You're Not Behind (Yet): The New Marketing Playbook

All right everyone, we're going live today and we're doing this podcast on Neil's birthday. He's very old now. Happy birthday, Neil.

Thank you.

All right, so we're going to jump into things. We got a lot to talk about today. First and foremost, we want to make an announcement. Neil and I will both be speaking at this summit in LA. So if you want to hang out with us, it's invite only, but I don't think it's going to cost you a dime. So it's the Social Commerce Summit. Again, it's the Social Commerce Summit. I think it's socommsummit.com or something like that. So S-O-C-O-M-M-S-U-M-M-I-T. I think we're both speaking on May 14th or something like that. So check it out. There's going to be some cool speakers there, but more than anything, you can come hang out with us if you are in LA.

It's in Manhattan Beach.

All right, so let's jump into it, Neil. So I've been seeing a lot of stuff earlier this week. I posted about TBPN about how their clipping system works, and that post actually did really well. TVPN, the one that sold to OpenAI for $200 million, the podcast.

Oh yeah, the podcasting company.

Well, yeah, the tech bro, they call it Tech Bros Podcast Network or whatever. It's not really called that. But remember we talked about how this podcast, in 18 months they went from, in 18 months they went up to $5 million and then this year they were on track to do $30 million in advertising revenue, which is a good chunk. And then they sold to OpenAI supposedly. For $200 million. And so I actually had my OpenClaw do some research on how exactly their strategy works, and I literally just cut and pasted that to Twitter, got 150,000 views on it. And so I think it's, it's worth us talking about this. And people talking about chief clipping officers, um, they're talking about the clipping economy, um, why Andreessen Horowitz is crushing it with social views. I think all these things connect because I just had lunch with a guy who's really strong with social. His name is Ryan. And we're just talking about how this is like the new meta, the new way of playing this game. So let's talk about that. How about that? You want to see the post?

Yeah, I want to see the post. Well, what's the breakdown? I also think one of the reasons that they do well is a lot of it has to do with the topic, right? A lot of the topics that they talk about are ones that it's easier to get views on, just in my personal opinion. And it's also the people that they have on as guests. They're so successful and a lot of people want to hear from them. It makes it even easier to get the views.

Yeah. So here's what I would say. I'm going to share my screen here. So what I have some thoughts around this, especially after having the lunch. Okay, so Neil, look at this. So TBPN is a 7K live viewer podcast that sold to OpenAI for $200 million because their average clip gets 257K views. Everyone's talking about the strategy. So this is from this guy, Eric Siu. on Twitter. Um, and then it says, here's the structure. Uh, number 1, format is engineered for clippability. And we should— I can actually click around here, Neil, so you can see the clips, because I think there's probably some things we can take away for this considering all the time and effort we put into this. I think we're coming up on 10 years on this thing. So they stream, Neil, 3 hours a day, live, 5 days a week. We ain't gonna do that. Okay, so massive raw inventory demand. We have businesses to run. Not that they don't have a business, but that is their business, right? Um, Guest call-ins. So to your point, Neil, they have like Mark Cuban come on. They might have Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber. So they have 6 to 8 per show, built in 5 to 10-minute self-contained segments. Every guest segment is a prepackaged clip candidate with a hook, an arc, and a payoff. The hosts read the tweets live on air. You get instant memes, okay? And then the tweet author shares the clip back, distribution loop. So high and low aesthetic. So you have a mahogany desk, cinematic lighting. suits, but the content is group chat casual. So they make the clips feel premium and authentic at the same time. So let's go one at a time. So what do you think about this?

I think that helps, but I think the biggest thing there is actually the guests. Because when any of those people say anything, if you're talking to them for an hour, you're going to get some aha moment that you can just like clip and it'll just skyrocket. And you use Mark Cuban as an example. Do you remember him in the All In podcast and the clip that went viral all over Instagram? You saw that, right? I—

you have to remind me on what it was.

So during the All-In podcast, which is, uh, the besties, right? There's 4 of them. They were doing one of their summits and Mark Cuban was on stage with Tucker Carlson, I believe it was. And they were talking about Ukraine. When you have a lot of these rich people, they tend to be asked about things that are outside of what they're known for. So a lot of times people talk to them about money or politics or war. And someone asked Mark Cuban, they asked Mark Cuban about Ukraine and if the US should fund or help them out. And I think Mark Cuban, I'm paraphrasing here, said, I think so. I'm Ukrainian. I'm talking as he is, or part of his family is from Ukraine on, I don't know which side. And Tucker Carlson said, so you're Ukrainian?

Why don't you put in the money? Yeah.

Have you given any money? And he says, no. And he's like, you're a billionaire. And he's like, well, I'm trying to solve healthcare. And then he's like, solve healthcare in Ukraine. And then he said, it's so hypocritical for you billionaires to tell other people what to do when you're not really willing to cough up your own money. Now, again, I'm paraphrasing and I'm off, but that's roughly the context of what was discussed. And you guys get the point. But that went viral. And it's not hard for those kind of things to go viral, especially with billionaires who are really well known. Again, Eric and I are not here to sit, talk about war and politics, and if Mark Cuban or anyone else should fund or not fund any war or anything like that. But this is just the example we're using here to explain why it's so much easier to go viral on that topic. Now, on the flip side, if you took someone like me or Eric and you put ourselves in Mark Cuban's shoes, it wouldn't go anywhere nearly as viral because we're not multi-billionaires who own a sports team.

So here's what I'll say. So my thoughts on this one. So format is engineered for clippability, not the other way around. So Neil, I'm not going to say you're wrong. I think these 2 things can exist in the same world. So you can have a guest come in and that's why they designed that section for that. But I would also say that when you do 3 hours a day and you do 5 days a week, this massive raw inventory is really important because to me, clipping is like a slot machine. It's, I just look at it as you never know what's going to take off. So for example, you and I talk about Shake Shack discount, 8 million views. You and I talk about Loro Piana discounts, 4 million views on it. Okay, let me show you something else here, Neil. Remember, there's a period of time where I was experimenting with this. Look at this. You see my Shorts channel over here?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. What does it show you on my most popular Shorts?

I can't see.

You can't see? Okay, so Neil's blind. Okay, so I think Neil's on an iPad right now.

I can see Your Rich BFF. No, I'm on my laptop. I can see Your Rich BFF. I can't see the number 2 person. Then number— I mean, I can't— and number 3, number 4 is also Your Rich BFF.

I'll read it to you. So basically, this is my Shorts channel, okay? Or this is my YouTube channel. So the number 1 is Your Rich BFF, and she has— this one has 3.9 million views on it. So the title is How Rich Can You Get on Content Creation? Number 2 over here is This will change your perception around money. Number 3, never stay at a job for more than 2 years, right? And so all these are based on what? Personal finance, based on real estate. This is based on investing over here. It's a wide TAM. And here's the thing, the way I did these podcasts was, Neil, I engineered it for clipping. I made it so the questions I asked were the hook itself. Now, I think that part is good and we don't necessarily do that here. And look at this over here, $135K with Bryan Johnson, and you have all these other people over here. So I think when you create the conditions to make it more where you create more opportunities to get lucky, I think that's what they're doing, right? And I think when you add the guests in that you're creating more opportunities to get lucky and that's why it pays off. Because here's the thing, Neil, if they're only getting like, I think 7,000 live viewers is actually a lot, but when they average 257K views, a lot of that's coming from X. And what they do at the end of these videos, Neil, is they add an ad at the end of it. So that actually is their ad inventory. And I think that's really smart. I'm like, oh, we should do that for ours. Like, we should have these clips and then have an ad at the end of it.

Yeah. And you're so right. When you used to do that and Eric stopped doing, you know, trying to go viral on social media with clips and it was an experiment for him and he quickly realized it was getting him attention, but it wasn't driving as much revenue as he would like. So then he shifted. And again, he didn't assume when he started that it was going to drive tons of revenue. It was just an experiment to see what would happen with his brand and if that would create more business. I do believe you did go to some EO or YPO events and more people said that they were noticing you because of the clip.

You know who came up to me? It was the wives that came and said, I really liked that clip. I was like, oh, okay, thanks.

But you're spot on about the engineering because if you go back to the Mark Cuban, Tucker Carlson example, why would you put them both on a stage unless you're trying to provoke something and trying to get some clips?

Yeah, so let me show you something real quick, Neil. I got access to this new tool. Shout out to this tool, Social Proof. So you see this over here?

Yep.

Okay, so this actually shows over the last 3 months or so how TBPN has done. So you can see here, they have this clip over here. Those of you that can't see the screen right now, this is Andrew, they're interviewing Andrew Huberman. So you know Andrew Huberman, very popular doctor. So this one got 4.5 million impressions and it looks like it was on X. A lot of their views, Neil, you can see their top channels. Look, 97% of their views are coming from X, okay? 1.3% from Shorts. So you would expect that they would do really well on TikTok or Instagram, for example. And so when I was having lunch with Ryan today, just now, he's like, dude, your content. So talking about us, Neil, your content should live more on X and LinkedIn because that's where your audience is. And I was thinking about it. I was like, yeah, my really good leads actually come in from X. It's not like, or like a LinkedIn. It doesn't really come from— YouTube, if I'm being honest, at least for me personally. I think it's different for you, but I think it's— when you look at social proof and you look at how they've been growing over time, it's like they hit on the right audience because all the tech bros are actually hanging out on X. Yes.

Speaking of right audiences, you saw what happened with MrBeast, right? And someone ended up breaking down how his views are going down and he's declining. And then he actually set up a meeting with them and he's like, oh cool, I want to learn more and get some ideas.

Yeah. No, when was this?

I don't know when it was, but I saw it last week.

Dude, but Neil, as a separate thing, I'm not going to read the entire tweet here, but like it shows the entire analysis, like the clip itself, consistent visual grammar, the caption tweet wrapper volume and cadence, the real edge. By the way, again, the other meta game here is this post generated 126K views, right? Like not bad for an OpenClaw generated post.

That's a lot.

Yeah. So do you want to see one of their clips? Let's just show people here.

Okay. Aggression, and you will be back soon. You did. Now I—

So anyway, it's going really long. I'm just gonna play the end of it just so you guys can see the ad, but I think my thing's freezing a little bit. Hold on, let me go back here.

I don't get why they went viral.

Yeah, I think it's just, dude, it's, it's just sheer volume, Neil. Um, but I don't know why my, my thing has frozen. Um, anyway, you can continue while I try to repair this.

Yeah, look, I think clipping is worth it. I think you have to pick the right platform to clip, and instead of optimizing for views, you need to optimize for views with your right audience. You may not get the leads you want or the sales directly, and that's okay because I still think the branding is worth it. But I think the mistake that most people make with clipping is the content doesn't resonate with their ideal customer. And if it does resonate with their ideal customer, because you can say, hey, everyone's interested in finance. Well, if what you don't sell is, if you're not selling finance, getting views for finance isn't going to help your main business. So it needs to be related to your main business and the content needs to be around that. And then you need to focus on the channels that are relevant where your ideal customers are sitting. It's the same reason why I don't really log on to TikTok or Instagram much. Yes, we collect leads from Instagram and TikTok and I'm passing them on to my team, But even then, it's not like it's our main core focus because we know that's not going to really change our business. Yeah.

So to Neil's point, I'm back on the TBPN X account over here. So look, they have 400,000 followers and they just did a show about 2 hours ago. So they had Gary Vee. I think this is the CEO of CrowdStrike.

Yep.

CEO of CrowdStrike. They had Ben Horowitz, not Ben Horowitz, but Ben Horowitz. And then they had, looks like the CEO of ComfyUI. And so they're bringing on people that have reached, to Neil's point, and this is a 2-hour podcast. Look, 5,000 100,000 views livestream.

Okay, wait, is it with all of them at the same time?

No, it separates them. So I think they'll bring them on like during this time, they'll just call them in at a certain time and then they join. Um, so I think that's actually really smart. Um, and so when you go with this video over here, I'm just gonna boost it very good. The chat asked for a fire. There's no ad on that one. I want to play one with an ad real quick. Okay, look, they— and they take pictures, so they have a production crew where you can see they're sitting in the middle, Gary Vee's in the back, and they're, they're doing this. Like, that's pretty Cool. So let's pick one over here. Do you see? Okay, this one with Cathie Wood.

Here we go.

Good impression.

Have a great day. Enjoy. How about this one?

Let's see. This is Mark Benioff. Those of you that can't see, and Mark Benioff obviously has a large reach, especially on X. $41 billion public and made the CEO of Salesforce. Let's see what we've got here. I think we've made $1.5 billion on that. I think we've made $1.5 billion on Wiz. Gorgeous. I think we have now. So they put an ad at the bottom over here with AppLovin, and then they have all their sponsors at the bottom. But I do see them at the very end of these sometimes say, hey, go check out Axon over here, go check out AppLovin at the end. And I think that starts to become more interesting for advertisers. That's what I saw.

Yep.

Cool. Anyway, all that to say is like this post alone, Neil, people talking about this and revealing the strategy, people are like, oh, you need to hire a chief clipping officer now. I think what you need, maybe it's not a chief clipping officer. I do think you need someone with taste that knows how to find the right moments and make sure that they're published to the right channel. Because I do think the type of stuff we talk about here, if we publish it the right way to X and to an extent LinkedIn, it would do better because again, that's where I see the good leads coming from.

Yeah, but we also have to manufacture the clips. And what I mean by that is not just the people to help us clip or using software, it's more so what we're saying. Because when you and I are trying to get views, it's still hard for us to go viral. It's hard for anyone to go viral, but we can add more nuggets intentionally. And we do know that it'll help with views.

I do think so. Here's the thing, Neil. I watched some of our videos, some of our podcasts from like maybe like 10 minutes or so from like a week ago. And within that 10 minutes, Neil, no joke. And I tend to think that I have high standards. I found at least 3 clippable moments in that 10 minutes. And so it's a matter of finding the right people because we are talking about timely things. And guess what? A lot of my topics come from what? Twitter. So, and then you and I are, we do talk to a lot of amazing people too. And we have a lot of interesting conversations. Now, what could we change differently? We're not going to record 3 hours a day, but what I would do if we actually, if you wanted to make this practical for yourself is maybe you're doing 1 or 2 lives per week. And Neil, basically he does a webinar every 2 weeks or so. I consider it a live. I consider those like if he's presenting mainly, there's probably clippable moments from that too. So I just think the way you look at it now, it's like the guy that wrote The Clipping Economy, he wrote an X article about this. It's not so much about the main podcast, like this main podcast, it's more about the clips. Because Neil, to your point, when people walk up to me at a conference or a dinner, it's, hey, I saw you in this clip. It's not, hey, I listened to your podcast. I saw you in this clip. So that's how things are kind of changing a little bit.

Yeah. And on a side note, you have a topic here, why A16Z is crushing it with social views. So I'm curious what that says, because my take on why A16Z does so well is you have 2 billionaires who people want to hear from, and they are— they have become more polarizing over the past few years, especially when they started getting into politics and just being open with their opinions.

