Major Shift: Why Companies STOPPED Cutting People

So here's how AI generated IKEA's new $1 billion business line. So have you heard about this?

Uh-uh.

No? See, so IKEA deployed an AI chatbot named Billy, okay? You know Billy, right?

Yeah.

To handle level 1 customer service inquiries. It reportedly resolved around 57% of those engagements without human escalation. Most companies would have celebrated the labor savings and stopped right there. Cost takeout, right? But the more interesting move, Neil, was to study the 43% of cases Billy could not resolve, okay? Could not resolve. Those unresolved inquiries pointed to customer demand looking for interior design help because you don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, you don't want to do it either, right?

Yeah.

IKEA responded by spinning up a design consultancy, reskilling customer service employees powered by AI, and creating a new revenue stream that generated roughly €1 billion in new revenue in its first year. So automation plus augmentation equals exponential growth.

Isn't that interesting?

That's awesome.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah, that's interesting.

It's like AI finds all the edge use cases of things, right? And then it's like, oh, well, I have all this labor over here. Instead of sacking them, why don't we reskill them to do something else and maybe even pay them more?

And I love that because, you know, you mentioned it head on. A lot of companies are thinking about, hey, how do I just sack employees and save expenses? And the right methodology is, How can you start thinking about how you can reuse those people, train them on new things, and actually create more new revenue streams for the business? That's a win-win situation.

Do you remember in elementary school they would say recycle, reduce, reuse, and close the loop?

Yeah.

Right? So like this is the same thing.

Captain Planet.

Oh yeah, that's Captain Planet. That's right. That's Captain Planet. That's right. Only we would know that because we're older now. But yeah, that's cool. I think this is, I think that the main takeaway for everyone here is, sure, like Neil, you and I, like I was just in another meeting this week, it's like, oh yeah, we're cutting 50%, we're cutting 40%, like we're hearing that over and over, but maybe before you do that, think about, because humans are amazing, right? Maybe think about the things that your other, 'cause your business is a problem-solving machine. What other problems can your business solve if you had this labor already? And then absolutely, if you need to, like last resort, maybe you think about cutting, right? 'Cause we might talk about it a lot, but none of us take any pleasure in having to cut people. It's, there's people's livelihoods.

So dude, I met up with the company a few days ago, 2 days ago in Canada, and we were talking about AI and how it can just make things more efficient. So this company is in the medical space specifically, like think like Hims Hers, right? So similar type of business where prescription drugs, medical advice, telemedicine, all that kind of stuff. They have AI cranking out 4,500 creatives per month. It helped them scale the business from $1.5 million a month within a few months to guess how much? Technically they're doing $1.5 million and that took them years to build up. And in a few months with 4,500 creatives per month and 3 months later, what do you think they got the MRR to?

$50 million.

Crazy. It's a high number. It wasn't as big as 50, but close enough. It was a little bit more than 20. So to go from $1.5 million to $20+ million in a matter of 3 months.

$12 to $240.

That's ridiculous.

I know, yeah.

Yeah. And it was all because 4,500 new creatives per month. And that was the goal. Because you know this, dude, once you can crack the nut and you can get your ROI to be, you know, high enough, You can scale really fast and they were able to scale their own ads. Then you can give all those ads and the stuff that's working to affiliates, which a lot of companies don't think about, but it's still an extremely powerful marketing tool and channel. And then you get all the affiliates to start pushing you as well. And then now you're growing faster on both ends and it's much more profitable.

That's right, Noah. You need more creative for your business because at a certain point creative is the limiting factor. It's not even the ad optimization anymore, it's the creative.

Yeah, dude, everyone keeps telling me, it's like, oh yeah, you know, we're focusing on our campaign structures, we're focusing on our bid management. And I was just saying that to you, dude, when I meet so many people at conferences, even corporations, and I'm giving speeches on like, you know, using AI in your SEO and your paid advertising, making it more efficient, and they're telling me like how they restructure their campaigns or they're running tests on, hey, should we not bid for our brand name or should we bid for our brand name? Bidding for your brand name, assuming you're a big company, can cost you a lot of money because if you don't bid, typically you control the organic listings and then you should only be bidding when your other competitors are bidding for your name. And in theory, large corporations trademark their name so that you can't have other companies bidding on your name and including your name in the actual ad copy. So you have an advantage there. But when I always talk to companies about paid ads, I always tell them there's 2 main levers you have over the competition and people don't get it. And when I say they don't get it, they don't really execute on it. One is creative. You talked about that. And I would bucket in creative with landing pages and the flow and the whole experience because your creative is not just about the images, it's also about the messaging and you need to make sure the messaging flows. But that is just one thing. And if you can test tons of variations of that, you'll eventually figure out how to get more leverage. The second thing is your first-party data. What you upload to the system drastically impacts the output. If you have more data than the competition, it can help learn way better and figure out what people to target. If you're a brand new business with very little data, you are not going to perform as well compared to established business, at least from, you know, a targeting perspective versus someone who can upload 200,000 data points and just be like, here you go, find more people like these existing 200,000 customers. And out of these 200,000 customers, these 10,000 are really our ideal customer profile.

So you're talking about ads right now, right? And I think something that's interesting because ads have largely been auction-based for a long time, right? So I think an interesting thought here is when you think about the future of pricing, the future of pricing might be auction-based too. And what I mean by that is this. So Let's use Ubersuggest, let's use AnswerThePublic, or let's use ClickFlow as an example. Okay, so let's assume all of these, all of our tools have APIs on them. So the argument here is that API pricing is going to look a lot more like ad auctions in the agent-first future. Okay, so let's say, you know, I'm using your API a lot, okay, but a lot of other people are demanding it as well, maybe might just be auction-based. Okay, so because you might have like a .md file, the agents can call it and they'll say, okay, let's see who the highest bidder is, because they're bidding at such a high frequency. So then it's like, okay, you want to use our API? Instead of getting rate limited, you'll say, no, just pay more and we won't rate limit you.

Yes.

That's interesting, right?

It is really interesting.

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Back to the show. By the way, I'm curious on your take on this, and I'll tell you what I think is going to end up happening. I had a a discussion with around like 6 or 7 other marketers yesterday on where we think ads are going to go within these LLMs. I'm not talking about just ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, et cetera.

Gemini.

Yeah, the list goes on and on. Where do you think ads are going to go?

Like how they're going to look?

Not how they're going to look, or let me rephrase that. Well, actually I don't know how to state the question, but more so when I was talking to people, A lot of people think that ads are going to look like similar to how they look today, but instead, there's just different formats of them. So you may see more interactive ads or videos explaining things because of AI, and then maybe you convince them and do— because some people do educational-based ads. So instead of sending a text-based article, maybe AI creates a video for the customer if they're looking to reduce their wrinkles and it pitches their product and it does that in real time. I think we're going to start seeing more of that over time, but I think what we're really going to see is all the platforms copy Instagram and TikTok.

Hmm.

If you think about Instagram and TikTok, now they're just trying to keep you on platform and do every single transaction there. I know in the past Google has tested trying to collect mortgage leads or travel or insurance or whatever it may be for certain industries and just keep them on google.com. But I believe you're going to start seeing more and more of that. Let's take banking, for example. If you're on ChatGPT or if you're on Google or Gemini and you're looking up the best bank accounts for you, the banks with the best mortgage rates and credit cards based on your income and where you are in life and how old you are and your credit, if you're a bank, do you really care if they visit your website to sign up or they just sign up right there and then on the LLM? Because the LLM will pass you all the data, right?

Yeah.

To create the bank account. You're still collecting their name, their email, their social, all the stuff that you need. So you can still target the person, you have all their information. If the conversions are 15 to 20% higher because they're still on the platform, so it's cheaper for you, wouldn't you just want more conversions to keep them on the platform versus them going to your website? They can log in on your website. Who cares? Let them sign up wherever. Money's money.

So I think the future of ads is one, you're going to have more in-app conversions because you're already seeing it with the Stripe API. I forgot what they were calling it, but they partnered up with Stripe, Shopify, and Google had partnered up to do that, right? Agentic Commerce. Yeah, Agentic Commerce, something ACP, Agentic Commerce Platform. That's what it was. Okay, so that's going to happen. But I think you're going to have a lot of things happening. We had talked about dynamic movies in the past, right? You might watch an Indian movie, I might watch a Chinese movie or whatever, but it's the same movie, but it's being personalized. I think that's going to happen with ads because Google has all of your data already. They have YouTube, they have everything. So maybe you're watching a YouTube video and then all of a sudden it's like instead of, you know how like when people watch soccer games or basketball games, like the ads are dynamic, right?

Yes.

It's going to be dynamic, but it's going to be a lot more tasteful. That's coming down the road, I think. And I think hardcore, you're going to see way more agentic ads because the agents, the speed of agents right now is growing parabolic. So we're going to see a lot.

Yeah, and when you think about ads, the best example of more of what you're going to see is kind of like YouTube TV. Because if I watch CNBC, which I do through YouTube TV, and someone else watches CNBC through YouTube TV, we're going to see different ads because they understand or they have data on us and they can do much better targeting. But in addition to that, what Eric and I are talking about is on the fly, they're going to modify the ad copy and the videos to adjust to the individual. So it's more personalized and that should help conversions go up as well.

