You DON'T Need A Personal Brand to Grow a $10B Business

All right, so Neil, you know, we should, uh, we should talk about the, the craziness that's happening with Instinct right now. So Instinct is an agent and it's growing at 10% a day. And it's interesting because a kid— I'm saying kid right now, the founder is a 23-year-old, okay? So I think they, they've raised, uh, I, I think a billion dollars or so, and they're valued at $10 billion. Is that what it is?

It was a billion at 10.

Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting to hear him talk because I listened to him on Invest Like the Best, which is a great podcast where you can listen to some of the best investors in the world. And it's interesting because it's the first interview that he's really done. And I think one of the things that relate this to from a marketing angle is that you don't really need to build a personal brand as a founder. All you need to do is to just do. Like, if you just build something amazing that people use, whether you're Mark Zuckerberg or you're Elon Musk or you're Steve Jobs or you're like Lisa Su from AMD, right? You know, she runs AMD. You just, you don't need a personal brand or even Fei-Fei Li who just sold her company for $8.2 billion to AMD, right? So all these people who talk about building a personal brand, this and this, they teach you how to do it and they sell you how to do it. Neil and I both as marketers, even though we have quote unquote personal brands, we're playing the game because we sell marketing services.

Did you see the Lisa Su clip at Formula One?

No, what did she say?

So she had a badge on, she's backstage, someone's coming up like, hey, who are you? What do you do? And like they're trying to find out, you know, my name's Lisa Su. What do you do? I'm the CEO of AMD, you know, like we sponsor that car.

And how they react to that?

I'm like paraphrasing, but pretty much AMD is a sponsor. I don't know which car AMD Official team sponsor F1. Which car is it? Uh, is official team sponsor Mercedes-AMG Formula 1. So yeah. Yeah. Um, so, uh, they didn't really know how to react, you know. It's like more so like, hey, what are you doing here? But, um, I agree with you, but I do think it wasn't this way a few years ago. So not, not even a few years ago, like 2 or 3, I would say 5 plus. If you go back 5, 6 years ago, I honestly saw companies looking too similar and you saw the rise of personal brands. And I'm not saying 5 or 6 years ago is when it started. I was saying it was working maybe 5 or 6 years ago because you would see like Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics, Rihanna, Fenty, right? People were leveraging personal brands to create companies. And I did a smaller version of it. I did Neil Patel, NP Digital. And at first it wasn't called NP Digital, it was called Neil Patel Digital, and then it transformed into NP Digital because we found that calling a company after my name, like directly my name, not last name, like my full name, it actually hurt us when we started going upstream because people were just like, oh, you have key man risk. And what I mean it hurt us, it hurt us when you talk to potential investors, it hurts you when you talk to bankers, like they all worry that there's more key man risk and even potential clients like, What would happen if Neil's not here? We don't get those questions as much. We still get them a few times a year.

Yeah, well, let me play devil's advocate on that because once they ask what NP means, it's like, oh, it's Neil Patel. Well, does Neil Patel still work there? He still does. So how does that play?

It does, but most people don't ask what NP stands for. Some people do know it is my name, but some people just don't know and they don't care. They just look at it as 2 random letters. Most people don't know that HP stands for Hewlett-Packard. A lot of us tech people do, but a lot of random people are like, oh, that's HP or IBM, right? They don't know what IBM actually stands for, but we all see IBM as a company. Again, I know a lot of people listening to this do know the acronyms and what they do stand for, but the rest of the world, like the average population, many of them do not know what these brands stand for. And the reason I was saying 5, 6 years ago is there wasn't too much differentiation in the marketplace. I think AI's changed that. People are executing faster. They're creating more new innovative companies than we've ever seen before. And it's going back to people not caring as much for the personal brand. They're caring about the product, the service, the results. And you're also seeing in today's market that I've never seen this before. I've been an entrepreneur for 25, 26 years. People will switch on a dime. It used to be that people were super loyal to Nike and they loved them. And then it became, oh, I'm going to try On shoes. Oh, I'm going to try Adidas. I'm going to try Reebok. You see, you used to see a lot of people loyal to Lululemon. Now they'll go to Alo and then Vuori and not care as much between switching between brands.

That's true. I wear all those.

Yeah, but we're seeing it. How much loyal are you to a brand now than when you're compared to a kid? Like when you're a kid, I bet you love Nike. Right. I don't think you have the same loyalty to a brand right now that you did when you were a kid. And I think it's a lot because we as consumers expect more. We aren't as accepting of not being satisfied and we'll just switch on a dime. And it's never been easier to switch. And because of all these things and how you have to create better products and services and how it really means a lot more like from a quality perspective, I think personal brands don't matter as much because a business has to stand on its own.

Well, you know what, I actually bring up a good point. I actually think there's been a democratization of being able to create these things because, okay, you think about when we're born, when we're born, there's no internet, right? There's no like, oh, like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. There's no social media right now because information is flowing a lot faster. You're seeing a lot more of these brands pop up faster, which is all, by the way, you see these personal brands and like a MrBeast, for example, he's quickly spinning up or like a Logan Paul, they're spinning up like their drinks and all that. Like, I don't know how those are doing right now, but my point is, even with AI too, like, this actually moves over to like a video that I shared with my team this morning, that it's never been easier to just make in general, right? Which means that the expectations for quality gets higher and the people will just default to quality. And especially when you have agents searching for everything, it's going to be quality, right? Did I send you that DHH video from Rails World, I think? You know, the co-founder of Basecamp.

Yeah, I don't know if he was the co-founder. I think he's the unofficial co-founder. I think he joined later on, but I think he was one of the co-creators of Ruby on Rails.

But he's, I mean, he's a, talk about personal brand. He, him and Jason Fried. Yeah, Jason Fried were kind of brands back in the day, you know, from a developer standpoint, right? Now here's what's interesting. So he, and I told my team, guys, this is required watching. It's like a 1-hour video. And it's basically him talking about the thumbnail says, look at all the things that I'm not doing, right? And what he talks about there is like, okay, you know, before AI, he's like, AI really started to happen last December. Remember what I keep bringing up, Opus 4.5, right? Last December. To him, it was like November, but to me, last week of December, that's when everything started to change. He's like, the expectations, like we could just build anything now. And look at all the things we're doing. We were just pressing enter all the time and we're not even coding anymore. We're not even writing code. We're not even reviewing code anymore. And look at how much more we're shipping and look how good the design quality is this and that. So that actually goes back to the point that people are shipping more, more and more. Like, entrepreneurship is more accessible to, to more people today. So I think that's just going to force more competition and quality goes up as well. Um, so I think it's a, it's a worthy watch for everyone.

Yeah, I haven't seen it. I'm gonna definitely check it out. That brings me to a point when you're talking about how much more people are doing without actually doing themselves. a16z had a chart. I have not seen it yet, but I've, uh, heard about it. Quite a few people talking about it on television. I was flying back today, so I couldn't pull it up. The Wi-Fi sucked, but CNBC livestream worked out really well about token usage. And it's just showing how usage of AI is just through the roof. And a lot of the usage is not actually humans. It's AI using AI at this point.

Yeah, let me try to find that. So, I mean, do you want to speak more to it as I try to find it?

That's all they said on CNBC, but I believe it. And it was an interview with a Milan company. I forgot the name of it. It was like Doyne, Doyne.

Doyne?

Yeah, D-O-Y-N-E or something like that. I'm messing up the name. You know, they're supposedly raised money at a $2 billion valuation and they were just talking about differentiation in today's world, which funny enough brings us back to personal branding. But yeah, I think usage is just crazy. And going back to the personal branding point, I don't think it's much of a differentiation. Nike stock tanked when they did not renew their partnership with Mbappé, you know, the soccer player or football player. You know, it doesn't drive as much revenue as one may think. They have so many personal brands and their stock and companies are struggling.

Do you see the screen here? So agents are a 14x increase over humans. So you can see on February 6th, 2026, when the year started, agentic tokens surpassed human ones, right? This is interesting because what you see on the chart over here, so this is in the blue. So you can see as of today, as of August 7th, this is probably even higher now. So you have 7-day average token usage on OpenRouter. This is only OpenRouter, right? So 7.5 trillion versus humans are 1 trillion and then mix is like 1 trillion as well. But then when you go back to the last week of December, I'm citing like December 18th, maybe December 26th over here. You can see that agent— agentic usage was still under humans, significantly under, like it was still half of humans, right? And so when I say things really started to take off, look, that's end of January over here and things really started to rip, right? And that's when I think AI really started to happen and become a lot more useful and it got better and better rapidly and now it's getting crazier and crazier every day, right? But going back to the point, I think The video with DHH talking about you can do anything now, and that you really— the point that he's making is that look at all the things I'm not doing. Look at all the non-robot things that I'm not doing, or sorry, the robot things that I'm not doing, right? So he's not doing robot things anymore, and his team gets to work on— they get to spin up like a Windows app very quickly and all this other stuff, right? And obviously they have guidelines for it. And so no matter what I do, Neil, right? And no matter what you do, probably same thing as well. Is the people that want to embrace this stuff are flying with it right now. The people that aren't, they just aren't, right? But we also have to keep in mind too that human inertia is a very real thing. Because if I say that this exploded last December, guys, we're still not even a year. It still hasn't been a year yet. And look how much the world has changed.