Okay. So here, this is, uh, so everybody— okay, this guy tweets this. This guy's name is Mitchell. Everyone wants to be a new media company, but few know how to make viral content. Okay, so you can see over here, um, Andreessen— I think these are all Andreessen Horowitz-backed companies. Okay, so, uh, we raised $7.5 million to kill AI Slap, 4.4 million views. Introducing Meridian, 5.2 million views. My last company, Opendoor, did this. Okay, whatever they're working on now. 1.7 million views, and then this one over here, 3.5 million views. So what I was actually looking at before, let me bring up this, this will be helpful too, and then we can react to this. So Neil, to your point, this is Andreessen Horowitz before buying Terpentine, and Terpentine, it's ran by this guy named Eric, I forgot what his name is, and look at it now. So the thumbnails are way different than before, and the approach, the different types of topics they're covering. So just so those of you that can't see on the screen, a year ago, Some of their videos would get like 2,000 views, 3,000 views or so, 3,000 views. Some would go up, 484K, some would get 93,000 or so, which is pretty good. But when you have their stature and you're getting 1,000 to 3,000 views, that's not that good, right? Now, A Day's Meal, the new thumbnails, 13K views, 14K views, 161K views, 20K views. So it's a lot better than it was before. And this guy's argument, Guillaume, is that When they bought Turpentine and they actually started hiring, you know, new media people, they started to do a lot better.

Yeah, you can see that.

Yeah, so I mean, you can see, I mean, just they have like Magic Johnson here, right? And talking about investing, they got Andrew Huberman. So I think they got better guests, they got better packaging, and they just knew how to play the game in a better way versus what they had before. Because you look at this implementation data impact of healthcare AI with Julie and Vijay. One, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Julie and Vijay, Don't really know who you are. Um, and then it's like, okay, that title is boring. I don't want to spend my valuable attention to click on that. Versus if you show me Magic Johnson and the peptide revolution with Andrew Huberman, I'm going to click on this. You show me Alex Karp from Palantir, I'm going to click on it because he's entertaining.

Well, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen are extremely connected with not just influential business people, with a lot of celebrities, and they know them. And like, if you look at the dinners and the parties and all this kind of stuff that they've done over the years. They're able to get the right group of people around the table for almost anything. And of course, if you put the right packaging around it, it's not hard. If you look at the companies who are consistently getting the views, I'm not talking about the 11,000 or 13,000 views. I'm talking about when you get like hundreds of thousands, if not millions. A lot of times it's all about who you can end up bringing on.

Yep.

I think that makes a big difference.

I think one of the big value adds they have as a venture firm is the media piece because they just look, they're helping all— they have a playbook that helps and I think they all kind of just promote each other. And by the way, guys, like drop a comment below if you think we are basically the TBE PN for marketing, drop a comment. That'll make— that would be interesting to me. Okay, so look, you're seeing a couple things. They're good at clipping, they're good at packaging. The main Meta theme, I think, or the overarching theme is how they play the game. They know how to play the game natively for each platform, which is ironically also called meta. Not the advertising company, but the optimized way of playing the game for each channel. So anyway, that's the one on that one.

Cool.

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Mm-hmm.

Okay, so I'm going to show you these charts because Neil, you like charts. So TBPN average livestream viewership versus clip viewership, what do you see here?

I can't read it, my screen's too small.

Oh my God, do you have like a—

TBPN average livestream viewership versus clip viewership, live views is 7K, clip views is 257K?

Exactly, which is what we talked about earlier, right? And this is from sources are Kalanidhi and Samir and Prof G. He's basically saying, look, this is where legacy media's like, cute, but clips don't make money. And so he's saying, this is where they're wrong. Unlike most media organizations, TBPN bakes ads directly into their clips. At the end of each 1-minute snippet, the clip was brought to you by. Ads are enabled in TBPN to generate $5 million in revenue last year, on track for $30 million in 2026. The podcast isn't so much a podcast as a vehicle for generating clips. The same could be said of many podcasts, by the way, but the ingenuity of TBPN is that they're the first organization whose business model actually reflected that. So, when I think about some of the podcasts I listen to right now, I was listening to a Peptides episode with Diary of a CEO, and you could tell by the way he's asking questions, it's just to get the clips. It's to get the clips, right? And you can see sometimes when I record, I was like, Neil, let me get that clip, let me get that clip, right? And so, when we do get that clip, when we take this, like when our clips take off, Neil, you know they take off. It's just we don't— I'll make an open call. If you're amazing at clips, Neil and I, we are looking to have you for the Marketing School Podcast just to amplify what it is we're doing because we've been doing this for such a long time. Now look at this, Neil. So I'm going to read this off. So you look at average livestream viewership versus clip viewership, okay? April 2026. Hasan Piker, don't really know who that is. Nick Fuentes, I think he's a political commentator. And then Clavicular, I've seen him in clips. So look at this. Average livestream viewership, okay, 33K, which I think is a lot. Average clip viewership, 706,000. Nick Fuentes, 612,000. 19K for average livestream. And then Clavicular, okay, 16K and then 251K.

That's a lot.

Okay, now I think there's one more chart over here. So it's no secret that legacy media isn't doing well. Over the past 5 years, companies like Disney, Warner Bros., Discovery, and Comcast have lost a lot more than a third of their value. No amount of streaming acquisitions, rebrands, or spinoffs have been able to stop the bleeding. So if you look at this, Neil, we got Comcast, Comcast going down and to the right, Disney going down to the right, and then Warner Brothers is actually— they were down before, but they're coming back up.

Dude, it's, uh, interesting because I was in New York earlier this week and someone was telling me how all these social creators are making a killing. Some of it's because of their audience, some of it's because of live streaming, like the Twitches of the world and stuff like that. And what they're breaking down is A lot of them got really popular because of certain viral clips, and then from there they started building up their audience. So one of the guys there was talking about IShowSpeed. Have you seen IShowSpeed?

Yeah, I know who that is.

And he always says that phrase, I can beat him, I can beat him, and everything, right?

Yeah.

And I don't know if you saw the chart that breaks down how fast he is if you compared him to any US college men's track star, right? So if you're in a college in the US, He wouldn't even rank in the top 100, top 200. Now I'm not saying he's not fast. I think it was like something like he was ranked somewhere between 300 and 600. I'm not saying he's not fast. He's much quicker than me. He probably can literally run laps around me.

Both of us.

Yes. And the point I'm making here is people assume if you can go viral and get lots and lots of views, you make lots of money. So we were talking about IShowSpeed and they're like, dude, he makes— someone's telling me on the other side of the table, like he makes over $100 million a year. I'm like, there's no way. IShowSpeed makes over $100 million.

Oh, for sure he does.

You think he does? You should see how much revenue he makes from—

Not $100 million a year. I think he's, he's worth over $100 million. That's what— that was what I was trying to say.

Sure, he could be worth over $100 million, but they're saying he makes over $100 million a year.

I don't know about that.

And I'm like, that's way too high. Because remember how MrBeast ended up breaking down his monetization of YouTube and he had people guess on X and it was way lower? You and I have seen a lot of YouTube monetization stats. It doesn't do as well as people think. The key here is not necessarily about the number of views, it's the topic you discuss because the topic you discuss affects how monetizable it is. And if you're just creating content that goes viral about you being fast, there's only so much money you can make. But on the flip side, if I look at my most profitable videos, they were actually me talking about AI from an ad revenue perspective. Now just think about how much companies are talking about AI. The amount of money being dumped into AI right now is so ridiculous. You have so many multi-billion and even trillion-dollar companies that a lot of the world has not heard of. Like, there's literally so many AI companies that are worth billions of dollars that generate a lot of revenue that if you ask the average Joe, they'd be like, I don't even know what you're talking about. But on the flip side, you ask anyone about IShowSpeed, he's done an amazing job at branding himself, amazing job at marketing. A lot of people know him, but yet the revenue isn't there. It's when you do clipping, I would recommend that you do clips for your ideal audience around the type of content that you're monetizing, not about the stuff that gets views. And if you do that, you won't get as many views, but you may get double or triple than what you used to when you were talking about your content before.

