your now wife, myself, you know, there was a gal with me, should have married her.

More like 4:00 PM, 5:00 PM in Arizona. Yes.

Yes. And then Yaniv was there too. So at least one of my personal lessons is I should have just married her, right? For me, that's one. I think lessons-wise also, I mean, obviously I learned to focus a lot better, right? I think that's a big one. I think had, you know, actually I'll just leave it on me. Had I stayed focused, I think, you know, things would be different. I'm still happy with the outcome in terms of, you know, what I've learned over time.

Yeah.

And I think it's really those 2 things that stuck out to me. And then also, like, I will say I had a lot of pictures of the office that we got back then. Having people in person is— it's very difficult to beat that, especially with some of the topics that we'll talk about today with AI and all that. We did have a fun discussion. So that's the then. But Neil, I'll throw you something that maybe we could come back to. So I had brought up— we had a debate point around this on when universal basic income is going to happen for the majority of the population. How far do you think that is away, Neil?

Extremely far because we can't afford it. We have issues getting budget approval for anything right now.

Pick like a range, like 3 to 5 years, 5 to 10, 15 plus, 20 plus. What do you think it is?

I don't think it's going to happen.

Okay. Is it a 0% chance?

I don't know for certain, but if I had to pick a number, I would say it's not going to happen at all.

Okay. It's really interesting because everyone across the board had different answers. And then obviously some people are way more opinionated than other people, so they'll like Put their opinion down way harder, but it's interesting. Like I can see that answer coming from you, and you know we'll see what happens overall. But even when I put a poll up on Twitter yesterday, it's like all over the place. Like nobody really knows. My guess is five to ten years. Syed says fifteen, which is actually pretty fast still. And then everyone else was actually some people were actually more aggressive than I was, like three to five years. I don't know about that. Yeah, yeah. Yaniv was actually three to five years. So.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I look at AI as more of the change we had from things like agriculture, manufacturing, and humans in general. Yes, a lot of them lost jobs, but then we adapted and there was new jobs that were created. I look at AI as the same thing in which— and I'm a big believer in Peter Thiel's camp, and Thiel talks about how A lot of people talk about AI and all this stuff it's going to do. And then you got the doomsday people that talk about how it's not going to affect anything. He's somewhere in the middle. I'm with him. I'm not saying he's right or wrong. I love his viewpoint because he is an investor in a lot of these AI companies. So for him, he actually makes more money if it succeeds. But for him to state that a lot of it's overblown from a job perspective, and I do believe it. Like when Heineken says, we cut off 9,000 employees because of AI. I'm not saying AI can't impact employees. I doubt Heineken actually cut 9,000 employees because of AI. From a marketing perspective, that's a great narrative to pitch to the market. If you pitch the narrative of, hey, we had all these employees, we weren't able to perform and we weren't doing well, so we had to terminate them, that's probably going to make your stock tank because people are like, you're not doing as well. Using the AI narrative is much more advantageous. And I remember CNBC was at a conference, or there was a big AI conference or a tech conference. CNBC, Bloomberg was all there, and they're interviewing a lot of these founders, both the Perplexity founder and the Anthropic founder. And both of them said most of these job losses have nothing to do with AI. Everyone's just using AI as a scapegoat. That doesn't mean AI won't impact jobs in the future, but as of now, when people are like, yeah, we're at Heineken, we're in manufacturing, and, you know, we have all these people in the back office, these big organizations move really, really slow. I don't know if you've seen any organizations the size of Microsoft or Heineken or Coca-Cola move extremely fast like a startup, Eric. I don't know if you have. I haven't.

Yeah, I haven't.

I'll take that as he hasn't either. Yeah. So I doubt that they adapted that fast and they were able to eliminate 9,000 jobs. But so I just believe that universal basic income is probably not going to happen. One, because we can't afford it as the United States. And I'm assuming when Eric asked this question to your peer set, I'm assuming you guys mean mainly United States because some other countries already have universal basic income.

I think everyone means the United States.

Yeah. And I think the United States being more capitalistic is probably not going to do it. But I could be really, really wrong here.

So I'll give you my take on it. So wait, did you finish yet?

Yeah, go for it.

Okay. So my take on it is I think in the long run we're going to be okay. I think. But when you, when you look at, when you look at the industrialization or when you look at when we move from kind of most people being farmers to, you know, most people becoming factory workers, that change took about 30 years. And there was definitely job displacement during that. I don't think it's going to take 30 years this time. But to your point, people are slow. I think these things happen. I mean, there's going to be job displacement. Maybe that job displacement happens for a couple of years or so, then I think we even out. But during that time, maybe, you know, people realize maybe there does need to be UBI because there's going to be so much job displacement. Right. And the reason why I'm saying this, too, is because we kind of went around the room and nobody's actively hiring right now. We'll just put it that way. Right. If anything, some people are looking to cut. And I think that that's kind of what we're seeing. across the board right now and even with like other friends that I talk to too. So that's why I think it's 5 to 10 years because to me this is, this is bigger than anything I've ever seen. Like the internet was already pretty big. I think this is bigger than the internet and like even the things people were showing, like some people, like everyone's at different levels on the AI side over here in terms of their shares. But I think that's kind of where like my take is, yes, there's going to be some short-term job displacement. And then I do think UBI is going to happen too. Because why? Because America, I don't think the money printer ever turns off. And so, you know, and I do think this is going into a little bit of politics, but I do think that because we were talking about worldviews and I'll just give you one of mine, I do think we're going to see like the rise of socialism, like really, really push in the next couple of years. So I think, and what do people want in that situation? People want UBI, right? And so the government, you want people to run on a ticket where it's like, oh yeah, We're going to give UBI to everyone, right? That's a president that can win to appease the majority of people.

So I agree, the majority of people would probably vote for universal basic income. I think the majority of the US would be very happy with that, even though there'd be drastic consequences for us to just print that much cash. Yeah.

And Neil, one more thing. I think like this stuff, like, okay, let's say this costs like what if you were to buy it retail, maybe like $5 or something like that at a hotel?

Icelandic water, one can, or are you talking about a whole case?

Just one can.

Yeah. $1, $2.

Okay. So I think because of AI and robotics and everything, I think it's going to bring downward pressure on pricing. And so maybe the price itself doesn't come down, but you're— if you're making $35,000 a year, it goes a lot further because you can, you can do more with that money. That's, that's my point.