Yeah, I think you're going to not only see this climb, but I think you're going to see some ups and downs in between because people are spending a lot of money and they're just like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Our revenue is not growing and our costs are just increasing, so we need to start adjusting how much we're spending. And we're seeing this across the board with most major companies that we work for, that we work with. Their finance team is pushing back. This is just in marketing, right? So it must be organization-wide, but they're pushing back on marketing saying, hey, you guys are spending so much on these AI tools. We're not seeing tons of growth from this, but we're seeing rapid increase in costs and it's affecting potential earnings.

Neil, so I'm going to show you a memo from Hormozi in a moment talking about internal AI usage, but, and then I want to give our reaction to how we're thinking about this internally. But so we pay for an Ahrefs subscription, right? And they had, there's a limit on API tokens that they give. So I was actually going to try to test something and then it's like, you're out of AI tokens, right? API tokens. I'm like, what? And then I looked at it, it was like, it was someone else on my team that had maxed out all the tokens. And I'm like, how did you do that? Right? He's like, I was just testing it. And I think the issue was he just let it run. And I'm like, dude. And so, so I think, and by the way, this guy's a great guy. I love him. But what my point is, is a lot of people, they want more and more usage. They want more and more tools. But when we aren't holding people accountable to like, hey, what's the actual ROI? Not, I estimated I saved this time. No, no, no, no, F that, right? It's more so what, how much more traffic did you drive? Yeah. How much more conversions did you drive? How much more usage did you drive if you're a product organization, right? If you're talking about a product, but no, no estimated this, estimated that, right? I'm literally spending money. I don't need your estimation, right? I need to know what the ROI is, and I'm the number one proponent of AI, don't get me wrong, but come on, there has to be some guardrails around this stuff.

There has to be, and all these things cost a lot of money, and I think that's where people make huge mistakes in which they just use and they don't think about the consequence of Oh, I just spent a lot of money from the company. Maybe not new money, but we had existing contracts and I just used up everything. So the company, if they want to use these features or these capabilities, they have to spend more money.

By the way, one of our mutual friends, he's like, oh, he messaged me the other day. He's like, I'm spending $14,000 a day on tokens, right? So that's about $5.1 million a year. And so like, you know, this stuff's got to— I'm not saying don't spend on tokens. I'm saying you just got to be smart about how you use it. And I do think it's a good barometer when you look at someone's token usage. How they're using it is important. And I think that should be— that goes into the performance review, in my opinion.

Yeah. And you're also seeing something that's happening in marketing right now, at least in B2B. Companies are releasing too many features. And you may be thinking, Neil, how could you have too many features? We're entering in a world where it's so easy to release these. And yes, you can have product marketers or people who just focus on releasing features and marketing them. and making the experience delightful. But the issue is, is now as consumers, what we're seeing from a marketing perspective, they're getting overwhelmed. Like, oh, look, my tool does 1,000 things. Well, 1,000 things is a lot. I only need you to do 5 things really well, and this is just getting too complicated. So sometimes pushing out more faster than your competition can actually hurt you because your product becomes too complex.

This is funny, Neil. We're talking right now. I'm looking at X. And I'm looking at Neil Patel is hosting summit day 3. There's 910 people there. How are you hosting a summit when we're doing this podcast right now?

You can do both.

It's Neil's AI double.

No, not AI double. It goes all day.

Okay, well, I'm assuming other people are speaking. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So let's look at this memo real quick. I actually hadn't read this yet, but I just saw this the other day. I scrolled by and I just Googled this right now. So Hormozi here says, internal AI usage cap memo. In response to requests for increased AI budgets, They aren't coming, and here's why. We currently offer 16x token spend per employee compared to average of tech-forward companies based on ramp spend data from 70,000 businesses. I say this to reestablish— I actually want to look up that number. I say this to establish, for those of you who request increases, it's unlikely that you'll get it. Unlimited budgets create unlimited waste, a luxury we do not have. Okay, that part I agree with. So budget and use your tokens only on projects that have a clear revenue-producing or cost savings. Uh, That, yeah, okay. Otherwise, it's likely to be fired on their shit that doesn't matter and not worth spending money on. To help you, we will be offering trainings on how to figure out what's worth working on. Biggest miss number 1, how to use fewer tokens to get same output. Think of this as AI hygiene. How to use the time AI saves you to be more effective. I think those are good trainings. AI is a tool that creates leverage. It helps you get more out of what you put in. That said, company revenue is flat relative terms compared to AI usage increases. This suggests that people are largely using on projects that don't matter or using on things that don't matter than spending the time, the saved time working on things that don't matter. Okay, so this discrepancy hints at a skill deficiency in the team, one which I hope we will train up just as we train up on AI usage. Okay, right. Hey, what did we say earlier? P.S., the more clearly you can articulate how what you do generates a return, the more likely tokens will be in your future. And the way to maximize a return is to show how little you can use and how much you can get from it.

Yeah, I also think you're going to see companies reducing the cost for a lot of this stuff. They already are, right? It's getting more and more competitive, and you're going to have the bigger players willing to lose money to gain the account over some of the new up-and-comers just because the big incumbents have just tons of cash that they can burn.

Yeah, here's what I'll say about this one. I think you've heard me, my stance on this. There's all the trainings you can do in the world, but it's not going to change a mindset thing. And I think what he's addressing here is a mindset thing. I honestly think that's what he's addressing. Now, that being said, I do think it is worth to train people on what is worth working on, right? And then also, what do slop grenades look like? I actually put up a policy on our writing policy and slop grenades and how to use fewer tokens, like using Jev, right? Using an open router, for example, having Jev as an in-between and how to think about it helping you be more effective. And also, how do you communicate the ROI from this, right? Let's just look at this. I actually asked Grok over here, so I was curious. So he said they offer 16x token spend per employee compared to the average of tech-forward companies based on what Ramp said. Okay, so reports a median AI spend of about $11.95 per month, roughly $12 across recent months. Okay, so he's saying they offer up $200 per month. That doesn't seem right to me. But anyway, if that's what it is, I guess it is around $200 a month. Well above the median. I actually think you have to go harder than that. And I think what has to happen is you— not you, Neil, but I think those of you listening to this right now, it's more so first you figure out how to hire the people that are very AI native, right? And then if they can, they know how to do this well, they know how to use this well, and they know how to prove the ROI, then you give them significantly more than $200 a month. That's what I think.

I think a lot of companies need to go back, especially in marketing, to hiring based off of past results. If you know someone really did well in your sector or your space for a competitor on a specific channel or area that you're struggling in, those are the people to start recruiting. Have them focus. If they use AI to do even a better job, great. But people need to start going back to the basics because in marketing right now, I'm seeing a lot of AI fatigue. And I use Eric as a good barometer of this. A year ago, everything AI, AI this, AI that, push, push, push. I only want employees that are AI-pilled. To now, hey, there's too much slop. People shouldn't just be spending. A lot of these campaigns aren't working. People are just getting frustrated with the expense and not getting the output that's producing the results that they're looking for.

Yeah, I think on my end, it's more so, it's the revelation that The fortunate thing is we don't have a ton of headcount, right? So we can move quickly with decisions. I would say from a personnel standpoint, ultimately making sure that the people that we have on are the AI-native people that can move quickly because they enjoy working with each other. And then also helping the people that maybe don't want to work like that, helping them find the other thing where they'll be happy, right? It's just the way we see it, the way I see it more than anything, is that it's The amount that you can do now as a person if you work like this is a lot more. So my take on it is actually you need to hire the people that have the experience, one. But they, in my mind, for my organization at least, they have to be AI native or else it's just not going to work because they just cannot keep up with the other people. There's other people are like this, they're like this, and they might have a lot of experience, but if they can't keep up, might as well just find someone else that has experience and can keep up. So I saw this post from Noah Kagan over here. And he mentioned, so Noah Kagan from AppSumo. So he said, new thing you must steal today. I shipped 19 SEO pages for my $20 Mac app. And so since then, 6 PayPal sales in 3 days, 2 types of pages every product needs. So we're talking about if you're going to use AI for this stuff to make SEO stuff, you might as well try to generate ROI from it, going back to our main point. So what do you say? Competitor pages, guys. So these are versus pages. So Rhino versus Whisperflow, Whisperflow alternatives. So I guess he has a Whisperflow alternative. Okay. Yeah. And then he has best product for, you know, X, for lawyers, doctors, ADHD students, right? Paste this into Claude Code. Find my top 5 competitors, build a versus page and an alternative page for each. Then write 10 best products for audience guides. Be honest and say when a competitor is better. Copy this layout. It's clean. So this, by the way, guys, I'm not saying this is the end-all be-all. What I'm saying is this is a good example if you want to prove to your manager or your founder, your CEO, whoever it is that you're working with directly, Just show them this. Hey, I shipped these things over here. We got this ROI over here and I am ready to scale it. If I can spend X amount of dollars, if we spend X amount of dollars, I think I'm going to get Y return and we should do this, right? Not just, I need more token spend.

