How Claude Code Will Change Business Forever

So I want to talk about how you can get rich using Claude Code. So, Neil, this past week, I don't even think it's been a week, but this past week, everyone on Twitter has been going nuts about Claude Code. And the reason for this, Neil, is because the Opus 4.5 model, it's gotten a lot stronger. And so imagine someone like you and me, you don't know how to code. I don't know how to code, right? So imagine anything that you want to build for yourself.

Yeah.

Okay, you're now able to do, right? And so I was just talking to my CTO, we had our creative strategist in the office. I just walked back from the office and we're just sitting there. I'm like, man, if I didn't have all these meetings all day, I would just be on Claude Code. I'd be sitting there like, usually what happens in the morning, Neil, when I wake up is I'll do my morning stuff and I'll go to my Peloton bike, right? I was walking over to my Peloton bike. I actually made a U-turn. I walked straight over to this computer and I just sat down on Claude Code for like 30 to 45 minutes or so. And so I want to give some practical examples of what's possible and where I think this is going. And then you can either ask questions, you can push back. But I just think this also ties in with businesses. I think businesses are going to grow way faster, 10 to 100 times faster using Claude Code because, Neil, what was unavailable to you and me before is now available. I'll give you an example. Last night I was bored, right? I was like, oh, you know, we have all these sales transcripts, sales calls transcripts, you have customer transcripts. You have your HubSpot CRM, okay? You have your Ahrefs, you have your Google Analytics, you have Google Search Console. When you combine all this data, you can say, hey, based on all of our sales conversations, what are the main challenges people are having? Or with customers, what are the main objections that they have? Or whatever it is exactly. And then you can run it through whatever's high converting for you on your website. And then from there, you can start to create briefs automatically from Slack. And so I basically, Within an hour, Neil, I just created a Slack bot that allows me to do a very basic version of that. And it continues to compound. And we know how products compound, right? You continue to add more to it, you take more away from it, and it continues to get stronger and stronger. And so my thing is, Neil, you and I are both very impatient people. Okay. And so what I would like— I was talking to my CTO this morning. He's like, yeah, a lot of the stuff we're going to build is garbage. Okay. But there's some stuff that everyone's going to start using, and that can easily merge into our products, right? And so a lot of people now on Twitter right now that used to be— they used to be coders, they spent tens of thousands of hours on this. A lot of people are like, man, like, I feel like I'm useless now. And my CTO is like, dude, I saw that coming 2 years ago. And so it's not to say that coding as a discipline is completely gone, but a lot of these people are like, dude, a lot of the code that's being written now is all code written by code. And but now, you You and I get to participate. And I don't care if it's you or me, or I don't care if it's somebody listening to this and you're 18 years old or 15 years old or whatever, you now have a superpower that's in the palm of your hands. And if you don't take advantage of that right now, you're going to not only fall behind, but you're going to lose out on a chance to make generational money for yourself. That's how I see this. Because it's not even me or you, it's like our creative strategist. When I walked in on Monday, he was already in the office, right? This is my first time meeting him. And he had Claude Code pulled up. I'm like, what are you doing?

Right?

He had Cursor pulled up and Claude Code. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, oh dude, like we should be doing like 10x more, if not 100x more. I'm like, I like, I like how you think. I'm like, I'm like, does the team know that you're doing this right now? He's like, no. I'm like, why do they not know that you're doing this right now? Right? And so we had a little conversation. He's going to speak up a lot more, but that's the reason. Like I've been tweeting about this or posting my stories so much is because I genuinely now feel like I'm playing a video game. Like 17 years ago when I was addicted to World of Warcraft, This feels like that.

My only issue with Claude Code or any of the solutions out there, I do agree with you, it's amazing. What we're finding in organizations, specifically in marketing departments, because we mainly deal with marketing departments, is people are using these tools to do more in marketing, but when we talk to the individuals, at least at enterprise companies, we're finding that maybe like 70, 80% of the time, They're spending efforts creating stuff that doesn't need to be created. Like they think it'll be cool, but it really has no value. I think it was either TechCrunch or CNBC that had an article on for 2026 when it comes to AI. You're having the CIOs pushing organizations really hard saying we need to adapt AI technology. Like this is a no-brainer, let's go and do it. You have the CFOs who are saying, slow down, you guys are moving too fast. We're not seeing the ROI, we're just seeing increase in spend. All right? So I think there's some sort of a balance. I don't agree with the CFO because some of it's the future and you just need to implement it if you're a believer. I think, you know, you and I are in the camp of believers. I also don't agree with the CIO in which let's go, let's go, let's go. I think there's somewhere in between that's the reality. And especially in marketing departments, I agree people should be using this stuff. They can get so much more done, but getting so much more done that doesn't move the needle is just a waste of time and a waste of ROI. It's like you're paying someone and they just did a lot of useless work that does nothing. If you did that for a client and they're paying you, they'd be like, screw you. You just wasted a lot of the hours that I paid you for. I want them back. And I think what's going to happen in 2026, it's not the adoption of these tools because I think they've already been adopted by a lot of organizations, maybe not percentage-wise that they're looking for per employee, but a lot of organizations are already using this tool, even if it's at a low-level basis or a high-integration basis. And what I believe that you're going to start seeing is companies are going to spend much more time on strategy in all departments, including marketing, to figure out what they should use these tools for versus just go and use these tools. Or I think they're going to start implementing, and I've seen some organizations already talk about this, at least in marketing, the Sergey Brin model. Hey, with 10% of your time, you can do whatever you want. And then they can go and experiment or whatnot. Eric Schmidt talked about how he is a brilliant mathematician. Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, how Sergey Brin was a brilliant mathematician and came up with data on how if people spent 10% of their time on whatever they wanted, it would make the company more money. I can see the 10% of the time. I think for the other 90%, these tools will be integrated with an organization, but there'll be more structure on what they need to use them for.

Yeah. So here's my take on it. So we've kind of said something, both you and I have said this like maybe a week or two ago. So I'm saying in this last week, holy shit, right? Like literally in the last week, I feel like I've advanced like a couple years. Like it's warp speed now, right? And so what Neil's saying is true. There are people even on X, let's use X as an example, right? So there are large enterprises that are actually blocking products like Claude Code from being used because security, there's a lot of approvals and things like that. I will say, because we're still on this recruiting push right now, when I'm talking to people right now, It's very much, and they're seeing the stuff I'm posting on AI and they're reaching out and I'm talking to these people. I'm like, why are you looking to leave this company right now? It's like, some of them are coming from publicly traded companies. I'm like, why leave? Like, it's so stable. It's a good job. It's like, we're moving too slowly, right? It's the implementation's too slow. I talked to someone else just on Monday and he's at this agency. Let's say they have like, you know, 200 people or so. And I'm like, why are you looking to leave? He's like, we're just, we said we're gonna move quickly on AI, but we're talking about safety and all these things and I'm just not interested, right? And then All this to say is I think if you're going to run an AI fluency program, I think we at least were focused on revenue per employee. Okay, that's one piece of it. Revenue per employee, we're looking for efficiencies. I don't want this theater BS. And so that's why we have weekly office hours for AI. We have hackathons that we're going to be doing quarterly and we're going to take up probably 3 days and we're just going to drop everything and do that. And I got that from the Zapier founder. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. And what I want to bring your attention to, Neil, is I was just talking about revenue per employee, right? Take a look at this. So if you look at the revenue per employee here, this is the ARR, so annual recurring revenue per full-time employee of leading AI versus non-AI software companies, right? And obviously this is a very small sample. So in this graph on the very left side, or this chart I should say, on the very left side of this chart, Neil, you see Cursor. Cursor has $6.1 million in annual recurring revenue per FTE. Okay, Lovable is number 2 at $3.4 million, OpenAI is $1.5 million, Anthropic's at $1.2 million. Now Atlassian's at, you know, $0.46, so let's just call it $460 grand. Datadog's at $510K, ServiceNow $490K, Salesforce $540K. Um, obviously these are, you know, very big companies. Some of them are cursor, lovable revenue size is not comparable to like a Salesforce, right? So, you know, scale takes into account here as well. But my expectation here, looking at this graph, if I'm Salesforce is I hope this number starts to slowly move up 0.54 to 0.55 to 0.56 over time. There has to be some guardrails and some discipline around this. Otherwise everyone's just going to YOLO and build whatever they want. And you can't let that happen. Yes.