Actually, Neil, that's a good point because I do get quite a bit of outreach now because obviously you've seen it firsthand. All I do is nerd out on AI right now and that's all I like to talk about. And it does generate— people are like, oh, I want to talk about this. I want to talk— literally there's calls and calls and calls where people are just like, hey, we want to do what you're doing, right? And that's from us creating this content about this stuff. And I'm sure it generates, you know, hopefully stuff for you guys too. But I want to come back to this for a moment, Neil. If you look at this, so I think he explains a good story, this guy Ed, okay?

Yeah.

So look, he's talking about Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers. He's like, their problem is simple. Legacy media over here, people don't watch traditional content anymore. They watch clips. Since before the pandemic, time spent watching video content on social media has more than doubled. And in that same time period, Meta's revenues have nearly tripled and TikTok's have grown tenfold. This really hit home for me the night of the Oscars. I asked my girlfriend, who is a, I think, Timothée Chalamet fan, if she wanted to watch it. And to my surprise, she said no. Why?

I asked.

Her answer was clarifying. It's too long and boring. I'll just wait for the morning and watch the clips. There's only one path back for legacy media. They have to win the clip economy. The bad news is it'll feel beneath them. The good news is it will be easy. Legacy media is better at original content than anyone. And original content is to clips what Lightspeed Crude is to gasoline. Put another way, Disney and Warner Brothers are sitting on top of a clip field the size of a Permian Basin. I'll give you an analogy. Dude, Neil, so you know what I do on YouTube Shorts sometimes? I watch The Rock from WWE back in the day and I just watch all his, all his promos, right? Because it's so funny. That's what these legacy media companies need to do.

Dude, on YouTube, sometimes when I'm bored and sitting in a hotel room and I can't go to sleep, I'll go to YouTube and I'll watch clips of Billions. You know that TV show with Bob Odenkirk?

What is wrong with you, man? You're still thinking about business when you're bored.

So I'm watching like all the business moments, like the clippable moments. Um, same with Landman. I don't know if you've seen Landman. It's about selling oil and monetizing it. Great show on Paramount. It's with, uh, Billy Bob Thornton. Um, and there's amazing clips in there as well. It's, it's all about just running an oil business and, you know, monopolizing it.

So that's so fun. But, but you and I are experienced, even though we're older now. I, I hate to say that we're, you know, I, I'm about to hit my 40s. You're, you're, you're in your 40s. So, um, but it's, it's the world is passing us by because now you're at the age where you're just like, son, at, at, at, at At your age, I was doing this, right? You never thought you'd say that before, right?

No, but I do say that.

Dude, you know, as you drink your water, have you played around with ChatGPT Images 2.0? I got to show you this.

I have not. I saw articles about it, but I haven't played. You're talking about their new release? Yesterday was a new release on 5.5, I believe.

Yeah, so they released 3 things this week. 5.5, they released— so ChatGPT 5.5, They released Images, okay? So that's their like Nano Banana competitor. And then they released Workspace Agents. That's their idea of having agents that can work with you. So let me show you just 2.0 real quick. This is— I was just messing around with this on the couch yesterday, Neil, and this is the new version. I'm like, this is a version of how I might want the Single Brain site to look. So those that can't see this right now, this is like a landing page design and it's like your revenue system running 24/7 in 30 days. And I really like Japanese culture. So you can see there's like Japanese sketches here. Even the characters, the agents are Japanese. as well. There's like a samurai here. And I was like, by the way, I want you to pull inspiration from fin.ai. I want you to pull inspiration from all these other SaaS sites. I'm like, dude, this is like 80, 85% there. It needs some cleanup. I'm not a designer per se, but it's not a bad start.

This is for your own website?

Yeah, this would be for singlebrain.com.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, but you have your own, I'm sure there's certain inspirations you like and things like that, and you can get it there. And then the cool thing is you can then work, the best workflow now for ChatGPT Images 2.0 is to do it in ChatGPT's Images 2.0 and then bring it over to Claude Design because Claude Design eats up credits really quickly. So you finish it, like get it close, get your concepts done in Images 2.0 and ChatGPT, and then move it over to Claude Design. And then you combine those 2 and you have something really good. That's a good workflow.

And I don't have data on this, but from what I read, GPT-5.5 is much more efficient on the cost end.

I, so you know what I did do? Let me show you something, Neil. You want to talk about costs? I'll show you my personal costs here. Let me show you something. You'll like this, Neil.

Oh, you got it down from the 7 grand.

This is, and this is my personal cost.

Okay.

So let me show you this real quick. Let me share my screen. So guys, just for context, just, I was spending $7,500 myself, which some people were laughing at about Instagram. I'm like, more power to you to laugh at it. I just think it's going to go up for everyone. But what do you see in the chart here?

Per month, Eric was spending $7,500 per month.

Yeah, dude. But look at this over here. So it was going up, I mean, as high as $413 a day this month. And then it basically, I dropped it down to $30. And I think today, today I figured out how to optimize it. I think it should drop to basically zero per day going forward. So you want to know how I dropped my cost from $7,500 to zero?

You have a Mac Mini that's set up and you're using some open source models?

No, even easier than that, Neil. I don't even need that. In fact, that was stupid money spent so far. All you need to do now, because OpenCLAW and Claude Code, they were shut off, or Claude was shut off for a while, you just switch to Claude CLI because they turned it back on now. So if you switch to Claude, you could just use your Mac subscription, the $200 you pay a month, and just run it through that. And then if that— once you run—

Mac subscription of $200? What are you talking about, Mac subscription?

So Claude has a Claude Mac subscription. That's their $200—

Oh, I thought you said Mac, like Apple, like Mac, MacBook.

Yeah. If you want to bring your cost down from $7,500 to $0 using Anthropic, using Claude, all you have to do is switch it to the CLI version And then just use your subscription. And then you might be thinking, oh, if I run out of tokens, um, what am I gonna do? Here's what you do. If you're paying for OpenAI, which I am, the $200, you have a fallback that switches to the OpenAI OAuth, which switches to 5.5. And only then, if both of them fail, if you run out of tokens, then you switch it to the API.

Yeah, they're losing so much money on you.

But you know what's crazy, Neil? Dude, I listened to another Patel today, Dylan Patel. He runs, um, Semiconductors Analysis. You've heard this guy, right?

No.

Okay, so he, he apparently he does all the semiconductor analysis, like a research firm, and I think they probably do like $100 million a year. So last year he was saying he was spending tens of thousands a year on tokens. He said this year they're on track to spend $7 million as a research firm. Okay, and he's like, their payroll is like $25 million a year, so I have to assume they're doing like $100 or something like that. Okay, um, and so I was talking to one of our mutual friends today. I was like, how much do you think you're gonna spend on tokens this year? He's like, at least, at least a million. I'm like, I'm like, dude, you're gonna be spending a lot more. So how much do you think you guys are gonna spend this year on tokens?

Low end, if I had to guess, maybe $5, $6 million. High end, maybe $15 million.

Yeah, exactly right. I think it's just gonna go up because the thing is we all want the best intelligence, and so we're willing to pay for the frontier models even though whatever is like open source is like pretty close. I'm like, not close enough. You want the best of the best.

