OpenAI tempers hype with GPT-5-less DevDay, Social media's 2025 shift due to disinformation, & more

Did you see how OpenAI tempers expectations with less bombastic GPT-5, less Dev Day this fall? That was actually the headline from TechCrunch.

What? Go on.

They're pretty much tempering expectations, you know, and I, you know, Chat— or OpenAI and ChatGPT, they're going to continually make more and more amazing announcements. They're going to continually innovate and develop more great products, but It's— we've had so much rapid development. And dude, you know this just as every other entrepreneur, when something's newer, it's easier to continually release new products, have more cycles, releases, et cetera. But as the team starts growing, the company starts getting older, the code starts getting more bloated and older, uh, you start having things slow down quite a bit.

Yeah.

And people just keep expecting more and more from AI at such a fast pace. And it's just like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. It's evolved at a really rapid rate. It's continually going to evolve at a rapid pace. But people are just expecting announcement after announcement after, you know, expecting the next new revolutionary thing that they haven't seen yet. But on that note, funny enough, I think, and this is a prediction, I think social media will change in 2025 because of elections, policies, and disinformation.

It's disinformation everywhere. I mean, there's, you know, on X, there was, you know, the Olympics are happening right now. And, you know, there's this uproar about these 2 boxers, one's Algerian and one's Taiwanese actually, being males that are in a female sport. And actually, so everyone, there's this big uproar and each of these posts is getting millions and millions of impressions. Like, oh my God, look at the Olympics. They're letting males beat up females, right, in boxing. But the reality is—

J.K. Rowling posts about it too.

Yeah, yeah. And that got a lot of impressions. But the reality is, no, both of these people are actually female. Both boxers are actually born female, right? It's just, you know, they will not go into the medical stuff, but that is actually misinformation. And they're getting millions of views, right? And so to your point, I mean, a lot of stuff is, you know, we're talking about elections, we talk about Olympics, there's disinformation everywhere.

Dude, what was funny is on X, I saw a lot of posts of someone saying the X so-and-so of the, you know, some committee said that one of the boxers was a male.

Mm-hmm.

So then I copy and paste into Google, 'cause it kept showing up over and over. I'm like, why does this keep showing up in my feed? So I copy and paste it. All the search results were just X posts. And I was like, oh cool, where did this actually really come from? And I'm not saying someone's a male or a female. I haven't really looked into it or dug into it or anything like that. But the reason I think social media is going to change is if you're having all this misinformation and they're not flagging it, 'cause they all say, oh, there's community notes, or, oh, you know, on Instagram we do this, A lot of these guys are not actually flagging it, whether it's X, Instagram, Facebook.

These posts weren't actually flagged. And then the other thing too is I was actually triggered initially. I was like, oh my God, that's screwed up. Like, why are they letting males? Like, if I got triggered so quickly, imagine how many people, they're not looking deeper and they stay triggered that way, right? And then I did more research. I was like, oh no, they're actually females.

And it was something similar in the UK that's happening right now with all the riots.

Oh yeah.

There was someone who sadly murdered 3 children. I think it was 3 girls. And some of the posts on TikTok and X were saying that they're of a specific race. So then people came out, uh, and religion, they were saying their specific race and religion. People ended up coming out, starting to protest. The other side ended up protesting as well. And then all of a sudden the news and the police actually reported, no, they're not of that race and religion. This is what they actually represent. And a lot of people are protesting because of what they saw online. And I think this is going to affect marketing in 2 big ways. One, you're going to start seeing a lot less views on these social platforms. I think this, the polarizing content is actually causing traffic spikes and you're seeing it in the analytics and the reporting on some of these sites like SimilarWeb or Elon posting about it, about traffic spikes. I think you're going to start seeing these sites have less overall traffic. And 2, They're going to get fined a lot of money to stop doing this kind of stuff.

I think they're going to be regulated. I think this stuff needs to be regulated.

Totally agree. And I think this is going to cause a lot of corporations to slow roll their spend. You know, I was in a meeting with someone who is, I won't say where they are, what their company name is, but globally they're a top 10 spender in advertising. Literally a top 10 advertiser. Everyone knows the product that they sell. They actually have tons of products. And I was talking to one of the CMOs that—

Procter Gamble.

No, I'm not going to say who it is. But I was talking to the CMO who runs their European region, like all of Europe. And this person, I'm not going to say their gender because then you can start Googling it. This person was mentioning how they're going to slowly start weeding off some of these platforms because of this. And they don't want this negativity to, or this misinformation to impact their brand. And a lot of these corporations are jaded. As you see them starting to wean off some of these platforms, you're going to start seeing the CPCs substantially get cheaper and it's going to help SMBs. But that's what I really think is going to happen in social media in 2025. And these platforms are doing it to themselves. They choose not to regulate, adjust disinformation, or put community notes. Why? Because they're getting tons of traffic from it, but it's causing issues globally.

My guess is this stuff will be regulated in the next couple of years and your prediction will come true. But I do think after, we'll see where AI takes us with technology. But I think then it'll actually get to a spot where the community notes are, they can happen real time and quickly. They can verify things and maybe remove things quickly. So we'll see what happens because there's just too much money being made by these platforms. They need to protect their platforms. Um, I think they're all in a bad spot right now. Um, it's funny, I was telling Brad, but one of my— you talk about people polarizing content, right? So I had a polarizing piece of content published. It has like 2.5 million views on my Reels right now. And there's like 10,000 comments. It's men fighting women. It's like—

Wow.

Yeah, it's, it's all purely men versus women. And the women are like, you guys are misogynists. And the men are like, the men are like, you know, um, you know, I don't like your tone or whatever. Right. And it's just like, it's, That's, that's, that's how this stuff grows. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency. And we'll see you inside. But can we talk about something that's separate from marketing? This is a more general topic.

Sure, go for it. All right.

So, you know the UBI experiment, universal basic income?

Okay.

Did you read about how it failed?

I did not. I didn't know about the UBI experiment.

So, the UBI experiment, basically it was a test to see how people would behave if you gave them extra money versus not. And so, basically it says this tweet over here, the result of the largest American-controlled experiment in universal basic income, UBI, was released. You haven't heard about it because the findings are terrifyingly bad. So by the way, Andrew Yang campaigned on this, like, I'm going to give everyone like an extra $1,000 or whatever, right? And we kind of did this in COVID, the stimmy checks, right? So it was funded by the founders of ChatGPT. Oh, I didn't know that. So Sam Altman, I guess, presumably to mitigate the potential job losses anticipated through AI and AGI. So 1,100 randomized households making under $29,000 a year were given $1,000 per month for 3 years. Essentially, their income increased by 40%. The UBI participants lived in urban, suburban, and rural towns in Texas and Illinois. Result 1, UBI experiments ended— participants ended up earning $1,500 less despite being given $12,000 more annually. For every $1 received, total household income dropped by at least 21 cents. What do you think about that?

So they got more lazy and they just worked less because they were just given free money.

It seems so, but let's continue on here. So result 2, UBI participants stayed unemployed for an extra month compared to those unemployed in the control group. So you're saying they got lazier, right? Result 3, UBI participants worked less and there were no substantive changes in quality of employment. UBI participants did little to improve their education or training to improve their income. Result 4, UBI participants self-reported increased rates of disability to limit the work they can do. So 2 ways to look at these results. The American underclass is so worn down that when thrown a life preserver, they can only float rather than paddle to safety. UBI advocates will argue that $1,000 per month was not enough, or universal basic income and the collectivist derivatives are never enough. Work is intrinsically tied to human dignity, happiness, and progress. So in other words, it says over here, it gets a little political. According to Ronald Reagan when he accepted the 1980 GOP nomination, work and family are at the center of our lives. The foundation of our dignity as a free people. When we deprive people of what they have earned or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families. Ronald Reagan. Totally agree with that.

You want to know my solution to make it better for people who are making less money?

What?

I'm not an economist. I'm not a politician. So that's my disclaimer. I have no stats on data on this. You take a number, let's call it someone makes— a family makes under $200,000 and something or $300,000 or $150,000, whatever the number is. Anything under that amount, they pay zero taxes. All right. So you just get rid of their taxes. If you make their taxes lower and pretty much make it zero, it should be easier for them to buy food, spend money, and all that kind of stuff. The second thing is you take all the politicians, because a lot of them somehow, I don't know how their net worth on some of these people who are not president.

Nancy Pelosi?

I'm not going to speak out to any particular names. started increasing at like $50 million or $100 million, but who knows if they're actually even accurate based on these online sites.

Yeah.

And you take it and you say, you know what, as a politician, you're now getting a really amazing salary. Your salary is making up $4 or $5 million a year or $3 million a year. If you hit these milestones, you get an extra X million. If you hit these crazy milestones, you even get paid even more. They got to A, keep the people happy. B, they can't operate the country as a deficit and they got to cut the useless spending. Because if they cut the useless spending, They don't need as much and hopefully they can reallocate money for the common good, especially the people who are struggling more. That's my second thing. The third thing, you put a luxury tax on these rich people. If my buddy wants to buy a Bentley— How much tax? It depends. Let's say my home. I bought a home recently, right? I bought a home. I didn't need it. Charge me an extra tax on it. I'm gladly willing to pay more money on the purchase of that home just for that money to go towards people who need help or whatever it may be. They should tax the rich more, but not tax them more in which like, hey, your, your income is crazy high, just pay more taxes. I don't think that does any good. Tax them on their spending. And the reason I say that is when my income's good, what do I do? I just keep reinvesting back into the business and hire more, right?

Yep.

And people could say, well, that's an expense. Not necessarily, because depending on how you're investing, whether it's buying companies and things like that, and depending on your corporate structure, It's not all a write-off and you had to pay taxes on that money, even if you're buying another company and trying to create more jobs from it, right? But I think if they did those 3 things, they can run the country more efficiently. Well, first off, poor people would have access to more stuff because they have more money to spend, which would be great. People in office, if they weren't running things efficiently, they can't be reelected. And they're also getting paid a much better rate. So you would have, I think you would have a lot more talented people being like, wait, being a politician, I can make $5, $10 million a year. Well, why wouldn't I do this? This is a great career. And they'll do what's right for the country and people, cuz if they don't, it'll just be in writing that they can't ever be reelected again.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. Wanna talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So, if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So, singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. You know, so Warren Buffett said this. Warren Buffett, same deal. I was going to ask you this earlier. Should the rich be taxed more? And my opinion is yes. You know, again, when you're rich, what you do is you continue to reinvest the money, you continue to compound and it gets crazier and crazier over time too, right? Because your rates of return are generally better than average as well. So, it's just the law of large numbers. The other thing that he says is that if you're a politician, if the GDP doesn't grow, then you can't serve another term, right? And that'll quickly get people to shape up. Like, you have— you've thought through a little more, but the incentives should be aligned. The incentives are not aligned right now, which is why we're spending like crazy and we're fighting over stupid things.

Spending like drunken sailors.

Yeah. And then the other thing, like, our deficit is what, $34 trillion?

Something like that, yeah.

Right? Um, and then what, what percent do we pay? I don't know, 3%, 4% a year, something crazy, right? It's actually more than our annual defense budget. Um, and the other thing too is the— going back to the, you know, have you read the book Man's Search for Meaning?

No.

So it's about this guy, um, that lived in the concentration camps and he saw how the people that died versus the people that survived versus the people that died. The people that survived, the main thing that kept them around was that they had a purpose. So, you can give people all the money in the world, but if you don't give them a sense of purpose, they're still going to not be that happy or useful at the end of the day. And so, this doesn't seem like it worked out. I guarantee if you gave them more money, probably still wouldn't do much, right?

No.

You can't do that. You have to give people a sense of purpose and you have to give them a sense that they're feeling useful at the end of the day. So I would say those 3 things are top of mind for me.

Dude, and then they keep saying, oh, let's just tax the rich more. My tax rate is already around 50%. How much higher are you going to end up getting? I'm not asking for my tax rate to be lowered by any means. I just want the money to be used in a better way. If someone told me pay 5% more than I'm paying right now and everyone who couldn't afford health insurance got it for free and it really got it and their treatments were great, I would be happy with it.

There should be more accountability, but politicians are so focused on, you know, Their battles, their petty battles.

And then I would take the ultra-rich, which none of us really follow in, and they have a lot of unrealized gains with their stocks and stuff like that. That's fine. They shouldn't pay taxes on it. But if they want to borrow money and buy a yacht or a plane, tax them on that kind of stuff.

But guess who makes these laws?

Politicians.

Yeah. Who's funding the politicians?

Rich people.

The ultra-rich. Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard for this stuff to change.

It is. It's like, oh, you bought a $200 million yacht. You don't want to pay taxes. I get people borrowing money against their stock portfolio, but borrowing money to use it for personal use, like jets, yachts, cars—

They're borrowing just not to pay taxes.

Yeah, they're borrowing not to pay that kind of stuff. You should pay taxes. But if your stock went up to double or triple and you're not borrowing against it, you shouldn't pay tax on it because it can also go down backwards and really hurt people. Or if you're a private, Venture-funded startup. It's like, oh cool, I never made money. My company's now worth $200 million, but we don't make any money.

Yeah, yeah, you're underwater.

You're underwater. We're only worth $200 million because we did some AI hot startup, but we make $0 in revenue. They're betting on the future.

Yeah.

Oh, the government wants us to pay tax on these shares? You can't do that.

Yeah, I, I think you also get taxed on the markups too. When the VCs mark you up, you get taxed on it.

That's crazy. That's what they're trying to pass.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

But it's just ridiculous. But at the same time, the person who wants to buy a $200 million yacht, no, you should just sell your shares or pay taxes on that yacht. Whatever you want to do, just go collect the tax money from that person on their yacht.

Yep. All right guys, so that's it for today's episode. marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's our little community. In fact, Neil, do you want to come to the next session next week? Are you in town next week?

Depending what time I'm driving home, but yeah.

All right. Figure it out. So this is when Neil and I will jump in every now and then, every month or so, and we'll have guest speakers and all that. And you have an entire community of people all trying to grow. We're talking, we're talking 7, 8-figure agency owners, 6 figures as well. And yeah, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow.