Why You Should Be Excited and Enraged About AI

All right, so Neil, you want to see something cool? I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you how OpenClaw is literally writing me articles right now on X, and it's averaging about 100,000 views per post. You want to see it?

Let's do it.

Okay, here we go. So check this out.

Wait, but before you show me, I bet you none of them are marketing related if they're getting 100,000 views. I hope I'm wrong.

Uh, well, this one's revenue related. OpenClaw for business setup that scales revenue, 85,000 views. Check this one out over here. So ordering your food with Open Claw is cute, but making money with it is better. Okay, so in this one, I'm going to talk about how my system works under the hood. If you want some Open Claw business use case example, the original post is here. So it just goes through and there's— I have these like diagrams because diagrams make it seem like, you know, it's well researched and all this stuff, right? So look, this setup and all this stuff, right? Uh, here's a cron job, whatever, right? But my point is, dude, you look at this one, look, 85,000 views. Okay, this one, 86,000 views. By the way, look at my little plush doll over here. This is me on the computer, my little plush doll, my This is you riding a lobster over here. 101,000 views. Look, I made some plush toys. Your daughter would like this.

Give OpenCLAW agents one shared brain. They stop being stupid.

Yeah. And then I run 30 OpenCLAW jobs a day. This is what actually makes them profitable because not a lot of people are talking about how they make money right now with this. So this one's 68,000 views. I threw it up yesterday. You know what's interesting, Neil? I did the original AI version yesterday where I just threw it up with the title it chose. And it only got one like in the first hour. So I just changed the title and I republished it and it took off.

So this reminds me, I wasn't using Open— how about you first finish on how you're using OpenClaw to do this? And then I'll go into my experience.

So I'm using OpenClaw to, basically there's a content repurposer skill, so it knows how I write. Okay. So I just kind of dictate to it, it pulls from that skill. And literally I just go to my OpenClaw because I work with it all the time and it knows what my goals are. It knows my working style and all that. I'm like, hey, What's the most interesting thing we've worked on in the last 24 hours? And it'll give me a bunch of ideas and I'm like, this one sounds good. Use the Content Repurposer for X for that.

Boom.

Right. And then that's basically it. Yeah.

No, this is really cool stuff. So this reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT, you know, when people were talking about prompts, right? Like, and I used to give them like marketing prompts and what it would do well on content. And doing keyword research and for SEO and all that kind of stuff. Got tons of views on X. The hard part with content like that, that at least I've always faced, it's very tough for me to generate revenue from those pieces of content.

Yeah.

So I tend not to spend too much time on 'em. Like I'm in Mexico City right now. So we had, we had, you know, as I mentioned to Eric in the past, we tend to hold our own events. And when I say our own events, it was a restaurant. They had a projector behind me, 2 on the side depending on where people are sitting. It was upstairs rooftop area with canopies coming down. So it was nice and not cold or anything like that. It was in the morning. Everyone had food and we invited a lot of corporations. Okay? Every single corporation there, I think maybe 90% of the corporations there, CMO, VP levels for marketing. And that was actually almost 100%, but 80 to 90% of the corporations, probably 90+% were all publicly traded. All right. So when I look at like the questions they ask me, they'll ask me questions like, what's the biggest mistake we're making with AI and not thinking about yet? Or there's all this new technology and security issues and people are worried about software and employment and all those kinds of— some of these people are in teams. How should we structure our teams going forward? Or they'll ask questions, and this is where more of the focus is on. We're all using AI and we have been for years. How do we generate more positive revenue or see efficiencies where we're actually increasing our profit? But majority of it is not really profit related. It's more so revenue related because if you can grow your top line when you're that large, saving $1 million or $2 million or $3 million or $4 million doesn't make a difference when you're a corporation doing like $10 billion a year in revenue. People want you to grow your top line more than saving a few million bucks. I'm assuming you agree with that as well, especially in the public markets.

So here's what I'll say. So here's the thing with these articles. I looked at who joined the livestreams and the recent webinars we've done. You have, um, you have AT&T, you know, somewhat legit company, right?

That is a very legit company.

Right. And so you have, you have, uh, people from— I'm looking at some other companies too. 1Password, they're not as big, but they're, they're a significant company, right?

1Password's big?

Yeah. So they're coming through to these because they don't know what to do and they're scared. There's a lot of fear with this right now, right? And so, um, I will say like that I didn't— I, I was kind of like, when I wrote these same— I, I had the same kind of inkling that you had where it's like, it was probably not going to generate any revenue. But I'm looking at the people coming through, I'm looking at the people responding, I'm looking at the people adding me, especially on Twitter, because you can see who's adding you, right? I'm like, oh, it's like legit people adding. And so I'm like, I'm just gonna keep doing this because one, I enjoy what I'm doing right now, and plus I can easily tie it in with marketing and business. The thing that, you know, I'm getting texts every single day right now. My friend's like, dude, I just want to— I went to the Apple Store to try to buy a Mac Mini. They're sold out right now because everyone's doing it for Open Claw, right? Um, and everyone's like, how do I set this up? I talked to, um, Bernard from Clearscope a couple hours ago. Um, and he's like, dude, I get what you mean now. I got to set up on Sunday. He showed me all the crap he was building. He's like, it's over, man. It's like, it's so over. He's like, it's so over for software. It's so over. Like, what are you doing right now? So everyone's like trying to trade notes. It's almost like, uh, I don't know. When's the last time something really cool came out? Like ChatGPT, I guess. So, so this is like one of those moments.

Yeah, but okay, so you got AT&T to sign up. Are these C-level or VP levels from these organizations?

Yeah.

All of them?

Yeah. No, there's no way. I'm not going to say all of them. I'm not saying all of them. I'm saying you have, you, they're all, they're either senior director or above. That's what I'll say. Got it.

Okay. But most of corporations, see, because we've tested content like this from even some of our employee accounts, we find that the type of articles that you're producing, they do generate traffic. It tends to be more, not mid-level, more junior level than anything else in quantity.

Yeah, so that's a good point. So what Neil's bringing up, and I don't know if you're referring to this, but the thing you bring up here is, especially on my YouTube now, my YouTube's finally in good graces because I'm covering a trending topic, right? Like, I'm like, God, it took forever to struggle out of this. But I don't really cover how-to. It bothers a lot of people. They're like, dude, show us how to do it. Show us. I'm like, I ain't going to show you how to do it. You know why? Because it doesn't drive leads. You get the tire kickers and the DIY people, dude. We used to do that all the time. Neil used to create how-to, and we thought we're doing like, all this good for the world. And I went to Perplexity the other day. I was like, hey, show me the research behind this. You know, if you make a bunch of how-to content versus just showing people like what you're doing right now. And then Perplexity is like, yeah, it's been proven that the how-to stuff doesn't generate revenue. If you show like, like Neil does this a lot, like charts or like what you're doing, which is what I'm doing right now, that gets people interested. And, um, so I will say, um, I was initially skeptical, Neil, but it is, it's moving in the right direction for us at least.

So I want to cover something that you just mentioned, and, or actually before I cover that, going back to the AI topic really quickly, when we meet with most corporations, they're trying to figure out how to generate more revenue through AI, and majority of it, at least in marketing, is not related to using the tools, it's being mentioned by the LLMs. That's the biggest use case by far that they're all looking for because when they look at their data, It's proven to drive revenue. Maybe it's small and maybe it's not as big enough, or maybe their competitors are doing better for it, but that's the biggest thing we see that large corporations want. The other stuff is a little bit of a nuance, and that goes into what you were just saying about like building it. I know you mentioned you were texting someone.

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So I was at an event a few days ago in Texas. I won't mention the company name. $4 billion a year in revenue plus. That's a good-sized revenue company, publicly traded. I don't know what their profit numbers are. I haven't looked them up, but they are public. And the CEO, he's very tech-enabled. They have a lot of devs. He's like, I don't want to end up paying $1 million, $2 million for Salesforce anymore. I'm just going to code it. And I'm like, there's going to be a lot of bugs. He's like, no, we'll fix it. It's fine. He's like, I don't want to pay for Slack anymore. I'm just going to end up cutting it all. So he's easily breaking down maybe like $5, $10 million of money that he'll save. Now, of course, there's going to be some server costs and employment costs. So maybe the $5, $10 million turns to $4 to $8 million in savings, whatever the number is. And I'm looking at him and I'm just having a discussion with him. And I'm not saying AI can or can't do this. If you put enough resources, you definitely can figure out how to end up trying to build your own Salesforce. But I'm like, this is a terrible use of time. If you're a CEO of a company that's publicly traded doing billions and billions of dollars in revenue a year, why are you focused on saving less than $10 million when you should be figuring out how to grow from $4 billion in revenue to $5 or $6 billion in revenue? And for me, if I was a shareholder, I'd be really pissed. I'm like, this is the wrong thing that you're focusing on. Yes, is Salesforce expensive at $1 million, but percentage of revenue, That is a really small amount of money that they're spending on Salesforce.

Yeah, so get this, so you'll like this, and by the way, my title for this livestream on Twitter, I'm looking at it right now, it says, how Open Call levels up your marketing, so we have to talk about Open Call the whole time, but anyway, so this guy, Anish Acharya, is that, that's one of your people, right? Anish Acharya?

I think he's Indian.

Yeah, looks Indian. Yeah, sounds Indian. So he's a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he's investing in AI apps at Andreessen Horowitz, he's Anish Acharya, I think, so Harry Stebbings from 20VC tweets this, so, Is SaaS dead? Will we vibe code everything? If you look at SaaS spend today, it's 8 to 12% of enterprise spend, okay? Even if you vibe coded your ERP and your payroll with all of the kind of risks and dangers that entails, you're going to save 8 to 12%. You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you be— why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM? You're going to take it— and use it to extend your core advantage as a business, or you're going to take in and optimize the other 90% that you're not spending on software today. So the point is, like, I think this is the best point over here. If you have such power with these models and such resources, why the hell would you spend your time rebuilding these CRMs or these ERPs or these payroll providers? That's the real point.

Dude, I'm with you. And I, I look at some of these people who are trying to make this play, and I just think it's the silliest play. I'm like, Why don't you try to grow your revenue 20%, 30%, 40%? And by the way, that company, while we were, you know, I'm looking up their stock, okay? And their profit is in the 8 figures. It's not even high 8 figures. So when I say 8 figures, like sub-$50 million on, call it $4+ billion in revenue. There you go. I pulled up the wrong stock. All right, now I got the right one. So their profit is a small margin, okay? So it's not much. And their revenue growth is 6% a year, sometimes negative. On a good year, it was like 20% during the COVID booms, but like, let's call it 5%, 6% a year that they're growing at. If I look at it quarterly right now, it's sub-10%. Um, it's definitely closer to 5-ish percent. Why the heck would you focus on saving a few million bucks instead of solving the bigger problem, which is how do you grow your top line?

Yep. By the way, you wanna— so I wanna come back to the OpenClaw thing for a little bit because I've titled this this way. So I listened to Lex Fridman talk to the founder of OpenClaw, um, today. I think, uh, his name is Peter Steinberg or Steinberger. Um, so get this, so OpenClaw, you know, it's been taking off right now. It's trending really well on Google Trends. So apparently, I think OpenAI and Meta have made offers to him, and that's why I think he's in the SF area right now. But isn't it crazy? Like, literally this thing came out from nowhere and then boom, right? Like, it's— I think he talked to Sam Altman about, hey, is it okay if I have Open Claude? Because Anthropic wasn't okay with the Claude name, right? Because it was called Claude Bot before. So I think, you know, it looks like he's probably going to sell it. And then who knows? Like, I do think it'd be cool if Meta bought it because they have open source models and they just bought Manus. And so I could really see Meta buying it. Yeah. Yeah.

Just as a quick disclaimer, do not run it on your main PC or Mac or whatever you use for all your other stuff. Run it on a separate machine.

Oh yeah, let's talk about that real quick. Let's talk about that real quick. Yeah, so I literally have a Mac mini here and it has its own Apple ID, its own Gmail, it has its own 1Password vault. It's really secure and I don't let it post autonomously. So if we want to talk about using OpenCall to grow your marketing, Earlier I showed you, yes, you can get these articles done. Like, you know, X Articles is giving me more reach right now, but I don't let it YOLO, meaning I don't let it just post whatever it wants to post. Like, it gives me a lot of repurposing ideas. By the way, Neil, it's connected to my Granola. It's connected to all of my— it ingests all of our content and keeps coming up with repurposing angles, and then it writes it natively for other channels. So I can easily hand that over to a social media manager and plug it into Slack if I wanted to. Right now I just have it in an isolated Telegram where I'm just messing with it. I think I spent 10 days on it. And I think if I get it to like 30 days, 60 days or so, I think it's just cranking, right? I think it's just really next level. And I did a livestream this morning. I was like, hey guys, I pulled up this screen, check this out, Neil. So everyone was like, let me show you my screen over here. So this is my OpenClaw coded, my Vibe coded dashboard over here. So Neil, can you see this?

Yeah.

Okay. So I'm like, okay guys, I got this mission control over here. It shows me the recurring tasks that are happening every day. Here's the team over here. Here's the tasks that are queued. Here's the skills that we have. Here's what's happening with marketing. Here's the things to review. Here's a live feed. Everyone's like, oh my God, oh my God. Like, is this available? Where can I get this? Where can I get this? I was like, guys—

Wait, you can just do it in Trello.

You know what I did, Neil? I took a screenshot of someone else's mission control. I just dragged it into my OpenClaw. I was like, okay, based on all my goals and based on everything I want to do, let's make this for my sake, right? So guys, you can code this up in your sleep, right? And this, by the way, this dashboard is not a fake dashboard. This is a real dashboard. This is live in production. I get this every single morning and I can see what the heck is going on. Because when you can vibe code anything you want, you start to forget, right? And that's really important. So yeah.

The big thing that I'm seeing is people are using a lot of this stuff and the hardest part is figuring out how to generate more revenue and profit from it because more output and more action doesn't necessarily gain more profit. The thing I've been telling companies is it's in its very early days in infancy. I think we'll get a much better understanding of how to use a lot of this technology to impact our bottom line within 12 months to 24 months. I know that sounds like a long time, but it really isn't that long.

I'll bet you it's a lot faster than that.

What size company are you talking about?

I mean, let's—

Startups, sure.

Right.

But I'm talking about like established organizations. It's hard for established organizations.

What do you mean by established organizations?

Minimum 9 figures in revenue a year.

I think, okay. So, well, there's a wide range, right? 9 figures to like 10 figures, 11 figures. Like what do we just want to focus on 9 figures?

No, no. 9 figures plus like established organizations doing at least $100 million in revenue a year. And they're using this specifically for marketing. I'm not talking about other departments, right?

Yeah.

For marketing, it's not that you can't get more action and output. It's hard to necessarily know which activities is going to directly impact your bottom line because a lot of the stuff that it works on, like things like content creation, or if you want to end up vibe coding some stuff, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to impact or generate more revenue.

So this thing's booking meetings for us right now.

Yeah, but how many of those booked meetings are closing?

It just started doing it. So here's the thing, right? It's whether it's the idea I got from you for manufacturing deals or reviving or like looking at stalled deals, it's moving and it's coming up with different angles, right? And these angles are pretty good. So it's actually like, we haven't, like, it's giving like a deal a day right now because I'm still testing a bunch of different things at once. But once I hand it off and the sales team wants to jack it up to a lot more, it'll do that. But it's working in small spurts right now. So my take on this is if we're talking 9-figure companies, I'd say 6 months out max, right? Because here's the thing, we have one mutual friend and then I have actually another friend, they're both at 9 figures, right? One of our mutual friends sent me a text the other day, I'm cutting 600 people. And then I had another friend actually I played tennis with on Saturday. He's like, oh, I cut half my staff, right? And so That's not all related to OpenClaw. I don't want to make it seem like that. But I just think, like, I looked at the Microsoft AI CEO recently. He's like, dude, like, you look at all these white-collar jobs, like, I think you saw this too. In the next, I think he said, what, 9, 12 months or something like that, or 18 months max, it's like all these jobs are done, right? And so, like, when I talked to Bernard today, actually, I'll leave this a little more in confidence, but we're just like, dude, like, what happens to most people? Right. And this actually brings me up to a 2x2 chart that I want to pull up over here and we can talk about this 2x2 chart. Check this out. So Neil, what do you think about, have you seen this 2x2 chart?

