The AI Apprenticeship, How We Actually Use AI in Marketing Today

Really nice background. It lasted for like a month. And, uh, this time he has a nice background again. So, uh, you know, Neil has this issue with business. He's very focused, but when it comes to his homes, he's very unfocused. When he— when it comes to his car, he's very, very unfocused too.

You know, I bought a new car, right?

You got the Model Y, right?

Yeah, it's the best thing ever from a self-driving perspective. Shittiest seats. I've sat in a long time for a car.

That's all you complain about is the seats, but you miss out on like all the good things too. The fact that you don't have to drive is great.

But I have back pain, that's why. Oh well, so like I notice it within like 15-20 minutes of sitting. Um, it's so much so that I've been using the self-driving and I started researching every single car company that has self-driving technology out there. I couldn't find good results. So then I plugged into LLM and it's breaking down how Mercedes is going to do a good job. And I like Mercedes, their cars are really comfortable. And what I started doing was I asked the LLMs to find me, or Google to find me every YouTube video of someone test driving the Mercedes self-driving. And then it ended up giving me results and I started watching the video and it was making so many mistakes. I was like, oh, I can't use the Mercedes self-driving technology.

I think that the lesson to learn from this one from a business standpoint is that even just a philosophical standpoint, so this comes from Thomas Sowell, who's like an economist, right? And I think he's still alive today, but one of the quotes that really sticks out to me is, There are no solutions, only trade-offs. And so you might say, okay, the Mercedes seats are a lot nicer and it looks, it's just more luxury in general. Okay, you get that. But then you miss out on the trade-off that you miss out on is the cream of the crop when it comes to self-driving, right? And then the trade-off is when you drive the Tesla, you get crappy seats, right? And so if you look at everything across business, almost everything that you see, there's a trade-off at the end of the day. There's no perfect solution. There's always a trade-off.

But you have to figure out if the trade-off is worth it. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up. So like for me, I have back pain. I can't do the trade-off of a Mercedes and use their self-driving for no back pain, because the trade-off in this situation is self-driving technology that may get me in a crash and may kill me.

Yeah.

Because based on the videos I saw, it's not that great. And the same problem goes in business. When people pick trade-offs, it's, you may prefer one over the other, but you got to really analyze the consequences and figure out, can you even, is this consequence something that you can even afford to have?

Yeah. So by the way, Neil, I have a, I just came back from an AI mastermind last week in Costa Rica. I thought I could maybe start off by sharing experiences and you can talk about cool stuff that you've, that's happened in the last 7 days. Maybe that's a good starting point. What do you think?

Let's do it. Okay.

So, I was in Costa Rica. By the way, I've never been to Costa Rica before. Have you?

No, I've never been to Costa Rica.

So, Costa Rica is really nice. So, one of the guys in the group, his name is Alan, he recommended Costa Rica and he did a great job of planning the event. And so, I'll reveal what I can. I can't go into too many details obviously, but I'll just talk about maybe the setup for this thing and how I think everyone should think about at least forming an AI text group or even like an AI founders chat or whatever role that you're in. I think it's really helpful to have peers and maybe that can be a follow-up to this piece. But I have always talked about why it's helpful to have a forum. These are like-minded people. Okay? So Neil might have a group of people that he texts all the time and Neil and I, we text all the time as well. You want to have people that you can bounce ideas off of, right? And that's always been very helpful. And so that's why I've always been a fan of groups like EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, or groups like YPO, Young Presidents Organization, or even Hampton, for example, because they help facilitate that. Now, what I would say is I was lacking a forum that would just primarily talk about AI. All we wanted to nerd out about was business and AI. We don't want to talk about partying. We don't want to talk about anything else. We don't want to talk about our relationships. All we want to talk about is AI and business, right? And so we went to Costa Rica basically last Thursday to Sunday or so, and it was beautiful. So the whole idea here is that you do it in a nice spot. We had a big house and it was overlooking the water. We had a nice pool and everything. And just every day we'd wake up, we'd have someone cook breakfast for us. They were amazing. And then from 8:00 AM to 12:00, we'd just be talking about business and AI shares and things like that. And then afternoon we play pickleball and then we probably into the evening—

Wait, wait, wait. Let's go back. AI shares. So you guys were talking about stocks and all that kind of stuff and which shares you guys own?

No, no, no. AI shares as in we're sharing things around AI and business, not the stocks. But we did talk about stocks. We did talk about stocks. Yeah. It's like the stuff that I showed you already. You saw the stocks that jumped like 8,000% in a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did talk about investments. We did talk about stocks. I think it's just really anything around business, right? And I would just say that going into some of the AI learnings, at least from my end, one thing is after I came back, I started off this apprenticeship at my company. And this was a result of one of my explorations that I did where I was talking about some of the challenges I was having. And so I noticed something with some of the people that I trained up at the company. I would spend like, I would do these 30-minute meetings. And I would do these meetings like 10 to 15 times or so. Okay. And, but these, after I did these meetings with these people, these people were flying and like, I didn't have to tell them much. They were just very high agency people and they were just figuring everything out and they were doing the jobs of like, you know, like 4 or 5 different jobs at once. I'm like, dude, why don't I just figure out how I can duplicate that across like more people? Why don't I like Jedi train some more people in the organization so then they can Jedi train more people in the organization and spend time like I was doing too, right? In terms of scaling it out. So we created this pod of one apprenticeship and I already started rolling it out this week. So that's one thing that I immediately did. I'll pause for a second here.

So some of them have already been doing this, right? Where they rolled out this pod and doing this apprenticeship. What are people getting from it? What are the results that people have been experiencing that have been doing it for longer? I'm making an assumption here, but I'm assuming some of these guys have been doing it for Longer because you guys are all sharing new ideas with each other.

Yeah, we're always sharing ideas and things like that. But I think when I'm actively spending one-on-one time with some of these people that are very talented and AI forward, and I'm guiding them along the way in terms of my speed, my expectations, and teaching them along the way, that's why I say it's like Jedi training. They tend to move a lot faster because I asked one of the people that I trained, I was like, hey, How impactful was it? Because I don't think anything of the time I spend with someone. And this guy was like, oh, it was honestly like a 9 out of 10. It was massive for me that you spent the time doing that. And I was like, okay, I'm going to pick 6 other people in my organization to do this with. And then they're going to train the rest of the people in terms of just spending a lot of time with them. And so I've been doing that this week and it's already been a high leverage thing already where I'm like, whoa, this is really good. And I haven't thought of doing like an apprenticeship before, but this is what I'm thinking about. So when we talk about this AI apprenticeship, if you want to join my company, we're hiring more. I'll actually spend time with you if you're that damn good. If you're not that damn good, I will spend no time with you.

Well, if you're not that good, forget the time. Are you going to even actually hire them?

Well, we make hiring mistakes sometimes, you know? Like how often do you get hired right? That's the question.

Yeah. I looked at my track record last week. We were actually going through every single company I've been through and looking at how many times I hire a good manager that works out. I'm talking about a manager who typically leads a division or a project, whatnot. And this is literally 20+ years of doing business. I think I'm what, 25, 26 years of doing business at this point. I'm a little bit better than 50%. You know, I was just like, oh, maybe I've gone better. Maybe I'm at 70, 80, 90%. And I'm talking about, we have really strict hiring processes. I've done much better later on, but I'm still not batting like 70, 80, 90%. It's, it gets really hard when you're hiring at scale. I'm not talking about lower level or middle management. I'm talking about senior management looking to like lead a country or a division or do something new. Roughly 50%, sadly.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. I think I'm probably around 50%. I need to run the numbers on this. I might be around 50% or maybe even slightly below 50%. But I think we all like to think that we're really good at hiring when we're not, because we're all different people and people are very complex and we all have different personalities. Neil's a very different person than what I am. I'll share one more thing, Neil, because I don't want to take up too much airtime here. One other thing that we rolled out ASAP is, so I built this using Codex. And so you know how Meta right now, they're basically, they're kind of seeing how people are, their employees are doing things and they're making processes with it. Or like if I, some factory companies are making you wear a suit so they can see how you run certain processes when you're building things. Are you familiar with this?