Yep.

And on another note, I also was having a debate with people on what they think is going to be the winners in the AI space when it comes to these LLMs.

Who are you debating?

I was debating some people that work at financial companies and they're publicly traded, they're large.

Interesting. So what is quantified as a win?

Win being like, who's going to be the leaders? Just like how Google's the leader in search. They say, you know, Meta's the leader in social media, whether people agree with it or not. The data shows they are the leader, at least by revenue. I believe when it comes to enterprise, I don't think Claude is going to be the winner. I actually think in the long run it'll be Google, Or Microsoft in the long run, not short run. I'm not talking about the next year.

I'm talking about— 5 years?

Within 5, I would say, yeah, within 5 years, you know, or for sure within 10, I believe Gemini and Microsoft are going to be the leaders within enterprise. For consumer, I think it's going to vary based on generation. I think the younger generation is going to use Gemini way more than ChatGPT, and we're already seeing this. Did I give you the example of Ari and Jaden, my sister's kids? and how they don't use ChatGPT.

Keaton's kids?

Yeah.

No. Oh yeah, you did. You told me this a while back. Yeah, they laugh at you when you're like a boomer if you use ChatGPT.

Yeah, because they're like, why would you pay $20 a month? They're like, if we use our homework for ChatGPT, it cuts you off after a while.

Did you see the thing I shared to my Instagram where the guy's like, what a— pardon my language, but I shared a meme to like one of those skits, right? And the guy's like, you use ChatGPT? And he starts dancing. What a complete dumbass. So that is kind of how I feel about people who just use ChatGPT now. Uh-huh, and then— Sorry, I don't feel like you're a dumbass. I just feel like it's behind the times.

Yeah, I think Claude is doing some really cool stuff. I think Claude will take a big bite out of enterprise, but I think really quickly Microsoft and Google will catch up. When I say quickly, I'm talking about within a year or 2 years, and what they'll do is they'll just say, here you go, you already pay us for our corporate suite, it's free, and companies are going to be like, I could use Claude, which has been great, But this is costing me $5 million a year as a big company. Google's just offering this stuff for us for free. I'll take the free, and they can afford the losses.

Yeah, I think so. There's a couple things here. I think Anthropic right now has all the— like, they have the mindshare, they have all the momentum right now. They've surpassed OpenAI's revenue.

Yes.

Yeah, you saw that, right? And so it used to be OpenAI had all the mindshare. ChatGPT, ChatGPT. Yeah, $30 billion run rate. Yeah, it's insane. And it was just a couple months ago, it was like, what, nothing? I believe it was 9. It went from 6 to 9 to 30, okay? So I think there's gonna be a lot of players, but to your point, I think who's gonna win long-term, I would pick Google over Microsoft 'cause Google actually has the models and they have the— remember we talked about the entire stack? They have the TPUs, they have everything, right? And they have all the data too. So I'm like, I would pick Google and then I like Anthropic over OpenAI just from an execution standpoint, so.

Microsoft has the majority of the penetration for enterprise though.

They have the mindshare too when it comes to enterprise, so like, Maybe, but they're getting screwed over by OpenAI right now. They're fighting, who knows what's going to happen.

But forget if they get screwed over. I don't actually think Microsoft will get screwed over by OpenAI, and here's why. They got contracts.

So no matter what happens, they'll just sue and they'll figure out how to get their money.

And they made a statement too. I don't know if you saw it publicly. I think it was Satya or someone on their team. They're like, hey, we're not worried about getting litigious. We have our contracts, everything's in writing. We're not worried about it on our end. We feel very secure. Did you see this?

I didn't read this full article, but the Sam Altman on New York Times and people are just talking about how it is working with him and all that. And like, you know, obviously he's getting sued by Elon right now. And then like, you know, there's all these, and then there's like the employee that like supposedly like offed himself. Like, so anyway, there's a lot around there where I'm just like, eh, OpenAI as a company is a little shaky right now. But—

I think if Sam goes, I bet you Brett Taylor will take it over.

Which is good. From Sierra? Yeah.

I bet you he'll, they'll just buy Brett Taylor's company. He'll take it over. He's amazing operator.

He's strong.

He's a strong operator. He was supposed to be the CEO of Salesforce.

He's on Facebook's board, right?

Is he on Facebook's board?

He was on Facebook's board.

Twitter, I know he was on Twitter's board.

Yeah, so he's really strong investor, very strong operator.

Came from Google.

Yeah.

Did really well there. I think they bought his company.

He did Maps, I think.

Something like that. I know Salesforce bought one of his companies.

Yeah.

And he was supposed to be the CEO, and then he decided to go do his own thing.

Yeah, Sierra, which is, they're growing quickly. I think they're doing $175 or something like that. Okay, so we're talking about OpenAI. I think we might as well also talk about, How OpenAI paid $200 million for an 18-month-old podcast. So TBPN, which people thought it was Tech Bros Podcast Network, I thought it was that the whole time, but apparently it's called something else. So they paid $200 million for this podcast. I'm opening up the post right now on Instagram.

I didn't know it was $200 million. I saw the post because the post I saw when they did the announcement, they didn't disclose the price.

What did you think it was?

I had no idea.

Yeah. So Anyway, the key thing here is I'm not going to pull it up, but so $200 million. And the thinking here is that we can talk about this. OpenAI, they get a lot of press written about them, right? Not all of it's good press right now, especially that New York Times article, right? So the thinking here is like Andreessen Horowitz has said that, you know, they want to own the media, they want to own what's being said about them. So I think this is what OpenAI is trying to do. And for Sam Altman, it's probably like, okay, it's $200 million, it's probably a drop in the bucket versus all the other stuff that they have going on.

Uh-huh.

So he probably let the transaction through. Now, so they have to turn off all their ads now. This podcast last year did $5 million with 11 employees. This year it has like a $30 million run rate. That being said, so now it's gonna be their distribution channel or whatever. You know, you can argue it's a distraction, but maybe they have somewhat like a VP that's managing it. What do you think about this transaction?

So they already have so many eyeballs, I think it's a waste, but that's just my 2 cents. Also owned by them, I think your guests are gonna end up changing too and who's gonna want to be on it and not be on it. For example, why would Zuck want to continually be on a podcast owned by OpenAI. That's just my 2 cents. Maybe I'm wrong. You and I are both media companies in and of ourselves, right? Because we have audiences. I find that media, having eyeballs is really valuable, but owning the properties isn't always the best. And, you know, like, you know, we throw conferences all throughout the world and our own events. So we just came back from Canada and I was doing an event in Toronto. And I think our event is called Full Circle. I should know this, but I don't know it.

Unbelievable.

I showed up. I didn't even know we were having an event, but dude, I'm speaking sometimes like 4 times a week where it's just so hard to keep track. It's just like—

You went from no speaking to full speaking.

More than last year. It's just ridiculous. I think this week alone, I gave 5 speeches.

Wow. Including online?

No, not including online.

All in person?

All in person. It's becoming so much that like, I didn't even know we were throwing our own event. I know we throw our own event, but it's usually partnered with the Canadian Marketing Association. And this time they're just like, we want to throw our own event, like an NP Digital event. So what our team did, which I thought was really smart, there's a conference, a social media conference that I was speaking at the next day called Social Next. And I spoke at their Calgary event. I spoke at their Toronto event yesterday. They had really good ratings and feedback from me. The founder of it said, he's just like, hey, guess what? His name's Mike. He's like, did you know you were our highest rated speaker? He's like, of, you know, pretty much for the whole event, people were ecstatic for you. I think it was the whole event or the whole year for all their events. So he's ecstatic. And I didn't know that we partnered with him to throw our own event. And they sold tickets to it. I think they sold 180 tickets at $500 a pop. We also put money out of our pockets because we normally spend, call it $20,000, $25,000. This is in Canadian dollars, by the way, for on both ends, ticket prices and how much we spend. So let's call it, you know, I don't know how much the event did in profit, but my guess is it broke even based on everything I can see with the food and everything.

Which they usually do, by the way.

Yeah. So I was talking to my team how we'd end up doing this. I'm like, don't tell me we're getting in the conference business. And they said, no, we're not getting in conference business. SocialNex runs it for us. It's our branded event and they handle everything. It's for them to make profit or for them to lose money. We of course help them because we don't want them to lose money.

And for the leads to go to you.

Exactly. And for events, usually you end up losing money for the first few years and most people don't realize that. If you do a really good job, you can eventually make money. They're really happy. They want to work with us more. And I was like, yeah, we should roll this out on the West Coast of Canada too, because this conference organizer does both the East and the West Coast. And then I was like, we should do this in a lot of countries. So instead of us owning the conference, we don't want to own the conference. And I think my team made the right decision, but we're getting access to the media and the eyeballs. And it's kind of like ours because we're—

You're co-branded.

It's co-branded, but we don't have to deal with the logistics, the food or anything. And yes, eventually they'll make great profit from it. We don't care for the profit because that's not our core business. I don't think the money is in running media companies.

