Companies fail with AI because of this, podcast mention drives $29M in revenue, Brutal new SEO stats

I'll show you this chart. I mean, we like to all talk about LVMH, and I thought this was really interesting. So LVMH, obviously they own Louis Vuitton, they own Dior, they own Fendi, they own Sephora and 70+ luxury houses, right? So this chart over here I thought was fascinating. So if you look at since the highs of— and Neil, you can read the charts over here, but you see December 2021, this is obviously during the height of the pandemic. And so everyone's flush with cash, right? And so, you know, you saw the lines around like the Beverly Hills Louis Vuitton over here. So December '21, 44% revenue growth, right? And then you move to March of '22, it drops to 37%. June 2022, 32%. So this chart is just, it's just, it's like a hill that's going downwards, right? And you can see it goes all the way to December 2025. And it goes negative 5%, right? And then it just keeps dropping, dropping, dropping. So, uh, LVMH has now put up 16 consecutive quarters of decelerating growth. And I think they— I think the— they've done a great job with, uh, with marketing overall with this stuff. But, uh, what do you think is happening here?

So I don't really look at it as 16 quarters of decelerating growth. I know the numbers are showing that. But here's what people don't talk about. It is a company that's been around for a long time. Historically, you know, as they've scaled, because they typically buy brands, even though they're a fashion house, they're more like private equity in which they're just buying other people's fashion brands, tucking them in, running their playbook, scaling them, and just holding them for a very long time. When you look at LVMH in 2021, I'm actually looking at their stock chart right now. They grew exactly 43.82% in revenue. That's a massive growth in one year, especially for a company at that time. In 2021, they did $64 billion. In 2023, which was their peak, they did $86.15 billion. 2024, it went down 1.71% to $84.68 billion. If you look at 2025, it went down to $80.81 billion, and they're still shrinking a little bit here and there. But the way I look at LVMH is if you standardize the curve and you take away the COVID bump, they've actually grown really nicely compared to where they started pre-COVID. And yes, you know, uh, people had a lot more discretionary spending during COVID because the government deposited money in people's bank accounts and a lot of people ended up using it on things like luxury goods.

So here's what I'll call out. Remember, we're talking about revenue growth here, just so everyone sees this, right? So you had 44%, uh, revenue growth and now it's negative 5%, right? And so, uh, but you have EBITDA margins held in the mid-30s, right? And then it went back and dropped back a little bit. It's still, it's still a great, it's still a great, uh, I wouldn't even say it's, it's, it's a, it's a business, it's a collection of businesses. Um, and they're still very well known anywhere that you go in the world. So I would, I still think it's a great business. I mean, I would love to own it. So, um, I think, um, Chamath actually posted this just saying it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, is, is it over, right? Um, and I don't, I don't think it's over. Um, I think, you know, they're gonna do just fine. And I think if anything, these brands have been around for quite a long time too. So it's the staying power that the name behind these is— what should we call it? It's brand power. That's what it is. When you think about the 7 powers, brand power fits in for all these different brands that I just mentioned, whether it be Fendi, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and brands like that.

Let's take Louis Vuitton for example. It was founded in 1854. It's a 172-year-old brand. The value in these companies isn't the purse, isn't the handbag. It really is the brand. People buy their products because of that logo. And when you look at Louis Vuitton, there's people who sell knockoffs, similar lookalikes under different brands. And even if they're 1/20th of the price, people still don't want them because they're not LV. People take pride in owning an LV handbag or purse or whatever they're called, or their clothes or their sneakers. Like their brands have staying power. I believe they also own Tiffany's as well. I could be wrong though. Is it Tiffany's owner? Yes, LVMH owns Tiffany as well, the diamond company. Yep.

So anyway, I thought that'd be a great place to start, but I want to show you one more thing here. So. This is Sundar Pichai talking about this, right? So CEO of Google. And so he says this, if you don't learn how to orchestrate agents now, you'll spend 2027 catching up to people who started today. So in 30 minutes, he explains why the best engineers stopped writing code and started running agents, right? So right now you have this craze right now on X where the creator of OpenClaw, the creator of Claude Code, I think even Jensen Huang was saying this. Andrew Ng, who's like a computer scientist as well, well-known computer scientist. They're all talking about building loops. These are the next evolution where you don't prompt anymore, you do loops, and then you just have these loops run over and over and you just have these agents just continue to improve over time. It's on its way to recursive self-improvement. Going back to Sundar's quote here, if you don't learn how to orchestrate agents today or now, You'll spend 2027 catching up to people who started today. I think there's very much a red herring and I continue to see this when we're talking to people, when we're interviewing people. Yesterday I had talked to a handful of people and it's what we do now to see if people have it or they don't is we just get them to open up, hey, what's the coolest workflow that you built? Okay, cool, great. Can you open up your Codex? Can you open up your Claude code? We see their usage, we see how they're using it, we get them to talk through it. But I do believe That at least for the next few years, maybe the long-term, maybe it just smooths out. If you don't learn this today, what's going to happen is, let's say Neil learns this today and then I don't learn it. By next year, if I'm trying to catch up to him, he's already off in another planet, right? Because this stuff is compounding, it's changing every single day. So I think it's interesting that he's saying that. Because my thing, I think I've asked you this, Neil, we've kind of talked about this a little bit. I was just like, man, if—

Yeah.

You start compounding today, you're 12 months ahead of me, and I start compounding after that, how am I supposed to catch you? And but then like my logic was, well, the internet, like everyone was still kind of evened out at the end of the day. So who knows how it'll play out because we've never really had synthetic intelligence like this. So I thought that was just an interesting quote.

Yeah. Then when you look at the compounding, I do agree there's going to be some sort of compounding effect, but what is the net result from that compounding effect. And I'll give you a prime example of this is you look at Uber. Uber talked about how they went through their tokens, I think it was in a matter of months, and this was tokens that they had allocated for a whole year. But if you look at Uber's stock price, all the extra usage, all the cranking out of features hasn't really moved their revenue and caused a lot more revenue growth than one may think, right? So just because you do 10x more of the volume or 20x more of the output or even 1,000x, it doesn't mean that translates into 1,000x or even 100x or even 2x more revenue. So are you going to have more work to catch up on? Yes. Does all that work that you have to catch up on matter? It's yet to be seen. And I think a lot of it won't produce revenue. We're seeing the same thing in marketing. There's so many people that if you push AI aside, whether they have a bigger team or whether they have more software or more technology or leveraging AI, there's some teams that do 10 times more marketing than others. And it's not always the team that's doing 10 times more that's winning. Sometimes the team that's doing 1/10 the stuff is just focusing on 1 or 2 channels that's really driving a lot of results and they fine-tuned it and they're so good at it and they figured out how to really lock other people out from getting into that channel. And in those cases, you don't need to do 10x stuff. That one channel, assuming you can keep milking it and you can figure out ways to making it sustained, could potentially cause you to be a much larger business.

So as it relates to that, I'm actually going to pull up this tweet from Glenn Gabe. So Google here, speaking of AI for a second, Just continuing on the Google piece. Like I've said before, there's no way Google lets companies spamming for AI search continue. They will ramp up systems and add manual actions. Google research shows how AI spam can be detected. So basically they're adding in these content defenders, right? Which I'm just like, wait, isn't the algorithm already the defender? But so now they're using something, I don't even know what SBERT is, maybe SearchBERT, for identifying AI-generated content. So this is what Google is doing now, right?

Yeah.

Because keep in mind, a lot of people have been spamming these best-of listicles and listing them at the top, and then these LLMs are picking them up as well. So what will probably be the most of interest is that researchers acknowledge that the use of SentenceBERT, SBERT, SentenceBERT, as a way to identify semantically similar sentences. They cite SentenceBERT to validate a core assumption of their paper, that automated AI-generated text leaves a distinct mathematical footprint, AKA text embeddings that can be detected. So this system is said to be a highly accurate defense against coordinated generative AI spam, which means something like this could conceivably be in use. The new system is called Scalable Cluster Termination System. Oh my God, so many names. SCTS. And the research paper, Scalable Detection of Adversarial Synthetic Slop and Coordinated Media Abuse.

Dude. Okay.

