What businesses can learn from Block's 40% AI layoff, the death of marketers, new marketing channel

For Neil, he's in India right now. He's been up since 2:00 AM. We were just talking. I just came back from a 1-day trip in Arizona yesterday. And so there's a lot going on. Last week, Founder Retreat. Neil's been traveling for 2 weeks. So Neil, maybe we can just even talk about how are things going from a business and marketing standpoint right now? Because I was texting with one of my friends this morning and we're just like, dude, every single day is crazy right now. It's not even every week. Every single day is crazy. Okay. Block cuts 4,000, 40% of staff yesterday, right?

Yeah.

Every single day there's a new AI launch or whatever. People are talking about the death of marketers. It's over for paid media, right? These are all the things that we're going to talk about, why you must disrupt yourself now. Cursor, they went from fastest company or one of the fastest companies to get up to a billion in revenue. And now everyone's churning everywhere, not using Cursor anymore, right? And so the world's crazy right now. And yeah, maybe let's just do a quick debrief real quick while people roll in.

Yeah, the world is definitely crazy, but I think it's been crazy for, Or crazy, forget the word crazy. I think it's been difficult since mid-2022, which is when rates started going up, and there's been a lot of ups and downs. Some of the ups and downs is because of AI. Some of the ups and downs are because of interest rates. Some of the ups and downs are because of random political policies like tariffs. Some of it is because of war, right? But I think it's been. a really chaotic 3 years or 4 years actually, where it's starting to go on, right? And what's happening now is I think we're all getting used to the craziness and it's becoming normal.

I think it's getting crazier. In some ways it's good, in some ways it's bad. Oh, that's a nice water bottle. So some ways it's good, some ways it's bad. But I subscribe to the belief that we are at the top of the roller coaster ride right now. We're just about to get to the top of it and it's about to come down. And so it's only going to get crazier. The world's going to accelerate even more. And I'm here for it. I think, I don't know about you. Actually, I do know about you. I'll speak for you here. I operate better in chaos. I think you do pretty well in chaos too.

So— Yeah. Chaos is good because chaos gets rid of a lot of competition.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, a lot of people can't take it, right? They don't have the stomach for it. And so I think if there's one takeaway for you, like the chaos that we've been through in our careers, Neil's been in business, I want to say 24 years. I want to say I've been in business, call it 10, 11 years or so. And the more chaos you face, the more you get through, the more resilience you build, and the better you turn out for business. Because I believe that the stat is 90% of businesses fail within the first 5 years or so. The case for that is really just lack of resiliency. And there's a stat that I came across yesterday, Neil. For any big business, we're talking like the generational companies ever, Really, it's by year 15 that they really start to take off. And that actually aligns well with Jensen Huang from Nvidia, right? It took till year 15 for them to really take off. And he said for the first 15 years, he was a pretty crappy CEO. And they've been around for a very long time. So I do think it takes quite a while to build something great. And even for MP Digital has been around for 8 years or so. You've been building your brand for a while and you've been in the marketing space for a while, right? You've been building for a bit. You've been building marketing software, right? And for me, it's been a little less than that, but I just, I think it's good to kind of share examples around this stuff.

Yeah, no, the key during these unknown times is you hunker down, you focus, and you focus on what really moves the needle for you. I think what happens during these times is entrepreneurs and marketers get distracted and they forget A lot of basic things like paid ads still work. SEO still works. GEO, whatever you want to end up calling it, AEO still works, right? You know, doing social media marketing, all these things still work. You just got to keep pushing through it. And the people who push hard and double down more when competitors are pulling away, especially during bad times, they're the ones who tend to gobble up more market share during the Let me tell you something.

I was sitting in a conference room yesterday, Neil. And so 2 people were executives at this company.

Okay.

Let's just say they're VP level. Okay. This company, let's just say they have 2,000 employees, something like that. And another one was a consultant. So he had a consultant come in the room. He just kind of flew in from, let's say Florida. Okay. One of our friends and my CTO was in the room. Now, all the things, all the problems we were talking about, okay. When you dissect it, it really came down to the people that were doing well in whatever companies, or for example, the consultant was working with, or the problems these 2 VPs had, or the problems that we had as an organization. It really comes down to one thing. And I'll give Syed credit for this term, but we actually, you and I had already talked about this a few weeks prior where we say that money amplifies your nature and AI amplifies your intelligence.

Yeah.

Syed had it even cleaner. He says, AI is actually IA. Do you want to know what IA is?

No. Okay.

IA is—

I do want to know, but I don't know what it is.

Yeah. Yeah. So IA is intelligence amplifier, right? And I'm like, oh, well, if you're a dummy, it's also a dummy amplifier too, right? And so my point of saying this is that I think anybody that we work with in our organizations right now that are really AI enabled, it's really intelligence amplifier. And I could see that the 2 executives that I was talking to, The things that they were complaining about had to do with people, but more so it had to do with people that weren't enabled by this stuff, right? And then you and I have been talking about this for a while, but I just want to call that out. And I'm not calling those people dummies necessarily. I'm just saying that the gap, all the complaints I'm hearing, this room is kind of microcosm of that, right? The complaints that I'm hearing, it's just that the gap is getting wider and wider. And the crazy thing is, as I kind of walked the floor in that office, I was just like, dude, A lot of these people, and I was messaging one of the co-founders later, I was like, he's asking me, how was the culture? I was like, dude, the culture's amazing. Whenever our sales goes up, people start clapping and stuff. I'm like, that's amazing. People are in office 5 days a week. I'm like, that's cool. But it is very apparent that the vast majority of people are unaware of this stuff. And I put up a chart on my Instagram about a week ago or so, and I took it from X. And I don't know if you saw it on my Instagram. Did you see it? 84% of people are not using AI in the world right now. Here, check this out over here. So I'm sharing my screen and Neil, you can tell, you can say what you see on the screen over here.

Do you see this? It's really tiny. It says each dot is 3.2 million people. The text on the right is too hard for me to read.

Okay, here, I'll make it. Oh, when I make it bigger, it makes it smaller. Okay. So what I have on the screen right here is this is a chart and some of you might've seen this already, but the whole idea with this chart is you have, I think there's 2,500 dots on this screen. Each dot represents 8— it represents 3.2 million people. So you have a total of 8.1 billion humans. Are you following so far?

Yeah.

Okay. So you can see the vast majority of these dots, 84%, are people who have never used AI. So you have 6.8 billion people, that's 84%. Now, you have a bunch of green dots on the screen, about 16% or so, 1.3 billion are free chatbot users. So like the free version of ChatGPT as an example. Then you have the yellow dots, which is about 15 to 25 million, which is 0.3% of the world. These are the people who pay $20 a month for AI.

Okay?

Then you have the red dot over here, which is using coding scaffold like Claude Code, for example, or Codex, right? That's 0.04%. That's 2 to 5 million people in the world. Now here's the thing with this chart. I think it's like, okay, on one end you can be like, okay, yeah, we're in the very early innings of AI. On my end, the way I look at that, Neil, is like, that's a very complacent way to look at this. I look at this as even if I'm not competing with the top 0.04% over here to $2 to $5 million, it's better for me to just look at the fact that maybe I am competing with them, right? Because that's going to push me. Because the fact of the matter is this is all moving so quickly right now. So I'd rather not like, sure, we are very early right now, But I'd rather take the other angle where I want to cover my butt.

Adult population uses AI.

Neil's verifying the data here. Yeah.

So this is from 2025. So I bet you it's a little bit higher right now. If you just look at the US, and the reason I want to end up saying the US because I'm not saying that data is inaccurate. It's just more so, I bet you it varies a lot country by country. So if you look at the US adult population, and this was in 2025, roughly 60% of the US population uses AI. I think that number from Google AI Overviews.

Oh, okay. Well, what is this? Where did it source from?

Uh, let me go back into my history and Do the Google search again. All right, so it's pulling from Pew Research Center.

Okay, yeah.

And then YouGov and then Associated Press News. I don't know where the AP pulled from, but the main source is the Pew Research Center. Um, so yeah, people are using AI. Uh, when it look— when they look at daily usage, I believe I saw somewhere in here 27%.

Yeah. By the way, Neil, you know how many— what percent of the world is American? That's like 4%. And so I would say because we are— We're the richest. Exactly.

Countries with high GDP. And then by the way, when I pulled it up the second time, because I went through history, the first time it was 55 to 60%. I used 60%, right? This time on the screen, the AI overview says 35 to 62%.