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think the Icelandic water example is maybe not the best example because companies like that with manufacturing, a lot of it is pretty automated. I do see AI helping in the back office, but with a lot of those companies, their real cost is just manufacturing, and most of that stuff is already using robotics and automated, and it's pretty cheap. But if you take that same example, what Eric's talking about, and you implement it with things like building SaaS products, right, which are very labor intensive, and the people that you're paying for engineers— I don't know what engineers go for, Eric, these days, but hundreds and thousands of dollars sometimes. you know, $200,000, $300,000 for really amazing people. It's very rare that you're hiring good engineers for $50,000. I'm assuming you agree with that statement. He's nodding his head. You know, you give them Claude Code and Cursor and let's say it improves their productivity by double, triple, right? It's now way cheaper for you to end up making these SaaS products, which then makes it easier for you to give it away for Cheaper or even freemium or even free. And that starts pushing a lot of downward pressure and just makes the whole market more competitive.

Quick break. One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90+ hours a month on content alone. ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work, not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice. It helps you with other areas such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs. We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show. Dude, you want to know something interesting before I show you some stats? Neil, so this is the first time my YouTube got filtered. It really didn't like one of my titles. I had a video come out on Monday. I'm like, dude, the click-through rate's 9% and it's not getting any traffic. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? So the title was Can OpenClaw and Claude code actually replace humans, right? And it really— because there's an algorithm update that happened, I think this month, where YouTube hates sensationalist headlines. And I'm like, what's going on? 9% click-through rate. And then I'm like, oh, I got filtered. So just a flag for everyone. If you're doing YouTube, they're really cracking down on the sensationalist headlines and the packaging now.

Speaking of sensational headlines, another big marketing lesson that I learned back in the day is I used to be really active on social media. And when I say social media, Back then it was very different for marketers. It was mainly Digg and Reddit. There was StumbleUpon that was driving a lot of traffic to websites that was created by Garrett Camp, who's one of the Uber founders.

Yeah, then he founded Uber.

Yeah. And there was also Delicious. I believe Yahoo ended up buying Delicious for $30 million or something.

Went nowhere.

Uh-huh. So when you look at those type of websites and they were driving a lot of traffic to webmasters, Those kind of websites did really well with sensational headlines. And in marketing, they would call it, what was it, clickbait, right? A lot of it was like clickbait back then. And what I ended up finding out is the clickbait is really great to get eyeballs and sensational headlines is really great to get eyeballs and attention, but very rarely does it ever convert to revenue. And as a marketer, I remember I used to believe that the most important thing that I could do was drive traffic. And I was sitting in a board meeting with investor back in the day. His name is Phil Black. Phil Black worked at Summit Partners, which is a massive private equity venture fund. I don't know how much money they manage, call it $30, $40 billion. I'm guessing it's somewhere around there. I can actually Google it. Summit Partners AUM, $46 billion. Oh, it was close. And he also worked at Deutsche Bank, went to Stanford, probably went to Stanford first. And then eventually he created his own venture fund called True Ventures with, I believe, a guy named John Callahan and had massive success throughout his whole career. And I remember in a board meeting, Phil's like, who's working on what? So, you know, my co-founder, Hiten, my brother-in-law was CEO. I was working on marketing. We had a guy named Ben Sardella working on sales. And I remember him telling me something that was interesting, right? Because he was just giving us feedback because every quarter you would have board meetings or every other month. And you would think like as a marketer, your job is to get more leads and more traffic. And I remember him telling me one thing. He's just like, your number one job, no matter what role you're in, Because he's seen a lot of companies, is just hire the best people. If you just hire those people, it doesn't matter if we're in an AI revolution, if we're in a manufacturing revolution, agriculture, it doesn't matter. He's like, your number one job is to hire the best people. If you hire the best people who are really good at solving your problems and they're smart, sometimes they could be young, sometimes they could be gray-haired people who have done it before within your space. Sometimes it could be—

Yeah.

people who are just really creative and scrappy and they're engineers and they can solve problems in very different verticals, like Elon Musk, right? He's like, your number one job is just to hire amazing talent. And he's like, if you look at all the companies I've invested in over his career, and he's invested in a lot, he's quite a bit older than I am, but he still looks young. He was just like, the companies tend to do the best are the ones who just crush hiring. And I never forgot that lesson. And right now I'm interviewing people in marketing right now for NP Digital to do our marketing internally. And when we look at that role, I have very specific questions for them. And if people don't have good responses, I just X them out right away.

Ask the questions.

So questions would be, you know, let's say you work for A random company, whatever it may be you do marketing. I say, okay, have you seen our business? Yes. Have we given you a lot of stats and data? The answer should be yes, because we give them information. I'll be like, okay, we generate a lot of revenue from webinars. What would be the webinars that you would end up creating? All right. And what are the topics and why?

Now keep in mind— This is for an internal marketing team, right?

This is their internal marketing team. These are people I'm interviewing. These aren't things that they have to give me on the spot. We actually gave them homework. So they're presenting the webinar topics that they would do to us. They're presenting how they would modify our Facebook ads to make them perform better, right? And they're actually showcasing everything to us. And I'll ask them questions about AI. Did they use it? You know, I can, because I can tell a lot of times when they use AI or not, especially on the copywriting. I've gotten actually really good. at figuring out who's using AI to write their copy. And it's very similar on how AI writes copy. A lot of it is, as Ramit Sethi used to say, bombtastic. Do you remember him talking about that term?

Yeah, but to be specific, I mean, some examples would be like, Neil, it's not this, it's this. Do you see that a lot? And the em dashes?

Yes, tons of em dashes. And they go, AI creates a lot of polarizing content. So the example is like, if everyone's investing in AI, it'll be like, you better not invest in AI unless you do this, right? And, you know, so I get to ask people those questions, like what they're using AI for and whatnot. Some people are honest, some people are like, I didn't use AI for anything. Then you see a lot of em dashes, you're like, Yes. I remember I interviewed one person who's like, I don't use AI for anything. And they're citing examples of webinar topics to include specific people. I'm like, oh, you know so-and-so? And you can tell they don't know them and no one in marketing would know them. And then you Google them and there's the person who wrote a Forbes article, which, you know, AI loves pulling from.

Mm-hmm.

So I'll get specific on that, or I'll get specific on questions like, if you start, what would you do in the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? If someone says in the first week, I'm going to make all these changes, right? One, they better be 100% sure they should make those changes. But usually if someone has been doing marketing for a long time, they're not making a lot of changes in the first week. The reality is, is if you're coming into a new role in an established business, you're getting to know and understand the culture, the people, all that kind of stuff, what's been done, what has worked, what hasn't worked. You're looking for all the data, hopefully using AI to understand all of it and compute it much faster so the onboarding is quicker. And then you're going to make more informed decisions versus going out the gate and making changes from day one without knowing what's been tested, what hasn't been tested. But yeah, you know, what I learned from Phil Black, and it has been true, is hiring. And it took me a long time. I would say I genuinely understood the concept because he taught me that maybe 14, 15 years ago. I probably truly understood it 8 years ago or somewhere around there. And that was when I created NP Digital.