And AMD's Lisa Su, who funny enough, I believe is a cousin of the Nvidia founder and CEO, She said that AI isn't replacing people, but changing who gets hired. And with AMD specifically, and we're seeing this in most marketing departments because we haven't really seen a slowdown, and other than the bad economy, right? For so 3 years, yes, we haven't seen marketing be as bullish, but we haven't really in the last few years really seen a slowdown in marketers being hired. It's more so similar to what AMD's saying. They're prioritizing candidates who truly embrace AI. And as Siu said, we're hiring people who are AI forward. And I think that's what you're seeing in organizations. A lot of companies, at least when it comes to marketing, they're not saying, oh, AI is going to replace all these people. They're more saying, we need people. We may not need as many people in the long run, but for now, we want people who are really AI forward. And what we're seeing is Companies look at AI as from a marketing perspective that, oh, it's ChatGPT and just getting mentioned on there drives a lot of revenue. That's one aspect of it. And although ChatGPT is improving a lot, there's not a ton I would say that it's going to improve in the next 12 months from a user like Eric and I or you typing in a question into ChatGPT and getting a prompt. It already does a really good job at that. Would you agree with that, Eric?

Yeah.

I would say the real ROI with AI is things like Claude Code that not enough marketers are leveraging. So instead of focusing too much on, hey, ChatGPT and how can I get mentioned? And you should still do that because that's a great way to generate ROI. You need to start thinking about how can you use these tools to make your marketing better?

Yeah, and by the way, Neil, I didn't tell you about this, but I'm going to do a Claude Code for Business meetup type of thing, whether they're small happy hours or dinners, and so Send me, I have an Instagram post on this. A bunch of people left a comment. You can DM me on Instagram or DM me on Twitter. And who knows, maybe you'll get to hang out with Neil and myself. I just wanna start doing these things 'cause when you see something moving like this so quickly, it's communities. Community goes a long way. We'll just put it that way. The last thing I wanna call out, Neil, is maybe some how-to around these AI-forward people. I'll just say this. When I find myself talking to someone during an interview process, what have you built with AI? Show me the workflows you built. Show me this. When I find that I can riff with them, I find that myself enjoying the strategic conversation, I know that they got it. And this is important for us. So our 4 core values are, and I'm actually curious if this aligns with your core values too, if you think about it, Neil, watch. So one core value is we want people who are relentless learners. So people who like to learn all the time. Number 2 is we want people who are biased to action. 3 is we want people who are unreasonably resilient, meaning that they've taken a couple punches to the face. The last one is we want people who make bold long-term bets. Now, when you look at those 4 things, those actually tie in. If you're AI-forward, you got all 4 of those things, right? You're making bold long-term bets, you're trying to figure this stuff out, you're getting punched in the face all the time, you're trying to learn, you have a bias to action. So at least for us, someone who's AI-forward actually captures all 4 of those values. How about for you guys? What are your 3 values? Have fun.

We have more than 3 values, but it's like think big, own it, I don't know all our values.

I should. Have fun's in there. I think have fun's in there.

Is have fun in there?

See, I know your values more than you do. What is this, dude? Uh, it's something—

have fun could be in there. I know the big ones that we really focus on are think big and own it.

Yeah.

And the reason I say own it is I hate when people just make excuses.

Yeah. But this doesn't— this kind of tie in with being AI forward. Yeah. And if you're having fun with the AI, it kind of— all 3 of those tie in.

Dude, so I had someone leave our organization this week, or they put in their notice, and they're not executive, but close enough to being executive. They're in marketing and there's an exit interview. So I want to know why people are leaving. And when people are leaving, they can tell me whatever they want to tell me. All right? So I don't want to be the one interjecting, trying to correct them or disagree with them. I just let them riff. And I've known this person for a very long, long time.

Is this the person we talked about earlier this week?

Yeah. So they're in a different country. They're not in the US, they're in Latin America. They got paid more than they would in the US for their job. We already pay them really well. Like in their country, they're like not even in the 1%. They're like a fraction of a percent. So they're, you know, what we pay them a year, they can Buy a house in like a year and a half in a nice neighborhood, and someone was pretty much willing to double that. And we're like, there's a point where it just doesn't logically make sense because we're already overpaying this person within their region, and we were paying them almost to what someone would be getting in the United States. Someone offered them, you know, more than the average person for that role would be getting in the United States. And when I was talking on the exit interview, they were telling me. You know, one of the reasons that they left was they're like, I just wanted to make more and you didn't pay me, you know, what I believe I can get elsewhere. And I knew they were looking around talking, but they worked with us for a very, very long time. They weren't able to find anyone to pay them more other than just now. And this is probably over 10 years, right? So that was a long time I was able to keep them. It was also because I was paying them well for where they lived. It's like Microsoft. If you live in India, Microsoft doesn't pay you US rates. work for them in India. They pay you India rates. And the second thing, and this wasn't as big, but this ties into AI. They're like, your company needs to remove, this was just their feedback, 40% of your employees, 30 on the low end, and just embrace AI more and just get rid of all these people and you'll have higher margins. Okay? So keep in mind they're in marketing and they're not client-facing. So when I say they're marketing, they're doing marketing for us at NP Digital. They're not doing marketing for our customers. And we have a lot of different divisions from an SMB division to enterprise division to software divisions. So they don't talk much at all with the team that is working on the customer-facing side. And they don't know what we've done or haven't done on the AI side, but we've actually done quite a bit. We have a whole team that's building workflows and automations and systems to help us provide more for our customers. But they were just like, you use no AI, which the first one was wrong. But again, I don't try to correct people on the exit interviews. And then the second one was, you just need to eliminate a ton of people and have higher margins. This is the only way to compete in the new world of marketing is to just have very little people and have AI do everything. And then they were quoting some of these AI legends who are multi-billionaires on the Forbes list. And I'm like, look, that's great and dandy. I wish we can do everything that they're saying. The technology isn't here where I can just cut 40% of my staff. If I did that, majority of my clients would leave tomorrow. And I did ask them one thing. I said, you do marketing for us like we do marketing for a customer to some extent. It's different, but it's similar. They're like, yeah. I'm like, you've been using AI, right?

Yeah.

Your team's grown over the last few years, right? Because you've been requesting that you need more and more people, right? They're like, yeah. So I'm like, question for you, how have you been able to implement AI to automate all the marketing where we could potentially redo our marketing team and cut 30 to 40%? I know we already can. And, you know, I stumped them and they weren't able to answer that question because I think people also have misconceptions on AI in which they're like, You don't need as many people in marketing. You can just replace all of them with AI. It's just like, but why haven't you done that if you're running a lot of the areas in marketing?

You know what's interesting, Neil? So after I drank this pill, and I'm somehow going to get you to onboard to this, because once you onboard, you're going to be the same as me. You're going to be like, oh yeah, you're going to be on the whole time. Like, I find that I'm working harder than I have before. I can't help myself. I need to be on it, right? Because you're just constantly making progress and you know it's compounding. I'm telling you, so I've been texting, you know, our mutual friends. I sent a text message to go, who's on this right now? How are you using it? I just like all over the place, I'm posting everywhere. Um, let me, let me show you something real quick, and then I want to come back to your, your, your part about the, the, the losing people piece, because I had a debate with my team this morning, and I think we should talk about this too, because I think a lot of people are torn. It's like, well, what do you do with the people? So we should talk about that. But let me, let me share my screen real quick. Check this out. So let me read the bottom. It's a little complex to read this. It starts at the bottom here. So It says here where I'm highlighting, so Yuchen Jin, okay, so Yuchen, yeah, Yuchen. So he says, Claude code built in an hour what took a Google team a year. That part isn't shocking. What is shocking is that Google allows their engineers to use Claude code instead of forcing Gemini command line interface or AntiGravity. So this is a Google engineer down here, Jana Dogen. And then it says, I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. So Google has really smart engineers, right? Some of the best models in the world. There are various options. Not everyone is aligned. I gave Claude Code a description of the problem. It generated what we built last year in an hour. Okay, so then you have this guy up here who used to— I think he helped build Gemini. So he's like, I used to be a Google engineer too. I leveled up all the way and feel if I had agentic coding and particularly Opus, so Claude's Opus, I would've saved myself first 6 years of work compressed into a few months, right? So he was an ex-Google and Meta distinguished engineer, Google, um, co-author. So my point of bringing this up right now is we've been talking about this for a while, Neil, but I'm telling you, in the last week it's been a step change. And you and I have been able— we're able to enter the arena now. Um, and it— this is what these people are seeing right now. And I'm telling you, the moment I get you to feel this, you'll, you'll be like, okay, yeah.

