Big Businesses Are Widening the Gap With AI

So Neil, I did something funny with AI the other day. I basically had it look through the last 6 months of our YouTube channel. I used the YouTube API for this, and I asked it to look at the predictions you made and the predictions I made and score us over time. How do you think you did with your predictions?

I have no idea. Call it 6 out of 10, 7 out of 10.

Okay, so check this out. So it basically, okay, So let me, I basically, here's the prompt that I use for everyone here, okay? So if you use the YouTube API for the Marketing School Podcast over the last 6 months, how has Neil's predictions been versus Eric's predictions over time, right? And it looked at 320 videos over the last 6 months, okay? And it looked through all the transcripts, okay? So where Neil was right, number 1, SEO isn't dead, it's shifting to transactional and revenue keywords, okay? That's number 1. Number 2, AI is overhyped in the short term. Okay, the verdict is yes, he's correct. Number 3, you still need humans in the loop for paid media. Creative is the moat. Yes. And then number 4, economy is starting to turn around. Partially right. And then number 5, multiple AI platforms will win. Okay, so it scores you on these things. And then it looks at— it basically gives me like, it looks at your things and it looks at my things too, right? And so— Basically, here's the key takeaway here. And I'm going to give you a couple of YouTube API use cases, but I just thought this would be funny to mention to Neil because he's traveling right now. So Eric, where he's been wrong. So number one, I said manets will take over in 2026. I overshot. Okay. Will AI beat human IQ in 2026? Directly right on benchmarks, but framing was sensational. Okay. And then I said UBI is going to happen, deflationary utopia timeline, right? Too early. So Where I'm generally wrong is I will overshoot my predictions, right? Now, for you, where Neil has been wrong, Neil underestimates the speed of AI displacement and then downplaying the coding revolution, right? So it gives all these quotes here. So overall scorecard, to your point, Neil, you said 6 out of 10. It said Neil is right, batting about 65%. Okay. Strength is market structure calls. So multi-platform, SEO shifting, not dying, creative as a moat. He reads the macro correctly. Weakness is he's consistently 6 to 12 months behind Eric on AI velocity. Eric, I'm batting about 72%, okay? My strength is technology trajectory calls are generally correct. He's a practitioner, not just a commentator. His best calls come from firsthand usage. Weakness is he tends to extrapolate personal experience into universal timelines. The excitement runs ahead of the adoption curve. Okay, here's the main thing for everyone, okay? So the pattern, AI does a good job with patterns, and this is what I'm trying to give to everyone here. You use a YouTube API, you use an X API, it'll spot the patterns for you and you can get better from it, right? And Neil, I never thought about it this way, but it says the meta pattern why this podcast works, Neil, is Neil is right about what persists. So SEO, creative, multi-platform. Eric is right about what's changing— agents, coding, K-shaped work. Together they cover the full picture better than either does alone. That's probably why the podcast works. Isn't that funny?

It is. And my favorite part out of this whole thing was How it states you are sensational. I thought that was entertaining because it was like, it doesn't matter if you're sensational or not, but it was just funny how it picked up on that. And it's like, you know, but it was spot on. And I figured roughly what my batting average is because I said 6 or 7, I believe, right? And it was right in between, 6.5. Yep.

And like, by the way, like if Neil's at 65%, I'm at 72%, neither of us is really that much better than each other. That's why this thing works, right? And Neil has a lot of experience. I have a lot of experience. That's all to say that we're going to be wrong a lot of times, like 3 out of 4 wrong is still a lot. And so every— any podcast you listen to, you have to kind of apply your own level of experience and thinking to it. But my point of saying all this, like the way I use this for YouTube, we use it to generate new ideas. We use it to look at other competitive channels, to look at ideas they're coming up with. When you leverage a YouTube API, the X API, do these things and you combine them, it actually helps a lot from a content generation standpoint because these things are really good at pattern recognition.

What I've learned over the years, and I think this has helped us actually do quite well, if you look at the batting average here, right? So call it 3 out of 10 times we're both wrong. All right? Eric and I love to be proven wrong. So when we have ideas on what we think work for marketing, we love when people internally or externally want to challenge us, not because it's a fighting battle to be like, I'm smarter than you, or I have more experience. It's actually none of that. It's more so, great, prove me wrong. Because if the data shows that we're wrong, we're really happy because we found a new channel, a new avenue for growth. And I think that's the biggest mentality shift that marketers need to have. You're going to have ideas on what you think works or doesn't, but if you disagree with someone, be open to looking at data and people who are trying the stuff that you disagree with. Because you'll be shocked at how many times you'll find some winners in there. And it's not because you're wrong, it's more so because algorithms change. So what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow, and what doesn't work today may work tomorrow.

Yeah, so your relationship with change— we've said this already— your relationship with change and adaptability has to be really strong in this era. And I'll tell you what, Neil, I just came from a call where I was arguing with this head of growth from a well-known AI startup, and he's like, I challenge you on this. I'm like, well, I challenge you on this. He's like, well, I push back on this. He's Indian too, so I knew it would be fine because the bickering that we do on this podcast, right? We bicker all the time. And it was just like that, we're bickering. I was like, I just want you to know I'm not mad. And we just kept going at it.

It was public.

There are other people in the room. I'm like, you're wrong here. And then we're pulling up data proving each other wrong. But in the end, we respected each other more for it. That's also part of it too.

And it's really cool because as marketers, you should be open to when people share data or experiments, even if it's a really small sample size. Don't push it away. Look, because no joke, you can always end up learning something new. And I was giving a talk in Toronto. I don't know if we talked about this a while ago. I forget the exact revenue numbers now, but there was a company that grew from like a million to call it 20-something million in monthly recurring revenue within like a matter of like 3, 4 months. It was a really short time period. Crazy growth. And sometimes when people are doing these kind of things and they're leveraging affiliates, a lot of their tactics are aggressive and a lot of the way in their messaging is aggressive. So people could be looking at it like they only grew because it's shady, and that could be the case. But when I look at companies like that and Eric looks at companies like that, what we look at is how are you able to scale that fast? Oh, okay. Yes, maybe the ads were overpromising. Maybe they're pushing boundaries on areas Eric and I would not want to push on. But oh, the root behind this, or the root, one of the root causes for growth is not the sensational type of marketing because you were doing that 3, 4 months ago. It's actually used AI to create 4,500 ad variations every single month. And now you could say, okay, that's not that hard. Let's just use tools and crank out 4,500 ad variations. But if you're not doing it in a systematical approach and you don't have some reasoning behind what you're creating, You're just going to create 4,500 ads. A lot of them will be duds and you'll lose money on a lot of your ads because bad ads means inefficient advertising. But we start looking at the processes and what people are doing. We then take those tactics and implement it in legitimate businesses and legitimate strategies, and we don't push too aggressive and we don't promise the world. And we've found over the years, because we've met a lot of these people at these masterminds, that's caused a lot of—

Yeah.

I would say our growth over the years, like I met a ton of them at War Room, right? Like just people being really aggressive with forced continuity.

Yeah. What I would say is, by the way, you want to explain forced continuity to people? I don't think many people know that. Sure.

So to give you context, this was maybe more than 10 years ago or something like that. Eric and I would be sitting down in a roundtable. So mastermind, think of like a group of marketers all getting together and people talking about growth. There were some marketers who talked about like, yeah, I took a business from $0 to $100 million. I know that's more common in today's world with AI. 10 years ago, that was not that common. You're like, $0 to $100 million bootstrap, no venture capitalists?

How?

Oh, I sell anti-wrinkle cream. Okay, what makes your cream so unique? Oh, just the same stuff. But check this out, we do a free trial and then we charge every single month. So I was like, but how does that convert? Why wouldn't most people just not pay? They're like, oh, we just say it's a free trial and we keep charging people every single month until they cancel. That's forced continuity because you're charging people when they don't realize they're being charged. To me, that's not an entrepreneur who is good or clever. That's just someone being unethical, especially in marketing.

To me, that's a— I mean, to be fair, Neil, I would say that's a short-term thinking entrepreneur, not a long-term thinking entrepreneur. Very entrepreneurial still. We've always said this on the podcast ever since we started this podcast close to 10 years ago now, Neil. Do things, do black hat things in a white hat way. So the black hat things that work often, they're innovating quite a bit, right? And if you figure out how to do it in a white hat way, which is clean, then you're going to get the best of both worlds. And so that's why Neil and I, we're always trying to learn. We've just always found too that when you try to do things short term, it never ends up working out.

Dude, the first person that actually told me on the black hat thing, the white hat way, was Ryan Deiss. Because when I first met him, I flew to Austin and everyone was doing like a soap opera series with email marketing, which is a way to like drive people through different emotions and then eventually cause them to convert, or doing a tripwire where you get someone to buy something really cheap that's an amazing deal, and then you upsell them on higher-priced items to boost your conversion rates and your LTV. Both those models work. So when I met up Ryan in Austin, I remember him saying, he's like, look dude, this whole space with info marketers, it's a shitty space, but some of these marketers do some really clever stuff. Take those tactics and apply them to legitimate businesses and legitimate offers.