I think it's 8 years ago. Let me tell you why. So I was going to ask you the question, when did you take that on? Because I've known you for 15 years or so, right? And I know before the way you hired was pretty like whatever. I would say maybe 8 years ago when you first started NP Digital, because when you first started, the first hire you made to be your CEO, I was like, that's not the right hire. And then you, I think after that, once Mike was, and you were focused on it, I think you guys locked it down like really quickly.

Yeah. You're talking about the mustache man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was like, you did not think through that one.

No. So Eric, me, and my co-founder Mike were at a conference and there were some other friends that were at that conference. I think it was a growth conference in San Francisco.

Yeah, it was Vasil's conference, which is rest in peace. It was his Growth Hackers conference or growth marketing conference.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. He's a good guy. I miss him. So when you look at that event, there was a guy, we call him the Mustache Man because he had a really amazing, cool stache. And Mike and I were like, yeah, you can do agency stuff. And he's really smart the way he talks. And I don't know how long he lasted, Eric. I don't know if you remember, what, maybe a month?

2 weeks. With us?

I think we fired him pretty fast.

2 weeks.

2 weeks. Yeah. So, but we got really picky at hiring and yeah, we very quickly learned that you need the right people. It doesn't matter how many leads you have or how good at sales you are, but if you just have the wrong team, you're not going to do well. And we see that in every division. Like, I don't care if it's marketing, I don't care if it's sales, I don't care if it's operations, I don't care if it's someone doing AI initiative stuff for you. If you don't hire the right people, you really are screwed.

Yeah. You know what's interesting? I'll share another lesson and then I have some things tied to kind of what we're talking about. I have some charts to show, but there's a period of time— I don't think we've really talked about this on the podcast— where it was actually going to be Neil, Mike, and myself partnering up for NP Digital. And I think we would have done well together. We would have worked well together. But I don't regret how things are set up now because you get to do things your way and I get to do things my way. I think Mike would have largely just gone with whatever, but I think we're both largely happy. Like, I am very happy with how things have turned out, and I trust that you're happy too.

I am. And I remember Mike and I pitching Eric, and Eric just straight up being like he wanted to do his own thing, and I respect that.

Well, I said yes until I said no.

Yes. Or he didn't say yes. He said he needs to think about it. And then eventually he decided that he wanted to do his own thing, which I respect. I've had people offer me amazing jobs and roles. And I know Eric too, because I remember Eric interviewed with Ray Dalio's team. You didn't take it. You weren't interested. You passed it over to me. I interviewed with them and I said I wasn't interested either. This was before Ray Dalio created his book Principles, right? Or before he was launching, he wanted in-house margin. It paid well too. I remember it was like a million bucks. Bridgewater Group.

Bridgewater Group. Yeah.

Yeah. This was like, it was like a million plus dollars, million, $2 million, somewhere around there back in the day. But going back at it, it's just like, it doesn't matter if someone is willing to pay you a lot. I had someone offer me a $6 million job offer. You know, I was telling Eric about it as well back in the day. It's like none of us really wanted to work for someone. And it doesn't matter if you can make more money or less money. If you're truly not happy and passionate about what you're doing, like life is short, you know, cut back on your expenses. Don't buy all the stuff that you may want or dream about. You'll be happier just doing what you love every day than owning that fancy watch or car or house that loses its glam after a week.

Yeah. So you've gotten bigger offers than that, but we don't need to talk about that. And then I think you actually passed one over to me where it's like a $10 million signing bonus or something like that. So it isn't about the money. And then, by the way, in this situation, Um, I think you, you and Mike were asking me to be CEO, and we would have been partners here in this situation. But I think, you know, I— there's still a lot of, especially on the focus side, there's a lot for me to learn there. So I'm happy with how things turned out, and there's a lot that you guys learned too. So, um, anyway, I want to share my screen over here because we're talking about AI hiring and all that. So, uh, I think a week or two ago we talked about the K-shaped economy, right? And so I want to review what that is and talk about where that's going. And then I found another article yesterday talking about— the headline is, you've been kicked out of the arena, you just don't know it yet. Because everyone's talking about you got to be the man in the arena and all that, right? But people are just like, no, you've been kicked out of the arena, you just don't know yet. And I want to get your reaction to that. Okay, so let me share my first screen here. Um, and I apologize, I'm on a laptop, so I hope this doesn't break. Neil, can you see this okay?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. So I'm going to show the graph first. So it says, look, This is the K-shaped economy. Okay. So basically what you're seeing on the screen over here is you're seeing a line, you're seeing a graph. Okay. And then chronologically it's just like one line, but then that line diverges into one that, that scales up. Okay. The graph goes up and then the line graph goes down. Okay. That's where it splits off. That's why it looks like a K. So you have high agency, which is the— this is the bifurcation point where it's moving up. And these are high agency plus AI mastery people. Okay. Then you have Low agency people who are managed by AI. So, and I literally think this is—

Before you go into it, do you want to explain high agency, low agency? Because Eric here is not talking about ad agencies or marketing agencies, if anyone's listening and can't see the graph.

Oh, totally, dude. I got to give you some insight. I spoke to one of these ad agency people too. He works with a holding company, so we should talk about that. But on the agency side, okay, high agency means that If you're a high agency person, that means that you're someone that's very proactive. You get things done and you just figure things out, right? Like, you know, everyone knows those people. You're very resilient. You're very— you have a very strong bias to action. Am I making sense there?

Yeah. You execute. You're a go-getter. You don't procrastinate. You don't wait for someone to tell you what to do. You just go and do stuff on your own.

And the world revolves around these people. People are attracted to these people, right? Low agency is like, okay, maybe you just want to— you're the exact opposite. Maybe you don't want to have a bias to action. Maybe you just want to chill, right? Maybe you just want a 9 to 5, which is okay, right? Maybe, maybe you're in a different phase of your life, but that's lower agency. You don't want to get things done that quickly. So his point here is that in 10 years there's going to be 2 classes of people. So economists call it the K-shaped economy, and the next 2 to 3 years will decide which line you're on. So I don't think there's a lot of time here, right? So you're going to have an overclass that uses AI as a lever to build wealth, automate income, and make decisions at a speed that no human can compete with alone. And then you're going to have an underclass that gets managed by it. So imagine this, like, you need— not you need— Neil, when— because you've worked as a janitor before, right? And I've worked at like, I think I've worked at a fast food restaurant. No, no, no, no. I worked at Circuit City before. You worked at it. You clean, right?