Yeah, because you can just describe what you want and it creates it.

Yeah. And then, and then, by the way, when you can't figure it out, hey, can you just do this for me? That's what I keep doing. Can you just do this for me? Can you just solve it for me? Yeah.

No, we have a big WhatsApp thread on this internally. And what we're finding is it is amazing. You still need an engineer to help fix bugs and stuff like that, but it is amazing. That's what we're finding internally on our WhatsApp. And like, we're seeing messages on this, like literally, you know, a few times an hour and people are sharing what they're doing.

Yeah. So I was, so at lunch I was talking to Sean on my team and I was like, yeah, we're, he's like, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm like, no, we don't know anything about infrastructure. We don't know anything about security. We don't know anything about anything.

Okay.

We don't know anything about these bugs that compound. Okay. And, you know, we're all kind of just YOLOing it right now. And so there's going to be a lot of use. And like, in fact, you're going to help scale the entire organization. So one thing, Neil, you kind of just brought up. So he was mentioning cutting 30 to 40% of people. I don't think it's as easy as that. And, you know, I— but there is one thing I think we should talk about. Let me ask you a question, Neil.

Yeah.

Why do you think it is that we've tested this in the past, whenever you've introduced yourself as a product person versus an agency person, You get a different reaction. Why do you think that is?

So you're saying when I introduce people like, hey, I'm Neil, I do product.

Okay. Maybe I'll just use myself as an example. Okay. So when I used to go to conferences, I would test like, hey, I have, I'm in software or hey, I'm in, I have a marketing agency, right? Whenever I would say I have a marketing agency, they start looking around the room. They want to walk into a different direction.

Or they look down on you or they look down on you.

Yeah. I think it's both. They look down on you and they look in a different direction. Now, when you say your product, they're interested, tell me more, right?

Yeah.

Why do you think that is?

Well, I think people want to know what kind of product you have to offer. If you're in software and they're like, oh, can this actually help my life or make, you know, something easier for me? If you're, if you're saying you're an agency person, they look at it as like you're pitching them for their money. If you say like you're a software product person, they look at it as like, oh, maybe you have a solution to a problem that they have.

Yeah. So the way I look at it, Neil, is when you have good experiences with the product, you know, the product continues to compound and you know, it's reliable. The problem, this is why I think a lot of people don't, they dislike agencies, is they've had a lot of bad experiences. Because once you find a really good person at an agency, you want to work with that person forever. You're going to try to get max utilization out of that person. That person ends up flaming out sometimes, right? Now, that's why a lot of agencies, they throw a lot of people at the problem. You have 4 different forms of leverage: code, capital, media, labor. Labor is the oldest form of leverage, okay? So agencies historically have thrown people at the problem. And that's why they get a bad rap, right? Versus with a product, it continues to get better. So my point of saying all this is the lesson I was giving to my team is like, hey guys, like I look at our people, like how we build this company as a product too, because we're going to need to scale and we need to continually bring revenue per employee up. But it's not to say we're going to cut 30 to 40% of people just like that, but we need to continue to hire AI-forward people. But sometimes people think that I just want to remove everyone and go all AI and like YOLO it, right? That's not the way.

No, it's not the way. And if you lose people who don't have the same thought process and vision, that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're right. It doesn't mean that they're right. You have to do what you feel is right for the organization. Sometimes you'll make the right call. Sometimes you'll make the wrong call. You know, like the person who I lost asked me, why didn't you give me a counter? And then I said, you know, Because we evaluate how you get paid within the region compared to your peers. And they weren't happy with that. They're like, but that's not fair. And I said, question for you, if you got a job locally and you applied, how much would you get paid? A really good job. They're like, maybe half of what you pay. And I'm like, okay. And they're like, but I work for American company, so I want American wages. There's no winning that argument. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm not saying they're right. Sometimes you just have to move on and You know, do what's best for yourself.

Question for you on that one. I mean, he was with you for 10 years. Did he have any incentives tied to his work?

Yes.

Yeah. So he had really good incentives. Plus, so on top of the base that he had, he, he was like, are you saying all in he was doing really well or just saying where he was referring to his base earlier?

No, I was only referring to base. If you include the incentives in even more.

So he's, he's crushing it all in. Yeah.

Within his country. Yes. If you include the total comp. He can probably buy a new house in his neighborhood once every year and like 3 months or 2 months.

So without giving numbers here, so let's say the new offer that he got was maybe 4 times what he was getting all in, like potentially he can make 4 times potentially, right?

Realistic, when I was talking to him, he was going to make almost double.

So in my mind, and if you're listening to this, we're not going to name names, but if you're listening to this and maybe one day, maybe Neil will take you back. I actually think Neil might take you back one day. I think it's actually shortsighted to look at it that way, to potentially make double for a person you don't know versus someone you know, like, and trust over 10 years. It's very hard to find that. I'll just put it that way.

So yeah, no, but look, I wish him the best of luck. People have to do what's in their best interest and their family interests as well, right?

And it's just my opinion. It's— I could be proven wrong and I'm happy to be proven wrong. Go ahead.

Yeah, they went to a company that has extremely high margins. So the company they went to, Has Nvidia-style margins. Now where their big spend is, is not actually on physical hardware. It's mainly their own— their main cost is just advertising. So they have extremely high margins. And I was telling them, I'm like, look, the problem that you're going to face with this company, and I gave them feedback, is if you look online at the reviews, there's a lot of bad reviews. So you're going into a place—

The marketing team had a lot of churn.

Yes, they're going to have massive churn and they already have a ton of bad reviews. And I'm like, they're going to have more bad reviews. So then you're going to potentially have issues, you know, 6 months. And they believe that the future is pure AI, non-humans. So they wanted to go to a company that believes eliminating humans. And in essence, what they're doing now is they're creating marketing-related products. Think of like consulting, like helping a company grow, but only doing it through AI and eliminating all humans, which I'm not saying won't be possible in the future, but in today's world, if you want to run a marketing campaign for a good-sized organization, we haven't figured it out how to do it purely on AI with no human intervention.

Yeah, for the record, I just want to make the record clear here. So Neil and I are very pro-people. I think you need great people to run these things and great people to scale quickly. And I think that's always going to continue to happen. And like I mentioned again, me or anybody on my team right now, we have a Claude Code channel. Whoever's using Claude Code right now, they are working harder than they've worked before. So they're not working less, they're working harder. And then the people who don't want to join you for the ride, that's okay. What my thinking is, eventually they're going to find something that they like. And I do think eventually there's going to be enough prosperity where everyone is doing well enough where they don't need to do a job that they don't want to do. But that's like 10, 15 years out.

So yeah, I think it's going to take a long time. But on a side note, did you see how Facebook bought Mantis for $2 billion?

Mantis?

Mantis.

I actually think it was $5 billion. I don't. I think two billion was too low. Where was it? Where'd you see the two billion?

Everywhere.

Really?

Let me show you.

Let me show you. When did you read? You probably read this recently. When'd you read it?

Multiple times throughout the day. So I read regular regulatory stuff as well.

So okay, here's here's what I got from Wall Street Journal. I here let's talk about the strategy in a second. But here let me share my screen real quick. Wall Street Journal's two billion. But it says. More than $2 billion.

Yeah. Acquires AI startup Manus for $2 billion. Yahoo Finance, Financial Times, CNBC, they're all saying $2 billion roughly.

Yeah. So let's talk about this. You brought it up so you can kick it off.

Yeah. So Manus is an AI company that is quote unquote in Singapore, originally from China, and they ended up moving themselves from China to Singapore, although the Chinese government is now saying they did not do it correctly. So there may be some regulatory issues or they may not, they may try to block this And the price tag supposedly between Financial Times, Reuters, et cetera, is between $2 and $3 billion is what people are saying. But I don't know if it'll go through. The US is okay with it from what it looks like. It seems like China has an issue with them purchasing Manus.

Have you used Manus?

I have not.

So I signed up earlier last year, middle last year, I made a Manus video on YouTube. It got like 200,000 long-form views, right? It was like how Manus will make you rich. Boom. And it was really good, but then I churned off of it. When the acquisition happened, I was like, I wonder how good it's gotten. So I started using it last week. I signed up again and let me give you an example. So remember how I was talking about how the Nine Operators Podcast makes like $5 million a year? I was like, you know what, Manus, help me find all the advertisers on the Nine Operators Podcast and find out the right person to reach out to. And I want you to personalize an email and schedule it for tomorrow and send it from my Gmail. It did it. It did it this morning. That was my prompt. It literally did all of that. So in my mind, I'm like, hey, anybody who's complaining about there's not enough leads, there's— how about you just go to Madison? You can just query this stuff now. And I'm saying it's a really good general agent. It's been good at making custom carousels for me. So I saw the Instagram CEO, he made these carousels, right? I was like, hey, just copy these carousels. Madison copied it and it made it into a really nice format that I posted to Instagram. Like I posted 2 carousels in the last week or so. So I think this is really smart for Meta because now they actually have a product. Before, they were lacking like a ChatGPT-like or any type of product, right? I don't know if they're going to give it away for free. I think that'd be smart, but they have all this intent data now and they can see what people are doing and they can continue to train on this data. So I think it's a smart acquisition if it goes through. Yeah.

Do you want to know why I don't use it at all? China, I guess? Yeah, China.

It's okay. I'm trying.

I have nothing against China or Chinese people. China's a beautiful country. A lot of my friends are from China. It's more so just data. It's like, I won't use Huawei or Huawei. I forgot what it's called. Their devices, even though they have an iPad that folds and it's like double the size of the iPad so you can watch movies in crazy dimensions. And I really want it because I don't know what— I don't want to potentially have someone in another country like China have access to my data and I don't know what they're going to be doing with it.

Have you been to China before?

I have. Um, uh, Shanghai.

Yeah, okay. And when did you go?

A long time ago. This was pre-COVID. It's changed though.

I think you go to Shanghai, Shenzhen, it's like it's a different world. And I'm not saying you should keep doing what you're doing on the security side. I think that's a smart move. Um, but I think there's a lot of preconceived notion— this is not coming from you— but a lot of people think it's like The way— because the way we talk about China in the US is very negative, but when you go there, one, they don't give a crap about, you know, all these US politics. They just want to have a good, prosperous life, uh, and they're living a prosperous life. A lot of these people are.

So my buddy Ash used to work for Microsoft, and back in the day he would create the Windows Mobile phone. Do you remember they had their own operating system for the Windows Mobile phone? This is a long, long time ago. He went to China to go and demo it, and straight up In the room. They said, we've already seen it. And then the person pulls up on their computer— this is something that hasn't been released yet, okay? This is Windows Phone for the first time. They're like, we already have it all. And they're demoing it to him right then and there. And then Ash doesn't know what to do. And the guy said something, and I'm gonna butcher it, so don't quote me here. He's like, oh, I have ties to something in China, some party or some affiliation or whatever it may be. So Ash calls back, he ends up talking. It was either Ash or his colleague, but I believe he was there because he's telling me the story. And, you know, Microsoft was like, you can't do anything, just come back, right? And they pretty much just jacked all the tech. This is a long, long time ago, right? And then I've seen tweets from like Marc Andreessen about China and data and security and a few others who are big into tech. And this is where I disagree with the Nvidia founder in which he's just like, yes, we should be able to sell to China as much as we want. I believe not everything is money. We do live in America. I look at Europe as very similar to America, Canada, and many other parts of the world. And I'm not saying China's bad, but I just want to make sure that our country is safe and someone doesn't just have access to all our data and can shut us down.

I think the reality is every country's spying on everyone. And I think the US, we definitely do it too. And it's for our own interest, right? And I think every country, you know, they're protecting themselves by being aggressive. Um, now that being said, you brought up politics. Let me tell you what, I had a field day over the weekend, um, when, when Venezuela— I went to Venezuela, right? And so on Threads, real quick, um, so those of you that don't know, I'm running this experiment right now on Threads where I'm just rage baiting everybody. Um, and some people— it's funny, my friends, uh, called me yesterday. He's like, dude, my girlfriend thinks you're crazy. My girlfriend thinks you've gone off the deep end. It's like, has Eric gone crazy? So I will literally post, it's like, because when Venezuela was, we went into Venezuela and got the president, right? Their president. A lot of Americans were angry about it, but many Venezuelans were happy about it, right? So I just posted to Threads like, huh, how come so many Americans are mad while Venezuelans are happy? 5,000 likes, right? And then I was like, you know what's comedy? It's when Venezuelans tell Americans to shut Shut the F up, right? When they're telling them what to do, 13,000 likes. So my point in saying all this is that there's a trap that most creators fall into. It's called audience capture. And what audience capture is, and we've talked about some of these people, Neil, is when you start to get a lot of engagement in one area, you start to say things that you actually don't believe and you start to double down and triple down on it. So you and I, we know a guy who sells courses and he's gone hard left. And I don't know if he's actually hard left. I think you say he is, but I don't know if I actually—

I think he is. I think he always has been.

But then we have other people who are capitalists saying that, you know, so-and-so billionaire shouldn't exist. And I'm like, wait a minute, you're a capitalist. And like, you're saying things that you don't actually believe. So I think it's a trap that you as a creator don't want to fall into. The good thing for Neil and I is we both have businesses. So it's, it's, I don't, we're not as incentivized to fall into that trap. Um, you just gotta be careful.

So I want to clarify something here. When Eric posts on Threads, he's really doing this as an experiment. Not everything he puts out on Threads is actually his views. He's just pushing out little quotes and seeing what happens, and he's trying to see how that impacts his followers, his overall engagement. He even sent me a screenshot of him posting something that's political, and I think it was thousands of hearts or likes or whatever.

13,000 likes.

Okay. And then he shows me right after he put something marketing related, I think he got like 5 likes.

It goes to show you, like, you have to think of the thread, the threads, like it's, you have a lot of people who are just fighting each other all the time. So you have to one, understand what platform you're on, but just be careful of the game that you're playing because I'm playing this game right now to see what buttons I can push and to see how much engagement I can get. Plus it's also for my weekend entertainment as well. But, you know, it's, it's this experiment that I'm probably going to stop soon and it's not like it's going to help drive business or anything, but it's entertaining. I'll tell you that much.

So yeah, it reminds me of the All-In podcast because if you look at the 4 on the All-In podcast from Calacanis to Chamath to Sacks, to Friedberg, they're all startup guys, investors, or one or the other, but they're all, call it, let's say entrepreneurs. When you look at them, I don't remember the early episodes of the All-In podcast, but they were not as political.

It was all investment, the startup investments they've made, cool tech. I remember David Sacks was like, yeah, when you ride the bird, it feels like a magical moment.

And now, It's almost all politics. Would you agree with me? Not 100%, but it's close enough to just a political show.

I mean, David's in the White House, right? And then Chamath's pretty close. Like he goes to these Trump dinners too. And then like, I think it's very political now.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

So just be careful. And just, I mean, if your business is politics, sure, then you can rage bait all day. But I will, I can confirm that rage baiting works on Threads. When you, when I go on X, for example, my feed is just everyone trying to help each other, cloud code this, everyone's sharing case studies, research and all that. Just be careful the game that you play. If you're in B2B, here's the deal: LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to with Carrot. It allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's carrot k a r r o t dot a i, and we'll see you on. other side. Um, so by the way, let's move over to another one here. Did I actually talk about the Pornhub email marketing recap strategy with you?

No.

Okay, you know what this is though, right?

No.

So here, check this out, check this out.

I just know that company had issues with like child pornography or something. Didn't they get sued and private equity took them over or something like that? It was all over TechCrunch.

That I have no idea, but here, let me give you this. Okay, this is a Pornhub email marketing strategy. Okay, it says, your Pornhub 2025 recap. It says, nah, just kidding, Camille, but since you're reading this, it's Mike. Are you already using Salesforce at your company? We help early-stage and growing-stage startups set up Salesforce instances. This is going to have a high click-through rate, right?

So I saw this, you, you forwarded it to me.

Yeah. Oh yeah, I did. That's right.

Yeah, I didn't know that that's what you're talking about, email. I thought you had like some viral way to capture more emails, but I think this is going to have amazing open rate, kind of. And the reason I say kind of, for when it lands in the inbox, I think it's going to have a high open rate, but I think that title and saying adult words in your subject line is going to cause a lot of the emails to go into the spam box.