Yep.

Okay.

Yes.

So I made something. So we're talking about this, but I basically made something using Codex that it's been watching me for this last week. So it'll take screenshots every now and then. I don't even know what screenshots it's taking. but it's watching my screen and it's telling me, hey, this is how you work right now. These are the skills that I think you should be making. Meaning that these are processes that I can then— these skills I can hand off to other people and make them very portable. But it's also telling me in which ways I work very inefficiently and how I can work better. And so I've been running it on myself and it didn't take me that long to build. I was actually pretty shocked how long it took me to build it. But I'm like, oh man, if we run this with the understanding that, hey, this is going to help make everyone better and we're going to basically— it's going to make you work more efficiently and it's going to Make a lot of processes, skills that you can then hand off to a robot to take care of so you don't have to do it. I'm like, that is super high leverage. I have a lot of these other things I can share, but that was another one that I got working. I built it on the plane, I think, and now it's just working. I'm just staring at it right now.

I was in Colombia yesterday. Funny enough, it is Friday while we're recording this. Yeah, Bogota. I left Wednesday afternoon-ish or early afternoon-ish, got there Thursday early in the morning, like 2:00 AM, right? So I was at the hotel by 3:00 AM. Driver took a little bit to pick me up. I was waiting out there. I'm like, come on, man, there's no traffic here. I was speaking at a marketing event, IAB, Interactive Advertising Bureau. And then I left Thursday right after my speech, right? And then I got back home, call it around midnight.

That's not an easy flight. That's a 7-hour flight, isn't it?

More because there's no direct flights. So connecting, and I'm like sitting and crammed, my head, my neck and back just hurt because, you know, I was up sleeping in an airplane seat for a while. But nonetheless, when I was there, I was talking to some of my team members and we were having this debate on, do you fire marketing employees because of AI? And what I mean by this specifically is there's 2 camps right now when it comes to AI and employees. Some are saying, hey, we're letting go of people because we're making things much more efficient. Okay? I'm not talking about the companies that are saying we're letting people go because of AI and they're not growing. A lot of those are actually just letting people go because they overhired and they're just cutting. But there are actually businesses that have made efficiencies that are cutting due to AI. But there's another camp, and my team and I were talking about this, and some of them were like, eventually you can just get rid of a lot of people and you'll have way less. Our old VP of marketing, Salo, used to make the pitch to me. He was like, dude, if you want your company to succeed, and he's a friend, so when he left, I had an exit interview. I let people say whatever they want and you get feedback. Because it doesn't matter what you believe, it's good to hear what other people have to say. And I remember Saulo telling me, you should get rid of half to 3/4 of your company and just automate everything through AI. Now there's differences of opinion, but I believe in marketing, what we're seeing on the ground working with companies, because of AI, people aren't really putting too much pressure to pay us less. They're putting more pressure to get more. And what we're finding is if you go the route of just cutting a ton of headcount and you're using AI to automate a lot of stuff, the quality isn't there yet where clients will be happy or the marketing outputs will produce the results that we're looking for. So what we're finding in today's world, at least in marketing, and we're finding the winning combination is not necessarily firing because of AI, but more so maintaining because of AI. I'm not saying hire a ton more, I'm saying maintaining. And then you're using technology to make every single person better, more efficient, so that way you can create more outputs for your customers.

Yeah.

Or for your own company that you're working for. And I don't think there's really another way because if you end up cutting staff, it is still hard to get a lot of high-quality output done in marketing. And people right now, we're not hearing the pressure of we need to pay less. we're hearing the pressure of marketing needs to do more. We need better results. And this is just globally. I'm not talking about just our customers. I'm just, when I go to conferences, I'm hearing everyone say, we need more done faster and better. I don't really hear we need to cut cost.

Yep. So here's what I think about AI as it relates to staffing in general. And as you know, we've talked about this on the podcast where I believe that My stance is that AI is going to create— it's going to lead to more job creation in the long term. And sure, there might be some short-term job displacement, but what I haven't changed my stance on is that someone with AI is going to replace people that don't use AI. So as an example, if Neil and I are fighting right now, let's say it's a physical fight, okay? If I'm holding a knife and Neil's holding a gun, in 1,000— over 1,000 times, who's most likely going to win? It's going to be Neil with a gun, right?

Yeah.

Sometimes I might get lucky.

Assuming I can aim right though. Yeah.

Well, assuming if we fight 1,000 times, you're probably going to win most of them, right? You agree?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you.

Neil, you keep the gun.

Okay?

You keep the handgun. Now I have upgraded to a rifle. Out of 1,000 times, who's more likely to win now?

You, because a rifle, if I'm not mistaken, I've never shot one, or I've actually never even shot a gun, but a rifle I believe spreads out, right? So it's easier to hit the target.

So you might be able to— you run out of bullets in 12 shots. I can shoot rapidly in 30 shots or so, and it's much more rapid fire, right? And then, okay, Neil, I have the rifle now. Now you get the machine gun now. You are now more likely to win. So the way I see it now is just like, it's no different than Neil riding a horse and I'm driving a car, and then he's driving a Formula 1 car. That's how I see this stuff. And the crazy thing to me, Neil, I was at an event yesterday and I cited the stat. I was like, look, You have 46% of Americans are pro-AI, whereas 87% of Chinese are pro-AI. How do you reconcile that? Some people, I'm just like, it just makes you faster. The way I see it is like, look, we want to hire people that are very pro-AI and are using the tools because what I'm seeing, same thing as you, Neil, is that on our end, what we're seeing is people want more work. They want more help. I don't think it's ever going to change that people want help with this stuff. And when we're showing them stuff on the Single Brain side, when they're looking at how these workflows are working, they're like, can you do this? Can you do this?

Can you do this?

How about this? How about this? How about this? It's much more of a more, more, more, and I'm all here for it because we're all going to do better if we're using these tools.

Yes. And I learned today that a rifle doesn't shoot spread out. I think that's a shotgun.

That's a shotgun. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, shotgun versus gun, you'd have a better shot if you had a shotgun. So anyway, All that to say is that's why I think it's really important. Neil talks about his team will, they have people that will insert into different squads and maybe not necessarily train, but maybe they'll set up the work. And on my end, I'm like, okay, maybe we can set up a couple of these apprenticeships with the people that are ahead of the game and figure out how we can spread it throughout the organization. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You can even combine these things. But I just think that the things that I'm talking about over here, the thing watching me to build skills and all that, I think we're gonna need more and more of this 'cause people want more work done.

Yeah. And on a side note, when we're talking about AI constantly, when I go to events and I don't know about you, Eric, but most people wanna talk about how to get included into ChatGPT. And I don't see as many people care or wanna talk as much about AI overviews. But there was a BrightEdge study that came out Did you know that AI Overviews cite brands, like a company brand, 2.5x higher? Not percent, 2.5x. So 250% more likely to get a brand to cite you on AI Overviews or AI Overviews to cite your brand than ChatGPT because they're more likely to do it. In essence, AI Overviews prefer citing brands over ChatGPT.

Why is that?

I don't know. It's just the way— and AI mode is, uh, so when we look at the data, ChatGPT is 2.37 brands per query, uh, AI Overviews is 6.02 brands per query. Google AI mode though is less than ChatGPT. It's 1.59 brands per query.

Huh, interesting. Well, since we're on the note of, we're talking about AEO and SEO right now, you also have another one here on Google and ChatGPT look at Wikipedia citations differently.

Yeah. So when you look at Wikipedia and how they're citing them, this is from, where is it? Is it Demand Sage? Yeah. So they did an interesting study and what they ended up finding is, or I think it was actually, no, I put the wrong link in here. I'm pretty sure it was from BrightEdge. But I know either way, when you look at how ChatGPT includes Wikipedia, they'll include sites like Healthline and others along with it. But on the flip side, if you look at Google, they include the social networks, Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Facebook along with Wikipedia. So Google views Wikipedia more like a social network. Although, and ChatGPT, which is quite a bit different, looks at it as more of like an authoritative source like Encyclopedia Britannica, the Webster Dictionary, Cleveland Clinic headline, Mayo Clinic. These are all examples of other sites that are cited along Wikipedia on ChatGPT. But the Google examples in AI Overviews, Wikipedia typically gets cited with YouTube, Reddit, Britannica, Quora, IMDb, Facebook, right? Most of them are social.

This is interesting. So basically this shows the difference between ChatGPT Wikipedia versus Google Wikipedia. So if you look at the table over here, Google AI overviews. So YouTube co-occurrence rate 13%, Reddit 9%, and then Encyclopedia Britannica, and then you have Quora, IMDb, Facebook. Okay, so a lot of these are social platforms. And then, um, you look at this one over here, top co-citations alongside Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica. But by the way, we haven't heard of Encyclopedia Britannica in a very long time. Like that's something you use when you're a kid, but I guess they're still around and you have a Webster Dictionary, Mayo Clinic and all that. So it's interesting. But the question is, Neil, what are the implications? Well, bless you. Sorry.

Thank you. I forgot to click mute.

That's okay. Well, so what are the, what do you think the implications are behind this?

I don't really think there's any implications. It's more so Google doesn't view Wikipedia as authoritative as ChatGPT does, right? Because I would assume that Google doesn't view social content that anyone can just create as valuable as, let's say, authoritative content from an expert like Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or Healthline, right? They're very picky about eat signals when it comes to health. If you look at ChatGPT, they're putting Wikipedia along with expert-created content.

Dude, you know, speaking of content, I want to talk about how to automate quality content marketing. But before we do that, Neil, I just want to show you something. So I was publishing something today where it's like a newsjacking thing because Opus 4.8 came out. And I'm like, man, I can't publish it today because like my video editor's not available. And then our thumbnail person can't get it out that quickly. And you know what happened, Neil? Here, I just published this. You can't quite see it that well. Maybe you can see this thumbnail a little bit, right? It says OpenSea 4.8, right? It doesn't look bad as a thumbnail, right? And I got that done as I was just talking to you and I'm just publishing it right now. But it looks pretty good.

That looks good.

Yeah. Yeah. So my point is there should be no excuses now. I think if someone like you and me, because we're more business operators than creators, but we're still creators, right? But if I want to react to a video quickly and I have a viewpoint on it, I'm just going to take what videos I have. I'm going to use ChatGPT images and I'm just going to crank it out. And I showed it to my team because I was like, hey guys, this is really frustrating because I really want to get this video out right now, but I can't do it. And I just opened up ChatGPT images. I was just like, hey, use this. I did it a little bit and then I just published it. So I think this solves a lot of problems. We'll just leave it at that. Okay. So I want to show you something, Neil. So this is a Do you want to know how you can automate quality content marketing?

Go for it.

Okay. So check this out. So this is from Ryan Law of Ahrefs. Okay. So I think Ryan's really smart. And he's just like, look, content marketing is going through the biggest step change since Google appeared. One personal example, I have an old website I built a decade ago. The content was old. The design was old. I had no time to improve it. I resigned. It was resigned to a slow death. Whatever this French line is. But now I migrated the website from Squarespace to static HTML. I vibe coded a brand new design with tons of custom widgets. I hooked it up to Codex and now every day Codex chooses one old article to improve automatically. So those of you that are listening right now, watching this right now, you might be thinking, oh, it's probably crappy quality, but I can assure you Ryan is a really smart content marketer. He doesn't just, he doesn't just publish crap. Okay. I'll just leave it at that. And so he says it pulls performance data from Ahrefs MCP. It reviews top-ranking articles. It finds content gaps, adds new sections, generates new images, improves internal linkings, and generates a preview for me to provide feedback on. It takes me about 10 minutes to review and finalize the article, and Codex saves my feedback to a memory file that it reviews the next time it goes to update an article. It is literally like having a team working for me to my exact specification, reviving all my old projects, and it costs me $20 a month. And so he's like, this is just a dumb hobby project, right? So content marketing is absolutely crazy right now. And frankly, I'm having the best time. But he's like, I think there's always going to be value for and reward for extremely high quality content. And strangely, I think AI is about to become essential for making competitive high quality content. But traditional content marketing, how can traditional content marketing compete with automated content updating, with deeper research, with unique data visualizations and custom coded— Yeah. Page experiences. So my take on this, Neil, is that I think what he said over here, the last part is very important. So sure, maybe he's running these basic updates right now and maybe they're working to a degree, but my belief, just like what I just showed you with the thumbnail, it's going to enable us to create more data visualizations, more images and things like that. I think it's going to help more. It's going to democratize the ability to create higher quality content. So I actually think we're going to see more higher quality content. And I actually think we're also going to see more high-quality poo-poo content too. Yes.

And you saw the announcement Google did with YouTube and the change they made with flagging AI content?

Yeah, they're doing it. Instagram's doing it.

Yeah. So YouTube is labeling if content is AI created. If you're a creator and you believe your content wasn't AI created, you can flag it, but they're pretty much marking it. And I think this is going to be a standard and I believe what's going to happen is even though content marketing is getting easier because of AI, I believe AI-generated content won't do as well in the long run. And Lily Rae's done a lot of studies on this and she's posted quite a bit of stuff that breaks down how you're getting short-term boosts in traffic, long-term declines. I do believe you can use AI, but AI needs to be combined with a human. If it's pure AI, I believe you're just not going to get the views and the traffic and the engagement. than if it was human created. And you could say, well, what happens if the AI content's so amazing, it's just like a human or even better? I'm not joking. I believe all the systems eventually are going to start having to flag this from a legal perspective. I'm not a lawyer, but this is just my guess and prediction that eventually these guys are going to get pressure from regulators all around the world. They're going to have to flag AI content more. And people are using these as LLMs to create the AI content so they know what's being created by them. And what's going to eventually happening is you're just not going to get the results you're looking for or expecting.

Well, let's talk about this topic that you have over here that relates to it. So where we see AI content winning and losing.

Yeah, so I see it winning for things like helping you brainstorm, helping you update old outdated content. Like the example that you gave, I believe the guy's name was Ryan from Ahrefs, right? Updating content. Helping you translate and transcribe your content so you can go global faster. Helping you research gaps, stats, data so that way you can cite things. Helping you come up with better hooks and headlines, fine-tuning what you're doing, right? I use AI for that as well. Sometimes I'm creating charts on something because my team will send me data and I'm like, okay, And I'll give you a great example of this. My team worked with, I don't know how many companies, and we started asking, these companies were asking people, how'd you hear about us? For customers that were checking out. So customers would say social, Google, ChatGPT, et cetera, right? Email, whatever the channels may be. When they selected Google, we would dive in more and ask follow-up questions. And these were just like a tick box, like a multiple choice answer. So you could say AI overviews, traditional Google search, paid search, map results, videos, images, whatever it may be, shopping, et cetera. So I was just like, oh cool. I don't want to create a chart that showcases how people or how customers are learning about businesses. I wanted to create a chart that breaks down where inside Google are people actually learning about a business when they use Google. come up with a chart idea? And this, no joke, was yesterday around like 1-something AM because I slept in the plane, didn't have Wi-Fi. So I was wide awake and I was like, all right, let me, you know, uh, crank this out into a chart idea because my team already sent me the data. We just needed a title for a chart. So I plugged in the data into ChatGPT and I was like, I'm stuck on a chart idea or a title for it. And it says, how about where brand discovery happens on Google? And I was like, cool, this works. They gave me like 10 options, right? And out of the 10 options, the where brand discovery happens on Google, they gave me a longer variation of it. It wasn't too much longer. I cut out a few words and adjusted one or two, and I'm like, this is good to go. So I think you can help it a lot for fine-tuning, even if you're good at what you do, because even if you're good at what you do, Sometimes you're not always going to be on your A-game. Sometimes you have burnout, sometimes you're tired, sometimes you just have brain fog. But where I don't see AI helping with content and it being successful in the long run is it just doing everything from soup to nuts and it just being successful because I believe the platforms are going to flag it even if the content's amazing and it's just going to get crushed over time.

Yeah, so here's my take on it. I'll show a couple of examples here. So I think what's helpful, okay, so let me share. 2 things real quick here. So here's how I think AI is going to— AI is affecting marketing, content marketing in general. So if I share this screen with you over here, you can see this, right? So basically I was messing with this today and I was making a skill. So I was like, hey, look at the All In Podcast. And Neil, this actually applies to our podcast Marketing School, right? I'm like, they actually do a good job with the— I think their thumbnails are pretty good and their titles are pretty good. So I was like, hey, based on this, I want you to make a skill here. And what the skill does every single time is that when we have a new podcast that's over an hour or so, I just wanted to use this skill. So it'll come up with the ideas. And so I was playing with it today and for today's podcast, I took all the titles over here and I was just like, hey, use this and tell me what titles you would pick. And in fact, it was like, because we're going to talk about why ClickUp shed 22% people to build a 100x team. And there's all these different topic ideas here. And so I think it does a good job with coming up with titles potentially, and then you can iterate on them. I don't think you just go with what they say, at least right now. It comes up with good thumbnails. And I just showed you the thumbnail that I did on the screen earlier, and that was really good. That was using ChatGPT Images. But not only that, Neil, this is super half-assed yesterday, but I saw someone post something about what charts tend to work on LinkedIn. So I took that X post and I went to my AI, my Hermes. I was like, hey, make it into a skill. So it made this image over here. It's like, yeah, what clients buy versus what must exist. Outcome above the waterline, machine underneath. So it created this chart. And is it perfect? No. You can see that the text is overlapping here, but what did it generate? 35 bookmarks on X, which is not bad from this half-assed image and 33 likes, right? And I know I can iterate off of this. So I think when it comes to making charts, graphs, images off of raw data that you have already, That's great. And then you, the creator, you need to be able to speak to what your angle is or what your opinion is on it. I think that's the part that makes you unique because we're all different.

Yes. The number one way I— or let's go back on this. You've used AI with content and I've used AI for content as well. If you had to pick just one, what has been your biggest ROI from using AI in content?

Driving. Okay, so the X posts that it creates drive hundreds of thousands of views that actually drive pipeline and pipeline that has closed. So it does drive revenue.

And specifically for creating content for X and articles, not tweets, articles.

Correct. They're articles for X.

Yeah. And then for me, I would say the highest ROI by far, it's a leader. I don't have the exact percentage, but I know because we do a weekly marketing standup. And it's just so much larger by multiples, is translating and transcribing our campaigns using AI. So if something works for English, we'll just whip it out in all the countries that have a similar culture to the US. So whether it is whipping it out for Canada in French or Portuguese or Spanish or whatever languages that the team wants to test, We find that that helps us scale faster and it just replicates the campaigns and it produces a really positive ROI.

You just whip it out, huh? Just whip it out. All right, keep going here. All right, so ClickUp, I want to talk about— crank it out is a better term, but yeah, there you go. So, okay, I want to talk about something here. So Neil, obviously you've seen this, that ClickUp, they cut 22% of staff and they're talking about getting 100x employees and then Cloudflare did this thing where they did a layoff and then each of their CEOs wrote a really long post on X and it got millions and millions of views. And then you've heard people that have different opinions on this, right? So let me pull this up real quick and then we can react to this because I want to talk about this from a business operator angle versus just reacting like someone from the news. So Jason Lemkin put this up here. So Zeb from ClickUp, I just want— he's the CEO founder of ClickUp. And so this post has 9 million views. Oh my God. Wow. Okay. So I think folks are partially missing the story here. ClickUp is in the category perhaps most devastated by AI. So we talked about this last week, but I want to react to it more. So Monday, Asana, et cetera, are further down than anyone else. Atlassian, Jira was too until the last quarter, literally the worst category of software in the AI age. What I want to talk about here is this whole idea of focusing on 100x employees because if he needs to, like ClickUp or Cloudflare, they need to cut. And they're talking about making way for 100x employees. Naval has talked about this concept of you're not even a 10x engineer anymore. You're not even a 100x engineer. You could be a 1,000x engineer in this case. And when I look at the way I'm working now, just on the right side of my screen, I can't help myself. And I even asked my Hermes, I'm like, how much faster am I? And so I do think it's smart. Even when I talk to our recruiter right now for people that are looking for, let's say, a lot of money that that we have maybe very over budget for what we budgeted for that role. I'm like, hey, if they're really good, I still want to have them on the bench because as we continue to scale with these things, we're going to need amazing people. And if these people can do 10x or 100x of the job, we want to pay these people. And that's what I think this kind of goes back to what you were saying earlier where it's like, are you trying to fire people because of AI? No, not necessarily. It's more so we want to find all the people, most, as many as we can, that can be 10x or 100x or so. That's what really it comes down to. It's not really like an AI or not AI thing.

Yeah. And when I look at this post, I'm not doubting that you can't have better employees. I think all organizations can have better employees because if you're at scale, you have people that are dragging a company down. That's in all corporations. But if you look at the companies that are performing the best in the stock market, How many layoffs do you think they're doing, Eric? Or what percentage of them do you think they're doing layoffs?

Are we talking about the Magnificent Seven?

No, I'm talking about the ones that are gaining the most traction from a stock price, which is mainly all the AI companies.

Yeah, I don't think many of them are.

Yeah, exactly. And there's been a counterargument to this. If you look at the companies that are booming the most, like MU, you know, Scandis, and the list goes on and on.

Eric also shared— Sandisk.

Sandisk. Uh, Eric shared me a list with, uh, all the AI stocks that are booming. And if you just look at all those companies, most of them are not doing layoffs. Just in general, the companies that are growing the fastest in the public markets, most of them are not talking about layoffs at all. It's the companies that are struggling that are doing the layoffs. And They're coming up with different narratives. I'm not saying the 100x employee isn't true or the 1,000x or the 10x or even 5x, because even if you double the employees' efficiencies, that has huge impacts on an organization. But I think a lot of the companies that are pushing out this narrative are struggling in some way and they're looking to pivot and make changes. I'm not saying these changes are bad or good. I'm just saying they have no choice but to make changes because of the position they're in.

So I think there's multiple things going on here and I'm actually, I'm having Google chart this out for us right now. But I do think a business like a ClickUp, that's a troubled category right now. And I hope they figure it out. I trust that they will. But I will say that also, if we look at Amazon, for example, right? So 16,000 corporate positions axed, and then you have Meta that cut 16,000. I think they had another small one this week. And so those I think are pretty good companies. Oracle cut $30K, but I wouldn't say they're cream of the crop, but they're still a pretty good company. And then you have—

Yeah.

Then there's others out there, like you have Block, for example, that cut $4,000. So let me just show this to you real quick. There's a graph here, Neon. We can talk about this and then we can talk about these other stocks too. This is not financial advice for anybody, but so— excuse me. UPS cut $30K. This is 2026. Oracle cut $30K. Excuse me. Citibank cut $20K. Amazon $16K. Meta $16K. Estée Lauder $10K. Cisco $4K. Block $4K. I would say cream of the crop of this list over here, Neil, we can disagree on this one or agree, but I think Amazon's cream of the crop. I think Meta's a really great company too. They also have hundreds of thousands of employees, just FYI. I think Citibank's a pretty good company too. And I think these are all pretty good companies, but I think Amazon, Meta kind of stick out to me here. Yeah.

But if you look at— forget what we think about the companies, like our own perspective. When you look at it from just a pure stock price perspective, right? Amazon and Facebook are still growing. They're just not necessarily growing as well. Like when I look at Facebook, where's Meta? Year to date, what are they at? Meta's down 3%. I know Citi is booming. Citi must be up a lot for this year, uh, but some of these are doing well, some of them aren't as doing well. But when you compare them to like the high flyers, like, you know, MU, Intel's been crushing it recently, you know. And my mom has a different stock agenda. This is not financial advice. She rides the trends and the waves, like she doesn't look at the financials. So my, my mom will be like Oh, Intel's cheap, $19, buy. Like literally, I believe she bought at $19 and she's up maybe 5x her money at this point because I believe it's trading at over $100. Intel's financials haven't improved that much. It's worth, I think, around $500 billion. I'm more of a value-add buyer where I look for things that are just really crushed and depressed and the fundamentals are really strong from a revenue and profitability standpoint and a growth standpoint. But my mom's actually crushing me with her portfolio versus mine, no research. She just buys the high flyers. None of these are really— some of them may be laying off, like Intel may have done so in the past when they were struggling, but she's just looking for the ones that are just on a tear because of AI. And most of these companies are on a hiring binge, not a firing binge.

So let me show you something, Neal. So there's 2 things we can talk about here. So I have more charts for you because we like charts here. So you can see on my screen over here, I pardoned it for all the tabs. I haven't restarted for a while because with all the AI stuff, I don't like restarting my computer anymore.

Your tabs are like NASCAR, dude.

It's usually not like this. I used to turn off my computer every night. Now I almost don't turn it on for days or weeks at a time. Anyway, so here's a normalized year-to-date percentage returns. If we're looking at Amazon, Oracle, If you look at this chart over here, this chart's very hard to read, so I'm just going to give you kind of the TL;DR from January until now. To Neil's point, Meta is down 3.5%. Cloudflare is down 2.1%. Citibank is down 1%. And then—

No, this is off. Citibank is not down.

Do you have something that's more relevant or sooner?

Citibank is up 6.35% this year. No. Yeah, 6.35%.

On all year-to-date numbers, especially Citibank. So let this be known that it hallucinated in front of us.

Um, UPS, did they say 5.5% up?

No, Citibank, it said UPS is a 5.5. Yeah. And then Amazon, it says it's up 19.1.

Yeah, I know Amazon's done decently well this year.

Okay, so here, here it says, uh, Citibank is up 7.7% and then Amazon's up 16.8%. Does that sound more right?

Uh, no, Amazon's closer to 19%. The first one was right. And Citibank is up, uh, let's see, year to date, uh, 6.35%.

Okay, so my point here, Neil, is I still think it's kind of like— I think so, in some cases they're cutting people, and in many cases they're cutting people that just aren't a fit, that don't fit the AI narrative. Now speaking of AI narrative here, I want to show you this one. So I've shown Neil some of these stocks over here. If you look at stocks like AXTI, Intel, Marvel Technology, and Vertiv, I could speak to these in a moment. But if you look at 1 year, okay, AXTI is up 6,800%, okay? And then Intel's up 500%. Marvel Technology is 243%. Vertiv, which does cooling, is up 188%. And so speaking of narrative, Neil, we talked about this last time, but none of these, like AXTI, it's not like they're crushing it from like a revenue growth standpoint or cash flow growth standpoint. It's the narrative that's tied to this.

Yes. And I totally agree. It's the narratives. A lot of this has nothing to do with fundamentals. It's just the narrative. And all of these guys, when they're doing layoffs, they all pitch the same narrative. We're reinvesting the savings into AI, or, hey, our employees are so much more efficient because of AI. I'm not saying it's not true to some extent, but the real reason that most of these companies are laying off is because they're just not growing the way they expected. And they made these hires assuming they were going to. So now they got to cut back. And when your stock price goes down, you need to figure out how to make your economics look better for the market. And you got to paint a narrative. You can't go to the public markets and say, hey, we're missing our numbers and we don't think we're going to actually grow the way we projected over the next few years. So we're going to fire a ton of people. Your stock's just going to tank even more. It's marketing. They're just spinning the verbiage and the messaging to make themselves look better.

Yep. The last thing, then we can move on from this, but I just want to go through what this, uh, what the CEO of ClickUp said here. So the whole concept of the 100x organization here. So the primary change is that what we're restructuring around what I call the 100x org. The goal is 100x output. Okay. So the roles required to build the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago. Build at the highest level. Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken. The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems. These roles will evolve, but waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now. That part I agree with. The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people, infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working. That I agree with as well because the thing is I look at how we're doing things now. There's, for example, the agents that we have, there's a lot of debugging that's required with these agents. So you're going to need to hire agent managers and you're going to need to hire more developers, more forward-deployed engineers, more customer success people. But more importantly, they need to be able to do these things because if they can't, they're actually going to be A hindrance to your organization.

Yeah. And when you look at what these guys are doing, I'm telling you, my just personal beliefs is they don't have a choice. And the restructuring and the reorg, I have it in the sheet. There was an interesting stat from DemandSage. 70% of SEO teams haven't been restructured for AI. And I don't think it's just a marketing thing. Most divisions within an organization haven't been restructured for AI to leverage the technology, to harness it. With SEO, it's a little bit different because you have 2 angles. One is using the tools to be more efficient and increase output. The second is to actually go and optimize for these LLMs, right? Because we haven't seen too many organizations adapt as well internally. And a great example of this is I was speaking at a Fortune 100 company, like literally at their offices to the CMOs and marketing. And it was about GEO. They had Accenture give a talk. When Accenture gave the talk, they were like, we want to explain to you about GEO. This stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Imagine when you search on ChatGPT, what if your brand showed up for products related to your space? And they were just like, we kind of already know what a lot of this is. We were expecting you guys to come in with strategies and tactics. But the reason Accenture gave that talk, and I'm not trying to knock them, is most people don't have the basics even down, right? So it's like, if you don't have the basics down, then there's no point in talking about advanced stuff. And I think a lot of organizations are going to go through restructuring. I do believe that is going to cause some layoffs. I also believe that's going to cause for new people to be hired. But the narrative that companies are pushing right now, because AI or 100x and all this kind of stuff, the reality is, is most organizations will never get 100x output from their employees. I get the marketing message around it. They just aren't doing that well and they got to figure out how to perform better because they have investors or they're publicly traded and they've raised too much money.

So similarly, Neil, I mean, we just kind of talked about hiring here, right? So I want to talk about why I think now is one of the best times if you're coming out of college to find a job. Um, especially if you hang out on the internet all the time, and especially if you play video games. Um, and here's why I think that's because we just hired a 17-year-old, uh, Neil, and very, very cracked out. And then we're probably gonna hire his friend as well, who's probably only 17 or 18 years old, um, as, um, kind of software engineers because they're, they're pretty cracked out and they're pretty good, right? And so this is from the Cloudflare CEO. Um, we received almost a million applicants for 1,100 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI native. They're all builders or sellers, and we expect the majority will get full-time offers. And so I will also speak for you, Neil. We are always looking to hire amazing people who are very AI-forward, just very productive, especially on the intern side because you learn a lot and then we help you, you help us grow, we help you grow as well. So we are both looking for interns. So go to, for us it's singlegrain.com/careers. How about you, Neil? What's your career space? Is it mpdigital.com/careers?

Yeah, you nailed it. I looked at it right now. It's mpdigital.com/careers.

Yeah. So we are actively hiring and we are running through these apprenticeship programs. So both our companies are hiring. Now, by the way, one more thing on the marketing side. This is like a negative marketing thing. I think for the Cloudflare team, he shouldn't— the Cloudflare CEO shouldn't have said this thing around AI isn't coming for builders or sellers, but it's coming for the measurers. And what he means by measures are like the finance people or people that are just kind of people managers. He calls those kind of the managers. I don't think you should be doing this because it's not a good look for your company.

I do believe AI is coming for measures, but in a different way than he's saying. We're seeing an increase in most companies that we work with, AI just pushing hard, hitting up CMOs, CFOs, trying to hack their accounts, get access to data and uh, do sketchy stuff. We mainly see it in more, um, uh, the financial categories. For any large company, we're just seeing people trying to get access to CFO emails and stuff like that and just start sending money because they're using AI to personalize emails to other internal teams when they hack to sound just like the CFO and be like, wire money here.

Yeah.

And they're doing analysis of where you sent money to in the past and they're just switching up little details And saying like, hey, wire it to Hong Kong instead of India or whatever it may be.

Dude, it's kind of similar to when you get those, you get all these invoices. And so the whole idea is that you just send invoices to everyone that works at a company because the AP team will just be like, oh yeah, this looks like it's legit. And you just keep sending it. And then eventually they abuse you or they abuse someone else. And I think that's billions and billions of dollars in fraud.

And we're also seeing a new trend with invoices. People are trying to start sending us invoices with numbers, like crypto accounts, you know? And I'm like, what the heck? Like actual businesses. So then we had to call and verify and get all the documentation. Like, is this fraud? But yeah, things are changing fast.

I want to talk about what I learned from meeting a centi-billion-dollar Chinese company earlier this week, but maybe you can talk about your experience in Colombia this week. Like, is there any, Are there any learnings from this week? Anything you want to share?

I don't really have any big learnings. The one that just smacks me in the head when I meet people, when I was meeting a lot of people in Colombia, it's like people are paying for the technology and these tools and the issue isn't the tools. The issue is people not using what they're paying for. We're seeing the same SaaS problem with AI tools. So in the old SaaS age, you would pay for a tool and you'd just be like, yeah, we're trying to do this and we're trying to roll this out. And I'm like, so you have a CRM solution that has these features? Have you tried using it for that? Oh, we didn't know that it could actually do it. You're paying for it. Why are you trying to sign up for a new software that does the same thing for the one that you're already paying for? And the issue is actually how people are using the tools. Same with AI. So in almost every country I go to and every event, most of these people are working at large organizations. They all have access to the latest cutting-edge tools. And let's face it, they have access to these tools in a better way than Eric and I do because they work for larger publicly traded companies and they have much bigger budgets. And they have access to so many internal resources for training and help and all this kind of stuff. And what we're finding is, is they're paying for the technology and they're asking questions. And I'm like, but you're paying for tools that can actually help you with this, like landing pages. You know, I was at an event that— the water purification conference, or not water purification, they deal with water, fire, mold, more than just purification of water, fixing water or leaks or plumbing. They pretty much do anything for like home remodeling, but it's mainly dealing with like fixing issues on the spot. And a lot of the people at this event were given a HighLevel account for free and they're asking me questions. And I was like, you do know the product that you already use that your parent franchise organization has and pays for has these features and you can just get this done right away.

And they're like, oh, I didn't know that.

And it's just like, Just people aren't using the technology that they're given.

Actually, so Neil, this actually dovetails well into the meeting I had with this Chinese company. So everyone knows who this company is. We met with 5 people from their staff and they want to help on the marketing side. So here's something I learned, Neil. One thing I'll tell you is that they're very ahead on the AI piece. Okay? So this is like everyone in their company and uses AI because they're a Chinese company. Again, 87% of Chinese are pro-AI, and then 46% of Americans are pro-AI. When I showed them Neil, our agent that works inside of Slack, to most Americans, it blows them away. To me, I'm like, whatever. I've been doing this for the last 3, 4, 5 months or so. When I showed them, they looked at me like I was a caveman, as if what I showed them is nothing new. They looked at me like I was an idiot. My CTO used the word, the R word, and he doesn't really use the R word much. So he's like, they looked at you like you were R word, right? And I was like, yeah, they did. And they're like, they already have their agents that live inside of their chat solution. That's one piece, which means they're just on top of it. The second piece is the person I was sitting next to, she's like, oh yeah, I use Codex to help me with my stock investments. Notice she doesn't say she uses ChatGPT or Claude. She uses Codex, which is the coding harness from OpenAI. That is also advanced as well, right? And then just everything that we're talking about, they're super on top of it and they're very curious too. The things that they're not, they don't really understand like AEO. I think it just comes down to, Neil, if I had to make it simple, because I have a Chinese background, right? I look at it as the reason why 87% of them are so pro-AI, it's a mindset thing. It's a curiosity thing. And so I don't think it's anything about age, right? So people like to say, oh, you got to hire young kids. No, it's not a young kids thing because there's plenty of young people that are very anti-AI, right? You've heard these CEOs get booed off the commencement stages, right?

Yes.

And then I've also met older people that are running circles around the younger people. So I just think this all comes down to a mindset thing. And the fact that I can meet 5 people from this company and they're all super AI-pilled, it just is, how do you just learn to flip the mindset? And show people that this is a very beneficial thing. So that's what I learned.

Dude, speaking of young people hating, I actually see more young people hating AI than actually older people. And when I meet these younger, and I mainly meet marketers who are younger, right? Because that's the industry that Eric and I are in. But they're just like, yeah, it's going to screw up my possibilities to work and get a job in the future. I hate this stuff. It was so much easier during my parents' generation. And yes, there's some things that were easier in your parents' generation, just like Eric and I can say the same thing for our parents' generation. But there was many things that were much harder in our parents' generation than it was for us. And a lot of our parents struggled in ways we never had to. But I always tell people, don't hate, embrace, If you hate, you're going to struggle to succeed in today's world. If you embrace, you're much more likely to do well. And what we find, and again, my interactions are mainly in marketing departments, organizations, at least large ones that are publicly traded, are figuring out ways to help bring up everyone in their organization and marketing up to speed and making them better. Whether it's training, having speakers come in, whether it's signing up for educational courses and classes, you know, they're bringing people in to make their employees better. This is amazing. You're getting thousands and thousands of dollars of education for $0, and this is going to make you do better in your career when you switch jobs or go somewhere else.

Like, it's priceless. Yep. And speaking of which, Neil, before I move to the next topic here, I believe that if we're talking about training here, that every company needs to have a skills academy or I know Ramp, for example, they have a skills dojo. And what I mean by that is you have a repository of all the processes, all the skills that your team's using to do the work. And that way, when Neil joins a company, let's say he joins the sales team, he gets a repository of all the sales skills. And it's almost like putting an Iron Man suit on for sales, right? And I think if you have something like that, that's gonna go a long way. Let me show you an example of what we actually put together for our little Skills Dojo over here. So check this out. We stole the name from Ramp and I have like, there's a handful of companies that do this. We even have mutual friends that do this as well, like multiple ones. Can you see this?

Yeah.

Okay. So the whole idea here is that single-grain Skills Dojo, okay? So you can see all teams, sales teams, whatever. Let's say you want some for sales, okay? So we have a lead dossier pipeline skill. This one will build multi-source accounts, account dossiers with enrichment, trigger contacts, and outreach angles. It'll go to HubSpot and find revived deals. And the cool thing is you can see how many people have downloaded it, how many upvotes there are. People can fork it to make their own version. There can be different users. You can even see there's a leaderboard here on how the teams are doing, individuals are doing over here. So the whole idea here is that we wanna democratize all these skills. It's almost like an app store. And then the whole idea with an app store too is there might be a lot of poo-poo apps, But the best apps rise to the top. And then you can have this dojo here where it's like sales, these are all the skills that you'd have if you joined a sales team, right? So I think every company will have something like this to help train their people up because this forces people to follow a process and they can iterate on it if they want to.

What we found with this is if you don't push it on people, especially people who have already worked at a company, it is hard to get them to adapt. So culturally you need to make the push. And when you bring on new people, you need to indoctrinate them with this in the first day or 2 or 3, pretty much in their first week and really get them onboarded. If you don't, what you'll find is you as a company would have created all this stuff. You can have a repository for tools, technology, A/B tests, what works, what doesn't, failed experiments, successful experiments. And we do this in marketing a lot on our end. And what we find is there's people who use it, but the majority in any organization typically don't. They could be heavy and hot or hot and heavy on it in the first week or two, but over time they slow down on the usage. If you don't keep people to continually use it, what you'll find is there'll just be a lot of wastage and inefficiencies.

Yep. And the good news is what I talked about earlier in this podcast, where you have something that can help skillify a lot of things that you're doing, and you have something almost like it's, it's, uh, It's observing what you're doing and helping enhance you. It's almost like an Alfred in the background that's helping enhance you or Jarvis from Iron Man, right? By the way, so I want to switch gears here. So Neil, here's a question for you. So I want to show you this number. When you have what, 100— there's 150,000 ecommerce stores, Neil. If you were to use the Pareto principle here, if you were to look at maybe the top 1% of ad accounts, How many ads do you think these top 1% ad accounts are responsible for? Like 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%?

Top 1%?

Yep.

I would go with somewhere around 50%, 60%.

Okay, close. I would go the 50, like it's actually 36%. So Meta actually reported on this. So this comes from Brian Bumgarner shared this. So the top 1.4% of ad accounts are responsible for 36% of all ad creative on Meta. So they use Clay to scrape 150K ecommerce sites to answer one question. How many businesses are running ads right now? 47,000 of the 150,000 stores have one active ad. And here's where it gets crazy. Okay. So 9,000 accounts are running 100+ active ads. So 19.3% of advertisers, 1,600 ad accounts are running 500+ ads. So 3.5%. And then 679 accounts are running 1,000+ active ads. That's 1.4%. The median advertiser is running 23 different ads at any given time. The median Northbeam customer, I think they're like an e-commerce company platform for machine learning powered advertising attribution. Okay, great. Is running 150. Oh, so this is not a Meta study, but Meta said it. Creative diversification is key, not just hooks, but completely new ad creative. So your marketing team should look like a content creation house. So there's this graph over here done by Northbeam and you can see what's happening here. So what I want to call out before we react to this is it's the whole idea of 80/20, right? You have this top 20% or so, they are driving the 80% of the results ultimately. Because I think this is, if you add the results ultimately here, yeah, I think 1.4%. No, actually no, they don't actually have that number here. But my point is 1.4% for 36% is a lot.

So the, the 1% in many industries account for a lot— taxes, ads.

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

By the way, did you watch the CNBC interview with Jeff Bezos?

No, what happened? Oh, the, the— yeah, yeah, he's like, I, I, uh, bottom 50% shouldn't pay taxes, right? Which I, I think is good.

Remember, I've been saying for years, if you make under $100 grand, you shouldn't pay taxes because a lot of the business owners Those people would spend more on rent, food, et cetera, and it would cause marketing to boom, right? People would spend more money. It would actually just cause GDP and business to boom. Yeah, that's at least my 2 cents.

But why don't you talk about some of your takeaways from that one? Because I didn't watch the whole thing. I only watched that snippet, that clip.

A lot of it was political, so let's avoid most of it.

Okay. All right. That's fine.

But the big thing that he said that I think should be eye-opening for a lot of people I think he used the example of a radiologist. You know, a lot of people are worried being like, oh, AI is going to replace my job. He's like, I disagree. He's like, it's going to make you better. That radiologist is going to be so much better with this technology. So his whole take is people are still needed in organizations. It's just more so they're going to have like a companion or a buddy or AI, whatever you want to end up calling it, that's just going to make them a lot better.

I don't know about you, Neil, but I just have more fun at work now because I can do more. It just makes me happier. And I think maybe naturally, if you're an entrepreneur, you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you just want to create more, you want to do more. And I actually do think the majority of people do want to create something. They do want to be useful and this just enables it more.

Yeah.

Yeah. But going back to the 80/20 thing, yeah, I think we've reacted to that one enough. So I want to come over to, you have one over here. Go ahead.

Wait, real quick. One interesting thing that I saw Bezos doing, you know, this is what all marketers end up doing. So everyone knows SpaceX is going to IPO soon, right? They've been talking about it. Numbers have been floated. If they're going to raise $50 billion and how much Goldman Sachs is going to end up making from it, it's causing, you know, if one thing's doing well in a category, Extremely well, let's say SpaceX, it can create a whole wave, a whole trend. And in marketing, they call it, hey, when something's doing really well or catching on fire, ride the trend. So Bezos talks about how for the first time he's thinking about taking external investors, because if SpaceX goes out and it gets a $1.5 or $2 trillion valuation or $1.7, whatever they're aiming for, he's riding the trend. He's like, hey, let me just go, you know, Get money while I can based on this trend being hot.

I think that's smart. And also, he's very credible. And also this space, the real player right now is SpaceX. And so if he can be a credible second player, I think there's more than enough room here. And I think it's very smart. He needs a lot of money to make this happen. It's very capital intensive.

It's very capital intensive. In pretty much every industry, you need a number one and you need a number two. Even if the number 2's not that big and he's primed to be the number 2.

Yeah. And I think it's good to have competitors, right? People like to say like, oh, you shouldn't. I think it's good to have healthy competition between like Anthropic and OpenAI, for example. I think it's good to have a Google versus Microsoft. I think these things are all good.

Yeah. The other thing that he did mention in his interview was he will do more good from his for-profit companies than he will when he gives away the majority of his net worth. And he does give away a lot of his net worth. And he was talking about it, like he provides a lot of shelters for homeless people. He has a lot of projects that he's funding, but his impact on the world will be much greater from his for-profit entities than his nonprofit. And I can see a similar side, like you and I have created content and education for so many years. You and I have also both donated money. We don't have anywhere near the money that some of these guys were talking about, but we've donated money where we can. And no matter how much money we've donated, I believe we'll impact and help people do better financially for their families through the education we've created more than any of the money that we've given away.

Yep. I agree with that. And the thing is, it's unfortunate that business gets painted in a negative light. Like the more success you have, the worse it is now today. It shouldn't be like that because business ultimately is You trying to create a product or service that helps other people. And if people vote with their money and if you do well, it means that you've created something very valuable. I don't know how it gets misconstrued into something else, but I feel like that's always been history. That's always been human nature. So—

It always has.

Yep. One thing I want to talk about, Neil. So I don't know if you saw, so Opus 4.8 came out yesterday and there's one part of it that changes business completely. So I want to share this with everyone because I want you to, you know, This weekend's coming up and hopefully you have time to play with it. You can see yesterday Anthropic's introducing Claude Opus 4.8, which I was like, okay, is it going to be not that great? But I'm in all these AI CEO chat groups right now and everyone's like, oh, my teams are using this. It's crazy. I'm like, crazy in a good way? They're like, yeah, crazy in a good way. I'm like, okay, cool. You can see obviously when they market themselves on these benchmarks, this is one way of marketing your LLM. You just show that you're beating everyone else. So whenever something new comes out, obviously you're going to be number one. So you can see Opus 4A is in the red. But what I want to call out here is that they launched this new thing called Dynamic Workflows. So what this means, Neil, is if you want to do a big migration on your website, you can just ask it to do it. Now I'm like, okay, well, Neil, you're not going to do a migration yourself. I'm not going to do it myself. I'm like, how do I apply this? To business, to making more money, right? And so I worked with my Hermes on this. I'm going to share a couple of prompts with you, but there's even a video down here, Embrace Long-Running Tasks with Opus 4A and Claude Code. Basically, it will create all these workflows for you and you can have hundreds, if not thousands of these subagents working. And the main benefit here is that oftentimes when you have an agent work, they might not follow the process in terms of steps. They might go step 4 first, then step 5, and then step— 10 and then step 1, which screws up everything. But dynamic workflows allow you to spin up a bunch of subagents and they follow the process. Um, that's what it is. So any questions before I show you some of the flows, Neil?

No.

Okay, so check this out. I'm gonna pull this up on my, on my screen, on my Slack real quick. Give me a second here. So here we go. Let me share my screen. Share this over here. Do you see this?

I do. I can't read it, but I can see it.

That's okay. I will read it. Those of you watching right now. I asked my Hermes, my Hermes over here. You can see Hermes Paris. Highest leverage Claude code dynamic workflows. I'm like, tell me what the highest leverage things we can do. Okay. Here's a cool one. I'm just going to read this one off. It's called Revenue Command Center. You guys can screenshot what I have on my screen over here. This is a problem.

Can you zoom in for people so that way they can actually screenshot it? Or maybe it's just tiny on my end.

I think it's bigger.

I expect it's probably bigger on— there you go. Oh, that's helpful. Thank you.

How about this? How about this? A little bigger?

Even better.

Okay, great. So this one's called Revenue Command Center. Okay. So use a workflow, build a revenue command center for NP Digital. Inspect every available data source I provide. CRM exports, call transcripts, email threads, analytics, proposals, client reports, SEO data, ad data, internal docs. Create a unified map of where revenue is being created, delayed, leaked, or ignored. Then run specialist subagents in parallel for pipeline retention, upsells, SEO, paid acquisition, outbound partnerships, operational bottlenecks. Return a list, a ranked list of the top 25 revenue opportunities with estimated upside, confidence, owner, next action, and required assets, and a 7-day execution plan. Then implement any safe automations, dashboard scripts, or draft assets needed to start capturing the top opportunities immediately. In fact, I want to hang up from this podcast right now and just run this on my cloud code and not talk to Neil. And then this one over here, stalled revenue recovery, use a workflow, analyze all deals. My point of saying all this is client expansion engine, churn prevention, and safe plan. So I'm going to see how these turn out. I would encourage you all to try something like this. And I would encourage you to talk to whatever agent you're working with. To figure out how you can make use of these dynamic workflows to make you more money, because it's not just a programming thing for engineers.

Yeah, dude, the technology's here, the tools are here, people have access to them, they're just not using them.

Yep, yep.

That's the real reality.

It's what you said earlier.

Yeah, and I don't think that's going to change because, you know, if you look at traditional SaaS, it's been around for how long? I don't know, more than 20 years, right? Way more than 20 years. 'Cause SaaS was around even before the cloud. And when you look at SaaS, people still don't use all the features they pay for. And you and I are also guilty of it. There's no way that we use every single feature for all the products we pay for, right?

Nope.

We do a better job 'cause we're really picky and we're price sensitive, being entrepreneurs and startups. But I think the bigger organization gets, the worse they get about using what they're paying for.

Yep. Maybe a place where— because we're really talking about inertia, human inertia. And I've given this example already, but my dad said when the internet came out, it took companies 5 years to adopt email. What I want to bring up is Neil and I have been fortunate enough to meet a lot of amazing people. Neil's been in business for 26 years or so, I think, for For me, it's, I want to say, I don't know, 13 years or so, 14 years or so. But really, I get this question a lot. I don't know about you, Neil, but it's, Eric, how did you build your network? How do you find your peer group? And how do you find AI peers or how do you find marketing peers in general? And so we both have different ways of doing it. I think Neil was very early to the content process, so he was able to build a big audience and naturally that carried. A lot of people wanted to associate themselves with him, but I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think there's a few practical things we can share here on how to build your peer network, because I do think events and human-to-human connection's going to become more valuable. And I know networking's done a lot for me and it's also done a lot for Neil. So Neil, you want to go first? You want me to go first? Go for it. Okay. So again, I've been sharing I'm in a couple of these AI founder groups, right? And I have friends that will message me on Instagram saying, hey, can I get into this group? And I don't own any of these groups, right? And so I do think that let's say you don't have a network right now. I remember when I was 26 years old, I found a group of directors of marketing because that was kind of the niche I was in at the time. And I invited them over to my place and we just had meetups where we'd talk about our marketing challenges and things like that. So as long as you're the curator, You can certainly— and you're saying, hey, I'm going to get a good group of people together. We're going to have a great discussion. Here's what we're going to talk about. And maybe even sometimes if you have some money, you can invite them to a dinner, for example, or even it can be at a happy hour, or maybe you can have someone else sponsor it. Those are all ways to get the right people in the room. And as you do that more and more, people are going to see you as a connector. And that's a way for you to start from scratch without having to know anybody.

Yeah. The main way I actually built my network is in-person events. So just meeting people, talking to them. I'm not talking about just ones I'm speaking at, just any in-person event. And the next one, and this is the bigger way, and you don't have to have a personal brand or be well known for this, is I just hit up people that I like and reading their content. I was reading a piece of content from Search Engine Land by this guy named Adam Ganoose. I'm probably mispronouncing his last name. Sorry, Adam. I did message him. He may not see it depending on if he logs onto the platform that I messaged him because you can do LinkedIn, you can do email, you can pick whatever platform, LinkedIn, I mean Instagram and direct message. And that's worked out really well. And I just read a lot of content. Eric reads a lot of content. I know a lot of you guys consume a lot of information as well. So I think it's really a good idea to just message people. That's how Eric and I got to know each other back in the day. And people message me all the time and I message a lot of random people who have no clue who I am and it works out. And I've built many long-lasting friendships from this method.

Honestly, you might think it's too late to create content today, but it's not because we talk about, like Gary Vee likes to talk about, it's no longer social media, it's interest media. So if you post something that's really good, people are going to follow you and they're going to want to meet with you. So I'll give you an example here. Neil, remember how I just showed you those stocks, the one that jumped like 8,000% in a year? That's from a guy. I just saw his post on X and he just started posting. He does a lot of research on all the AI bottleneck stuff and he literally has a website called aibottlenecks.app or something. And he just started posting and he has some of the best investors in the world following him now because he publishes interesting stuff. To him, it wasn't that interesting before, but he lives his life all the time. But when he started making it public, he started, people like to say increasing your surface area of luck. And so even if you might not be doing really interesting research right now, even if you're an intern right now or you're in college right now, share your experience of learning whatever it is that you're working on, build in public, and then people are naturally going to want to associate themselves with you. So for example, my best friend Marc Andreessen or my best friend Gary Tan, for example, from YC or Andreessen Horowitz, that's because I've created content. Neil, the way I got acquainted with Neil was because he used to have a blog called Quick Sprout. And I really enjoyed his content around how he spent X amount of dollars on clothes or how he spent on this and that and how it generated Y ROI. But being more serious here, he wrote a lot of stuff around SEO. And then one time I thought he was making something up, so I emailed him and then that's how our relationship started. And it started on Skype. And here's the other thing, as you create more and more content, you're producing things, you're building in public, Maybe as an example, Neil, let's say you're speaking at a conference in Mexico or I'm speaking at a conference in Germany. One time I spoke at a conference in Germany and one guy hit me up and he's like, hey, I've been a fan of your work for a very long time. Let's meet up. We met up. We had great German food. And that was cool. You never know what happens with these things. So the content piece is great. I think putting events together is great too. Going to events, hanging out with people too. I think eventually you make your own mastermind too. You get a group of like-minded people. We had the same We've had the same mastermind since 2018, Neil. I put this group together and I can see this is a group that I'll probably grow old with. So all that to say is be helpful, be out there creating content, and then you'll increase your surface area of luck. That's how you build this peer group and that's how you get into these AI chats because people are aware of who you are and what you stand for.

Dude, totally. And speaking of Adam that I mentioned who I messaged and Adam, congrats to you. Love the article. He wrote an interesting article that breaks down the average time on site for traditional SEO traffic versus LLM traffic. You want to hear some of the stats? It was quite interesting.

Yeah, of course.

So for tool and demo pages, organic average traffic for those tool and demo pages from, let's say, traditional Google traffic was 101 seconds. LLM traffic, 146 seconds. So roughly a 46% increase. 45%, 46% increase. Homepage traffic from traditional search, 36 seconds. Homepage traffic from LLM, 82 seconds. So more than double. Service products, 69 seconds for organic. LLM traffic, this was a decline of 63 seconds. And article/content, organic traditional, 56 seconds. LLM traffic was 40 seconds. So there was quite a bit of a drop there.

Cool. I have the— he has a table popped up here. So service pages punch above their weight class for LLM traffic. So service product, I don't know if you mentioned this already, but LLM sessions per 1,000 organic, 30, and then 23 for article. That's number 2. And then FAQ is number 14. Homepage is 5.6. This is pretty cool. What company does he work at? I have no idea. Yeah, you should take a look. So by the way, as Neil pulls that up, tool and demo, I think, is this what you called out? I think this is what you called out. Yeah.

Yeah. He works at Saltbox Solutions.

Okay. Sounds like an agency. So I would say if you look at this table I have pulled up over here, this is what Neil was just calling out. So in the middle, you can see organic average time and then LLM average time. And almost in most cases, LLM time is higher except for service and product pages. Organic time is just a little longer, but dwell time is mostly longer on using LLMs to what you said.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

Cool. This is awesome. Well, I think that will wrap us for today. Hope you enjoyed this and we will catch you tomorrow.