There's 2 things here that you guys can adjust with the strategy if you want it to work really well. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it can work even better. The first is figure out how you can reach out to other websites and convince them to publish this content. So it works really well if it's not just on your website. That's A, because if you look at most queries, whenever you search for Claude or ChatGPT or whatever it may be, majority of the time they're looking off of your own website, right? They're looking on other people's websites. They do a lot of fan-out queries. The second thing is if you ask ChatGPT or Claude a question related to your space and you're seeing the results that they bring up, if you are comparing other businesses that aren't on that list, it's not going to do as well compared to comparing businesses that they're already recommending. So what we see is, let's say you had 50 articles that you created. You wouldn't want to just create 50 articles on your website, but I'm just giving you a hypothetical because if you have too much junk content, it actually hurts you. If you create articles on your website and you're comparing products that ChatGPT and Claude aren't referencing a lot, they tend not to pull from what we see your content as much. Compared to if you're referencing competitors that they tend to pull more often for the queries you're looking for, that gets you included much faster from what we see.

By the way, I mean, you know what you can do to do that? Just people listening to this, this is a very simple thing to do now because when you use something like a Grokbot, you can just literally take the transcript from what Neil just said right now, dump that into Grokbot and say, just build this for me. Right? And then you can just continue to iterate on it over time and have it handle the outreach for you. You can keep tweaking over time. It gets smarter over time too, right? And so to Neil's point, yes, the LLMs have gotten smarter about this because if you think about it, oh, all these people are gaming the system. Oh, how are they gaming the system? Oh, they're just posting listicles on their websites, their own sites, and then citing their thing as number 1. Well, that's pretty easy to spot. So you like, they've evolved. Like, I'm not saying this doesn't work, by the way, and Neil's not saying it doesn't work either. It does. But like, if you think about it, how have— how has Google always worked? Well, they realized that people used to just spam their own stuff, like when they spam keywords on their site. So what happened? They realized that links were the answer. And this is the new way of links, right? It's the same thing, but, you know, new again.

Yeah. And speaking of listicles and comparisons, we see comparison articles, they— even though listicles, we see them being cited more, Just from a one-to-one, from a revenue standpoint, we see the comparison articles drive way more revenue than listicles.

That's interesting. So while we sit on— by the way, let's talk, let's go back to Instinct for a moment, right? So if they're growing 10% day on day, so Instinct, just so everyone knows, it's like a, it's an agent that you can manage inside of your iMessage right now, and there's not any setup that's needed, and it's always being proactive for you, right? It's like, for example, they reach out to a bunch of people to speak at my AI summit, right, which is happening next month. And so it's, that part is cool. And a lot of people are, I think, Neil, this is interesting. If you basically, if you use the product for like 1 or 2 weeks, about 40% of new users will put in their credit card information, right? Which is already pretty big. And so there, when I think about that, if you're growing 10% a day and you're compounding really quickly, that's why these VCs are willing to give you money too. And plus you have to pay for compute costs too. But the challenge with his business too is like, You have to decide if you want to make that compute bet or not. And the other challenge too is when you're up against Meta Muse, I mean, you're up against Grokbot, and then, you know, Google supposedly has their own bot. I think everyone's going to have their own bot coming out. How do you stand out, right? And so, um, I think for him, he's got to figure out his path to monetization. He's not going to just try to collect, um, you know, like a, like a, like a sliver of payments. He's not, he's not trying to play the payments game. Uh, but it's interesting to me when you have the users coming in The world is your oyster. So I think it's worth talking about because he's got some interesting challenges.

Well, he has a big waitlist, so I think that helps with their growth rate because you can choose how many you want to let in. I look at that business as you're going to have tons of competitors over time. I'm not saying he's going to lose or win. Time will tell. I'm a little bit of a different entrepreneur and I'm wrong probably majority of the times. Like, I would have never made that, what, $13 billion bet that Facebook made on Scale.

Yeah.

Uh-huh. Uh, or $11 or whatever it was. Uh, it was something like that. If I was Instinct and I can sell the business for $12 or $15 billion, I would sell it to like Apple and let them just plug it in and give away a lot of it for free because Apple has the cash flow. And I bet you someone like Apple would be like, this is a great fit. We struggled with Siri. Sure, let's spend $10 billion. I know $10 billion or even $15 sounds like a lot of money, but to Apple, it actually is not that much money. Yeah. And it's a perfect fit to their product. Like, unlike, unlike the scale acquisition that Facebook did, and it's working out so far with Muse, this is a direct, like, fit into Apple products. And it just totally makes sense. Even if it costs $20 billion, I'm just like, we should just pay $20 billion and just buy this company.

And they can afford the compute too, right? And so, and they have the hardware, they have the infrastructure for it.

They have everything. It would make their iPhones so much better. Like, this is great.

My bet, Neil, is he'll probably sell it. You know why? Because he knows it's so competitive and it's so tough that that's probably— and I don't think he started this thing to sell it. And he's saying all the things right now, like, you know, we're going to keep going, blah, blah, blah. But I'm a— I would bet you on this one that he would sell it. Do you want to take that bet?

I agree with you. I'm the one who first started with he should sell the company.

Let me bet you on your own call.

But like, I honestly think the best place for this company is Apple. And Apple would pay for. You could also say Google as well, but like Apple—

Google has their own coming.

Yeah, Apple needs to do something really cool in AI. And if you look at what Apple does is they tend to just create beautiful products that are simple and easy to use. That's their game. They make complex things look very simple and beautiful. And this is, they're taking something very powerful And making it simple because you can just talk to Siri or text Siri back and forth. And I'm like, this would just blow up and more people would want to buy Apple phones because of it.

You know, here's my take on this. Here's, here's, uh, here's what I actually think as we're talking through this right now. And then I'm going to share something from Sam, uh, Leeson, I think, from The Information. Um, I actually think that what— if you have Apple's resources, this isn't hard to build, um, because you've seen so many versions of this. Or by the way, I'm not saying— I'm sorry, it's, it's— I'm not an engineer, right? But I'm just saying that There's so many versions of this already, right? You have OpenClaw, you have Hermes. Muse is built off of the learnings from OpenClaw, right? You have GrokBot. GrokBot came out in a month, right? So my take on it is if you're paying a lot of engineers a lot of money for this, you should be able to put this together, especially if you have the infrastructure, you have the compute for it. And so maybe they might not buy it, right? And so let me just share this with you, Neil. This actually relates to the topic that we're on. So Sam Leeson from The Information says there is no moat in AI agents. None. I will die on this hill. New More or Less is up. So I guess that's his podcast. So he says, I switch between Muse, Instinct, and Dots at basically zero cost. I basically do the same thing every day. One GitHub repo, a few databases, and feed the thing my— the new thing my context. Done. If the cost of writing software is going to zero, API integrations are not a moat. The only moat left is user setup costs. Which means winner takes some, not winner takes all. Guess who sets up this stuff, Neil? Services, right? Adrian's point, AI collapses— I guess this is his podcast co-host. So Adrian's point, AI collapses value the second an idea works. So Jev, which just came out recently, got reverse engineered in 48 hours, and the people who built it captured nothing. My take, play that to the limit and you get Middle Ages 2.0. Everyone builds a castle, hoards data, ships black boxes that self-destruct if you open them. Dave says humans don't work that way. We'll see. Meanwhile, Brit's Instinct started— I guess that's somebody else he works with. So Instinct, the agent that we're talking about, started talking to Dave's Instinct and they didn't text for a day. She says it's killing humanity. Nobody said that about FaceTime. Now, funny enough, Neil, our mutual friend, I'm having my Instinct and his Instinct coordinate our trip right now, our founders retreat that we do annually. And Jess said the only benchmark that matters is if the agent logs into school software, Syncs 3 kids' after-school schedules, and Muse does 90% of that. By the way, I'm pretty sure this was written by AI, but I think that's the challenge right now, right? That's why I said like Instinct, I think other people might just build it, and I think they might, I don't know, it might not work out if they don't come out with a big differentiator, because I don't see a major differentiator right now.