Yep. And I think people mark it as spam too. I think some people are going to find it in good taste, like you and I would find it funny. I think some people will really not like it and mark it as spam, and I think it's going to do more brand damage than it actually helps. So I don't think it's worth it. The trade-off isn't worth it to get this type of response unless you're like a meme, you know, channel or something like that.

Wait, did they get a lot of likes on LinkedIn?

This guy posted it like yesterday, so it's already old news, but on Twitter just got a lot of engagement, a ton of engagement.

Not on LinkedIn though.

No, not on LinkedIn. Yeah, I think it's like 200 likes or something, which is like decent.

Yeah, because on LinkedIn it's so corporate and proper and people can see who likes what and they're like, oh, this can make me look bad.

You know what I say too, if you want to move quickly with the, the pace of information, it's, it's X, like not even close. It's, it's like LinkedIn is like, it's so Proper. It's so like the news you get on LinkedIn is sometimes it's even months old.

So, well, I would clarify on that. I think LinkedIn, I mean, X is the place to move forward on information when it comes to news and politics. I think for a lot of other stuff, it is not the source where people are releasing information and launches and updates and all that kind of stuff. I think it's X is a place to go for mainstream news and you can see In some cases, or a lot of cases, I would say what's more accurate. But a lot of the times, and I'm a heavy X user, I probably use X more than any other social network, just as FYI. But a lot of times it is off. And a great example of this is, and there could be community notes now, but when I saw yesterday something on X that said, Madani, who's the new mayor of New York City, has froze all sales of homes. You're no longer allowed to sell homes. And right away I Googled it. It was gaining traction. I'm like, this can't be true, right? Because whatever he wants to end up doing, to some extent, people, the city or the government, whatever you want to call it, is just going to get sued and people are going to win. It's very hard for the government to tell you, you bought a home with your own money, you're not allowed to sell it. And I knew that was wrong, but on X right away it showed that, you know, it was there and it was gaining traction and no community notes.

Yeah, I mean, because of the speed, sometimes the information is going to be off. And there's a— I actually read this on X— the reason misinformation happens— remember the game we used to play as kids, Neil, telephone? No, like people twist things into their own words And that's how misinformation happens. So no matter what, there's always going to be misinformation, right? Because you transfer it, someone will exaggerate a little bit, they'll take something out to, you know, maybe make their view look more favorable. So just take that part into account too. It's always a game of telephone, and that's why you have to look at information, but you have to learn how to make decisions for yourself and learn how to think for yourself. People on X are better at doing that than people on Threads, I'll tell you that much.

So there's an interesting telephone experiment, right? And this talks about misinformation on the web. When I was a little kid in school, we had telephone. I don't know what my class size was. Call it 20-something students. I'm making up a number. And when I say a little kid, like, you know, like 9 or 10 years old, right? So not too young, but still young enough. And the teacher said, I'm gonna tell this person something. They're gonna tell each of you and you pass it down. I want you to repeat it exactly. Like the person told you. Don't change it, just repeat it exactly. All right, so when kids are young and a teacher's telling them something, they usually try to follow instructions. And I don't think they're trying to do anything malicious because most kids don't understand the concept of misinformation. But what I learned from it was still when the teacher told everyone to repeat it exactly, it wasn't the same at the very end. And what ends up happening is It's not that people are trying to cheat or lie or screw others over. It's that people interpret certain things a different way than you or me or other people in this world may. It's just how their brains work. So they say something a little bit different unintentionally, and it's really hard to fix misinformation. And I think this is actually the biggest problem of AI that we're going to see in 2026 and 2027. Everyone's talking about how it's going to do everything for you. AI is really often a lot of research. AI is often a lot of stuff because they're scraping the web, which has a ton of misinformation, and it's hard to get rid of misinformation. You always have more and more coming every single day, and you have strong social signals and just algorithm signals for both the misinformation and the accurate information.

This kind of reminds me, Neil, that little book that I read, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. So, the whole idea behind this book is because there's so much misinformation and because you have people— there's 4 categories of people. You have intelligent people, you have stupid people, you have bandits, and you have people who are helpless, right? Now, it's actually only— it's not even the bandits who ruin the world. It says it's the stupid people that ruin the world because they'll interpret information in a way that isn't helpful. Whatever they try to do, they end up hurting society and they end up hurting themselves in the process, right? So I highly recommend that book. It's only 73 pages or so, and I think it teaches you a lot. And I've actually never thought about stupidity that way, but something to keep in mind. Do you want to say something else?

No.

Okay. So I was— Neil, I mean, you know, in investing there's a concept of high alpha and low beta, right? How would you define those 2 if you had to define those?

So high alpha, from my understanding, is like high return. Like you can end up making a lot of money on something. Low beta, is low beta low commitment?

No, low beta would be like low volatility. So like bonds. Yeah. So yes on the high alpha. So when you're talking about like a stock that's high alpha, you're looking to outperform the index, right? We agree on that. Yes. And if we're talking about—

You're looking for outsized returns with high alpha.

Correct. And then low beta, you want low volatility. So that actually applies into organization. So in your organization, sales, high alpha or low beta?

Low beta, it's pretty consistent.

No, high alpha. You want someone that's going to outperform, right, in sales, right?

I thought you meant like as an organization, like sales is very predictable. There's not tons of ups and downs.

Sales as a role, right? And like, uh, let's say operations.

Oh, you're talking about an individual contributor, not a whole department, not like our numbers for the month.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, we look for the people who are way better than the average so they can close way more. Like we have some sales reps who are way better than the average and they really crush it for us.

And these people, a lot of times they're, they're very creative. They're also very aggressive and they'll push boundaries, right?

No, no. I would say the ones who are high alpha for our sales team is a little bit different. They're not actually salespeople. They tended to be product people or account managers, and they're subject matter experts and they understand it really well. So instead of looking at sales as a sales role, they'll look at it as a problem-solving role and they're super analytical. And when you're pitching enterprises, that actually works way better than someone selling.

So you're making my point for me. So it's, I, I, when a high alpha role is very dynamic. Okay. So Now, the point that I'm trying to make here, Neil, is low beta would be someone like in finance, for example. You don't want someone who's that super, like a controller. Okay? You don't need them to be that. You need them to be on the dot. You need them to be detailed. Okay? Now, maybe different with a CFO. You want them to be more strategic, right? So my point of saying all this is that there, I hadn't thought about this way. Like obviously high alpha and low beta applies to investing, but you're also investing in people too. And so I was talking to someone on my team, I'm like, hey, how would you define yourself? She's like, well, I'm very high alpha. Like she is jumping around, she's solving a lot of problems, right? I was like, yeah, exactly. That's why it's not the role, the role that you're in right now is actually a low beta role where you actually just need to make sure you're running the trains on time. That's why you're the right person, but you're in the wrong seat. And so a lot of times I think we need to think about our people in as investments and think about, hey, like, are they actually high alpha, low beta? And are they actually in the right role? And that's something I don't think enough about. Um, I'm pretty sure you don't think about it either, but it's— I think it's nice to think about.

So we don't think about it that way, but close enough. When we're hiring people, we look for not only people that potentially produce outsized returns and are A-players— that's what we call like high-alpha individuals where they can potentially do more— um, but we want to make sure they're in the right roles. So I'll give you an example of this. So in our Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic product, we're hiring someone. I forgot what division it is, whether it's engineering or product or support. And we have 2 amazing candidates. One candidate is super overqualified. All right. They can do that job plus a lot more. And the reason— and we'll end up choosing the one that's overqualified.

Yeah.

Because even though that role may limit them, we as an organization tend to say, this is what you need to do and maintain this or make this way better. But on a side note, if you feel you can do anything else to help the organization, come to us and we'll help you get it done. And if they can show that they can do other things and provide a lot more value, We'll figure out new roles, new responsibilities, or expanding their role and making their comp plan align with the value that they're bringing. And we found that to work really well because good people will take a role sometimes that you have that they know they're overqualified for, but if they know there's an opportunity for them to do more in that role, a lot of times they'll jump on it if they can see the opportunity. And we love those people because some people are just like, I'm overqualified for this. I'm not going to touch this. I only want this kind of role. We find that the ones who are more hungry and aggressive and are willing to do whatever tend to produce better returns for us than the person who's like, I'm overqualified. This is the only role I want. We tend to find those people a little bit more complacent and lazy. We like go-getters. And when we have people Including our CEO who's like, I'll scrub a toilet. I don't give a crap. I'll do whatever it takes. We find those people tend to produce the best for us. And those are our highest alpha people.