That's so smart. That's actually something a lot of people should do. Because there's a lot of these conference businesses that are hungry for distribution audience and they just want to make money. Whereas you just want the leads.

Yeah, we just want the leads.

To make more money, to be honest. Correct.

Because we believe our business model is better than running a conference.

Which is true. Okay, so I actually pulled up the deal here. So you got Zuck's face, Alex Karp's face from Palantir, and you got Satya Nadella's, right? So deal valued at $200 million. I'm sure there's some, maybe there's some stock, I don't know. And only 11 employees, and then $5 million ad revenue in 2025, on track for $30 million. Revenue per employee, assuming $30 million in sales, is greater than Apple's. I think that's a stupid comparison to even talk about that. Yeah.

$30 million versus, Do you want to know what Apple's revenue is?

Billions and billions? Uh, I think, is Apple getting close to $400 billion?

Oh dude, oh wow, what is it? Yeah, I was right, $416 billion in revenue.

Yeah, I'll take the other one. Yeah, so, okay, here's the thing. So look at this, they achieve 4,000 to 10,000 views per episode, which is not a lot. 257,000 average views per clip on X. The clips aren't marketing, the clips are the product. Okay, so average views on YouTube, 4K, which is Not much average live viewership, 7K. So the clips do really well for them, which is cool because X has a lot of, you know, tech folks hanging out there. So they are very much like in the middle of the culture, or you can call it the zeitgeist, I guess. Tech buy media is an old playbook. Microsoft plus NBC plus MSNBC equals MSNBC. Bloomberg sells terminals. Robinhood acquired MarketSnacks. I don't think a lot of these go anywhere. And I think in this case, sure, maybe it's a drop in the bucket, But OpenAI had just said, because it's code red right now, because Anthropic's whooping their butt, they said, we got to focus right now. We got to— we're going to— they said they're going to move over to the enterprise. I had talked to someone yesterday. This is a salesperson because we were talking about working with their company. And he said, we're on ChatGPT Enterprise right now. We were going to switch to Anthropic, which would've been like $5 million switch. But ChatGPT was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We have something coming out that's going to crush Cowork in the next month, which they probably aren't. But you can see they're losing a lot of like, Deals left and right.

I believe they really are losing a ton of deals right now.

Yep. So anyway, on the topic of X, Neil, I did something.

Let's go back really quickly to OpenAI. Did you see their marketing move that they just pulled off?

What'd they do?

They already have the eyeballs. They're losing a lot of people to Claude. So what did they just announce? Cheaper pricing and integration with Claude.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The integration with With, was it Claude Code? I think it's integrated with Claude Code. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is smart because you're being the pipes, right? And in marketing, if you can't win the mindshare, you can win a lot of people just on price. Like if your offer is just half the price or a third, a lot of people will just switch over.

Yeah, and so with OpenCLAW right now, by the way, Claude, Anthropic had shut down the, just to use the OAuth, which means that you can just use like a $200 subscription instead of paying like, $7,500 like I did last month. So they shut off the loophole. Now a lot of people are switching over to using Codex or ChatGPT 5.4, sorry, from OpenAI.

Wait, can you break down what you're talking about with the $7,500?

So what was happening with OpenCLAW was people were using Claude for it because Claude is still the best model to use OpenCLAW with, okay? But there was a loophole. You could actually tie in OpenCLAW with your Claude subscription, which is only $20 or $200 a month. And Anthropic will subsidize your $200 for— it's like $5,000 to $6,000 worth of tokens, okay? So people were abusing it that way, but that was costing Anthropic too much money. So they're like, we gotta shut that down.

Oh, so they closed the loophole.

We gotta shut that down. And when they shut that down, all the entire OpenCLAW community got mad, right? And so a lot of them are moving over to OpenAI's and they're just using their subscription, which OpenAI's okay with 'cause they own—

OpenCLAW.

They own OpenCLAW, right? So, but this week Claude, This is a misstep, I think. They launched their own version of managed agents, which is like an OpenCLAW competitor. It's a piece of crap right now. It'll probably get better, but you know, it's kind of trash, so.

Yeah.

Yeah, but net-net, I think Anthropic's doing a really good job of shipping. Their high-velocity shipping is a way of marketing because they have all these like clips that they're sharing on X and they're doing well. Google does a really good job too. Google makes like a Gemma account. They have like a Nano Banana account. They have all these accounts and they all like cross-promote each other and they get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

It's funny, no one really talks about Nano Banana anymore, but it's so great.

I love it. It's great. Yeah.

If you're not using it and you're a marketer, you're making a big mistake.

Yeah. So something I want to talk about. So Jack Dorsey wrote something about world intelligence.

Okay.

So I was reading this post and I was like, as I was reading this post, he talks about this concept of world intelligence where you have this one AI that's trained and integrated with all of your software and then your entire team can query this. And I'm reading it, I'm like, Dude, we have this already. So then I write a post on how you can deploy world intelligence to X. That post gets about 500,000 views on it. And what I realized, and I don't know what you're seeing, Neil, but a lot of companies have reached out to us after that, right? They're like, and we already have, we have Single Brain, right? Single Brain is this world intelligence.

Yeah.

And, you know, vibe-coded website or not, it drives leads, I'll tell you that much. So a couple of publicly traded multi-billion dollar companies reached out this week. And what I've learned from the AI needs from people is, everyone wants AI. 2, they have no idea what they want, okay? But number 3, they want it now, okay?

Yes.

So, but so everyone, to your point, like, as you were saying earlier, so one company's like, we want to do, we're working with a large agency holding company right now. You know, we want to do 1,000 ads a month. They're too slow. We want this for ads, okay? Another company's like, oh, we want the cold outbound piece of what you do with SingleBrain because it does end-to-end workflows, builds out cold emails, everything, right? Deal Resurrector. And so, I've just realized that one, everyone needs a single brain and that's kind of our wedge into everything. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this because Ramp, you know, the credit card company.

Uh-huh.

So they do this too. They have something called Glass, I think, and it's like their world intelligence for their internal team where they can query whatever they want. And then they have this thing called Sensei. It's like a big Japanese arc and Sensei will coach people and say, oh, you need these skills over here. Are you adding this? And then everyone has their own agent, right? So we're already doing that internally and My team is saying, one person said I'm 40% faster. One person onboarded himself using one of these agents. He's like, it's a 9 out of 10. And someone else yesterday was complaining to me saying, hey, hey, how do we fix this? I like, I think I'm dependent on this thing now. So I think this is where the world's going. And I think the fact that I understand more now why Jack Dorsey was confident cutting 40% of people.

So. I also think, and you're seeing this, he cut 40% of people because they just weren't growing. So they had, Kind of no choice.

2 things can exist in the same world.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm with you on that.

Yeah.

By the way, you know, my company is getting off of Amex. I was shocked.

Why?

Because I have an Amex credit card.

Wait, without you saying yes? You've been Amex hardcore your whole life.

I still have Amex.

Yeah, I know.

Personally and for my other companies.

Okay, so explain the story.

I have no idea. They just told me the other day that we're switching. I believe it's called Ram. It was— what's the other? There's 2 of them.

There's Ramp and Brex. You're probably switching to Ramp. You know why? Ramp has APIs and you can ask whatever you want. Dude, you will like this because I'm switching us to Ramp. I said, hey, enough of this bill.com crap. Okay. I'm not going to apply for bill.com API. I need an API so I can ask whatever I want and I can, I can, I can control all this spending stuff if I need to, if I need to, but I don't need to.

Yeah. But our team's switching everything to Ramp and I didn't ask why. They just said, hey, you're going to get a new credit card. Your Amex is no longer going to work. In the next 30 days, you will get a ramped credit card.

Are you still keeping your Black Card?

Uh, that's personal.

Okay.

Why would I get rid of that? I don't know. The perks are amazing.

Explain.

The perks?

Yeah. Your perks keep getting better. That's all I know.

The fees. I think we pay $20,000 a month for the Black Amex. Me, $5,000 a month. I mean, $5,000 a year. My wife's credit card, another $5,000 a year. And then the corporate cards, I have 2 other corporations that I own. That's another $5,000 each a year. So just in Amex fees, I'm not talking about, you know, like what I'm spending on the card. I'm talking about what Amex charges me for the cards on an annual basis. I believe I'm spending around $20,000.

Did they give you the, you know, that LAX airport thing where they like drive you around?

Yes, that's one of the biggest things that I use. So when I land in LAX, I don't have to go through security. Amex through the— it's called like a private shuttle or service or something like that.

Yeah.

They have it at certain airports where, you know, like when I landed from Hong Kong and I just got back from Canada, I don't use it for that. 'Cause when you, if you're a US citizen coming back from Canada, they have immigration when you're in Canada. So you, you, you go through it. So when you land in the US, you don't have to go through customs or anything. But when I was coming from Hong Kong, right when I landed, Instead of going through immigration, right when I exit the plane, right, I'm walking down off that off-ramp. There's someone there holding a sign with my name. I'm not talking about even going into the airport. I'm talking about just right when you—

Yeah, I know what you mean.

And they'd walk you down the stairs, put you in a car. They take you to a different place. There's a customs person there. If there's of course no one in line, it takes like 1 second. They get you through. A car picks me up and takes me back to my home. And guess what my cost was?

Zero.

Yes.

But that thing typically costs a lot per year. I think it was, was it like $200 grand a year or $100 grand a year?

For what?

For that service.

No, it's in the thousands per year, I believe, as a member. And then you got to pay per usage. And I have a lot of usage for free because you get usage for, you get X amount of usage for free per Black Amex card. So I have so many of them, I just cycle through them.

That's a good clip for you.

But that's one of the best perks that I get. There's another perk that I get that I've never used. I get free Equinox gym membership.

Yeah, you never go. Yeah.

I've never signed up for it.

You should just give it to me and sign me up for your family. I pay for it.

You pay for Equinox membership?

Yeah, $300 a month, $350. $350.

It's that expensive?

Yeah, because I use the one at the mall.

Yeah, but I can go to any Equinox for free.

Just Eric Patel.

We'll find out if I can use mine and hook it up for you, and I gladly will because I don't use it.

I'll take it. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so, okay, but here's the thing we should talk about, and then we can move on here. So RAMP is interesting to me because they ship— again, it's kind of like Anthropic— they ship so quickly. Talking about Glass, they're like, here's how we got our company AI-pilled, here's the software we use over here. You just— their velocity is so fast, and nobody talks about Brex anymore. Brex sold, right? And congratulations to the— Oh, Brex sold? Yeah.

It was like Mastercard or one of those companies bought them.

Yeah, so to me, like, sure, the founders probably made out well and congratulations to them, but in my mind, Brex was ahead and then Ramp was like, oh, another one? And then Ramp kicked their butt just by shipping. And I met the founders before, really nice guys.

New York-based.

I met them in Miami. So they have a house in Miami.

Of course, 'cause they don't want to pay state income tax.

There you go, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But no, it's a good card. I just won't switch because of the Amex perks. The biggest one is actually not, The security, it's actually buying plane tickets. I get half off.

Wait, what?

Yeah. The Business Centurion, you get half off when you use points. They'll give you 50% back.

Oh, it's like it was 50% on Platinum before and then they reduced it to 35% and they like cheapened that one. But yours stays the same. I think.

I get 50% back every time.

Are you talking about you're using, just buying it on points? Yeah.

They'll give me 50% back right away.

Yeah. For every flight, any flight. Uh-huh. That's, see, that's, that's good.

So when I look at the cost for the card versus how much I actually save, because I fly so much, the savings is way more than the fees that they're charging me.

Yeah, that's good. And then your, the way your points accrue, well, here's the problem. Your points would accrue from your personal spend. Yes. But your company spend was, was helping a lot with that in the past.

No, I never collected points from the corporate spend. We just do cashback.

Which is, which is good.

Because our corporate spend was high.

Yeah.

I just have so many points that I just don't use them.

So remember our late friend Brandon? So he brought this up a long time ago. Like, it's like getting cash back is better because if you're to sell your company later, you have a multiple on that cash.

I don't know about the multiple on the cash because when someone buys your company, they look at every single transaction and they can pick and choose which ones they want to accept. The reason we did cash back is there was a point where I had like 10, 11,000 or 10, 11 million Amex points and it was building really fast. I was stacking up more than a million points A month. And I was like, man, what am I doing with all these points? Because half the time when I travel, someone's paying for it. Actually, not even half, probably like 80 to 90% of the time I'm traveling, someone else is paying for the flight.

Yep.

So there's only so many times I'm using it. And then I fly so much, I accumulate so many airline miles that I don't even use it. Like when my wife booked the Disney cruise vacation, I was like, oh, $1,000 per ticket, one way to go from LA to Vancouver business class. I'm like, these fuel prices are causing plane tickets to be so expensive. I was like, eh, just use the United points. I didn't even care if it was a good deal or not. I just have so many points. I didn't want to pay the 4 grand personally.

Dude, I'll buy your points at a discount.

Yeah. So I don't really use them. And then I have Amex points. So I don't really use tons of those either. Yes, I do make enough money from my Amex points, you know, booking flights and stuff like that where it's worth the fees. But majority of the time, like if I'm flying, like I flew Emirates to India right before the war, it was almost $30,000 for a round trip. I didn't pay for that, right? So it's like, and I wouldn't pay for that. I'll go fly business or something that's way more cheaper.

Yeah.

But the points started accumulating. And what I found was when I started getting points, call it 10 years ago, you could redeem them and it was a really good deal. Now, because flights are so expensive, the points don't take you that far. I don't care to collect anymore. Once I'm done using all of mine, I'll cut down on my Amex cards because then I won't need as many, like the perks won't be as good. I'll keep only 3. I'll get rid of one of the corporation ones. Actually, I should do that now. I don't know why I don't. And that outside of that, you know, I'll just get cash back for everything because the ROI is better if you just get money versus the points.

So, well, we'll end it with this. I think if you have a surplus of points, don't be an idiot like me. I remember that flight to Dubai when we flew Emirates first class. I was stupid. I could have gotten that flight for 400,000 points. Instead, I spent like 2 million or 2.2 million or something like that. Right. But My point is everyone needs a points dealer. So I actually have a points dealer now that all he does is focus on optimizing points. Okay. I can intro you to him. You tell me why you started.

I wish you told me before you did that. I could have told you just, just book it with points.

I did book it with points.

No, not points. The transfer to Emirates.

Yeah. I didn't, I think I, I think I knew about it, but I was too lazy to do it, but it cost me 1.6 million points or 1.8 million points. But my point is, if you have a points dealer, all they do is say, okay, how many points do you have? Where are you trying to go? Okay. I got it. He, he spends all the time doing it and you pay him what? $100 to do the work.

Yeah. But the problem now with Emirates, when you transfer points, because I booked my parents' tickets to India, uh, when you transfer it to there, a lot of times though, you'll use the points and they expect you to pay half with cash. So like the deals overall of just using points to book any type of airline, whether it's through your credit card or with the airline, they're terrible. It's not great anymore. Just take your cash.

Do you think they're terrible right now because of the war or?

No, they've been terrible for years. That's why I stopped trying to collect points. The reason I still collect points on Amex is because I, without getting into it, my personal credit card bills aren't the lowest.

You've already made this public before.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay. All right. So let's continue on here. So Neil, I'm sure you've seen this already, but I think it's worth talking about this. So this guy created 800 fake doctors to generate $1.8 billion in revenue with one employee. Okay. So this guy, Matthew Gallagher.

Okay.

So he made 800+ Facebook accounts for fake doctors to advertise on Facebook and went on to build a GLP-1 telehealth company with just $20,000 to start with, AI, and only one full-time teammate, his brother. So generated $401 million in 2025 and could reach $1.8 billion in 2026. So this is the guy over here. And then these are all the ads that he's running. I don't think so. I mean, this GLP-1 that he's doing, a lot of people are doing it. They're basically like affiliates for this GLP-1 company and he's just going hard on the doctors. And he was responding to this. He was saying like a lot of people do this. So I don't know if that's okay. He says a lot of people do it. I don't know if it's okay.

I don't think that's okay.

Creating fake doctor profiles. Yeah.

Typically when you can make money in marketing that fast, something's wrong.

Easy come, easy go.

Yes. And it's going to get shut down. So, but if you made your money really quickly, great for you. But me personally, I wouldn't want to do something unethical, like create fake doctor profiles.

I think we're going to see more, maybe not exactly like this business model, but I think we are going to start to see more one-person billion-dollar companies with one employee, like just because he used AI to write the code, which isn't really that sophisticated. Produce the website copy, generate the— I really think his main wedge was he pushed hard on AI ads piece because someone else on X responded saying, I'm in this space as well. Everyone knows this guy. He's just super aggressive with the ads. And that's what you need to do as an affiliate. You need to be hardcore. That's how the biggest affiliates win.

Yes, but you also have to be careful because if you're super aggressive, you can get sued too, because you're probably making claims and promises that you shouldn't be.

Yes. And so we're not saying you should do that, but I think we're saying Be aggressive and you'll be able to do well.

Or let me rephrase what Eric is really saying. He's not saying be aggressive from the aspect of creating false promises.

Yes, I do that.

He's saying be aggressive with AI and have it help you scale up faster.

Correct.

Sorry for interrupting.

No, no, no, you're fine. And speaking of, because we're talking about AI right now, have you seen— I've been reading these Coatue charts. I think it's worth it for— I'm like, I really like how they do their charts. They have their blog is just all these. You've seen these, right? Yeah. So, okay, this Coatue chart over here, those of you that can't see it, I'm going explain it. Neil can re-explain it as well. So if you look from 1900 to 1960, this is the adoption of the tractor.

Okay?

So the tractor decimated farm employment but led to the greatest expansion in US history.

Okay?

So when you look over here, you have 12 million agricultural workers in the beginning of 1900, and then manufacturing starts to take off. Okay? And then this guy Keynes, who's the economist, We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not have heard the name, but which they will hear a great deal in the years to come, namely technological unemployment. Okay? So the tractor becomes widespread in 1917. And then what happens is you see agriculture, the green line over here continues to go down all the way to 1970. So it goes from 12 million to 3.5 million, which is 2% of the workforce, from 41% to 2%. But what ends up happening, Neil? is employment actually goes up. So job displacement happens, okay, from this period, 1970 to 1940-ish, but it goes up over time, right? And that's the same thing with the bank, the ATM. The ATM, when it came out, people were like, oh my God, everyone's going to lose their jobs, blah, blah, blah. There's a period of time where like, sure, there's some job displacement, but after what happened, more banks opened, which created more employment. So I think short-term, yes, fear. Long-term, everything's going to be okay.

I'm with you. And I think Marc Andreessen talked about how he believes that we're going to see a massive boom because of AI. And I agree with that. We're seeing it actually create more employment opportunities than it did before. Yes, it's also reducing employment, but it's about how can you shift people from a job that can easily be replaced, retrain them, and put them into something else.

Here's what I'll say, Neil. This is just my observations. I will say that Everyone on my team's a good person, right? I will say the interns are completely cracked out right now. Okay, so the interns are extremely hardworking, all in on AI. Okay, that's one piece. The second piece is the engineers and the product people all in. Okay, when you talk to them about this stuff, they're just working around the clock. They are working until their eyes hurt, right? And so I actually think, so my, I have 2 NVIDIA DGX Sparks arriving today, so I'm gonna be working on that over the weekend. I think my token costs, even though I'm reducing it with this infrastructure, I think it's gonna go way higher 'cause everyone's starting to use it. like this. And so what's going to happen is I was doing the math. I'm like, man, maybe even 36 months out, I'm going to need the power of 336 H100s from NVIDIA. And by that time, it's going to be something else. But I'm just— this thing's called Jevons' paradox. When electricity came out, people started to use it more. Internet came out, people started to use it more and more. AI came out, people are going to want to use it more and more. So our costs, I think it's going to skyrocket. It might even be equal to or more than our headcount costs. Yeah. Have you mapped that out yet for your company?

No.

I'm sure your people have.

They may have. I have no idea, honestly, if they mapped it out or not.

Yeah.

I just, dude, it's just fascinating on how many things are changing so fast. Like you're, we're coming to an inflection point where AI is really useful in corporations because of agents. Everyone talked about agents and how they're going to change consumers. And oh, they're going to shop for you and do all this stuff. I think the big revolution with agents is not going to be the consumer side. I actually think it's going to be the corporate side. On the consumer side, yeah, people want an agent to be like their little mini assistant. But on the corporation side, I think it's just going to change the world on how businesses do work. But the hard part that we're seeing everywhere we go, dude, everyone wants to move 10 times faster now. We're not seeing people talk too much about like, hey, how do we cut costs? They're talking about we need to do 10x more.

Yeah.

And that's the mentality that I think is the correct approach.

That's the vibe. So like one of my friends messaged me, he's like, so I wasn't even telling him to buy anything. I was just telling him what we're working on. And all of a sudden he's like, the answer is yes, we need this. And so whoever you like, I think if you're working right now, you're like, man, there's not going to be that much opportunity. I'm telling you, the opportunity is going to be insane for everybody. I think a lot of people are going to win. And I just, by the way, I've been mapping out these charts, Neil, check this out. So Here's the infrastructure scale. Check this out, Neil. So this is the infrastructure requirements for Single Brain. If we experience hypergrowth, it goes like this in terms of how much infrastructure we need in the next 36 months. Aggressive is like this blue line over here. Conservative is like, it still goes up, but this shows how many H100 nodes I'm going to need. And by that time, it's going to be something else because the chips are advancing so quickly. We're probably going to rent this infrastructure and you're probably going to have to rent. Which is why I'm like, oh man, maybe we should buy CoreWeave stock. Yeah. Not financial advice, but they have all the infrastructure. I think a lot of people are going to be renting this stuff.

Yes. Sorry, my bad. Someone was texting me. They're like, you jacked a client from me. And I was like, I'm like, I don't know what client I jacked from you. I'm sorry. We have like a ton of people in our company.

That's— do I know this person? Yeah, you know them and I know them and they're a good friend. Oh, are they in Orange County?

Yeah, they're in Orange County. And I'm like, I didn't jack a client from you. I'm like, dude, I don't know who the heck reaches out to me.

Yep.

So, but yeah, I was like, what can I do?

What can you do?

I can't. It's like, this is what happens when you have a company and people reach out and then like I get blamed for jacking a client when I didn't even—

Oh, that means it's okay for me to poach from Neil. Just kidding. Just kidding.

No, dude, do whatever works for your business.

No, I don't do that. That's screwed up. Remember, we have, we know someone that has done that to you multiple times. And that's not cool because this person came to you for advice and what you said— That was employees. Yeah.

No, no, but this person didn't. He's pissed off that I took his client.

I know, but I kind of look at them in similar veins, right? Like you just don't do that. But like in your case, like this is not something you were like aware of. Like if you were aware of, you wouldn't have done it. This person willingly did it to you on the employee side, right?

Yes.

So yeah, but by the way, this is, this is maybe rosy, but it shows how revenue scales and infrastructure scales. The revenue is the blue. So it scales a lot faster than the infrastructure costs. So I'll pay for this all day. So yeah. Anyway, you can pick up.

I'm just hoping all these costs start going down because we're starting to see our financial bills or, you know, we had an internal meeting about reducing our AI costs.

Like it's getting out of hand, but why would you reduce it if you're paying for intelligence that can do more for you and the costs are going to continue to come down?

Not necessarily. Just because AI is going to be more efficient and just because the cost for using these platforms and technology is going to come down, there's efficient ways to use it and there's inefficient ways to use it.

That you should reduce.

Yes. And when we look at how some of our team members are using it, there's much more efficient ways where they can be using it and your costs go down drastically. Like, dude, you know this, there's a lot of things you can do on-premise on your own machines or buy machines, and it's just way cheaper than paying some of these guys money. So it's just like, Okay, do we want to end up putting in all this effort to set up our own machines? And I'm like, yes, because we're spending so much money on a monthly basis. I'm like, the recuperation time is not years. It's really quick, like a month or two. This is like, just pay for this.

I'll explain it this way. Like, so here's how we save on AI right now. So the way we save on AI is 15% is Ferrari cost. Okay, so you have Ferrari models, which is like the frontier models. And then the other 85% is Honda Accord budget. Okay, so that's where you like, that's a daily beater that you use to go get your groceries or whatever. So most of the time your people are asking like normal questions, like basic queries, like going back and forth. Maybe sometimes I might ask stupid questions. That goes in 85%. The 15%, the Ferrari budget, that goes into you actually having the model think for you and code for you. Okay, and that's how our infrastructure is, like the cost is breaking down right now.

Yeah.

And you might use tools like OpenRouter to route to the right model and that'll save you more on cost. They'll charge you like 5% or something. That's pretty good. But also, you know what you can do with your model? Here's the hack. If you tell your model to speak like a caveman, that saves you a lot on costs. So it was like, me code this now, me need this. I'm not even joking. Like it cuts down to like 50 to 70% on costs. I'm not even joking. Yeah, it probably is.

I haven't actually looked at the breakdown, but it probably really is.

Yeah.

And then what do you think of the outputs? I don't think people are getting the outputs they really want, but they're burning the money.

Oh, here, I have an example. So there's this gal, Claire Vo, that shares this on her Twitter. So her OpenCLaw is full caveman right now. So here, check this out. Oh my God, she tweets a lot. Okay, here we go. Check this out. Need find files. Need maybe scripts in another dir hidden, directory hidden, grep. Need locate script, maybe grep with find plus grep. Need likely there's another script for mention monitor generating worth engaging. Maybe system uses xsearch. Search worth engaging?

What we're starting to analyze on our end is how much are people using internally? What's the output that they're getting and how much of the output do they actually use? Because there's a big problem right now, at least what we're seeing in marketing departments. Yes, people are using AI. Yes, there are some efficiencies to be had and you can say you can save on employees or whatever, but you're paying these LLMs and it's not cheap. And what you're finding is people are using them for whatever they want. And a lot of the stuff that they're using AI for, A, they may have not needed to use in the first place, and B, the outputs that they were created, they aren't using it because they weren't happy with it. But sometimes they are using it, sometimes they're not. So if you start looking at the wastage and how much money you're spending on that, it's adding up for like big companies to be millions of dollars a year. And you know me, I go through credit card statements line item by line item and expenses. And I'm like, dude, there's just waste. How do we cut the waste?

Dude, the good news now is we started getting paid for a sponsorship. So that's why you're not getting bills for a while. So for this stuff.

We have been for a while now.

No, they just started paying. We just got the first payment on that one.

Oh, but we were doing it for a while. We just started receiving the checks is what you're saying. But before then, Dude, we had sponsors for a while. Did she ever pay up on all the other stuff or did the other company ever pay up on the other stuff?

We didn't get that much. It was like, it came over to cover our costs. We didn't get a lot. We got like, like she'd, she would send us, uh, like, uh, payments for like $10 sometimes.

Like, but I thought we were doing all these sponsorships and she's like, look at all these contracts that I got.

We were declining a lot. We just didn't want to do these things. Yeah, it was stupid. So, but we did, like, we did cover all of our costs going through her. We didn't make a lot though. Which is why we came off of it.

It was a terrible deal because her people promised the world and they didn't deliver on much.

Here's what I'll say about that, then I want to come back to what you're saying too, and I'm starting to forget what you're going to say too, but like, what were you just talking about before I cover that?

AI costs.

Okay, so we'll come back to AI costs. So the partnership, so what had happened, Neil, was I was talking to a bunch of people and a lot of people had a lot of followers, and even when I talked to the HubSpot team, that team, like when they heard about this team, they're like, oh, Like, I'm like, why are you guys reacting like that? It's like, it's not good to work with. And everybody I've talked to is like, it's not good to work with these people. So we tried it, didn't work out. We have our own experiences, but we'll leave it at that. So AI costs. So on the AI cost side, what we're doing is one of— because we're putting everything into Nemo Claw, right? Which is the enterprise-grade version of OpenClaw. And we're saying, okay, we want the agents to help with performance intelligence, which is where it will coach people, okay? It will see how they're using it, how they're asking questions, how often they're asking questions, how it's getting coaching and all that, and how productive they're being with this in general, right? So, you know, in my mind, I'm like, okay, if you have this world intelligence, this single brain, and I think every company needs a single brain, if you have the single brain, it understands the entire company, all the goals, and it works with every single person, it coaches them up as well, then everyone should grow. And then also it's like, okay, based on how you're working with all these people, in what ways are we using this in a stupid way, and how do we save on costs? And then you can have the agent itself, improve on saving you money. That's how I look at it because I'm constantly asking it. There's a command, Neil, called /cost. You would run this all the time. It just tells you how you're spending your money and how to optimize it. Yeah.

I didn't know Nemo Cloud was out already. The NVIDIA one. It's already out.

Yeah.

When did it come out?

Like a month?

Like, is that a month ago?

When he released it, it was already like coming out.

Oh, got it. I heard the announcement. I didn't know that it was already out.

Yeah. So that's why I have NVIDIA infrastructure. I'm like, oh crap, I need to buy a lot more of these DGXs.

Nvidia's just, their chips are so expensive.

Yeah. So I just, for 2 of them for myself, it costs 10 grand for, and here's the crazy thing, Neil, these DGX Sparks originally they were $3,900. Now they're $4,700. So I think the pricing on these is going to continue to go up over time.

Yes. I think they're going to go up over time. I think you're going to continually see costs go up.

And it's the weirdest thing to me, Neil, because when I was 9 years old, I bought an Nvidia chip. I bought a GeForce for my computer because This is what during the internet boom and during the gaming boom. Okay. 30 years later, I find myself buying Nvidia chips again during another boom. Yeah. So everything kind of comes full circle. Yeah.

So what else do we have on— oh, the 4 levels of AI marketing. I was curious on this one. I haven't read this one yet.

So this one is from Anthropic's single employee. Remember they had that single growth marketer? So he has mapped out the 4 levels of AI marketing use. So most people sit at level 1. automating what they already do. So level 1, Neil, automate what you already do. So reporting, copy, data pulls, like using it at a pretty rudimentary level. That's level 1.

Yeah.

Level 2 is you use AI as a thinking partner where it's better than you.

Okay.

So you might ask about tax situations or tax laws. I might ask about those as well, right? Or I might ask about, you know, certain implications around doing work, right? Level 3 is do work that was below the ROI threshold before. So an example of that might be, Performance intelligence, which I just mentioned. Like it's too much work to have to say, "Oh Neil, how did you? What questions did you ask? Say how'd you work? How'd you use your token? Say da da da da da. You couldn't do that before. This work is now all doable, right? A lot of these edge case scenarios you can do now. Level four: Build custom tools only you would ever build. Okay, so level three is work that never existed before. So stuff nobody did because the manual cost was never worth it. So mining negative keywords across every ad group, checking your full site for broken links daily. Same logic applies to content research, QA, competitor monitoring, and work that. existed in theory, but nobody had the hours for, which is kind of how we're, we're using our thing for. Level 4, which we just talked about, is where the ROI compounds. So there are hundreds of AI marketing skills and plugins floating around GitHub right now. Most of them work in theory, but fall apart in practice because they're built for general use cases, not your case. Your business has specific data, specific workflows, specific edge cases that no generic tool will ever cover. The people building custom tools around their own problems are the ones pulling ahead. Which is similar to what Ramp is doing with Glass. They don't want to use any off-the-shelf software. They're building it for their solution. Their single brain version is that we have our own single brain version and then we're working on selling that. But I think every company has their own institutional AI that they need to have.

I believe level 1, the automate what you already do, reporting, copying, data pulls, etc., I don't think people will be using the LLMs directly for that. I believe they're going to start using most of the software companies for that because it'll just be cheaper and more efficient.

I think they're going to be using a lot of these Chinese models, I'll tell you that much. So the Chinese models are really good.

And they're really cost-effective.

Quinn, Kimmy, uh, they're all amazing. Gemma, even from Google, Gemma's amazing. You can run it on like a crap computer and it's amazing.

Yeah, but I, I really do believe people are just going to pay for the software solutions.

Yeah.

Because some of these software solutions are like $10, $15 a month or even freemium. And it's just cheaper to do that because they'll perfect it. for that specific task or those marketing functions that you have. And it's just easier than you having someone internally using AI to do it and maintaining it and making sure it's doing it accurately. Did you see the Alibaba news, how they're funding a real-world version of AI?

No.

So Alibaba, I believe, funded $200-something million round with a Chinese AI company where it's deciphering what's happening in real world and videos and all of that kind of stuff. to make AI way more sophisticated. So instead of just text-based, it's trying to analyze real-world stuff based on how we interact as humans. Because the way you read text is very different than how a human interacts with each other in person or through video.

Yeah, dude, this is funny. Okay, so you're talking about this, right? Like, you just got me to think about how crazy people— I'm Chinese, right? So look, so people in China, they're all lining up in public For OpenCLAW, to learn OpenCLAW. I don't see any of that happening in America. Where's that happening right now? Right? Like, this is like embedded into our culture. It's like, oh, if you're gonna make money for it, we're gonna line up for this stuff.

What's interesting is the narrative in the US is there's gonna be a lot of job cuts. AI is gonna create a lot of displacement. AI is bad.

It's so negative. Yes.

Yeah. In China, I've seen, and all the articles I've read, it's actually a very positive sentiment. People don't worry about job displacement. They worry about, hey, how can I learn all this stuff and adapt so then that way I can be better for the future?

So let me give you the numbers here, Neil, because we like numbers, right? So Chinese public sentiment towards AI is significantly more optimistic and trusting compared to the US. What do you think the number is percentage-wise optimism in China?

90-plus percent.

Close, 80%. That's like having pocket aces, okay? You're good, right? Now, what do you think it is in the US?

10%.

35%. Because look, you and I are pretty— I think Noah's pretty optimistic about it too. I am optimistic. I'm like short-term doomer, long-term optimistic, right? Which is like, a lot of it's politicized here. It shouldn't be politicized. This is like intelligence in your hands.

Wait, you know, Noah, this just made me think. You have a business where you pay people to help you create content. Why don't you just use AI and have him—

How could you not have thought about this already?

And AI just create the content. No, no, for him, for his business.

I know, I know, but how could— this is obvious to me like in the beginning.

Yeah, but he's not doing it.

The difference is that the customers don't want that. They don't want AI.

Really?

Micah, we had to get a whole new set of customers. See, this is like our customers that want manual content only. Human-generated content. Human-generated content.

Yeah. So it's just, yeah, it's a future path, but it's—

I think it depends on the user because there are customers, there's a .ai for that with the word. Okay. And they do well, right? Yeah, I think it depends, Neil. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can see it. We work with a lot of companies and even my own company, I don't want AI content for my own business.

Dude, look at this. And then I'm going to move over to the next thing. So look, they're literally in the park. Okay. You have people in China in the park. They're all like huddled over like these laptops. People are on their phones. They're all trying to learn OpenCL. I bet you this is during the weekend too.

How do you beat this? Society-wise, it's really tough. They're just, majority of people here that I've met are not that hungry, sadly.

I bet you they're like this in India too. Your, your people.

Yeah.

Real quick, if acquiring customers has been a struggle for you and you are trying to figure out how AEO works, answer engine optimization, or the new version of SEO, how paid works, how all this AI stuff is going to play into your customer acquisition strategy, then check out my ad agency, Single Grain. It's singlegrain.com. And if it looks like it's a good fit, we'll help you with a free marketing plan. So again, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Anyway, okay, so check this out. So the Anthropic person just mentioned GitHub repos, okay? So I did this for fun, Neil. I went to my OpenClaw. I was like, hey, look, all the cool stuff that we do from like an AI marketing standpoint, can you just make me a repo? So I threw up this GitHub repo over here. It's called AI Marketing Skills. If you go to singlegrain.com/skills, it's free, completely free. I have 1,700 stars on it. I didn't even know what that means before, right? 1,700 stars. And I have all these, these, I have like an Elon Musk skill where it helps you question, delete, simplify, speed up, automate things. I have a deal revival thing. It's all the things that I use and I just put it out there. I even have the finance skill that saved me $500 grand in here. It's all in here. So I think this is a nice way to market because this drove leads too. Because what I do at the end of them is there's like a call to action for like Single Grain and all the things that we have down here, right? You can like, you can collect emails if you want. I'm not going to go that far, but I do constantly remind people, hey, there's an updated version. Can you give us feedback on it? Whatever. And we can see what people are using. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this, this GitHub marketing.

Yeah, I think we're going to see a ton more of this. And, you know, if you look at GitHub, it's an amazing place to go to get access to what companies are doing internally because a lot of them will share it. The interesting thing was, was it Claude or someone, one of the companies had a lot of their stuff on their, that was released on a GitHub or something like that and it was made public.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And they didn't want to.

Their code, I thought that was a joke. I thought that was an April Fool's joke. That's what people said.

I didn't know if it was an April Fool's joke or not.

But they did, I did see them make someone else take the repo down. So you get DMCA takedown requests in GitHub. They take down things really quickly. They're owned by Microsoft.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I think it's just, you're going to have agentic marketing, you're going to have hyper-personalized marketing, hyper-personalized ads, you're going to have GitHub marketing, you know, all the tools are probably going to give a lot of it away for free and identify PQLs and then just have agents that sell them. Dude, I use this thing called Bordi. Have you heard of bordi.ai? I didn't tell you about this?

No.

Okay, so do this later. Okay, so I go to bordi.ai and what it does is it'll connect you with like, potential recruits or investors or co-founders. It's like one of those startup networking things, okay?

Yeah.

So I get on a discovery call with the AI just to see how good it is. Phenomenal. I'm like end to end, it was like a 20 to 25 minute call. It handled everything and literally it's putting me in touch with potential recruits as well and it's showing me all their LinkedIns and it's doing a really good job of it. And so again, if you want to use it for networking or anything, I think this is a new way of building your network with LinkedIn because that network's just going to get stronger and stronger.

Yeah.

But more than anything, That discovery call, because we have these voice agents right now that we used building Google Live 3.1, and I'm just like, dude, if these voice agents are that good already with a complex discovery call, sky's the limit.

Yes. Yeah.

Are you using any voice agents yet?

Our team does. I don't.

Yeah.

I just, I don't like the voice agents.

Try it later. Try it later. Like, I didn't expect it to be this good.

I'm like, I haven't found anyone that's good. The problem I'm seeing right now with all this stuff, and we're talking a little bit about it, dude, every company I go to, they're using so many of these AI tools, it's starting to create inefficiencies in their organization.

I'm going to send you this.

Especially in marketing.

I want you to try this later.

Yeah, I'll try it. But it's like people are trying so many tools, they're forgetting about what's actually driving ROI and growth. And I would recommend to anyone listening, you should not avoid testing out AI, You don't want to be spending all day using tools instead of focusing on what is driving you your ROI and letting your eye off the ball. Because if you've been in business for a while and you know your paid ads or certain things are driving certain amounts of revenue for you, the last thing you want to do is let your foot off the ball or let your eyes off the ball and focus on what's cool and sexy. And a great example of this is I was with a company that generates around 43% of their revenue, 43, 44% of their new revenue from affiliates. And they're telling me about all these cool AI tools that they're using and testing internally. And I was just like, okay, you make a lot of revenue through affiliates, right? They're like, yeah. How long have you been doing affiliate marketing for? They're like, 2 years now. I was like, oh, cool. How many people do you have internally that are managing your affiliate They're like, just 2? This is a big organization. I was like, instead of using all these cool AI tools, like for voice or content creation or whatnot, why don't you focus on using AI tools to help you scale out your affiliate program from more creatives to more outreach to following up, maintaining relationships? AI tools are great, but if you're using them on the wrong stuff, it's just like you're just going to end up wasting time. And that's what I see too many companies doing.

Mm-hmm.

They're not using the technology for the crap that's driving them ROI. They're using it for all this cool stuff that everyone's talking about instead of just focusing on the boring and ugly and just scaling it up more.

So we call that AI theater, right? Or AI compliance theater. So this is something we say. We say, guys, everything that you're building right now, it has to tie in with solving problems for your customers because we're a customer, we are a problem-solving machine. That's what we do. We're supposed to help our customers. So you can't build like a dashboard or whatever, and then that's theater, right? And so even when we think about like something like a boardie, for example, we think about our speed to lead when it comes to how quickly we get back to our customers or even missed opportunities we have for people visiting our website, like PQLs that we identify. So for us, this drives pipeline, which ties in with revenue. I will say in the beginning, maybe even 2, 3 years ago, like when all the new stuff was coming out, there's a lot of theater. I'm just testing everything. I think it's really important as you're doing this too. I literally have a skill in my OpenCLAW that says, hey, this isn't tied to your goals right now. This isn't going to help you make more money. This doesn't— This doesn't achieve the 4-to-1 ROI for all the things that you want to do. And so it'll push back on me, which is good.

No, that's great.

So you have to know how you work too. And like when you work with it more, by the way, I had it make a sheet for like how I work exactly. You should make one and then have it help you based on your strengths and your weaknesses.

For most of my stuff is phone calls and meetings and closing deals.

Maybe different for you, but like for me, I'm like, I'm in this all the time. So it just depends. Like for you, you might need one of those like little OpenAI, like the The pins, yeah. That are listening to you the whole time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't like that. I don't either, because it's privacy. Yeah, if someone sees it, they're like, I don't want to talk to you anymore. Yeah, yeah.

Dude, I was in a meeting with someone, this was months ago, and they're wearing that. I'm like, what is that? They're like, oh, this is AI, it helps me record everything. And I'm like, uh...

Like, that's not cool. Like, you didn't even ask me.

Yeah, and I was like, this is awkward. And they're like, yeah, it's really cool. I just use it for internal purposes. They're like, it just helps me keep track of everything.

I'm like, But it's not a normal conversation anymore.

No, it's not a normal conversation. Dude, what I said in the conversation, I don't say anything like gross or graphic or inappropriate.

No.

So I don't have to worry about any of that kind of stuff. But even when I'm talking about business, I'm not gonna, you know, break contracts and talk about stuff that I'm not supposed to talk about. It's just more so when someone's recording you, it just feels awkward. And you don't know how they're going to use it or abuse it or what they're going to do with it.

Maybe they'll come against you in the future.

Not just come against you, maybe they just start your voice and then trying to say, oh, look, Neil said this, and they just clip one little portion of it and it's taken out of context and then it just makes you look bad. And it's like, I don't want to be recorded.

I think there's a line, there's a line, there's a fine line with all these things. And I, I, I hope a lot of people aren't wearing those things because that would just, that would, I don't know, it would, I wouldn't say amplify, it would make the conversations a lot more, I don't know, dull.

So I have the same problem with the Meta glasses. I now notice so many more people wearing the Meta glasses with the 2 cameras.

Yeah.

On each side.

Yeah.

And I'm really careful when I talk around them.

So I was using the Meta glasses. The only time I use my Meta glasses, I was using it this morning. I was playing tennis with Yaniv, right? I only use it as my tennis coach. And then I dragged the file into Gemini. I said, you're the world's best tennis coach. What can I do better? That's the only reason I use it for. Only time I use it.

But that makes sense. But when I'm having a conversation with people, I don't like when people are wearing Meta glasses. That's just me.

Maybe other people— Can you tell that they're wearing it? Yeah, you can tell.

Because they're thicker.

Yeah.

Thicker. And then you have the camera and it's just like—

Yeah, yeah, I don't like that. Okay, so we have a few more to cover over here. I don't have any of the, I still have some of the classics up here. Let's pick some of the classics up here. You pick one.

All right, let's see. This podcast charges $4.7 million per mid-roll. I'm curious on this. What's the ROI for $4.7 million?

So this guy Evan Armstrong tweets this. Everyone talks about TBPM making $20 million on ads and then they just sold to OpenAI for $200 million, but no one talks about how Acquired FM is pricing their mid-roll $4.7 million. So here's Acquired is a, they're like a, let's just say like a business show. Okay. They talk about businesses. So check this out, Neil. Spring 2026, 4 episodes already sold out. Fall sold out. Spring 2027 sold out. It's like all of this sold out. So if you go all the way to fall 2029 season, mid-row is $4.7 million. So if you go to spring 2028, it's $2.9. Presenting is already sold out. So the presenting sponsorship, by the way, is $5.6 million.

Wow.

Yeah, and I think they're getting these conversions, 'cause I think people are realizing, I was stupid on this. I'm not going to say we were stupid, I was stupid on this, 'cause I was already listening to these things like Founders Acquired and all that. I should have just paid for all the ads in the very beginning, because anybody listening to this is smart, they're entrepreneurial, and they're probably decision makers. Like Jeff Bezos listens to The Founders Podcast.

Yeah, they have an amazing audience.

Yeah.

And they also have an event.

Acquired?

Yeah.

Yeah, Acquired has an event, but Founders is a different one. Founders is David Senra. He has a Founders podcast and now he has David, it's called David Senra Podcast. And he's had Michael Dell on it, James Dyson from it. He's had Marc Andreessen and all these people. So why does he get these people? 'Cause these people are learning machines.

Yeah, from my understanding, Acquired is much larger than, what's the other one called? The 4 Besties.

All In. All In?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think Acquired is quite a bit bigger.

I don't, you know, the thing is I don't listen to Acquired that much. I listen to All In a lot. I listen to Founders.

I'm the opposite. I listen to Acquired more.

You do? Did you listen to the Costco episode?

No.

I heard that one was one of the best ones.

I should check it out.

You should check it out. Yeah. So just so everyone knows, Acquired, they like to go, they like to do these deep dives on companies and there's a lot to learn from these. Like the Google one was really good. Yes. Microsoft was really good too.

The reason, the reason I like the Acquired podcast is for me, it's not really news. Like there's nothing wrong with the All-In podcast, but it's not like I'm listening to something on the All-In podcast. I'm like, okay, this is going to help me grow my business. Acquired, I actually feel I can listen, learn something, and then go and execute on that.

So this is worth talking about, I think, for a moment, and then I can pick one of the classics. So I like Acquired for that reason because it's historical context. How— yes, the Costco ones, like how did Costco start? Oh, actually it turns out he was the protégé of like Sam Walton's company. So he was part of Walmart before and then they had Price Club, right? right? Um, and Price Club, I think, is, is part of, uh, Walmart as well. Um, I think, I think Price Club is part of Costco. Sam's Club. Sam's Club. Sam's Club. Sorry, Sam's Club. Price Club is, is, uh, a different one, but Sam's Club is part of Walmart.

No, Price Club is Costco. I just Googled it.

But no, I was saying Sam's Club is Walmart.

Oh, I thought you were saying Price Club.

I did. I was wrong in the beginning, but I corrected it. So, um, but my point is you learn so much, like how hard it was to start Walmart initially. And then this guy, the way Costco started, like he, he he wasn't an entrepreneur before. He actually worked for Walmart and he kind of rose up the ranks and then eventually they're like, hey, let's go start this thing. And then, you know, this Costco took off. But my point of saying all this is that you learn from the nuggets and through these stories you figure out what you want to take and then what you should do, which is why I've liked these EO and YPO groups because you learn from other people's stories and then maybe you get some insights. Sometimes the stories suck from people.

Yeah.

So then, you know, questionable. But then founders, same thing too. You get to hear from, hey, I made this mistake over here, here's what I would do. And then you start to see the same patterns over and over and you're just like, I'm just going to keep repeating those patterns. Be curious and just do it for a long time, right? And yeah, you hear that over and over.

Are you going to renew your YPO membership? I'll take that as a no.

I've been thinking about that. So like, I will say one thing though, Neil, I promised to not do any more YPO events after I did the YPO Global Marketing Summit. I'm like, I'm not doing any more. I committed myself to do the YPO Global AI Summit in Istanbul. So, and I shouldn't have a problem like doing that one, but like that's just me wanting to give back and provide back. But yeah, I don't know is the answer.

Yeah, I dropped out of YPO a long time ago.

You know that. You'll be back when you're older.

It depends who's in there.

You'll be back when you're in the higher— Yeah, the gold group.

Would I have to be 55 or 50?

You have to be 50, but they're decreasing the age.

Are they?

They're bringing the age down. Yeah.

To 45?

Uh-huh.

I'm still 5 years away from 45, technically roughly 4.

Your birthday's coming up.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Roughly 4.

In 13 days.

Yeah.

I only know that now because you ate the gelato during the event.

So, but yeah, no, but yeah, I've always found those groups, the best groups I've ever been part of are ones you don't pay and they tell you what they're doing from a marketing aspect or a business aspect, but the ones that you have to end up paying You get shoved with a lot of random people versus when you do your own thing, you can pick and choose and it's just better.

So here's what I'll say, Neil, and then we can move on to the next thing. So the group I've been in with like Syed and Yaniv, for example, we've had that since 2018. I've invited you before, right? But like, we don't pay for that, right? We organize it ourselves. And that's like a group I can see myself growing old with. Now, so there's that group and like, we have fun, we play basketball, we share stuff on business. That's great. Great. Now, then with YPO, I actually formed another group recently and this one's like all business and we're not like, I created this group myself and then we formed it. I did it with Syed as well. And we're just like, we just want to talk about business. We don't want to meet all the time, okay? And we don't want to, we're not going to party either. And this is what it is. Now, to your point, when I think about my EO group, which I was with for 7 years, Entrepreneurs Organization, this group, like I grew together with, And we were like brothers from the beginning. Okay. Now some other groups I've been with, I was kind of shoved in and it was a brand new group and like all they liked to do was party, which is okay, just not for me. So to your point, like that does happen, but you just have to be very picky about the group that you're in. I think once you join this Gold Group in YPO, like you're going to be like, it's good because it does feel like you're learning from people that are either at your level or probably a few steps ahead of you.

Yeah, no, the YPO Gold Group that I want to join, there's quite a few people in there that are much more than a few steps ahead of me. They're much more older in their career. They have grandkids and they're ready to retire. And they have a lot of stories, kind of like Costco, because there's some of the ones that are in the LA chapter. Some of them are like some of the richest people in the world. And it would be great to learn how they went from starting to growing and all the lessons they learned. Like that kind of stuff is valuable. That's why I like the Acquired podcast.

And honestly, when you talk to people like that, the way they look at business, it's like a game. They feel like they're playing a game and they feel like they're They're like living life, right? Whereas in some cases, when I talk to some people in these groups, right, they are— business is like an afterthought. They're like, why do you talk about business so much? Right? And that doesn't make sense to me because business is so fun. So anyway, let's pick one more here. So I got one.

I think this is our last one.

Yeah, this is our last one.

So let's pick this one over here.

One of the old ones over here. Why don't we just talk about, because we talked about how you shouldn't overuse tools, why don't we just talk about our, like, our favorite, our best AI tools? We'll do 7. I'll start first, okay?

Okay.

Okay, so these are 7 AI tools that are going to help you grow faster, okay? Number 1 on my end that I just started using is actually the one I talked about, Bordi.ai. The reason I like Bordi.ai is first time I've heard an end-to-end discovery call where I'm like, whoa, I can handle this. This can be good for customer service. This can be good for handling all of our calls that we can't, maybe tier 4, tier 3 leads that we just can't take. And we can also get to leads faster if they don't, they don't want to wait to talk to a human. They can just talk to this right now. And it's great for networking too, because you can find people, maybe you're looking for like a CMO or something like that. It will pair you up with exactly the people that you're looking for. And if you're looking for investors, co-founders, whatever, it's basically got this whole, it's like an AI networking tool. So I would go with boardy.ai first.

My number, so number 2 for me would be fin.ai. I went to the wrong Fin website. Don't go to fin.com, go to fin.ai. We've been using it for a while. It's really good. It saves you money. It helps you scale faster. It creates happier customers. You get more positive reviews, which then helps your GEO and SEO. But check it out because you're always going to get people who are asking questions. Fin just helps make not only the responses faster, but more consistent, and you pair it up with a human.

Cool. Number 3 is Hermes. So Hermes is another agent that's similar to OpenCLAW, but you pair Hermes with OpenCLAW, so you have 2 agents working together. Hermes can check the work of OpenCLAW and vice versa. And it just allows you to move a lot faster.

Number 4, we still use it a lot, Nano Banana. We think it's great. It's amazing on the creative side. I think a lot of people take it for granted, but we've seen massive ROI with campaigns using it. And just keep this in mind, the real leverage in paid advertising is creative.

Number 5 is Paperclip. So Paperclip, I just mentioned OpenClaw and Hermes, but you need something to manage all of your agents and manage all your work because it's easy for For me to work on something, I go watch TV and I forget what I'm working on. Maybe I want to come back and work on it 2, 3 days later. So Paperclip allows you to manage all your agents and make it a lot easier.

Number 6, HighLevel has an AI software that's similar to Lovable and it helps a lot with things like landing pages. We find that it works quite a bit better than Lovable, especially if you're trying to improve your conversion rate.

Yeah. So number 7, I'll go something that's Surprisingly, Manus is really good. So I was trying to figure out flight situations, or I even had to go through our CRM and just say, who should we follow up with again? And just did all the work. So if you don't want to go into OpenCLAW, you want an introduction to OpenCLAW, just use Manus. Meta owns them as well, and the product's continually getting better. Or you can use Manus, you can use GenSmart. Those are both cool. I look at both of these as introduction to OpenCLAW. If you want a secure version of OpenCLAW, use NemoCLAW, which is what we deploy for our clients right now. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, Make sure you subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Bye.