In this July 2026 podcast episode, host Eric Siu and guest Neil Patel discuss several timely topics surrounding AI adoption and business strategy. They begin by examining Gumroad’s reported June 2026 parity between AI token spend ($43,000) and human payroll, noting the rapid rise from $13,000 a year earlier and speculating that many companies will soon see AI costs become a significant portion of operating expenses. The conversation shifts to Elon Musk’s recent Economist interview, where Patel highlights Musk’s claims about a future of universal abundance, the timeline he envisions, and the backlash from regulators and the public. Siu and Patel debate the role of fear‑mongering in AI marketing, contrasting American public anxiety (over 70% worried) with a reported 87% net‑positive sentiment in China. They argue for a free‑market approach to open‑source AI models, warning against heavy government regulation, and cite recent incidents such as OpenAI’s frontier model interfering with Hugging Face’s defense. Siu promotes Neil’s agency NP Digital and its SEO tools (Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic). The latter part of the episode explores personal entrepreneurship decisions: Patel reflects on reduced travel, the idea of acquiring overseas businesses to stay home, and his focus on organic growth tactics—cold‑calling, email sequences, and enterprise sales—to reduce churn in his SaaS division. Siu ties these anecdotes back to broader themes of adaptability, citing Jeff Bezos’s philosophy of frequent mindset shifts. The episode ends with technical issues and a promise to continue the discussion.
Chapters
So Sahil, the founder of Gumroad, apparently he works for the IRS now, but he has an agent that's running Gumroad right now, okay? So June 2026 was the first month that Gumroad spent equal amounts on AI tokens and human payroll. So if you see this over here, AI token spend is in the pink, and then in the black, that's human payroll. So you can see in June 2026, the payroll was $43,000, and the AI token spend was $43,000. So it was equal. But if you go to June 2025, it was $203,000 in human payroll, W-2 plus contractors. AI token spend was $13,000. that month, right? And then before, obviously, the, the human payroll, um, token was a lot more. So this one, I mean, it got a lot of engagement. I think Gary Tan even retweeted saying this is going to be the future. Um, so, uh, my take on this right now is I think we're going to continue to see this go up. Maybe it'll reach parity, or maybe for a lot of companies it'll be half. Um, but I don't know, um, you know, I don't know how fast this is going to be. Like, I think we're going to see this become a lot more common, but it's just, it's just a matter of how fast it's going to happen. So what's your reaction to this?
Yeah, I'm curious to see what happens at a company of scale, right? I'm not saying he doesn't have a big company. I don't know too much about Gumroad, but if his payroll is— it looks like $43,000 in a month from my terrible eyes at this point. I'm guessing his company is not at scale.
Yeah. So the highest it got to was about $400 grand in scale, which is, you know, let's call it $4.8 million a year, right? in, in, in payroll. So, you know, it's, it's dropped quite a bit, um, from the $200 grand to $43,000. But also keep in mind, in the last year he got this job at the IRS, right? And so, um, he's— he claims that Gumroad's being run by this Gumclaw right now, which is like, you can just call— he's saying it's run by this AI. I don't know if that's the case because I actually bookmarked another post from a guy saying, oh, I'm the human that actually runs this. So I don't know what's true and what isn't. Um, but I think this is the start of, you know, we're gonna start to see more and more of this, uh, over time. Maybe it's not gonna be equal, but it's gonna become much more significant.
Yeah, I'm curious to see what ends up happening. Did you ever watch the Elon Musk Economist interview?
No. So I saw clips of it. Can you talk about what you saw? I didn't see the whole thing. Did you see the whole thing?
I did. The majority of the interview is not like the clips. So like the clips are taking like the hot takes on like them asking about race and what he thinks about people who are Muslim, or they're asking him about AI and it's the future, or they're asking about Doge and if anyone ever died because of the cuts he made from USAID. You know, I'm not trying to get into the politics here, but that wasn't the majority of the interview. The majority of the interview was on AI, where it's going to go. And he made some comments, some of them it's obvious, but it really hit me watching the interview. Like he was talking about how he's responsible for a lot of what's happening in AI. And you think about it, he was a co-founder of OpenAI. Dario worked at OpenAI. That team spun out and created Anthropic, right? He was the one who poached the guy from Google because he believed they had a monopoly on AI at that time. So, but like, it really just hit me that I'm like, huh, Elon is actually responsible for a lot of the stuff that we're seeing in AI, whether it's directly or indirectly. And, you know, his big whole thing was, And I think he's off on this, but his big whole thing was within 10 years you won't need any money, you won't have to worry, everyone will be on extremely high universal, you know, income, and there'll be abundance of everything and there'll be deflation. I'm not saying he's not wrong on the concept, but It's not as simple to go, it's like, who's gonna pay for it? Even if you go to a world where there is no currency that's needed and government debt somehow miraculously gets paid off or whatever, they figure it out. I'm not saying you can't have this utopia that he's talking about. And he did say it's gonna be a bumpy road to get there. What I think is really off is, or let me actually reverse it. What I think is really fascinating, his view of the future, And I think he is correct that a lot of it can happen. Well, I think he's really off on his timelines on when he thinks that things can happen, because there's a lot of things that stand in his way, such as the government, right? Regulation, people getting in the way from that aspect can really slow him down or the whole industry down. The other thing that can slow things down is people coming out with a pitchfork. You know, The Economist talked about 70+% of people are worried about AI. And I do agree. If you talk about the majority of the people who don't have tons of money and they're worried for their jobs, forget what the future could look like. They're going to be coming out with pitchforks, right? That is just the real reality if there's that much displacement, assuming people don't have a way to buy food or have a home. And, you know, we just as a society can't figure that out. I would say one of the most interesting things for me listening to that interview as a marketer is when he was talking about Dario and Mythos and how he was really afraid of Mythos and felt it was really scary. And then when he released it, you know, there's issues with releasing it. And Elon's like, yeah, you got to choose your words more carefully. If you're talking about how you're scared or afraid of something and then you want to release something, of course people are going to be afraid as well.
Mm-hmm.
You know, he was talking about how some of these guys need to choose their words more carefully when it comes to AI because it's creating a lot of quote-unquote fear in the market, but it's self-inflicted fear from them. And then they get upset or not happy that things don't necessarily get released when they want, but they created the fear.
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 global companies or a global organization. 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 also keep in mind, Neil, we've talked about this on this podcast, but the reality is the majority of Americans are afraid of AI. But when you look at the Chinese, the Chinese are— the majority of them are, I think it's 87%, are net positive on AI, right? So it is about how we market it internally. And to your point, when you have some of the top AI players like Adario, for example, talking about how it's going to cause so much trouble and this and that. Of course, you're going to get people paying attention, right? Oh, this model is very powerful. It's too powerful. It causes a lot of fearmongering. But here's the challenge now. You have a KIMI, the newest version of KIMI, which I think might be KIMI 3, but that version is almost as powerful— they're claiming as powerful as like a Fable 5 or a 5.6. Even if it's not right now, eventually it's this stuff. The open source models are going to become as powerful. But then at that point, what do you do? Because you had OpenAI, OpenAI, like their strong frontier model actually hacked Hugging Face like a couple days ago or so, right? As of this recording. And so when you do stuff like that, and by the way, when Hugging Face was trying to defend themselves using the frontier models, the frontier models locked themselves down and saying we can't defend you, right? And so at a certain point, you have to decide what's more important. And I think you know this. I think. Dario, for example, is like, oh, the open source models, they're trying to kind of regulate them away, but you can't do that. I think you need to have a free market. You need to have like an open market and then let people choose what they want to choose and let them go from there. But all this regulation stuff right now, I think the genie's out of the bottle and you can't really stop it at this point. If you want to stop it, you have to shut it down completely and you can't now. So yeah, so my point is on OpenAI and Anthropic and Hugging Face is you don't want to let governments do the regulating. You want to let the free market play itself out. And I know it's not very black and white, but majority of the time you want to let the free market play itself out. And when you do this negative kind of fearmongering marketing and you get an entire population, like an entire nation like the United States, being fearful of it, and then when you have like a foreign adversary like the Chinese, they're net positive on it 87%. You know, who's going to end up being ahead in the next couple of years or so, right? That's really the question that I'm posing. So that being said, Neil, let's, let's move to the next thing. What has been happening in your world in the last couple couple of days?
Dude, for me, I haven't been traveling as much, and I'm not used to it. Like, it is a weird feeling to not travel for work, but it's also kind of really nice to just be at home. I haven't had this experience in a very long time to stay weeks at home without having to be on the road. But I have to say, I kind of like it. I like it so much so that I thought about every country that I have to travel to for work. And I was like, should I just buy a business there that I can integrate and make us at scale so I don't even have to travel anymore? And then I was like, well, knowing me, I would do that and then I would travel more to try to make it even grow faster. But, you know, I was I'm genuinely thinking so much so, dude, that for anyone listening, this is our second time trying to record this podcast this week. I have been, I've been waking up super early to talk with companies to potentially acquire them in the regions that I travel to very often. And I was like, oh, this is worth a shot. I'm like, I wonder what would happen. If I did this. So I just thought it would— it was an interesting experience being at home, and I kind of can see how people like being at home. I do have to say this, I don't actually get as much work done at home versus on the road, but I still like it.
That's interesting. So by the way, if those of you that have been listening to this podcast for a while, if you look at the ebbs and flows of this podcast, you'll see that There'll be times where I'm traveling a lot. Neil's always been traveling quite a bit, but there was a period of time where he's like, you know, I'm over it, no more traveling, right? And then he stops for a little bit and he starts to back up again. And in this case, he's like, oh, it's nice being home. And he's like, maybe I'll buy some companies and stay home. But it's like, no, it's like, it's always— there's the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and there's the ups and downs of, you know, how you make decisions can change from time to time on a dime. And Jeff Bezos was very famous for doing that, right? And his whole thing was— If you're not changing your mind often, then maybe you're not that smart of a person. Yeah.
And I wouldn't say I'm smart or anything like that, but I probably do change my mind on some of these things too often. Buying companies, if I get a good deal, I never really change my mind on that because that's just financial. Those are the easiest black and white things for me to decide on and control. But yeah, no, it's It's— that's been my last few weeks. The other thing that I've been spending a lot of time on is organic growth, you know, and when I say organic growth, it's like basic things like what could we do to grow our tools faster? And when I look at our SaaS division, people are like, oh, there's massive churn. I was like, okay, then what could we do to go after enterprise, right? So some of it is email sequences, some of it is cold calling, some of it is Just figuring out the right scripts and testing new things out. Some of it is lead comes in, a portion of them are qualified, me just calling every single one up and trying to sell them on an enterprise package and see what happens. But I've been focusing more on fine-tuning, and what I found is when you don't travel as much, you can just be more in the weeds on certain things that you can't do when you're traveling as much, like cold calling. Um, so I've been spending a lot of time just fine-tuning a lot of different aspects of our sales pitches, our marketing. It's been fun, interesting, but fun.
Okay, well guys, that's it for today. Sorry for the technical issues. That being said, we will catch