Yeah. So you can layer this on with top grading, however you look at an A-player hiring blueprint, whatever. And now you have this high alpha, low beta thing. I think it should be a helpful framework for you. By the way, earlier we were talking a little bit about politics and I had this piece pulled up here from Bill Ackman, who was— we were just talking about investing. So I thought I'd pull this up. So what's interesting to me, Neil, and I haven't been paying attention to this, but he— so Bill Ackman, who's an investor, shares this tweet. So he says, um, protesters who are paid should be required to disclose that they are being paid and by whom. Protests are political speech/advertising. Why are they exempt from the same disclosures required for political advertising? And so this person, WallStreetApes, um, tweets this out and he's like, check this out. Um, 4 protests in 4 different states. Pay very close attention to solid white signs with black Letter of writing for protests in 4 different states, right? Um, proof this is all paid and organized. So New York City, Chicago, Orlando, Boston, and also check Portland, uh, protests, and they have the same signs, right? And so what do you think about this? Because it is a marketing thing.

And I, I saw that. So I saw it right when he tweeted it out. Um, I agree with it. And this, I think someone was saying that it may be China or Russia, and I don't know what's true or not.

I have no proof of any of this kind of stuff.

But I know being someone who makes marketing material and puts it out there, there's no way that you have people in all these cities with very similar signs, if not the exact same sign.

They got 'em up so fast. Yes.

Got up so fast and rallying at the same time. Huh. I wonder who's organizing all of this and funding it. And I forgot who ended up doing this, but someone was going on the street This was during the Hamas, like Israel-Hamas, during that time, someone went on the street and started asking people if they were getting paid. And a lot of people were like, no comment. I don't want to respond to this. Now, if you weren't getting paid, most people wouldn't care to be like, of course I'm not getting paid.

Oh yeah.

Right? Yeah, but when a lot of people start saying no comment or I don't have to end up telling you, chances are they're probably getting paid.

I don't know if you remember this, this goes all the way back to COVID, but, um, you would see these videos of people protesting, but you would see a pallet of bricks in the middle of the streets. Just like, how do you just see that? It's like you're playing a video game where you can pick up, like Fortnite, you can pick up the bricks and just like go, like it's just ammo that's dropped in the middle, right? And so you can't tell me this is not paid. And The thing is, they actually went deeper on this because the extraction of Maduro, I think is his name, the Venezuelan president, that happened very early in the morning. By 2:00 AM or so, or 2:30 AM, these signs were already in production. So they were showing these signs in production. And because these protests happened the next day, how is it that they all organized together and they all had the same signs the next day? So I think there should be disclosures here.

Yeah.

Just like a lot of things don't make sense. Why aren't there disclosures for political advertising? Why is it that no voter ID is required? Like, how does that make any sense, right?

So yeah, we're one of the only countries, from my understanding, that's like that.

Yeah. Anyway, on a more positive note here, Neil, I have— if you were to guess today, okay, what do you think? Because we're talking about all the AI stuff is moving so quickly. You know, a lot of stuff is getting commoditized, whatever. What do you think is the last moat standing? Because, you know, people like to talk about distribution, they like to talk about all these things. What do you think it is?

I think the last moat is really brand. I think that is the only moat, at least in marketing, that's left. And I keep using this example, but it's one that resonates with anyone, you know, in the world because they all know it. Everyone understands a Michael Jordan shoe. You have the Jumpman logo and people buy it. It's not because it's more comfortable or it looks cool. There's a lot of other shoe companies that can create shoes that are just as comfortable, if not more comfortable, and just as cool. The reason people buy that is because their affinity to Michael Jordan. I think branding is everything in marketing. It's really hard to build a massive brand, and if you can, you're onto something big. Peter Thiel talks about it in his presentation on Zero to One on how it's super important. If you look at a lot of the big companies that are monopolies, they have a massive brand. But it's funny, in his speech, he's like, They have a big brand. I don't understand how they created the brand, right? It's harder for him to compute on that. Really brilliant guy. I'm not trying to diss him, but it is one of the most important things. And I think you build a brand not just by being consistent, omnichannel, doing things for a long time, doing it really well. What I'm seeing in today's world, people really have affinities towards personal brands. And if you can tie in a personal brand to whatever you're doing, I think that does help because a corporate brand is more of a faceless company and it's hard for people to associate with a corporate brand as much as they can with a personal brand. And you can see this, go on social media, look up any company. There's no company that has more followers than like a Cristiano Ronaldo or a Kardashian or any of them. People just associate more with personal brands.

Yeah. So what I'll say, I'll do a modification of this because we've been saying this on the podcast for a while, but I read this piece the other day and the title of this post is The Last Moat Standing. Okay. So the question that this person poses is, if anyone can build your product in a weekend, what's actually defensible? So the truth is the kid in his dorm now can quickly build the same product that your Series B startup took 5 years to piece together. We built it is about as defensible as we have a website. Congrats. So does my dentist. So if anything and everything can be built quickly, what's left to build that has real staying power? Are there any moats left? The answer is simple. The last real moat standing is this: an opinionated perspective on the solution. Or said differently, if you scroll down over here, having a perspective worth paying for. So when you— when Neil just brought up Jordan's, for example, Jordan tells a story. Jordan tells a story of greatest basketball player ever.

Okay.

Talks about championships. There's a story around that. A brand tells a good story, and that's how I look at it. Like, why do you buy, you know, uh, Coca-Cola over, like, I don't know, Pepsi, for example? It's because Coca-Cola— you think about the polar bears, you think about having the Coke back with your family during the holidays back in the day. There's a story with the brand, and I think we're kind of saying the same thing here, what the person's saying. So, so yeah.

It all ties in. To build a brand, a lot of times you have to end up creating a narrative and a story that people can relate to. You know, when you look at Jordan, people understand his story and the hardships. Same with like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant or some of these athletes. Not all of them had hardships, but some of them did, and people can really resonate with them. Or like the Williams sisters, right? Serena and Venus Williams. A lot of people love their movie. I believe Will Smith won an award for it. That was the day he slapped Chris Rock, if I'm not mistaken. But when you look at that movie, the reason it's done really well is people resonate extremely well with brands and stories, especially ones that are relatable and go through a lot of ups and downs, right? They call it the emotional rollercoaster. If you can get people hooked on your emotional rollercoaster, you can do really well with your personal brand. Now, the one thing people forget with branding is a big brand without streamlined operations and systems isn't that useful. You can't forget the fundamentals, and people believe if they have a brand but they lack the fundamentals, they'll still be okay. This is the reason why companies like L'Oréal and Estée Lauder are so much bigger than Kylie Cosmetics. It doesn't mean Kylie Cosmetics did a bad job. L'Oréal has a ton of distribution and reach and systems and processes. That really helped their brands make a ton of money.

I'm going to give you a similar tweet to this one, and then we can wrap this part up. But so this person, Yash, tweets this. So he says, I'm now significantly bearish on big headcounts and team. Opus 4.5 is clearly better than 90% of talent. Without taste and agency, any extra hires are merely a deadweight. New talent will have to adapt to AI or be prepared to be jobless or underpaid for the rest of their lives. Now, this actually goes back into the brand piece. Without taste. Taste to me helps fulfill a brand's promise, okay? And a lot of people right now are talking about, oh, you got to have taste, right? Which is kind of similar to what the other guy was saying. All these things are kind of intertwined. Now, the other piece here, any extra hires are merely dead weight, and then, you know, be prepared to adapt to AI. One of our initiatives now, Neil, and I'm curious to know kind of what you guys are doing here, but from an AI fluency standpoint, I'm like, dude, forget you know, having people build these agentic workflows, our mandate now, the— and I do think this is a code red situation for us at least, um, is everyone needs to be proficient at Claude code, um, in the next 6 months or so. And we're gonna get them there because literally, like, we had someone on our team, she was a little hesitant, but yesterday she started picking it up and today she's asking me for API access to this and that, right? Um, and the people who are using it right now are, are moving at warp speed. So, um, for us it's like, okay, we're gonna do the office hours weekly. We're gonna do the hackathons every quarter or so. Um, we're gonna meet with people whenever they need. We might need to hire other coaches, you know, during office off hours or whatever. But to me, I would rather— I don't want to say these people are dead weight, let's get rid of them. I want to bring people along for the journey, and whoever wants to drink the water, great. And whoever doesn't, you know, that's— they'll— I think they'll kind of self-select themselves out. But I want to make it a situation where everyone has a chance to grow, because it's easier to bring— I hope it's easier to bring people along than to have to, you know, not have them.