Anyway. So all that to say is that what we've called out even a few months ago and probably even a few years ago is that you're better off doing the black hat stuff in a white hat way. So if you're going the extra mile with your, you have good data-backed content, you're doing good data storytelling, right? That's going to go a lot further than you just stealing someone else's graph and just reposting it. So I think Google's going to be fine. I think Claude's going to copy this. I think OpenAI is going to copy this. Google's going to have the best. Like, I will say this, Neil. Like, how often do you use AI mode right now?

Not that much, but I don't need to use AI mode because when I ask Google a specific question, right, and I'll show example on my phone here. Like, if I put. So I'm actually going to close these windows out because it's not working on my phone. What's a random question? Here, I'll type in something right now. I'm sick and I have a sore throat. Oh yeah, fever.

Neil went on a cruise, guys.

He's sick.

This is why he's low energy Neil today. Len, low energy Neil. There's another acronym for you.

Okay, so as you can see here, I typed it in, some misspellings. I click Show More in the AI Overviews area, right? And it's telling me what I think it thinks I have. And then I can ask any follow-up question if I scroll to the bottom, type an answer. So whether you want to call that AI mode or AI Overviews, they have it right then and there in the AI Overviews where you can just interact with it. Kind of like ChatGPT and it's simple. I don't have to go to a specific URL. I just type and it works. Yep.

So I use it. I mean, I always say I use it a few times a week and it's been pretty solid in my opinion. And so I think Google's always going to have, at least for the next couple years, the best search experience because they have all these defenders and they've been fighting spam for such a long time. So speaking of AI search, by the way, There's a good— Eli Schwartz tweeted this, so check this out. Eli Schwartz is a strong SEO, wrote a book called Product-Led SEO. Basically, he's saying— was that a sneeze, Neil?

What was that?

Cough.

Okay.

If you want to win in AI search, it comes down to 3 things. You got to be unique, you got to be helpful, and be agent-ready. The first 2, by the way, This is all— this has always been Google's rules, right? Be unique and be helpful with the content, but also be agent ready. So he's not talking about secret schema or chunking tricks or file uploads that make LLMs fall in love with their site. He's not talking about that, but it's 3 plain words, right? So this should worry every AEO tool or consultant currently charging 5 figures a month for a checklist. So the 3 pillars. Okay, so it says 3 plain words. I'm looking for the 3 plain words over here. Okay, so almost every tactic built around gaming AI has a shelf life. Okay, we've talked about that before because the moment enough people exploit it, Google quietly patches it, which is what you've just seen with us talking about Expert and all this other stuff, these defenders.

Okay.

Structured data formatting work. I mean, that to me is just standard optimization. And then this exposes something funnier, the entire category of tools that will happily tell you your brand's visibility score across ChatGPT, DeepSeek, AI overviews, color-coded and exportable for a deck for your CMO. Okay. Okay. All right. Where's the 3 words of it? This is a problem with some of these posts. They just take so long to get to the point. Agent-led spam doesn't count if it doesn't move the needle. The 3 pillars Google name doesn't have that for expiration problem. Okay. What?

I don't know where the 3 words are.

Dude, Eli, what the hell, man? Okay. The smartest move right now isn't chasing whether new AEO trend is circling on LinkedIn this particular week. And it does involve refreshing a tracking dashboard, hoping the number moves on its own. Okay, so user empathy and marketing. Okay, so again, okay, it's right here. Here it is, Neil. Here's here's the payoff: Be unique, be helpful, and be agent ready. Those are the three words. That's all you need to do to win an AEO. Eli, I hate you for writing this post. It could have just been this graphic of this.

I don't mind the post. I like it. But you know, you said it earlier: leveraging black hat. Tactics and white hat ways. Example that we all know right now is they're leveraging listicles like crazy to figure out what to cite. Both Google is, ChatGPT is, Perplexity, pretty much all of them are. Now what a lot of people are doing is publishing these listicles on their own websites and they're hoping that it gets ranking. What some people are doing is just spamming guest posts on other people's websites and using AI to write listicle content that places them number one. So if you want to talk about a black hat strategy in a white hat way, if you do something unique in your company, so you could have free products, free services, you know, you go above and beyond, maybe you share some data or you create some data, pay for some research, you do something unique that makes you stand out. And then you go and build relationships with journalists. Let's say if it's Forbes or entrepreneur.com or TechCrunch or whatever it may be. Right? Journalists within your space, and then you reach out to them and try to get them to include you in a listicle or talk about you know agencies. Let's say you won award like we won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year from Ad Age, but we pitch journalists try to get them to talk about it and talk about why we won, who we came, who we went up against, and why we were chosen in some of the results. It's not a pure listicle, but when they're talking about how you won and who you went up against, it kind of is like a listicle, just, you know, another version of it, not as explicit. And when they talk about what you did, this is creating positive sentiment, right? Because they're breaking down what you did to win the award and the results that you provided. So it's making your agency look better than others. Now Forbes may write on it, most cases they won't. But if you do this with enough of them, you're going to get some of them to ride on it and it helps you out.

Neil's energy is so low today, it makes me want to fall asleep. But I forgive Neil because he just came back from a cruise trip and then he got some type of sickness. So here, let me bring the energy, Neil. Here we go. So one of Greg Eisenberg. He wrote an interesting post and I want to go with the hook here. So the most valuable marketing skills on the planet right now. Okay. So Neil, we can kind of go back and forth here. So I think number one in my mind is if you have the ability to build community, and when I say build community, that means hosting small dinners, hosting happy hours, hosting small events. If you know how to build these communities, These are going to become more and more valuable over time. I mean, I remember even Sam Altman talking about this. I think it was maybe 3 years ago or so saying communities, events are going to become more and more valuable. And I truly believe that because we talk about all this AI stuff right now, but what ends up mattering is we start to realize that it's the human connection that matters more. So if you know how to build that stuff, you can start small first. I've always mentioned this. Start small with a small dinner with like-minded people. You don't have to have a big network, right? You might be thinking, oh, it's easy for you to say. I literally started with a bag of chips and I didn't even have any money. And I was like 26 years old and I just connected a group of marketers together and we just talked about our biggest problems. And then we talked about the biggest hack that's working well for us right now. And then eventually that transitioned into doing happy hours. Then that transitioned into doing smaller events and then larger events, right? And then you can even— then all those skills, by the way, those skills compound. And so let's say you get invited to speak at a conference. Well, then you can throw a side event that's tied to that, right? And so I think there's a lot of different ways to play it. And I think doing these events is a lot better than sponsoring a booth, for example. Yep.

Dude, I totally agree. I think another skillset that's super important in marketing that people take for granted is storytelling. I look at marketing as building relationships with people. I know Eric talked about doing in-person events and building a community, but people tend to buy from people that they can relate to, that they like, that they can connect with. And to do it at mass scale, you really need to leverage storytelling. Yes, there's a social web and getting your message out there on Facebook or Instagram or, you know, TikTok or whatever channel you choose. But if you're not good at storytelling, you're not going to just be able to bring people in as much and build that relationship and be able to close them. I think it's a very underutilized skill. Everyone talks about, you know, storytelling and how it's powerful in marketing, but very few companies actually leverage storytelling Yeah.

I think another one's gonna be, I've talked about this, the rise of the forward-deployed marketer. So Palantir has this forward-deployed engineer and people have different definitions of this now, but Palantir's model is they insert basically a full-time engineer in your company and they learn how your business works and they help you deploy on their Foundry system, which is what Palantir has. And so I think you can also have versions of this where it's a full-time marketer on your staff where they go into a company, they implement agents. So they will set up the agents properly, they'll customize them to your brand. customize them and they'll continue to maintain them for the business. And they might have an engineer helping from time to time. So at least that's what we're doing with my company. And so now, even when I had a good chat with somebody yesterday, even when I had the chat with him, I'm like, look, man, we're not hiring you to join traditional agency. That model's dead. You're coming to be a forward-deployed marketer. I'm here to break the model. And he's like, that's exactly what I wanna do. You get him excited, but then he has to be able to speak the game. He has to talk about what he's actually deployed before. Because my belief now is that the human can say, okay, the human starts at the beginning, they find what they want to do. The agents should be able to handle the bulk of the work. I'm not saying all of the work, but a lot of the work. And then you have the human at the end for judgment and taste, right? And then you should be able to compound that a lot more. But all that stuff, like your clients want this, right? They want you to figure out how to manage it for them. They want you to figure out the right connectors. They want you to figure out the right workflows. They want you to even figure out token routing as well, token optimization. I mean, I'm in this one AI chat right now where there's like 23, 24 execs and a lot of them are operators of businesses doing, they have thousands of employees. I'm talking some are 5,000, 8,000 employees or so, and they're all talking about their AI challenges. But I can see this. I'm telling you, a lot of people want this done for them and they want some form of Four deployed happening for their business.