Even Muse, dude. So I've played around a lot with Muse, and I use most these tools for more business purposes than marketing purposes, I would say. I'm assuming you would agree with that. Yep. And when I look at Muse, I had to compile a list of every single M&A advisory shop, banker that sells agencies. And I did this for Europe, I did this for the United States, and I did it for Japan. Okay. I worked on it to be very, very specific on what I'm looking for. The size of the banking shop, the deal sizes that they've done in the past. If they've done too big of deals to exclude them from the list. Like, I got very specific because if they're used to selling companies for $200 million, I'm not buying companies for $200 million. I'm not rich enough to do that. So I'm getting very specific because I don't want to waste my time. Muse goes, it creates a list, and I do this for all 3 regions. And the reason I have it start with the United States is I know the US really well. Like, I know a lot of the players in this space. And then I start having it fine-tune, I refine it. Once I do that, it's connected to Gmail from a perspective that I can just create drafts, right? So I'm not letting it just blast my contacts or anything like that. I have removed access from my Gmail since. It ended up creating me drafts, and when I say drafts, I'm not talking about like 20, 30, or anything like that. I'm talking about hundreds. It was actually less than 300, and when I started going through them, I found a few issues, and I've told it to not give me generic email addresses. Like, if it can't find it, let me know, or exclude those companies. It didn't do a good job of that. It sometimes sent me the email addresses in these companies of people who are in communications department, which breaks the whole model because I told it if they have too many employees outside of 5 or 6, I said the max is actually 10, exclude them from the list. If you have people and you're an M&A advisory shop who are just in communications and they get your messaging out, you have more than 10 employees typically. Right? So it didn't classify the employee count right. It gave me a lot of firms that aren't even M&A advisory firms. It gave me a lot of companies that don't specialize in agencies when I asked them to only give me companies that have done past agency deals and please double-check and remove the ones that haven't. And I was very specific. I didn't say traditional agency. I said digital agencies that specialize in SEO, GEO. I actually did not say GEO, it was too new, but SEO, paid media, social media marketing. I gave the list, right? Email marketing, et cetera. And what I found is I started sending out a lot of the drafts. I started going through 10, the first batch. And when I went through the first 10, I only sent out 2 out of the 10. And then I started going through the second 10 and I was even more picky. I started actually going through each and every single website and doing my own research, and I sent out 1 out of the 10 from the second batch. After that, I deleted the rest of the drafts. I was just like, this is just costing me so much time. It would be cheaper to pay a human to do this than it would using Muse.

Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. Yeah. So here's what I'll call out with this. So let me share my screen real quick and then I'll tell you kind of how I think about this. So this is from Evry and this shows a personal agents comparison. So those of you that can't see the screen, there's a comparison with Dot versus Gemini Spark versus GrokBot versus Hermes versus Instinct versus Muse versus OpenClaw, right? So I think the thing to call out here is each of these has their own unique Use case. I will also say the model that Meta uses is not necessarily the greatest right now, right? And by the way, even if you're using a frontier model, it's still going to hallucinate quite a bit. Now, what I would say with Neil's build is I would actually just put Jev in, right? Jev as a classifier. This is why they say 0% hallucinations, because they'll do a lot of this classification at scale where it's too expensive or too slow for these frontier models to do it, or even like Muse's— sorry, Meta's open source way. Um, so that's what I would do to add in, because what I'm doing right now with people who engage on like a, like a LinkedIn post that I have that has like 2,300 comments on it, right? So I'm like, oh, who could we actually, who has actually engaged there? So signal-based selling, right? Who's actually engaged like 2 or 3 times that seems like they're a good fit to work with us based on our recruiting page. Now I can do that using a Jev, right? For fractions of a penny, right? And then not only that, I can look for, by the way, Neil, you have a nice audience. How do we look at all the people who follow you that have the size of the agencies that you're looking for, right? Or like even those M&A advisors, right, that might follow you as well. And so that's all happening at a very high level with, you know, no hallucination, little to no, right? And it's a fraction of a penny and it happens very quickly too. And I was kind of messing around with this the other day. I was like, okay, well, I'm doing this event. I can see who's coming to this event. I'm like, I just cut and pasted it. Then I'm like, who is actually like ICP fit, right? Boom. Like in like, I don't know, like a minute or so and like a fraction of a second, I can easily see, oh, this company, is in this region over here, they do $1.3 billion and they have this many employees, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, having a classifier is a must. And I think that's going to be built into all these models eventually. So yeah.

Yeah, no, I think you're spot on with this. And people don't mind paying, but they want the job done correctly. It's just like someone giving you— a team member giving you AI slop. It's like AI giving you slop just makes you pissed off and it just wastes a lot of your time. And it was like, this was just a bad use because if you look at how much time I spent with Muse, and yes, even works in the background and you can shut off your computer and it still works on there and through their servers. I still wasted a lot of my time. And when I say wasted a lot of my time, I was giving Muse feedback throughout the whole process. I probably spent 45 minutes to an hour easily, and I was just pissed off after, right? Yeah. And that's not even going through the drafts. I'm just talking about just working with Muse. And I was like, man, this was just a really terrible experience. But it goes down to what that guy said on X. I actually don't have any loyalty to any of these products. It's not like me actually buying a physical product like a Nike or Chanel or Louis Vuitton. And I know we also discussed our affinity to those brands probably wasn't as strong, at least with Nike for Eric and I, to where we were with kids, right? Humans are more open to switching ever than before.

I have an affinity to Air One.

Yeah, you love Erewhon. You always wear Erewhon cap and you always save the jars. But I learned from you, the jars actually give you back money.

Yeah, that's why I keep them all, because each one's $3, man.

Oh, you get $3 back for each one?

Yeah, I have, I have so many of these jars now.

Yeah, dude, I started saving them from all our soups because I was like, wait, because remember you took us for lunch and then you're like, no, no, I got this. And I was trying to pay you, like, no, no, it's free. And then you come with all these jars. Yeah, I loved it. But no, it's just like, it's spot on. I don't think we have affinity to any of this, which is why Instinct should just sell to Apple if they could get an offer.

Agreed. By the way, Neil, let me show you this, this guy, Thibault Maker. So he's an engineer, right? I think he's a developer by trade, but he has this tool called outrank.so, which is an SEO tool. So this is interesting. So check this out. So you know how SEO Twitter, you know, they kind of poo-poo on a lot of things, right? They have a lot of opinions. So his tool sells links, they allow you to, like, if you're part of his ecosystem, you can actually put your site up to, you know, exchange links with other sites, right? And technically this is against Google's terms, but here's what he said, right? So he's like, 3 weeks ago, SEO Twitter decided to, uh, decided to outrage burn domains, right? So they're all talking crap about his tool, right? So our signups fell 26% by the next day, not going to print ahead, that didn't hurt. But that really affected me. So I set this mission myself to help founders with my products. So I was really nervous about us potentially harming domains because he's an engineer, right? He doesn't know about this SEO stuff. So then he's— but because he's an engineer and he's data-driven, he's like, you know what, I pulled GSC data for Google Search Console for our users. I asked AI for a full analysis and grouped them by how many of our backlinks they received, meaning how much they used Outrank. Okay, so if you got 0 to 9 links from his ecosystem, 24% of Google clicks jumped since joining. And if you got 400+ links from his ecosystem, 115% Google clicks joined. Jumped since joining, right? So he says, the more you use this tool, obviously, right, the more you grow. But what's interesting to me, Neil, is he starts showing these numbers, right? So he's like, okay, here's a chart that shows clicks per how many months since they joined Outrank, right? So let's take a look at this. So you can see in the purple over here, right, since joining Outrank, like month 1, month 2, month 3, you can see over time by month 11, it's 2.37x. And you can see their impressions jump by 3.8x. Now that's not it, Neil. There's a little more here. So before we react to this, so he says, look, more exchange links, more growth. So 0 to 9, 24%, 400+, 115%. The sites that fell by links received, share declining websites now at half or less of their best 28-day window. 0 to 9 links, 42.5%, 150+, 21.7%. So I just think it's— nobody has really shared this data before, and I think it's helpful to at least look at this.

Yeah, no, it is really helpful. And I'm not saying you should do link exchange or break Google's policy, and nor is Eric saying that. But I think this guy Thibault makes a good point about one thing in which if you go to X or you go to LinkedIn, you're going to get a lot of hate depending what industry you're in. If you're building something good, and I'm not saying you should break people's terms of use or policy or do something that won't work in the long run, But if you really believe you're building something good that's going to change people's lives or is going to do something amazing, if you're going to get hate on it, it's okay. Just move on and ignore it. And I've learned that a long time ago because I get a ton of hate and probably not as much anymore because my brand isn't as big as it used to be. And Eric would send me the articles or links of just people hating on me and he would see them before me and he would send them to me because he knew I wasn't really checking them out or looking. But my solution in the past, because people would be like, how does it not affect you? I'm like, you just don't look. You just move on and you just keep doing what you're doing and you build the best company you can and you do what's best for your customers and you don't worry about what competitors or other people in the industry are going to say if they're going to be negative and just haters all day.