I think we'll see a switch on our end this year in which a lot of the frontier models will not be needed as much for a lot of the work that marketers are doing.

Yeah. I mean, what I would recommend doing is you can work with whatever agent you have and build a smart router where it's like, if it's not strategic work or it's not building or you're not coding, it should fall back to some of these other models that are open source that won't cost you as much. So I think you're still going to need to do that, but at least right now with this, Guys, use the CLI, okay? Claude CLI, or use, uh, use your, your max, your, uh, your ChatGPT subscriptions and then have it fall back to the API. You're going to save a lot of money.

Dude, we were talking to, or we surveyed, I believe it was, um, 300 companies, 100 SMB, 100 mid-sized businesses, 100, uh, large corporations. You want to take a guess how most of these people are building agents?

How?

They're outsourcing it to either agencies or freelancers.

Isn't that ironic?

It is. Very few people are building agents internally. It's almost all outsourced work.

Yeah, dude, when we talk to people right now on these agent calls, I'm like, so what are you guys doing? They— one, they want us to build the agents because they wanted to also make their people more AI fluent. So because we do a pilot process where we're onboarding them, um, they're like, oh, we're down for that, right? Because they want to learn. So I don't think agencies are going anywhere. I think they're going to be more in demand than ever, um, with kind of what we're seeing. I'm sure you guys are seeing the same thing too.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay, now—

It's— dude, I was talking to Andrew Dumas. You know Andrew Dumas?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Many times.

Yeah.

Um, and we're talking, we're just like, we're starting to feel like SaaS companies— we were texting about this the other day— are becoming like dinosaurs, you know? Um, a lot of them aren't adapting. Uh, a lot of them aren't really needed in this new world. I'm not talking about the ones that are controlling the data. I know there's a lot of publicly traded companies that are adapting, but I'm talking about a lot of smaller ones. And then what we're finding from a marketing angle, when you look at a lot of the SMB SaaS companies, they're much harder to market these days than they ever have been before. And the main reason is, is when you think about marketing, it's all about solving problems and showcasing the benefits. It's really hard to do with traditional SaaS that hasn't adapted because people don't want to look at dashboards as much anymore. They just want software to just solve the problem For them. I'm not talking about AI. I'm not talking about traditional SaaS. When I say people just want the problem solved for them, they don't give a crap if it's AI or traditional software. They just want to click buttons and then just the software or AI or whatever you want to call it just does it on their own. And you can classify it however you want, but the end consumer just wants to pay and something solve it for them in the least amount of work. the quickest amount of time, the most cost-efficient, and do it accurately and produce the best results. And it's hard to do, of course, all of that through technology in today's world, but it's getting better and better.

I think the world we're going to go to in terms of pricing is you're going to have— even when I look at ChatGPT, how they're pricing their Workspace agents. So right now it's free until May 6th. And the way the Workspace agents are, their agents, you pay the $20 a month or $25 a month for your, like, the team accounts for ChatGPT, and then you can enable the agents. Then they're charge you based on credits or tokens, right? And then that's how they're going to make their money there. Because with the agents, it's kind of, sometimes it's hard to attribute the outcomes that you're driving. Now, if you're an agency, like Neil and I both have agencies, in some cases, maybe you still charge a base fee and maybe there's like a token overage that you might tack on with your clients. In some cases, you can add on outcomes if it's easy to track, but that's harder to track for the majority of people. And most enterprises aren't willing to do that unless you have a really good relationship with them. But even then, Still tougher. But I think that's where things are going. By the way, I'll give you a fun thing here, Neil. Someone said in the chat over here, because we're live, someone said, Carl Rau, why Neil looks sad? Let me tell you why he looks sad. Because it's his birthday today. He feels a little older. That's why he looks sad. Okay, so anyway, let me show you some stats over here, Neil, because you like graphs. You ready?

Yeah. Okay, so check this out.

All right, so check this out. The economy is splitting. AI is the fault line. So on Ramp, November 2022 to November 2025, so they're the credit cards company, tech finance company, annualized revenue growth by AI intensity. So this is comparing heavy AI users versus moderate AI versus no AI spend. These are the companies, okay? So look at this. If you're a heavy AI use company, 27% growth, okay? Annualized revenue growth by AI intensity. Moderate AI, 18%, okay, which is pretty good still. No AI spend, 3%, which is US nominal GDP. Look at this over here, right? I just find that fascinating.

Yeah, I didn't know Ramp tracks finances. I thought they just tracked credit card spending.

Yeah, I, I know they track everything. So we're actually switching over to Ramp right now because they have an API versus bill.com or something like that doesn't. So you can query whatever you want and you can spin up, you know, virtual cards and control your expenses a lot tighter. Dude, imagine talking to an agent within Slack asking about your expense stuff, asking about your finance stuff, you're going to be able to move a lot faster. So that's what we're doing with it, at least.

Yeah, I think I told you on one of the previous podcasts, I've been so loyal to American Express for years. You know, I think their marketing is great. Their product's great from the business end. You know, they just switched to Ramp, or I'm pretty sure it was Ramp. Um, and I was shocked because someone told me I'm getting a new credit card and I'm like, what am I getting a new credit card for? They're like, yeah, we're using I believe it's Ramp for our corporate cards, but I don't think, and I've never used Ramp personally from outside of just a credit card, because I've been with some other companies that have given me Ramp credit cards, but outside of that, I've never used them for accounting or anything like that. We still stick with NetSuite, which is really expensive, but it works well for enterprise.

Yeah. Dude, let's go back to the clipping thing real quick. So the cool thing when we record these, um, when we're not together, Neil, is I get to show you a lot of stuff on the screen and they're great for clips. I'll tell you that much. So, uh, here, check this out. So this tweet is from Ashnee Christ. Uh, so Ashnee says, this is a new creation media stack. So the new creation media stack, I call it the VSC flywheel. MrBeast uses it. So basically V stands for produce video. that drives traffic to S. Okay, what is S? S is a stream, a consistent live show that becomes C. Well, what is C? C is clips, brand awareness generation tactic to drive traffic back to V. In a reality where everyone is a media company and competing for the same eyeballs, community is defensibility, and the VSC flywheel is how you build it. So, you know, they're also talking about like a 24/7 community hub, like a Discord, Telegram school, et cetera. By the way, if Neil and I were younger right now, I would say, Neil, if you and I were in our 20s doing this show, we'd probably have a school group. We'd probably be doing this. We'd probably go hard on clipping and all that. But we have a primary business. And so as much time as we'd like to put into this, we have other things that are higher leverage. So you just got to decide what's highest leverage for you. Don't just listen to whatever we're talking about because if we were younger, we'd be doing this for sure.

Yes, but our older selves have learned that the money is in the boring and the ugly. Not the cool and the sexy. The majority of the biggest companies in the world are companies you've never heard of, dude. So at the end of this year, it'll be the 9th year that I've been running NP Digital. I think you've been at— how many years for Single Grain now? 12?

I joined Single Grain, uh, 2013, I want to say. So 13 years.

This is 13.

Okay.

So, uh, this will be my 9. This will be your, I think, 13 or 14. I don't know which You're going to end up on. And the amount of companies we get hit up by on an annual basis is a big number. The amount of companies we work with is much smaller. And a lot of it's dependent on, can we, A, produce results? Because sometimes people have unrealistic expectations. And 2, they don't always have the budget for their expectations or unrealistic expectations. And even if they have the budget and it's unrealistic, we'll tell them. that it's not worth doing because they're not going to get the results that they want. Because sometimes it's their CEO or CFO who puts it on them. They're like, I got to quadruple the business. And I'm like, you're a 50-year-old business. You're not going to quadruple your leads with the same amount of money, you know, or cutting back on money. And we've seen situations where people have less budget and they want way more leads. But every year, if I look at the majority of the companies we sign, I would say probably 40 to 50% of them I've never heard of.