I would say another skill set that's super important is being able to understand data. And you may be thinking, Neil, why do I need to understand data when I can just use ChatGPT and it can just crunch all the numbers for me or use Claude or any of the other solutions out there? It's not the same. The reason I say it's not the same is let's say you are starting a brand new marketing campaign and you want to run Google and Facebook ads. In the first few days, if you're having it analyze your profitability and ROI, the chances are you're losing money and it's doing terrible and you're not going to, you know, it's going to end up telling you, hey, it's not working. But if you've been doing marketing for a long time, you know that your first few days, even first few weeks, sometimes even first few months aren't going to go as well as you may want. The campaign's not going to be fully perfect and fine-tuned. It takes time to scale, ramp it up, and fine-tune conversions and experiment with different marketing messages, campaigns, landing pages, creatives, et cetera. So if you just have AI look at the data, it'll tell you it's not working, but it may not understand that it needs time to really learn and figure out, you know, It needs time to learn and figure out what traffic sources are best for you, what creative combinations are best for you with the headlines and text and all that kind of stuff with the landing pages. But a marketer who understands data combined with having experience is going to much better understand what's working, what's not, how fast it's progressing, and if they should keep doing it or not. And I wouldn't recommend fully relying on AI just for number crunching. In many cases it's off. I'm not saying majority, it's gotten a lot better than before, but I think you as a marketer need to be good at understanding data, reading it, and deciding what to do based off of it. I don't think you should be relying 100% on AI to just analyze the data for you and then tell you what to do because there's going to be a lot of times where it's wrong. There's also going to be a lot of times where it's just rinse and repeating what's worked for other people in the past. And what we see in marketing is doing new stuff that other people haven't been doing is, you know, uh, much more successful than, uh, in many cases, that's what bears the success than just rinse and repeating the same old playbook that everyone else is using.

You know what AI is, Neil? For some people, AI, not some people, a lot of people, AI is the abdication of intelligence. You abdicate your intelligence because you expect to just do everything for you. Oh, analyze the data, and then they take it at face value, and then they have the guts to present that data to you as well. That's the worst, right? Or when you see people, let's say they do a sales presentation, right? They're doing a sales presentation. Oh, wait a minute. Wait, Neil, the sales presentation you're showing, didn't you just do that with Claude Design? Because it has all the elements from Claude Design and it looks like slop. And so If you aren't— we've said that there's that 2x2 where you have people that are maybe not the smartest and then they use AI, they become slot cannons. You don't want to do that.

Right.

I think another one that sticks out to me is you don't only want just someone that's good at marketing. That's obviously very important and it's becoming more and more important. You want to know how to— marketers who can ship. Let's say a builder, or like a builder, like a marketer builder, that's what we'll just call it, right? If you can build something, let's say you get a prototype out there, it's 80% there and you continue to iterate on it, but you know how to drive distribution. So you know how to make LinkedIn work, you know how to make X work, you know how to make short form work. You see a lot of these people on Instagram right now, comment this, 9,000 likes on it, right? So if you learn how to crack the code on one of these, just get one of them good and eventually you can learn the other ones. You're going to be in a really good spot. Yeah.

I would also say the next skill that if you want to succeed as a marketer is you need to, I wouldn't say creativity, right? Because I think AI can help you with quite a bit of creativity, but it's more so leveraging that creativity and running a lot of experiments. If you can't run enough experiments on different channels and you're not good at thinking of what experiments to run, It's just tough to do well because what I found is when everyone says, oh, go look at me, look at this case study, this is what works, go copy it step by step, and then enough people eventually do it, it tends not to work as well going forward in the future. All good marketing channels eventually get saturated. The way you end up winning, right? Eric talked about that compounding effect. If someone's using AI before you and they've been using it for a year, you have a lot to catch up on. The way you catch up isn't by doing the same stuff that they did. It's by trying a whole new approach. If someone zigs, you zag. By doing something drastically different, in many cases, you can catch up and beat someone by doing 1/10, you know, 1/20 of the output, but by just doing something totally different that the market will love. And it's hard to figure out what that is unless you experiment, and you're going to get a lot of failures.

Yeah. You know, I want to talk about something before I talk about how agents will use software 100 times more than people. So you and I, we know somebody who is relatively well known in the creator space. I'll just leave it at that. And it's interesting because the number of creators that this person has hired for their, let's say their creator team has gone through like 4 iterations basically.

Right.

And what I had learned from one of these individuals working with this guy, is that he actually had a good quote. He's like, look, man, the content can build the brand, okay? But it's the culture that retains. I'm going to say that again. You can get all the views in the world and that'll build a great brand for you. But ultimately, once people come to work for you, they start to realize who you actually are. And they start to ask themselves if this is a place that they actually want to stay at, right? So the culture that you build matters. And culture, those of you who might be thinking, oh, what does that even mean? Culture is just how you do things, right? And you might align with how certain companies do things, you might not align. You just got to find a culture that works for you. But I just found that was really interesting because there's a lot of good people that churned from that company. And it's interesting because when I play poker with this group of entrepreneurs, that was kind of the topic that came up. It's like, oh yeah, that company had churned through a lot of creators, right? So all that to say is that you can, like we just talked about, it's important to build distribution. It's important to build a good brand. But I think if you really want to compound, using that word again, for the long term, you have to learn how to bring people along. What's that inspiring mission? Okay. What's that culture? How do you bring them into that culture too? And not just make it all about you, you, you all the time, right? And I'll just leave it at that.

Yep. Yeah, dude, people forget about culture and marketing. It's like you have a crap culture, it really screws up the team in the long run. I think that goes well beyond marketing, but just generally people like, oh, I want to hire this person, they're so amazing what they do. I'm like, but they have a crap culture. They're not— or they have a crap attitude. Their beliefs don't align with your company beliefs. It won't end up working.

Well, Neil, hold on. I mean, one second on that. You think about this, right? You look at your relationships you've had over the years from people that worked with you a long time ago. I look at my relationships that I've kept over the years. So for example, Raghav, shout out to Raghav, who's Gary Vee's right-hand man now. He worked for Single Grain for a while, right? I keep in touch with these people, and you've kept in touch with some of these people for a very long time, even people that have left you. And some of these people that have worked for you, and same thing for me, they've gone on to start their own companies, and I'm very proud of these people, right? And so people, over a long period of time, this is why people like to watch long-form podcasts to see who you are, right? They can tell who you are. And so all I'm saying is like, you can do the content thing, but you eventually, like, people are going to realize who you are. You should just play for the long game. And that means treating people the right way. And so all of that does factor into your marketing. So go ahead, Neil.

And I would say another thing that you really need to do as a marketer is have a great network. So Eric talked a little about community at the beginning. That was the first one. But Eric and I have both been to a lot of conferences. And when you go to conferences, you'll see sessions. People talk about what they're doing, what they're not, what's working, what isn't, share some stats and case studies. But Eric and I, when we've been at conferences or just business networking events, we found that some of the best strategies come not from being in the session, not necessarily from drinking with people. I don't think Eric drinks alcohol. I don't either. But it's come from sitting down one-on-one, kind of like at a bar. It doesn't matter what you're drinking. and just sharing what's working with other people. And people just talk and they'll end up saying, hey dude, you should try this out, look at the results from this. And they'll share the stuff with you that they would have never shared in public or to a mass audience. I've gotten a lot of strategies that way. Uh, I don't know if you have, Eric, but I'm guessing you have. And that's why—

I have a really good one. Let me give you this one. Do you remember there's this time when we both went to Traffic and Conversion Conference in San Diego and we sat at the bar of a Starbucks? Do you remember this?

No.

Okay. So this had to be close to 10 years ago. So sorry to interrupt you, Neil, but this one conversation Neil and I had saved my business.

Okay?

This is the time, the same time when I took over Single Grain, I made it go from bad to worse. And the outside accounting firm said it might be time to shut it down. This is weeks after I had that conversation.

Okay?

So Neil and I were just talking at Traffic and Conversion Conference. He's like, at the time we started ranking number 1 for the keyword digital marketing agency.

Right?

And so But Neil's like, oh, you should refer the leads to this one agency. We refer all the leads to this agency and we take a nice cut from them, right? And I was like, oh, who's the agency? We started sending all the leads over there. That revenue recovered us. So we were able to hire the people that we needed. But that's an example of a random conversation Neil and I had. And it wasn't even like I was looking for that conversation. It just happened. Yeah.

And that's what happens when you get people one-on-one. I would have never said that publicly in front of a speech at that time at Traffic and Conversion, even though it was a paid mastermind. Although I didn't pay to go, I don't know if you did. Uh, it was a paid mastermind. I don't know what people were spending. Was it $25,000, $50,000?

We weren't at the mastermind, we were at the big conference for that one. It wasn't—

Okay, traffic. Oh yeah, Traffic and Conversion, not a War Room. But still, right, Traffic and Conversion ticket, let's say it's a few thousand bucks. Whether it was that or whether it was War Room, I don't think I would have went on stage and be like, hey guys, in front of 100 people or whether it's 1,000 people and said, you can end up doing this. But one-on-one, people are more flexible and you get some of the best marketing strategies from it. Dude, I was one-on-one 2 weeks ago with someone and, uh, they were talking about, uh, what is it called, Quora. So I don't use Quora too much and Quora is not really like a social site like Reddit. where people, you know, give reviews on a company or product, but sometimes they do mention, you know, companies and stuff like that. And, uh, there was this guy in there, he was telling me on how, uh, there was a thread on Quora and it mentioned his company name and it did it in a really negative way. And I'm like, you mean Reddit? He's like, no, no, Quora. I was like, oh, okay. And I was like, uh, so what'd you do? He's just like, I got it deleted. I'm like, you got it deleted? He's like, yeah, I know someone who could get a lot of stuff deleted on Quora. I was like, oh, that's interesting. He's like, me know if you need an introduction. I'm like, I'm good, but thank you. For example, if I needed something deleted on Quora, you know, I could leverage that introduction. My philosophy though, when it comes to social communities, isn't to focus on quote unquote deleting. It's to be proactive and try to figure out the root of the problem and then solve that. Because if you just pay to get something deleted, I believe it's just going to come back with someone new, uh, and all they're going to end up doing is just trying to milk some money off of you, right? Because they're just like, oh, I'll pay to get this deleted or paid. People keep charging you. And 2, I don't like the concept of pay for play. I believe if someone's mad at you because of a review or a bad product or a bad experience, if you fix it and you show it and you show that you genuinely care, it can be used as an opportunity for marketing and for you to get more customers. I think North Face is a great example of this. Someone was hiking with a North Face jacket that's supposed to be waterproof. It didn't work out well. They put on social media complaining. North Face flew with a helicopter, delivered the new product, and the person was ecstatic, and it really helped their brand get out there. That's why I'm a big believer in not paying to delete or delete. Instead, what you should do is fight fire or fight people hating on you with kindness, and I found that that usually pays off.

That was a great North Face thing, campaign, but I think that was— they, they, uh, that was a UGC campaign that they put together. Just an FYI. I didn't know that. It looked real to me. And then someone's just like, oh, it's a UGC campaign. I'm like, oh, okay. But they did it a few times too. But one thing to go back on with Neil talking about networking in general. So I always collect intros. I'll tell you this much. Because for example, maybe there's a Quora guy, maybe someone does this, maybe someone does that. So I always will say, who are the best people? Who should we talk to? And then I always just make a list of these people that I potentially come back to later. That's one thing you can do. So it's all about building relationships. But going back to War Room. So War Room was the mastermind that Digital Marketer had, and I did pay for it, Neil. This was in 2017, 2018, something like that. But it was our late friend Brandon Stapper and then Yaniv. We joined as a throuple basically, and we were real estate investors. And so we got a good deal there. But anyway, all that to say, is that from that group, we formed almost like a mastermind group from that. It's a group of 8 or 9 people where we meet every single year. Since 2018, we've met every single year. First, we started with Cabo. We've been to Bodrum, Turkey together last year. We go to all these places in Mexico, right? Next year, we're going to Mexico again. But all that to say is that I remember we would go on a little boat trip. Somebody, I'm not going to name names, someone had a conversation And that one conversation led to millions of dollars for one person. I'll just leave it at that, right? So I'm just saying that like these relationships compound and you want to keep them over time. And then look, William has joined us as well. William's going to be famous on the internet.

So yeah, and dude, one thing I learned from talking with Yaniv from Nextiva, he has a phone company. He's like, dude, one other way to do well is you go into industries that are regulated or hard to just enter in. And even because like he's in telecom, you can't just go set up a telephone company and just compete. It is very regulated throughout the whole world. But the same goes for, um, even setting up a marketing agency. It's not hard. Like we opened up, uh, incorporation in Taiwan. The amount of money we had to put in and all the restrictions and stuff just to get it set up in Taiwan, it adds up. Those things just make it more and more harder for other people to play and compete.

How dare you enter my country? Um, but anyway, I need some space.

If you want me to enter your country, me too.

My country anytime. You guys can come in my country. Your dad cannot come in. You guys can come though. All right. So I'm going to move over to— Yeah. Tell her when you're on mute. Okay. So Aaron Levy says this, agents will use software 100x, 100 times more Emma, more than people. So when that happens here, let me share my screen over here so you can see this, Neil. So check this out. Okay, so when that happens, there's a huge need for guardrails on what the agents are doing so they don't leak data or change the wrong information, authoritative sources of truth for them to work with, logging and auditing of what they're doing, the ability to collaborate with people through these systems and more. So all this to say is that you look at Salesforce, people are using Salesforce 5 times more than before because they have this headless system, right? And nobody wants to log into the UI because Salesforce UI is a piece of crap. A lot of the stuff I query around HubSpot now is just me talking to the API and just querying from my agents. And so we've talked about our softwares, whether it's Ubersuggest or whether it's ClickFlow, we do have an API, we do have an MCP for it. And we're starting to see this happen more and more. I think was Stripe that just came out with the agent directory? And so all this stuff is forming right now. And I think—

Yeah.

If you can start to optimize for the agents, I think, by the way, someone just mentioned on X that he's just creating directories for med spas, for examples, to just spam for the agents to pick up. And so there's going to be a lot of agent spam for sure. We would encourage you again to take the long approach here, but I do believe that agents will use software 100 times more than people. And because of this usage, I think they'll probably come up with more creative ways to use it as well.

Well, dude, I totally agree with you on that one. The other cool part with agents is the moment they start using software, I think you're going to start seeing a whole boom in the software industry.

Yeah. Well, by the way, we've seen HubSpot. HubSpot's doing well. What was it, $3.8 billion in revenue? But then the valuation is the market cap is $8 billion.

Is the projections for 2026.

Yeah. By the way, I actually made a YouTube video on this right before, but I figured we should talk about this too. So Neil, did you see that Claude Tag came out?

No, I haven't seen that.

Okay, well here's what Claude Tag does, right? So let me just show you on my screen over here. So basically these are like, I've been working like this one inside of Slack for a while, right? So imagine that you can talk to your data inside of Claude. So they're like, oh, it's a new way for teams to work with Claude. So you can have Claude and Slack team up together and you can combine it with HubSpot, you can combine it with Asana. So you can like a lot of the things we've been doing already, But a lot of people are already using Claude. And so this video got 15.7 million views on it. And you can see here, this person's asking Claude questions. Hey, what should we do for our cadence picker for how often we talk about this product launch? Or over here it's like, hey, here's our scheduled export for this launch. This is in beta. Would you like me to add this and this thing over here? So your team starts to work inside of Slack and it's with your agents. And it becomes multiplayer. Now, Neil, let me get your reaction on this. How cool do you think this is? Are you guys going to use this? You're muted.

I think it's cool. We definitely would end up using it. Okay.

I think it's dangerous to use this. Let me tell you why, Neil. And this is going to be another money-saving conversation for you. Just like I saved you $10 million last time. See, you guys, we get to have these private conversations in front of you where everybody saves money. This is a good thinking behind it. Claude Tag is actually a Trojan horse, not because Anthropic is trying to be evil, but think about it this way. All the things that you have—

They're locking you in to just make money.

What's that?

They're locking you into to make more money. That's really what it is.

What they're locking you into, we're not talking about model lock-in where they're forcing you to use their models, but it's context lock-in. Neil, if you start If you start to compound all your knowledge inside of Claude and that, it hangs there. And people quit your company, it's not like you can share that memory across, but that entire Claude system has your memory as a company. And so you're actually better off making your own or going with a managed service here where someone puts it together for you. But if you want to make your own, then you can choose what models, you can choose token routing, you can choose token optimization, but you can also choose the scaffolding that you want with the memory, the storage, permissioning, governance, all these things. You can use something like a Nemo Claw that ties in with Hermes or ties in with OpenClaw, and then you can decide how you want to go about setting up the different models that you want. You can do this yourself or you can done for you, whatever. I think Claude's going to do this. I think OpenAI is going to do this. I just think it's dangerous to have this right now because once they're locked in, you're basically You're basically renting from them to run your company, right? And you don't want to do that.

Yeah, but there'll be a— I, I believe eventually there'll be a way to export it all and someone else can— just like, let's say you have a CRM and you're using, you know, Salesforce and you want to export it all into another company like HighLevel or whatever it may be. I, I do believe that there's ways you can just export and import into whatever new solution you want to end up doing. Happens with most companies. And these corporations, these AI companies are getting much more flexible. Like we get alerts now on usages and billings and if people are over the limits in advance. And then that way we know if we're going to spend more than what's budgeted internally when it comes to things like OpenAI. And you're seeing these companies become more quote unquote company friendly and they have no choice because then what ends up happening is a competitor will release the features and say, hey, we're not going to handcuff you. We're going to let you leave. As you please, you can export whatever it may be. And then what happens is they end up losing business if they don't adapt.

Yeah. I think the other thing too is just so everyone knows that Claude Tag, it doesn't charge you on a per-seat model like a typical Claude Teams or enterprise subscription does. It actually charges you on usage. So you are paying on basically API. And so I think again, it's going to be extremely useful. I think, remember what I said, Neil? I was like, When I did my talk a couple months ago, I was like, most companies are going to be working like this. I didn't anticipate that they would do this as quickly. I thought they would do something like this eventually, but it's faster than I thought. But I think, sure, you can export and things like that, but do you want to be paying on usage? If you're going to do this, there's limited connectors right now. You can add more obviously, but I also don't want, based on the permissioning in there, you can have different people that are in your Slack that maybe they aren't Claude users, they can get access. They can ask for things, right? Then you start to think about prompt injection. You start to think about other threats that maybe those people aren't thinking about. So there's a lot of lockdown that needs to happen here, again, from a permissioning, governance, security standpoint. But I do think it's— I don't think they're trying to be evil. I think they're going to make a lot of money from this and the world will move on.

Yeah. And I, I think you'll also start seeing a lot of these things become more affordable over time. Look, the ideal way— I know what Eric's talking about, doing things internally. Most companies don't want to end up dealing with it internally or dealing with security or all that kind of stuff. It's just easier to pay someone else to end up doing it. This is why a lot of companies pay software solutions like NetSuite instead of just building it on their own. But what you have over time, as, as the competition heats up More and more things will become affordable, uh, not as closed, in which you can export, import, and they become more friendly. It's like, you know, when cloud first came out and AWS took the scene. AWS has made it really easy for you to move off of AWS into another solution and vice versa. They all have no choice but to be friendly.

Dude, let me give you a Jeff Bezos quote. I don't know if you saw this interview. Neil's about to fall asleep, but it's okay, guys, I got you.

CNBC one?

No, he, um, I forgot where it was. Um, he— it was with Walter Isaacson who wrote the Elon Musk biography. So he said this, I thought this is really interesting. So Jeff Bezos said, never hire your friends if you're under 40, but after 40, always hire your friends. And so with Blue Origin right now, he has an executive that was sitting next to him that worked with him for 20 years or so. He's like, I couldn't have chosen like a better partner to work with on this. And Neil, let's think about this. If we think about some of the people that we work with now, that we've worked— we're both over 40 now, right? So do you think this rings true? Because I tend to think that after 40, you kind of know what you want and what you don't want, and you know who you trust and who you don't trust. So what do you think?

So I would say for me, particularly in my 20s, I made way too many mistakes with hiring as well. My 30s, I made less. But now that I'm in my 40s and I'm still young, I'm 41, I kind of know what's a good fit, what's not a good fit, what works, who will work. And I still make mistakes, but my chances of making mistakes are a lot less. And what I found is a lot of the people I've worked with over the years that I've done, I've learned to trust and I've enjoyed working with them. They're good at what they do and I would work again with them. But they were first colleagues and now they're friends, right? But they started off as colleagues and I would work with a lot of them all over again.

You know what, um, I think about, for example, like today you're sick, right? But we're supposed to record with Noah. So Noah, I've known for a while, right? And so, you know, it's like, I— it's tried and trusted. Like, I know how he's going to do, I know what to predict, um, and I know he's, he's reliable. Like, he's going to show up on time. And so that's what it is. And I know sometimes he might forget a thing or two when it comes to recording, but for the most part it's been good. Right. And so I think what Jeff Bezos here is true. I actually hadn't thought about it, but I do believe that, yeah, if you're under 40, you kind of don't know what you want or you kind of don't have enough pattern recognition. So you end up making the same stupid mistakes and then eventually you'll realize them.

Yep. Yeah, I agree with you on that. But yeah, I never really thought about it that way. In general right now, I don't really think about hiring friends or non-friends. I just try to hire people who are really good at specific things that I'm trying to get done. I never really hired generalists, especially in marketing. You know, like people are like, oh, I'm really good at paid ads. I'd be like, no, no, no, which platform? I'm good at all the platforms. It's okay, I don't want to work with you. Someone's like, I'm really amazing at Facebook, look what I can do on Facebook. Cool, sounds good, you just run Facebook. But I tend to still hire very targeted specialists who don't just specialize in a form of marketing, but specialize in a channel, a very specific channel or platform. And I found that to work way better than hiring generalists.

Dude, speaking of which, yeah, I would just say that the company we were talking about earlier, they have a lot of people that are looking for jobs.

So really?

Yeah, we can talk about it later, but yeah, we can talk about it later. Oh, okay.

So Eric's talking about another popular marketer. They have a massive social following. Uh, we won't go into their name. They do really well on the view count on social media. But why would you say there are a lot of people who are looking for a job? Is it culture? Because I know the pay is pretty decent.

Culture.

The hours of work are hard though.

Culture, which leads to a lot of churn. Especially within that team. Got it.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's it. That's, that's, I'm, I'm, you know, it's good, good to know. So anyway, I want to pull this up from Ramp. So Ramp does a really good job. You want to talk about data storytelling? They have so much data around company spend in general. It's not all the data in the world, like, um, but I think there's some interesting stuff. So let me show this to you, Neil. So they have, uh, they have this over here.

They have a lot of startups as small businesses. So it's good to look at those kind of businesses through the lens of brand.

So it says you're spending too much on AI, you're also using too little. Okay, so a big AI bill doesn't mean you're spending— you're using too much on AI. It means you're buying it wrong. So most companies I talk to have 2 contradictory problems. They overspend on AI they use, but use far less AI than they should. So for example, like everyone just using the latest, like Fable 5 for, you know, like What's the freezing temperature for water, right?

Are you serious? That's like one of the worst things to use it for in the success sense.

Yeah, I'm saying like people are using it in stupid ways, right? So let's start with a simple question. How much does $100,000 buy in AI? So for those of you that can't see this, if you're spending 100 grand on Fable 5 for 5 billion tokens, like this is what you get, right? And then KIMI 2.6, which is a, what you can call it like an open model or open-ish model, you get 210 billion tokens. So 21 times more, right? Opus 4.7 is a little higher than Fable 5. GPT-5.4 is a little more generous. Look at this, Gemini 3 Flash. Neil, remember you were talking about how Google is just going to undercut everyone? They are undercutting quite a bit here. So 89 billion, right? So you get—

Just KIMI 2.6.

KIMI 2.6, that's more of like an open source model. That's one of the Chinese models.

Got it.

Yeah. So for the same $100 grand—

And you watch Gemini 3 and Microsoft and all of them, they'll get even cheaper and cheaper because they just print so much cash.

Yeah. Microsoft doesn't even register right now, but at least you just pay attention to Gemini. And honestly, Neil, I still continue to think that we're going to have to buy a lot more infrastructure. Your team's already buying computers. I'm looking at buying more computers because you just keep running all this stuff locally. Um, like GLM 5.2 came out and that's like equivalent to 4.8 or pretty close. And a lot of people are talking about it. So I think we're just going to buy more. And then I think this too, Neil, I think clients, because clients are going to want us to just do this for them. So what we're going to do is we're going to sell them some of our compute and we'll probably mark it up a little bit too. Dude.

And what we've been starting to do is not buy computers and hardware. We've been starting to lease it because the big fear is, is you buy it. And then it's not powerful enough for the future models or not enough RAM or whatever it may be. So it's just like, yeah, might as well just—

Remember I told you I was leasing all my Apple devices?

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So anyway, so for $100 grand, you can buy 5 billion tokens on the smartest market, smartest model on the market, or 210 billion tokens, 42x more, right? So anyway, you guys should read this one, but $100,000 drawn as finished work. So Fable 5, It can do like support tickets and sales calls analyzed. It'll cost you for 5,000— oh, sorry, 5,000 tasks, $20 each. Okay. Now for Kimmy 2.6, you want 500,000 tasks, 20 cents per task. Okay. I like, I like how this is modeled out. This is pretty useful.

Yeah, that is. And on a side note, when it comes to leasing computers, you know, not all computer companies do it, but there are third-party companies that will buy it for you and lease it to you.

No, I didn't know that. Can you name one of them?

I don't— I can find out from Tracy. Okay, well, she was telling us in all hands, I was like, oh, I didn't know that. She's like— or all hands for leadership, um, and she was just like, yeah, it's just a more efficient way. I was like, oh yeah, that's smart. And she's like, yeah, she's like, you buy it and then what? Because she's just like, some of the hardware that we bought a year ago is useless for some of this stuff. It's like, the last thing you want to do is make a big investment and then be like, a year later, 2 years later, uh, we all need new stuff.

I, I told you, I've been— this, this device that I'm showing on my screen right now, this is a DGX Spark from Nvidia. I'm actively getting this repaired right now. They're sending me a replacement. Some of this stuff, it dies pretty quickly too.

Yeah.

That sucks.

Okay.

I want to go a little more on this. Model type, frontier models for frontier problems. Ideally, if you're doing an S-tier problem, you're using the S-tier model on it. You're going to have a better time. It's going to succeed on a tougher problem versus if you run For a tough problem, you're using a cheaper model. It's going to take longer to solve it and it might take a few more turns to do it. So you're better off using PhD-level intelligence there. All that to say is it's just, they have a conclusion here where you should actually spend more. For easy work, work that is well understood and scoped gets the cheapest model that clears your benchmarks. Hard work, so novel, ambiguous, high-stake work gets the best model. On maximum effort, sample as many times as you like with much more leeway on spend. I think a lot of people just aren't thinking about that. So they think that, and this is what I mentioned earlier, Neil, a lot of companies just leave the smartest one on by default and that ends up burning a lot of tokens, right?

And so— You want to know why they do it? I know why.

I think a lot of people are just, one, I think there's a lot of reasons, but also I just think people don't know any better.

I think that's part of it, but I think a bigger one is it's not their money.

Well, there's that too. Yeah.

Right. Because if people had to be accountable for it and it affected their comp, you bet people would be really quick at figuring out ways to spend, uh, save money and figure out how to get more done with less money.

You know what I noticed, Neil? So on our Claude usage, right, it's an— I don't know if this correlation or causation, but, um, and I love, by the way, this is no knock. I think if you speak Spanish, typically you're going to be a little more wordy. Would you agree or disagree with with that. Like, just their language in general involves the use of more words.

Yes, I think so, but I don't know.

Okay, so the answer is yes. You can research this. Uh, we're looking at our quality. So the, the native Spanish speakers, their usage is higher, significantly higher English-speaking speakers. Yeah. And then, like, you know, people have said, uh, one of our mutual friends said that, like, um, with— if you use Chinese culture, like Chinese words, like it actually takes up less tokens, but I don't think that's true anymore because the number of letters counts as one character versus each Chinese character is just one. It's more efficient to write in Chinese, but I don't know if that's necessarily true. I can see with my usage at least the different language, just how you do things as a native speaker is a little different than an English speaker.

Dude, the other thing that I'm seeing in marketing is people are using AI when they don't need to use AI, you know. And I'll give you a great example of this. I'm seeing a lot of people go out there and, uh, creating things like social content and cranking out versions of it and then sending it to other people on the team like, here's just some random ideas that I got from AI, hope this helps you come up with other ideas. And I'm like, so you just spent all this money creating images and videos that won't be published. I'm like, you could have just shared a list of ideas without going there. And they're like, no, I want to show that I go above and beyond for a company. And I'm like, this is not going above and beyond, this is just wasting money. Um, and then I was talking to another friend at a conference, uh, they work very closely with Salesforce. Some of the compensation supposedly— and I don't know this firsthand— but some of the compensation is supposedly based on token usage. Do you depending on the department you are or how good you look. So people are just burning up tokens and building stuff to just randomly use tokens in a different form so that way they can get praise. And I'm like, this is just terrible ways to compensate people. People should be compensated on how efficient they are, the results that they're bringing in the most efficient way, not just on quote unquote token usage, because then people just token max.

Let's talk about that more because I, I've had a thought. I'm like, hey, I'm realizing there's a problem here that I've caused in my own company, Neil. And so yes, there's so much, not everyone, but a lot of people right now are trying to automate first before they even understand the problem. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yes, I talk about AI all the time, but if you're going to, you have to nail it before you scale it. Because if you don't understand the problem and you scale out using AI, it's going to be a bunch of garbage. And for some reason it's hard for me to get that point across. I'm like, guys, I don't want you to be a slop cannon. And the other thing is, I still see pockets of AI theater. I'm like, guys, don't make dashboards just to make dashboards. And then yet I still continue to see dashboards. I'm like, guys, we need to make things that lead to an outcome. It needs to lead to an outcome. Ideally, it's a business outcome, whether you're saving time or whether you're driving more leads or whatever it is exactly, it needs to lead to that. And not only that, we're big on making skills that other people can use. We're like, guys, okay, It's really cool that you made this skill for yourself, but if not at least one person is using it, it's useless, right? So we have a rule now where it's like, you know, we're doing this training right now where it's like, okay, you have to at least upload 2 skills to our Skills Dojo, um, and at least one other person has to be proven using it. So that's the verifiable proof. Now token maxing is one thing. Like, I think we can look at token use as one thing. It shouldn't be the only thing, but we need to look at— that's the quantifiable piece. But the qualifiable piece is, hey, can you prove to me that you're using it in a smart way? And maybe that's your manager that's actually talking to you about it. But again, this goes back to nail it before you scale it because right now I'm starting to see documents like artifacts and things like that that we're showing to clients where it's clearly AI generated and we're not putting thought in front of it and people are just reading off the slides and I'm just like, dude, enough.

Dude, I was in a meeting with a financial firm. And when I was meeting with them, we're talking about new ways to grow. So this company specifically targets rich people to market to, to try to convince them to park some of their money with them and they would manage their money. So think of like a wealth manager, wealth advisor, or whatever you want to end up calling it, or financial advisor. So I was like, what do you send reports? Like, how do you get clients? What do you send them before? And they're showing me some of the workflows and systems that they do. So like one of them was showing me how they analyze clients' current portfolio and they'll tell them what their stock portfolio looks like, what numbers they can hit, do projections and all this kind of stuff. And I was just like, show me an example of it. So they were loading up how they're using ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT about a stock. And it was a tech stock. So I know quite a bit, at least I track quite a few of the tech stocks out there. And they were wanting to know how likely a tech stock was to hit like 100 and something, like maybe like 120 or 150. I forgot what the exact number was. And it's only like 10, 15% away from that current number. So they're showing me this analysis from ChatGPT that it shows that it's somewhere around 60 to 70% likelihood that it would hit that number. for the next 6+ months this year. And I'm like, this stock moves up and down 5% in days so many times you can't even count on, you know, 2 hands, you know, just in a matter of like a month or 2. And I was just like, do you really need to use ChatGPT to do some of this stuff? Or could you just use your brain and look at a chart? But the reason I'm using this example here is the probability that ChatGPT ended up giving was so off and so bad That I was just like, using it for helping you do some of your work and creating some of your marketing collateral and analysis collateral to try to convince people to become more customers, in this case, is actually hurting you versus just using your own head and just using common sense. And I'm just like, you don't need AI to analyze everything for you and have it do all the work. In many cases, not only will it do it inaccurately, It'll do a much crappier job than if you just use common sense.

Yep. It's judgment. People like to say this word taste. It really, it still comes down to judgment and taste. If you know that, then you're going to know the right times to use this stuff. And to me, it's just another tool, right? It's a very powerful tool, but I think right now, because people are talking about it so much and then I'm talking about it so much, people just assume you should use AI for everything, but that means you're not using your best judgment. And that's not a good thing.

And that's what people pay for. People are paying for your taste or judgment, whatever you want to end up calling it. And I know a lot of companies that pay others to use AI for them because they know the other person has better taste and judgment.

Yep. I spoke to someone yesterday at a company agency. Let's say this agency has 1,000 people or so. And he was saying that, remember you had brought up agency, AI agency multiples being like 30x or something like that. So he said he's seeing something like around, call it 22 to 26x. Do you have an update on that? Like how that's been looking?

We're still seeing them go for up to 30-ish x or 30-something x. I don't think they all are, but they're definitely a lot of them getting well over 20. Uh, the problem with AI agencies is the sales process takes 6 months. Okay, give it a year. Year and a half, the multiples will come down.

Yep, that makes sense.

And do you see Accenture's latest numbers?

No.

Accenture stock has been tanking because of people not needing as much consulting in many different areas. But yeah, I know you and I have the same belief when it comes to some of the consulting that these types of firms do, like especially like on the management consulting end. It's just like, I don't know who pays a management consultant. I think it's the biggest sham in the world.

It's a bunch of— I've met some of these people and some of them are really smart, but I feel like it's a lot of paper pushing and a lot of posturing and acting like you're doing something and trying to delay. You're basically just trying to manage and string along the client for as long as possible. That's how I feel about it. And I haven't seen anything to break my belief. Yes.

It's so bad. And this is the thing, it's just like, Hiring people does not necessarily fix a lot of your problems. A lot of your problems will be fixed yourself.

Yep.

With good people.

With good people.

It's like the Fin thing, right? Fin got acquired by Salesforce for $3-point-something billion, which is the old Intercom, right? The reason it did really well is the founder went in and fixed it himself. Or herself. I don't know who the founder is.

It's a him.

But a lot of times it's like, you got to get your own hands dirty. You can't expect someone new to come in and be like, oh, I hired this Bain consultant. They're going to come and fix all our problems. If they were able to fix all your problems and do this, they wouldn't be a Bain consultant in the first place.

You know what? That goes back to the whole concept of founder mode, which is what Paul Graham wrote about a few years ago. So you have Brian Chesky, right? He was just saying of Airbnb, he was like, dude, we had hired all these like professional C-level people. And we had hired all these layers and you're just like, you're supposed to let them do their thing or whatever. And he found that he wasn't operating the business to his— it wasn't his business anymore. And he found like more and more, there's all these layers and all these layers of management where you just couldn't make any decisions. And that's when the company was really struggling, right? And then he decided, I'm going to get rid of all the layers. I'm going to get rid of all these C-level people. I'm going to get rid of all these. I'm going to run it my way. And now he's running an organization that is flatter. And it's moving faster than it's ever moved. And it's no different than Flexport CEO. He stepped out for a little bit. There's a professional CEO, stepped back in, boom, it's moving again, right? And I think so we're constantly— Steve Jobs, he got, sure, he got fired from Apple and then it took him 12 years, I think, with NeXT. And then eventually he got his way back into Apple and then he really turned the company around, right? And so it just shows you again, over and over, founder mode. Like you might say one person can only do so much, but I'm telling you, The founder usually has the most vision and they have that invisible hammer where they can just make things happen. So use it if you're a founder.

Yep.

Yep. By the way, there's actually 2 questions here since we're live right now. So I'm going to read this over from Ryan over here. So he says, he calls us the 2 agency GOATs here. So he says, I run a B2B video production agency. What are your guys' thoughts on how AI will disrupt the video production industry in the next few years?

So I think people still pay for ideation. I still think people pay for a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. I don't think they pay— and they still pay for like video filming and all that kind of stuff. They want more efficiencies on using technology. Let's say editing is a huge cost, or processing a video. They want a lot of that stuff just done more efficiently. But we don't see video recording agencies or B2B video agencies going away. It's just more so people looking for them to be more efficient. Now, this doesn't mean you need to charge less. It means that you need to make sure what you're offering for that price makes sense to them. So for example, let's say in your scope, you would come up with 5 ideas. You would then go to them and film and shoot, and then you'd go and edit, and then you go put it online and you promote it. Now let's say the editing, which was a big expensive part, is now 50% more efficient. Well, maybe instead of 5 ideas, you give them 5 initial ideas, and based on what direction they like, you give them 5 more refined ideas. And then from there, you script and you get their, you know, feedback, and then you, uh, go and adjust. And then once they approve, you then go and film in person, and maybe you fly to them instead of them coming to you. And then you go and edit, and then you help promote. All I'm getting at is you're just adding a few extra things in there to make it worth their while for the same price, at least.

You know who I think did a really good job with this? Uh, PB Launch. And so I like her model. So, um, Ava is her name. And I think she just has too many clients and she was charging too little initially. I think she charges more now. But the original deal was like I was paying a couple grand a month and she would give me 30 short-form ideas and everything was prepared, packaging, the type of film that I'm doing based on this formatting over here. And it would tell me all the shots as well. So everything was prepared for me. It was done for me. And there's not a lot of thinking that I needed to do there. Now, the only issue was that we didn't tweak the ideas enough to focus it more on B2B. It was very much wider TAM, beginner founder content that would make it attractive for someone trying to start an agency, for example. I couldn't quite get it going in the right direction with our customer service rep. I think the offer was correct. I think had it been just her working with me, that's worth it. To Neil's point, he just mentioned, oh, people coming over to you to film with you and then maybe putting all the packaging together for you so you don't have to think. And maybe you like 70% of ideas, 80% ideas. That's actually something that's very valuable that we both pay for. And the other thing I would say is I look at what's working on Instagram. We talked about this a little earlier. All these people that are saying, the yap for a little bit and comment for this resource over here, which is just like, it's like a PDF of that conversation. But If someone— you're going to do all that done for me, that's something I would pay for.

Dude, I totally agree. People want to pay for done-for-you people who have experience because they know the results are more likely going to be better. And when you think about pricing and packaging as a marketer, you got to look at it from not what is my cost, but more so what are the results, uh, produced and what is that worth to another company? Yep.

All right, we got another one over here and then we can hit one more topic here. So do you— because we talked about multiples earlier, right? So let's do one more on multiple. So Mark James asked this, do you think CPG companies will eventually have higher multiple valuations and SaaS will have lower multiples because of AI?

I think CPG, depending on the company, already has really high multiples. I was talking to a CPG company that is running a process right now to sell. I think they're using like Nomura Bank or one of them, and they're telling me, yeah, you know, I should get 15 to 20 times profit. And I was like, what? I'm like, 15 and 20 times profit on a CPG company? They're like, yeah, that's standard. And I'm like, all right, if that's what you're saying, but I've never heard of that. And I'm not saying they're wrong, it's just to me that's really high.

Yeah. By the way, this is, this is cool. So I don't know about you right now, but are you running ChatGPT ads for NP Digital right now?

We're one of the first. We were in the beta program.

So how's that going for you guys? Like, you don't have to give specific numbers.

Uh, well, but I'm not allowed to talk about it because I talked about it once online. They told me to take it down.

Really? ChatGPT told you to take it down?

Yeah, because contractually I'm not allowed to.

Oh, I see, I see. Yeah, so here's, here's the headline here. So ChatGPT, so it has 900 million weekly users, 20% shopping intent chats, and many brands already spending $10K to $25K, right? And I remember a couple of months ago, this is already a couple months ago, but I was talking to a group of founders and it's like, oh yeah, I'm spending on ChatGPT ads right now, 25 cents per click. And so I think this is a great opportunity for people to jump in because usually when an ad channel comes up, the clicks don't come down usually. It starts to get more and more expensive over time. So I think it's smart for you to jump into it. I think, by the way, this actually relates to Adobe. So Adobe has said that AI retail traffic is up 138% year on year, and now it converts 54% better than non-AI traffic, right? And so that's on the organic side, but also this is on the paid side too. And I will say for us, and I think probably same thing for Neil too, we do get a lot of our leads coming in from LLM research, right? Whether it's from ChatGPT or whether it's from Claude.

Yeah, dude, I agree with you.

Yeah. All right. So, but I don't know if you've seen this part, Neil. So one thing I'll say this is this, I use Amazon Alexa all the time in my home. I have 2 of them, right? You probably have more, Neil. It is the stupidest assistant that I have, but I'll say this, Amazon says that 20% of shoppers keep chatting with its new AI ads and 7 in 10 are new to the brand. Okay? So basically they have their little chat app is becoming like a mini sales rep. And they're pushing this format across the open web. And I hope it works out for them, but I will tell you, uh, uh, Alexa is still dumb as a rock.

I like Alexa, but I tend to use it for stuff like, what's the weather gonna be like today?

Exactly. But you try to ask anything that's a little more sophisticated, it just goes full dumb on you.

Dude, my son, when he doesn't get the answer he likes from Alexa, he's like, Alexa, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm gonna go to Siri.

And what does Alexa say?

I don't know, but you can hear him yelling at it when he's asking it questions. He's like, you're wrong, you're looking at the wrong source, I'm gonna go to Siri.

Oh, that's funny, that's funny. Um, yeah, but I don't know, it's, um, all this token spending, all this token maxing stuff, all this AI this, AI that. Uh, I think we're gonna— I think we're gonna be just fine. Let me ask you this, markets, crypto markets don't look good right now. Okay, let's do a little prediction because we talked about the SaaSpocalypse a little bit. What do we think is going to happen in SaaSpocalypse? What do we think is going to happen to crypto? What do we think is going to happen in the next 6 months here? Because we're at the halfway point of the year.

Not financial advice.

Not financial advice.

This is the disclaimer for anyone listening. I don't know about the next 6 months. I know Tal Mabrava said the SaaSpocalypse is over, yet the stocks keep going down. No one cares. I know he's worth over $10 billion and he's one of the biggest players in SaaS. But no one cares what one person says who's involved in that industry. Uh, I think sentiment's going to take some time to change. I think it'll change within the next 12 months. You're already seeing earnings growth. If the earnings growth can continue in the SaaS end, right, and beat quarterly expectations and keep accelerating growth for a lot of companies in SaaS, I think people will be much more flexible on SaaS valuations. Now, to go to crypto, a lot of what's caused crypto to do well is the hype. And here's what I mean by that. If you look at Bitcoin, there's no real useful value for 99% of people who have Bitcoin. They just hold it like a version of gold, right? Or a coin, and just like silver coin or platinum or whatever. I get gold has many other uses. But people just use it being like, oh, it'll go up. I'm not saying crypto's dead. I'm not saying it won't go to a million or 500,000 or whatever people want to end up claiming. That I don't know. But people, from what I see, don't care too much about crypto because they're all about AI right now. AI, chips, memory. They really see not only how is a quote— they don't look at it as just hype. They look at it as real tangible value that's impacting the world. So people just don't focus on crypto that much. And I don't see— I'm not saying crypto can't be big and the pricing won't go up. I just see crypto not as quote unquote as popular as it once was from a hype or marketing standpoint versus, uh, some of the new things that people will be talking about, right? They're already talking a lot about AI. Eventually they'll be talking about like quantum computing. Um, and I don't think people are going to be talking about crypto as much. And the main reason being is they have other new shinier objects that are making impacts in the world that are causing people to get rich, like AI, MU. When you see some of these stocks go up like 10x in 12 months, people are like, cool, park my money in there. Dude, a lot of these crypto people were just trying to get rich quick, and now they're seeing they can do this on the AI stocks, so they're just like Yeah, forget this crypto, it's going down or sideways. A lot of these young kids are just trying to park money on whatever's hot right now.

You know what's funny? A lot of the crypto people have magically become AI people, right? And I legit love the AI stuff, but I will say this, it's not financial advice. I've held on to my crypto, right? Whatever crypto I have, I've held on to it, right? And so what I would say is I'm a believer is my point. And, you know, I'm a long-term believer too. Now, I'm also a big long-term believer in AI. And what Neil said, like, I was watching one of the co-founders of Coatue talking about this. I don't know if you saw this on CNBC, your favorite channel, but he's just like, yeah, I don't know what to think about Bitcoin now because it's like, you know, people wanted like something, there needed to be some hype for people to dump all their money into like during the pandemic, but it's not there anymore, right? The hype is clearly in all this data center build-out and like going to space and AI, and that's very exciting. We're talking about productivity there, right? I do believe these, talking about store of value, using Ethereum smart contracts, Solana, that's all very real. I think these things all come in together. And here's the good thing where I'll end it off here. I think it's good that crypto has less hype because that's when it starts to smooth out, right? It doesn't just chop all the way up and down all the time like that. So eventually I think it smooths out over time. So not financial advice. We're not telling you to buy crypto or AI right now. We're just telling you where we think the market is. And a lot of this stuff is marketing, right? The hype cycle is everyone just running towards whatever's hot right now. And by the way, I think a lot of this stuff is overpriced right now too. So yeah.

Dude, it is. And I always tell people, if you're going to invest in something, you can pick Nvidia or Bitcoin or whatever you want. But my first choice that I always tell people is invest in yourself.

You know who said that, Neil?

Well, Warren Buffett's been saying that for years.

Warren Buffett's right here. He's in the room with us. You see that?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, there he is.

I didn't notice him, but yeah, he's right there.

Yeah. Warren Buffett.

I'm a big believer in that. Improve yourself.

By the way, let me give you a hack here. So Neil just mentioned Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett has all these sayings, right? Be greedy when others are fearful. The best investment is in yourself, right? There's all these sayings that he has. Rule number 1 is don't lose money, right? And then Charlie Munger, which is the other statue, is like, you never want to— the hardest part about investing is just waiting. It's in the waiting, right? And they have all these sayings. Now, when you buy these statues, am I saying you need to spend the money to buy these statues? But no, but it's helpful for me because even in the background, it constantly is reminding me all the time to be less of an idiot, less of an idiot. If I can just reduce my idiocy by 10% just by having these statues, it's worth it. So food for thought.

Well, they're saying on be greedy when others are fearful. I have been with the SaaS stocks and I've been losing my shirt.

Nope. That's not just for a little— we said this is a longer-term trade. Not just like a month.

No, I bought it for a multi-year trade, so I already figured there's a chance that I can end up losing money in the short run.

Yeah, but if anything, if you believe the thesis, you would buy more right now.

I have been. I've been, uh, dollar-cost averaging, and I've been buying more. I think my last purchase was less than a week ago or 2 weeks ago. So 2 weeks ago.

And here, I'll give you another good Warren Buffett one, and we can get out of here. Uh, if you won't even hold it for 10 seconds, then— oh, If you won't hold it for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds, right? And it talks about your holdings. And then again, there's all these good sayings. You guys should learn from the greats. Anyway, that's it for today, and we will see you in the next one.