Yeah, what we're doing on the AI front is We're really looking forward to people who not only understand where the world's going, where it's going, but how to adapt. And I'll give you a great example of this. We're doing a webinar soon. I forgot what the title is, but it's something like 51% of website traffic is now bots. Here's how to do well in a bot-first marketing world, right? So if marketers don't understand the concept on what's actually going to happen in the next year or 2, because I bet you even more bots are going to end up, you know, visiting websites and interacting with them. If they don't understand how to adapt and what that world looks like, they're not going to succeed for the customer. They're just going to succeed in the old game, and the old game doesn't work anymore.

Yep, dude. Actually, you know what's interesting? Um, speaking of the old game, remember, um, Gagan, who founded Udemy, and now he had— remember, he had Hackers Conference. So he, he tweeted this today and you were just talking about the old way, right? So growth hacking is a term or growth marketing is a term that hasn't been used in a while. So I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but Gagan tweets this and he says, growth marketing was perhaps the most important trend in tech in 2010. Chamath literally got 1% of Facebook and became a billionaire for starting the first ever growth team at Facebook. I ran a conference called Growth Hackers Conference and it was sold out multiple years in a row. But by 2020, growth marketing was practically dead. Nobody was talking about it. And most growth teams folded fully into product orgs. In 2026, I believe growth hacking will make a strong comeback, likely without the cringy name. Growth used to be cool art where super high IQ and high EQ practitioners leverage consumer insight, data, and product to create unique ways to launch their products. So he thinks what it's going to look like now is, you know, you're going to have vibe coding, which we kind of talked about, right, to build micro products and micro workflows from scratch. We've talked about this many times on the podcast. AI can ingest massive amounts of data and therefore create new insights. AE will become a massive growth opportunity. And then I'm fairly confident OpenAI, Anthropic will offer an app store for ChatGPT in cloud. And finally, content marketing will look totally different in the age of unlimited creativity and productivity from AI-generated content. So there are a lot of fresh opportunities for growth marketers to play with and innovate on. The intersection of data, product, and marketing is going to have a rebirth. Game on.

Yeah, I agree with him. I think you're already starting to see a resurgence, but it's not called growth hacking or growth marketing. People just want marketers to think— when I look at the old school version of a growth hacker or growth marketer, or they would call it growth hacking or something like that, I forgot, but it was one of those terms.

Yeah. Growth hacking. Growth hacker. Yeah.

They looked at it as like, hey, you're not a hacker that's breaking code. They didn't look at it as you're a VP of marketing. They looked at it as you're leveraging whatever to grow the business. Sometimes that's traditional marketing channels like Google Ads or SEO. Sometimes that's non-traditional channels like viral loops. Remember Dropbox? Get more space if you share this on social media or invite more users who actually sign up, right? That's a creative way to grow and you're growing in traditional marketing sense, but you can also grow through product or referral systems or You can do things like Lovable. I don't know if you've seen Lovable, but if you build something on Lovable, it's public. And them having all that stuff public helps feed more people into their ecosystem, which causes more signups to Lovable. And in today's world, because of AI and because of things like Claude Code, marketers now have more skills without really having to learn all these skills, right? So I think companies are going to look for individuals who are more out-of-the-box thinkers and are leveraging the tools at their fingertips to get more done, even without quote unquote really knowing all those skill sets because the tools enable.

And these, I'll say that the people we're talking to right now, I mentioned a little earlier on this podcast, the people we're talking to, they're interested in leaving their companies because their companies aren't moving quickly enough. So they're hungry. The cool thing, I think it's going to become cool to say you want to move to AI-forward company because you want a job in the future, right? But I think people are at the tip of the iceberg right now. They are looking to leave these companies and this is your chance to hire these people. And I would just say this, you know, for you and I, like sure, we have our businesses to operate, but to have these superpowers now, I do feel like growth hacking is back. Maybe I don't want to call it that, but these are things that I wish I would've had, you and I in our mid-20s or so, wish we would've had because we'd had to wait for engineering to push to make changes and then changes might take another 3 days or another week or another 2 weeks or so. Maybe it's not what you want exactly. But here you're just constantly keeping it going and you can have multiple tabs open where you can go all day. So I think really the sky's the limit. And by the way, if you are this type of person, reach out to me on Instagram or X. Um, and you know, both Neil and I, we are hiring these people. And so please reach out to us because, uh, you are, you're very high leverage. And I think we're going to move into a world, Neil, where a lot of companies are going to have less headcount, but I think people are going to get paid a lot more.

Yeah, I can see people getting paid more. Also, The easiest way for people to think about this, everyone knows Superman. It's just like, would you want laser eyes or ice eyes where you can like make things freeze?

Would you like— You're just making this slop, man. You're like a ChatGPT.

No, I thought Superman was able to freeze stuff too.

He can blow to freeze things and he has laser eyes.

So the eyes are only laser. Okay, my bad. He's using his mouth to— I knew he could freeze, but he's using his mouth to freeze. He can run extremely fast. He could fly. He has super strength. Think about a human with all these abilities. It sounds really cool. They can do way more than the average human. It's the same thing. Yes, you as a human, you're not really changing, but you have all these tools at your fingertips that can allow you to perform way better than you're used to. But here's the kicker. You got to actually be willing to use them and embrace them. It's like the person who works out but never takes protein powder, and they're like, Why am I not getting muscle definition? Well, if you don't ever take enough protein, your body can't actually build it. So there's solutions like supplements and stuff like that. Some people choose not to take them. Some people do. It's— you have these things at your fingertips. If you don't use them, you're not going to do well in today's world. That's the hardest part that we're finding. Everyone says they're willing to use it, but then when you actually check what they've done and how they use them in the past during interview processes, people don't really use them. They just claim they're open to it and they do use it, but it's just a lot of BS.

Dude, as we talk about this more, I think when I do these interviews now, I'm just gonna have a full AI conversation with them. If they can't keep up, I'm just ending the interview. Like, that's all I need because it covers all 4 of our values. I'm like, how much easier does it get right now?

Yeah, I think it depends on what role, but yes, some roles like HR, you may not need it as much.

Even the HR person we're interviewing right now is heavy on AI. And I'm like, thank God. I'm like, I'm like, hey, so how do you do that? He's like, I'm actually responsible for rolling AI fluency throughout the organization. I was like, Sounds good.

So, oh, that's cool. I've never seen HR being responsible for that.

So I asked him about that. I was like, so why are you guys responsible for— he's like, if it's not coming in from the people team, the HR team, and we're not— it's not coming bottom up, we're not going to adopt it as quickly. And he's like, that's how we adopted at the current company that he's at right now.

So yeah, that's a good model. Never thought about that.

But to Neil's point, again, it's— so maybe we can talk about the hows, right? The superpowers. And I can talk about some of these superpowers I gained in the last week or so. Again, For Claude Code, it's just, there's actually a Claude Code for Marketing course. You can search for that. There's a lot of people talking about it on X. I think you just got to go out there and play with it, set it up, and then just get your feet wet, right? That's just a matter of getting the reps in and starting to build some muscle there. I think Manus is great, although it can get pretty expensive. It's a great general agent. You know, dude, I'm talking to the CEO of Gamma, you know, the presentation app?

No.

So I'm talking to him about an hour or so, and I'm interviewing all these CEOs to understand how they're driving AI fluency and how efficient their businesses are right now. And, um, he's— they're valued at $2.1 billion. They have 50 employees and they do $100 million in annual recurring revenue. So they have a mandate that revenue per employee needs to be above $2 million a year or so. But they— their whole thing too is like, we're only going to hire AI-forward people. Same thing with Lovable. We can only hire AI-forward people. So I think you just got to play with these things, whether it's Gamma, you're using Granola for note-taking, you're using Super Whisper or Whisper Flow for dictation, um, and, and get out there and do it. Because if you start doing these things, you're gonna be way ahead of everyone else. And people, again, like when I was talking to my friend group yesterday, everyone's looking to hire these people. In fact, I have people messaging me, they're texting me, they're like, dude, can we just do a call? Can you like tell me, like, I don't know what to do as a founder right now. And these people are, they're doing fairly well. Let's just call it like $50, $60 million a year. And I had someone else text me, he has like a media company on Instagram. He messaged me and he's like, dude, can you make a video on this? I'm like, what would you like the video to be about? He's like, I just need to know how to use all this stuff, right? And he does really well too. My point is nobody really knows what they're doing right now. I don't think— I'm like flying by the seat of my pants right now. Um, the moment I convince Neil to do this, he'll be flying by the seat of his pants too. Um, and I'm not saying Neil doesn't do this stuff, he does use it, but I gotta, I gotta get him on this Claude code train. So yeah.

And the one caveat I would tell everyone is when you're looking to hire, depending on the size of your organization, you don't need AI fluency amazing for every single role. An example for this is Let's say you have someone whose job, or you're looking to hire someone who just acquires companies. All right. And we've had this role and this guy Carlos, he goes and finds deals for us. There's other people in our organization who can help him source deals by using AI to send a lot of emails. But Carlos himself doesn't have crazy AI fluency that let's say Eric may have. But Carlos's job is to evaluate deals. We can use tech, our finance team can use tech to help evaluate deals, and internal team can help also evaluate. But what his job is to really do is other than evaluate deals before bringing it to the team, is once we like a deal, to go figure out a structure that works, close the deal, create something that's a win-win scenario, or at least a win on our end. And you of course want to win on the other person's end because Because if you're not, they're not going to stick around. And someone like Carlos doesn't have to have the highest knowledge when it comes to AI, maybe understanding what AI is when he's looking for deals, but he's not going to know how to do half the stuff Eric's talking about. And I'd rather have someone like that who's like, yeah, over my career I bought $6 billion worth of deals versus someone who's newer, who knows AI, And then sending them to go negotiate a $50 million deal and they screw it up and they, it costs you $60 million instead of $50 because they just don't have some of the skills that are needed to go close a decent-sized deal. Yeah.

So my response to that would be, um, just your company, your own company, you know, you, you would just, you'll establish your own guidelines for what AI proficient means. I, and I do think, I think you probably agree with this. Carlos needs to at least be proficient, whatever that means to your company.

Yeah. Like how to use ChatGPT, like he'll be able to put numbers in it and then it crunches it so he doesn't waste the finance team for basic stuff, right? But like, we don't expect him to like learn how to code stuff up. It's just, it's not really needed for his role.

I think they're— so one, every company needs to have baseline expectations for AI fluency. If you don't, I think that's the starting point. The second piece is whatever that means. It could be ChatGPT. For us, you know, we've defined, you know, we have one level which is unacceptable, meaning you're not using it at all. 2 would be, you know, you are capable, meaning you're using ChatGPT. 3 would be you're adoptive, right? Or adaptive, that you're trying new things, you're building agentic workflows. Transformative would be that you're using cloud code. So the mandate I'm going to have, and I don't expect everyone to do this because I think it's a fairly high bar, but our mandate is everyone needs to be good at cloud code because it's not like we have tons of people right now. So I'd rather get us to that baseline fluency. And if people are capable and willing, then we're going to take them there. And if not, that's fine. You know, there's plenty of places that will.

So Yeah, no, um, and I, I think you're spot on. I don't know if they actually do this, but I do know we pay for, you know, some of these tools for our users, whether it's ChatGPT, uh, Copilot, etc. And I don't know if they do this, but it would be really cool if they had a report on how many people in your organization actually use what you're paying for.

They do. The problem with the usage thing is, because I was thinking about this, I was like, okay, should we measure on usage? The problem is usage is very easy to game. You can just log in, log out. Um, I'd rather see shit that they've actually built and more importantly to what you said earlier, shit that actually adds to efficiencies, which will help with revenue per employee. So usage alone, I don't think will be helpful enough, but there are reports like, um, our mutual friend, he actually has team accounts for everyone, um, for OpenAI and you can see how much usage is happening. Same thing with Cursor. You can see how much code people are pushing.

Oh, that's cool. But I want to know like, hey, uh, if I tell ChatGPT, this is what we're looking people to use a product for in different departments, how many of them actually do it?

You can do that. Yeah. Yeah. So are you going to go buy it?

No comment. Yeah.

But look, I think before we wrap up here, I mean, I think maybe, you know what, I can share some of the stuff I built during AI Week as we wrap up here.

So— And going back to Eric's question to me, yeah, I would implement it if it's not implemented right now. I'm going to actually message the team about it after we're done with this.

Okay. So by the way, one thing I want to call out too is we— actually, no, I'll leave that one alone. Okay. Let me just talk about what I built over Christmas break or holidays. So I built a churn risk and expansion monitor that looks at all of our our client call transcripts, and it has memory. So it sees over time how we're doing with that client. And then there's a leaderboard at the end of the week, and it basically maps out— it'll say, like, for example, if Neil, you and I are on the call, and you said 2 or 3 things that showed expansion opportunity, it will actually say, hey, Neil said this and that. And we think that based on this account size, we can upsell this and that, right? And then we also think, here's some opportunity for goodwill. Here's some churn flags that you should spot. And this will basically feed into that client Slack channel. That's one thing. But the key thing is you're able to build this with like a Lindy or Zapier, but you can build this using Claude Code and it has memory, which that memory then compounds over time. And you can see how— you can see over time how that client is doing too. You have like a line graph, right? But before, Neil, like, I'm sure that'd be pretty valuable to you guys, right? But before, you and I would have wanted it, but like, We wouldn't know where to get it from.

Yes, dude. I think 2026 is going to be an amazing year. And the reason I say that is we've had AI. I'm not looking for a new version of ChatGPT or, you know, Copilot or Gemini. What I'm looking for is tools that actually improve productivity more than just someone searching and getting an answer. And I think these AI platforms are shifting Towards creating more tools that make our lives easier as marketers.

Neil, I'll give you one more. Neil, you think you make pretty sound decisions, right? Most of the time?

Yes.

Okay. So imagine if there's an ambient Neil, you clone yourself and maybe it's trained on all your information, all the client, all the calls that you've been on internally, it's trained on all the content you put out there. So maybe it's not all the stuff that you say behind the scenes because you're on the phone a lot, right? But imagine it took, you know, your transcripts, whatever, you have a Neil Patel brain. Okay. That whenever something is slipping according to what the company's goals are, it can notify you if it's a big thing. Most of the small things you let go, but because you are good at being in different spots at once and coming in when you need to push, right? But at the same time, you kind of need to know what's happening. And if you're notified on these things, like you're quick to jump on it. How useful would that be to you? A little bit useful?

It would be useful. A little bit useful. One thing that we do have, I've written down Since my start of my career. So I'm 24 years in, all the major mistakes that I've made that have cost me a lot of money and the circumstances around those mistakes and the timing of it. So not only like the year, I don't always have the exact like day, but I have the month, the month and the year, the situation I was in, the way where the business was at and what happened. And I do have it uploaded where I can end up asking questions And it breaks down all the mistakes and all the big decisions that I've made that were worth it. It's just kind of like a sound check if I'm crazy or not.

Dude, I have— okay, see, the good thing about Neil is he doesn't even need to read these books. So you actually pulled that— you didn't read this book, but it's actually from a book called The Effective Executive from Peter Drucker. And it's only like a 50-page book, but it talks about feedback analysis, which is where you're writing out all the big decisions you made in your life and you're spotting patterns, right? Now imagine if you had that doc trained on all your content, trained on all the context in the company, and then it's mapping out, hey, it looks like this is happening again, Neil. Hey, it looks like this pattern might be happening. It might be a false positive, but if it's spotting it for you ahead of time, you can then decide what you want to do with that.

Yeah, and it's not that advanced. It's more so I ask questions and then it'll tell me based on past, not necessarily, hey, you're following into this pattern again and notify me. That would be great, but we don't have that yet.

Trust me, once I get you on this train, you're just gonna go build this yourself and won't take you out.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm thinking, I'm like, after dinner, should I just load up Claude Code and code myself?

I'm telling you, you have nothing better to do right now. You're in a hotel. So like—

No, I have a meeting right after this.

Okay, fine. You have something better to do right now, but maybe after you can do it. Yeah, you can do it on the plane when you're flying back.

Uh, Friday, Friday early morning.

Yeah. Yeah, and then do it when you're flying back.

Yeah.

All right, well, anyway guys, that's it for today. We hope you enjoyed this. Um, I went a little too crazy with Claude Code, but this is how serious I am. Like, I haven't had this amount of enjoyment in work or video games for like 17 years, then it's back. So that being said, we will catch you later. Bye.