Dude, you want to speak of a— so I was speaking of arguing this week. I was debating someone. No, we can call this an argument. So here's the thing. We have the Single Brain website up, okay? And so This person who's a marketer, she was debating with me and she's like, this is AI slop, we have to redesign this page. And so here's what I said, okay? I just said, hey, do you know how well this page converts right now? Like good or bad? She's like, I don't know, right? She thought I was trying to like trap her or something. And I said, I know, I'm just curious. You're like, you want to change this, you want to allocate resources to redesigning this. How do you think it converts right now? She says, I don't know.

Okay.

So then here's the thing, Neil. That page, singlebrain.com, which is for sure AI, it looks AI generated, right? Doesn't matter.

Wait, pull it up and share your screen. We're on a piece.

Okay, here, I'm going to share my screen. Neil, I'm going to get your feedback on this, okay? So, and Neil will give his honest feedback. You know, I'm not telling him to say positive or negative things here. Take a look at this. You see this?

Yeah.

Okay, so this is SingleBrain. Same headcount, 3x pipeline, 2x deal size, half the cycle time. Secure AI revenue agents. So that's what it does, okay? So we build and manage team of AI agents that run your revenue operations 24/7. They source leads, write outbound, create content, recruit candidates, and get smarter every week. Work with us.

I'm assuming you're pitching this to B2B companies, not B2C. Correct.

This is B2B. These are revenue agents. And you scroll down, your team spends time here. Here's the numbers over here. Here's your agent team over here. And then this is enterprise-grade by default because we run it on NVIDIA, their enterprise runtime. So all that to say, okay, does it look AI-generated?

Yes.

But would you qualify this as AI slop?

No. So I would only make a few main tweaks to it. I would reduce the white space, you know, like there between the logo and the headline and between each section, there's a decent amount of white space. And I would also add more call to actions. But other than that, dude, this page isn't bad at all.

It's not bad for being AI generated. And I actually agree with Neil. Okay. So it took me like an afternoon to make this, Neil, because I didn't want to wait like 6 weeks to get a page up. Okay. Once we got this up, you know who came in? Um, we got, uh, Vodafone came in, okay? Enterprise company. They went through this, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter what it looks like. Like, ready? Like, this is all you need. And then we had— who else we had? Oh, GymPass, now known as WellHub. They came through this too. So if it converts multi-billion dollar companies, who gives a crap, right? Just get it out right now and optimize it. Come on, man.

If you're looking at the YouTube version, you'll notice when Eric was sharing, there's things like the logos aren't centered and stuff. And you'll notice that I did not say I would fix the logos here, that. I'm not saying you shouldn't fine-tune those things, but most of those things do not have an impact on conversion. Your number one goal is speed and optimize for ROI. Then someone else can go in there and fine-tune the copy and adjust and tweak and A/B test. But it's like, to me, you said you did this in a weekend, how many hours?

It took, dude, I did this in 2 hours. On my OpenClaw.

And getting it up and launch form fields.

It puts it on Vercel. It connected to my domain. So I didn't know, you know, when you have to do like the whole like CNAME and like trans— it did all of that stuff. So it's got it set up on a domain and it got it live.

That's a great website for 2 hours.

Yeah.

If someone has an issue with it, tell them to go create a better one in 2 hours.

Exactly. And here's the point. Neil said this, guys, we're not saying don't optimize and don't— like design matters at the end of the day, but in the beginning right now, because the clock speed is so fast and you can roll these things back quickly, you might Might as well just get it out now, start collecting data, and then optimize it. Don't say I'm going to take 4 weeks or 8 weeks and do this because the human clock speed has changed. It doesn't work anymore. Human versus AI, dude. I've been talking— my Claude coworker has been sourcing all these people. I've been talking to all these people from WPP. Did I tell you about this yesterday? I think I did. So—

No, not WPP. You didn't tell me about that. Oh yeah, you told me a little bit about that.

I've been talking to these holding company people, and by the way, these are like— we're talking COO, GM level, like, you know, executive VP. So they're high up at these companies, right? I'm like, so why are you guys looking to leave, right? Um, and they're like, yeah, you know, we think the holding company model is done. You know, I, I like— a lot of these people have said, oh, there's, there's only so much I can take where I need to keep outsourcing to, you know, um, um, other countries for $20 an hour. That's what the model is. I'm like, okay, cool. And they're like, yeah, they're— you know, we're not just— we're not AI-forward enough. I was like, okay, cool. So you must be very AI-forward. What are you doing right now? Like, oh, I, I love ChatGPT. I, I pay $40 a month for ChatGPT. I make these agents that I was like There's no $40 a month plan for ChatGPT. What are you talking about, right? And then you know what they do? They hide behind the whole like, oh, WPP, they, they only allow us to use these, uh, you know, closed, uh, closed models, or like, you know, we can't use all these other things, whatever. I'm like, just show me something that you built. Uh, you talk, you talk about these agents, just show me something. And then by the way, Neil, here's the funny part. When I get the compensation, I'm more than happy to pay this compensation. I'll just put it to you this way. If you pay someone $500 grand and they make you $5 million, $50 million, whatever, yeah. Worth it. Good ROI, right? Or if they want $1 million—

Assuming you have more than a 10% margin of $500 grand and $5 million.

Yes, exactly right. That's— but the whole point is we want a return on our investment. But what I'm seeing right now, Neil, is that people want, like, let's say they want $1 million in compensation, but they don't— they haven't adapted. And like, their work is being deflated away. It's becoming deflationary. Like, maybe they're doing like $100 grand worth of work. And so all that to say is that the clock speed has changed. And like, they can see the clock speed's not working at their organization anymore. But They're not changing their clock speed.

Dude, totally. And it's so funny how people are like, yeah, I do this and I do that, and they don't really actually do it. Or when they'll make the excuse that, oh, my company does not. Oh cool, so what do you do on your spare time at home? Because your company's not restricting your home internet, and it's very little. But, um, the overall, the Single Grain website, it's good. I used to tell my employees before AI really pushed hard is quick and dirty, just give me something and get it up. Now I tell them quick and decent because AI, you don't need something dirty. It's good enough where you can get something decent in the first round really fast.

I like that. When did you come up with that? Quick and decent. That's good.

Like 4 months ago when I was telling them quick and decent.

I like that. I like that. Quick and decent.

That's good. But one other thing, going back to hiring marketers, I was just talking to one of my leaders about this the other day. We had a person that we hired in Southeast Asia, and the salaries there are quite affordable. Let's call it less than 6 figures or somewhere around there, maybe with taxes and stuff like that. I'm talking about USD. So if you do the currency exchange, they're like, oh, it's quite a bit. That's great wages there. And I remember telling the person when I first met them, this person won't work out. And they're like, why? I'm like, they're not a go-getter. They're not going to close business. They're trying to coddle people. I'm like, this doesn't work out culturally for us. I'm like, this person's not going to end up working out. You can figure out what you want to do when. I'm like, you're running this region, you figure it out. But I'm like, this is just my 2 cents and I could be wrong and I'm happy to be proven wrong. They eventually figured out the person's not going to work out. So then they come to me. I was like, oh, who'd you end up replacing with? And they literally told me like, well, we want to look at budgets. Maybe sometime next year we'll figure it out. We're going to do this and this internally so we can cover it and there'll be no issues. And I said, you know what you should look for? And they're like, what? I'm like, there's this other country that's close to the one that we're operating. We technically were in both. I'm like, you can get a leader that works on both at the same time because these 2 countries are next to each other and they're connected by land. And I was just like, you should— and it's a quick flight and people in those 2 regions work in both countries and they share the same language. And I was like, what you should do is look for someone who costs 2 to 3 times what you were paying, ideally 3. And like, that's a lot. And I'm like, yeah, good people produce better results. You go the cheap route, you're going to make less. It's like you can't start looking at it as like, I paid this marketer $300,000 a year. Well, if they made you $60 million in revenue growth, give them a bonus. Like, who cares?

More power to them. Yeah.

And this is where I think people get wrong. We interviewed a marketer who worked for one of our competitors and they're like, we can help you get at NPD so much more LLM traffic. Look at this playbook that I'm running. And I didn't hire them. They wanted a good amount of money. It wasn't that. Their playbook was, we just create, you know, 500 articles on our own website, listicles, talking about how our agency is the best for X, Y, and Z. I'm like, I get that works now. The reason we don't do it is because we don't believe that's a long-term strategy and it's useless.

Also, welcome to like 5 years ago.

Yeah. Well, this is for LLMs, but yeah, it's 5 years ago for SEO or 10 years ago for SEO, but they're like, this will work for LLMs too. I'm like, It does work right now, but it won't work that long.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so anyway, it goes back to how we started this too. You want to go for black hat things that work in a white hat way, even though programmatic's technically not black. Maybe it's a little gray if you spam it too hard.

So, going back to the people you were interviewing from WPP, you put out, I'm assuming, a job post, correct?

No. So this is Claude Cowork sourcing based on our careers page and our, uh, Beat Claude challenge.

So they're emailing out people or messaging out people?

It's, uh, it's So it's actually on my other computer right now. It's, um, and our team does this too. So it logs into the LinkedIn recruiter and it just sends messages from that. Yeah. And it personalizes it for every single one. And the response rates are great. Like, I'm like, this is better than Juicebox, which is what we pay $500 a month for or something like that. But I've been having really good conversations. Like, if anything, it's like I can pick some of these people up later, but there's, there's been some really— I will say, guys, um, the vast majority, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of people are still not AI forward. So No.

And then, uh, for that OpenCLaw setup, how much did you pay for the computer? I'm assuming it's a Mac Mini.

Yeah, it's— this one's a Mac Mini, but I have the, the DGX Sparks next to me too. You see this? I just, I set that up over the weekend.

Ah, cool. How much did you spend on the Mac Mini?

So the Mac Mini, $700.

Okay. And the, the DGX Spark?

Dude, these are like $5,000 apiece.

Yeah. So the reason I'm asking about the cost, some people also like make their Mac Minis like all out with RAM and stuff, so it adds up way more than—

Well, that's my Mac Studio, so we're talking on my Mac Studio, right? That's all out with RAM right now.

Okay, and, and the reason I mentioned that to Eric is if you notice, he's spending the money. People look at AI costs like, oh, $5,000, that's expensive. Well, if you're spending $1,000 a month in tokens and it helps you save that by one-time cost of $5,000, you'll make your money back in 5 months. Like, you, you can't be penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Real quick, if acquiring customers has been a struggle for you and you are trying to figure out how AEO works, answer engine optimization, or the new version of SEO, how paid works, how all this AI stuff is going to play into your customer acquisition strategy, and check out my ad agency, Single Grain. It's singlegrain.com. And if it looks like it's a good fit, we'll help you with a free marketing plan. So again, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, let's, let's, let's pull this up. Let's, let's talk about this real quick. I actually have a piece on this. So, okay, check this out. So, so Uber gave 5,000 engineers So Uber gave 5,000 engineers access to Claude Code in December. By February, usage had nearly doubled. By April, the CTO told the company they burned through the entire annual AI budget. So the adoption curve tells you everything about what happened. In December 2024, 32% of Uber's engineers were using Claude Code. By February 2026, that number was 63%. That seems a little slow to me. But anyway, that's not a gradual rollout. That's a product so useful that engineers pulled it into their workflow faster than finance could model the spend. Okay, that's a lot of employees though. Uber has about 34,000 employees and engineering is roughly 15% of that. Okay, so all this to say, Neil, is this CTO— if I go back over here, so look, AI-related costs at Uber are up 6x since 2024. This is what we're talking about, and we're seeing this in our organization, yours too. Um, CTO Praveen Nepali Naga's quote was, I'm back to the drawing board. That's the CTO of a $144 billion company admitting that the tools work so well that his team can't afford to keep using them at this rate. So here's the thing. So he has to go back to his CFO and ask for a larger budget now. But to Neil's point, if this is working for you so well, you should be spending more. And here's the other thing. You might be thinking, oh, I can put this all on open source tokens. But if you're actively building things and shipping code, you can't put it on open source tokens because you might need to rework it a couple of times and the time you spent there is not worth it. Chances are if you're shipping a lot of this stuff, a lot of it's going to have to be on frontier models.

So, and there's an important thing here. They rolled this out in December, and by February they had good adoption. By April they went through all their tokens. I bet you there's a lot of terrible usage of Claude Code within this organization. I don't mean in a bad way. It's actually in almost all organizations where they're doing a lot of things inefficiently and they're not optimizing for cost savings. That'll start coming out soon where companies start thinking about it. And then his budget from April will last the whole year and he won't need to go back to the CFO.

We'll see. I mean, so it says the CFO problem here is now the bottleneck of AI adoption at enterprise level. The technology works, productivity gains are real. Uber's own data says 75% of code review comments are marked helpful by engineers. Okay, there's your thing, Neal. 75% are helpful. The constraint is that the traditional annual budgeting was designed for tools with predictable per-seat costs, and AI coding agents have usage curves that look like cloud compute bills from 2015. Exponential until someone notices. Every enterprise CTO is about to have the same meeting. The tools are too good to pull back. The costs are too unpredictable to ignore. And the companies that figure out token cost optimization first will have a structural advantage over every competitor still running annual budget cycles. I'll tell you something, Neil. We've been playing around with token optimization this week just on my own stuff. I'm trying all the models, right? Gemma 4, Quen, which is from Alibaba. I'm trying all these other ones. It's like, They're decent, but they're still nothing close to what you get with Claude.

Well, on our end, we're— so let's look at it from a business standpoint. We tend to create a lot of tools for marketing-related purposes, all right? For ourselves, our clients, or, you know, just putting out there because tools get you more brand mentions, build more links. So we use Claude quite a bit. What we've found is our outputs are similar, and I don't know exactly what my team is using, but I saw a report on this. We're down 21% in cost because we've been optimizing for efficiencies. So 21% savings over the last 30 days is huge. And I bet you as time goes forward, not only will the models get cheaper, but people will come up with solutions for optimization because this is a big problem. And I bet you our bill a year from now will be maybe like 25% of what it is today on a monthly basis.

So I'll give you guys some practical things you can do, and I'll give you my thoughts on this, Neil. So you guys can all use OpenRouter. So OpenRouter will help you route to the right models and they'll save— it'll help you save a lot of money. They take 5% of the, basically the spend because you're routing everything through them, right? That's one thing you can do. You can buy local infrastructure. So the reason why I bought these DGX Sparks is to see kind of how local inference will work, and then we're going to consider buying more and more. The thing is, Neil, I think we're going to token optimize. I think I mentioned it last time, maybe 75, 80% goes through it. Maybe, maybe for open models and then 15-20% on frontier, which is like, when I say frontier, I mean, you know, you're using Claude Opus, like the latest version, right? Or using Mythos when it comes out. I think, Neil, the costs are going to come down, but what's going to happen is usage is going to skyrocket even more. And so what ends up happening is costs still keep going up because the usage is still unpredictable. And because I see my team using it now, the ones that are getting pilled by it, they're like, we need more, we need more, because they see how I'm using it and they start to use it that way. They're like, oh my God, right? I'm like, oh my God. If they even start using it even like 25% in the way I use it right now, my costs still go up exponentially.

Yeah, but I don't look at costs going up exponentially because at the same time, even though the models are becoming cheaper and cheaper, you're going to have it to a certain point where some of the older models are good enough for a lot of tasks and you won't be using as many frontier models. So that I think will save a lot. B, and this is the big one, No business really cares about the cost if the work is actually producing a direct ROI. So if they're able to— if they grow their cost by 10x for that department, but their profitability and their revenue grows in total, a business is happy. Look, if you're publicly traded and you spent too much on AI credit, but you can show, hey, we were predicting 20% growth in revenue and we actually hit 28%, And I know our profit for the quarter was supposed to be $1 billion, but we have the same amount of people. Yes, we use AI more, and due to the revenue increase, our profitability was actually $1.2 billion. The market will reward you and your stock goes up. No one really cares if you're spending more if you can produce more.

I just think this, and this actually, I have a thing that ties in with this. I just think we're all going to be producing a lot more, just looking at how I work. You might say you don't work that hard. I still think you work really hard right now. Um, but I think the way we— I think we're just gonna end up doing more. So let me, let me share this with you real quick because I've kind of said this before, Neil, on this podcast. I think there's going to be net new— there's going to be more entrepreneurs in the world because you can do so much now. So this guy from Deal, remember Deal, the, the one that did the, the spy with Rippling? So—

Oh yeah, the, the company that you can use to— I think it's like pay employees internationally or something.

Yeah. Um, I think, I think they're a good company, but they did that whole spy thing. So he said P. Marca. So P. Marca is Marc Andreessen. Oh, look, hey, look, I'm cool with these guys. I'm homies. Um, so look at this. So when a company becomes more productive, this is from Alex, um, Boaz. I don't know how to pronounce it. So when a company becomes more productive, it doesn't sit still. It goes after more customers, enters new markets, builds new products. Productivity gives you leverage, and leverage makes you want to do more, not less. Exactly what I just said. So no CEO in history has looked at a more productive team and said, great, let's shrink. They hire more. That's what we're seeing in our data. So we also tend to forget that new tech creates new jobs and industries. A job title that didn't exist now demands 70K people, 283% year on year. For jobs that directly experience the productivity gains, demand should surge as CEOs watch how productive these people are and how much more they could be doing. So if you see this over here, Neil, you want to read it?

Uh, so AI trainers outpacing every job in 2025 at 283% growth. I can't—

I can read 20. Yeah, I'll call out the rest, Neil. So, um, thank you for reading that part. So 2025 starts, you have 18,000 AI trainers employed globally. Now that's 70,000. Wait, Neil, I never even thought about this. Like, you're gonna need more AI trainers, obviously, right? Um, AI engineers and PM roles are actually up 400%. So you have 15,000 OpenAI engineering jobs, not the company, just open AI jobs, and 1,135 open AI product manager jobs. So it's going up, right? So I think, Neil, we're going to see more entrepreneurs, and then I think people are going to realize that creation gives them a sense of meaning and purpose, and they're going to want to do more of it. And I think we're just going to want more and more and more, Neil. That being said, I don't disagree with you that for more basic tasks like doing 1 1, maybe that's going to be free or close to free. But I think we're always like maybe 10 to 20% of the time, you're still always trying to build new stuff, and that still eats up a lot of budget 'cause you still want the smartest models.