This just goes back to the personal brand thing, right? Like forget about worrying about the personal brand that much. Just do. Like as long as you're doing, you're accomplishing, you have a team that's following you. Like by the way, that's a big signal. If there's people that work with you, That means that they actually appreciate your leadership, right? So let me, let me add one more thing around this too. So it says sites that fell by links received. So it says some connected sites have SEO decreasing traffic, which is orange below, and most were going down before they started using Outrank. And again, the more backlinks received by Outrank, let's just take Outrank out. The more backlinks you receive, the slower the decrease is, right? So you and I have always known that. We're not saying exchange links. We're not saying buy links or anything like that. We're just saying if you build something useful, it can get a lot of links, like a linkable asset. Like a lot of people are giving away these tools now. It used to be back in the day calculators, but because you can build anything with AI now, the bar is getting higher, right? And so I like, you know what I like about this, this thread the most, Neil, is all these people talk crap about him, but then what happened is you don't see the SEOs coming in to poo poo on him because you know why? He's got the data, right? Data does a good job of shutting people up.

No, even if he has the data, you'll see the SEOs poo poo on him just in different places.

Yeah, well, not here anymore, right? So, but like this guy over here is like, numbers like that are hard to argue with. Uh, like this guy's like, okay, this is not— that does not much match my experience. All right, you can pick something, Neil, because you just came back. Where did you come back from?

I came back from, uh, uh, Brazil and I had some—

That's a long flight.

Yeah, a long flight. I had some good meetings, you know, and I was talking to one of my team members when I was in Brazil and I think Marketers have something that's really wrong. So one of my team members had experience pitching a really large company. All right, it's everyone in the United States at least knows this company. And they won a contract for SEO, call it for a few million bucks, multi-year contract, let's say 3 years. So call it $6 million total over 3 years. And do you know what was in their SEO presentation? You want to know what they focused on?

Regular SEO?

They focus on almost nothing related to SEO. They focus on the business problem. You're this company, you need to move these metrics for your stock price. This is what the board wants. This is what's been happening. This is your budget. You need to produce ROI. We're going to produce the ROI and here's the overall strategy. It wasn't about rankings or clicks. It was, This is how we're going to achieve these numbers. It wasn't, we're going to build X amount of links, look at these on-page errors. And they won the pitch, or he won the pitch because he focused on the business outcomes. And we were talking about how to stand out in the age of AI. And this could be for B2B or B2C. And the big thing that we're discussing is, is Too many people focus on features and benefits. It's just like, we should go back to, you got a problem, we can help you solve the problem, and here's the unique solution that makes this worth you choosing, and here are the economics behind it, and just focus more on the business case. And everyone says they do this and they understand this, but when you actually look at people's presentations or marketing material, It is very different from what they actually claim they know and what they are talking about, right? It's 2 different things. And we believe that the market needs to go back to simplicity in which the world is getting more complex with AI. People crave human interactions. Businesses are struggling. If you look at the Fortune, the S&P 500, It is growing, but it's growing only because of AI. If you stripped out all the AI growth, you would actually have companies declining and the economy not looking as good. So just going back to basic business principles and talking about, here's how we're going to fix this, here's the KPIs around this, here's what it means for your business, here's your profitability broken down per quarter, and here's how this is going to be achieved. Like, that's the stuff people want to hear. They're tired of hearing, Look at this cool thing that we're doing with AI, and we're going to implement this in your company. People are tired of not seeing their numbers grow. And if you can go back to pitching or adjusting your messaging around solving people's problems and explaining in a dead simple way and showing them proof that you can actually do it, I think that's the key to winning in today's world with things becoming more and more complex.

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Niels. agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So I'll come back to the how to win in today's world with the sales piece, but I'm just looking at the September 2026 jobs report. Okay. So the consensus was we're going to add 90,000 jobs. United States, we added just 29,000. Unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%. Why am I even bringing this up? Prior revisions, July and August totals were revised down by 60,000 jobs combined, right? Wage growth, uh, earnings slowed. So equities moved higher, right? So why am I even bringing this up right now? People think it's a really good economy right now. If there's no AI in this economy right now, we're in a recession, right?

That's just a bad recession.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I know a lot of the technologists would be like, the economy is going to boom and GDP is going to boom. The people who are in technology are seeing a lot of the benefits. A lot of normal people outside of technology, which is the majority of the world, are struggling and seeing suffering. I'm not saying Elon or all these VCs are wrong, that eventually everyday people are going to see abundance and all this kind of stuff, but people are worried about just getting by. Like, I was at the grocery store, my kids start putting whatever in the cart, and I see the grocery bill. And I was like, what the heck? There's so much food costs.

Which grocery stores you go to?

The Whole Foods on Crescent in Beverly Hills.

I didn't even know there's a Whole Foods in Beverly Hills.

Yeah, we tend to go there or Bristol Farms. Now don't get me wrong, I'm shopping at Whole Foods and I'm shopping at a location where the rent is more, so the cost of goods may be higher. I don't know. I don't really compare. I'm not coupon clipping. But I felt the bill. And where I really felt it was I felt it for the other people checking out on how much money this is going to cost them. And I'm like, how the heck are they going to afford it, dude? And I'm seeing this, you know, just general in life. My wife was at Target the other day, the one on Beverly Center. You know where that is?

Yeah.

So, and my wife's buying stuff. The, the old lady— there was a grandma with her granddaughter who was behind my wife, and she's just like— the, the granddaughter's telling her grandma, you know, this blender is really going to help me lose weight. I really need it. Thank you, Grandma. And Grandma's like, well, it's expensive, but I just got my check. So, you know, if you really think it's worth it and it's going to help you out and help you get better and healthier in life, I guess we can swing it. So my wife doesn't say anything. She pays for her bill, and then she tells the clerk to let her pay for it. And she's like, I can't let you pay for it until I ring it all up. So she's like, but just stand on the side. So then the moment she's done ringing up all this stuff, my wife quickly taps a credit card and bounces, right? So that way they don't see her or do anything. She doesn't care for someone to say, oh, thank you, or whatever. She just, she just felt bad. Yeah. And what I'm getting at is, yes, in this AI world, there's a lot of people in tech that are doing well, but there's just so many people who are struggling. And I would say we live in a rich area, right? Beverly Center isn't the cheapest area. It's close by. I think that's West Hollywood. But still, like, people are struggling and it's sad to see. Like, just honestly, it's sad to see these people struggling. And I think That's a bigger problem. And if that keeps going, I think more businesses are going to suffer, at least in the next few years.

This is beyond our pay grade. What I would say is the government should— whoever's in office at the time should figure out how to bridge the gap. Because you and I have always said that there is going to be a period of instability before we get to abundance. I've always believed that since the beginning, which is why I push so hard on this stuff right now. Because like, I don't want to be— I don't want to be part of that, right? Like, I want to be able to help the people that want to help themselves. But also, the government needs to make sure that we help the people bridge the gap. As we go into this new world, because there's always been periods where there's been massive job destruction, right? Or like job instability, right? Which is what I think we're going into or what we're in right now. So anyway, Neil, going back— oh, your light turned off. But—

Yeah, I know. I'm like, who the heck turned off the light in the office? But really quick thing on that, there's a win-win solution that no one wants to do, which is very simple. Tax the rich, like people like not even just the Jeff Bezoses, but people like you and I more money. I'm happy to pay 2, 3, 4, 5% more taxes.

How about 15%?

15%? They already take 50%. So you want to take 65%? There's a point where it's like, you're just, you're just taking too much money. But when I say, let's say 5%, right? Take people under $100 grand and just charge them no federal taxes for it. And if that means I have to pay 6% more, 7%, 8%, or 9% more, assuming actually the whole money is going towards it, Okay, if it's 15%, which is a lot and I don't want to pay it, but if people who are actually struggling, 100%, not 98%, not 97%, 100% of the money actually went in their pockets and life was better for them, I honestly think it's a win-win situation because businesses would flourish and I also would make more money from that. And I think I would actually make more than the 7% to 10% to 15% that I would have to pay.

I think, you know what, I think, what's his name, Steve Hilton, who's running for California governor, I think he proposed that Anybody making less than $150 grand should not get taxed, right? I agree with that, right? And so anyway, I think it's— if we're going to have all this abundance, I think everyone should be taken care of, right? Because we're all supposed to feel wealthier than before, right? So anyway, going back to what we were talking about a second ago. So in terms of how you can win any deal, how to win any deal, right, in today's day and age, or even from the past, all you have to do is just think about someone else's problems, right? And so For example, if Neil tore his ACL and I offer him help to repair his elbow, like he would look at me like a moron, right? And it's like, so it's thinking about their problems. It's also thinking about what their incentives are. And so if you're talking to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, he cares about his stock price, right? He cares about his numbers. So if you can speak like that, greater. If you're talking to a marketing manager, maybe you can adjust how you're speaking to what they care about, right? It's constantly what they care about. You're selling to the customer. And you need to understand the customers. Most people don't even try to do that. I think 99% of people don't try to do that. So anyway.

Dude, I'll give you a real-life marketing example. When I was in Brazil, I had lunch with one of the biggest retailers in Latin America. All right, so a really big company, they do really well. Their big thing is not just to grow, they're growing, but their thing is also to still be around 10, 20, 30 years from now, right? So the question I had at lunch, because we work with them and they're just like, what would you do differently if you were in our shoes? And I said, we all know agents are coming and agents are going to affect shopping. Their quick response was, in Brazil and Latin America, we believe people are going to be slower than the US to just accept agents spending on their behalf. And I said, that could be the case, but I also think people in the United States are also slow to letting an agent just go and spend on their behalf. I don't think we're there yet either. But nonetheless, we all agree that agents are going to impact transactions, whether it's 3 years from now, 5 years from now, 8 years from now, right? Like, yes. And this is an old company that does extremely well. And I was like, the one thing that people in Latin America aren't doing is optimizing for all the LLMs to choose them. I'm not talking about just showing up on a list of recommendations from ChatGPT. I'm talking about choosing them. Why should they buy from their company? Why do they have the cheapest prices, fastest shipping, or quickest delivery, whatever it may be, best return policy? And I was like, if I were you guys, I would optimize for all the LLMs to choose you and your company and the products that people sell through your company versus someone else. And then they were talking about the revenue implications for them. I'm like, I don't think you're going to see huge revenue gains in the short run. But when agents start making decisions on people's behalf, this will help solidify you and keep your position as the market leader. And I think that is more important to make that bet right now when others aren't making that bet. When yes, your goal is growth, but you already are pretty much one of the largest companies in Latin America. Your goal is not just growth. Your goal is preservation and continually being around 20, 30, 50 years from now. And I'm like, this is a bet that doesn't cost much of your advertising budget that helps ensure that you'll continue being around years later as agents come around and they're like, how are you optimizing for agents? I'm like, look, agents are pulling from the same technology that they're building that are doing the searches and gathering information and giving you advice on what you should or shouldn't buy. It's just taking the next step and helping you complete the transaction. So I'm like, you should start with the first step. in which you're the recommended company to purchase from. And then you have the next step, which is they start automatically doing it and choosing from you.

Yeah. So in my mind, AEO is not only answer engine optimization now, it's actually agent engine optimization, right? Um, which pulls from Google, by the way, guys, like you're still grounded on these things. But here's the thing, Neil, let me show you this. So Doodoo actually handled something for me on Meta. So I bought I bought from on.com, right? It screwed up one of my offers. The the

so you bought from what dot com?

On.com, the the running shoe brand.

Okay.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah. So get this. So I made an an order on September 13th, right? And then they kept going back and forth. I didn't want to deal with it. So I told Doodoo to handle it. I said, "Hey, just keep talking to our support. Keep bothering them every day, right?" And then what happened is they just canceled my order, right? I was like, "Oh no no no no no." I was like, "Me this." Sorry, not me, it's Doodoo. I said, Doodoo, tell them I have a large social media following and I will talk about them if they don't give me— because all they did is they canceled it and they said, here's a 20% off. I'm like, no, no, no, it's got to be better than that. I'm like, right, Doodoo? It's got to be better than that. It's like, yeah, yeah, it's got to be better than that, right? And so what happens over here? I get the 40% off code. I got the 40% off, right? But you have to kind of split the codes up. And it found 2 other 20% codes that I had. And I was like, can you just handle it for me? So then it used Link to buy it, right? So is agentic shopping coming? It's coming because I literally just— this, I think this is one of my first agentic transactions. And you can see here, I'm actually messing with my Turkey flight points because that's where I'm hosting that Global AI Summit thing, right? So I'm having it, hey, have these points over here, can you handle it? So it's getting pretty good. I'm like, hey, hey, I don't want to do trial road testing, but can you just handle it for me? And it's like, I have a little trial road testing thing that's running over here. And it's like, I'm just like, hey, can you just run it end to end? So I think this stuff's going to get a lot better. This is all stuff that you and I don't want to do, Neil. It's all the robot stuff, right? So I think we're going to see it grow pretty rapidly, probably in the next year or 2. So

I agree with you. For me, I have a really good personal assistant and a business assistant, so it's just like they don't mess up on my stuff. And I've had AI mess up too much. And like with travel and stuff like that, I just don't want any hiccups.

Yeah. Travel is a scary one because if you get stuck on one area, your entire day can be done. So yeah.

Yeah.

But by the way, Neil, I've been using Dots from OpenAI, right? So the cool thing about Dots is I can insert it into Slack and I can have it fill in context when other people are talking and I can push my work over there. But the cool thing, and I saw Sam Altman talking about this in an interview, right? I'm like, okay, I'm going to try this. But Every day it's actually telling me like it's connected to your email and all these. It's like, hey Neil, uh, for this transaction over here, you actually have these terms wrong. It seems like you pulled this from maybe another template. So it will spot all those little details and tell you, and then you can forward it over to your team. Or Sam Altman says he has like a living document on all the things he cares about in his business every day, and it's filling out the living document, right? And so the more connectors you have, the better. And so I was initially not big on DOTS, but I think it's going to be a significant deal if you're spending on OpenAI infrastructure or OpenAI tokens, I should say. Yeah. So

doesn't Grok own dots.com or X?

No, I don't think so.

No, dot.com.

Or you mean bots or bot.com? Bot or dot?

Uh, dot is owned by, uh, SpaceX. Oh, I

didn't even know that.

Did you know that? Go to dot.com and go to x.ai/bot.

That's funny. That's funny. I'm sure Elon bought a bunch of domains when he was younger and that was one of them. Yeah,

that was a little branding mishap by OpenAI. You should double-check who owns domains.

By the way, I mean, so I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but there's a couple things we should talk about here because OpenAI has 1 billion MAUs, so monthly active users. So OpenAI just came out with some new distribution channels, and I think we should talk about them, right? So one of them is that you can now use your OpenAI subscription, you can use those tokens, and you can have them distributed to their marketplace, right? So let's say If I'm like Harvey or I'm Ramp or whatever, I can have software in there. You can use your subscription tokens to pay for some of this other software that you might need, right? So I think that's really nice because one, there's a marketplace, um, and then 2, like, that's a, that's a new distribution channel in my mind. But also the second thing too is whatever you're making right now inside of ChatGPT, you can make into a ChatGPT website. So they'll spin the website up, you can put it out there, you can add an MCP to it, but then you can convert it into a plugin. They actually have a plugin ecosystem that they're doubling down on. So that to me is also another distribution channel. So what I'm going to be messing around with when I have time this weekend is I'm going to be messing with this stuff because I'm like, oh, we have like Karat, we have ClickFlow. Like, why don't we just make that into like a— make that into a plugin or make it so people can just, you know, use their tokens and pay for that? You can do the same thing with Ubersuggest too and AnswerThePublic, right? I'm like, why wouldn't we do that?

Yeah, no, I agree. Also, it's like I think that's really wise of OpenAI because people spend a lot of money and they have a lot of unused money. So if you can end up getting the most value from it, it just makes them happier.

I think they're trying to drive more lock-in. That's what it is. So

yes, I'm telling you, dude, the race is going to be competitive. Like, everyone's like, oh, Anthropic's winning, or OpenAI is winning. You give it a few years, Microsoft and Google will just come out and be like, ours is 95% of what you need, or 98%, and it's just included. And I'll be like, okay, sounds good, our company switching to this. People may be like, no, I don't want to. Who cares? It's just saved us a crapload of money. We're switching. No one has a choice.

I think we're already close to there. I think if anything, it happens— the cycle completes in 2027. Like, the frontier is still going to get smarter. Um, but, you know, OpenAI, they're like, oh, if you want to get in the marketplace, I'm sure they're going to open up for everyone. But right now they're like, enterprise people can get invited, right? It's like enterprise people only. And so they're trying to make sure that you lock yourself into an enterprise contract and then they can add Into that.

So by the way, this is just a random note, uh, and this is not financial advice. Do you have access to Xmoney?

Yeah, I do.

I have some dough in there. 6%. Yeah, 6% on your money. And they, uh, I think it's like insured up to $10 million. I'm like, oh, this isn't bad. I'm like, I want 6% on my money. It's better than what I'm getting from

the bank. Did you put some dough in there?

Uh, I was in Brazil when I ended up finding out, but now that I'm back, yeah, I'm transferring on Monday.

Good. I hope you max it out. But here's what I'll say. I mean, xMoney is— that's, by the way, 6% on your money is nuts, right? Because what is the interest rate right now?

Are you talking about the interest rate or SOFR?

Both.

SOFR is, call it, I think 3.7-ish. I'm guessing somewhere around there. The interest rate, if you put your money in a bank account, It's usually below 4% from what I see. You can get above 3% if you have good relationships. It's not that hard. X is giving you a good amount of money. Maybe you can find 4% from somewhere, but they're also— their credit card fees on cashback is 3%. You know, like I have an Amex Centurion card. You know, I've spent good money in the past. I think I still spend decent money on a monthly basis, at least on the personal business. We went away from it. But even on the personal end, right? I don't know what I spend on an annual basis, but I'd rather have 3% cashback than points. Just give me the 3%. I'll take that all day long.

The lesson here is the offer matters. It's a damn good offer. You get 6% on your money and then you get 3% and they give you a nice card as well, which doesn't matter as much. But also X Money, like they want you to be able to transfer to each other, your creator payouts that you get on X. I think I have like $1,200 sitting in my X account right now, Neil. Like the more you share your Grok bots, by the way, you get like $500 for sharing your Grok bots, right? I think you have to share at least twice or whatever. So there's a couple of things here. A really good offer matters, right? And also show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Now everybody's just got to try to make a bunch of bots and they're going to try to generate more buzz around it. So

I tweeted this one time, but I wish they would do this and I don't think they're going to. In my ideal world, I want the 3% In, uh, SpaceX stock. So it would be really cool for every time my family swipes their credit card, I would get more SpaceX shares.

I bet you, you know who I think would do that? Robinhood would try to come out with a product like that.

It would be really good. I'm like, yeah, just give me it in stock. I don't need the cashback. Just give me it in stock.

That's why I like the Coinbase card because it just keeps giving you more Bitcoin. So. Oh,

okay. I never tried the Coinbase card.

4% back for Bitcoin.

4% on everything?

There's a limit on it, but yeah.

Yeah. I, I like that. And give me the SpaceX stock instead.

It's 4% up to like a certain amount and then it's, then it's, then it stays at 1%, I think. So.

No, 1%. I'm happy with 3% for my total spend. I'll switch my corporate cards to it as well.

Yeah. Well, so guys, the power of the offer, right? By the way, one more thing we should talk about, Neil, is the fact that OpenAI labs, like OpenAI, they're paying for data, right? Whether it's OpenAI or Anthropic. And so you've probably gotten these offers too, right? So there's like funny videos being made about this as well. So some people, depending on the size of your business, it could be millions of dollars or it can be like hundreds of thousands of dollars. So these labs are going through third parties and the third parties are reaching out to you and they're offering, they're saying, hey, they would like to buy your data. Are you open to selling it? Right? So the question, Neil, is If you own a company, should you be selling your data to these labs? And it also depends too, because if you're in like the medical field, you probably shouldn't be selling that data, right? But I think it depends, but you can answer first.

You cut out at the last minute. They could be messing with my electricity or something, but—

Oh yeah. So what I was saying is that should you be— the labs are paying millions for your data, right? Or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Should you be selling your data to these labs?

It depends on your business model. If you are Britannica, sure, because it's hard for you to monetize in other ways. If you're a corporation selling a product or a service, you're like Amazon or something like that, and you have a lot of e-commerce data, you should not be selling your data.

Yep. My take on this is exactly that. Like, if you're in the medical field, you shouldn't be selling your data. You have a lot of confidential information in there, and that's bad on you to do that. But I'll say this, like, if you're in transition with your business right now, let's say you're transitioning to a completely different type of business, you're becoming more AI-enabled or whatever it is, technically you can sell your stuff right now as you make this transition because it kind of doesn't matter, right? Uh, provided that you're in an industry that allows you to do it. So I think the answer is it depends. But here's the other thing, Neil. If these labs are willing to pay millions and millions of dollars for data from all these people, guess what? My bet is they're all going to come and try to compete in these places. in these spaces. Like, why wouldn't you? If you have the best frontier intelligence, why would you just not try to compete with everyone where it seems like there's a good place to attack?

Yep. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think the data is what's really going to separate you from the competitors because everyone's going to have similar models over time and it's catching up. I know these models are getting better and better, but I don't think the innovation is growing as fast from the leaps and bounds perspective from version to version, like compared to what it was a year ago. I know it's better, much better now, but you would see leaps and bounds. And it was also at a much earlier standpoint where there was a lot of bad stuff and you would see things being fixed and just being much better. Yeah. Like you can see video comparisons of people using OpenAI versus Anthropic and like, yeah, I'm all— I'm all Claude, I'm all ChatGPT. And you're looking at the videos and they're like, they're pretty much similar. There's not that much of a difference. Like they both work.

Yeah. Well, I'll say one thing, like I was, I was, um, I've been making more YouTube videos, right? Because I'm no longer encumbered on that front. And I've talked about this on this podcast, so I can pump out a lot more content. So yesterday I had one come out, um, and it did decently on my channel. I think like 17,000 views or something like that in the first 24 hours. And so for me, because I'm targeting more B2B and, and, uh, business type Um, you know, audience with my content. Like, by the way, it's been driving leads too. I'm like, this is good. But, um, my point is that your time is compressing a lot faster, right? And so I would say last year, Opus 4 or 5, in around— from around December, you can code a lot more, but you couldn't do what you're doing now from, from like an editing standpoint or like a design standpoint from, from thumbnails. So you're just able to do more now. Um, and that's why it's, it's not as impressive as it was like a year ago where it was a major step change. Whoa, what was that, Neil? Did someone drop something?

That's what I was saying, the electricity. They're doing construction on the lights in the house right now.

I see, I see. Okay, so look at this study. It says 94% of marketers say AI hasn't made a significant impact. I have thoughts on this already. So the key takeaway says a new study found that just 6% marketers report that AI is impacting performance at their firms. The problem certainly is in adoption, with 47% of marketing leaders saying that AI is a core capability for the industry. Researchers note that to become a marketing leader that actually sees impact, You have to establish a centralized AI strategy that focuses on customer value. So who said this exactly? Oh, study from Bain. Okay, so it's from Bain. All right. Okay, got it. And, you know, only 6% of marketing professionals say that AI has influenced performance in a significantly positive way, despite 47% of leaders noting it's a core capability. So, so how are these 6% of professionals making a difference with marketing? They focus on providing top-down centralized AI strategy rather than throwing tools at employees and hoping for the best. Let me react to this one first. Okay. First and foremost, this is coming from Bain. Okay. So Bain is not exactly like— to me, they're like a slow-moving behemoth, right? Um, I think they're like a poster child for what's going to happen to a lot of these services firms, right, if they don't adopt quickly. And so they probably service a lot— surveyed a lot of their employees as well. But here's what I'll say. When you have a lot of bloat in your organization, you're talking about the top 1 to 5% or so. This actually maps pretty well in my mind. And so of course, only 6%, these are the top 6% of people. The rest are just slot-grenading it or they're not even using this stuff. That's my opinion. Go ahead, Neil.

So I used to, when I go to conferences, I used to ask people how AI is impacting them. And then most people would say it doesn't really produce much revenue for them. And then over time it changed where a lot of people like, yeah, it does produce a lot of results. And then I started asking follow-up questions to the audience, when they used to say like, yeah, it produces really good results because then it started becoming the majority. And then I'd say, other people are raising their hands. How many of your guys' companies actually growing this year? And so many put their hands down. I'm like, okay, so it's actually not working out the way you think it's working out, right? The biggest way we see AI helping in marketing is actually driving new business. I'm not saying the technology can't help marketers perform better. Do better A/B testing on creatives and be more efficient with campaigns. But where we really see the win is people who are dominating paid and organic on the LLMs. That's the number one way we're seeing more growth. The second is, is things like creative testing. That's the second area that we see huge wins on. The third area is in data and analytics and reducing wasted spend. But those are the top 3 areas we're seeing right now with most of the companies we're working with when they're seeing wins from AI specifically. But yeah, does that mean that's how it's going to be in the future? No, I think it's going to get better, but the technology is really early on. And the issue you have at the same time that you're seeing positive gains, what's distorting the whole image and the data is you have a lot of people just using AI, running up costs, and working on things that would don't matter in marketing, that would never move the needle. Whether they hired 5 more humans to do this or whether they use AI to do this, it doesn't matter. They're working on crap that doesn't really move the needle. And that's, I see, is a bigger problem in organizations than the technology itself. It's people are focusing on the wrong thing. But that's what we're seeing on our end.

So let me just call this out and then I'm going to show you a chart over here because, Neil, we like charts. The challenge is, and we've talked about this on the podcast quite a bit, AI is just an intelligence amplifier, right? And I've called this out quite a few times. And so here's the thing. Why do most people say that, okay, being average is not a good thing? And also, why do most people say that being like most people is also not a good thing? It's because you're average, right? But when you think about it, what does the average person want? The average person wants everything, but they don't want to work for anything, right? And so if you put that into If you take that in mind, right, and if you think about, well, if AI is leverage, it's going to blow up the mindset of the good people, right? In terms of the good— I'm not going to say any of these people are bad, but the people who want to work hard versus the people that don't want to work hard, that gets blown up completely and it reveals everyone completely. We've talked about this so many times. I don't think it's going to be the last time that we talk about it, Neil. And the other thing that Andreessen Horowitz called out too, there's a chart that I'm trying to pull up right now. Only 3% of people in the world are paying for AI right now from like a personal standpoint. Yeah. So here we go. Here, I have the chart. Let me show you the chart and then we can react to this. All right, so check this out. You see this? So check this out, Neil. This is— and you're muted, by the way. So this is from Andreessen Horowitz. It says more and more households are paying for AI. So when you look at January 2023, it's like basically 0%. When you look at— this is April 2026, 2.2%. So 98% of households aren't paying for AI yet. Neil, what you just said earlier, we're still very early as well.

Yeah. And on a random note, I know we have time for a few more topics. Eric and I are no longer looking for clippers. We don't need our content clipped anymore. You saw the recent YouTube announcement, right?

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Explain what clipping means though.

So

clipping means 2 things. So

sure. Well, a lot of people do when they talk about clipping and marketing is they take long pieces of content like this, or it could be content that we created from other podcasts or speeches, and they'll take short little clips, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and they start posting them from a lot of different accounts on Instagram, on YouTube, and all the other social networks. Sometimes these accounts are other people's accounts. Sometimes it could be Neil Patel SEO clips, Neil Patel business clips, Neil Patel social media clips, right? And it could be for a channel that's just specifically about me talking about social media or just Instagram and me giving Instagram advice. So YouTube ended up putting something out there and it says, hey everyone, our recommendation systems are designed to connect viewers with videos they find genuinely valuable. We evaluate billions of signals including watch history, topic interests, and engagement. To ensure the best possible experience for viewers. To improve the Shorts experience for everyone, we're updating our recommendation systems to further prioritize original content and reduce the reach of content re-uploaded from other creators without adding anything of their own. This update to our recommendation system delivers a better experience for viewers while ensuring creators publishing original content have the best chance to grow and succeed. This change is also aligned with our existing YouTube policies. What this means for you: focus on originality. Channels identified as primarily aggregating or re-uploading other creator videos without significant changes will likely see less distribution within the Shorts feeds. If you use clips from another— if you use clips from another creator, make sure you're adding real value through your own original commentary, unique edits, or storytelling. And add in your own. Then the next bullet was add your own unique perspective or take, which is kind of similar to the one on being more original.

Yeah. So by the way, Instagram was already doing this, right? And so what Neil's really calling out here is that the reason why we're no longer hiring clippers, one, clipping is actually easier now because these bots are going to get better at clipping the moments for you. But also what Neil is talking about in terms of spamming, like a lot of these clippers were spamming, like they would actually, they would take some from some of my interviews, like your Rich BFF. They would steal the clip and then they would put it on another channel and it would blow up on another channel, right? And so that unoriginal stuff, or even, uh, like these— a lot of these faceless channels where they use AI to generate a lot of this content, they're trying to reduce that because they know that if it just becomes a bunch of low-quality stuff, people are going to leave the platform and they're not going to make as much money.

Did you ever get pitched on creating like Eric Siu SEO, Eric Siu marketing? Did you ever do it, like creating like 20 channels?

No, I never did it. No.

You? Yeah, me neither. I never liked it because I was just like, I don't mind people clipping my own content and then me posting my own content. But like, dude, even my team, like, you need to create 10 channels. Look how Mosey does it. I'm like, that's great. It's probably working really well for him. I'm not interested in this tactic.

Yeah. What I'll say is, like, by the way, I'm sure you see this in your DMs when you check your Instagram DMs. There's all these clippers that reach out and it's always like, hey bro, hey bro, hey bro, hey brother, hey brother, hey brother. And it's like, dude, you start with that, man, I'm just not going to respond to you, man. Like, like, and these are like kids, right? But what I say, like, if you're a kid right now, uh, like, by the way, I think kids can do many amazing things. We hire people like teenagers, right, um, that are doing amazing work from like a coding standpoint, and their parents say it's okay, right? Um, but my whole thing is the people that we hire, they behave very professionally, and it's all about, hey, what can they actually build and what leverage can they add, right? Because to me now, if we're talking about clipping, like, if we use my YouTube channel as an example, Like, I'm gonna pat myself on the back over here because there's 3 different things happening right now. I no longer need a thumbnail person. I no longer need an editor anymore. I don't even need a poster for me on this one anymore in terms of someone scheduling it because the AI just does it for me, right? And so some of these videos, like, I got this one out, like, I recorded this, uh, after Dev Day. I just recorded it. It's like a 7-minute video. I just cranked it out, right? And I'm like, hey, yeah, put some gold in there, you know, put some, you know, put that in there. Hey, for this one, you know, put, put the dots in there, put the Grokbots in there. I'm enjoying myself. Look, look, look at the muscle one over here, right? Where it's like, did that one do as well? No, it didn't do as well, right?

But I'm just saying you enjoy the content and it's related to your single brain company and you'll get more qualified leads. And it did well from that perspective. Maybe you didn't get 14,000 or 20,000 views, but who cares? Because it's targeting your ideal customer. Because someone who's talking about Jev maxing and Jev for marketing is ideal customer for Single Brain, not the grain side, but the brain side, which many of you guys haven't heard of yet and you guys should check out. And that's the type of content that's going to generate you revenue because the companies that already know about Jev, they're usually companies who are on cutting edge and looking for services like your Single Brain.

By the way, to Neil's point, I actually want to pull up Neil's channel in a moment here. But if you're doing 1,800 views, imagine you're in like a basketball stadium, like a high school basketball stadium, right? That's close to 2,000 people that watch it. Or Neil, when I do my webinars, I put them live and I actually want to come to you in a second. But when I did like this one over here, 5,800 views, right? Or this one has 12,000. So you do a webinar, you can somehow fill up like a stadium full of people. That's amazing, right? And so anyway, Neil, let's go to your channel real quick because you do the webinars, but you don't set them to go live here, right? What's the reason for that?

It goes live on YouTube.

Yeah, but then you don't leave it there.

Yeah, I have no idea why we do or do not do it.

I think it makes sense for you to leave it there. If you have like, unless you're trying to gate it all and like people get around it, but I'm like, if they get around it, they get around it. So

I'll find out from my team. I know we do use it in email sequence follow-ups to collect more leads. So it could be that's why they don't want to end up putting it live, but, or Keeping it live, but I'll find out from

him. That's cool. By the way, this is Neil and I from 6 years ago. It's pretty funny with Noah here as well. But Neil, do you want to go through your channel real quick? Because you've been cranking out more content. And so let's look at your channel for a second.

Yeah. So let's see, is GPT-6 going to change marketing? Got a decent amount of views. How to start an AI marketing agency. We're looking for more agencies, hence some of that content as well. Why ChatGPT is ignoring biggest Chains. So we're trying to go very specific. Chains would be like local franchises and stuff like that. Franchises make up good customers for us because you have to remember, we may not make a lot from one store, but if they have 500 stores in the United States or 500 stores or 1,000 globally, it adds up to, you know, a pretty penny over time.

I think this is smart. Look, when you go with the chains, because Neil wants more chains, right? Why ChatGPT is ignoring the biggest chains. It's like, oh damn, like I'm a chain, like I need like If you're a chain, like you're doing a lot in revenue, right? You can just stack them all up together. So, and by the way, I'm pretty sure Neil tweaked this with his team over time because before, like there's like how to become rich right now. It's, I'm sure a lot of your opinion comes into this, right?

It does. And it's not just my opinion. We take it from our sales team. So what's in the pipe? What are our best customers? What has the lowest churn? We're taking those type of customers and then creating content based on their problems.

Yep. I think that's really good. And so by the way, guys, like if you have your customer calls stored in like a Gong or whatever it is, you can easily just query up the API to MCP and you can use Jev to classify it, right? And then if you're creating content, then it can give you a list of content to go after. So anyway, at least for me now, Neil, I'm enjoying YouTube more. I don't know about you. Are you enjoying it more?

I'm enjoying it. And yeah, I'm picking more of the topics and being more specific, so much so that my recording sessions are pretty quick now. I'm I've also condensed it too. So I only do long forms once a month and I do short forms twice a month and that's it. Because it was getting overwhelming. Like sometimes I'd be recording twice in a week and I'm like, this is becoming too much.

Yeah, cool. Well, anyway guys, that's it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we will catch you tomorrow.