Wow.

I'm talking about publicly traded companies or large enterprises, like never heard of them. And I'm like, huh? Oh, look them up. Never knew they were a $16 billion company. Like there's just so many companies that make a crapload of money that most people have never heard of. And it just goes to show, literally the money is in the boring and ugly.

You know what the money is really in? The boring and the ugly, but also the money is really in sticking with something for a long time.

That's true, but the boring and ugly typically has massive TAMs and just people don't want to do it because it's not cool.

Both. You need both. Like if I have a poo-poo shoveling company, which is important, you need fertilizer, right?

Poo-poo.

Um, and you do a lot with poo-poo, right? And so, but my point is you do it for a very— or even trash, for example, you look at 1-800, uh, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, right? It took a very long time for them to grow. Like you just, you have to, you have to be willing to go through the roller coaster of entrepreneurship. Um, so That's what it is.

And if you look at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, you know what they've done really well from a marketing perspective? They've outspent their competition hands down. If you look at their marketing, I've analyzed it quite a bit. They really do outspend their competition and they want to make sure that they're top of mind. Now you can't just go from a marketing perspective and be like, we're just going to spend more money and it's going to work. Your marketing has to be good. Your product has to be good. You know, your funnel has to be good in which the way you convert people. You have to be pretty efficient as well. But assuming you can fine-tune those other things, outspending does work.

There you go. And we've— I mean, you and I used to go to this mastermind where I think it was Ryan Deiss that always would like to say, talk about like, you have to outspend your competitors. Remember that?

Oh, War Room. Yeah.

Yeah, War Room. Yeah.

Okay.

By the way, this Andrew Chen tweet over here caught my eye and I wanted us to react to this one. So check this out.

So Andrew Chen, that recent Horowitz guy?

Correct. So hot take, the biggest and most productive people in the AI era are the folks who are already good at their jobs. AI as a multiplier, not an equalizer democratizer. So basically this is saying that this actually increases inequality.

I do. I agree with that. You and I have been talking about this for ages. I think the amazing marketers and the amazing people in organization are going to come even better. And the crappy people, it's going to be really obvious that they're crappy and you're going to need less of them. Again, I think the workforce is going to look like a diamond. So typically people talk about a workforce as a pyramid. If you're on video, you can see me creating a pyramid. And when I say diamond, take a pyramid and then take another pyramid and flip it upside down. And then so you have a pointy top, a wide middle, and a pointy bottom. In other words, like if you look at a marketing department, you'll need your A-players at the top. You'll have a good group of people who are senior, mid-level, and you won't need as many people at the bottom.

You know what I've been finding, Neil, because I'm ground floor in terms of I'm really in the trenches when it comes to bringing my team to AI fluency because I naively believe that I can get everyone there because I think I can change people still. But you really can't, guys. This is me talking to myself. You believe you can change people, you can. But anyway, I still believe I can. So all that to say is that it's very easy to see who's got it and who doesn't, right? And so the people that, you know, one person built, you know, an ad creative tool that can crank out ads, and then that's combining with our agents that we use inside of Slack. So you can go inside of Slack and say, hey, we want to crank out more ad creatives here. Or on the sales side, literally I see, you know, someone from my sales team, he is cranking out all these different sequences and then finding new leads, enriching them, And then putting them into instantly and then constantly refreshing them and adding more scaffolding to that. And so you can quickly see the ones that are hitting it head on versus the ones that are kind of shying away from it, right? And so what I want to say that I've been saying to the team is it's not an AI versus your work. It's not versus, it's and. So people are like, oh, Eric, I don't have the time to learn AI right now. If I learn AI, then something's going to have to suffer. I'm like, no. Like, do you— did you need time to learn the internet first? No. Like, you need to do both right now. Like, are you like— and I'll say this too, Neil, the most joy I get— like, there's people on my team that are working till 1 AM or 2 AM. I'm like, hey, don't work so hard. Like, and I wasn't telling them to work till 1 or 2. I'm like, why are you working so much? Like, it's because I want to, Eric, because I'm having so much fun. I'm like, okay, that's great, but still, you need more sleep, right? All that is— and so like, people are working so hard right now because it's so fun and there's not enough time in the day. So when I'm on the When I'm working with people who are AI-enabled, it's such a joy to do that, right? When I have the— unfortunately, when there's people that are resisting, it's very hard. And so, I would just tell you that companies can't hold on that much longer when it comes to that, and you have to learn this stuff. That's all I'll leave it at.

Yeah, but you do need to get good sleep. And Eric and I have seen this as entrepreneurs in which if you're not sleeping, ideally you want a solid 8 hours. really try to get into deep sleep for as much of those 8 hours as possible. You'll actually be much more productive and you'll perform way better, whether it's in marketing or business. Sleep is really huge and people take it for granted. Yeah.

And Neil, here's what I'll say too. I'm realizing something now. I'm like, if there's any big trade-off right now with the AI stuff, I'm like, guys, because you love to work so much, because work is so fun now, I'm realizing that there's more— like I used to kind of, you know, people are like, okay, you need a mental health policy. I'm like, this time you probably do need a mental health take a break policy. Because if you don't put the brakes on your team, they're going to keep working so hard and they're going to burn out. I've seen so many people burn out before. You and I haven't really burnt out. I don't think I have at least. I don't think you have either. But there has to be some type of rest policy to stop from the AI psychosis. Yeah.

And the reason most people burn out is because they don't see progress. That's what I really think. We've talked about this in a past episode. It's just like, if you can see progress, it doesn't necessarily mean revenue has to be going up or traffic has to be going up. But if you can see that you're going in the right direction, It's a good feeling. If you keep trying and you can't find any progress, we find that's when people tend to get burnt out the most.

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. Dude, you want to gimme— you want to gimme— let me give you some Give you something else. I don't think I talked to you about this, Neil. So I've been talking to a lot of these agency holdco people to potentially join the company. One of them, I don't think I told you about this, but he helped one agency exit for, you know, a couple hundred million or so, was the president at this company. And I talked to a handful of these companies. So one thing is for sure, if you're working at like a, you know, like an Omnicom or a Dentsu or something like that, all these people are looking to get out. I'm like, why are you looking to get out? Oh, it's a sinking ship. Our labor arbitrage model doesn't work anymore. I can't just hire people offshore and like it works like that. Doesn't work like that anymore. I'm like, okay, great. So tell me, what does your AI fluency look like right now? Like, what are you paying for AI per month? Oh, you know, I just paid $20 a month for ChatGPT. I pay for Gemini. I'm like, okay, so what workflows? Oh, you know, I haven't gotten that far yet. I'm really interested in it though. I'm like, okay. So in my mind, I'm like, you want to jump ship, you want to be saved, but then you don't want to save yourself. And it's just funny how the world works, right? You want— like, everybody wants to win. Nobody wants to prepare.

Dude, I was talking to a marketer that I was interviewing the other day, and I was talking about what are some unique use cases that you've used AI for? And they're just like, and they were, I'm like, look, you can tell me anything. I'm like, what are you doing with AI? And they were giving me some examples of what they're doing with social media, crawling the latest news, from there seeing what's trending, from there coming up with variations to posts that are text-based on LinkedIn and X. And then from there it writes in their tone of voice, adjusts it, shows it to 'em. If they approve, it then just gets posted. And I was like, cool, can you show me an example of what you've built with an agent that's up and running right now? Right? Because they had access to their computer and all that kind of stuff. They showed me, they showed me them taking a DMV test, like a traffic school online.