Yeah, so I'm in Brazil right now as we're recording this, and yesterday I was at a really large publicly traded company's office in Brazil. They're global. To give you perspective, they own 3 floors of an office space. They're not the biggest floors, they're normal size, like, you know, just good-sized buildings, but they have 3 floors, or that's what they take up. I don't know how much they spent on their new office. If I had a guess, $50-ish million. Okay. Which is really, that's a lot of money for like decorations and technology and all that kind of stuff. Right. And I'm in Brazil. So if you take the currency exchanger, that's roughly like $250 million USD equivalent. That's a lot of money because remember, people get paid less in Brazil as well. So for a company to spend around $250 million in their currency and employees get paid proportionally, like US employee getting $100 grand, they get 100 reais. So that would be like $20,000 US. And I was talking to the whole marketing team and we were talking about strategy for Brazil as well as global strategy. And the one thing that's consistent with them and almost every other company I talked to, no one's thinking about shrinking or laying off employees in marketing or anywhere else. Everyone's talking about, hey, everyone's using AI. It's causing companies to move faster. We need to move faster. How do we adopt these tools in the correct way to be more effective? How do we focus on the right KPIs so that way we actually see revenue growth and not just increased costs in AI and no change in the top line? But everyone has this mentality that we've been seeing recently because if you go back a year, Eric, I think you'll agree with this. Everyone's like, oh my God, doom and gloom. Everyone's going to start getting laid off. Tons of jobs are going to be displaced, at least in the corporate world. We're not talking about flipping burgers or stuff like that. Even in the corporate world, people were afraid of that. But we're seeing the opposite. We're not seeing sales reps get canceled, marketing employees get canceled. We're seeing them stay roughly the same, sometimes even increase, but everyone's like, how do you get 2x the output and productive output? Productive output doesn't mean, oh, they did 2x more work. It's more so they did 2x more stuff that actually moves the bottom line or the top line.

Yeah.

And that's what we're seeing. And if you don't keep up with the competitors, you're going to Lose. So you can't actually cut. You just got to figure out how to move faster with what you have.

You're not using your microphone.

I'm not.

That's right. Okay. Anyway, Neil's gonna get cut. So, okay. So, um, I want to know what happened. What?

So I had, uh, on my last trip coming back from Toronto, I keep it in my bag. So I have protein powder in my bag. Okay. Like, literally, I, I, you know, travel with protein powder.

Yeah.

Vegan protein shake.

Wait, show the brand. That's Legion, right?

Yeah, it's Legion.

We should, we should give a shout out to Legion. There you go.

Great product.

Okay.

So I didn't know that they had to check it. Like they checked to see if there's powder. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I had my mic on top. The rep pulled it out and then boom, it hit the ground and it got messed up. So I ordered a new one from Amazon, but I was pissed. But what can I do? You know, it's like, you can't be like, hey, TSA rep, you owe me a mic.

You know? You know what's funny? Sometimes I would get pulled aside from TSA and they'd take the mic out. I get stopped for the mic because they think it's a grenade.

Yeah, I don't get the grenade. They would tell me, because you know when they say take all electronic devices out, I would say maybe like 30-40% of the time they stop my bag and they're like, you didn't take out your technology. And I'm like, it's a microphone, you just said laptops. But electric toothbrush, they never make me take out, but for some reason the mic, it gets flagged.

Yeah, the mic gets flagged quite often. Anyway, so Neil, I think I have one point to bring up, but it'll come back to me. So I want to bring up these charts over here. So these charts are from CO2. We've kind of covered them before, but I think it's worth bringing it up because the key thing here is, will AI lead to mass unemployment? Oh, I remember what I was going to say. So the way I think we might measure— this is going to be an experiment for us, Neil. So the way we're going to measure AI adoption is We have Claude Teams right now. We can see usage in Claude Code. We can see usage in Claude Cowork. So we want to see, one, we want to see usage, but we also want to see the pull requests coming from GitHub. Now, those 2 things can be gamed. If you're just shipping a bunch of pull requests and you're just spending a lot, you could— it could be stupid spend, right? To Neil's point. So the thing that you saw earlier from Uber where they're saying 75% of engineers said the code was helpful code, we might have something like that where the engineers or maybe the people, the managers are checking and saying, hey, like you did all this, you're engaged, but what have you actually built? Can you screen share with us, right? So my point of saying this is that you can have these metrics that are maybe easy to record, but they might be easy to game. You need to have a pairing metric next to it to make sure that what you're doing is actually quality and it's not just a bunch of slop, which is what my homepage got called, even though it converts. So yeah, anyway.

Eric's homepage was not slop. That's just what, again, what someone else thinks. I'm neutral. If his homepage was crap, I would tell him. Yes, is it perfect from a design perspective? No. But get it out there, find out if the model works, if the marketing message converts, and then go and adjust it and fine-tune it later on once you figured out how to really make the funnel.

You know what I've learned from this, Neil, right now is when the— like you and I, we grew up during the internet era, but we weren't exactly working at the time just yet. And what I've learned is when the demand is there, it doesn't matter. Like you're going to get pulled. The demand is going to pull you and like, who cares? Right? Okay, check this out. So this is done from CodeTwo. So literally they had a post about a month ago saying, will AI lead to mass unemployment?

Okay.

And so I just want to call out here the ROI that we want to look at. Instead of return on investment, we want to look at return on displacement, ROP. ROP. Okay. So when you look at agriculture in 1900, 12 million agricultural workers, 41% of workforce. You go all the way to 1970, it's 2% of workforce. 3.5 million workers, but net-net, what happened was agriculture lost 8 million jobs from 1910 to 1970, and then new industries gained 46 million jobs. Okay. So 46 divided by 12 over there, 5x, right? So there you have it.

I see the same thing with engineering. A lot of like, if you go back to the Uber example—

Sorry, it's 46 divided by 8. Yeah, go ahead.

Still, it's amazing, right? But if you look at like the Uber example and how they're talking about 75% efficiencies, The, the, or 75% approval, like they found it being helpful. The first thing that comes to my mind is outside of cost, when you're using it, yes, you're releasing more, but is that releasing more improving LTV customer, you know, repeat visits or repeat usage, you know, conversion rates, new potential onboarding or revenue, like all those kinds of things. And What I believe is you'll end up seeing is you'll see some displacement because people are like, you're using all this AI stuff, do we actually need all these people? And B, I think you'll also see in addition to costs going down, people being like, you're using AI for all this stuff and this is great and you did 50 things this month versus the normal 10, but out of the 50 things you did, only 6 of them actually helped drive a return. Well, normally when you do 10, 4 of them drive a return. So you did 50% more things on that end, but you did 5 times, 5x the amount of output. So then they start fine-tuning what things are being used for, and you're going to start seeing not as much usage in certain areas, more usage in others, employees getting displaced because they realize they don't need them all. And then some of those employees go on to other sectors, other fields, other jobs. And it's the same thing in marketing, dude. The amount of customers that are asking us to build them agents right now is ridiculous. And it just goes to show people are like, oh, you're going to have to get rid of people. Well, we're at the same time, we're getting new requests that are requiring us to hire people or reshift.

We're replacing different people. So here's what I'll call it. I actually went and saw, guys, here's a, here's a free idea for you guys. So what Neil and I just said, this is a problem. We're all going to be spending more on tokens. We would like to track our return on token spend. are ROTs, return on token spend. Okay, so if you can figure out— and I just went, I just went to my agent, I asked, hey, can you build something that tracks return on token spend? Because like, that is something we'd all spend on, like, so we can optimize our costs, right? That's a smart idea. Someone take that idea. Neil will invest. I will co-invest with Neil. Um, I'm speaking for Neil here.

So anyway, I know, by the way, brilliant model.

You look at this, okay, by the way, Neil, remember, I think it was 98% of people used to be farmers, and then you go all the way to 2%. But this displacement took a long time, 1900 to 1970. Or so. Okay, I'm not even done here. There's a— there's another one over here. Spreadsheets, for example. Okay, the return on displacement with spreadsheets. So people are like, oh my God, uh, so bookkeepers— like, you see this in, in the blue over here, it's going up and up. So bookkeepers, and then VisiCalc comes out, Lotus 1-2-3, remember that one? Uh, Excel. And then it's the bookkeepers start going down. But what happens? Accountants and auditors starts going up, and then financial analysts starts going up. So 400K bookkeepers disappeared at the advent of the spreadsheet era, but 1.3 million accountants and financial analysts were added. So we're going to be doing Different things. And again, we've said this before, don't hire humans to do robot things. And more human tasks that we're used to are being taken over by robots. That's okay, because nobody wanted to do those things in the beginning anyway.

Yeah.

I have one more, Neil.

Go for it. Share the next one.

Here's one more. So, oh, by the way, look, uh, New York Times in 1973 predicted ATMs would cut bank teller jobs by 75%. Instead, teller employment grew by 81% from 1970 to 1988. That's because way more banks opened. Here's the other thing, radiologists. Oh my God, 10 years ago, I think one of these AI speakers was like, radiologists, that job's going to go away. What happened? There's more demand than ever for radiologists. So I think, yes, I think short-term there's going to be job displacement for the people that don't pick it up. Those are the people that I'm sensationalist, that I'm talking about, that I am genuinely concerned for those people, right? Because there's going to be some short-term displacement. Long-term, that's why I keep saying, Neil's been saying this too, everything's going to be okay because you see, you can see that history rhymes. It doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Speaking of ATMs, it was funny on— I saw a lot of the original ATM ad campaigns from back in the day, but, um, you know, if you haven't, Google them, you'll see them. They're kind of entertaining. Do you even use ATMs yourself? Like, I never use them.