That's such a wide range, right? That's such a wide range. Neil's calling out a very fair thing. And so the way you want to look at this too is you should probably segment by GDP in this situation because I will say, and probably same thing for you guys, Neil, whenever I talk to someone during an interview, they do use at the very least ChatGPT or Claude. Most of the responses you get are ChatGPT. So they're already in that high percentage, right? The 16% or something like that. I will also say though, so as an example, for my company at Single Grain, we are putting people into the red. We're forcing them to use coding scaffolds. But even in that case, some people use it in very basic ways. So they're not using it the most advanced way. So you even have to segment it further. That's why I'm saying that it's nice to look at when you blend all the metrics together, but that's going to make you complacent. You have to think about how is your nation and also what industry are you in and who you're competing with? Because the way I see it, Neil, I think we're competing with the top You know, 3%, if not the top 0.04%.

Yes, I agree with that. And what's funny is, is I'm at an event here in India. Someone asked me earlier today, no joke, hey, we work at a large corporation. We're trying to do training. We're trying to get these people onboarded and get them to use AI. And we're getting a lot of education. Some people are just struggling and don't want to adapt. What should I do? And I'm like, replace. I'm not trying to be cutthroat, but if they don't want to adapt and you're giving them the education and the tools, you're paying for it. I asked them, are they— are you expecting them to learn it on their own time or company time? They're like, no, during company time. And I'm like, well, if you're trying to train them and teach them, you know, go through HR, write them up, give them a warning. And if they don't adapt and they don't want to listen, then go through the termination process, whatever the legal route is depending on the country you're in.

You know what's crazy to me, Neil? It's so We do, we've kind of talked about this, but we do the hackathons. Okay? So we do the hackathons. Those are mandatory. And we say, okay, no client work, no sales calls, nothing. Those hackathon days are sacred. We have weekly office hours and then we do show and tells and all that. And then there's even a Claude Code help desk where people can ask questions and things like that. So I believe, and you can actually push back on this if you want, Neil, because we will disagree when we feel something. I'm like, on our end, I believe that we're doing what we can as a company to bring people to the water.

Yeah.

you can't make the horse drink, right? And so even if we've provided all this scaffolding, all this training, if someone is still saying, well, I want someone to teach me how to do this and I want someone to follow, or I'm just like, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, inertia is very real. I think this is just human nature. People naturally don't want to change, right? And that's why most people are most people. And I truly believe that, I was talking to one, by the way, dude, I got to tell you about the Beat Claude Challenge. The first person I talked to, oh my God, killer, killer. I'm just like, what is going on here? And I'm happy to explain the challenge again and go through that. But I'm just telling you, let me just ask you, Neil, I think you guys are trying to do what you can to train and bring AI transformation, AI fluency and all that. But if I come to you, you've given me the resource and I say, hey, I still want someone to teach me. What's your response going to be to me?

It depends what role they're in, right? And what we're requesting them to use AI for. If, if we're giving them the education, and usually when we give the education, it's not just go watch this video or tutorial or try this. We will give them— we'll pair them up with other people in the organization who are doing cool things, and they'll start showing them and teaching them. But more so, it's— we don't run into the problem of them saying, I still want you to teach me. Um, we run into the problem, and I think other organizations sometimes run into this problem, in which people just don't adapt even if you give them all the lessons and stuff, and they don't care and they don't want to adapt. It's not a big percentage, it's a very small percentage, but we do see some people who just— they don't care and they don't believe in it and they don't like it. And they're set in their ways.

You know what I think is important, Neil? You want to hire people. And the way I look at this too is the entrepreneurs I get along best with are, they always have a beginner's mindset, meaning that they know that they don't know. The older you get, the more you realize that, oh, I really don't know that much. And I'm really just trying to learn the whole time. I think it's the people who think they've made it, the people who think that they no longer need to learn, For example, if you did really well in school and you think you're just done after school, that doesn't compound. You've kind of stopped that compounding, right? And so, and to Neil's point too, you can't just send people a YouTube video and say, hey, go learn it, or go read this X thread and go learn it. It's more so, at least for us, I'll just share the example is when we do these hackathons, we are putting people into pods and we're building real solutions. They're learning how to build real solutions and they're sharing these things. And I'm in there asking pointed questions when the show and tell happens. And so you want to bring people along for the ride. You want people to contribute. But one of my friends, actually one of our mutual friends, he just started asking his direct reports every week, like, what have you automated this week? What have you automated this week? Right? And it's a very scary question to keep getting that from your boss all the time, but it does start to drive people. So we can leave at that. But do you want to hear about the Beat Claude thing and how the results were on the very first one?

Sure.

Okay. All right. So the Beat Claude challenge, if you go to singlegrain.com/apply, if you're interested in a job, We basically say, hey, if you want to work at Single Grain, you have to beat AI. And you can use AI all you want in this challenge. We encourage you to use AI. So use Claude, use ChatGPT, use whatever you want. And the key thing is we're going to score you against this. And there's a scoring rubric that it uses. And so we'll score the individual and we'll score the AI. If the individual can't beat the AI out the gate, they're out. And so the first person that I talked to scored like a 93. 6 or something. I'm like, that's too high. I'm like, for sure he's not that good, right? Um, so I end up talking to the guy. He's very, you know, um, kind of a shy person, you know, very soft-spoken and all that. And I talked to him more and more, and then eventually, um, he starts telling me about how he started his business, how he hired a bunch of people before, and how like unfortunately the business didn't work out. Business is tough, right? And then he started showing me his workflows. I'm like, what's the most impressive thing you built? He starts showing me all these workflows. We start going back and forth on this, and then I'm like, This is good. And because the third, what I'm looking for, Neil, is when I want to hire an exceptional person, I want to have an exceptional conversation with them. That entire conversation was exceptional. And then I was like, okay, he spoke to the CTO after. He's actually meeting again with the CTO today to build in real time. And you can't do this for every role, I believe, but for AI-enabled one, like AI automation engineer, that's what we're looking for. One of our mutual friends, He has 6 AI automation engineers right now. You know what's happening? They are running circles around a product team and the product team is actually blocking them. The product team hates this team. The product team didn't want to give these people API keys for 2 months or so. Imagine that happening in your organization.

Wow. I would be pissed.

Yeah. You would be pissed as a CEO, but there's a lot of politicking going on in a larger organization around your size, I would say. But my point is, I think People are like, I see people talking about, oh, we're not going to hire anybody below a staff or principal engineer now. But I actually think hiring these kids out of college, dude, they're working for $20 to $25 an hour or so, and they're working 100-hour weeks, and they're getting celebrated. And that's scaring a lot of people in the company. But dude, some of these are sleeping in the office, not showering.

Right? So anyway.

That's crazy.

But no, you know, it's— people will adapt. We'll see what happens with marketing. It's funny, um, I saw— I think I saw the same thing that you saw, uh, for is paid— is it over for paid media? I think the guy was talking about, uh, Facebook acquiring Manus.

Yes.

I could be wrong, but I think you're right. You're talking about— right? Yeah, it was an interesting read. I don't fully agree with it, but curious your take on it.

Okay, so let's give people the context here. So I have this pulled up over here. So this guy, his name's Zach. So the Meta AI situation is bigger than anyone realizes. This is what he's saying, not what Neil and I are saying. Millions of media buyers are about to get left behind or even fired. Meta just paid over $2 billion for a Singapore-based AI company that launched in March 2025, making it one of their largest acquisitions ever, right behind WhatsApp. And if you think this is just ChatGPT with extra features, you're completely missing what's actually happening. There are 2 types of people right now. So I'll just give the 2 types of people. People who think AI is a tool, that you use when you need help asking questions and copying answers into your work, and people who understand AI as an autonomous worker that executes entire workflows while they're literally asleep. So let me explain. So Manus now, so Manus is a general agent that Meta bought. Manus can now log into ad platforms, analyze campaign performance, make optimization changes, and handle customer support by monitoring inboxes and responding, all without human intervention. And I think this is where we can talk about our reaction.

Um, yeah, no, so here's the big thing with Facebook and Google managing your ads, okay? And this person, just to be very clear here, they're talking about Facebook managing your ads, and they're talking about in the Facebook portal because of the acquisition that they made. Facebook and Google They've had AI technology for a long time when it comes to ads and they've been trying to improve it. Mark Zuckerberg for a long time saying, why do agencies even need to exist? You have to keep in mind that what they optimize for is not always what you're optimizing for. They're optimizing, yes, for you to get great results, but they're also optimizing to maximize their own company's revenue. And sometimes those 2 things fight each other because what's best for Facebook may not be best for you, just like what's best for Google may not be best for you. Such as if you throw a ton of ads in Gmail, you'll see it doesn't convert that well and you can burn a lot of money really quickly. I'm not saying you can't make Gmail ads profitable, I'm just saying if you let the AI run wild, a lot of times you'll burn a ton of money in Gmail ads and other channels, um, that aren't the best versus someone typing a keyword into Google, clicking on a paid ad, and just buying. So the way I look at it is you still need humans in the loop. For a long time, there have been tools that help automate and make media buying easier. You can call it, oh, we have AI now, so it's much more sophisticated. They've been using, you know, uh, machine learning and a lot of cool tech to make it easier to buy ads and they have. But the real secret to doing really well from buying ads is not actually how you buy ads. Yes, I said before you need some humans in the loop, but what it really comes down to is a creative component. Yes, AI can help you with some creative ideas, but the real secret is doing something unique and trying new stuff that no one's tried before. And it's a big hit or miss. It's a big experimentation game. AI can help you run the experiments faster. But once you find the creative pitch that converts really well, that's not been tried before in your space, you double down and you just go really hard at it. But you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the right one that just works well.