Yeah. Yeah.

And they were saying how there's a minimum number of hours, how it acts like a human, goes through it, then clicks the next button. And then for the quiz, for each section, it copies and pastes in ChatGPT, gets the right answer, plugs it in, answers it. And they're like, this is how I'm going to pass my speeding or pass my traffic school for speeding ticket or whatever it's called. I was cracking up. I'm like, well, you should probably actually take it for this reason because you're doing something and you broke the law. But I was just cracking up. I'm like, oh, this is pretty creative.

I was like, how long did it take you to do this?

And they were just like, I did it in less than 40 minutes. And I was like, oh, that's not that bad. Wouldn't it take you— wouldn't it just be faster to just zip through it? And they're like, no, because with these traffic school systems that are online, they were telling me that you have to do like a minimum of, I don't know what it was, like 300 or 400 or 500 hours. So they're like, it's just easier to build an agent to do it for you. And I was like, oh, okay.

So are you moving him along the process or her?

Yeah, actually.

Okay.

But I did tell them my recommendation was that they do traffic school actually themselves and not use the agent for it, because I do think some things can be harmful. Like, there's a reason why they're doing traffic school. And they said, oh, now you're making a good point. They said they are gonna do it manually. I don't know if that's true or not.

No, come on, come on.

But the reason I liked them was The creativity.

Yeah. Here's what I'll say, and I think you're doing the same thing too. When I'm talking to people during interviews, all I want is an exceptional conversation. And usually an exceptional conversation revolves around AI because AI covers all 4 of our core values, because it— all the things, right? And so all I want is, is I want to feel energized after I leave the conversation. I want them to show me examples as well. I want them to be able to riff with me because that shows how it is in real life. And one thing I learned about Elon, Neil, is when Elon hired people, when he hired the president of Tesla, he just literally brought him up to like the factory office or something and said, hey, let's work on this problem together. And after the interview, the guy's like, where are you going to go now? He's like, I'm going to go down to the factory. I'm going to go solve the same problem we've been talking about. And so he's literally testing you at different levels to see how far you can go. And I think that's how it has to be now. Because you really, like, if you don't do that, what ends up happening? Because hiring— what was Gary Vee that said this? Hiring is guessing, firing is knowing. I'd rather have a very well-educated guess, especially nowadays because you can't afford not to.

Yeah, but even if you have a really well-educated guess, the amount of people I've hired in marketing, and I know marketing well, and I would say Eric, you know, same level, he knows marketing really well. And I would say, and we're not trying to be arrogant, Eric and I know marketing better than most people. Even then, when you hire, you're not going to hit 100%. I don't care what you're an expert in. You can never be 100%, but we both learned over the years, don't just jump in and hire, take your time. You still do need to fire fast. Eric knows this. I'm great at the firing fast part. Remember Mustache Man?

Oh yeah.

But the mistake I made there, I hired Mustache Man way too fast. And the reason I'm calling him that is he had a really cool mustache. Hired him too quickly, didn't work out, fired him really fast. But now we're much more picky on our hiring process. But even then, no matter how picky you are, how much you test people, you'll find that either A, some people are just great at interviewing or going through the processes, but they actually suck when you work with them. B, some people are amazing, but they're amazing for the time you needed them. And as a company changes, sometimes you need new people for your new problems and the old people can't adapt. But those are the 2 biggest things that I've seen when it's coming to hiring and it just not—

You know, Neil, I want to— one thing that that we have seen in our careers doesn't get talked about enough. And I think it really does come down to how good are you at layering employees? And what I mean by layering employees means that let's say I go to work for Neil's company and he hires me, I'm a marketing manager, and then I'm pretty good. Let's say I get promoted to director, but what ends up happening is he finds that I cap out at a certain level. Okay? So he could just not talk to me and hope that I get there, but then I don't get there and then he starts to feel resentment. Okay, then I don't get there and then I'm still holding that slot. And then if he tries to promote over me, maybe I'll threaten to quit or something like that. So what I mean by layering is that if you're good at doing that at your company and saying, hey, Eric, I think you're good at this and I'm going to give you a chance to get here and here's what you need to do. And then if you can't get there, we're going to have to layer above you. The good thing is I will quit or I will get better or I'll be open-minded to it, right? And so I don't think enough people talk about that, but that's one of the most important skills because, Neil, you've actually mentioned this a few times with at your company where like they were really good, but they weren't ready for the next level.

Yes. And sometimes you can help them, sometimes you can't. And, you know, it's not really hard to figure out what to do once you know where people are. But what I've also found is when you're hiring, if someone's not really passionate about what they're doing, it tends not to work out. Dude, I was interacting with this guy named Chase from this company called GoHighLevel. And Chase, no joke, on a Saturday, okay, on a Saturday, he doesn't work for me. I'm not his boss. We have separate companies. He's messaging me the cool stuff that they're doing with AI and marketing, like with their landing page builder and the results and the progress people are making and the usage and how their products, you know, the usage is showing that their product's really good based on the results. But here's where it really got interesting. He's showing me like new commercials that they're creating, such as like a person who is a home service business using AI or software through GoHighLevel. It pretty much, someone can call in, sets the appointment for a roof repair, you know, sounds like a human, guides them, books a call, schedules it, follows up, all that kind of stuff, right? To help the conversion rate from a lead to a close. But he's sending me this stuff on a weekend. He knows I'm not his boss. He knows I'm not going to report to his boss or the owners of the company on how he's amazing or anything like that. Yet he's communicating with me and showing the cool stuff he's working on on a Saturday. Why? Because he's passionate. And what I found is when people are trying to go through different levels, the ones who tend to succeed the most tend to have a real passion for what they're doing. And a passion for the business. You can't just be passionate about what you're doing and hate the company. You got to love both of them. That's when you really see people put in like the time, the energy, and really thrive.

You know what I'll say too, as this is for fun, I've noticed kind of a trend with the— obviously we have, you know, great, great team members in America or even offshore, nearshore. The people that are offshore, for example, let's say they're in Europe or Eastern Europe as an example, they're passionate because they're passionate about their survival. Okay. That's one thing, but they're, they like, Their work ethic is at another level. I'll just leave it that way. And sometimes it's a cultural thing. Sometimes it's— and obviously, like, we have that in America too. But I noticed, I think, more of that. And that's just my personal observation, probably not Neil's. Okay, Neil, have you heard of the fake GitHub economy?

No.

Okay, so check this out. So basically, on GitHub, you can buy stars. So we've shared GitHub repos before, like my GitHub repo now, the Marketing Skills one has like 2,200 stars.

Wait, GitHub lets you buy the stars?

No, it's a fake star economy. So you basically hire spammers to spam your GitHub repo for stars.

Oh, that makes more sense. I thought you were saying GitHub's selling it. I'm like, why would GitHub sell that? That would just screw up GitHub.

That would totally screw their business, like the integrity of their business.

So this is like people selling, uh, fake Yelp reviews and Google reviews.

Exactly, exactly. It's no different. Like everyone wants it. Or fake Amazon reviews back in the day, right? So for $85 to $285 in budget stars, a startup can manufacture a 2,850-star seed median. For $990 to $4,500, it can reach Series A territory. Against typical seed rounds of $1 to $10 million, the ROI ranges from 3,500x to 117,000x. So at least 7 open source tools on GitHub, fake GitHub history, commit bot committers, exist specifically to fabricate GitHub contribution graphs. Prebuilt GitHub profiles with 5-year commit histories and Arctic cold vault contributor badges sell for approximately $5,000 on Telegraph.