Only when I go to Vegas. When I lose money, then I go to the ATM.

The fees are so high.

Yeah, but it's okay. I pay it anyway because I'm at Vegas.

I don't even have an ATM card because I'm worried about fraud.

You don't use an ATM. You just use your regular card.

What do you mean?

So, okay, this is when you're being degenerate like me. Guys, don't be like me. Okay, so let's say you're gambling, for example. Your ATM card has a limit on it, so you don't use a debit card because there's a limit on it, right? And then you can call them to try to break your limit, but that's annoying. So what you do sometimes if you get desperate is you just do a cash advance with the card. You end up paying even a bigger fee.

So I have a credit card, I have an Amex. You're saying with the American Express I can go to ATM and put it in and get money out?

So I know what— here, let me speak on a debit card. The debit card piece first, I know you can get a cash advance. I think you could do the same thing with a credit card too, but I— that if memory serves me right, I haven't done this for a while. This is only during my degenerate times when I gambled a lot.

So, but, and Eric's talking crap about himself, he's actually a very good gambler and overall has made money. He typically plays poker and he usually comes out winning.

No, but when I play stupid table games, I lose a lot. And this is back in our 20s or so, like you're actually partying and drinking and stuff and being stupid. So like, you know, we don't do any of that anymore.

So yeah, Eric came visiting me in Vegas one time and we all did dinner with his friends in Aria. And I remember Eric was gambling because we were waiting on some of his friends and we were there early. And one of his friends comes to me, he's like, well, Eric just lost $5,000 at a table playing blackjack, right? And even though it sounds bad and a lot of people were shocked, his poker winnings more than make up for all his table game losses. He's actually very good at poker.

Poker, by the way, poker is great for— poker is great for business. All you learn a lot from it. You know, you know, remember your brother-in-law Heaton? So I was just talking about how poker has been so good for me and I tweeted it. And he's like, while you're playing poker, I'm playing business. So Heaton tweeted that at me, right? I was like, oh, motherfucker, right? So that's part of my language. And so you know what I did? I was like, well, Chamath doesn't think that. Chamath thinks it's good for business and da da da. And then Chamath responds. Chamath's like, 100%, you know, poker has been great for business. It helped me with everything. It helped me with my return on investment. I was like, that's right, Heaton. That's right.

You take that.

So anyway, that's just a fun story.

So wait, to go back on it. On the poker thing, it's not even just great for like strategy or whatnot. If you ever want to get into poker, I'm not big on poker, it is amazing networking. Like just from that aspect, the people you meet at like home games, you'll find that you can end up doing business with a lot of people if you are playing in the right games. So I just want to put that out there for anyone who's thinking about gambling.

I can speak on that, Neil, because I actually do go to these home games. So one of the home games has like a, there's a few entrepreneurs there. Actually everyone's an entrepreneur. entrepreneur there. There's some bestselling authors there as well. You would know the names. And so we play like once a month or so. And then we were even talking about going to the World Series of Poker in July to play. But it's good because we end up talking about business. We talk about AI, we talk about— and we just, we have a lot of fun. And we— I will say this too, Neil, it's good for networking. That's number one. You just got to make sure you're hanging out with the right crew. Don't hang out at those like underground poker games in LA. You probably don't want to do that. But the other thing is, You learn how to manage your bankroll. You learn how to manage your emotions a lot better too. And you learn when to bet hard and press your chips versus when not to. So Neil, I got to give Neil a lot of credit. Neil knows when to press hard. When he sees an advantage, he presses really hard. I'm not going to give examples here, but very hard, more like harder than you would ever imagine, right? I'll just leave it at that. Even when it comes to SEO. So all that to say is poker is good for you for You need all these things. You need to learn to break role management. You need to know who's the fish at the table. You need to know when to press hard. You need to know what your odds are at every stage of the game. So, and then to your point, Neil, it's great for networking too.

Yeah. When you said you played with a bestselling author, is this bestselling author a Stanford graduate?

No. Okay.

So it's not the one I'm thinking, not the one that posts a lot of political stuff on X.

I don't even know who you're talking about.

You do.

Who?

The limits of—

You can write it in chat. You can write it in chat.

Oh yeah. Let's see. Where's the chat button?

You can write in chat. Okay. So while, while Neil sends me that—

I can chat with you.

You can? Okay. Whatever. Oh yeah.

Now I can. All right. Check this out. Yeah, it's not that person, but that's who I assumed when you said best friend.

Oh no, no, no, no, absolutely not. No, no, no, definitely no. Quick break for agency owners. You know the content bottleneck. Clients want more content, but writers are more expensive. Freelancers are inconsistent and you can't scale. ClickFlow fixes that. It creates production-grade content your clients will actually approve, not generic AI slop. It's content that actually matches their voice. One agency using it reported saving 90 hours a month per person. That's margin back in your pocket. Plus, it handles internal linking and content audits, which most agencies charge extra for. There's a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. Your ops team will thank you. Back to the show. Okay, anyway, so I'm going to continue on here. So I was going to talk about that person, but I'm not. So Anthropic sees a moat, Neil. So what do you think this moat is if you were to guess on this moat? I don't— this is too obtuse. I don't think you're going to get it. So try it.

No, I don't think I'm going to get it. I wouldn't say it's enterprise or adoption or anything because they're already— all the enterprises are adopting whatever platforms they want. I don't know.

So this is interesting. This guy, Jaya Gupta from Foundation Capital, so he tweeted this. So Anthropic sees this mode, the scarce asset in enterprise AI is shifting from intelligence to permission. And we're seeing this right now, Neil. So same thing, you're getting demand for agents. We're getting a lot of demand for agents and we're building out these revenue agents right now. And what's happening, Neil, is our agents, because my team wants to have agents like mine where they can ask it to do whatever and it has a lot of content, it's connected to all the data that we have, Internally, um, and there's like, uh, all our SOPs, all these things, right? And what I'm realizing is that permissioning is a very big deal. So obviously you shouldn't let everyone in your company see all of your QuickBooks information or all compensation information, right? Um, you shouldn't have that. And so you needed this. So models are now good enough. The harder question is whether companies will let them act inside real systems. So will you let them write code? Will you let every one of your team manager— uh, team members merge changes with your code, right? Or touch infrastructure or trigger actions. That is a big deal. And you need to have these— this governance in place. And then some companies are launching this right now, like Zapier just launched something in terms of governance. And so I think you're gonna have to piecemeal a lot of these things together. We're doing the same thing as well. But that's why we're— we slowly started to test this on ourselves first with our single brain unified intelligence. And then we're slowly rolling it out to clients too. But they're all— Neil, I'll say all of the clients right now, they're all on pilots. Because we want to make sure that we're building with them every single week because every client has different needs. And that's why, like, I'll tell you, like, having to get SOC— getting ready for SOC 2 compliance, like, all these things are a huge pain in the butt, as you know. But we want to make sure that we're building these things right, as I'm sure you guys are too. So governance matters, permission matters quite a bit. Otherwise, it's going to become a poo-poo show at your company and you don't want that to happen.

Yes. And also, when you are leveraging some of these marketing tactics, let's say people are going to— marketing agencies are creating agents for others or You're going to ride on this wave. Keep in mind that if something has been out there for 6 months or a year and is already popular and like, man, I missed the boat. If you switch the marketing angle to focus more on enterprise, you'll be shocked at how much slower companies adapt and you can penetrate. And then if you're like, well, in the US they're already starting to adapt, that could just be in the US. And a lot of other countries are much slower to adapt than the US because a lot of this technology gets rolled out from San Francisco. to the whole US and then to other countries. So what you can do is say, hey, I'm going to end up creating this for SMBs or enterprises in Portuguese or in Hindi or in whatever language, and then adapt for those countries that you know will eventually follow through, but they're not there yet. Yeah.

Remember we talked about this, Neil? Institutional AI versus individual AI. So individual AI could be like you using ChatGPT to help it figure out recipes for you or plan your travel or whatever. Okay. Institutional AI is, for example, Neil and I are both marketers. We both know quite a bit on marketing. I won't say we're the best in the world, but we have a lot of SOPs. We have staff that help us. And so what ends up becoming more important is the skill.md files that you have throughout your whole organization, because that's how these agents read this stuff, right? It's all these skill.md files. So the more that you have and the deeper they are, the more of an advantage you're going to have. And you want to go institutional in terms of deep in one area and not just try to be everything to everyone.

Yes. Uh, did I give you the example of how AI really messed up a family vacation for me?

Yeah, you told me this, like the 3 times where it spent like $7,500 over or something like that.

Uh, no, no, the how it put me on a cruise ship. Did I tell you that?

No, no, no, go.

Uh, how Michelle wanted me to spend more time with the kids. She accepted, as my wife, she already knows I work a lot, but it's more so the kids are starting to cry. Like even my daughter, you haven't come to any of my school functions. I'm like, I volunteer during lunch and stuff. She's like, but you haven't seen my open— you won't come for open house.

You haven't seen my open claw.

And I'm like, honey, I'm so sorry. I had a conference booked 3 months ago or some meetings in a different country. I can't just fly back from Italy and then fly back over. And so my wife planned a Disney cruise using ChatGPT, shitty internet, coordinated with my assistant so she knows when my calendar was free and all that kind of stuff. So the Disney cruise, or from Vancouver to Alaska, ChatGPT ends up breaking down like, oh, here's a perfect date in June. Keep in mind, I had a few dates open for many months, or a few weeks open, and it tells my wife how June is the best time. All right, so then we tell some friends who have kids similar to our kids' age that are in that area, like, hey, do you want to join us and whatnot? Hands down, everyone we told, Some of them may end up joining us, but hands down, everyone we told said, why are you going in June? July is way better. June is not a good month to go on the cruise. So my wife goes back to ChatGPT, hey, you told me June is the best month to go. Everyone's telling me July. And they're like, oh, you make a good point here. But the reason I picked June is when you look outside, you can still see a little bit of snow at the top of the mountain, which looks beautiful. So that's why we say it's the best month. But then you can't do crap outside because of the weather and it's not conducive. I was like, you've picked a crap month and wasted— made us waste money on a non-refundable trip. And not just a little bit of money. Flights, I think, were like $4,000. The cruise, $20-something thousand. I do not know how the heck people can afford this Disney cruise. I was pissed off at the price. Like, people don't have options. This isn't a fancy room. This is like a Motel 6 looking room. I'm like, how the heck does it cost this much money? They just charge that much and get away with it.

But— ChatGPT, this is how ChatGPT screwed you out of $30,000.

Probably more, but yes, to start off with. And it picked the wrong date.

Probably $50,000.

And then I'll have— forget the cost on that, I'll have crappy internet for the whole week, so I'll be very unproductive.

That will cost you even— yeah, it's going to cost you way more.

Yeah, but I get that one because I've been Working so much. And Eric sent me an amazing X quote, or quote from X, from this guy talking about the net worth versus spending time with kids and how you can't take it with you. And I agree with him and I've been trying to make it better, but I actually found I've probably traveled more this year than last year and it's probably worse.

I was just going to say before you said that, I was like, I need to remind Neil to reread the IRR meme. So the whole idea with that one is nobody, your daughters are, and your son's not going to care at age 21 how much your IRR was at 31% versus 25%. So you can spend more time with them, right? I was going to say, Neil, you've actually regressed this year. So you need to reread that.

Yeah. It's gone a little crazy. You've done really well. You've cut back traveling a lot, if I'm not mistaken. Like I've noticed way less travel and you spent a lot more time on operations on your business, like actually doing the work instead of going out there and trying to build a brand, collect leads and all that kind of stuff. What has been, out of curiosity, if you had to put some tangible numbers or percentages, what would you say, rough range? Because I know it's too hard to exact, but you probably have a rough idea because I know you would've already adapted if it was hurting you.

Yeah. So here's what I can share. So I will say, I was, Neil, like we can do a quick comparison. At the high point, I was probably traveling half of the year. So 140 to 150 days, sometimes even like 180 days. 70 or something like that. Um, I think you're probably on track for probably a little more than that. It sounds like—

I think I'm on track for like 65% to 70%.

Okay. So, so Neil's worse than I am, but I used to be kind of around that. Um, what I found though is that me focusing on my business, I'm working harder than I ever have. And so usually Neil and I would be focused more on, um, or at least for myself, I'd be focused more on strategy and driving distribution. And this to me is part of driving distribution. But I'm doing more than I ever have done. So I think now, Neil, you can't just be a strategist, you have to be a doer as well. And you and I have always— we're willing to kind of pick up a shovel or like clean the bathrooms if we have to do it. And so I would just say that I've been more productive than ever because I'm not distracted by travel. And I'm able to quickly meet with people more. I'm able to quickly just, you know, huddle them or something like that, right? So communication cycles are a lot faster now. And I would just say that without me focusing on this, I wouldn't have gotten the Single Grain thing out, which I think Single Grain is the AI marketing services company of the future. And that to me, like building that future is very important.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great use of your time, but let's go back to your organization, Single Grain, okay? I know for a fact AI has helped you save In addition to whatever you spent, if you look at total savings, it saved you probably over half a million to a million dollars and told you where to save money without reducing headcount, like without having to fire people or anything like that. It's actually saved you money in a positive way.

Yeah. So what I can report on is, so I did, I actually made a video on this yesterday, Neil. So my agent, just on saving cost savings alone. So I spent $7,500 on tokens last month. Okay. And, but the savings on that, if you do $500 grand divided by the $7,500, that's a 66.66x return. Okay. Just on that alone. And I made those cuts within 3 days. So we cut a ton of software costs. We did cut contractor costs, but we didn't cut— what I can proudly say for right now is like, we haven't— from that, we haven't tried to cut like full-time costs. Okay. And that's a good thing. I think it's like a lot of people are saying, oh, we're good. We got to cut like 20%, 50% here. Like I talk about it a lot, but that's not something that we're actively doing. Right. Now, that also on top of that, Neil, the way my team uses it now, like, sure, I spent the $7,500, but that was the toll booth to get everyone else using it like this. So everyone else is getting a lift. They're like, oh, I built this over here. I built this. I saw someone on the team build this. We have something now that can crank out like 400, 600 ads, and we're hooking it into SingleBrain. We have like an API for that. And then end to end, Having Alfred, our agent, build out cold email infrastructure, which we've talked about a little bit. So it's building out all these end-to-end things. Had I not spent the time and the money on that, we wouldn't have been able to show the team that we can do it and unlock it for everyone else. And that to me, like, I think we can, we can see the gains on that. Come back to me in like 6 months or so, but I think we'll have harder numbers there. But also, Neil, the, the single brain website generated in 2 hours, the enterprise leads coming through that right now, like That's real pipeline.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. And I've been on the opposite. I haven't been in the trenches as much as Eric has this year in business. My role this year, if I had to say, I've been spending, and even a lot of last year, but it's gotten worse this year. I spent a lot of my time networking and doing meals and doing presentations. When I say presentations, I'm not talking about going to a conference, even though I do that quite a bit and I just finished one up earlier today. I'm talking about going into companies and meeting their executive team, doing presentations internally about business strategy, marketing strategy, how they can adapt, what happens when low-cost competitors enter the market, how should they adapt their marketing messages and pivot, still try to maintain and grow market share. And we'll do lunches and dinners with these people and get to know them. And the reason this is important is I'm playing a game of Whale hunting, right? I don't actually hunt whales, but you guys get the point in which—

You call this spearing, Neil.

Spearing. Yeah. What I'm trying to do is land multi-7 or 8-figure deals. And it's a lot of those, it doesn't matter how good you are with AI or marketing or any of that stuff. A lot of that comes down to relationships and wining and dining and meeting and hanging out and just getting to know people because People don't like signing big contracts with someone they don't actually know. I'm not talking about, oh, I see Neil and Eric on the internet type of know. I'm talking about sit down and have a drink, even though I don't drink alcohol, but like, you know, have a meal or break bread or whatever you want to call it. Like really getting to know the person, their family and what they do for fun and all that good stuff.

You know what's unexpected, Neil, is the pilots that are coming through right now for Single Brain. A lot of them are, to your point, relationships, and a lot of them are through what? YPO, right? Even though I talked about— but that YPO is networking. What Neil's talking about is a form of networking. I think that's very— everything comes down to relationships at the end of the day. Um, and I think, I think it is high leverage for Neil to be doing this. And Neil, I've got a question for you. What happened to that 9-figure deal?

Uh, the 9-figure deal did not close, although I got a verbal on an 8-figure deal yesterday, so that should close. So that's not bad. And when I say verbal, It wasn't verbal. We were going over the last red lines on a phone call.

It's basically done. Yeah. So what Neil does, you want to remind them what you do with the outreach? Because I think it's something everybody can do.

It's free.

You might as well do it.

Yeah. So what I really think about is who am I connected with that knows other really influential people? other companies, and I will try to convince the other person, because I've built relationships with all these people that I'm connected with, to go and talk to the person that they know at a larger corporation like Apple or Microsoft or whoever it is, and not only introduce me to the person I'm trying to meet, but explain to them like, hey, I want to introduce you to X, Y, and Z. They're doing some really cool stuff in your space, and I'll provide the examples. And then have them say like, this person's really legit, you should be working with them, they're amazing. And I found that I get really massive contracts from that strategy. Now you may be able to, you may be thinking, well, Neil, this is really hard for me to replicate. And it doesn't matter if you use AI or not, it is going to be hard for you to replicate. The things that work out really well is I've built these relationships over a long time, so you got to put in the work there. I built up a personal brand, which makes it easier to convert and close people. So, you got to put in the effort and put in the time and years there. And my corporation has amazing track record, a lot of awards. We're scaled to size and have tons of case studies that we can end up showing. So, all those combined with the correct introduction from the other person who they don't look at as just like an employee or someone beneath them, but someone at their same level, like a peer that they respect.

Yeah.

That works really well. It's like if someone has a hot flying startup that is now worth $4 billion and they look up to someone and that someone does an intro about me to them, there's a really good chance I can close a big deal.