Yeah. So my reaction to this in regards to if paid media is over or is it over for paid media marketers, I think the paid media marketers who don't adapt, right? So just the button pushers alone are going to be in big trouble. That's my opinion. And I think if you're a paid media person, you're going to have to become a different— I think a lot of roles in marketing are converging now, right? And so Satya Nadella from Microsoft actually said that, look, if you're on the product side, you're actually kind of converging with designers, you're converging with engineers at the same time. So a lot of roles are going to start to converge. And so Taylor Holiday actually posted this to X talking about head of growth, media buyer, creative strategist, retention strategist becomes profit engineer, whatever that means. So my whole point is I think if you evolve, yes, pay being is still important. Yes, you still need a human in loop. You can't let these things fully automate. But again, and we haven't reacted to this yet, but when you look at Block cutting 40% of staff, that's a lot of people. You don't just cut 40% and there's probably some, you don't get it right too. When you cut 40%, There's probably some really amazing people that you probably shouldn't have cut, right? But I digress. My point is, I think, and Neil, curious to get your thoughts. I think if you're just like, if we did 5 to 10 years ago, if you're just a button pusher paid media, you're actually pretty valuable. A lot of agencies needed to hire you, right? I don't think that's going to be the case anymore because that actually means if you're just a button pusher today, you actually haven't evolved. I think if I was working in paid media completely today, fully immersed, I would try to learn as much as possible. Hey, how can I start to learn the AI creative piece? How can I learn to start to make creatives and how can I learn to make creatives at scale? Because it's only going to get better over time. Or if I'm an SEO, I'm going to try to really learn the AEO side of things. Like how do we learn Reddit as well? How do we learn YouTube as well? I can't just be a one-trick pony, right? So I think one-trick ponies are going to get shot. I think the ones that adapt, the roles that converge, those people are going to not only get paid more, but they're going to be in more demand.

Yeah, and, and by the way, the media buyers that just push buttons and weren't doing anything amazing, I think a lot of them weren't doing well from a job perspective for many years now. I don't even think a lot of that's related to AI. I think for a while now, a lot of these roles when people are just clicking a few buttons, they've been losing contracts if they're agencies, or they've been eventually getting replaced because people like, you're not adding much value. Because technology has made a lot of this stuff easier for years. I don't think anything's really changing. It's just accelerating. It's the same stuff just getting accelerated because technology's getting better. And when companies are laying off a lot of people, like Block laying off 4,000, and I spoke at their—

I have 40%.

I think it was 4,000 though. I spoke at their internal marketing conference. I can't go into discuss what I spoke about because I signed a contract. But when you think about AI and Block, Am I going to say that AI is not causing any jobs to be replaced? No. Am I going to say that AI is a reason for 4,000 jobs to be fully replaced? No. I bet you there was a ton of wastage in there. If you just look at X, okay, a company that Jack Dorsey created, or Twitter, and Elon ended up buying it, he canned a lot of people and they've seen growth in usage with a much smaller team. This was pre all this AI stuff. A lot of these large corporations have been bloated for a long, long time and they need a cut and many of them need a cut even more.

Yep. So let me give you the numbers around this deal. So you like numbers, right? So Block was $24 billion in revenue and 24% gross profit growth, okay? Just cut 4,000 people while raising 2026 guidance to $12.2 billion in gross profit. Stock ripped 20% after hours. The market added roughly $6 billion market cap. So that's $1.5 million in enterprise value created per eliminated role. Now, maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but I would say that there's a handful of things. I think one, I think the way Jack Dorsey handled it, if you look at his message, was handled really well. You do 20 weeks of severance plus for every, I think it's an extra week for every year of tenure, plus you get to keep your equipment. There's insurance and all that. And he's saying, look, the reality is something has come and artificial intelligence. Sure, you can use that narrative. I think part of it is to AI. But I think the other part is you look at 2020, 2021, I think people just overhired, right? And so I think part of that is still kind of undoing that.

Totally agree. I think the biggest issue is people overhired. Like a lot of these companies don't need that many employees. And I look at some of these companies that are publicly traded in the SaaS space, they're barely growing. And it's just like you haven't really released too many new features and product updates. Yet you have 500 people working on product and engineering. And I'm like, uh, I would fire a lot of those people if you haven't really made any major product changes in the last 12 months. Like, why do you need 500 people on a team? The 5— forget AI, 500 people are just really inefficient. There's too much bureaucracy. Get rid of a lot of them. You can probably get more done with like 50 people.

Yep. And that— the bureaucracy is actually something we can talk about, Neil, because I mean, just sitting in that office yesterday, I can just tell that People are really inundated by the bureaucracy. And so what's interesting, I got called out because one of the people that was the VP at that company used to work at my company. And for example, Neil, let me just ask you, when you have your metrics pulled up, when a metric is— you look at traffic lights, red, yellow, green. Red means it's really bad. Yellow means it's not doing well. Green means it's moving in the right direction. You're going to focus on the red and yellow things. So let me ask you, Neil, Neil Patel's way of looking at this. Uh, if something's red or yellow, when do you address it? Do you wait a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks for you to ask for a remedy? Like, what is, what is your stance on it?

Well, before I see the report, I hope they already told me what they're going to do to fix the reds and the yellows.

Okay.

So there's not really a waiting. It's more so my team, when there's problems, they don't come to me with the problems. They come to me with potential solutions. Some solutions I love, some solutions I don't like, some solutions are whatever. So then the solutions that I don't like, we'll brainstorm and try to come up with better ones. The solutions that are whatever, again, we'll do a similar process there. And it's not always me with the best ideas. There's a lot of other people who have better ideas than me. It's just more so as a collective group, we try to be proactive about solving problems. I think just looking at things like Red, yellow, green. And if someone doesn't want to come to solutions and they just want to complain about the reds, and it's like, all right, this is just wasting everyone's time.

And what if they're like, Neil, I've tried coming up with the solutions, but I kind of want to hear from you, uh, what solutions you have in mind. So I've tried it a couple times already, it's not working. Neil, um, you know, please, what are your ideas?

So I would say, what were your solutions that you came up with? You must have came up with at least once. You you could have at least typed it into ChatGPT and asked them to help you come up with the solution, even if it's a terrible one. I just want to hear what you were thinking.

Yep.

And if you don't have an actual solution, what direction were you thinking? Like, you know, um, you know, uh, what made you get stuck, right? And in all reality, I'm kind of being nice, but I would just want to straight up know why didn't they come up with any solutions, and why didn't they even try to ask AI or a friend or a colleague? And I'll just be pissed.

Yeah. So at this company, look, so yes, yes, totally agree with you. I think my flaw calling out in public is, you know, we do the traffic lights, which I actually got from the great book, The Great CEO Within. The problem is I think one of the things that's flawed with that book is saying, hey, when something is red or yellow, you should wait 2 or 3 weeks, right? And so I followed that for a little bit, but—

2 or 3 weeks? That's what they tell you in that book?

Which is actually 2 to 4% of the year, right? Which is crazy, right? So I was doing that before. And then one of the guys called me out. He's like, yeah, when you did that, that was really stupid, right? I was like, yes, it was absolutely stupid. But I think that the key thing for everyone listening to this is that if something's red or yellow, I think you've got to keep applying pressure or you're going to feel it. Hopefully, yes, if you're going to your boss, for example, come with actually 3 solutions, pick the best one, and then go back and forth to prove that you're proactive with it. But waiting it out and being okay with it and letting the scorecard be red or yellow, that is a nice way to stunt the growth of your company.

Yeah, the one thing I love about hiring is if you look for personality traits of people who are obsessive, they pay attention to details, they stress out a lot, and they worry about things, those people usually don't wait for the red lights. When they see something that's yellow, they try to fix it right away or figure out a solution. They stress, keeps them up at night. Yes, you want them to have a work-life balance and all that kind of good stuff and not have issues with their family, but those people naturally just perform well from what I've seen, assuming you're hiring people with experience as well. And then with those people, you don't have to push them to solve the reds or the yellows in marketing or business. More so, you got to force them to unplug a little bit and go spend time with their kids or their significant other.

Dude, so Neil, um, you might not know the answer to this, so if you don't, I'll go ahead and fill in for you and I'll tell you what we do. But what do you guys do to kind of figure out if they have that— um, maybe obsessive is not the right word, but like, you know, they can't help but—

Yeah, obsessive personality.

Okay, so what are you guys doing to filter for that during the hiring process?

It's just interviewing. So when we're interviewing, um, we'll ask, um, specific tasks. Okay, so let's say if I'm interviewing for a product role and I give someone, um, a design, all right? And I would be like, how would you make this flow better? I would look to see where they designed some elements. Did they match the style guide? Did they ask me for the style guide even if I didn't provide it? Because I'll tell them, here is— here's what we're looking for. Let me know if you need anything from me. So we'll start looking for people if they use the right color of orange or if they, you know, use our right fonts and all this kind of stuff. And if people don't pay attention to those little details and obsess about them, then we usually know that they're not the right fit. And that's an easy example for product because it's more black and white. You know, with non-black and white roles, sometimes in management roles, you'd go ask them very specific details like, hey, you know, client was upset, X, Y, and Z happened. You gave it to employee. Didn't get resolved. What do you, what do you do? And I would have them break down not just scenarios like that, but I would have them give examples in the past of working with the team where things didn't go their way and what they did.

Yep. So what Neil's talking about, and then we screen for this, uh, it's looking for that bias to action, right? And the very first question I actually ask, and this is part of it, it's not everything, but the very first question when they get to me during the interview is like, How did you prepare for this call? Right? And I'll tell you what, the Beat Claude guy, the AI guy, he's like, oh, I read your book. I was like, oh, you read my book? I was like, not many people do that, right? Like you read my book to prepare for the interview? Like, that's cool, right? But that's a bias to action right there. And, you know, not everyone has the same demeanor around it, but that goes back to our core values, right? So ours is bias to action. We want relentless learners. You know, we want people who make bold long-term bets, unreasonably resilient. But one thing I did find out, Neil, so you've seen the show Billions, right?

Yeah.

Okay. Wendy Rhoades. So do you want to describe what Wendy Rhoades did for a living?

Sure. So Billions is a TV show about a hedge fund manager named Axe and Wendy Rhoades. She was their in-house psychiatrist or shrink or something like that. And she would help people mentally get in the game so they can be a top performer. So let's say you have someone, and I'm going to give you guys a marketing example that's all relatable. You have someone who is doing affiliate marketing for you internally. They're figuring out how to arbitrage ads and make more money, uh, you know, uh, for other businesses, and you're collecting affiliate revenue from it. Or they're figuring out how do you get you press on a lot of sites and, you know, adding in affiliate links and then convincing them like, hey, add an affiliate link, you can make more money and push our products and adjust the text instead of just mentioning our name. Which in many cases doesn't do anything because there's very little context there. And sometimes they're just off on their game and they have some personal issues that's slowing them down on work because it happens to a lot of us. And Wendy Rhodes, in this example, the shrink or psychiatrist, she would figure out what's blocking them, whether it's personal or work-wise, help them resolve it so then that way they can go back to performing well.

Yep. So that was a very good explanation. I didn't expect you to go into that much detail, especially with it being, you you know, 10:18 PM for Neil. So here's the thing. The reason why I just asked, why I'm talking about Wendy Rhodes right now is because I actually posted something to Twitter just saying how, you know, whatever you're using, like OpenClaw where it has memory, when you work with it over time, you actually can have it do a complete personality test diagnosis of you. Okay. So I had it do a diagnosis of everything, but the Wendy— so there's someone kind of known as Wendy Rhodes. Like she's like the Wendy Rhodes type on Twitter. She responded and she's like, hey, all the personality tests you mentioned, like they're fine, right? But you should use this one. So you should try this out too. It's called the MMPI. So whatever LLM you're using the most, just say, hey, you work with me a lot, score me on the MMPI. It's actually a 576-question personality test. And I ask it to call out patterns, right? And the reason I'm giving this to everyone is I think you should do this with whatever LLM you're using. So look for the MMPI. But what I'm going to test doing now, Neil, is whoever we're talking to during the call, I'm going to say, hey, Pull up whatever you're using, ChatGPT, whatever. Ask it about your MMPI, whatever you're working with, and then tell me what it says. And that's actually where it can show your neuroticism and all those things. Go ahead, Neil.

It's Minnesota Multifaceted Personality Inventory or something like that.

I don't know. I don't even know what it's called.

The administration are real. It says it's a licensed clinical test that's given and interpreted by a trained psychologist. It goes on and on, but pretty much it says I can't actually administer or score And then it gives reasons why.

Okay. So check this out. Tell me if you disagree or agree with these things, right? These are the main outliers for me, Neil. And you tell me if you agree or disagree. Are you ready?

Yeah.

Okay. So hypomania. So Scorpion hypomania. This is on a scale of 0 to 100. Mine's a 72, which is, it says significantly elevated. This is your defining scale. High energy, rapid ideation, parallel work streams, impatience with slow people, a tendency to start more than you finish. You run at a pace most people can't sustain. The 8 to 7 Enneagram map directly— maps directly here. Not clinical mania. This is a trait-level hypomaniac drive that builds companies. That's number 1. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Agree.

Okay. Number 2 is psychopathic deviate. Okay. I'm high on that. That's a 68, right? So it's elevated. This scale catches rule breakers, authority challengers, and people who reject conventional paths. You dropped out of the corporate track, built companies your way, run— Hiring through Beat Claude Challenge instead of HR playbooks. High PD in entrepreneurs is extremely common. Agree or disagree?

Agreed.

Okay. So let me tell you where I'm going with this. So it spotted a pattern because it's my Claude code, right? So I was like, okay, it's like your specific pattern. Look at your history. So 2014 to 2016, energy, survival, hustle. It works out for you. 2018 and 2020, you install a GM, enjoyed growth. Like, you know, it kind of worked, right? 2021 to 2023, spread across multiple different projects, acquisitions, drift, revenue drops. Starting in 2024, reengage, performance rises again. So it's like, notice the pattern? When external friction drops, so bull market, high liquidity, momentum, you expand aggressively. When reality constrains you, you focus. You don't naturally self-constrain. And that's the core, right? And so my point of calling this out is like, it's pretty spot on. And so during the interview, Neil, I do think it's hard to just call it out with someone. You're going to get different answers and you might find some person more likable than the other one. But if you're able to get this out, I think, and you're able to look at those traits, maybe you can dive in a little more. That's how I'm looking at maybe approaching this in the future with hiring. So this is more of an experiment, but I find it fascinating. And I was like, hey, give me a one-liner on this, on how I am so I can tell everyone that works with me how I work, right? So the one-liner is, I naturally over-index on building the future and don't generate enough internal friction around margins and metrics. So without structured accountability, I can let operational discipline drift. While chasing expansion. I was like, damn, that's pretty good.

So yeah, I had the same talk with you a few weeks ago. I said, you're spending a lot of time on AI, which is the future. And I'm like, the fundamentals is what's going to grow. So you just need both.

Well, what Neil said, I think this was 2 weeks ago, Neil was like, this is, this is post-call and I'm happy to share this. Neil was like, I think this could be a distraction like Clubhouse.

Yes.

Yeah. So anyway, um, let's—

We were talking about, what was it, OpenClaw or something like that?

I was talking about OpenClaw, Claude Code. I will tell you though, um, From that retreat last week, I'm not going to name names, but the people who are using Claude Code are like, they're really innovating. The people who are on ChatGPT, someone showed custom GPTs and all that, right? The people that were already on Claude Code and Open Claude, they're kind of past that. But the ChatGPT people were desperately trying to catch up and they're like, oh crap, I'm really behind, right? And so I do think my belief on this, and we probably disagree for now, is that I think the founders really need to be all in on this stuff. Otherwise, the company can't move as quickly as the company needs to move. So in my mind, I'm like, this is the fundamental because stuff is changing too quickly. So anyway, right?

Yeah. But to go back on that, I actually agree with you on which, whether it's AI or anything, if your leadership and the founders aren't on board, it's very hard to get anything changed from an organizational standpoint. You need the person at the top to buy in. and push it because if they don't buy in and push it, others will not adapt. And I think you end up losing the race, but at the same time, you just have to keep pushing on the fundamentals that are driving the business until you can figure out how to get growth from the new quote unquote vision.

Yeah. Which is actually interesting, Neil. I'll kind of give out the vision, the reason why I was even in Arizona yesterday. And that was like, I woke up at 3:30 AM, flew there, was in the office at 9:00 AM with my CTO. And then we flew back and by the, By the time I flew back, it was like 4:30 PM. I was back in my home.

Let's go back a little bit. You went to Arizona for what?

Because your office is in LA. Yeah. So we went to Arizona because I'll just say, I'm not going to name names right now. We'll keep it anonymous. But you would know. Went to Arizona because we're basically creating an offer right now where We are basically going to be driving phone calls or leads for one of their businesses. They have a new SaaS product. Let's just call it that. Okay. And that has a lot of AI that's driven into it. And so basically a lot of the scaffolding my CTO and I want to do. So we had a lot of questions for their executives. We also had questions for their people, boots on the ground, to understand what the problems were, right? So that's almost like doing customer development or customer discovery. And so what we're going to do here is we are going to Whether it's sending, whether it's making phone calls or whether it is driving outbound emails, right? Or whether it's making an agent that fulfills the call, like the sale end to end, that's what we wanna do, right? And then that is actually the vision of the future where we want to be able to build these solutions for customers, right? Called Ford Deployed Marketer. And then we have the Smart Marketer managing and customizing it for the clients, right? And so that's why we had that conversation. When we started having those conversations like, oh man, They, they might have a lot of people, but they're just like, not enough people are AI-enabled and they just can't do it. So, um, that's, that's where we are with that right now.

Your meeting in Arizona reminds me of Ethan's company, TinyLab.

What does— what did TinyLab do?

Uh, AI deployment company. So they go in 7 days, they, they figure out whatever problems you have in 7 days, they try to deploy, uh, As much AI as possible that solves a problem literally within 7 days.

Yeah, we're not doing that. So the model's a little, it's all pay for performance.

Oh, so it's all pay for performance.

Correct.

But it's similar in which you're fixing some of the problems.

Yeah, exactly.

'Cause some of this that you're mentioning isn't all marketing related.

No, it is. I would say it's more like, we can call it enterprise revenue agents, right? If you want to call it that, right?

It's more like business consulting, but we're using it through AI.

We're basically building revenue solutions to solve all their problems there. So we're not really consulting much. There's not going to be phone calls back and forth, reports and all that.

No, no, no. But when people think of consulting, if you go back to Accenture, Accenture, when you pay them, it's not just they come with a strategy. They will go and build the product, solve the problem, and help deploy it. You're pretty much going in there, You're doing the consulting part from figuring out the problem, and then you're coming up with the solution, you're building the solution, and you're deploying it.

Correct. So our vision, even last year, towards the end of last year, um, we had planned this out already, that the 3-year vision is tech-enabled services, and this fits in really well with it. And the only way this is going to move forward, to your point earlier, is like the founders have to be involved. And so that's why we flew in last— like, I hit up my, my CTO Monday, I was like, we're going to Arizona on Thursday. And literally we just got up and went. So that's where we are with it. I do think in the new world that we're moving into right now, it does enable a lot of interesting models with pay for performance because pay for performance before, it's a lot harder, especially when you have a lot of hard costs with people and everything. But if you're able to build a lot of scaffolding with these agents and you're able to make it work, you can actually repeat it for different verticals or different companies. So that's how we see it and we'll see where it goes. But at least I'm giving you guys that model that you can work with.

Yep.

Yep. Cool. Anything from your side, or else I can just keep picking from this list.

Uh, did you see how, uh, core wholesale prices rose like crazy?

What did?

Core wholesale prices.

No, I didn't.

So core PPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, increases seasonally adjusted 0.8%, more than the 0.6% gain in December. And well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate of 0.3%.

So are we cutting interest rates?

Uh, the 10-year went down. So usually if the 10-year goes down, that means they believe that rates are gonna start going down, but they're worried about stagflation at this point.

Yeah, I mean, the world's crazy right now. Um, but, and honestly, like, okay, we can say that, right? But honestly, like, we should just say, okay, the world's crazy right now, like, here's what we would do about it. So here's what at least I would do about it. I I only think there's one way through it. If you're curious and you're actually out there, you're curious, you're learning, you're experimenting, and you're actually even— a bonus would be if you're out there teaching, you will be unstoppable no matter what. I think all the stuff that people are talking about, oh, there's AI, there's layoffs right now. All you can worry about is yourself. And the only way out is through. So I'm looking over a hill right now. There's a hill over there. Okay? So there's this giant tidal wave coming over that hill right now. And you can choose to surf that wave or you can choose to not do anything and just stare at it and just get hit by it. Right? But I would say the more curious you are, the more entrepreneurial you are, and you don't have to be an entrepreneur, you can be like an intrapreneur, um, you're gonna do just fine and you're gonna surf this wave. And that's why during this period of chaos right now, as the world adapts, I think there's gonna be some job displacement, but I think net-net, long-term, we're gonna be okay. Yeah.

And when you look at like the overall wholesale prices, which is just another version of inflation, um, for anyone who's not sure what I mean by core wholesale prices, Think of a business buying a product that they are going to resell to someone else. So you're buying, you know, I'm Best Buy, which is electronics company if you don't live in the US.

Wow.

And they go buy a TV from Sony and then they go and sell it to end consumer, right? So they get a wholesale price. They don't pay the sticker price for a Sony TV. If they did, there would be no margin, no profit for them. And on an annual basis, Core wholesale prices accelerated 3.6%. Now, is that some of that caused from tariffs and other stuff? I don't know, but the market didn't like it.

We should talk about this because I actually have a tweet that's related to this. So we're talking about inflation. We're talking about stagflation, which is actually you have no growth plus inflation, really bad. Stagflation is terrible. Now, We're talking about, okay, Block's doing these layoffs over here. I just pulled this up. I saw this this morning as I was walking back from the gym. So this guy, Jeff, previously at Coatue and Goldman Sachs, so finance guy. I think we actually work with this company. This is a crypto company. Yeah, we did. We worked with this company before, Sei Network. Okay. So spoke with— this guy Jeff says, spoke with several YC founders planning to lay off all engineers below staff Basically everyone under L5. This only became viable after Opus 4.5 in December. The block layoffs are a signal the floor just collapsed. If you're early in your career, the next few years are everything. Your edge will be how well you integrate AI into the value you create. The fastest learners are about to compound at absurd rates. Maybe that's part of the reason why, Neil, I'm excited for you, me, our other friends who love to learn. Point is, you're talking about inflation going up and you're talking about these layoffs over here. So the headline I had for this one is the price of knowledge work is going to continue to trend towards zero because a lot of this stuff can do the work. But the people who are able to converge their roles into multiple roles, they will make a lot more money and they'll be in even more demand. So again, if you keep compounding yourself, you keep learning, you're constantly curious, you're experimenting, you're eating the poo-poo, You will be fine.

Yep.

All right. So we have this interesting one over here, Neil, on the new distribution channel is agents. So Google, I think recently just launched their Web MCP. So Neil, when you look at the ClickFlow website or you look at the Karat website, Ubersuggest is a good example or AnswerThePublic is a good example because you have, I think for both of those, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you have versions where they can just use it, right? Like, freemium version, they can get a couple uses, correct?

Uh-huh.

Okay. So, or we can talk about booking flights on Expedia, for example, right? So if you're gonna be running these agents, whether you're using like, I know Perplexity just came out with a computer use one. You can use Claude Cowork to do work for you and it can browse the internet. You want these agents, you wanna make it very easy for them to, you know, ideally not do web browsing, but call on MCPs and just book a flight using, you know, whatever travel website you're using. Or call on data from you know Uber Suggest or Answer to Public or ClickFlow or Carrot, right? Or spin up ads very quickly. So Web MCP was launched by Google. Okay, and I think what are we talking about here? Google. I think Stripe also launched something. I think called like to allow agents to interact with each other. So I think you're gonna have a lot more. I think you even had a post on how like a lot of traffic coming to your website now is like what?

51% of website traffic in general are bots now.

Yeah. So this guy Akush is just saying that Andrej Karpathy said that the new channel, the new distribution channel for software is agents. Agents don't just browse your marketing site. They watch your demo video. They don't watch your demo video. They don't click through to your onboarding flow. They call your CLI. So that's your command line interface. Okay. That's like using a terminal. They hit your MCP server, they read your docs programmatically. If none of those surface areas exist, your product is invisible to them. Look at how fast this moves. MCP went from 0 to 97 million monthly SDK, so software development kit downloads in 12 months, 10,000+ active servers. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Cloudflare all adopted it. By December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP. Oh, I didn't even know that, to the Linux Foundation because the standard had already won. Running an MCP server is now compared to running a web server. That's the new baseline for product discovery. What do you think about this?

Yeah, I agree.

You're just too tired right now.

I am tired, dude. I'm like not daydreaming, but I kind of am.

I can tell you don't have it anymore. It's okay. I'll carry us through the rest of these 30 minutes. So, okay. I'll talk about it more. This is good. Neil, catch me up.

I've been up for 27 hours at this point.

Did you— so you just landed, right?

No, I landed a while ago, but I'm working both time zones, so it's just—

That's on you. That's on you. Yeah, see, by the way, we should— I'll take a little quick detour here. So Neil, did you, um, sign up for the, the peptide company I was telling you about? Literally, it's called The Peptide Company, from our mutual friend Jacob. Yeah, so did he give you the, the sleep peptides? Pinolon? Are you trying them right now?

I'm traveling.

You didn't bring it with you?

No.

Oh, that's unfortunate. Okay. So anyway, I'll give this to everyone. We can take a little detour here and then come back to talking about distribution channels. This is not health advice, by the way, but I was taking Pinolon and that's— I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but that is a peptide. And basically, It gives me super deep sleep and it leveled up my HRV, which is my stress level. So you want this to be higher, so to like 107, which is pretty good. And it brought my heart rate down from 45 resting heart rate down to 40, which is really good. So all that to say, with people that are tired like Neil, who does traveling, there's a lot of travel hacking that you can do, right? And one of my other travel hacks too is to also not fall asleep until you're in the time zone and then fall asleep at the right time. So that way you don't have jet lag. But Neil never listened to me for that one. He just kind of works both—

No.

Both time zones. So that's why he's dead right now.

And you have an app that helps with it.

I don't know what it's called. Yeah, it's called TimeShifter. So it tells you the right times to sleep and all that. Sometimes it's pretty brutal. It tells you to fall asleep immediately when it's in the middle of the day. I'm like, how do you do that? Sometimes you need special stuff for that, but I'll leave that part alone. Okay, so coming back to this distribution channel piece. So 85% of enterprises are expected to have AI agents deployed. These agents need structured programmatic access to your product. They need CLIs, MCP endpoints, and machine-readable documentation. A beautiful React dashboard is worthless to an agent trying to pull data into workflow at 3:00 AM. The way I look at this right now is yes, think about MCPs. Yes, think about building for agents. Yes, also, if you want to distribute your repos from a marketing standpoint, put it on GitHub. That's what Corey Haynes did. He did a really good job with that. At the same time, you still need a dashboard for humans. So the stuff we're building for pay for performance right now, Neil, we do have a dashboard for the outbound emails we're sending, the outbound sales calls that we're doing. That's one side of things. But even internally, we need a dashboard to manage all of our agents. You need some type of dashboard, some type of control system to see what they're doing and how they're performing. And I will tell you, these agents are just continuing to compound every day. And by the way, Neil, even when I went to the gym today, I didn't realize I was running 10 different workflows while I was at the gym. When I was sitting next to my CTO yesterday when we were flying back, by the way, we're sitting row 26 economy. It was great. As he was talking to me, he spun up a couple of different things, but by the time he landed, he's like, dude, I just pushed something to GitHub that would've taken 2 days to do and I got it done in the middle of our conversation. One, AI efficiency is crazy. That's one. The second one is build dashboards for your agents. The third one is, yes, you want to be looking at building discoverability. You want to make discoverability easy for agents because you're going to have a world where agents are doing a lot of the work.

You do. But the key here is, because dude, I was just in a heated debate about agents like 24 hours. It's a big company. I was at their offices. I can't mention the company, but they own some of the biggest cars that we all see in Los Angeles and in all places all over the world. And they own more than just cars. They're a really massive company. Walmart.

Yep.

So when you think about it, we were talking about agents and deploying at mass scale, and they were just like, oh, we want to do an agent for this. We want to do an agent for that. And they were showing me some of the stuff that they're building and their biggest problem wasn't the ideas, it wasn't actually even building the agents. They didn't have checks in place for how the agents were doing their work. I thought it was a smart idea to have a team continually go and build all these agents and get a lot of work done. And this group would help other departments internally create agents so then that way they could be more efficient. So think of it like as a centralized hub. That just helps a lot of different teams in an organization build agents. And I was like, the biggest problem here isn't the building part. If you're not actually checking the quality of the work, it could be costing you a lot of money. I'm like, you guys need to figure out how to put that within your processes and systems.

Dude, that's okay, Neil. I did this like 2 days ago. Okay. So I've been building my, my OpenClaw has been sitting in my Telegram. So it's really only been working with me. as almost like my chief of staff assistant, if you want to call it that. It has a lot of context around the business, the goals. It's hooked in with a bunch of MCPs. I added it into Slack 2 days ago. I added it into some of the private channels that we have and people are working with it back and forth now. They're asking questions, they're querying data, they're asking for strategies, they're asking it to build things. I'm like, holy crap, I've just opened up this machine. And so to Neil's point, I do think you need a human in the loop to fact-check and check the data as well. You need a human in the loop to continue to fine-tune it. The problem is I was building all these things out of my own entertainment, but now it's time for me to release some of my babies into the wild and let my team work with it. I'm still— I think there's one thing to have a personal assistant, but when you have the personal assistant that knows what you want to hit and your goals and knows how you work and your team is querying data, like for example, oh, hey, we created all these programmatic SEO pages around ChatGPT ads a few weeks ago. How's that going right now? Give me a 4-week table. Boom. Like literally in a couple seconds, it spun out and everyone can see how things are going. Oh, what should we do about that? It seems like, what are next steps here? Well, it's not performing over here and you're not driving any conversions here. You should do this. And I'm like, oh, hey, SEO person over here, what do you think about this idea? And it's just happening in real time. And it's amazing. And then I added to the sales channel too. Hey, how have we been doing with— look at our Gong and look at our HubSpot. How have we been doing in the last 60 days or so? What trends are you seeing? Right. And then if it starts to repeat something, report something wrong, the, the, it's okay. Cause the salespeople jump in. But the key thing, Neil, is that now they're starting to engage with it more and they're having conversations with it and it's moving things along. That is the key. Yeah. So.

On a side note, I just got this email. It's one of the best marketing emails I've gotten in a long time. Check this out.

Like, I'm so boring, guys, that Neil's starting to check his email in the middle of the conversation.

No, no, no, no, this just popped up. So I, I have an OCD where I always have to have zero inbox. I don't know why. Um, so this is to my dev email. You know, I'm— I get forwarded all my dev stuff, uh, when it comes to all the tech emails, so that way I can see what my team is doing without asking them what they're doing. And we use Claude, of course. But look at this subject line: Reduce your Claude API costs. They're trying to send me an email that helps me save money, which would hurt them, but in the long run it would make me more loyal to them and cause me to spend more money over time. You'd use it more too. I would use it more. Uh, so build efficiency with Claude. You're building with Claude. Now let's optimize your implementation. Here are 4 ways to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. Learn more. And then they just break down a lot of different examples. I was like, that's a great marketing email. It's very rare that a company Does what's beneficial for you and hurts them in the short run. And this hurts them. This would make them less money, but in the long run, it would make them more money and have a much loyal customer.

You know what it is too, Neil? The subject line is really good. When it says reduce your API costs, um, any entrepreneur that's looking at it, any finance person is looking at it, it's like, hell yeah, right? Dude, my API costs for Anthropic this month already, it's like $3,500. I'm like, oh, Oh damn. So I need to do something about that to optimize it. But you know what's going to happen in the future, Neil? You might get that email as a human and say, hey, and then there's going to be a link saying, hey, do you want me to just do it for you? And you just click it and it does it for you, right? Or the future is going to be, it's just going to be sent to an agent and the agent's going to be like, hey, I spotted this over here. There's a way to save costs by 80% or so. Would you like us to do that? And actually my agent does that now. It's like, hey, you're spending on all these stupid costs over here. This model's too expensive. You should use this model over here. I'm like, that's good, right? So yeah, yeah.

No, it's great as long as it does it accurately and good. And I think that's a problem that we face right now with AI in which it can make recommendations, it can help you save time, it can help you save money, but in that process it makes a lot of mistakes from what we see. But I bet if you compare Jan 1st, 2026 to Jan 1st, 2027, The amount of errors will drastically get reduced.

Yeah. By the way, the cost per token is going to drastically reduce as well. You know what's crazy to me? It's Anthropic or OpenAI. They're raising for the next round, the next training run. They're spending all the money because here's the thing. They know the price per token is going to drop, but they know they also have to have the best model, a very competitive model. They're just raising for the next round, the next round, the next round. I don't know when that's going to stop, but it's exciting to watch from the side. I actually, Neil, I've been messaging Apple. I've been trying to do the math on whether it makes sense to buy the Mac Studio Ultras, like the new ones that are coming out, I think next week. You can buy a fully loaded one for basically 10 grand because I want to run these models locally for a lot of the things because it's going to be a lot cheaper if you do it that way, especially the work that I'm talking about doing now. I'm like, okay, well, if I buy 2 of these Mac Studios running KIMI, which is a Chinese open-source model locally, I'm going to save a ton of money. I'm going to be making money pretty quickly. But if I were to buy 5 of these Mac Studio Ultras, that probably would cost me $50,000 or something like that out the gate. And so do I want to buy it? I'm like, well, the chips update every year or 2 years or so. The chips in 2 years are going to be even crazier. And so I'm like, okay, well, instead of paying the $50,000 upfront, I can pay basically $8,000 To lease 5 of these. I'm just giving you a simple example. $8,000 to lease 5 of these Mac Studio Ultras for 24 months.

So 2 years.

Okay. Are you following? Wow.

I didn't know they have leasing programs.

That's a way better deal. Interesting.

You're not going to keep this stuff for 5 years. It's going to be way better tech in a year.

Right. And so I was working with my OpenClaw on coming up with the math where it's like, yeah, you should just lease these things. Because one of our mutual friends yesterday is like, why don't you just buy it? I'm like, because this stuff becomes outdated so quickly and I want the latest technology running my stuff. Especially if it's for our own stuff and also if it's helping clients, because clients are going to want stuff local, isolated to one computer.

So yeah, I think leasing's smart unless it slows you down a lot, and then it's just a cost analysis. Because to do leasing, typically you got to fill out financial paperwork and all this kind of stuff.

It's really easy. It's really easy. Oh, okay.

If it's really easy and it doesn't slow you down, but like if something was going to slow you down a month or two, it's like, yeah, I'm not saying spend the $50 grand, but maybe you go and You buy one of them for 10 grand and you lease the rest.

That's exactly what I'm going to do. So I'm going to buy one for 10 grand and then the other ones I'm probably just going to lease. It just depends on how this scales. If this one, this initial pilot test goes well, we're going to be off into the races. Neil, let me tell you about an offer someone sent me on WhatsApp the other day. Let me tell you what the text message was this. Okay? So this guy's looking at our YouTube channel. Okay? And he's like, dude, your Marketing School YouTube channel sucks. And he's like, you guys are so good. You guys get no views, whatever. How about I 5x your views? I'm like, long-form views? He's like, yeah, long-form views. I 5x your long-form views. And if I don't do that in the first 3 months, I will not only give you a full refund, I will give you 10 grand. I'm like, not a bad offer, but I'm going to talk to him a little more, but it's not like we get that many long-form views anyway, but he's pretty good at YouTube.

Yeah, I usually don't believe like the 10 grand ones. I've been getting a lot saying, hey, uh, do this. If you're tired of this and you don't want to respond, just let me know and I'll send you $100. All right, so I'm just like, so you're telling me you'll send me $100?

Yeah.

So then for shits and giggles, I responded back. I'm like, not interested. Here's where you can send the $100. I never got my $100.

Oh, that's not cool.

And I've been getting a few of them from different people.

No one sent me the $100, so I stopped responding to them. That's not cool.

That's not cool.

Um, so we, um, Neil, I think you know this guy. So I actually know this guy and I've met him a few times and he actually works with some of these finance YouTubers and he knows his stuff, right? So I think I might consider doing it for my channel first to see how it goes and then maybe consider rolling it out to ours because our channel, um, is actually starting to move a little bit. I'm like, oh, the views are actually going up. For our little marketing school, um, YouTube channel. And we'll see.

Yeah, dude, views are going up for a lot of stuff if you can create content that's really good for AI. Anything that's AI right now is hot, as long as you're covering the hot thing.

Not if you have a sensational headline like mine.

Not if, you're saying? Oh yeah, that's true.

It was hitting you.

Yeah, on our last episode you were talking about 9%.

Click-through rate.

Or if you're talking about stuff like the best ChatGPT prompts for marketers, no one cares for ChatGPT prompts for content creation or marketing. Like that's, that's like they would be interested in that a year and a half ago.

Yeah. Right. I'll, I'll just tell you kind of my approach with it right now, cuz I'm, I'm pretty like on top of the Open Claude, Claude Code stuff. My angle is basically, um, I want to hit it from a marketing angle first, if not business angle. So I want to tie it to revenue cuz for whatever reason, people aren't really talking about how it ties in with revenue. Maybe because they don't know how to drive it to revenue. So I'm doing that. And you know what's interesting, Neil? Yesterday I got an email from an executive assistant. It's like, oh yeah, we saw your Open Claw video. We want to do this for a CEO. And I looked at the CEO, it's like the ex-boyfriend of someone who I dated in the past. So it was pretty funny. But anyway—

Did you respond to them?

No, I didn't respond. But I will tell you, it actually, like the Claude Code or Open Claw videos I make, Because I'm just sharing, again, guys, I'm not sharing how to do it. I just share what I'm doing that actually generates leads. And we're talking fast-growing supplement company over here or B2B companies. And so you just have to figure out what your angle is. And then when you insert, by the way, ClickFlow, our SEO product, the MRR is just going up right now. I'm like, oh, this is great. Hilton just came in and all these, they're all finding it through that type of content. And so us inserting our own ads, For our own products and services that works well, especially when YouTube is kind of the gift that keeps on giving. And you're still doing pretty well with your YouTube.

Yeah. We started getting really specific based on what drives revenue. You did tell me about how you were inserting ads. We did try that out. That's worked out okay for us. The hard part, what we found with a lot of these channels for us, because we're going Enterprise and we're trying to go enterprise globally. It's great for top of funnel, like brand awareness. And then hopefully a year or two later, they start including you in RFPs and pitches.

Dude, do you have, um, do you have full-time people dedicated to finding RFPs for you? Like, how does that work for you guys?

No, you tend to just— they email you and you gotta—

Okay, maybe it's a little different.

So we do go We— Nick, who's on our sales team, and a few others, Kim, they will look on LinkedIn and they'll see if there's any RFPs that they can get included in. But think of it from this perspective: if you're not included in the RFP and then you're trying to push your way in, we found that it's a really, really slim chance to close. Like, we haven't closed any of those yet. It costs money to pitch. When you're taking a lot of people from your organization, they're spending Days, hours in person, they're practice pitching, all this kind of stuff. It's expensive. You're not spending like $5,000, $10,000. You're substantially spending more than that. You can easily spend over $100,000 just on one pitch. So if you're trying to force yourself into pitches that you don't think are a good fit, you probably shouldn't do it. And another example is, is we get RFPs as well. Like we got one RFP from a company. That the agency fees would be, I think it was like $15, $16 million, and we didn't pitch. The reason being is we aren't the best company to go get you tons of billboard ads, like traditional billboard ads throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe. We don't have that infrastructure. You need a Old school holding company, and they had digital requirements as well. And we were willing to just pitch for the digital part, but they were looking for someone, and they made it clear, that can do everything, and we weren't that. So it's just like, why would you want to go and pitch something that you know you can't do? You're just going to burn money and you're not going to get selected anyways. And if you do get selected, you can't provide, so you're going to have to refund the money. Yep. Or you're going to tarnish your name, so it's not worth it.

Yep. Um, Couple more minutes here. So, Neil, have you seen that AI podcasts are ripping right now?

Yes, you're talking about specifically AI podcasts. You at least what I'm talking about is people creating podcasts using AI, and they're getting tons of traction because they're creating episodes on a lot of different stuff.

This is what I mean: literally generated by AI. People ask me why I won't touch Chinese peptides anymore because I have no idea.

Yeah.

So these are both fake. And so basically it's like, I think if you're starting out or if you have a media, by the way, Andreessen Horowitz has a nice media arm. I think this is something that might make sense. But if you can generate these things so quickly, I think you're going to see a big increase in these, which means you're going to see a lot more slop on the internet. It's going to be interesting. Some of it will be good content. Don't get me wrong, but you're going to see a lot of stuff.

Wait, what percentage do you think is going to be good content?

Like 1%.

Yeah, people are just gonna get so tired, they're gonna start boycotting, being like, dude, we're tired of listening to podcasts that are AI. And then I'm telling you, these platforms, whether it's Apple or Google or, uh, Spotify, people are going to get irritated. So they're gonna have to start labeling like AI-generated podcasts.

You know what I'm telling you, like, it's gonna go everywhere with I actually think a new social media platform is going to come out where it's just focused on all human content only, or all human curation. And that's going to be a thing. That's an angle.

I thought you were going to say a new platform for all AI content like Sora.

Yeah, but yeah, that too, which remember I told you, the people in my building, they use Sora quite a bit. The workers, when I talk to them, they're like, check out this thing I made over here. So I think we're Go ahead.

Let's go back to Sora. How do you think Sora is doing right now?

Not well. Yeah.

And they're thinking it's pretty much done.

Yeah. You know what's interesting? I might help with another event this year on the YPO side. I might do an AI summit in Istanbul. Let me know if you want to come. But if you want, because it's actually tied in with their global business summit, right? Which is one of their events where you can do deals. So I don't know if you're still in the group, but this is the only event where you can pitch each other. So I might throw that event and do it, and I'm going to let Neil go to sleep soon. But I think next year we should consider, maybe the year after, we should consider having the planners who helped us before bring Marketing School Live back, something like that. Maybe 2027, 2028, we should do that.

Yeah, dude. And for me, I can't go to the YPO events. I dropped out of YPO. I'm no longer a member.

You can still speak at them if I invite you to speak.

Oh, I didn't know that. But yeah, I didn't renew. You know why? I was butthurt. Not really. I wasn't butthurt that they didn't accept me. I was in YPO and then I tried to get into YPO— was it called Gold? Yeah, Gold.

Dude, you qualify in like— you qualify in 4 years. You're good.

How old do you have to be?

Over 45.

Oh, so I had to just wait 5 years.

Just wait it out. Yeah, wait it out. I will say, like, I, I went to a dine-around and then I think we can tie this in with, um, Having a friend group and all that. I'll tie it in together with the retreat that I did last week. And then that'll give Neil a little more rest time here. But we did this YPO dine-around. So every year in your chapter, right? So YPO is a global entrepreneur or a business operator group, right? And so this year I went up to an event up in the Palisades. So every year there's a dine-around, meaning that you go to a member's house and then they host. And so they had a cook, bartender and all that. This house was huge. And the crazy thing is this house was right by the hill where the Palestinians' fire started. So it didn't hit that. They had firefighters defending it and his house got protected. But I'm just saying that huge house, by the way, ginormous. Neil's really going to fall asleep now, but you would've liked this house, Neil. I'm just saying that the group that Neil wants to join, the gold one, obviously if the age is 45 minimum, The net worth of these people is going to be significantly larger. I know some of the people in that chapter, right? They've created amazing movies that you all have seen. They've brokered some deals with NBA arenas. One person used to be CEO of a large social media company. So heavy hitters.

They own hotel brands like Hyatt, like the actual owner of Hyatt.

Yeah. So Neil wants to be in this one and no shade at all. Neil should look for that. You want to be with people at your level or even above your level, ideally on average. But the under 45 group for YPO, you do have some people who are heavy hitters, but it's pretty hard to find them because they haven't compounded for that long. And so that's kind of how I look at it. But where I'm going with this is that, for example, the Palm Beach retreat that I did last week, I put this group together and we've been together since 2017, 2018. I was looking at pictures from 10 years ago. And the memories that we build, it's just like, I would like to grow old. And I got this from Syed actually. It's like, you want to grow old with these groups. And I'd rather have these relationships compound sooner than later. Now, that being said, you shouldn't just try to join any group. And Neil's done a good job of filtering here because some groups I've been in in the past, some groups like to focus more on partying, for example, or some groups like to focus more on maybe talking about family. And that's totally fine. My focus right now is more on the business side. And when Neil joins these things, he's completely locked in on business. And so he doesn't want to hear about the other stuff for the most part. No.

I don't want to hear about your problems with your kid. I know that sounds really bad, but I'm paying for some business stuff. I want business value. I don't want to give feedback on marital problems and people complaining about their significant others.

And here's the thing. Even if you're listening to this right now, it's like, oh, I don't qualify for EO or YPO or Hampton or any of these groups. groups. Even when I was 26, 27 years old, I would put together these small dinners where I— even when I was like, I didn't have a lot of, any money, right? I was broke basically. So I think the sooner you start to put these groups together, the better, because some of these people in these groups, maybe only 1 or 2 might compound into building something really big. The rest, maybe not so much, but if you're the leader of this group, you can filter people in and out and you can rotate the Which is what I've done over the years. And it's not just an Eric decision, it's actually a group decision.

Yeah. What I found easier than doing groups like what Eric's talking about, I think groups are really valuable. It's easier to just attend other people's groups every once in a while.

Yeah. So you, yeah, I'm sure. Neil, have you actually gone to any of these events where you get invited? I'm sure you get invited all the time, right? The answer is no.

So I'm trying to think. In the last year or two? No, I haven't been to any of them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not exactly Neil's cup of tea, but I will tell you though, once Neil joins in 4 years, when we look back on this episode, Neil will be like, oh, Eric, I should have joined sooner.

You're talking about YPO Gold?

Uh-huh. That chapter.

No, I've tried to join sooner. I just did not get accepted. They didn't like my age. I know.

But once you join, you'll be like, Eric, I see the value beyond just the business side for forum. I see the value.

So yeah, my problem with YPO— so remember the marketing one in Miami? Good event. Um, Eric threw that event. A lot of amazing learnings, a lot of great speakers. The problem for me for YPO, not YPO Gold but YPO, you tend to network with more entrepreneurs and their size of their business tends to be much smaller. Even if you're not supposed to be able to do business in there, that's fine, right? I didn't join YPO originally to do business within, uh, my chapter. It was more so to learn. But my hard part was, is the learnings that they were going through for the majority of the people— not all, but the majority of the people in the group— were not applicable to me and the stage I am in life.

You mean the people that attended or the speakers?

Uh, let's go back. 2 things. So with the YPO Beverly Hills that I was in— I don't know if you're still in YPO Beverly I think you are, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So my issue is great chapter, but YPO in general, when I tried the chapter, a lot of the people and their learnings and where they're at in business were not applicable to me. It was more so they were more earlier stage. So it just wasn't, but there are some who are a good fit and some people have even much larger businesses than me. I was looking for a chapter where it was just larger businesses. Or all large businesses. Now, going to the Miami event, it's great, but most of them were not hired guns for like large organizations. So I think if you're focused on more mid-market or SMB, it's a great place to pick up potential customers and revenue from.

Yeah. I'll give you context just for everyone and we can wrap this. Do you want to finish your thought? Go ahead.

Yeah, no, it's spot on. You just have to end up finding, I don't know if there is YPO events where there's more Yeah. Traditional publicly traded companies or hired guns.

So what I'll say is this, right? Just to give everyone some context here. So the qualifications to join EO, it's like $1 million a year. I think Hampton's $3 million a year or so in revenue. Uh, YPO is $13 million plus. Um, or you can qualify on valuation. There's some ways you can play around with it. Um, but Neil, the group that Neil's trying to join, if you're in Gold, for example, and it's like, I think it's, um, Bel Air chapter or something like that, you have very wealthy people. Right? We're talking people that have done like, you know, multi-billion dollar deals and people that, um, you know, have, you know, let's say large venture funds or something like that. Um, and so, but also like the average age of these people that we're talking, Neil, these people are probably like 55, 60 years old plus. And so they've, they've had more time to compound and, um, Neil's done well enough where, you know, he, he, he definitely qualifies for that range. Um, so, but the key thing is Neil's very, you want to be very selective with your time, right? So who you're spending time with. So I would suggest that if you're looking to start a group, say you're a director of marketing right now, try to put a group together where it's like at least senior directors of marketing or CMOs, maybe they're a step or two above you, and then continue to compound. And that's what you're constantly looking for, right? But the problem is for Neil, for example, like at the YPO Global Marketing Summit, the average revenue was $52 million. But also the problem was when Neil asked the question, like, how many of you are part of multi-billion dollar companies? And Neil was like, so why are you here? Right? But Neil, I think there was probably 3, 4 companies, maybe 5 that were at that level out of a group of 170 or so. So those are outliers. Neil's looking to hang out with a group of outliers and that's okay because he's already at that level. So you just have to determine what makes sense for you and what your goals are. So there's no blanket statement for any of this peer group stuff.

Yeah. And I do think they're valuable. Eric and I, I had my own version of it. Eric had a combination of both. Early on, we had our own versions of this. So Eric did EO early on, then YPO. My versions of it was hanging out with other entrepreneurs that I know and getting advice from them, and I would give them advice. Eric also does that. He has his own groups where they'll go to places. On top of that, he'll not only do dinners. On top of that, he also has a good group of friends where he can hit up for advice anytime, and they can hit him up for advice anytime, right? So you can choose one or the other, or you can do a combination of all of them like Eric. And then based on what's worth your time or energy, like he's figured out, he then decides where to spend more time or energy. And I would say he probably spends the majority of the time with his own group that he created where you go to Palm Beach and stuff like that.

And that, that's fun, right? Because what we do is we talk about business, we, you know, we go play pickleball, tennis, and basketball and all that. But, um, it's I would just say that I think 3 or 4 people in that group are 9 figures. The rest are, let's just call it 8 figures or so. So it's a good group, right? But it's, you make it a fun experience. People want to hang out with like-minded people. So we'll leave it at that. Anyway, Neil's about to fall asleep. So I'm going to let Neil go to sleep. Guys, thank you for joining us and we will see you. We'll see you next time. Let me hit stop.