Meta Is Letting AI Do All the Ad Work, Elon vs Trump Online Drama, and Global Marketing Shifts

Do you want to talk about the Meta is letting AI do all the ad work now? Meta aims to fully automate ad creation using AI. So AI-powered advertising is part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the company's future. Let me give you a couple more things here. So AI-powered advertising is part of Meta chief Zuckerberg's grand vision for his company's evolution. Advertising makes up the bulk of Meta's business. It brought in more than 97% of overall revenue in 2024, and What he's basically saying here is in the not too distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they're trying to achieve, like selling or getting—

They just want to run everything.

A customer. Yeah. And the thing is, I think for someone like you or me or like the companies that we work with, they do want an agency helping them for a lot of these things. But if you're a small business, you would like to have a lot of these things done for you. And I think they might— that's kind of what his argument is. They're like, we'll just do it for you and just connect your bank account.

Yeah, but I already see a lot of small businesses using AI tools for the creative and letting Meta just run the ads, right? Because they already have AI that helps with a lot of stuff. And you want to know the number one problem when small businesses hit us up when they're using AI to do everything related to their ads?

It doesn't perform. It's off.

They're just like, we're losing money and we can't figure out how. Now I'm not saying paying a human is going to solve that because sometimes you pay a human and you just can't make it work because the offer is bad or the product's too expensive. Like I've had people come in and be like, we sell this kitty litter. It's such an amazing product.

And this is our closest competitor.

Our product is better because of A, B, and C reason. And I'm like, you're $400 for kitty litter and your closest competitor that has amazing reviews that people love is $100 or $50 or whatever.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I get you have these features, but let's actually survey people and figure out, do they want the features? And then you find out people don't really care for them. And I'm like, you're just trying to charge so much more. This is going to be a very hard sell. And we can run whatever the ads we want, but I'm like, this is a hard offer to make it work when you're pitching features that the market doesn't care about. But outside of that, what we find is with a lot of the AI for these ad platforms, they do optimize for your interests, but they also optimize for their interests. And having human intervention typically produces a higher ROI from what we see for most of our clients.

Yeah, I think, look, I, I, I do think inevitably marketing is going in this direction. We've talked about the future of marketing being one click. What I found interesting, so someone from my team earlier today shared this, but basically this is an ad here from Coach and Coach apparently, I think a Google rep probably sold them on their AI features and the Coach thing here says made with waste, coach.com made with waste. And so someone was just calling out that, hey, like you need someone to at least a human in the loop to check this stuff. You shouldn't just blindly believe it. So I think we're gonna get a lot of issues in the next couple years, But I think inevitably, like even you talking about it is about the offer and all these things, but most people don't even know how to create a good offer, right?

No.

So how do we skate to a direction where we're just doing a lot of these things for people? Like how do you create a really good offer? How do you do this? How do you do this? Eventually you'll get there. This is where I think we're not quite there yet, but I do think we need to prepare for the now and the future.

Yes. My team always talks about HAI, right? Human combined with AI.

Ah, I like that. HAI.

Yeah, and we believe that's the future. And that's why we think the pyramid is going to be upside down. You won't need as many people. You'll still need the talented execs that have the experience and stuff like that, but you won't need as many people doing grunt work.

That's why I tell my team—

You can just automate a lot.

Small teams, big businesses. That's why I'm so involved with hiring now. I'm actually driving down to OC on Monday to meet a recruit to just, you know, hopefully seal the deal there. But I'm so excited about like, it actually, when I ran that time report in Google Calendar, the one thing that has continue to compound month on month is my time spent on recruiting. And so like, it's good to know how your time is being used. Your calendar is not scheduled, so it wouldn't be helpful for you. But it's helpful for me. So okay, yeah. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows, we think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.

So I'm assuming people saw a lot of the drama from Elon saying, hey, the Epstein files haven't been released because Trump is on it.

It just started yesterday.

Did it? Yeah, it started yesterday. I was on a plane when I was, you know, reading it all. I bought the internet because I wanted to read. I was like, $20, this is worth it.

You would have bought it anyway.

No, I actually, a lot of times I don't buy the internet. Really?

Yeah. 'Cause it sucks.

It sucks. And it's $20. And when you're going over the ocean, just if they said, oh, we have Starlink, I'll be like, okay, sounds good, I'll buy it. But it's just so terrible for, and I know which planes it's going to be terrible on. So I tend to avoid purchasing it on the plane.

That's a good question for you. If a plane has Starlink, what is the upper bound of what you would pay?

How long of a flight?

14 hours.

$100, $200, $300. Exactly.

So there's a period of time where If you have Starlink on your plane, you can make a killing because I would easily pay $100, $200, $300 for that.

$1,000, I wouldn't. I think it's just $250. $250 out of you.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the hope that it comes down a lot.

Yeah. Because I look at it as like, if I get work done and things don't slow me down, it's worth it. But there's a certain point where you're just ripping me off.

I mean, even, okay. So that's a principle thing, right? Because even if you pay $1,000, you know, you're going to make way more off that $1,000.

But I just can't. Indian in me. And I don't mean to stereotype. I am Indian. I just can't pay it.

It's okay. The Chinese in me wouldn't pay for it either.

Dude, it was like today I paid a bill for LLC and it was $104 for one of my LLCs. And you know, they had a form, it was credit card and it autofills for me. And then I saw in parentheses 3% fee or e-check and you save 3%. I'm not going to pay the 3% fee. It took me probably extra like 5 minutes and it was a headache and I couldn't just automate it. I had to log in and takes me forever to log into bank accounts because of all the security stuff.

This is what we call not able to figure out the value of your time because how much is 1 minute of your time? Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Yeah, I just can't pay the 3 extra dollars or whatever it was for like—

But actually on the flip side of that, it's important to have these principles because it is how you do everything. And if you decide to cut corners in this area, you'll cut corners in other areas. So I think it's actually more important to keep the principles.

Yeah, but my sister has the same problem. We both have it selectively. Like, for example, when I was in San Francisco at her house, she has the nicest house in her neighborhood. She has VCs and other people who have homes in her neighborhood. No joke, the nicest house in her neighborhood. It's a community where there's HOA, so the outside looks, you know, the same. But if you walk in inside the house, you'd be like, what the heck? And how much money did she spend?

Yeah.

Right? And like, it straight up looks like from a really nice magazine. But I have the same problem of her in which some things I'll spend money on, other things I'll count a dollar and I'm just selectively cheap.

You know, another Indian, Ramit Sethi, talks about money dials, right? And so money dials mean you might spend, for me it's convenience.

I'll pay for conveni—

like the, my setup right now is super convenient, right? Where I live. You might, some people might want to pay for luxury. Some people might want to pay for experiences. Some people might want to pay for like, you have some things you would splurge on. So we all have that.

That's my point.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, that's true. We all have that.

Yours is homes. Yeah.

But going back to the Elon lesson, you know, he posted a lot of stuff online. Trump talked about contracts. Elon's like, okay, it's fine. Forget it. You don't need my Starship, or I forgot which Dragon thing capsule. I don't know all the names.

Yeah.

It was like, okay, you know, maybe I'll do it. I'll cool off. Yeah, sure. I'll keep it in there. And I get where Elon's going with this. I think he has mentality. I don't know him. I'm not in his head, but if I had to guess, one, he doesn't care for money. He's publicly stated that. And I genuinely believe that because he'll say stuff that causes his stock to tank and him lose billions of dollars and he really doesn't care. But 2, He also genuinely believes that if I build the best product like Starlink compared to my competitors, he's the one who got the astronauts down. Doesn't matter what you think or don't think. And when I say he, I'm talking about his company and the team. Yeah.

They went up there, brought the astronauts back when NASA couldn't do it.

Yeah.

Or Boeing couldn't do it.

Boeing or NASA or whoever.

Yeah.

I believe he looks at business as also, you can't threaten me. I'm the only option. And if you need this stuff, you have no choice but to pay me. But then if you want to talk about like the nuclear option, uh, one of the politicians, senator or congressman or someone, or congresswoman, or, you know, whoever it was, talked about, oh, we can just take over SpaceX if it is related to national security. And there's some clause in there that can allow— I don't think the US would ever go there. But the reason I put in this Elon and Trump topic, it's a lesson of what you shouldn't do online.

Yeah.

When you have reputational issues or people coming at you or disagreements, put your stuff all on the side, not on the internet. It's not the place to air your dirty laundry. I just think in most cases it's going to bite you in the butt versus help you out. You're just better off keeping your feuds and, you know, in business, whether it's legal issues or it's feuds or problems, you know, you see it on like social media where someone can badmouth a company or a product, you know, kill people with kindness. Yeah.

Don't put your The thing I'll say is I think the majority of people do believe that Elon's right. I literally looked at a poll from one of the reporters, Robert Scoble, I believe, and 73%, thousands of people voted for this, believe that Elon's right. And like his whole thing is, look, right on what? Right on just making sure that we don't add more to the deficit, right? Yeah, I believe that you pay more taxes. We all support that, right? I think to your point though, I think this could have been handled This could have been handled behind closed doors. And look, Neil and I, we're not politicians or anything, but I think if you have a feud with somebody, like we know someone close to us who, you know, there's someone attacking them online right now, and those things never end positively. And especially, by the way, when you have 2 powerful people with 2 powerful egos like that, it's just, they're just gonna keep going at each other and nobody's gonna give any way. The interesting thing in my mind, so yes, I agree, like, you know, let's just— They should keep it on the side. But When Elon said that he would decommission Dragon, I think one of the Dragon spaceships, one guy with like 200 followers on Twitter responded and was like, hey, this is not a good idea because you get like what you're doing for what you both are doing for the United States, whatever. Like it's helpful. And like, this is for national security, this is for the US, blah, blah, blah. And then Elon's like, that's good advice.

Well, no, he said cool off. You guys should just cool off for a few days and think about it. And you know, before you guys—

And so like, you never know, like some, some random person can just come and save the day, right? But hopefully in this situation, Cooler heads will prevail because I do think that Elon is net positive. He's just trying to help, right? And yes, no matter what you think about him, like he is trying to help.

I agree with the statement. Like, I don't want to pay more taxes. I think my tax dollars are misused in the first place and inefficiently used. But I hate to say this, I think we shouldn't get any tax breaks because we already have just too much debt. It's just going to screw up the future of the country. And I know this is a little extreme. When you look at the percentage of taxes generated from people who make $0 to $100,000 a year, it's actually pretty slim. I think they should just not charge them federal taxes and charge people like me and you more money because I think that'll help stimulate the economy because that money is just going to go straight up to being spent on businesses, groceries, products, cars, rent, et cetera, make their lives better.

Yeah.

And if we pay a little bit more, All right. I think that's okay. We can afford it. And I really do believe that'll help the lower class income class just make it, do better in life and be more comfortable, you know? And it's just, and I think that's a way to help stimulate the economy a little bit more. And at the same time, not add deficit, but I don't think they will do that because my opinion on that is probably really unfavorable for a lot of people in power.

I just remember one time that I kind of got into it with someone online. This is the only time actually. Actually, I do troll people in my YouTube comments. So like, I do that for fun. Like they'll say something and I'll call them something back. But that's for fun. But there's one guy that invited me to speak at an event, right? And then at the last minute, he's like, oh, the speaking slot's gone. And he changed me into like a panel, right? And then at the last minute, he uninvited me basically to the whole thing. Okay, I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna let that go. And then we actually had him speak on one of our virtual things during the pandemic when we used to get like a bunch of people together for like these little marketing sessions. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. That's part of the mastermind, right? And So he spoke once and then later we agreed to do something together. And then at the last minute he rug pulled me again and he's like, oh, it's just gonna be this instead. Oh, it's gonna be a panel again, panel again, right? It was solo and then it became a panel again, right?

Yep.

And so I'm like, man, this guy can't honor his word. So I like, for whatever reason, I was not having a good day, so I got pissed, right? And so like I basically called him out, but what did that do? Absolutely nothing. And in fact, We're not talking anymore. But my point of saying this is that it doesn't help to take these things online. We probably could have just settled it on the side and it probably would've been a net positive. So yeah, and I'm sure you've had many situations like this.

Yeah, no, totally.

And by the way, we should also talk about why you shouldn't clout chase either, because there's certain people that go after people.

Yes. But before we go to the clout chase, the one thing I want to talk about that I noticed with the Trump and Elon thing, when they're talking about all this stuff that's happening to economy, I get they don't want to add debt. We do marketing in so many countries that we see different patterns we're seeing. And the US has been slower to reduce rates. They haven't really cut down rates. The ECB, European Central Bank, reduced rates 8 times in the last 12 months. India, when the spot—

How about China? China too?

China just reduced because they're trying to stimulate the real estate market as well. India just reduced 0.5%. UK has been slowly reducing. Same, I believe, with Australia, Canada as well. So most markets are and they're trying to push things up to stimulate. The US isn't, but we're starting to see in the countries that have been reducing rates, our growth in marketing has actually been much better from getting new clients, clients spending more, them generating more revenue. We're starting to see upward momentum in marketing for the regions where we're seeing rate cuts.

You know, I think a lot of stuff ties in with global M2 money supply. So in the white line over here, you can see it's continuing to move up. Now it dropped for a little bit. And what happens is the S&P or Bitcoin, whatever tends to lag it. So the world is stimulating again. I think what's going to— I do think that we're going to have to drop rates relatively soon. What do you think about that?

I hope it happens earlier than Q4, but my guess is they probably will drop rates sometime in Q4 because of tariff stuff, right? Because they said specifically they want to wait and see. I'm hoping maybe Q3 if we're lucky, because we're pretty much almost done with Q2. Yeah.

So I think, look, your point here is that marketing is picking up in countries where rates are getting cut. And what is your foresight on the economy.

I think we won't see a better economy till at least in the United States, you're looking at more towards end of 2026.

End of 2026?

Yeah, because if they cut rates, they're not going to cut like 2, 3%, right? It's going to be much slower, gradual. And when they cut rates, we don't see the impact of it right away. I believe they say it takes like 6 months.

Yeah, I would say my prediction— so your prediction is end of 2026. My prediction is hopefully Beginning of 2026, things start to pick up again. Like when we say pick up, we mean, what do we mean by pick up? Do we mean like the economy's ripping?

Are you talking about just US economy or global economy?

Global economy.

I would say sometime in 2026 is— I don't, I don't think the economy is going to be ripping like it was during the COVID days.

2021. Yeah.

Yeah. But I think it's going to be in a much more steady growth-oriented, healthy way for private businesses. And the reason I say private businesses, a lot of government-owned businesses have been growing in headcount spending. A lot of private businesses have actually been Shrinking.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even the governments are shrinking. The, the, the—

At least now, because the IRS, 18,000 people.

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