Use the AI. Slopping cannons, I have not seen it. Does not use AI, deadweight. Has good judgment. Turbo brains, steady hands.

Yeah. So what Neil's calling out, let me just map it out for people that are listening. So this is a 2x2 chart. And so you have on the very bottom, it says, you know, people who do not have good judgment. And then to the right of that, you have people who have Good judgment. Okay. And then right above you have people who do not use AI versus people that use AI. So let's just put it this way. If you're someone that you do not have good judgment, nor do you not— and you don't know how to use AI, you are what? You are dead weight, guys. You are dead weight. I'm sorry. But if you're listening to this, for sure you're not dead weight because you have good judgment because you listen to this podcast. So if you have— if you don't have good judgment and you know how to use AI, guess what? You are a slop cannon, meaning you produce lots and lots and lots of slop because you think just because you know how to use it, you're adding a lot of value, which is, I think, a lot of what Neil kind of alludes to on this podcast is like people using it to create slop. And that is not helpful to the world.

That's the majority, by the way. That's more than 95% of what I see is dead weight, just creating more junk.

But Neil, hey, question for you. What percent of people do you think in the world have good judgment typically?

Less than 5% in the world.

Doesn't that add up? And we talked about this last week when we're like, hey, if you're using it, it amplifies your intelligence basically. Like whatever you tend to do, you've just amplified it 10x.

So I've been stealing Eric's quote recently at events. AI brings out the best in you and it brings out the worst in you. The lazy people are getting lazier and they're producing more junk and the good people are accelerating and becoming even higher performers. That we see. But when I look at marketing right now, from an AI perspective, people are only really doing 2 main things with AI. And you can add if you know any others that are taking up big buckets. One is creating content, and 2 is doing outbound to just generate more leads. Those are the 2 main things we see. If I had to add in a 3rd, I would add in more creative for AI. I mean, creative for ads, like mass-scale producing ads. If I had to add in a 4th, and it's a much smaller percentage doing this, is using it for data and analytics. But the main 2 are content and outreach. Those are the big 2 that I'm seeing. I don't know what you're seeing, but those are the main 2 that I'm seeing.

I actually want to address that. So let me finish the 2x2 here. So the 2x2 here, so let's say someone has good judgment, okay? But they do not use AI, they are steady hands, okay? So meaning that they're kind of more or less stabilizers, but if they have good judgment and they use AI, they are turbo brains. And so I think the reason I'm pulling this up is any of you watching this right now, you should be thinking about looking at this chart all the time. Whoever you're looking at hiring, you should run them through this, okay? And you're like, oh, well, how do I quickly test if they have good judgment or not? You know what we do? We have this thing now, Neil, called— I think I showed this to you, but it's literally— The Single Grain Beat Claude Challenge, right? And so it's basically like, hey, AI could do 80% of knowledge work now. We need people who can do the 20% that AI can't. Creative leaps, pattern recognition, judgment under uncertainty. So basically you can use AI all you want. That's baseline. If you only use AI, like, okay, then you haven't beaten Claude. So we just want to see people like fill these out. And then, you know, these challenges over here, here's like a brief and the situation and all that stuff. and they'll send it over to us and that's basically it. So your hiring process is going to have to become tougher. That's what I generally think. Now, going back to what Neil said, I think, Neil, you're talking about use cases, right?

Yeah, because at the end of the day, yes, people can use AI for whatever they want. As a business owner and as a marketer, we really care about revenue growth and profitability.

Yeah, so I would say in general, yes, but here's what I'll say, Neil, that's interesting. So what typically are the main kind of funnels that matter for a business, right? It's how good is your recruiting? How good is your sales? How good is your marketing? And if you have a good product, you need product fulfillment and product delivery, right? You kind of need those 4 main things. Am I missing anything?

Good finance, but yes.

Good finance, yes. Good finance. But you kind of need the first 4 before you get good finance, right?

Yeah, because you need money, but yes.

So we agree on that. So I do think a lot of stuff is like, okay, content creation or outreach right now, whether it's for outreach for sales or outreach for recruiting or like ad creative. Now, where I think this OpenClaw is going, Neil, because Bernard and I were talking today and he's like, dude, this is the first version of AGI. I was like, you know what? This is like the MS-DOS version of AGI, right? It's like the very, like, you know, in the 1970s, '80s where you're just using command line interface. And so I think you're going to be able to have your own version of OpenClaw. that allows you to do all these things as one. And then you just have really smart people. Neil, the way I'm looking at it is that you have 4 deployed marketers, like 4 deployed engineers, and these people are working maybe full-time embedded into a company, and they're just focused on customizing these things. And these people know how to talk business, they understand the latest in marketing, and they're creating new skills and new workflows within like a mission control dashboard. That's where I think a lot of this is going. So I don't disagree with you, like a lot of it's big news for that. But I think a lot of it's going to become consolidated. Like you don't need all these freaking SaaS products.

I agree with you that that's a big chunk of the future, maybe not all of it, but I don't think it's going to be 4 people. I think it's going to be many more than that because what we see is unless you have people who are really good specialists, when they use these products, the output isn't as good. So you really need the specialists. And I know when you were saying 4, you're not saying it's going to be 4 people.

You're just saying the random number.

I just want to clarify that for anyone listening because I already know Eric thinks a similar way to I do. We wouldn't want a paid Facebook advertiser to be using this technology for SEO. They're the wrong person. You're going to have a really mediocre output even if they're amazing at Facebook ads. And if they're amazing at Facebook ads but they haven't done much in Google ads, we wouldn't want them to be using this technology to help with Google ads. We want them to stick in their lane. The moment they start spreading outside of the lane, that's when you start getting mediocre outputs. Mediocre outputs don't work because that's what the majority of the competition is going to do, and you're not going to end up winning with that, right? And what we're seeing is we're running a test right now. I should end up knowing more, call it first week of March. All right, so my team set up a system where we're having AI outreach as me. And set up meetings. At the same time, I am, which we've talked about, I am setting up my own meetings and we're seeing what's going to end up driving more revenue by the end of, by sometime in March, right? At least from a pipe perspective, because we know based on how many meetings we get, based on how the first call goes, after the first call, we usually know what's in our pipe that's qualified and what percentage will close. But we need the first call. Just the email intro or someone willing to take a call doesn't tell us enough, even if it's company size or right title. We genuinely need the first call. Sometimes we need 2 calls, but if we need 2 calls, it's because typically they need to bring in someone else where we weren't able to get all the information we need on the first call. So in that case, we still classify the second call, even though it's the second one, we still classify it as a first call. But so far, no joke, it's setting up way more appointments than I am personally, of course, because it's working more hours and it's a machine. The quality, no matter how much input we give and training we give, the quality is not there yet. And I want to use the word yet because no matter how many qualifications and criteria you give, It's not as simple as inputting 10, 15, 20 years worth of relationships from your head that's not out there in email or that's not out there on your LinkedIn or whatnot and having the AI learn all of it. Like it does take time, but I do believe if I kept doing it through the AI for, call it another year or 2 years, which I know people think is a long time, but in reality it's not. Like look how long you and I have been entrepreneurs for. It's like short-term pain.

Yeah.

For long-term gain. I do believe that output for appointments that it's setting, the quality would be much higher, but I'll quickly see what's going to happen within 30 days from at least appointment to close.

And Neil, just to clarify, you're sending 1 per day, is that what it is?

Me personally? Me personally, I'm doing 5 to 15 a week. So I'm not consistently at one a day because it depends on how often I'm traveling.

Yeah. I mean, if you're traveling, you can do more, right?

No, it's really hard because like, let's say I'm in Mexico City. Morning meetings, morning event after that, then interview with Wired, then another speech at a university, then meeting with the university because we work with them. Then I had to go to Bloomberg for another interview. Then I had to do a meeting with my team to catch up with them. And then, here doing this. So like, I haven't had much chance to work at all today. That's the hard part. When I'm on a plane, it's different, but if I'm not on a plane, that's what I mean.

On a plane. Yeah. Not when you're on the ground. By the way, Neil, I just, let me, let's do this for fun. So what do you think the LLM IQ scores were on average in 2023?

100, 110, 90. I don't know, somewhere around there. Let's go 90 to 110.

Okay. Which is like, you know, that's actually average is 100. Okay. So, so get this and then let's, let's go a little more. 2024, what do you think it was?

Uh, I would go with maybe 120s and I would say today is probably closer to 130 to 140. Okay.

So pretty accurate here. Let me pull this up real quick because yesterday, um, some of my team was like, they're just robots. They're just robots. I was like, are you kidding me? And I'll explain why I said, are you kidding me? Because it's like, oh, we think just because we're the creator, we're going to be smarter than it forever. But check this out over here.

No way. It'll be smarter than humans.

Yeah. You're saying what?

There's no way it won't be smarter than humans. Humans will not be smarter.

We're on the same page. I'm like, it's just going to crush our intelligence, right? And so look at this, 70. Okay, then it jumped up to— 70 was initially 2023. And then GPT-4 was right in the middle of 2023, 2024, it jumped up to like 90. And then you go a little more to like early 2024, 100. And then last year, 2025, it jumped up to about 115 or so. And then now we're talking 2026, it's basically genius level, okay? 130.

Oh, close.

Yeah, you're very close, right? But check this out. So it's like, oh, it's doing this linear projection over here. So it goes to like 200 plus. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do a linear projection on something that's exponential. So I was like, give me an exponential scaling chart. It goes all the way to like 1,000.

Uh, so, so here's the hard part. For these models to get much, much better and smarter, it's so much more work than it was at the early days. I don't think it's exponential for them growing to like that kind of IQ. I actually think you start seeing diminishing returns after a while.

I don't know enough. Um, neither Neil or I are AI scientists. I just heard on a podcast that one of the scientists was like, oh yeah, Yeah, it's going like, I don't know if it's going to go to 1,000, but he's like, it should in a couple of years, it should be at like 300 or 350 or something like that. That I can believe. I don't even know how to fathom 1,000 because yeah.

And I want everyone to keep this in mind. Having a really high IQ, whether it's a human or AI, doesn't mean that they're going to produce amazing results for you. And Eric and I can attest to this, or at least I can attest. I don't know what your hiring has been like over the years. But I've tended to have the worst luck with people who graduated from Stanford or Harvard or Ivy League schools. When you look at their IQ tests, they tend to be really high, just generally speaking. Would you agree with this, Eric? He's nodding his head yes.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, or shaking his head yes, whatever it is. What I found is my hires from like Arizona State University tend to outperform Eric's giving me the thumbs up. They tend to outperform the people, in most cases, who graduated from Stanford.

Yeah.

Keep in mind, I'm not in a field like Elon Musk where I need all these computer scientists. So, it could vary field by field. But when you look at general IQ, IQ tests test you on a wide variety of things. My kids have taken IQ tests. An IQ test doesn't necessarily mean You're really amazing at one specific industry or field. And yes, AI can learn a lot, but here's a problem, and I'm a big believer of Ben Athlack with this. So Ben Athlack and Matt Damon were on a podcast. I don't know if you saw it.

Yeah, yeah, it was Rogan, right?

I think it was Rogan, and they were talking about the averages. I only saw clips of it, and they were just like, we don't think AI is going to be amazing at writing a script. We think AI optimizes for the average. You could say the average could be 136, 140 IQ, but that's just IQ. What is the output that they're producing for a specific industry? Someone could be really book smart, but they could be a terrible scriptwriter. Someone could be a really amazing marketer, but they could be terrible at math. And what I'm getting at is they're scraping the internet, learning from everyone. A lot of the crap that is out there on marketing is junk, and they're pulling from a lot of that. And that's why when Eric and I were talking about— how future organizations were looking like, and Eric mentioned 4 people, but he didn't really mean 4 people. What he meant to say and what I'm trying to say is it's going to be specialists. You're going to take really good people who are good at, let's say, Facebook ads, and they're going to be using AI to do a lot more damage. And instead of you needing a team of 5 or 6, you may be okay with a team of 2 amazing Facebook ad specialists Combined with AI instead of needing 5 or 6 people?

All right. So what I'll say is when it comes to Ivy League people I've either worked with or hired, they kind of— I'm generalizing here, but in many cases I've seen, they kind of struggle to get out of their own way sometimes, and they tend to overthink a lot of situations, which sometimes it's like, damn, you're really too smart for your own good. And so I'm generalizing here, but it does happen more often than I see. And I think, I don't know, maybe it's just a pattern that we've seen in our hiring.

Dude, my favorite one is we've had a lot of Ivy League people in M&A, and with M&A, a lot of these people are amazing at Excel. Like, just, they're rocket scientists when it comes to just using Excel, and it is a skill, believe it or not. And what we'll find is like, they'll show us deals and they'll be like, Neil, this company right here, oh my God, if you bought this, the business is going to change. And they show us a spreadsheet of the synergies with the business. You'll be able to cross-sell this to these customers. They'll be able to cross-sell their stuff to your customers. You can just cut this fat right here. Look at the additional profit. And they tend to struggle to take into account things like culture. Cross-selling doesn't always work that simply. Who is the person that is in charge of that other relationship? Are they even the decision maker for the service line item that we're discussing or that we have? Are they even part of that organization or part of that department, or is it something else? Is it in a different country? Like, there's so many nuances to M&A, and I'm like, you can't run M&A off a spreadsheet. And we bought companies that people told us like, ah, it's not growing that much, it's declining. I don't think it's a good company to buy and they want too much of a multiple. And I'm like, I'm going to go buy the company. And people are like, you're telling me you want to buy this company that's not growing as much, they have quality problems and you want to buy them? I'm like, they're one of the biggest in that region. They have a name. I'm going to go in and fix it. And they're like, why would you go through all that headache? I'm like, they have the brand recognition where they're getting hit up by most of the companies in the space. I can fix other stuff. You're telling me to go buy another company that's growing fast, that doesn't have the brand recognition, that doesn't have the right customer profile, but from financial, you think it's better. And I'm like, I'm telling you to go get the right companies to hit you up because of your name brand is much harder to do, in my opinion, than it is to fix operations for someone like me. And that's the skillset of my team and I. So I go with the route that I think I have the edge on. Versus what a number cruncher is going to tell me.

Yeah, I want to come to this over here. So this guy posted, um, Davey Fogarty. Um, Fogarty. So I have a friend who runs a very successful company. I'm curious to get your reaction to this, Neil. So I have a friend who runs a very successful company and he said, Davey, I don't care about hiring for talent anymore. I'm just hiring AI people. He thinks that with AI, talent isn't the true moat anymore. I'm not sure I totally agree, but he could be right. By the end of 2027, a $20 million e-com brand built from scratch could realistically have zero employees. Look at OpenClaw, literal proof of concept. Nobody's going to be manually structured campaigns because it's going to be an interface where you approve creative angles, formats, and the AI executes. For customer service, you'll spend 30 minutes approving high-risk tickets the AI flagged, and that's it. Influencer outreach will be an agent that contacts 20 creators, sends proposals, and handles responses. You will just approve. A $100 million company might just need one CMO, COO, and CTO who can handle what used to take an entire team. This sounds like doom, but there's actually opportunity here. So he said, look, talent is still the moat because it's the talent that's going to create the edge with these tools. There'll be new roles we can't even predict. You just need to build from the foundation up and be prepared for whatever comes your way. So what do you think about this angle, this whole, I don't care about hiring for talent anymore, I'm just hiring AI people?

I think that's really wrong. I think what you want to do is hire amazing talent and give them the AI capabilities. I think if you do that, you're going to have a much better output than if you just hire for AI, because if you just hire for AI and they lack the other skills that are needed to be successful in that role, you're screwed. And I think it's easier to teach the AI part than it is to teach all the other stuff.

So my opinion on this is I think talent is going to be the moat for the next couple years at least. I think If you— true talent is good at the AI stuff. That's my personal opinion. If you're really that damn good, you're pretty on top of this stuff for the most part, I think. And you will know how to commandeer and you also know how to bring other people with you. So I think you're very much going to need people. Now, the discussion around are companies going to be a lot smaller? I'm a little more like, yeah, I think companies are going to be a lot smaller. So we'll see. I think this plays out in the next 1, 2, 1, 2 years or so, Neil. So we'll see very quickly, you know, how it goes. But I think humans are still very much the moat. I think there's going to be more organizations, maybe smaller organizations, and I think that's how it'll play out.

Yeah, and I agree organizations will be smaller, but nowhere near what the person on X is saying is going to be smaller. I don't see $100 million companies being the norm with just a CEO, CMO, CFO, and very few people underneath. I'm not saying you need 1,000 people. I'm not saying you need 500. Maybe you're able to do it with half or a third or a fourth, but I don't see it being where you're building amazing companies with only a few people for the norm, right? Maybe you're going to see some outliers, but I don't think that's going to be the norm. And I think I disagree with Eric on that good people have AI skills. I know a lot of amazing salespeople, BD people, operating people, financial people that don't have AI skills, and they're amazing. And there's a lot of people in those sectors that are great at AI. And what I say is when you pair them with those amazing people that have been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, those people end up becoming much better. And a lot of those senior people, they're not going to know AI as much as some of these young kids who are starting off with it. But their experience for doing it in one space for 20, 30 years, in my opinion, that's not easily replaced by AI.

Yeah. So my take on it is, and we'll probably just agree to disagree here, but this is for everyone to think about here. My take on it is, you know, with the experience, experience definitely is valuable. You need to have that. There's a lot of context you have in those 10, 20, 30 years of doing things. But at the same time, if you're not on top of it and somebody else is, they're just that damn good. They're like so much better than you because I'll look at people, right? I'm not going to name names, but I'll look at people, maybe at people's companies, and they'll talk about, you know, one of their salespeople used to be like, there used to be a killer, really well, like really well-versed. But the other person has the same amount of experience, also enabled AI, is crushing that person, right? And, you know, I'm seeing that in multiple organizations.

Yeah.

And I just, I, that, that's why I try to push all my friends around. Like, even when I was talking to Bernard today, we're like, we're trying to push all our founder friends. Some are resistant, but the ones that once they see it, they open their eyes up, it's game over, right? Um, but there are a ton that resist right now, but once they see it, then they see it, they're like, holy crap. Like, that's why I posted earlier this week to Twitter. I was like, I'm, I've never been more excited to work, but I've also never been more enraged. And the reason I'm enraged right now is because I'm trying to shake my friends. I'm trying to shake my team members to fucking wake up, right? Because the things I'm able to do now, like, I'm compounding so much faster every day, and I'm just like, good luck fucking catching up with me, right? And so I think that's where I'm coming from. And I don't want that to happen to people listening right now. I don't want that to happen to people's organizations. I want them to feel— that's why I'm like, you need both. You need both. Ideally, if you're new in your career, fine. But if you have experience, you've got to have the AI piece. I don't— I think that's non-negotiable in my mind. I'm so passionate that I cussed twice on this podcast about it. Yeah.

So what we found is the ideal structure is to go hire the people with a lot of experience. They may not have the AI capabilities. You go put people underneath them who understand the technology and can bring them new ways of doing things. Now, we found that model to work better, but the key with the leadership there is The leadership has to be open to new ideas and change. Sometimes when you bring in people who are really experienced, have been doing things for 20, 30 years, they're set in their ways. So when you're going through the interview process, if they're set in their ways and they're not going to adapt, I would not hire them. My philosophy is, is it's better to hire the experienced people, and most good experienced people are open to change. And then you put underneath them the young kids who are just using this technology, are moving so much faster and bringing it to organization. And when you pair them together, we're seeing much I'll use the mutual friend again.

I was texting him a couple days ago, right? I'm gonna see him next week. So, um, so I was like, you know, sometimes I just look at people and I'm just like, it's like literally deer-in-the-headlight syndrome where you try to tell them something where like you're trying to get them to understand we're trying to train people on AI, right? And they just look at you like, right? And then I text him that. He's like, it's funny you say that because his CEO, who's a killer, you know his CEO, right?

Yeah.

Done really amazing for himself, but he's like, Amazing biker. Is he amazing biker? I don't know.

Peloton biker.

Oh yes, amazing Peloton biker. Yes, yes, yes, always number one. So, so, but, but the crazy thing is, um, he literally said the same thing. He's like literally deer in the headlights across the board, right? Um, so I think maybe the key takeaway before we move on to the next thing here, because I have another interesting topic, but I think, um, Neil's right. You have to bring people with you. You have to enable some type of AI transformation in your company. That's why we're teaching everyone Claude code right now. We're doing these hackathons, but even then I still I still don't think that's quite enough. I think our hiring process has got to change quite a bit and we've got to tighten that up quite a bit more. So, we're going to do what we can internally, but hiring is going to get a lot tougher to join us. At the very least, if you want to hire— if you want to see that test, by the way, go to singlegrain.com/apply and then you'll see what it looks like. But Neil, so remember when the internet first came out?

Before you go, 2 more things, okay? And I think the second one is a very important caveat. So the 2 things is when you're going through this process, just be careful and really pay attention to who you're hiring. In big organizations, it is going to be hard to scale with a ton of AI-forward talent because there's not a lot of good talent out there. Good talent, even in bad economy, they're not looking for a job. They have jobs. You have to go and poach them. And to get really good people, it's going to take a lot of effort. You're going to have to convince them, and you want to surround them with other amazing people that fill in the gaps, at least on the AI side. And you're going to have to go find them, right? So you may get some people applying or whatnot, but Eric and I don't wait for just people to apply. We go search and look for people that we think is amazing. The second thing, and this one's really important, I don't want anyone to forget this, When we hire the younger people, or I interact with companies all over the world, and I interact with these young kids who are hotshot AI kids and leveraging all this cool stuff, and they show me some of the stuff they're doing, you have to make sure you're watching them, not in a creepy way, but you're putting some limitations on them because we see some of these kids willing to do things and it'll cause multi, multi-million dollar lawsuits. And they're like, who cares if we don't do this? We're going to win. Screw it, let's just go. You have to be careful. If you have a company generating $50 million, $100 million, and it's bootstrapped, or you're publicly traded and you're generating $5 billion in revenue, you can't let a kid do whatever they want, even if you think it's the future, and increase or cause it where you're most likely going to get a lawsuit for $100, $200 million. You need to be very careful. And we see a lot of these kids tell us, One of the guys who left me for marketing, he was telling me, he's like, I always wanted to do this stuff and you wouldn't let me. And I'm like, dude, my clients would get sued if you wanted me to do some of this stuff. And he's like, yeah, but because you're not doing it, your clients are going to fail. And I'm like, straight up, this is going to create some legal issues in certain European countries. I get what you're trying to do and I understand it, but you got to figure out a framework that works for both ends. And yes, that is harder and that's some more tapes, But that's reality and that is business.

Yep. And by the way, guys, that's why I don't teach my team OpenClaw because there's too many liabilities tied to it. Yeah. Like any, like they're going to start connecting customer data sources and all these like passwords and things like that. Then the device gets compromised and like everything blows up, right? You can't, like, you got to think about the second and third order consequences. And the good thing is when Neil and I took that personality test, Neil like had 95% practicality. Same for me too. So you got to think about that. But the thing I want to call it, Neil, um, so interesting, in the last 7 days or so, I've had a couple agency owners reach out to me, right? Um, one was a holding company, uh, agency, um, smaller ones, PE-backed, um, around, around your size. I'll just call it that. And he's reaching out. And, um, and another one was like, dude, what do you think is going to happen to the agency model? I was like, what do you think is going to happen to the agency model? He's like, I think it's dead, right? He's like, I think the traditional model is dead. What are you doing right now? I'm like, He's like, what are you gonna do? I'm like, I'm gonna keep doing what we're doing right now, Mission Control. I'm gonna keep working 20, 30 years or so, and I think it's gonna be for deployed marketers. I'm gonna go down that route, right? Um, now the other one is like, oh, you know, I really want to talk about agentic transformation and all these things. I'm like, oh, AKA you have no idea what to do right now. Um, and so, yeah, so because he's been, he's been watching my content and all that, I'm like, oh, because, because I, I, we've hired some people from, from his company before, right? And I, I talked to people on my team, they're like, oh yeah, they have no idea what to doing right now, right? So I'm just like, dude, um, just— I thought that was interesting to bring up because, um, there are— I think this stuff all comes from the top, right? I think Neil's pushing his team on it. His co-founder Mike's really on top of it too. So, um, and then the founders I talked to that are eating it up right now, I'm getting— we're texting each other every single day. So I think this has to come from the top in some way, shape, or form. Um, and to Neil's point, it's not just, you know, AI YOLO, right? And do whatever you want. It's you need to couple good experience and good judgment By the way, that 2x2 again, good judgment plus AI win, and that all comes down to talent management.

Yeah, and one thing that we've been doing internally that we found to work really well, so we had some of our executives who are just like, man, I want to go take a few weeks and just go learn more about this AI stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want you to take a few weeks or even weekends. And they're like, what? Because some of them during their weekends, no joke, I have quite a few executives who literally just reach out and try to build up more pipe, even though that's— they're not in sales.

Mm-hmm.

So I was like, we're gonna hire— and we did this a while ago— I'm like, we're gonna hire people underneath you who are gonna explore all the AI stuff that can make your life better and more efficient. And just like the example you gave with OpenClaw, I don't need my executives to learn how to use it. I'd rather go put people underneath them that learn how to use it and then enable them to do their job better versus them wasting their time to learn how to use each and every single one of these things. And I'm not saying it's a bad use of time to learn AI, but when people are rainmakers and bringing a lot of revenue, like someone's bringing in 8 figures a year, you have them focus on bringing in the money and you can put other talent in that's not that expensive that can fill in all the gaps. And the reason I want to bring out that example is every organization I meet, they all talk about how do we get everyone to learn AI and use it super efficient. And I agree, the majority of people in an organization better learn how to use it and get better, but it doesn't mean that everyone in an organization needs to be 100% proficient at it. I think for some roles, you need to have them focus on what they're best at versus them learn every single new piece of technology. And the other reason we do this, just like you guys see, you know, OpenClaw or any of the new technology that comes out every month, there's something new. It's too hard for us to take our, you know, A players and be like, cool, every time there's something new, drop everything and go and learn it. It's better to have people in our organization who are starting to test out new things and then bringing their learnings to other people. It's just, it's too hard to keep up with. Every single thing every day.

Yeah, you know, actually what I'll bring up here that's related, and then I want to talk about the internet trend here in a second. So let me show you this. So we have a baseline level of proficiency that's required at Single Grain. So let's say it's for SEO, for example. Okay, so I have a table pulled up over here and basically what I'm showing— oh, damn it. Okay, so what I have highlighted over here, this is the SEO function. Okay, so we have 4 levels of AI fluency at Single Grain. We have unacceptable, we have capable, we have adoptive, and then we have transformative. Transformative is the highest level you can get to. Okay. Unacceptable would be AI used only for generic outlines, no SOPs. Capable would be uses AI for briefs, outlines, and scripts, right? I don't know why Claude Code is in here, but it should say ChatGPT. I'm not sure why it says Claude Code. Adoptive would be implements 2 documented automation SOP upgrades per month. You know, they show AI-powered internal linking. Automated meta description, whatever, right? It just shows that they're a little more sophisticated here. And then they're showing that they're saving time, like 20% time or whatever it is.

Grammarly thing's freaking annoying.

And then transformative would be they run SEO production system. So internal linking, refresh, QA reporting, 30 to 50% output at same headcount or pipeline, SEO hour lift. So this is at least what our fluency table is right now. This is going to change probably every 6 months or so. But to Neil's point, we don't need everyone at transformative. We probably need everyone at least at capable or adoptive, and that's what we're getting them to. And we believe that on the cloud code side of things, we have to get people that at least baseline capable, or else we're really going to be in trouble as an organization.

And with some of this stuff, you can actually just build so you don't even need to learn. Eric's just using generic stuff, uh, like just as a general outline on what he's looking for for his team to help them out. But for example, like with the internal linking, like with that kind of stuff, a lot of organizations like ours, we've already automated at NPD. So we don't personally care if someone comes in with the AI understanding of how to do that because it's already done for them. So what we want to do internally is when you get people who learn stuff or who get good at things, we expect them to productize it so it adapts to the rest of the organization. where the rest of the organization may need to understand what's happening, but they don't need to learn it because it's just being done for them. And then that way you can create efficiency. So then that way you don't need as many people and hopefully you can get clients results faster.

Yep. And I think this was created, this table was created quite some time ago. I'm looking at the date for it, but I'll try to dig it up. But to Neil's point, yes. Now—

I'm going to go with your table created a few months ago or modified a few months ago because of the cloud cut.

Probably no. Claude Code's been out for a while.

Your team's been using it heavily for a while or no?

I don't know why Claude Code's in there, but I know that we've been using it since the last, since the year started January 5th. Um, that's when we mandated everyone has to learn Claude Code. So I don't know how old this is, but Claude Code itself, like it's been around for over a year or something like that. Yeah. Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now. But you can do it with Karrot. It's www.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. Okay, so Neil, when the internet first came out, okay, do you remember how long it took for corporations to adopt the internet? Like to use it to get an email address and learn how to use the web?

Yeah, it was a long time. It took many, many, many years.

How many years? Just guess.

5+ years, no, maybe 10+ years.

5 to 10 years. Exactly. 5 to 10 years. 5 to 10 years. So Perplexity said this, right? So I had to do deep research and I was like, okay, well, well, if that's the case, like, isn't that probably going to be the case for AI? And it was like, yeah. And I'm like, but hypothetically, there's no time for people to adopt this time, right? Because it's, it's the things are changing so quickly this time. You don't have like a 5 to 10 year window. That's like this time you can actually, you know, we're talking about job loss and things like that. So I, I ran that idea by Perplexity. I was like, is that true or false? And it's like, this is largely true because, you know, the world's changing so quickly. You see layoffs, 17-year record, right? You see tech companies aren't hiring that much anymore. You see, like, it's not the same world that we're used to 2, 3 years ago. That's the point I'm trying to get at. And I saw a post earlier. I don't know if I shared this with you, but— oh, Yaniv shared this with me, actually. How, like, people think they can still work like the COVID years, like 3, 5 years. They think they can just coast. But the reality is it just isn't that anymore. And I'd rather kind of strike some motivation into people because this is not internet transformation where you're okay after. I think this is a situation where it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to— not knowing how to use this is akin to not knowing how to use the internet, but you don't get the time buffer that you got before.

So I want everyone to think about it from a little bit of a different perspective. And you can take Eric's perspective or my perspective. I'm not saying I'm right or anything like that. The reason the internet took a long time to adapt, technology wasn't in our fingertips. It wasn't in our hand.

Back then, a lot of— Shitty connections too.

Shitty, not just shitty connections. People were dialing up like Eric and I, our first internet connection was you plug it into a phone line and if someone called, it disconnected your internet. Like, stop using the phone, right? And it was really slow. On top of that, not everyone had computers. There wasn't these cell phone devices like you see right now. There weren't even really cell phones back then. Now we're in a place where people already have the technology and AI— or let me rephrase, not the technology, people already have the hardware. AI, the software layer, is plugging into the hardware that you're already using on a daily basis and you don't need new hardware. So you're seeing adoption much quicker. Just like when Facebook first came out, it took them a long time to get to a billion users. When Threads came out, they were able to get to users much faster. Same with ChatGPT or same with Slack because people already have the hardware in their hands and they can adapt this technology much faster. So it's just like if you look back in the day from all the technology changes and the eras, you know, I don't know who broke this down, but it was some billionaire, you know, like from the printing press and the manufacturing, you know, space and agriculture. They're breaking down like all the major changes in life. They used to— those windows were very long. And if you look at the internet and what happened, it wasn't as long. And if you look at what AI is doing, it's going to make it even shorter. It's because we already have a lot of the foundation, so it makes it easier and quicker for people to adapt. So if you think you have a long time to adapt, which is what Eric's getting at, you're very wrong. And the reason being is people are already adapting because it's not hard for them to.

Dude, I just ran this through Perplexity again on top of the chart. And so here's what it says, guys. We're not— by the way, when we say this, guys, we're not trying to be doomers. In fact, this podcast is meant to be inspirational. But sometimes when you try to inspire and it just doesn't work, sometimes a nice beatdown works too. So that's where I'm coming from, at least. Neil's not really giving a beatdown.

No, I think that's more Eric than me. I'm more positive.

Definitely coming more from my side. So where parabolic loss is most likely. So job loss can still look parabolic, highly automatable routine cognitive work, AI-first companies, Um, and so, so at the edge of your org chart, some roles can go from safe to mostly automated over 12 to 14 months, which feels parabolic if you're in that band, even if macro employment is high. So I do agree, like, I do think there's going to be net new jobs. I think everyone's going to be okay, but I think there's going to be a period of time for a couple years where there's going to be job displacement. And that's where, you know, people are going to be— might, might like, you know, rise up and be unhappy or whatever. Uh, please don't do that. Um, and then the other piece it says here, why there is some time to adapt. Okay, 3 structural frictions show Slow a true systemic cliff. Enterprise inertia and integration costs. So this is actually saying that you have time to adapt, right? So enterprises— Neil refers to enterprises quite a bit. Um, most— even if 78% of organizations use AI somewhere, most are still in pilots and pockets. And Neil has talked about that quite a bit. Not full-stack redesign, process change, compliance, and systems. All this stuff, system integration takes years. I agree with that. Second piece is skill and change management gaps. Especially when it's an enterprise, that stuff is really slow. We're talking large ship slow, okay? Most employees report only moderate AI support and capability building, right? And then, yeah, I think those are the 2 main things. So food for thought, you guys take it for what it is.

And to give you guys perspective, if I had to put Eric and I and talk about our differences so you guys can get an understanding of our viewpoints and how we think about things, I would say Eric is a very, very early adopter. If something comes out that day, he's probably going to test it that day or the next day or close enough within the week. Would you agree, Eric? You tend to adapt really early.

Yeah. So we gave an analogy for this. Remember, Neil, the D-Day analogy where I'm probably not on the first boat, but I'm probably like the third boat, whereas you're coming in on like a plane and parachuting in like once the invasion's done.

Yeah. And I wouldn't say Eric's on a third boat. I think he's close to the Second boat, maybe at the back of the first boat, right? He'll like—

I don't want to die, man. Don't put me on the first boat.

I'm not saying you want to die, but there is no death in this, right? There is early adopters, and I would probably say you're most likely on the first boat. You're just not the first person off the boat. You're probably waiting for everyone to get shot first and run through the mines, and then you'll go through after all the mines have been already run over, right?

Yeah.

But I would say Eric's pretty much on the first boat. Eric's spot on. I'm big on technology, but the way my brain works is I'm very numbers-oriented. And unless someone can show me ROI, revenue, profitability, or a path there, it's a harder time for me to be an early adopter because I believe, and I can be wrong on this, I believe I can buy my way in even if I'm flying in off of a plane and parachuting down. And I think money solves a lot of problems. I know that's a bad way to think, but I just believe that, hey, I don't have to be the first. I can hire some of the people who are going to be the first. And once I know something's going to work, I'll parachute down and I'll just pour a shitload of money at it and I won't care about my return in the short run.

Yeah. So what I'll say that's good about Neil since I've known him for, I guess, close to 15, 16 years now. Oh my God, we're coming on 16 years. So I've known him for 16 years. It feels like just yesterday that we met, but So Neil is— he'll wait and wait and wait and wait. And once he sees it, he will press and not only press, he'll press hard. Now he won't go to the blackjack table and press, but once he sees a bet that's worth making, it's all in. It's like all the chips and no need to get a return immediately. He's always been like that, right? So the reason I'm calling this out, and Neil kind of brought this up, is you have to understand yourself. You have to understand your demeanor. You have to understand your own risk tolerance. And anything Neil says or I say, it's not exactly gospel. It's just what we think based on our life experiences. So you take it for what it's worth and then you do your own research because none of this is financial advice. No.

And you also have to keep in mind, we're also different places in our career. It doesn't mean I'm doing better than Eric or worse than Eric. I've been an entrepreneur longer than he has, right? It's just fact.

24 years.

Yeah. 24 years. So, and I think you're on what, 10, 11? 12?

I think all I know is your gap. You've had 14 years in business longer than I have. That's, that's what I know.

Got it. So if I'm at 24, he's at 10.

Yeah.

Um, when I was starting out as an entrepreneur, I would be very early on, kind of like that first boat analogy that we were talking about. And I got shot a few times, not really shot, but you know, I've went through some landmines and ate some snakes. Yes. I got shot, a business version of it. And when you're in a startup mode and grinding it out, and I wouldn't say Eric is fully in startup mode, but you have to do that and you have to be scrappy. And when you have a more established company, it doesn't mean mine's bigger or smaller than him. I'm just giving context. If you have a more established company and you have a lot of people and revenue, and Eric does have revenue as well, but you also have to think about wealth preservation at the same time. And when you have a bigger organization, at least in headcount, you know, no matter what size you are, there's political bullcrap that you have to deal with and people deal with in your organization, no matter who it is. I don't care if you're a founder or not, just like the Sergey Brin example where he told Sundar when he was working on Gemini, he's like, you deal with these people.

Yeah.

They're getting in my way, right? Um, and he's at a much bigger scale, but it just goes to show, no matter who you are, what size company, especially at the larger scale, there are politics to deal with. And sometimes the shortcut at larger scale is you just go and spend the money. And your cost of business to get the result is you have to pay more to get the end result versus Eric can be scrappier and get the results without having to spend the capital.

All right, so moving on, I want to show you something going back to Open Claw. So did you see the Vibe-Coded Epstein Files podcast? So we want to talk about distribution with Open Claw. Okay, so going back to the topic of this, So let me show this to you, Neil. So check this out. So when you look at— can you see this?

Yeah.

So, okay, Levy.eth texted this or tweeted this. So Vibe coded The Epstein Files podcast with Claude in a weekend and just crossed 100,000 downloads in the first week. To put that in perspective, the top 1% of all podcasts globally get around 5,000 downloads in their first 7 days. This did 100K. That's 20 times the top 1% threshold. The average podcast gets 141 downloads in the first 30 days. Most spend 18 months trying crack 1,000 per episode. A lot never get there, and there are 4.5 million podcasts out there now. No fancy studio, no production team, just Claude, a Mac Mini. This is Open Claude basically, and a weekend of focused work curating the right approach to this series. Still processing this one honestly. That's kind of crazy to me because you can find any trending topic and this thing can just crank out a new podcast whenever it wants and it can rip, right? It's kind of similar to the GitHub repo of this guy, Corey Haynes, who I talked about in one of my videos. He's got this GitHub repo with 7,500 stars on it. And I just think there's going to be new ways of marketing that are coming out because when you have an open claw, it's able to do these things on its whim.

Look, I know some people think this is cool. I look at this as whatever. It's a trending topic, Epstein, that everyone's talking about. I personally feel bad for a lot of the people or what happened to a lot of the girls and stuff like that. And I don't care to read, just me personally, about these dudes who went to the island and did inappropriate stuff or listened to it because it's just sad to hear what happened or imagine what's happening. And I look at using technology for things like this to go off of trending topics. Eric's seen this playbook before. Remember all those sites like the BuzzFeeds of the world that were just hijacking Google Trends and getting tons of traffic? My big thing on this I've seen this playbook before. It's really hard to monetize. Yeah, people can say this is really cool, but it's going to be really hard to make money from it.

Yeah. So the way I see this, I think it just depends on the business model that you have. If it's a media business model, then by all means you go for it. So I don't think this really applies to Neil's business or my business necessarily.

Or the majority of businesses.

Well, it depends on your business, right? I think if you're, again, if you're like, if you are a media company, this applies to you. I do think, like for example, my OpenClaw, I have a bot that's called Flash that will tell me trending topics and then it tries to tie it in with whatever I'm talking about. It's nice, but I don't try to newsjack that much because to Neil's point, newsjacking has never— you might get the views, but you don't necessarily get the conversions from it. But I will say that the trend that I'm really surfing right now is OpenClaw and Claude Code, but I tie it in with marketing and business. That actually, if you find the intersection, it might work for you, but you're not always going to have that with trending topics.

So yeah.

Yeah. So we still got 10 minutes left. Yeah.

All right. Let's go for 2 more.

Do you see this? Do you have it open?

I have it open now.

Well, you pick one.

Let's see. You have something here that's humans are no longer the moat, and we talked about this. I want to talk about how brands, it's not really in here, but I still really do believe brands are the moat. And I was using this example earlier today. So someone asked me, you know, like, hey, in Latin America, you know, what's an example of a retail company that is using AI and how are they not worried about like some new brand just knocking them off? And crushing it. And before I went into that, I asked the person a question because they had a Louis Vuitton purse. All right. So they're holding up the handbag and I don't know how old Louis Vuitton is, but I'm pretty sure it's 100+ years old. I could be wrong, but I think it's 100 years old. Do you know, Eric?

I'm looking it up right now. 172 years. Yeah.

So it's a, it's an amazing brand. They have a really strong brand loyalty. If you go to China where they sell a lot of knockoffs, and I don't mean this in a bad way, it's just reality. I'm not saying Chinese people are the only ones knocking off. There's people in India, and I'm Indian, that knock other off products, and there's people all over the world that knock them off in the US, etc. But majority of the people don't want a knockoff. They actually want the real thing. Why? Because they love the brand so much, and it's a goal, and it's prestigious, and they really want it. And I think one thing that's hard to replace in today's world is a moat. Eric hasn't adapted yet. One day he will, once I figure out his shoe size in this brand. You know, like a lot of business people all around the world now, I always see him wearing Zegna Second Skin shoes.

I have 4 of them. You've been doing that?

I've been doing it for 2 years now. Yeah, I have 4 pairs of the same exact color.

They're more comfortable. But you usually wear the Common Projects.

No, I don't wear Common Projects as often. I wear Common Projects maybe a 10th of the time.

Yeah. Anyway, continue. Go ahead.

But they're, they're one of the most comfortable business dress sneakers or whatever you want to end up calling them ever made. They're more comfortable than Nikes for almost anyone who asks, who has, because most guys have Nikes.

When I go to Miami next week, I'll buy a pair.

All right. But it has to be second skin. If it's not second skin, it's not the same thing. Like, the comfort's not the same because Zegna has different kinds of sneakers. But the, but the point I'm getting at is like, it's that brand, it's that cachet. When you look at Michael Jordan shoes, if Eric and I spent all our money, I'm pretty sure we can build a shoe that's just as comfortable as a Michael Jordan shoe. And we can copy the design and it can look identical, but people won't buy it because ours won't have that Jumpman logo. And that Jumpman logo goes a long way. And I know this because before COVID I used to go to the Michael Jordan golf tournament and I met Jordan and a lot of his team and business managers. And Jordan's cool, but it was really fun to talk to his business team. And he actually has a small team that communicates to Nike on his behalf. And they were telling me about their Derek Jeter deal. Derek Jeter, for anyone who doesn't know, is an old baseball player, really good at baseball.

And there's not even that old.

He's not that old, but he's retired. That's probably a better way to put it. Like, uh, no longer plays.

Yeah.

But did you know they sold more Derek Jeter shoes when they started doing things like with a lot of their brand endorsement deals? Because they would go under Jordan. When they started removing the name and just having the Jumpman logo, the Jumpman logo helped produce more sales if they removed the other stuff from the same design shoe. And the point I'm getting at, what they were explaining to me is that brand affinity is so strong and people want it clean and just that, not other names with it. It could be Steph Curry rocking his version of Jordan shoes and people love that as well, but they don't want the name Steph Curry. They just wanted the Jordan logo. That sells a ton of shoes and that's the power of brand. And I think that is really hard to replace, but at the same time, I think that's really hard to create as well.

Yeah, I really think there's 2 moats, right? So brand is— a brand tells a story at the end of the day. And I forgot who I heard that from, but when you think about the Jumpman, it is when you watch Jordan, for example, and how he made you feel, right? Or when you think about Coca-Cola, you don't think about Coca-Cola, you think about the time you enjoyed that Coke, maybe with your mom when you're a kid or something like that, or maybe when you're at McDonald's, right? When you're a kid. And so I think one, talent is a moat and still, yes, Even with AI. And the second thing is brand is a moat. And this actually carries over into this tweet I'm looking at here. Sandra Jakic tweeted this. So, the highest paying job in tech will soon be marketing. What do you think about that? Because this one got 1.7 million views on it, 8,500 likes. What's your take on this?

I don't think it'll be the highest paying job in organization.

I think a lot of marketers liked it. Yeah.

The CMO is one of the highest churning roles in a C-suite. I think it is actually the highest churning role in a C-suite. And I think a CFO, COO, CEO will always get paid more in an organization than a CMO, but that's just my personal take and I could be wrong. I'm in marketing. I've seen so many of these large organizations and a lot of my buddies—

And you're CMO at your company. Yeah.

And a lot of my buddies are CEOs of publicly traded companies. And a lot of these numbers are public, but going back to brand, here's an interesting one for you, and I think we'll agree on this, okay? A lot of people used to talk about Cursor, right?

Oh yeah.

I know a lot of people still use Cursor and it's integrated with Cloud Code, but do you hear as many people talking about Cursor now?

No.

And do you think their brand is really that strong of a brand, like a Jordan brand?

Never.

Yes. I think Cursor built their brand because they're like, oh, this makes coding easier. People didn't have strong brand affinity to Cursor, in my opinion. They just looked at it as a tool that make their lives easier. I think ChatGPT has a strong brand, right? I think you would agree with that. It has extremely strong brand. Yeah.

Right? So, you know what's interesting? Go ahead, finish your thought. Go ahead.

And would you agree that Claude has a very strong brand, at least in the B2B world, specifically to organizations, not just SaaS companies, but for organizations.

Yeah. You know what actually, okay, so this is actually interesting that you bring it up this way. So I think about Claude, you know, I pay for Claude, we pay for ChatGPT, right? We pay for all the other ones, okay? Now, ChatGPT, strong brand, Claude, strong brand, they're all great. It kind of doesn't matter. So like, last couple weeks I was talking about Claude Code and then, you know, talking about Opus 4.6, But now I see all the engineers talking about using Codex, which is owned by OpenAI. They have Codex-53, which is a very strong model as well, which you can use for OpenCLaw. So anytime something new comes out, it's not even— earlier you were saying it's like the news cycles are monthly for AI. It's like every day. I am very promiscuous with my models. I don't care about the brand. So when the utility is higher and there's something new, I will gladly switch over to something. And that's when the switching costs just quite aren't— it's just not quite there right now, which is sometimes the brand itself is not strong enough.

And I don't think it's Eric. I think it's actually the majority of the market that thinks that way. I know I think that way. I think majority of corporations think that way, and he nailed it. It's because switching costs aren't high yet. I think that'll change over time. You want to hear an interesting side note? I was at that conference and that company does more than a billion a quarter, so over 4 a year. They were paying for ChatGPT. They wanted a change on ChatGPT, okay? And ChatGPT was just like, yeah, we don't do custom stuff for companies unless they're spending $10 million minimum with us a year. And Google was pitching them like, you guys are already on the Google Suite, you guys should just switch to Gemini. They're like, what's it cost? Like, nothing, it's included, it's free. Google can of course do that because they make $116 billion a year in profit, so they don't really—

Yeah.

Have to make the money like ChatGPT. And they're like, yeah, but we were wanting this custom stuff trying to get ChatGPT to do. Google's like, yeah, we'll do it for you. And they're like, what's the cost? They're like, nothing, we'll just do it for you. And they're like, all right.

And that's a good offer.

That's a great offer. Now, when Google first started working with them and OpenAI thought they were going to renew the deal and they did not renew with OpenAI and they were crushed, like, you're not going to renew with us? Because when they first had OpenAI, Gemini wasn't as good. Now they're like, wait, Gemini is really good. And in some cases That is for our main use cases, it's better. So it just shows you how companies aren't that loyal. You tell big organizations they're going to save a lot of money, they do. My team threw a fit when we switched from Google G Suite to Microsoft Outlook, right? And so many people emailed me like, Neil, we don't want to switch. And then the same with Teams. We don't want to use Teams. We prefer Slack. We prefer Zoom. And we didn't give a crap.

You just ignored them, right?

Yeah, we were saving so much money. We don't care. And you know what? Most companies we work with, keep in mind, we mainly work with enterprise companies. We do team calls with them even if they're sending the invites or Cisco or a lot of these platforms. Why? Because we choose the platforms that save us money and we don't care if people don't like one over another.

That's reality. And to tie this all together, like tying it back to AI, and this will be the closing point here, I suppose. Like, look, today we're talking about open claw. Tomorrow we might talk about closed claw, and then I might be talking about whatever claw. We don't even know, right? And so this stuff shifts quickly. You can take, you know, the— it's up to you on how fast you want to go, but hopefully you guys learned a thing or two. Anything else you want to say before we hop off?

No, that's it.

Thanks for paying attention today. All right, see you guys. Goodbye.