Toilets. Yeah, I clean toilets.

Yeah, you clean toilets, right? So, so my point is, you know, if you're a toilet cleaner in the future, you're probably going to get managed by an AI, right? Like early in your career, like, you know, the data entry job that I was doing, my first job out of college, I'd be managed by an AI.

So what this graph is just saying is there's a K-shaped economy, or what's the overall point?

The overall point is you're going to see with high agency, people are going to be the ones managing the AIs and then low agency people will get managed by AIs. That's the entire point because people are just growing so fast right now. Yeah. Yeah.

When I look at the K-shaped economy and like the graph, I look at even pre-AI, we were already heading into a K-shaped economy. I think AI just accelerates it.

Yeah, completely. And, you know, we kind of talked about this before, but, you know, I said that money amplifies your nature, AI amplifies your intelligence. And what's interesting is that, you know, a lot of people here see the same thing, right? And we're kind of talking about that right now. So to close out this point, he just says— this guy Miles says, if you're reading this now and you haven't built systems with AI, haven't automated a single workflow, haven't used it to create anything that makes you money or makes you irreplaceable, you are currently on the wrong line. That's not an insult. You have the agency Right? You have the will, your own willpower to change your trajectory right now. But 6 months from now, the gap will be twice as wide. And a year from now, it might not be crossable. And I actually see that. And what I'll say to everyone listening to this is, if you're looking for a job right now, and you're into this stuff, both Neil and I are hiring. And we're looking for people with amazing agency. Because to Neil's point earlier, everything is a talent game more than ever. Now, everything is a talent game that I think the AI stuff actually reinforces the need for strong Uh, talent, because last week we did one, an episode talking about slop cannons. We need to hire people with good judgment. Everything is downstream of hiring.

One of my favorite AI quotes is actually from Eric, and he said it either a week ago or 2 weeks ago when we were recording the podcast. AI brings out the best in you or the worst in you. And I 100% agree with what Eric said, and I love that quote, and I've been using it. In which if you are an A-player and you're just a go-getter, you execute on your own, AI just makes you even better, more dangerous, you know, more valuable. If you're lazy and you don't like working, AI brings out the worst in you, in which you try to figure out how to get AI to do as much of your job as possible. And it, you know, I see marketers being like, oh, look at this, it created a website for me. It's creating content for me. It's doing outreach to try to build links for me. And they're like, this is great. Look how much of my job I automated. And then they're telling me like, yeah, this technology is amazing. Everyone needs to use it. But then I see what they're doing with their time. They set up a lot of these systems and tools to help them out so that way they can go run around and take photos or go travel or hike or whatever they want. And I'm like, So you're telling me I don't need to pay you? Now, the people who are showing me this are friends and they don't really work for me, but it's just like if they show that to me and they were working for me, hypothetically, I'd be like, so you're telling me you want to get paid to not work? And yes, it's great how you can use AI to do a lot of stuff, but you should be using your time for other things that AI is not as great at. And when people have the attitude of, oh, I just automated everything so I don't need to work. It's just like those are people who are just going to be replaced and they're not going to be backfilled. And AI really does bring out the best in people from what I've seen and the worst. And people need to have the right mentality in which it's a great tool. It can do a lot of what you're doing and make you more efficient and do even some things better. But that opens up a lot of time for you to do other things if you decide to use that time. to do other things like personal stuff and expect to get paid for it, you're in for a reckoning.

Dude, you know what's crazy? I was getting a haircut before I flew out to Florida on Sunday, right? And this is the first time I got a haircut before I was using Open Claw. And so with my barber, typically we just kind of, you know, I'd be doom scrolling on my phone and we'd be kind of, you know, talking about whatever, like small talk, right? Hey, what video games are you playing right now? Blah, blah, blah. How's your family? Right? That type of stuff. This time, as he's talking to me, I'm not doom scrolling. I actually ended up shipping— like, when I say shipping, like, my open call was doing a bunch of tasks. So he cuts my hair, takes 30 minutes or so. In that 30 minutes, I pushed it to do 7 tasks, right? Whereas before, I was like, these are like tasks like a typical human would do, right? Whether we're like strategizing on things or like doing a PRD or something like that, right? I'm like, holy crap. And the thing is, like, before I'm going like, Neil talked about AI being an amplifier. Before I'm going to bed, I'm like on my phone, like it's like 7 PM because we're done with dinner and all that, right? And then literally until 10:30 PM, I'm on open call. I'm just pushing stuff, right? And so I'm saying that I've never had more fun at work, but also like I've never worked harder either because the entire thing feels like a video game now. And I saw David Hensel. So David Hensel, you know, he— we used to play a game together. So he was— I was 12 years old or so, and he was like, I think he's like 21 years old or something like that. We played a game called EverQuest, and I'm like, dude, this is just like EverQuest. He's like, it's exactly like EverQuest. It's like World of Warcraft, right? I'm like, holy crap, you can literally build whatever you want, whenever you want, and it's only going to get crazier from here. And that's why it's so exciting. So I literally show them all OpenClaw, and a lot of them are using Claude code. Some of them are like, maybe 1 or 2 people are just on ChatGPT. We all feel behind and that's every single day, but we all know that there's no time to slack off. Like, now's the time to press even harder.

Yeah. And when you look at OpenCLaw, a lot of people are telling me like, oh, I can't use it because I don't have a Mac Mini. Well, you can just spin up an AWS instance and just pop it on there. You don't need a Mac Mini.

I would be scared. That's only one word of caution there. I'd be concerned with the security items there.

No, no, you spin up a whole new instance and a whole new account on AWS.

Yeah, but that's— so the way I have it set up, right, it's when you put it on AWS or like a virtual private server or something like that, there's a lot of security issues around it. And even the way I have it set up right now on a Mac Mini, it's not bulletproof. So I would just say with OpenClaw, like it's nice and I use it, I'll use it for my own stuff, but we definitely wouldn't use it for clients because there's too many security issues. And so we would— we want like a SOC 2 compliant version. And which is something that we're actually actively working on building right now. And we just want to manage it ultimately because people like your clients, ultimately like our clients, they don't care if it's OpenClaw, ClosedClaw, or like whatever it is exactly, right? They just want outcomes. They just want outcomes.

Yeah. And if you're going to use it on an Amazon instance, you shouldn't be using it for anything sensitive, anything customer-facing. You should just be using it for testing and experimental, experimental stuff, in my opinion, and wait for OpenAI. who has a deal. And Eric called it on our last podcast. Do you remember you were saying like, yeah, the OpenCLaw founder is in San Francisco, probably doing a deal with, you know, like one of these big companies like OpenAI or Anthropic or one of them. I forgot which ones you were naming, uh, or Facebook. And he ended up doing a deal with OpenAI. And I'm waiting for OpenAI to release a version that's safe for us to all use. And then it's on.

Yeah, we'll, we'll see. I mean, it's, um, you know, we, we at, at Single Grain right now, we're, we're we're already working on a SOC 2 compliant version. And there's a handful like Manus, for example, which is owned by Meta. They kind of have their own version of like an agent as well. So I think a lot of these are moving into this space. So we'll see what happens. But the one thing I wanted to call out too, actually, this will be interesting, Neal, and then I want to come over to this article. So I met with someone at one of these— Google.

Okay.

So I met with someone at Google and he actually manages some of these holdco relationships, these traditional agency holdco relationships. He works directly with some of these CEOs. So I think you would find this interesting because this is your space. So I want to get your reactions to some of these and kind of go from there.

Are you ready? So to be clear, this is a person you met that is a Google employee. And then he deals with all the agencies and he specifically deals with the agency CEOs and stuff like that.

Yeah, some of these agencies hold co-CEOs. And I think there's a handful of these types of people, but, you know, very smart guy. And I've known him for a while. I was like, okay, so what's the deal right now? And I was just— I'll kind of fill you in on the conversation. I was just like, okay. He's like, dude, Eric, the churn right now, these holdcos say their churn is 20% annually. It's more like 30% and the churn is going up. And so he's like, when I talk to these holdco CEOs, I'm like, what are you guys going to do about this churn? Because the churn is really high, right? And none of them have a plan. I'm like, none of them have a plan? He's like, yeah, none of them. All their plan is to grow top line. Right now, it's just continue to grow top line. And he's like, the problem that I see with a lot of these agencies is that they're not AI native, right? And so he's like, you guys are like, you know, AI native, or at least he perceives me to be, right? And so he's like, they're going to have— because the way they're structured, they have— they used to throw people. The problem was a labor arbitrage. That arbitrage is not going to work as well in the next, you know, 5, 10 years or so. And so he's like— and also I'm like, I was like, hey, entertain me here. Because he used to work in tech, he used to work in SaaS, he used to work in e-commerce. I was like, hey, you've worked in all these industries. What percent of these people do you find impressive on the agency side? He's like, honestly, I don't look forward to having most of these conversations. Maybe only 5% of people are impressive on the agency side, which we've kind of joked about, right? I was like, okay, well, entertain me here. On the e-commerce side, on the startup side, on software side, what percent of people are generally impressive, right? He's like 15 to 20%. So that's 3 to 4 times more. So I'll pause for a second. What are your reactions to this so far?

Yeah, I could see how startups and smaller business are going to be more innovative because they don't have all the legacy, archaic bullcrap to deal with or politics, so they can do more innovative stuff. But the first reaction I get when you're telling me all of this is this person doesn't seem to enjoy their job. They should go find a new job.

Could be.

Could be. But that's my first reaction. On the churn metrics, it depends which companies you're talking about, but you have to keep in mind some of them are publicly traded, so I doubt that they're fudging their numbers on churn. He may not be talking about all publicly traded companies, and I'm assuming that is the case, but the publicly traded ones, I don't think they're churning at high numbers like 30% and stuff like that. What people tend to forget, and this is the big thing about agencies, and I saw Eric on an X thread about this. You were debating with someone, okay?

Oh yeah, it just came from this conversation. Yeah.

So the thing with agencies is agencies are hired for people more than anything else. So if you're a company, a big organization like Procter Gamble, And you're looking to figure out things, you're hiring Accenture or McKinsey to help you with AI. In many cases, you agree with that statement, right? If you look at Accenture and McKinsey, their businesses in some areas are struggling, but the AI parts are booming. And we see the same thing in marketing people. And it goes back to the topic Eric and I talked about earlier, where it's all about hiring and the quality of people that you're recruiting, right? You just want amazing talent. So a lot of companies, what they do is they hire agencies because they have amazing talent. Not all agencies do, but the ones that do have amazing talent tend to do well because people hire you for the people and they want you to just figure out their problems for them. I'm not saying that'll always be the case, but that has been the case historically, and I believe that's going to be the case over the next few years at least.

I think that's always going to be the case. People want something to just do the work for them, something or someone. But he made some other interesting points here. So he's like, one, you know, I'm like, so what do you see agency people as? And so they are hiring from the people, right? But he's like, now there are no longer any differentiators. He's like, these agencies are just literally like budget managers. And I was like, okay, so explain, like, why do you think that? He's like, dude, there— and I shared this in the thread, but he's like, there are software companies in India that will go to like an agency, like maybe a Procter Gamble. Oh, you're Procter Gamble. You're working with this agency over here. What's your, you know, what are they charging you? Right. It's like, Could be, you know, 10%, 15%, 20%, sometimes 5% in terms of ad budget. You agree with that? Yes.

Uh-huh. Okay.

So he's like, oh, let's say hypothetically some, some agency is charging like, you know, 10% or 15%. He's like, okay, well, if you're paying, you know, 10% or something like that, how about we just charge you 4%? Right. And he's seeing these, these upstarts in India with whatever software that they have, they're taking hundreds of millions of dollars of budget away. And he's like, dude, he's like, this is just going to continue to happen on the AI native side. I'm like, so what are people going to do? He's like, unfortunately, um, and he does— I think he does like his job. He works with really smart people. But he's like, dude, even people at Google, very smart, they don't want to rock the boat and they don't want to change anything, right? And so they'd rather not rock the boat and say, hey, these things are changing. They're just like, let's just keep it how it is. And that's why I— some people are like, yeah, maybe it's going to take a little longer for UBI to come, or in your case, maybe not at all.

So So I'm in a little bit of a different camp than this Google person, and this is just my own take. I've spoken at Google's offices a lot, at many different offices all throughout the world. Google and Facebook, I'll throw them also in the same bucket. They're really big on, they will build a technology that'll do all the bidding and everything, and they can leverage AI. And Mark Zuckerberg's even gone out being like, why do you need agencies? I don't know if you've heard him say that, but—

Yeah.

He's big on that. And from their perspective, just think of it this way. Let's say you're paying someone 10% to manage your ad spend. In many cases, it's more. It's very rarely less unless you're spending an arm and a leg because it's hard to do it at 5% and actually make it profitable. Facebook and Google rather have that money go to them. Imagine if everyone was spending an average of 10% more. Okay, if Google does over $200 and something billion a year just in ad spend revenue, let's just use the $200 billion. I know they do more than that in ad revenue. If they did 10% more, that's extra $20 billion, that straight drops to the bottom line and that's pure profit. They would go from $116 billion a year to $136 billion a year in pure profit. That's a lot of extra cash. They would love that money. It's in their benefit to just go and get it. Now, keep in mind, I'm biased, and I would say Eric's also biased because we also run agencies, so we're on the other side of it. And we've seen companies just leverage the technology, and we have a lot of clients who use the AI Max, PMax, and the list goes on and on. And when we put a human in the loop, including our fees, In all cases where we have customers paying us, because if we can't do this, a customer doesn't keep paying us, we produce a better ROI than them only using the AI tech that Google and Facebook are giving. So when we charge fees, it is black and white because you have to remember we're dealing with business people, CFOs, finance people, and I'm going to use basic simple example here. If a company is spending $10 million on ads and that $10 million brings in $40 million in revenue, not profit, just $40 million in revenue, and let's say it's profitable for them, and now they're spending $10 million and you, Neil, are taking $1 million in fees, all right? So let's say they're spending— let's just keep it simple. Let's say instead of spending $10 million on Google, you're spending $9 million on Google, And they're spending $1 million to you, if you generate them $40 million in revenue, they're not happy. They better see $45, $50, $60 million in revenue. So then that way it's a financial win for them. And we're able to do that for customers. And I'm assuming Eric is also able to do that for customers, because if he wasn't, he's shaking his head that he is. If he wasn't, he would be terminated. No, not I. Right? But we're seeing We're seeing companies, and we've seen this already, them going to not just places in India, we see this also in the US. Companies make the pitch how they can use AI and do this for them in an automated way and charge 1%, 2%. We're not even seeing 5%, we're seeing 1%, 2%. And we've actually seen some of our customers switch. We've seen 3 switch so far in the last 6 months from this. And of the 3, what do you think's happened if you had to take a guess, Eric?

A percentage are coming back?

You're right. 2 have come back. The 3rd one has not hit us up back yet. The 3rd one ended up switching. Dude, we just had a conversation on this on Tuesday. This is Thursday as we're recording this, but we go over lost accounts. So internally every week we go over lost accounts, that we performed exceptionally well and it is in their best benefit to come back. And the reason we cover this is, you know, we have game plans on how do we get them back over time.

Hmm.

Because if something is better for the client and it's a better financial pitch for the client, you should be able to convince them logically to come back over time. The one that hasn't come back yet, it's been roughly 2 and a half months. And, you know, with campaigns, you can analyze and see some of the data publicly, not all of the data. But I believe we'll be able to— maybe they don't come back to us because they didn't like the fees, but it was more profitable than what we believe they're doing right now. But I believe they'll make a change within another month or 2. And the reason being is even if someone's cheaper, but in the grand scheme of things, again, if you were spending— instead of spending $10 million on Google and $1 million And then you switch to us and then you're saying, oh, we're spending $9 million on Google and $1 million with NP Digital, but we're generating more revenue. Oh, we found another company that's just using AI. We can spend $9.5 million with Google and they're only going to take $500 grand in fees. Oh, this gets us more ad inventory. But then your revenue starts tanking. You're going to start questioning some things and you're going to end up starting to make changes. We're finding not technology being bad. We're finding the winning combination being technology with A players. In other words, rock stars combined with AI. And I think that's the caveat when Eric talks about agencies or this Google person talks about agencies. And we're not talking about our agencies. We're talking about other people's agencies. Some of these agencies have amazing talent. Some of them, especially as they scale and they get really big to like $10, $15 billion in revenue, you do have some amazing talent, but the majority of their talent is mediocre and average. And what we're seeing is the agencies who are focused on hiring amazing people and not bloating their headcount, they're doing well when they combine AI. The ones that are just hiring for the sake of hiring, those are the ones that are struggling right now. Yeah.

So the thing I want to bring up is there's that 2x2, the matrix again. I'm going to pull this up one more time just so everyone can see it. So let me— okay, here it is.

This is the Slop Cannon metric?

Yeah. Sorry. So I think it's important to call out because this is exactly what we're talking about, right? So this is what I have on the screen over here. So this is a 2x2, those of you that are just listening. On the very bottom left, you have people who do not use AI and people who do not have good judgment. These, unfortunately, this is dead weight on your company. Okay. Now, let's say if you have someone who has poor judgment and they use AI, that means they become slop cannons, which means they just add a bunch of gunk and garbage to the internet because they're just lazy in the way that they use it. Okay. Now, if you move to the bottom right here, you have people who have good judgment, but they don't use AI right now. So these are people, at least for right now in today's day and age, these are steady hands. Okay. So these are people that are, you know, They're going to get the job done overall, but they're not enhanced by AI. But if you have someone that has good judgment and they use AI, these are turbo brains. They're supercharged and they get things— they get way more done. They're already smart people anyway. These are the people that you ultimately want. And so you can't just say like at my company, it's like, don't get me wrong, I love AI, but I'm like, guys, guys, guys, we need to focus on talent right now. And people aren't quite— there's some people on my team that don't quite get what I mean, but I'm like, no, no, no. Everything comes downstream of talent. We can talk about AI all we want, but if we hire poorly, we're just going to have a bunch of slop cannons on the team.

Yeah, and I want to give an example of a slop cannon. I'm not going to reveal the names because I know them, but I've been explicit to them. So let's call one of them John and the other one Michelle, okay?

Michelle's your wife's name.

Yeah, Michelle's my wife's name, but my wife's not a marketer. She has a harder job than both Eric and I. She's a stay-at-home mom and she has to deal with 2 kids who are not rational. So, uh, which they'll be up in an hour and a half. Okay. So, uh, John says lovable.dev and build apps and websites with AI fast no-code builder. So then Michelle responds, but did you build anything? Was looking into it. John says, I've built 10 websites, sends screenshots, sends a whole image of a full-blown landing page and a website. And John's like, takes a day, LOL. Michelle says, wow, familiar logo. Michelle's saying that because John's website is pretty much a ripoff of my website. I don't think you need AI to do that. All right. And the logo is straight up a ripoff of my ad agency website. And Michelle says, wow, familiar logo. And John says, imagine a Claude plugin, but in a builder. Neil even did a testimonial for my website. Laughing my— I'm not going to say the last 2, it's A-O. LMAO. And John's like, can't believe you call yourself a marketer, Michelle. And you know, they're going into this. John's not a bad person. Great person. Like him as a friend. I've told John this to their face maybe 15, 20 times. What is John doing in your matrix here?

He's creating slop.

He's creating slop. This is no value. It's not going to convert well. You shouldn't use AI to just make up random testimonials. You could use it to copy other people's websites if you want to do that, but this is someone that doesn't need to be paid. If you're being paid to just copy someone else's website, why do they even need to pay you to do that? They can just do that themselves. There's no innovation here. Yes, you could use AI to help you build a website, but shouldn't you be hiring someone who has a solid sense of direction and a lot of experience so that way they don't need a designer, but they can use AI to build something that actually converts better? They understand your ideal customer profile, they're doing customer research and talking to customers to figuring out what angle you need to differentiate yourself versus another, all the other competitors out there. That is using AI to fine-tune their copy and going back and forth with AI to fine-tune it and making your headlines better, your CTAs better, running tests, et cetera. But like people like this who are using AI in the example I gave you for John, they are going to be replaced. And this is not how you should use AI as a marketer.

Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can You can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Karrot. It's www.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. You know what Satya Nadella said? We've talked about this, but I want to reinforce this. So CEO of Microsoft, he said that, look, the future designers that you're going to have or developers, they're really going to be a product manager, a designer, and a developer all in one, right? Because, Neil, like you and I, even 8 weeks ago, like I really didn't have developer or designer superpowers. I kind of do now. And so like, but you and I both have— I would say we have taste because we're all— we're always learning, we're talking to people, things like that. So that's— as long as you're constantly curious, you will learn these things, no doubt. Um, I think that's what's missing with people. It's like curiosity and resilience. And this brings me to the article, and then I want to end this one with maybe a little bit of a— we had a crypto debate yesterday at dinner, and then we can talk about that too, because I think it's interesting to share our philosophies, which is not financial advice but more so how to think about these things, because Neil and I, even we have different thoughts on how these things are. So let me go through the article first.

Let me make sure I hit the right screen here. Well, and as Eric's pulling it up, I think he's spot on. I do believe AI is going to impact marketing. I actually believe AI is going to impact development and product and design more than even marketing. That's just my personal opinion. And a great example of this is I'll use tools like Lovable. to mock stuff up for changes I want to my app really quickly, and I just go send it to my team, not for them to use that, but for me to explain the changes I want. And I remember maybe 3, 4 months ago, Eric was just like, dude, how do you make your changes? And I would tell him that, yeah, I just get on the phone with my team and I'll go into telling them to make changes. Lovable's improved a lot over the last year. It's now at a point because my team's in so many different time zones and I have people working while I'm sleeping that instead of waiting to get on the phone with them, I'll spend 20, 30 minutes cranking stuff out and sending it to them. I'm like, create something like this, run an A/B test, and they know to not just use my version but to modify it, make it better. The copy that I set in there is typically the copy that I want used, so they use my copy. But it just makes life easier. And that's the power of AI, right? Even in a marketer, I'm using it to adjust my flows and improve my conversion rates at a much faster efficiency rate. Cool.

All right. All right.

Can you see my article?

Can you see my screen? You can see my screen, right?

Yeah. You've been kicked out of the arena title. You just don't know it yet.

Yep. So this is— this article is from Claire Vo. She's a— I love the stuff that she puts out. Sometimes I listen to her podcast. So the title of this article is You've Been Kicked Out of the Arena. You just don't know it yet. So let me cover some of the key points here, right? So if AI had— if AI adoption had 7 stages of grief, almost all of you would be in denial. No matter how many AI memos your CEO sends, the amount of clod that's being coded, the chatbots and app and evals and data, I'm here to tell you, you're not competing. In fact, you probably can't anymore and you won't notice until it's too late. So the going concern is the walking dead, right? So she's like, I look around and I see a lot of businesses that would have 3 years ago been pretty enviable. $100 million plus in revenue, solid customer base, mature executives, and a good enough team. So on the surface, a few of them are trying to meet the moment, whether by choice or by force. It has worked its way into little parts of the business and the product. They have some internal power users. They're slapping on chatbots and MCPs to their product suite. They have a natural language interface for their product named after a girl or a gem or a spaceship. They start to say things internally like, we need to be Cursor for X or Claude Code for Y, or perhaps worse, we have a proprietary data moat that they'll all need. And in the meantime, the pot keeps boiling, right? So where she's going with this is like, look, your peers aren't your competition anymore. So the reason it's so easy to convince yourself and an entire company that you're totally in the game is you think your competition is who they've always been and will act the same way they always have. Because guess what? You, you're who you've always been and you'll act the same way you always have. You'll be in the same deals, have the same marketing tactics. You'll ship same equal proportions of new product and make noise about them in the same way. You call on and hire the same class of VPs, the engineers with the same YOE backgrounds. I don't know what that means. The same PMs with domain expertise. You listen to the same podcasts and forward the same tweets. You have the same ideas for how AI is going to transform your business and you'll pitch the same mini pivots to the board. So let me wrap this up here. So your competition, that's not your competition anymore. It's really the startups are doing everything you claim to be doing with AI, but without thinking about it or working too hard. They naturally reach for the right tools and have no processes that they need to circumvent to get access to them. While you are debating what percent of R&D you should be allocating to AI initiatives, They built the right product idea you have sitting on a slide, called on your customers, established their wedge, and you probably won't know until renewal time. You probably won't appreciate it until the best talent starts to leave, best talent starts to leave and work for them. You won't know until you're cooked. So this is the main point here. Everything that takes longer than a day, so everything greater than a day, NGMI. NGMI means what? Not gonna make it. Okay. And I've been talking to one of our mutual friends here at this event. Our little, our little retreat here. So she's like, look, I have a simple heuristic for identifying who has been kicked out of the arena, and it's this. And, uh, you know, this is something we could debate on. They can't do anything the same day. It doesn't matter what it is, but I'll give you a list of things I've seen companies be unable to do in a day: fix bugs, launch landing pages, upgrade to a new model, get a PM on a call with a customer, get access to a new AI tool, turn around negotiations on executive comp. Before AI, this was a less useful heuristic because many of these took scarce expertise like engineering and therefore time. But now we have the clarifying light of AI, and if you can move fast and yet you don't, it's a problem. It's a you problem, babe. Okay, so let me, let me get the, the last part here. Let me see if there's anything else there. So, um, here's what she's calling out here. So she's like, look, I can't blame you for wanting to try. So if I were at one of these companies, this is what I would do. Get everyone upskilled immediately. Stop the presses. Show up in 2 weeks and show me how you've automated 80% of your job. If you've done this, congrats, you have a new exciting job. Number 2, get legal security and finance to stop being annoying about trying new tools, right? That's, that's a problem at bigger companies. Number 3, let your engineers loose on making your repo agent-friendly. 4, resistant executives are out the door. 5, resistant engineers are out the door faster. 6, more aggressive than comfortable M&A. You probably can't build what you want. You might be able to buy it. And then there's a lot more here, but we'll just leave it at that. Like, hire executives sparingly and carefully. So, Neal, what do you think about this?

I think it works for some things like the simplest example there. She says, if you can't do this in a day, it doesn't make sense. And one of them is turning around—

Landing pages.

Executive comp negotiation within a day. I disagree with that. Some things just in business, you do not want to turn around in a day. And example of this, and Eric shaking his head agreeing, and we've both been through this. When someone asks you for a raise, you don't always want to give back right away. Sometimes you want to make them sweat and think because Eric and I have both been in this game long enough where there's some people who will want a raise every 2 to 3 months. And it's just like, you don't have the experience, the expertise, you don't deserve it. It doesn't make sense. I can hire better people than you for cheaper than what you're expecting for.

Dude, they don't have the double E-A-T. That's what they don't have.

That's right. So EEAT, we're joking around and you guys all know this, experience, expertise, authority, and trust, as Google likes calling it. But yeah, sometimes you just want to make people sweat. I agree though. I think things can move a lot faster. I don't think 80% of everyone's job in an organization can be replaced by AI. I think in some roles, 100% can be replaced. I think in some roles it's only going to be 10%, 15%, 20%. Yeah. It really varies on what you're doing and the way I see the world moving, at least in the marketing realm. I can't speak for every single division out there. There's certain things like if someone was doing keyword research manually, it's like, okay, you don't need to do keyword research manually. We can have AI just go through this and do it for you. You should still review it. And you should just double-check. And over time, AI will be good enough where you don't need to actually review the keyword research. So that'll just save you time. Like there's basic mundane, boring stuff that should and could be done in an automatic way. And it's going to be at least in marketing. And here's the kicker. A lot of people have been asking me over the last 3 months, how do we go and automate all this stuff in our organization when it comes to marketing? You know what I tell them, Eric? You don't need to. And I'm like, there's enough marketing software tools out there that are already building and doing all of this stuff. And I'm like, instead of you trying to figure all this out, just use one of these tech stacks that eventually you'll be able to spend $100 a month per seat and they'll just do it all for you. Yeah.

So my take on this one is I think there's obviously nuance to Neil's point. I do think in a lot of situations, if you're working with people on your team where it's like, oh, it's going to take me a week to do a landing page mockup, I'm like, you're basically— I'm sorry, you're Probably out. If you tell me, like, if I see you responding slowly or it's going to take you forever to— for example, like, if let's say if you're leading sales or something like that, if a big lead comes in and you haven't— if you're the sales leader and you haven't figured out how to automate that piece yet, where it's like send them a text message immediately that's more personalized, or even make a phone call quickly, like maybe not a phone call immediately yet because it's not that good yet. But my point is you should be able to figure out a lot of these things to make your life easier. Like, yeah, those things should take less than a day, right? When you're telling me like it's still old timelines, you're still working the same way. Like, don't— like, I'm telling you guys, those of you listening, like, if you're a founder, you can probably see this already. But if you're working for someone, and if maybe you're working with people on the team, like, you either have to confront them or do something about it, because these people are unfortunately holding the company back. Yeah.

And the landing page example Eric gave is perfect. Because if someone— if I want a landing page, either A, I'm going to do it myself, At least tell people what I want created and show them inspiration. And B, if someone's in charge of it, if they took a week, it's not going to fly. Even if they took a day, I would kind of be irritated. I want something, especially if they have time, turned around within an hour.

Yeah.

Like straight up an hour, 2 hours max. Like, and I want it deployed within the same day, maybe the next day at the latest.

Right.

But if you're taking a week to deploy something, I'm just already pissed and irritated and I'm like, this isn't going to work out for me.

Or, Neal, like, I don't need like a full budget projection, but if I wanted a data dump of finances and some analysis around it, that should be a lot faster now. And so, you know, it's interesting. Syed told me this. Syed's like, dude, and you've kind of said this yourself, like, he's like, Syed's like, Eric, you believe in people too much. He's like, you believe in people too much because you like giving them chances. You like to let them learn, right? But you like— not everybody's like us at the end of the day, right? But I'm like, I can't. Like, I just, I just want to like strangle people to like wake them up and say, hey, like, this is available now. Like, I want to help people, but some people just don't want to help themselves, right? And that's unfortunate. Because like, we truly do want the best for people. That's all I have to say.

So we're out of time. But before we end, And I want to clarify what Eric just said. Eric and I, and it came out the wrong way, and I'm not trying to talk down to Eric or anything like that. No, go ahead. Eric and I both believe in people. We do see the value of humans, and we think people are extremely valuable. What he's actually saying is, from his experience, there's some people in an organization that he's trying to help and educate and bring forward and teach them all this new stuff. But they don't want to adapt and they don't want to learn and they're stuck in their ways.

Yep.

And what he's getting at is, and most businesses believe this, you got to be careful who you hire. As we both stated earlier on, on this podcast, we believe talent is the most important element, AKA people, but you got to pick the right people and be careful and make sure either A, they know everything that you're looking to, And B, if they don't know everything, that's okay. They have to be open culturally to shifting, learning, and adapting instead of being closed-minded, because when someone's closed-minded, it's very hard for them to adapt.

Yeah. And the final thing I'll close on this one is inertia is a very real thing, right? You know, people are, you know, when it comes to physics, for example, like things tend to go back to their resting state. But, you know, if you're more entrepreneurial, which most people aren't, right? But you're tending— you want to increase the temperature all the time and you cannot like I know for Neil, I know for myself, like we can't— I'd be very unsettled if I was in a resting state all the time, right? I need to keep— we want to keep pushing. And so all that to say is like, yes, you know, very much focus on talent, focus on getting good at hiring talent. But even if you get really good at it, you're maybe only right maybe 50% of the time if you're good, right? Maybe a little higher than that if you're like world-class at it. But just keep that in mind. So that's all we have for today. We can leave the crypto debate for another time and we will see you.

We'll see you next week.

Goodbye.