Yeah. You know what I'll say? So, 2 things here. One, impact, confidence, ease. So, those of you saying, okay, I can't do that right now because to Neil's point, from an ease standpoint, Neil can easily reach out to people because he already has this network and that makes it easier because he's built this reputation over time. So, you're not going to be able to do that. Overnight. But from a confidence standpoint, I'm fairly confident on a scale of 1 to 10 that this works, literally because Neil's talking about it right now. Impact can be huge. So, let's just rate this real quick, 1 through 10 on all of these, right? So, impact, I mean, to me, this is like a 9 out of 10 at the least. Confidence, probably like a 10 out of 10 because you're proving that it works. But ease is where it's easier for Neil right now because he's put in the work over, God, what, 24 years of doing business? Right?

Yes.

And so don't— like, you might as well start now. It's okay to say, like, even if you start now, you compound over the next 5, 10 years or so, and you start to execute this over and over, you're going to do a lot better than your competitors. Yeah.

And, and to clarify on one thing, uh, actually 2 things. Ease, I would probably rate this as like a 1 out of 10 or a 2 out of 10 max. Um, I think it just takes a lot of years before it produces ROI. Uh, and the second thing that I want to clarify here When I ask for the introduction, I don't just hit up people asking for the introduction. So let's say if it's a friend, let's say it's Eric, and let's say he knows the CMO at Apple. I'm making this up, for example. I would say, hey Eric, I see that you're connected with so-and-so, they're the CMO of Apple. Do you know them well? What's your relationship? And then I start diving in with Eric and I'll just ask some questions. I'm like, hey, do they respect you? Do you know them well? Like, what do they think about you, your marketing strategies, all the stuff you put out? This will give me a really good understanding that if Eric does the introduction, that it will help or it'll hurt or do nothing. Because if it's going to do nothing, I don't care for Eric to make the introduction. If it's going to hurt, of course I don't want it. Because some people are connected with others on LinkedIn and they don't know them. They're like, oh, they used to like me, they don't like me now. And you'll be shocked, that does happen. But the key is like, if Eric says like, Oh, I know him really well. I'm like, oh, how well? Do you talk to him often? And Eric may say, yeah, I talk to him once every month and I've helped him actually solve some marketing problems and I've given him 4 or 5 hires and they really respect me in these areas. So yeah, I have an amazing relationship with him. I was like, cool, can you do this intro? This is what I did. Here's a public case study of Après competitors. They spent $4 million with us and look what— I wouldn't probably disclose the price, but I'm like, they spent a lot of money with us. Here were the results. I want to do this for Apple. And, you know, I have an opening because we stopped working with them. I can now work with Apple. Let me know if they're interested, or I'm just going to go back to the other company and see if they're interested. And I'm not trying to play the companies off of each other. I'm just letting them know, like, I either could do one or other, and maybe neither— any of the companies want to work with me in the future, and that's fine as well. So I'm not going in being like, if you don't sign up with me, I'm going to go to your competitor. I'm not trying to do that. It's just more so if our contract's large enough, sometimes people make you sign an NDA or no, not NDA. What is it? Non-compete, not non-compete, but you can't work with competitors. I forgot what the exact term is, but in the contract says like, you can't work with X, Y, and Z competitors. But yeah, it's just like, that's an example of a strategy that I found that to work well.

I think it's good. So a couple of things here. I have 2 things. One, those of you listening to this right now, take this segment, take the transcript from this. If you're watching this on YouTube, go to youtubetotranscript.com and take the strategies that we're talking about that sound interesting to you and figure out how you can identify these. What Neil's talking about right now, if you have some of these relationships, what's my play? Look at all my LinkedIn connections. Here's the export of my LinkedIn. How can you do this? Oftentimes, Neil, because my OpenClaw has all my LinkedIn connections in it, I'm just like, hey, who do I know here? Hey, I'm going to Mexico over here. I'm going to Mexico City. Who do you know over here that's an entrepreneur? Who should I— because I'm pretty good at setting up dinners and setting up these small events. And so, I'll do that, right? So, you got to play to your strengths. Here's a question, Neil. Theoretically, this can never stop because you're always going to want to grow more. So, when are you going to stop doing this?

I need to slow down because I think it's affecting my family in a negative way. Like my kids are starting to cry being like, I'm not involved. It's not even spending time because when I'm with them, I'm really like— I bought a crazy Formula 1 big Technic set. My kid likes big cars, or my son does. He's not old enough to do it. So I'm sitting there doing— there's 9 or 10 packs in there. I'm doing a pack a day and I do as much as I can with him and then I finish the rest of the pack on my own.

Technic is like a Lego or something?

It's sold by Lego. So it was in a Lego store. It was like a big Formula 1 car.

Yeah.

But like, he gets burned out after a while because he's 4 and it's meant for 18-year-olds. So like, I'll help him push piece, or he helps me push pieces, and then when he's like done, I'll finish the rest of the pack, and then every day I'll do one. But it's not the quality time that they're looking for. Like, I even do dinner dates with my kids, just like me and the kids by myself. Gives wife a break. She doesn't ask for the break, but I want one-on-one time as well.

Yeah.

But the kids are more upset that I'm not There for their school moments, that even though my parents weren't always there because they had to work and I understood it, I have the optionality to be there for my kids financially. My parents didn't. My parents, it was more so if they weren't there, it would be less money for food on the table. So they had no choice.

Yeah.

I have the option. And that's where my kids are getting hurt because when I tell them, oh, but I'm working hard so you can have a pretty room and all this kind of stuff, My kids keep saying, I don't need the room. I don't need the toys. I don't need any of this. I want my dad.

They're not wrong.

Correct.

But here's also like, one, I'll say they're not wrong, but that's on you at the end of the day to decide what you want to do. But also, I think about my past as you're saying that. I'm like, did I really care how often my parents were there? Not really.

Me neither.

Not really. Maybe the only time I cared was when they like my drumline competition my senior year. 'Cause we were actually good that year. That's the only time I cared. But other than that, I don't really care 'cause I enjoyed the work and the work at that time was playing video games. So that was the work for me and you were already working. So yeah, but we're all wired differently. So anyway, that was a real question. You can play this game infinitely if you want to. So I'm going to switch gears here. So Neil, did you see this guy that builds pools? Okay, so he basically closes these $50,000 pool deals. Like here, I'm going to show you over here. He uses OpenClaw for this. Like a swimming pool or are you talking about a pool with a swimming pool? Swimming pool.

Swimming pool.

Okay, thank you for that. So, okay, you know, this Open Claw bot finds $500 grand to $1.2 million homes without pools. It renders a pool in their backyard and mails the owner a postcard showing the before and after on autopilot. Here's how pool builders can close $50K deals with this system. Okay, so it scans the satellite imagery, it filters by lot size, it does all this stuff over here. And then check this out. So this guy's marketing tactic, comment pool, and I'll show you the full breakdown. And so he gets 1.2 million views on this. I think this is genius, right? You can see the rendering here. I'll make it a little bigger. You can see that. So you can see lots scanned over here, lots scanned in Tampa, pool rendered, and literally they get a postcard. So I think this is pretty cool because now you have an agent that can end-to-end handle this and look at all the homes and it'll create the postcard, it'll create the rendering. And this is a nice way to get people's attention when it comes to outbound. But what's funny to me, Neil, is when you look at what this guy has, if I can come off of this real quick. He gets 1.2 million views on this, and then at the very bottom, he's like, DM me if you want a custom Open Claw for your system. So Open Claw system for your business. Okay, so he's calling this out as a case study. That's cool. But you know what's funnier, Neil? Manus comes in. So this employee from Manus, you can see, uh, go-to-market at Manus. Oh, look, another homie, Neil. Um, but he's like, hey, I saw this and I just had to try it with Manus AI. Delivered all of these in one session, personalized to your name and This is hyper-personalized sales at its best. So it's like marketing on marketing on marketing.

Did I tell you I got hit up by Mannus? Have they hit you up for social posts?

Videos? Yeah.

They hit you up? The Mannus team?

Uh-huh.

Okay. If you ever need to be connected to more people there on that team, let me know.

Well, how come you didn't do a deal? Hey, how come they don't sponsor this podcast? This would be the perfect podcast for them to sponsor. We love Mannus.

Yes.

Okay, Neil's doing it right now. I can see Neil's in the middle of it. Neil's like, oh, good idea. Okay, thank you, Neil. But I made a video for them, by the way, when they first came out. That video got like 200,000 views on it, on long form. So they got some conversions out of that. Okay, and I called it out as a big winner last year, even though the AI said I was sensationalist. Okay, so I'm going to move over as Neil pulls that up. Neil, I want to talk about Sequoia's $1 trillion thesis. Okay, have you heard of this?

Uh-uh.

Okay, so Silicon Valley is finally waking up to this $1 trillion thesis by Sequoia. So Sequoia Capital, they are a popular venture firm. They funded some of the most iconic companies. I think they funded Apple back in the day. So Sequoia's thesis that the next $1 trillion company will sell work, not software, is the most important reframe in AI right now. So the argument is if you sell a Copilot, You're competing with every new model release. But if you sell the outcome, so books closed, contracts claimed, uh, customers driven, for example, claims handled, every AI improvement makes your margins better, not your product obsolete. So the key insight most people are missing, for every dollar spent on software, $6 is spent on services. Thank God, Neil, that we have a services business for both of us, right? Um, so don't think about AI for accountants. You want to think about the AI accounting firm, not AI for lawyers, but the AI law firm. Okay, so you look at this over here. What they're basically saying is that this team, we just published a paper on how to measure these economic outcomes. We call them outcome primitives. We track 1,300 agents over 21 days creating $32 million of economic value. So securing jobs, winning $200K grants, and shipping e-commerce shops. If your AI product is Copilot, you're competing on software margins, losing to big AI labs. If you're an AI product that delivers the primitive, you're competing on services margins, transforming outdated inefficient industries. So choose your battles wisely. I don't even know how to read this chart over here. All I'll just say is that services as a software, it's become the sexy thing. And thank God we stuck around, Neil. You could have sold out, but you didn't. That's right.

On a side note, I just did an introduction to the Manus team and told them how your past videos drove a lot of views and they should work with you. Good luck.

Work with us for this podcast.

No, no, I just said to you.

I don't want to do a one-off video. That's I just sponsored this podcast. We have HubSpot, they're a great sponsor. We're taking one more.

So cool.

Yeah. Here, try reading this real quick, Neil.

I can't see it. The text color and writing is too hard for me. Okay.

So I'm going to try to understand this real quick. So outcome magnitude, human effort equivalent. Okay. So for AP asset production, decision support, interpersonal navigation, health optimization. Okay.

Let's look at this.

I don't understand this. All we need to know, Neil, is there's a $1 trillion thesis by Sequoia, and that's why you have YC, you have companies like Sequoia talking about backing more services companies.

But this is outcome-based, so you're selling outcomes. They say it's—

Exactly.

$600 a dollar.

Which is what we've been doing anyway. You're selling outcomes, but you're going to do it more efficiently.

But this isn't the same thing as software as a service, is it? I don't know, it doesn't sound like it.

I think, I mean, this Sequoia one over here where you see this picture, I don't know who this is, but services as a software, YC was talking about. I think Sequoia is also talking about it too. So the next trillion-dollar company will sell work, not software, is the most important reframe in AI right now. And I tend to believe that, which is why we're not trying to— yeah.

I think they say service as a software is like a $15 trillion industry.

It is, because way more people spend money on services than software, like 6 to 1. Every dollar spent on software, $6 is spent on services.

Global software as a service market with estimated value of $250 billion exceeded.

I mean, you're going to go to town with With, uh, MPXL. That's what I'll say. Yeah.

Time will end up telling, but yeah, we'll try. Uh, I can't find where the rank is. All right, let me just actually use AI. Let's see where it says industry size.

What are you looking for? Can you share your screen?

Sure.

Uh, okay. So what do we got here?

So service as a software, it focuses on software as a service.

Oh, it failed. Yeah.

I tried it with ChatGPT the other day too, and it failed as well. It fails.

You know, these things fail quite often. Now that I speak to the agents all day, it fails a lot. Like, but it's still worth the trade-off because the gains you get from it are still worth it. So I'll take, like, you and I are not perfect. We fail a lot every single day.

Yeah.

So I'll leave it at that.

Did I tell you I have a friend who works at a publicly traded company and they did an experiment? with different divisions and canning employees for AI, small divisions. Okay.

No, of course.

So like, uh, they ended up canning quite a bit of people on marketing and they wanted to see what could be done automatically in a few other divisions. So they tried marketing, sales, you get the point, right? And they didn't pick the big divisions that are making billions of dollars. They picked the smaller ones where they could afford to lose some money. And what they found was the ones where they cut people And they couldn't cut everyone, but they cut a lot of people, or percentage-wise, it wasn't a big headcount number, so it wasn't big announcements. The results weren't great. And what they found was the biggest issue AI had was with strategy, especially in marketing, and it was doing a lot of subpar mediocre work. But here was a bigger thing. Some of the divisions they have are regulated, and one of them made a mistake that cost them $6 million. So, so at that point, they're just like, this AI stuff is cool, we want to pair it with humans. This is costing us too much money, both on the revenue front and on the penalty front.

You know what I think? I mean, so I'll tell you what, um, the good news is our, our marketing school YouTube is growing faster now. And so I want to give, um, Jan credit. Um, but also at the same time, I was speaking to him, so he helps us with the YouTube strategy. Um, and so, you know, he made a statement. I was just talking to him about it yesterday, and I'll just make it public. But it's like, He's like, yeah, you know, I, uh, I don't— I, you know, I don't tend to trust AI when it comes to, you know, uh, titles and strategy and all that. It's like, no, it's not AI or human, it's AI and human. When you do AI and human and use something like YouTube API, you're going to get better results ultimately because it's going to spot patterns that you wouldn't have spotted on your own, right? Um, and so I think that's what people need to, need to get right. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's not or, it's and.

Yeah, watch this everyone. And Eric, be honest. Do you think I'm a, if you had to rate my skills for writing copy, what would you rate me on a 1 to 10? Be honest. At least for marketing copy, like for stuff.

Probably 8.5 to 9.

Okay. What would you rate me if I had to write marketing copy for a marketing company, like marketing software or marketing agency?

Probably like a 4 or 5.

Out of 10?

Yeah.

Like writing copy for my own website.

For, okay. Writing copy for your own stuff. Like when I think about like Quick Sprout, for example, like I think 8.5, 9 out of 10. I think if you're writing for an agency, actually, no, you have written for your agency. I think, no, I think you do do a good job with, yeah. So I would say probably around the same range. Uh, but I don't know why I think you, what area do you suck in? I clearly think you suck in one area. What is it?

What area would you suck in?

In copywriting? Yeah. What area do you suck? I think you suck at something, but I don't know what it is.

No, in copywriting or something specific in marketing?

So no, in copywriting?

No, overall in copy, I'm really good.

Yeah, but so my point is I think you're good overall, but I clearly, I think you suck at something. I don't know what it is, but continue.

Go ahead. Okay, so let's say he's an 8.5. I agree, I'm not the best marketer at everything. I probably would give myself a 9 out of 10. So similar, I think Eric was around 8.5.

I was 8.59, yeah.

Yeah, so similar. I would give myself a 9 out of 10. I never give 10s. I always think you can get better. How often do you think I use AI or now let's rate ChatGPT or Claude or any of these for copywriting compared to me?

2 or 3.

Okay. So people would assume, and Eric already knows the answer to this, he doesn't know where I was going with this, but he knows the answer. Even though I'm a much better copywriter than AI itself, I'll come up with copy variations and once I have the versions I really like and want, Not always, but maybe like 15% of the time, 20% of the time max, I'll put it into AI and ask them for more variations because you know what? If you give them a good input, Yep. sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes it does come out with even better variations than what I came up with. So even though AI's not as good a copywriter as me, if you take someone who's really good at what they do and then they input that into AI, It can give you really good outputs.

Yeah. And to Neil's point, this is all garbage in, garbage out again. So if Neil has already written it already and then he just runs it through a prompt, it's going to be much better than saying, write me a good marketing article. That's not going to work well, right? And you know why my X articles do well? It's because I work with it all the time. I'm like, hey, what's all the cool stuff we worked on recently? And then I might dictate out something I want to talk about on top of that. So you have 2 layers, then you get something really good, right? But you're not going to get it If you don't give it good context. Because like, again, like how's somebody supposed to just read your mind and just create something that's going to work? Like it's never worked like that.

So. I know we're running out of time, but I'll give you a pro tip. You probably may already be doing this. I was talking with Sam from Writesonic. He's doing something that's really interesting. He takes all the news within a category. So you could be AI marketing, you pick whatever industry you're in. Then he looks at that news that's coming out. He looks at backlinks, social shares, comments, engagement shares, whatever metrics he can get because some platforms are closed, some you can easily crawl and scrape. And he's looking at that in real time. So like an hourly basis, right? As close to real time as possible. And then of course he's still looking back a day, 2 days, a week, et cetera. That tells him what's really hot in his industry. And then he looks at everything that he's created in the past that's resonated with his audience. And what hasn't. So it cross-references that, eliminates all the stuff that it thinks would not do well based on his audience type. And then he has AI create variations of the stuff that did well with his own taste and flavor and adding his own thoughts. So he's not just ripping or copying, he's just using that topic. Like if there's something new in the news that Claude is releasing a new model and everyone's sharing it and it's going viral, call it, 9.8 out of 10 times. He'll be like, if I create something on this tied to marketing, it'll do well. And the AI creates something related to that based on what it can see around the web. He goes in there, fine-tunes it, publishes it. His engagement numbers from the stats that he was showing, he was screen sharing, so it wasn't actual like a dashboard comparing posts, but we went through like 10 posts. No joke, it was more than double the engagement for all the posts that he was using the AI. Versus the ones that he was doing by hand. So the AI ones performed by double compared to the ones he was doing by hand. Sure, he had input on the AI ones, but it just goes to show the power if you combine humans with AI.

Yep. Yeah, I mean, guys, it's just, it's just technology. It's no different. Like, all technology exists to help make human life better. That's what I believe. So anyway, that's a good place to end it. We will see you all tomorrow. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe.