Tesla's Flying Roadster DESTROYED Porsche's Supercar Launch

So on the screen right now, you can see the Tesla flying car, basically the Roadster, which took a long time to unveil, but it's using like these— it's using these like air thrusters basically to flip it around. And then you can see it flying upside down here. And, you know, there's all these like memes happening right now. Everyone's like, oh my God, this is crazy. And then, and then all these people, by the way, it's funny because all the people are saying, oh, Remember, like people are saying, oh, Elon is like a stupid billionaire. He doesn't do anything. Da da da. And then he does stuff like this, and you just can't argue with it, right? And so, anyway, he's not

an engineer.

Yeah, he's not an engineer. He doesn't understand physics. You know, da da da da da. And oh, it's the other people that do it. Okay, well, who hired those people, and who had the vision for this, right? But I just think this is crazy. And I looked at the stock price this morning. Did you look at it?

Last I checked, before market opened, but it wasn't moving much at all.

Yeah, I didn't—

1.1%. Not much at all.

Yeah, yeah, not a big one. But then you look at this one. So Porsche just came out with a car yesterday. They came out with their first supercar and they picked the absolute worst day to reveal it because it's the same day that the Roadster revealed itself.

I actually like the Porsche car. I think it looks pretty sick.

It looks really sick, but would you get it? I wouldn't get it. I'd rather have like a flying car. Like with your kids, what car would you rather play with? You probably You wouldn't fly it with your kids, but what would you do?

Well, first off, let's clarify this. You cannot actually get the Tesla flying car. That is invite only. So very few people are going to have it. Second off, Elon stated that, and to go back to your first question, I would actually get the Porsche. But Elon stated that, and I have a Model Y, so I do love Tesla. And I think the Model Y is a great car and it's very practical. Uh, Elon stated that people are going to think this is AI and fake and like, it's going to be so ridiculous. It was ridiculous. My problem with that Tesla Roadster is the same problem that I have with the Cybertruck. It's not practical. Like, forget the price point, whether he wants to charge $50 grand or $200 grand or $500 grand for the one that can fly or $1 million. It genuinely is not practical. One, it, you know, people are—

Let the McRory, bro. What the fuck? What the fuck? Yo, this thing invented infinite downforce. What the fuck?

Keep going, keep going. I want everyone to see this.

Yep. People are reacting, but the reality is, is when are you going to use all of these features? What I believe, and this is just my hypothesis, it can't really fly and hold you and take you from destination A to B in the air. There's not enough thrust in there. If there was, he would've said you can fly for 30 miles straight, you know what I mean? Or he would've done like for 20 minutes straight or whatever.

Anyway, I just had to show you guys that reaction.

You can't do that. So it's just like doing a backflip in a car or whatever. Like, this is cool. Just go on a roller coaster, do whatever you want, right? But It's just not practical for everyday use. I do believe in Tesla as a company. I think it's cool what they release. I prefer the Porsche design, which is why I would say I would choose a Porsche over the Tesla. And if I was getting a supercar, the one that— I forgot what this one's called again. Roadster, right?

No, the Tesla's a Roadster. Yes.

Yeah. The Roadster is not self-driving. I like Tesla because of the technology and the self-driving capability. You take away that, right? I don't need to do backflips in the car. No offense, Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, a lot of those other manufacturers, they've— and you have a Porsche— they've really fine-tuned the comfort of the car from the seats to the massage features, like all those little things that make it special. They've done, and they do an amazing job. Tesla doesn't do a great job at those kinds of things. They do a great job at the technology. If you can't actually use the flying technology on a daily basis because it's not practical and you're driving it yourself, for me, it's not a car I would buy. But if Tesla wanted to unveil humanoid robots that'll clean your house, mow your lawn, and all this, I would be the first one signing up and putting a deposit or even paying for it upfront, even if you had to wait 5 years. Because to me, that changes people's life. A car that flips upside down doesn't change people's life. Even the downward force, dude, like, when are you really going to use that?

So my take on this one is this. So one, most people aren't going to get the Roadster because it's a very expensive car. It's $250 grand plus, right? It's— right now it's invite only.

No, no, it's $50,000.

The Roadster.

It's $50,000 starting. Go to their website. Go to their website right now. It's $50,000.

Roadster price.

Roadster Performance is $50,000. 0 to 60, I think—

So, so the AI overview on Google says this, right? And I'm not saying this is right. So look at this. Estimated price of $200K. And then 4 hours ago, Tesla Roadster price, $250K tops, but the highest level, right? And Tesla's releasing 3 different versions and the cost reserve is—

Here, let me share my screen.

Just look at this over here. I have $50,000 to reserve.

Let me share my screen.

You have $50,000 performance today. What it takes to reserve on $250,000 is the thrust.

Performance reserve due today, due within 10 days is $50,000. The thrust—

To reserve it.

I thought you had to pay for the whole thing.

No, to reserve it. It's a privilege to reserve it.

Reservations are not, are not final until payment is received. Reservation is subject. If payment is not completed within 10 days, refunds or modifications will not be issued. I'm pretty sure you're paying for the whole thing upfront. It's $50,000 for the whole thing. No, it's—

I will— I don't think so. That's not how I'm reading this. And this is too nice to be only $50,000.

No, no, but the performance version doesn't have thrust.

Yeah, I don't— I just don't think it's $50,000. I don't think he's trying to make something affordable. I think he's trying to— it's a marketing stunt, in my opinion, right? Like, to me, you don't— to your point, like, I don't think you need— nobody needs thrust, right? But to show it off where everyone's like, oh my God, this and that, right? It's a marketing stunt. And I think he's done a great job with the marketing stunt. So while the Porsche might be a little more practical, I don't think it's practical either because it's a supercar. Um, but I just think it brings— he— it brings him into the conversation. It's a mindshare type of situation. That's what I think it is. And I know you're focused on the numbers right now, but I think that's a lesson for everyone. Sometimes you have to come out with a good start.

Yeah, and you are right, at least according to Google AI Overviews, which they're pulling from Tech Insider. The $50,000 performance version is an upfront reservation payment, typically broke down by a $5,000 initial card payment followed by a $45,000 wire in 10 days. Uh, they, they have not announced the actual price. So my other issue with this This is just my personal 2 cents. I don't think they're clear on the pricing. Like when you reserve some of the other cars, you at least know what you're going to pay in total. I thought you would actually know what you're getting yourself into, which kind of sucks, but it's fine. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't mind it at all. The reason I like the Porsche is, again, if I'm self-driving, you're not really going to use 0 to 60 in 1 second or 2 seconds or 3 seconds. Like I have the performance version of the Model Y. It's pretty fast. My 0 to 60 is usually like 8 or 10 seconds or 12 seconds because Los Angeles has traffic and it doesn't matter what time of the day you drive. It's very rare that you're not, you don't have the ability to drive fast, right?

Yep.

And I think the Porsche design, for me personally, I think it looks cooler, but I agree with you. I think Elon did an amazing marketing stunt. The reason the stock isn't moving is Most people don't care, um, at least the financial people. And the reason being is it's not practical for people to pay based on the pricing that you're saying and the internet's paying. And 2, it only fits 2 people. 3, people aren't going to use the features like a thruster. It's just like, I have a Maybach, you know, the Maybach SUVs.

Yep. Yep.

Right. My wife has one and mother-in-law has one. You know, they bounce, right?

Yep. I didn't know that, but I didn't even know you had 2 of them.

Uh-huh, I have 2. They're the same exact color too. They bounce and they have that feature, like, so when you're going off-roading, you can get rid of the sand. So some people use it like when they're driving up Rodeo Drive because they just drive slowly and the car just bounces because it's hydraulics. But like, no one really uses that feature. It's just coming back to, if people barely use that, who the heck is going to use a car that flips upside down? You know, like,

who's

going to use those features?

I'm just, I think my whole thing is I like the design of both the Porsche or the Roadster, right? So he has a good design team, a good engineering team, and just combining together. And then this is also a precursor to me that he's going to combine the 2 companies at some point. Yes. I remember when he did an All-In interview recently, he's like, oh yeah, you know, at some point, right? And like, yeah, he's for sure going to combine the companies. But this makes me even more bullish on the stuff that he's building with the Tesla or SpaceX. But look, I think it's a great marketing stunt. I think he has the mindshare right now. I think it's unfortunate for Porsche that they launched on the same day because they have more mindshare now. Now, Porsche will be more— I think Porsche will be fine. I mean, they didn't do well as a company this year, but I think he did a great job from a marketing standpoint. So that's what it is.

You know why Porsche didn't do well?

Well, I know the profitability is low. What happened? The economy's not doing well.

Economy's part of it, but the problem with Porsche is it stopped becoming as exclusive as a car. They started mass-producing a lot of different models. It wasn't as special, so they're going back to it. Nike has the same problem with Air Jordans. Now, Nike's Air Jordan brand was their flagship. You know what they did with Nike Air Jordans, right? Everyone has Air Jordans because they made them more affordable and they put Air Jordans on pretty much a lot of shoes and just mass-produced it. It went from people waiting in line to wanting Air Jordans to, oh, They're just putting the Air Jordan label on any type of Nike shoe and just mass-producing it. And it's all the way from really cheap to really expensive. And it made the brand lose the appeal. It doesn't mean that you can't recover, right? Louis Vuitton once had an issue in marketing and they eventually ended up fixing it. This is reversible, but these things take time.

You know what brand became cool again? Freaking Meta. I think Meta has become a cool brand again because Muse is great. I think Alexander Wang and then Mark Zuckerberg are doing the podcast circuit now. And they're like, they have a frontier model. Um, you know, Muse is great. You know, their VR glasses are coming out too. And I think from like a year ago, they weren't doing that well, right? Now they're making a comeback. Google is making a— making a— Google is always doing well, but they're occupying more mindshare now because they're back on the frontier, right? Um, so I think a lot of this stuff is just mindshare. It's like you go up and down, up and down, up and down. Um, and like, you know, a year ago, I think Tesla was showing us robots. Now it's showing us these flying cars, right? So it's always like the next thing, the next thing. The marketing is always the next thing. As Seth Godin has always said, you know, today's amazing is tomorrow's whatever, basically. And that's how marketing has always been. So by the way, Neil, did you see this? I'm basically— I'm wearing these— this On branding, right? So this is from MetaMuse.

Don't mess up on their marketing. I thought you had issues with the delivery.

I did. But so they gave me— so my agent took care of it, took care of the whole thing end to end, got me 40% off, and then got me another 40% off coupon, right? So now our mutual friend Yaniv, I'm here in Arizona, he's like, dude, are you sponsored by them? I was like, MetaMuse handled it. And then you see that backpack over there? That backpack is my tennis backpack, right? You see my 2 rackets over there? So he saw it the other day and he's like, this is amazing. So he had his Instinct agent buy it for him yesterday. The Instinct did all the research and found him a 20% off coupon and bought it for him. So it's the beginning of agentic commerce and I think it's been great.

So yes, so I was talking to my team, I was in Madrid Yesterday and I got back and I was talking to my team and we were talking about LLMs and marketers because what's happening right now in marketing is at least a lot of people and marketers are just like, they're using all these LLMs to help them get a lot of tasks done. But when you look at the models that Claude has been releasing recently, at least when I'm talking to marketers, right? Forget engineers. This is just specifically marketing. They're not really seeing improvements that impact their life anymore. Sometimes they're actually switching to older models because some of the older models are doing some of the marketing tasks a little bit better than the newer models. And what I'm getting at with this is when I look at LLMs, I don't look at people paying for ChatGPT, and this is marketing specific. In marketing, I don't look at people paying for ChatGPT or Claude the future, I see them paying for agents that just help them get the tasks done. We don't really care about the models, right? Like, just in reality, as a marketer, if you have tasks done and your objective is to grow traffic or revenue or boost conversions, you don't really care about the model. You just want the objective achieved. And what you really want is an agent that is just good at achieving the task. And I think marketers when you fast forward 2, 3 years, it's going to get away from models and them talking about it. And then there's focusing on agents. And the reason I say focusing on agents is most agents really do suck. And we were talking about agents a year ago in marketing. They really aren't that great. And even right now they're better, but they're not that great. And I'll give you a real-life example because most people right now in marketing are using agents not to get complex marketing tasks done. They're using it more like a personal assistant that's helping them just get basic stuff done. So I introduced Eric to a physical therapist, right? A few weeks ago. And Eric has an appointment. I was there in person getting physical therapy done by Jovan, right? He was pushing on my neck and back and all that kind of stuff while your agent was messaging him to book an appointment. And he was breaking down his schedule and your agent was like, this is what time slots work for him. And he was just like, oh, these slots don't work. And the agent wasn't bad, it wasn't amazing. I saw the interaction firsthand. He's like, yeah, this isn't working out. He's like, I think he's using some AI or something to message me back.

Just to help you here, I never used an agent with him. That was just with him and I. There was no agent involved.

Oh, there was no agent?

It was just me. So apparently I'm an idiot. Yeah.

No, no, no. But, or maybe his team did not understand or he didn't understand, but eventually he figured it out because they just moved calendar. He thought it was an agent.

Yeah.

And then I was like, oh, this makes sense. I'm like, yeah, Eric uses agents and AI all the time. And they're like, oh yeah, it's probably his AI. I'm like, yeah, this makes sense.

But Neil, to your point there, like that, that, so that is, that, that is a good point because I'm not using an agent there because I know it's not— I'd rather just schedule it directly in some cases. And it's not reliable. It's like, for example, I'm going to be in Turkey in 2 weeks, right? So I'm trying to schedule tennis. Um, and they keep hanging up on the agent, right? Or I tried to book my dad and I for his birthday next week. And I think it booked a reservation, but I'm not sure if it did. So to your point, it's not as reliable as it could be.

Yes. And the crazy part when it comes with agents is it can be off. Like we had it book a reservation for Avra for me because I do a lot of my meetings at Avra in Beverly Hills. It booked a reservation for Avra in New York City. And we said Abra Beverly Hills. Abra New York City is not Abra Beverly Hills. There's not 2 in Beverly Hills. There's only one. And you know how I found out? I went to Abra and they're like, we don't have a reservation. I'm like showing them, right? Because I looked at it and then I'm like, wait, this is actually New York. It's my fault for not double-checking.

You know what it is when it comes to all this stuff, right? Whether it's agent or human to human or whatever, It just comes down to humans just want things to get done for them, right? And from a business standpoint, humans just want people to either make money for them or save money for them from a business standpoint, right? But it's interesting because I was sitting in a meeting with some of our engineers earlier this week, right? And we had the 15-year-old in the meeting and the 17-year-old in the meeting, right? I was like, hey, 15-year-old, I was like, so what are you seeing, right? He's like, I see low agency in this room. I was like, I love it, right? So he's seeing that people aren't moving fast enough. He called it out himself at age 15, right? And then I went to the 17-year-old, I was like, hey, so what should we do about this? And you know what he said? He said, just effing do it. And I was like, exactly, just effing do it, right? Now, I just thought that's funny because it comes from such young people that have such high agency. But what I wanted to show you, Neil, is this tweet from Andrej Karpathy. So I actually made something. I do see it. This is like only 6 billion people have barely touched an LLM, right? They're like using it for like very rudimentary stuff. Okay, six billion people. Then you have one to two billion people, twenty percent. They use it as like a glorified Google, right? And then if you zoom in a little more, Neil, you see twenty million people, point two percent of the world. They use the frontier. They they use agents to ship weeks of work, right? A lot of it's coding tasks. But then only five thousand people in the world, so point zero zero zero zero six, have internal frontier access. So swarms of agents that help like things with things like cancer, for example, right? So this whole thing is a funnel. $6 billion, $1 to $2 billion, $20 million, and then $5,000. And so, it just goes to show you there's a massive gap when it comes to this stuff and most people aren't going to look at the latest models, right? This ambition, access, and all this stuff. And so, keep in mind, like even if you're top 0.2% right now, which I would consider myself to be in, there's still like a— there's a tier above it, right? Which is only 5,000 people that are at the frontier. So anyway, I took Andrei Karpathy's tweet. I decided to just make like a little game, like video from it, and this is what it came up with. So food for thought.

Yeah. On a side note, I actually know why he thought your stuff was an agent or his team thought. You probably sent him a calendar link or like a link with your schedule.

Yeah, I sent him a booking. I sent him a Reclaim link, which is not like AI or anything.

So yeah, but most people outside of tech or don't know, right?

Oh, okay.

Maybe he eventually figured it out, but it was either his team or him, you know, because I know they were talking about like his availability. But yeah, going back to this, when it comes to the frontier models, dude, even as me as a marketer, it's too overwhelming now. I don't want to pay attention to all the latest releases. It's not that I don't want to learn and get better. It's at a point where it's just too overwhelming. Just give me the tool or the agent, whatever you want to call it, that just completes the task. To me, I just look at this as very similar as SaaS. Software as a service typically was you pay for some tool that will help you with reports or tracking or CRM or chatting with your team. Now I want to pay for software. You can call it agents, you can call it AI or machine learning or whatever. I just want to pay for software that actually just helps me complete the task. I don't need as many visuals. I don't need as many reports. Let me just type in what I want done and go and do it and do it correctly. But I think we're actually very far off from the agents being good in marketing and it's taking time. And what we're seeing internally, because I was talking to my EMEA team when I was in Europe because I did Romania and I did, or I did Bucharest and I did Madrid. The big issue that we're having internally is we're paying for the tech, people are using it. Sometimes the tech, even though it's really powerful, it's creating so much slop even with humans in the loop because it's just doing it wrong, which they had to go and redo it or check the work, fix it, redo it, and that's causing more time than if they just did it manually in the first place.

Yeah. So I think with any of this AI stuff, right, even if I show you a new agent or if I show you a new technology, if it's not reliable, people will just ignore it. So for example, OpenCLAW. OpenCLAW, was cool in the beginning, but it came really— it became really unreliable. Now, MetaMuse again was built off of OpenClaw. Their whole thing is they needed to make it reliable because once it becomes unreliable, people just stop using it, right? Like, I've sent a lot of this stuff to the team, but they just don't use it anymore because it's unreliable, right? Now, I think what's going to happen, Neil, is that you might inject your marketing taste because you've been doing marketing for a while. Same thing for me as well. And we're going to be selling workflows as a service so people can either rent our workflows, so we'll rent our workflows to them, or we can manage it for them, which I think a lot of people are still going to want you to it for them because again, 6 billion plus people are barely using this stuff. 1 to 2, but like 7 to 8 billion people are barely scratching the surface. Um, and so if you're in the top 0.2%, like of course they're gonna want your help, right? That's why Mark Cuban is so bullish on how, you know, he would just help people with AI implementation. He wouldn't even raise money today, right? And then Jason Fried retweeted that. He's like, if I wasn't working on Basecamp right now, I honestly would just be helping people with that. Um, whether it's AI marketing or AI implementation, whatever it is exactly. Because the world is so behind. So workflows as a service, I think that's going to become more and more of a thing. That's why GrokBot is paying so many people right now to reveal their bots to the public, like $500 if you tweet about it every month, right, for each bot that you tweet. And then I think Twitter is also— X is also paying people $5,000 if you post 15 videos in the next, like, you know, 15 days or whatever it is, or 30 days, because they want more people to post videos, right? So it's Money's a good incentivizer. That's a side note too.

You know what, you want to know what I think is one of the best marketing campaigns that was ever done? And it was done by Elon, but it was not Tesla. It's something actually way better that he did than the Tesla.

What?

X Money. Have you seen the returns on X Money?

Yeah,

3% cashback, 6% interest rate, $10 million guaranteed, in which, you know, they're rich enough where X is owned by SpaceX, I wouldn't worry about, you know, them jacking $10 million if you have $10 million or $1 million or whatever the number is, or $100 grand. So your money's secure, 6% interest, right? 3% cash back. Now there are some caveats, you know, you got to read the fine print. The 3% does not work on like Costco charges and certain things. So, but you can switch up credit cards for certain things. But the deal that you're getting, I'm like, this is too good to be true. If someone's willing to give you 6% on your money, why the heck would you want to, you know, it disincentivizes you to actually invest. 6% guaranteed returns is a lot.

But here's the thing. I agree it's a great offer, but I don't, I don't, I actually think it's under-marketed. I don't think many people are talking about it.

Right.

So

no, no, it's not open to everyone. That's why. They, they, they're only doing limited releases, so they can't push it too hard. And it's not available in every country.

It's fine.

It's only available in the US and only a certain amount of people in the US.

All the creator payouts right now for me, right? Because they send money each month. It's all going into an X account. So they didn't even allow me to pick anymore. I think by default it just keeps going to X account because they want you to use it.

So. Yeah, I think he would crush it in marketing if he did something a little bit different. And I, I tweeted about it one time. And I don't think they'll do it. Instead of 3% cashback on the charges or 6% interest, I don't know how you legally do it, but, um, because there's tax implications on this stuff. I don't know if there is on the credit card rebates. If I just got SpaceX stock, I would do that. I think to me that is better.

Yeah.

That is better than the actual cashback. And I think that'll help more people succeed. This is not financial advice, but if you look at how many people spend money on Starbucks or Nike or Apple or whatever, if your percentage back on the companies you love went into stock, I actually think it'll help with the wealth gap 40, 50 years from now because they're forced to invest.

Well, I think a lot more people would talk about it too. It's like, oh, he's actually not giving you money, he's giving you stock. And not many people have done it. It's innovative. Again, it's occupying mindshare.

Yes. And I think a lot of corporations would switch their corporate cards. So, I know we're on Ramp, and I don't know what the heck Ramp gives us, and I don't even know why my team chose Ramp, right? But I think they do it because of the software, right?

Ramp's easy to use. Yeah, the API is good.

Yes, and I think that's why they chose Ramp, and I know this sounds bad, but dude, someone in your organization, I'm assuming you don't have to deal with the finances or the controls, so it's not really your problem. If I could get stock in SpaceX for every time we swipe our corporate credit cards, which adds up to being a lot, let's say you have 1,000+ people globally, it adds up a lot. A lot of people swipe credit cards. Give me the stock. I just know that it'll be more of a pain for my team because they like the Ramp software or usage or however it works. I've never used Ramp myself, but I do have a Ramp credit card. And when, you know, Ramp emails me for like, hey, for your receipt or whatever, I just ignore it. Like, I don't even, Do whatever it's asking.

The Ramp API is good though, because I can query whatever I want around the business whenever I just want to know it. So that's been better than like the other ones.

But if you were able to get 3% cash back, but instead of the cash it would be SpaceX stock, would you forego the querying? Yeah, me too. And even if it was more work for my team, I'd be okay with it.

Yeah, because it's— I'm not looking at it ultimately. So.

Correct. I think it would be a great deal. I think it would be a killer opportunity.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. But going back to your point, Neil, around the agents, right? And so the A funny thing this week. So we were interviewing an SEO and I showed him like, I showed him a blog post, right? I was like, this is, this is completely human written. I was like, and we're going through the blog post. He's like, yeah, this is like a, like an 8 or 9 out of 10, right? And I'm like, yeah, it's really good. So how many of these do you think we can do per week? He's like, you know, probably like 2. And I'm like, okay, 2. And then I'm like, but, but so this quality, only 2 per week, right? He's like, yeah. I'm like, it is completely AI generated, right? And so we're getting to the point now where we still have a human in the loop editing. But it is using these workflows.

I'm confused. Was it actually human generated or was AI generated and you were just tricking him?

I was tricking him. Yeah. So because there's preconceived notions, if I say it's AI generated, he's going to say, oh yeah, you can't do that, right? But when I was like, yeah, this is completely human written right now, let's just go through it together. He's like, yeah, he's like, oh, this is so good, right? And even our editors on our team, like they're using it now. They're like, this is so good. And so I think the workflows are getting there, but most of them are unreliable. Like we have this talent workflow that's been really good for us too, but it's like a 7 out of 10. But this one, this one's actually really good, but it takes a long time to refine this stuff. And oftentimes you're going to have to keep upgrading it too. So that's why those of you that are listening and you have an agency right now, your job's not going anywhere because again, who's going to maintain this stuff? Who's going to upgrade it? Who's going to optimize it? So, but we're getting to the point now where we're not even talking about models. Like, I don't care if it's GrokBot, I don't care if it's MetaMuse, I don't care if it's like, you know, OpenAI Dots, as long as it's useful, great. If not, then you're in trouble, right? But yeah, go ahead. What do you have here, Neil?

This is the wrong chart, but this is human versus AI and purely written by AI. And you can see the difference on time on page. We actually did an experiment. I don't have the actual numbers, but we noticed there's a difference on time on page when we said human-written content versus AI-written content versus AI Or written, modified by a human. Same article, we just changed the, the thing and it was actually written by a human, right? That was not the chart that was showing there, but we found that if it's written by a human and it states that, and this is like right by the title, so this is like above the fold, right when people can see it, it's not all the way at the bottom, it affects read time because people have preconceived notions on if it's AI. Yep, exactly. You're spot on with that. Even if it's not, they just assume AI sucks, move on.

Yep. And, um, the, the editor who's— so one of the editors on our team who's very, very detail-oriented, right? She's like, though, this is exactly— once she started using the workflow, she's like, I see my job is completely different now. I'm like, so what are you now? She's like, I'm no longer just an editor, right? Um, and that, that's the world that we're going into. By the way, we're using, uh, our mutual friend Syed, uh, WP Vibe, which is growing very quickly. So I don't know about you, Neil, but I'm still on the outdated WordPress. But if I want to use the WordPress MCP, I connect it with WPvibe. It just gets the content out a lot faster and then we combine it with our workflow. So that's been good for us.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm on the newer WordPress from my understanding, but I don't know what we're using. But Sai did mention me, he didn't email me about that, which was pretty cool.

Yeah, so anyway, they're growing quickly. But by the way, remember I've been talking about Jev the last few weeks or so? Uh-huh. Um, so Jev added the ability to scan images very quickly. Okay, so I was, I was playing with it yesterday. I was like, dude, you know what you can do now, Neil? Like, let's just take sales from an outbound standpoint, right? So Jev, just so everyone remembers, it is a classifier, right? So you can classify information very quickly, like text. But now you can look at images for very, um, very cheap. So imagine you can watch like 6,000 images for like you know, a fraction of a penny right now. It can do that. And so I'm like, okay, from a sales standpoint, I can just say, okay, I'll reach out to one company, let's say on.com, right? And I'll say, hey, look at your competitors, Lululemon, and look at Vuori over here. Look at their ad libraries, look at the offers that they're putting out there, and look how many creatives they're putting out there. Would you like us to do this for you? Okay, by the way, here's some creatives for you. Okay, you can do that for very cheap, pennies on the dollar now, right? That's one example. Another example from a sales standpoint, is I can say, oh, um, hey, on .com, it looks like Lululemon's kicking your butt on the, on the SERPs right here. And here's some screenshots. Here's exactly what we would do. And it would cost you nothing to do that. So if you're in sales, like, it doesn't make sense for you not to use this. But from a marketing standpoint, you can look at all your competitors, Neil, and be like, hey, what, what, what offers are they running? How many, how many, uh, ads are they running? Um, and what, what have they been running for a very long time? And you can get that in seconds now, um, for very cheap, right? And so I just think if you're younger right now, you should be going all in on this stuff. Neil and I, we're a little older, you know, we're kind of becoming dinosaurs now, but I'm like still a little bit tuned in where I, I kind of know what's happening.

So— Eric's becoming less of a dinosaur than me.

But we're still dinosaurs.

I'm becoming more— yes. This is like when I saw the Tesla Roadster and all that marketing stuff that they were doing. Like, you gotta see it to believe it. This is why we needed the audience, because everyone would think it's AI, right? And he said that, which I agree with him. If the audience wasn't there, I'd be like, this shit's AI. Like, straight up, I think you would agree with that, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. At least if most companies did it and there wasn't an Elon Musk there, people would genuinely think it's AI. Yeah. But it's just like, I'm like, oh, I'd rather have— I remember the old days when I had a Mercedes S-Class. The ride was very smooth. It accelerates nice and slow. It's very comfortable. Like, it's an old man's car. I'm like, yes, I like the old man stuff.

Dude, you know what we should talk about over here on this topic? So this, this gal Potato who works at SpaceX because we're talking about SpaceX right now. So let me pop this up for you. So, so Potato, she's like a popular GrokBot developer now. So she's at SpaceX, right? She was at Cursor before. Look, it's called SpaceX SI now. We should talk about SI versus AI too in a second. So Potato here, she's like, I love writing. I never let agents write for me, whether it's docs or tweets or shitposts or even prompts. Okay, maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents. There's a simple reason for that. I still strongly believe that writing is thinking. It's a skill I hope to never give up. It's also important to me that whatever I say is always authentic, mistakes and all. My favorite posts are the ones I just full send without any editing. I suspect it also helps with prompting. Da da da da da. Knowing the right incantation, word incantations, incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. As models get more capable and the input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything. Words become the interface between you and the genie. There may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces, but until then, I'm writing every word. And so that goes back to the point that I find that so whenever I feel I can put my full name behind something and it's not backed by AI, um, you know, there's a certain human element that the AI can't copy, and the AI still continues to struggle at that today. So I mean, I'm just saying that the best You know, there's an argument that if you're a— whether you're a best marketer or best writer, you're not relying on AI to create your content.

Yeah, no, you're not relying on AI to create the content. I think having AI create content is— it just doesn't work. And it's not even just text written. It could be images, it could be videos. I'm not saying you can't use it. So I'm a big believer with you about not having AI write content. When it comes to just content in general, whether it's text or videos or images, I get you can use AI, but I would say more than 90% of the time it's not worth using. And the prime example of this is Sora. Everyone's like, it can create amazing content. Well, if it created such amazing content, why weren't people using that instead of Instagram? They decided not to. They had to shut it down because people didn't care for AI content. They wanted human-created content. Dude, the amount of people that would text me on how they're creating AI content studios and they're trying to raise money and they'd hit me up and just be like, hey, can I get a seed check of $25 grand or $100 grand or whatever? Look how many views I'm getting on all this. And I wouldn't give any of them a check because I was like, I don't think this is going to last. Not from the aspect that people can't use these tools because you can always use them to create it. It's just I don't see the engagement there. It was like Coca-Cola and using AI for their polar bear commercial, and people started getting mad at them, and they got a lot of backlash for it being insensitive. They just thought the content, the commercial wasn't as good versus it looking like a real polar bear.

You know what I'll say? Earlier in the year, I wrote some X articles. Some of them got like a million views or a couple hundred thousand views or so. Those were completely written by me. Right now, I have someone on my team who is repurposing a lot of stuff, and you can tell it's AI-generated. And these X articles, they do okay, right? They're still getting like 10,000, 15,000 views. But he has to keep retweeting it, retweeting it, quote tweeting it over and over to like slowly jack the views higher and higher on each one. Whereas when it's something that it's fully backed by me and it's like I've clearly thought about it, it takes you— like Neil and I know we've been writing for such a long time, it takes you hours, right, to write something really good. And sometimes you have to keep going back and editing it. But that raw human thing, people can tell, right? And you can also tell when it's AI generated too.

So yeah. Yeah, look, time will tell with, uh, with a lot of this stuff. And I just feel we're coming to a point where in marketing material, whether it's a blog post that's job is to promote a service or a product, or whether it's a TV commercial or just an Instagram post, people want that emotional connection and they feel that connection more when it's human written, not by any human, by a human who genuinely has, as Google calls it, the EEAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trust. When they have that and that person creates the content like someone who's really good at what they do, You can just tell the difference.

This is why I think YouTube is going to continue to be special. And it's interesting, I scrolled by one of Codie Sanchez's Reels yesterday. She does a good job with the Reels, right? So she was rating kind of the marketing channels in terms of moneymaking. And I think she rated YouTube as S-tier and then email as S-tier as well, which we'll talk about email in a second. But the reason why YouTube is so high, what do you think the reason is?

She probably does really well on it for her and she gets tons of views. I do think, I wouldn't say YouTube is an S tier. I wouldn't say email is an S tier. I think channels, and I know you agree on this, the quality drastically depends on the industry you're in and what you're selling. Because some of these channels are really amazing for B2B enterprise. Some of them are better for B2C. Some of them are, many of them actually, majority of them are terrible if you're selling something for $10 million plus minimum. You know, contract size.

Yeah. So what I think is this, I think YouTube is special and Neil's right. Like it's highly dependent on your industry. Like if you're selling consumer stuff, all in on TikTok, right? That's one of the channels. But anyway, so YouTube to me is special because it's the channel where they're spending a long time watching your videos, right? It's not just like one clip, like each, each video. Like if you do a webinar, for example, like chances are people are going to watch like if it's like an hour or 2 hours, They're going to watch, you know, 15 to 20 minutes or so, which is a very, very long time. And so to be able to capture that attention is very valuable. Now, I think YouTube is interesting. Now, the other thing too, she listed email as S-tier. So one guy, his name is Dan Shipper. He thinks that email newsletters as we know it are dying. Right. And I know you're going to have a reaction to this. So I'm going to pull this up real quick. So he says email newsletters are dead. Let me, let me pull this up real quick and then I want to get your thoughts first. Yeah. You can react to this first. So here, Neil, do you see this?

Yes. Now I can.

Okay. So Dan Shipper says with over 120,000 subscribers, Shipper argues newsletters are dying because AI filters email so well that getting into inbox no longer guarantees reader attention. He predicts full agent management of email within a year, urging publishers to integrate directly into AI systems like Slack agents for alerts. Others echo the shift with Brent Beshore, who has a great fund. I've been to his conferences, Capital Camp, praises AI Digest for personal use, but warning of harm to the newsletter business while creators see chances to prioritize unique voices and build agent-friendly ecosystems. So what are your thoughts on this one? He says the newsletter is dead.

I don't think the newsletter is dead. I don't think it's— but I do think it's not as effective as it used to be. I'm not too worried about AI adjusting placement. They've always had algorithms and things that affect inbox placement. If your content's really good, your placement's really good because people want to end up reading it. I do understand that email solutions like the Gmails, the Outlooks, et cetera, are summarizing emails more and more, which can affect newsletters. And if you look even here, Eric pulled this up, it was a Grok summary instead of going through the whole thing, right? People summarize a lot. If your content's really good for the people that do matter for your ideal customer profile, majority of them, in my opinion, would read it instead of summarizing it. I just believe the models of how you make money through email newsletters aren't as good as they used to be. And we're in a world now where you sadly still need to do email, you still need to do SEO, you still need to do YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and paid ads and LinkedIn. Assuming your ideal customers are on all these channels and you just got to surround them. That's the new world that we live in because if someone wants it in a quick digestible format, they can get it from maybe an AI summary. If they want the long version, maybe they get the newsletter. If they just want quick soundbites from you on what's popular based on data that you have to release, they can get it maybe from some shorts or some images that you post on Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn. If they want some quick thoughts, maybe they just read your X article or your LinkedIn post. Right? You got to adapt to where people are and you have to use all the channels that your ideal customer is on in today's world. And I don't think any channel actually performs better than it used to. I think the channels actually perform worse and worse over time because they get more competitive. And that's even before AI. Like when you had paid advertising, the reason they perform worse and worse over time is you have more competition, it costs more, You got to figure out new offers, conversions, and all that kind of stuff. It doesn't mean that some businesses aren't doing better with their paid advertising over time, or you're not making it more profitable. It's just that when a new channel comes around, it does really well. It's usually not competitive and the ROI is massive. As time goes on, these great channels get competitive, which reduces ROI for most companies.

So we've been saying this since the beginning of this podcast, the argument that you have to be omnichannel, and we said, You know, in marketing, it used to be the rule of 7. People would have to see your brand 7 times before taking an action. As this podcast went on, we're like, okay, maybe it's the rule of 14 now. And then maybe today it's— maybe a few years ago it was like rule of 21. Today, maybe it's the rule of 28, right? So the whole idea is that you have to kind of be everywhere. Now, to Neil's point too, if the more time you spend doing— I don't care if it's a newsletter or a blog post, the more time you spend writing it, the more time you spend doing research, the more tender loving care you put into it, the better it's going to be. And if you're known for that, then you're ultimately— people are going to open you a lot more, right? And people aren't going to want to read a summary because at the end of the day, the summary is just like a quick soundbite, just like a reel is or like a short is.

Yeah. And Eric has it spot on. We did a study. This is older though. I think this is like a year or two. No. Yeah, 2 years. So December 2024. So roughly 2 years. How many times does someone interact with a brand before they buy both B2C and B2B? If you look, if it's less than $100 in B2C, roughly 8 times, B2B 3 times, but it starts moving up. It can go all the way up. Eric said 20-something. Look at this for $10,000+ price points, 23 times before they buy. The rule of 7 no longer exists. I think the average here is what, like 14 or something like that? I don't know what the average number is if you just take all the data, but— It's much larger than 7. That number doesn't exist much at all anymore. People just need to interact with brands.

We should share a story around this. So, Neil and I were grabbing gelato last week, right? And there's a guy that walked to us and it looks like— I think his name's Casey, but he has like a tax company, I think, in LA, right? And then here's the most fascinating thing to me was he looked at Neil and I thought he knew us from marketing school. So, he turns to me, he's like, I watch your AI content. He turns to Neil, he's like, you're an OG. That means he doesn't— he didn't even know about the Marketing School podcast, right? And so when we do this podcast, we're like in many places. Some people know us from the podcast, some people know us from Neil being in the space for a while, some people know me from the AI content or whatever. But it just goes to show you that you never know where people are going to find you from or how people know you. And so you just got to be out there. That's what marketing is.

Yeah, and it was great. And I remember when we met him, he gave you feedback too on AI, uh, not your Yeah, onboarding

for one of our things. Yeah,

correct. So, and it was great because he was telling— he was just talking about like how he just wants to— I believe it was like get it and just use it and it requires some work. The guy wasn't being negative, he was being helpful and giving Eric feedback that can improve his, uh, that can improve his revenue, uh, usage.

It was one of our tools.

Yeah, and, and I thought it was just really good. And that feedback was genuine. It wasn't like he was trying to hate. He actually gave way more compliments than anything else. The guy was really kind. But that's, you know, all these interactions add up and you don't know where you're going to get them. Just like someone could end up hiring you because they see you on a podcast and then they see you in, or they listen to your podcast, they see you in person, they watch some of your videos. It all adds up. It goes down to the rule of whatever it is, 11, 14 now, whatever the number may be. And on top of this, when we met him up, I forgot his name and I was curious what he did. I didn't even say anything to Eric. Eric sent me a screenshot of him and what he does and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, oh cool, this guy's in finance.

No, I didn't look into him, right? Somehow he popped up for me later and then I'm just like, oh, I guess he's just this, right? And I sent it to you, but his name's Casey and he has a tax advising company in LA. So he seems to me like he'd be really good at taxes.

Uh-huh. But it was cool. I'll check it out too now and, you know, see what his services are. But this is what happens when you just keep interacting with people and seeing them all over.

Yeah. And by the way, like, I'll call something else out too. Like the, the YouTube channel for— and I've said this a couple of weeks ago, I'm sure the same thing for you, Neil, but it does drive leads for us because sometimes when people come to us, they might say that they came through Google or they might have come through LLM. But when I talk to their sales team, it's like, well, no, it's like a variety of things. Like they might have like They watch your YouTube video or they might have listened to the Marketing School Podcast and then they came through LLM. So you kind of, you can't figure out attribution. Like it goes back to the Ajo quote. It's like, you know, I know my marketing works, right? 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50%. And that's more truer today, I think, than ever.

And it's not because of technology. It's not that we can't track everything. It's that A, the platforms don't let you track everything and they don't want to release the data. And B, A lot of these reasons on why this is happening isn't because the platforms choose to be like this. It's because there's much more strict data and privacy laws than there used to be, call it 10 years ago. That just makes it harder for the platforms to share everything and track everything. And then also—

10 years ago? Yeah, go ahead.

I was saying also now the platforms are competing. Like, which tech company doesn't have an AI offering or an LLM, right? So they now also don't want to share data with each other and they want to block each other off.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a competitive thing, right? So competitive mode. So like, by the way, 10, 15 years ago, probably 15 years ago, Neil, when you can open up your Google Analytics and you see every single keyword that would convert for you, those were the golden days. You just don't have that anymore, right?

So yeah, they're like, you can now see the data in Google Search Console. It's just not as good because it doesn't have conversion data in there.

Nope. It gets worse and worse. But by the way, I was watching the Meta interview. So it was Mark Zuckerberg, Alexander Wang, and then he was on with the Stripe co-founder, Cheeky Pine, right? I was listening to that one.

Stripe co-founder?

Yeah, Stripe co-founder. It's— there's Patrick Collison and it's— there's— it wasn't Patrick. It's the other Collison brother. Maybe it's Jonathan? John Collison.

Oh, I thought you were saying the Stripe co-founder's name is Cheeky Pine. I'm like, what the heck?

Oh, no, that's— so it's funny because on that podcast, I'm sure you saw this on Instagram where Mark Zuckerberg drinks like the Guinness and he's like, he's like, Since, you know what I mean? That one, right? That's the podcast. So I was listening to—

Oh, that's the name of the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So guys, just keep in mind, Meta bought Scale AI for $14.9 billion or something like that. 49% of the company did the deal, right? Initially everyone's like, oh my God, if it's a good workout or not. It seems like the bet is paying off now. But what I want to call out is when they built that super AI team, super intelligence team, they were very methodical about how they did it because Meta has many employees, right? Tens of thousands. So Alexander, the former CEO of Scale AI, was like, look, you know, we're going to do like 200 people. So he manages like 200— his team's 200 people right now. And Mark Zuckerberg was just saying that, you know, what matters ultimately is that talent density beats big teams for AI. So they had to make a lot of adjustments. But in such a big organization, the thing that is capturing the most mindshare right now Is that 200-person organization. And I think we're seeing more and more of that today. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

Yeah, dude, every time I think about that acquisition that he ended up doing, If it was me, and I know we've talked about this on the podcast, I just would never do it. You, I believe, would do it, right? Like, if I just look at you personally—

I think you would, Neil, because here's the thing. If it's 1% of your market cap, why would you not at least put a 1% bet? I know you to make these bets, and that's not even a big bet for you.

That's true. I'm looking at $14 billion as a lot of money, but if you want to look at it from a perspective, I still don't know if I would've spent $14 billion just being Quite upfront, my mind works more like private equity when it comes to business and entrepreneurship than it does like a traditional entrepreneur who wants to innovate. And I don't think my mind, the way it works, is the best for people who want to innovate. Because if you look at what I've done as a company, I've never really built anything that innovates. Right. Just being very transparent.

I would say back in the day, Kissmetrics and Kiss Insights and all that, I would say that was like, it wasn't that innovative, but it was like, it was considered ahead of its time, kind of a little bit.

But that was my co-founder. He was always the one who like, that was always Hiten. Hiten likes innovating. Even when he sold his last company to Dropbox, he was trying to do something that was really innovative. He likes doing things that people haven't done before. If I look at all the business decisions I made in my life, even when I was partners with him, I tend to stick with things that are more like a person who's in private equity. My mind just works that way. And I'm not saying private equity is good or bad. I do believe innovation dies with private equity. That's just my personal 2 cents. Others may disagree with me.

But it makes money.

It makes money, but that's the way my brain works as an entrepreneur.

So what Neil's saying, by the way, I just want to reinforce this. There's no right or wrong way to entrepreneur. And I think we've learned that as we're a little older now, now that we're both in our 40s. There's like Mark Zuckerberg might do it this way. And so here's the thing. I learned this listening to him, right? Mark Zuckerberg on this podcast. So his whole thing is like, I'm just going to keep playing the long game because I'm not going to sell this thing. Right. And so one thing is he does go around asking his peers. So this is how he got the deal done. He went to Alexander. He's like, he just started talking to him more and more. Hey, do you just want to have a chat? And He's like, hey, what would you do with this company? And so Alexander sends him pages and pages of stuff and tells him what he'd do. And then Mark is like, dude, we just need to figure out how to work together. But Mark goes around to all his peers and like— you wouldn't see this, Neil. I don't think you would do this, right? I don't think you'd go around to your friends. You've never— certainly you don't go to me and like, what would you do with my company? But Mark Zuckerberg goes around doing that quite a bit. Yeah, exactly right. Like just different personalities, but that's how he got this deal done. And everyone's different. Like, you know, our president, love him or hate him, from what we've seen, like, he does go around asking people like what they would do, I think. And then he like figures out what he wants to do from there, whether it's a right or wrong decision. So.

Yeah, I do think you and I do go asking our peers for advice, right? You need— was a perfect example of this when we were refinancing our debt. One way corporations grow is they have corporate debt and you can use it to just go buy and gobble up more companies. Private equity does this. Apple has debt, Google has debt, they all do. And the bigger you are, the better your terms are. Like my debt is 2% plus SOFR at this point. It's more, it's interest only too. So it's, which is very financially favorable, right? And when you're looking at The overall cost, I think SoFi, when I looked it up yesterday, was 3.88%. So call it 5.88% interest only on corporate money. That is really cheap. The lowest I know I can get is 1.75% plus SoFi, because we're not going to be rated grade AAA like Google or something like that. So their debt is always going to be cheaper because they probably spin off about $140, $160-ish billion a year in Or in profit a year. And I hit up Yaniv and I got feedback on him because I know who he was talking to when he was doing that. So Eric and I do go to other entrepreneurs and get feedback on specific instances within our organization. Like, what do you think about this company that I'm looking to buy? Or I'm looking to go in this direction. What do you think about that? But it's very rare, at least for me, that I go to someone being like, if you own my company, what would you do? Like, I don't go that broad. I go to specific people that have expertise for something specific that I'm trying to do. And I already usually know what direction I want to go in before I start getting feedback around that area. And I may learn that I shouldn't do it or it's bad for me. Eric's given me feedback as well. Like, I've had offers from people to be majority owners in my company. And Eric's like, you won't do well with this. You're wasting your time. Yeah. And then I still go down the road and I talk to people. And then eventually when I get on the phone with them, and I remember one person telling me, I think they're based out of Colorado or Denver or something like that. And they were trying to give us some money. And I was asking them, if I want to expand into 10 more countries tomorrow, how would this work? And they were just like, well, we need to look at the financials and make sure we can afford it. And I'm like, but we can afford it based off our cash flow. Well, if we add debt to the business, For us buying a portion of your company, we just have to make sure we're in line with the ratios and the bank approvals. And that was the moment where I knew, I'm like, oh, this won't work.

They're going to slow me down. Yeah. It's going to slow me down. That's your reaction.

Yep. Yeah. I'm like, because anytime like a bank or someone tells me I can't do something, I'll figure it out. I'll use my own money or I'll pop— put in money or, you know what I mean? Right. Or like I'll negotiate.

You'd rather do that to grow a little slower and it would be more enjoyable.

Well, in my case, I believe I would grow faster, but I would have less profit if I did it. Right. So I would have less cash flow, but I would have a bigger company in the long run. And I'm okay with that. Like you and I are quite similar.

My point is you're okay with the trade-off. That's my point.

Yes. Eric and I are really okay with suffering in the short run. So short-term pain for long-term gain.

Yeah, and that's exactly what Zuckerberg was doing. He's like, he's willing to suffer, right? And like, by the way, when they made the bet that he wasn't sure it was going to work out, like while they were kind of figuring out Muse and all that— excuse me— he's like, dude, we're putting a lot of compute into this, we're putting a lot of investments, and then magically it worked out. So good for him.

Yeah, but, but the, the— and not everything works out. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. I can list so many failures. You know, how many failures did Elon Musk have of rockets not going up there or sadly exploding, hopefully live lost in any of this stuff. I know Musk doesn't want any lives lost, uh, or like, you know, hey, we're gonna release a Roadster, it's gonna come out in a few years, or a truck within a few years, and the timelines are just off. I remember them talking about SpaceX and how you're not gonna have to fly on airplanes. I'm still waiting for that, and that was a long time ago when they told us that. And Zuckerberg with, uh, uh, what is it, what was it called, the metaverse, right? That's why he changed it.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Meta.

Yeah, like we interact. I'm like, Who the heck wants to wear these goggles and interact with their friends in some virtual world? Maybe the new younger generation wants to, but I think us older generation people, which I would classify you and I in, we actually like seeing our friends in person and hanging out. We don't want to do it virtually. We actually want to see them in person. But all these people have had failures. What does Meta talk about the metaverse anymore? To me, it's a dead project whether they say it's dead or not.

You know what I mean? Look, even Jeff Bezos, right? The Kindle, when they had the TV, I think the Fire TV or whatever, or when they launched the phone, that didn't work out for them, right? There's always things that don't work out, and it's the failures that make you into— that forge the greatness, right? So Accenture, they found out that most of their— I think they're averaging like $1,000 per head in terms of AI spend. So they're limiting employee AI spend to $29 per month per employee. What do you think about that?

I think it's really smart. And there's 2 reasons. One, $1,000 really adds up. Now I'm assuming you're talking about $1,000 a year, not a month, right?

I think it's a month.

You sure? $1,000 a month is a lot.

Some of it was going up to a month. So I don't think they were saying everyone was, but because they saw some employees going up to like $1,000+ a month, they're setting the limits on it. And let me pull up this post for you so you can actually see it. So, let me share my screen. All right, Neil, do you see this?

You're right, $1,000 monthly, tech mean.

Yep.

And now, $29 a month per person.

Yeah, so you've been promoted to consumer. Okay, go ahead, continue.

I think it's smart. Even in my organization, I've heard direct hand from engineers that I trust and they get poached from other bigger corporations. That they're just like, a lot of these models are just expensive and some of the older ones do just as well. And I don't know why people need all these advanced models to do basic stuff, because that's the reality. Most people are paying for the most advanced models to do the most basic stuff, and it doesn't make sense. And then the next thing is, is there's so many open-source solutions now that can get a lot done for free. You don't need to end up spending an arm and a leg. Yeah, you may need a better PC or computer or setup, But that's much more palatable for corporations than it is to spend $1,000 a month.

Dude, you know what I'm just thinking about right now? Like, because Anthropic and OpenAI haven't IPO'd yet, right? So when companies really figure out how to optimize this, I wonder how it affects them down the road. But that's a completely different conversation.

So— They released their revenue recently, right? You saw the OpenAI revenue numbers?

$16 billion on Anthropic Q3, I think.

Yeah. Correct.

Which is—

and then they're going to get to $100 run rate.

Yeah.

But the interesting thing when they call revenue, revenue is not always all revenue. Some of these players have deals with other providers who provide them a lot of the infrastructure or money or whatever it may be, where they're getting a percentage of the revenue. So it's like eBay. eBay, Eric may sell some Pokémon cards on eBay. Okay. And these Pokémon cards that he had since he was a kid may go for $1,000. eBay's revenue from that is not $1,000, even though that product sold on eBay for $1,000.

It's GMV.

Yes. eBay's stake or percentage that they may keep, maybe 5%, I'm making up, I don't know what eBay actually takes. So let's call it $5. eBay's real revenue is $5 per transaction or for that transaction. And it's the way these guys are reporting numbers and tracking them and putting it out to market. varies a lot because they're not public. They can do whatever they want, but the moment they're public, people will look at how much is your real revenue and what are you collecting.

Well, actually, I mean, again, we don't have to go deeper into it, but I think I was reading something in passing where, uh, Anthropic's, uh, gross margins are like 80-85%, but then, you know, operating revenue is like 11% or something. But let's go back to the $1,000 real quick. So I think there's, there's caveats for this, okay? So again, Accenture is saying, okay, They're seeing some employees spending $1,000 a month, which is a lot of money, and they're converting everyone to $29 a month. Now, Ramp, we were talking about Ramp earlier. So Ramp actually has an AI spend index. Okay. So the median spend is $11. Okay. So they're saying, okay, we're going to give you like 3x the median spend, which is like if you do the math on it, it's like, okay, that's pretty good, right? And so I think as long as you're slightly above the median spend and then but you're not limiting your best people, maybe your best— as long as your best people can justify and they can prove that they're driving revenue or they're saving money, money on it, then great, right? But there has to be a process for it because you can't just let everyone YOLO and do whatever they want. Now, the cool thing about Ramp too, Neil, this is not a Ramp sponsorship, but the cool thing is you can connect your accounts and then you can see how much people are spending on average in your company, who's spending the most. And then I think you just need to have conversations with those people. So I don't think it's like a— I think it's cool to blanket, like set a limit for everybody, but then the people who do want to take it to the next level and are proving value, you should let them do it. So I think it's a Yes, and situation.

Yeah, I agree with you. And even though Accenture is saying it's limited to $29, if someone would bet me $1 million, I would bet that Accenture is not limiting every single employee to $29. And there's some people who can get exceptions if you wanted to go over, like engineers or people like that, because they must have some engineers doing some projects and they're okay with them spending more. But just as a general corporate policy, They're just saying, hey, $29 is your limit. And then for certain departments, certain people and roles, they have no choice but to spend more. And that's okay.

I agree with that. There needs to be a corporate policy for these things because remember what I just said earlier. If you have 6 billion people in the world that are just barely using this stuff and you have 1 to 2 billion that are using it as a glorified chatbot, what do you think is going to happen in a company like Accenture where they have, you know, tens of thousands of employees? The vast majority of people are not going to be using it in a smart way, and that's going to be costing the company too much money. There's going to be 0.2% of people that are using it a smart way. You let those people spend more.

Dude, did I tell you I downgraded my ChatGPT subscription?

Your own?

Yeah, my own. I downgraded it.

I love that you spent the time to actually do that. How much are you paying a month now?

I don't know how much I'm paying. I believe I was paying around $200 a month before. I could be off on the number, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around $200 because I would always get an email from my assistant being like, Neil, can you go get me the receipt? They didn't email it to you. We need it for accounting purposes. I was like, all right. And then I downgraded. I'm like, man, I'm like, I now really only use ChatGPT as a glorified search to do like research and stuff. And I'm like, why the heck am I on the highest plan for this? So I downgraded it. I think it's like $20 a month or $29 or something like that. I could be off on the pricing, but I know it's not $50 a month and I know it's not free. It's that pricing that's in between there, but it's not the highest plan.

Dude, I love my ChatGPT now. I was driving to see my dad last week, right? So when you drive to Arcadia, it's good. It's like 45-minute drive, 40 to 45 minutes. I just called Doodoo and I was just talking for 45 minutes and it's like, okay, what about this? What about this? Okay, can you move this forward over here? Can you advance this over here? This is like— we were just going back and forth.

Isn't Doodoo your muse?

They're both called Doodoo. So Doodoo is muse and Doodoo is also my dot too. They're both called Doodoo. So Anyway, so that's my OpenAI Dot. And like, it's really good because I'm like, oh, we're trying to make these ChatGPT plugins right now. Okay, we're trying to do this redesign over here. We're trying to do this over here. Oh, can you hand this over to Sean over here? Can you do this? Right? So I'm like, I'm just going back and forth with it. It's like you just talking to like an employee on your team for 45 minutes and it's just getting stuff done. So that to me is worth it. But I'm not on the $500 plan. I'm only on the $200 plan.

There's a $500 plan?

They just added a $500 plan. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, I should actually check to see what plan I'm on. I know it's the cheaper plan.

I'm sure yours is $29.

I'm on Plus. What's Plus?

$100, I think?

Plus, $20 a month.

Oh, well, yeah, they brought it down a little bit.

Yeah, this is great. Let's see all plans. Oh yeah, you're right. So, oh, they have an $8 a month plan? Expand access?

No, at a certain point, saving money is not worth it. That's diminishing returns.

Eric knows me really well. I'm like, ooh, I can save even more.

Okay, so this guy, how do you pronounce his name,

Neil? Sujayth? Sujayth? Yeah, I have no idea, but it sounds right.

Okay. All right.

I should know how to say his name, but I don't.

Yeah, you should know how to say it. So this guy says, I got a lot of pushback for saying that one product manager and one engineer can now beat a entire team. Now, Dan Schipper has a name for it, the pirate and the architect, right? So it used to be— remember Amazon's Jeff Bezos? He used to say, uh, 2-pizza teams, right? We want to have 2-pizza teams. Now today it's 2-slice teams, okay? So you can only get 2 slices for the team. So let me play this video real quick.

Now, I've started to come to you is you really want to use very, very, very small teams. For a long time, the standard for team size was the the 2-pizza team. So that's like 8 to 10 people. That's what Jeff Bezos came to. I think in the AI age, I call it a 2-slice team. Like, you want 1 or 2 people max. You can get so far so fast with 1 or 2 people that anything more, there's a lot of coordination overhead and there's differing visions and it just doesn't work. 1 or 2 people is really, really great. And I think the composition that works for us, and I think it's starting to work for other people, is I call them pirates and architects. So one person on the team is the pirate. They are slop cannons who are absolutely obsessed with finding value. That's me. Like, I'm just out there just doing lots and lots of stuff and I'm throwing it away and it's all messy, but I'm going to find something really interesting. And then architects are people who are like looking at a messy system, like maybe something that I built that's completely hardcoded, and trying to help shape it into something that's valuable and beautiful and extensible. Pairing those types of people together, I think, is very powerful in AI.

I think this is interesting, Neil, because we have our agent builders team right now, and then everyone has their own project. Most people are just working on their own on a project. Maybe there's someone else paired with them, but we have one team where there's 4 or 5 people on it. That team is the slowest one because there's so much drag that comes from coordination. You know, if you have 5 ideas, I have 5 ideas, someone else has 5 ideas, and then Noah has 5 ideas too, that's 20 ideas. And everyone wants to get their ideas forward, right? So I like this whole idea of a pirate and an architect because I'm probably more of a pirate where I just like throwing spaghetti against the wall. And then you do need an architect that can help you shape this stuff into like clay into like a little castle or something like that. But I have found firsthand experience that when you have You start to have more than 2 people building these things, it starts to get really complex, and there's politics start to build even at such a small size. So

dude, I'm, I'm with you. Uh, I do like the smaller teams. I was talking to one of my team members the other day, they're like, you used to run Ubersuggest back in the day, how'd you do it? I was like, with very few people. Fewer people means faster deployment. I do think in product and engineering and design, a lot of that stuff is definitely true. I do believe when you start getting into complex situations like finance and banking, small teams don't work out. Like Bank of America found out that through Claude that there's tons of bugs, so they hired 1,000 contractors to fix all the security bugs. You need a big team and you better crank that out really fast and fix all those bugs, especially because it's related to finance. But on the flip side, for some business cases, when you're doing, let's say, a merger and acquisition and you're trying to buy a company, you can't buy a company with a 2-person team. And I know the example there, they were not saying for M&A, but you'll need a finance person, you need a legal person, you need a person who actually knows the business really well, someone who understands maybe account management if it's in marketing, someone who understands You know, just looking at their delivery and seeing if they actually have a really good product or service, the churn rate, right? That gives them some data on that as well. Someone in sales to analyze their sales process and if they do a good job, because then you can figure out where to fix a lot of this stuff. But that usually requires more than a 2-person team. But I know in that video they're mainly talking about, you know, building products.

Yeah, I think it depends, right? Like earlier we were just talking about Meta having 200 people on that super AI team, by the way. They have 70,000 people. 200 divided by 70,000 is 0.002857. I have my calculator out.

They have how many people on the team?

200 people on the AI team. 200 people out of 70,000 employees total at Meta. Right. And then even the way Mark Zuckerberg was talking about it, it's like, yeah, it's like this elite team and they just want to move quickly. And to your point, like 200 of 70,000 is really not that much, but that's what it takes to move Lightning fast, right? And he wants that team to move lightning fast. Um, so there's that. But then I wanted to bring you up another thing over here because we're talking about private equity. Okay, so Bending Spoons, would you say Bending Spoons is kind of more like a private equity type model?

It is purely a private equity type model. Hence Berkshire Hathaway popped in money and then the stock popped like 40-50% in one day.

So check this out. So Bending Spoons, okay, I don't know if you saw this, but this guy Federico who works at Bending Spoons, they're based in Milan, so, you know, Italian guy, right? So today we're laying off a large part of the Airtable team. So remember, they bought Airtable, and I think they got a good, like, a decent deal on it. Um, so what Bending Spoon does is they bought Evernote, they bought Airtable, they— what else did they buy, Neil? Do you remember? Oh, okay. Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite, Evernote.

They're on the right side.

WeTransfer. Yeah. Meetup. Yeah. So they buy these struggling tech companies from the past. They used to be iconic tech companies, right? Like Eventbrite, Meetup, AOL, Evernote, right? So he's like, look, today we're laying off a large part of the Airtable team. This is not a reflection of their work, but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better. For Airtable, better is about to look like a new core team shipping your top requests monthly, upgraded, you know, this and that, new performance and infra teams. Okay, to everyone leaving, thank you. If you're hiring, these are excellent people and worth the call. So before you react, Neil, let me tell you why this is such a tone-deaf, uh, You know, posts, because instead of like, I even posted here, I was like, I was like, dude, where are all these people that you're laying off? Like, give me a list of those people, right? Um, and, but it's like, it's just like, yeah, you know, these are excellent people and worth a call. It's like, how do I know who to call? Um, and this is like, why are you even announcing your new product features when you're talking about a layoff? Like, those should be separate things.

Totally agree. I'm like, this is a terrible message. I don't know who wrote this. I'm assuming they're at Bending Spoons.

She leads product at Bending Spoons.

I just looked up how many employees Airtable has. This is from a Google overview. It says 800 or so. I'm guessing they're laying off more than 50% is my guess. I don't have any stats or data, but when they say a large part, Bending Spoons model is you gut, you increase profit. This is what private equity does. And this is why people say private equity is not the place where this is where companies go and their innovation dies. And I really do agree with that, you know, and people always talk to me about innovating and we have a lot of people on our team who try to innovate. And my co-founder and I are like, so if you're telling me this is going to be a new thing, is anyone doing that? And usually because of AI, people move so fast these days. They're like, yeah, there's these other companies that are doing it. They're really tiny. And my co-founder and I usually just shoot an email and it's like, let's just see if one of these companies will sell to us. It'll be easier.

Yep.

By the way, Neil, that is not where you go to innovate.

So let's call something out real quick. Okay. Evernote, back in the day, right? So Evernote used to be like the number one note-taking company. Okay. So Evernote's peak headcount was roughly 433 employees. Guess how many people are running Evernote today?

30.

Exactly 30. Okay.

So that's 70%.

They cut, they cut 93% of staff. Okay. And they're doing— that is their playbook, right? Airtable. Like, by the way, the core Airtable team, they're all on HyperAgent now. So they spun that off from Airtable and they sold Airtable, right? So the core Airtable team, they're already in HyperAgent. They've already sailed off to somewhere else. So they're okay with, with, you know, cutting the rest. Um, so anyway, that's the model. Cut 90, 95% or so, just have 20 to 30 people running it. And then the thing, the way they run Bending Spoons is they have, um, different product managers, different engineers. They're kind of working on different projects and they're just kind of moving around. Um, so it's, it's, it's interesting for them, you know. So

yeah, what's interesting as well is when you're publicly traded, most people can't cut too deep. Okay. But their model in the public markets, know this, is buy companies that aren't high flyer growth companies anymore and just gut them. And then you just take a cash flow pay model, right? Money is money. People are happy with just cash flow. If you're publicly traded and let's say you're focusing on something that's core, like a Microsoft, a Google, Atlassian, whatever it may be, If you announce that you're cutting 95% or 90% or 80%, the market would be like, something's wrong, and it can actually hurt your stock price more. Bending spoons is in a different model. The market accepts it and they're like, oh yeah, this is great. Cut, cut the fat. Dude, this is what we—

this is interesting. Neil's right. So Berkshire put $330 million into it yesterday, so sparked a share rally.

So

by the way, year to

date, put it a while ago.

Reuters said it's one day ago. So this is probably some wrong Google overview or whatever, but market cap $32 billion. They're up 25% in the last 6 months or so. So not bad for what they are. Yeah. Are you sure, Neil? Here, let me show this to you. Like, either I'm wrong.

October 13th. It's October 13th.

Oh, 3 days ago. 3 days ago. Yeah. So this is just like later news. Bending Spoons skyrockets 41% as Berkshire Hathaway makes $330 million. Okay. I see. Oh, and this was from their CEO, Abel, Greg Abel, right? So

yeah. Yeah. The reason I know the dates is a lot of times when I see this stuff, I'm like, man, You know, I, I, no one knew that they were going to do it or else it would be insider trading. I then go and look at the options chain and I'm like, well, if I put in money at this price, how much would I have made? I was just curious, right? So it was pretty good.

Anyway, all right guys, so that is it for today. Um, we hope you have a great day and we will see you tomorrow.