Wow.

Isn't it funny how this works? Remember, Neil, I told you about— I had, um, remember I had that Marriott hotel program and I was able to get like— it would allow you to stay at like really nice hotels for very cheap. So there's always these underground economies of, of, uh, these things. I'm not part of that thing anymore, so that's why I'm open to talk about it.

So yeah. Dude, it's just all these shortcuts don't end up working. I remember when people used to buy Amazon reviews back in the day. I'm like, but if you have a crap product, You're going to get sales by buying the reviews and the stars. They do. They've gotten better at catching people, but you end up shooting up in the systems, especially if you're also, you know, you're getting purchases, you're cheating the system is what these people are doing. But when they have a crappy product or service or more so product on Amazon, eventually you start getting into crappy reviews. And for every 1-star review, you need so many 5-star reviews to make it up. I'm like, the model doesn't work. It's just better to spend the time creating something that's amazing.

Dude, this is so funny. So, okay, well, I'm looking at the screen right now. So here's the marketplace. So if you want to buy premium stars, so aged accounts, uh, it's basically like 80 cents to 90 cents. So gradual natural delivery, years-old profiles with repos and contributions. This is no different than back in the day when people used to sell links on these forums. Um, mid-range, 20 cents to 50 cents, 1 to 2 weeks, some activity history. And then if you want to buy disposable accounts, 3 cents to 10 cents and new empty profiles. And so they basically do a comparison here, Neil, where if you look at an organic, uh, like LangChain, a lot of people know LangChain. So the median account age for people posting is like 3,000 days. Um, and then, you know, the number of, uh, zero public repos, uh, 6%. So when you compare it to all these other ones over here, like manipulated blockchain repos, this one over here, free domain, it has, uh, 28%. Uh, public, zero public repos, and then 81% are zero followers. So you can tell which, what is spam or not. But for GitHub, like, you know, they have other stuff to manage. And by the way, GitHub's owned by Microsoft, right? So I don't know how much time they have to allocate to this.

You know, Microsoft looked at buying Cursor, right? They decided not to.

You know who got Cursor? Yeah, SpaceX.

But SpaceX, I'm, I'm assuming the reason the deal was structured that way is they're waiting for them to themselves to go public and then do the transaction. Because they'll have more liquidity.

I actually, um, so the, the, the bull case for doing this deal is, is because Cursor, who was doing I think $6 billion a year or something like that, right? $6 billion a year.

Uh, I don't know, the last numbers I saw I think were $4 or $5, but they're growing so fast on a monthly basis that it's too hard to keep up.

So the problem for, for Cursor is at the $6 billion, because, you know, they're, they're limited on, on compute, for example. Um, they— and then, but xAI has a ton of compute, but they don't have revenue. So you combine the two together, and then xAI or SpaceX, if they're at, you know, uh, what is it, $2 trillion or something like that? Um, I— they can justify doing a— because this $60 billion is still a drop in the bucket based on their market cap.

Yeah, and then Google just put in $40 billion into Anthropic today.

Did they?

Uh-huh.

Dude, this is crazy. Yeah, everyone wants to buy Anthropic right now.

You know what's the number one most valued private company in the world right now? Or sorry, not valued, I— that I don't know. But it's the number one most wanted private stock right now, as in companies are trying to buy more, or investors are trying to buy Anthropic shares more than any other company. Number 2 is SpaceX. Um, I believe there's a girl named Zoe Talks who's a VC on Instagram. She breaks down the list. Uh, I don't think OpenAI was even in the top 5.

You know the thing though, OpenAI, they have a lot more compute. And so now, like, they're back in the game now, you know, 2.0. Like, you— every week something changes, right? It's like, oh, I don't use ChatGPT anymore. Now it's Like 5.5 is out, they have this out, they have the agents out, and then they have a lot more compute. Like, you just don't know. The good thing is, Neil and I, we're not part of these companies, so we can be promiscuous and jump around whenever we want.

And I heard the CFO of OpenAI talk today, and she was breaking down how roughly their split is 50/50 now from enterprise versus, uh, uh, just general consumers.

I think both companies will be fine. Are you gonna— let me ask you this, Neil. Are you gonna buy the IPOs for any of these?

No.

You know what I will buy? I'll wait for them to drop when there's a correction, when there's a big correction.

So Because Eric and— and this is not financial advice, and people who got in early probably made a killing.

Definitely.

It's more so like they're so expensive that the ROI for Eric and I to put in our money is not going to be that high. It's just easier for us to play the game with our own companies. But what's funny enough is on TV, the guy who's been being brought up a lot is Sam Bankman-Fried. Remember?

I was going to just say that.

Because he invested in Cursor. They're like, his Cursor shares would've been now worth $3 billion. He invested in Anthropic really early on and they were breaking out on TV. He didn't have the funds at the time and he should have never stole from customers. But on CNBC, they were talking about like, he actually may be one of the best VCs of our time when it comes to picking companies before they're actually hot.

You know what they say, Neil, pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered and he got too greedy. If you just played your main business and then continue to do what you're doing without having to go too far, everything would've been fine.

Well, he shouldn't have been using other people's money without their permission.

That's what I'm saying. Hogs get slaughtered.

He did.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. So anyway, and the sad thing is I think he came in at what, like 2— what was it? You looked at this, right? The valuation.

His Claude shares would have been— I mean, uh, uh, Cursor shares would have been worth $3 billion. That's what CNBC reported. Crazy.

All you needed to do—

Like, he made a killing. Now, knowing him, because in Eric's analogy he's describing me as a hog, even though the guy was a vegetarian, um, but I get the, the, uh, what is it called?

Uh, hogs can be vegetarian analogy.

Yeah, the analogy.

There you go.

I was blanking on it, uh, because I think that's a Warren Buffett phrase, right?

Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger, one of them.

Yeah, it was one or the other. But yeah, he would've probably doubled down and continually given him more money per funding round. Dude, even Robinhood, he ended up buying, I believe it was around 9% when their stock was at all-time lows. That thing went up almost 10x, right? That would've been another, I think he bought like around $900 million worth. That would've turned to $9 billion. The real problem is, Because one, he stole money and should have never done that. Two, the people who ran the liquidation, the lawyers or whoever, liquidated all this stuff at the wrong time. Like, they undersold it. Even when it came to Solana, they were selling it for what, $15 or something like that?

Solana shot up to $100, $200. During that period, remember Solana dropped down to $1, I think, something like that, or $9.

No, I think the cheapest was, yeah, like around $9, $10. But when they sold it, it wasn't anywhere near there. It was climbing up to like $80 or $100 or $200.

But you know, it's not their job. It's okay. Their job's to liquidate. So, um, Neil, one thing that we should talk about too, I don't know if you guys are doing this. I, I think it's smart. I just, you know, I don't have the time for it. Someone on our— hopefully someone can take this and do this for us. Um, but the rise of employee-generated content, have you seen this?

No, I'm curious on that one. Are you talking about employee-generated like social content or—

Yeah, so let's just look at this for, for, for fun. So Clay, okay, so we know the company Clay, right? They do, let's just say like data for sales or for outreach, for example. So let's see what we have going on with Clay. Let me share my screen with you all. So employee-generated content is basically when you have your team creating content, everyone's promoting each other, which this is to me, this has been done in the past, but more and more people are doing it now, I think to build a pot, like build company pods where people are just posting. And so let's just look at this. So Clay has posts, okay, over here. I don't know if they show employees. These are all Clay, but a lot of Clay employees will— okay, look, so I think this— does this guy work at Clay? I don't— I have no idea. But yeah, like Growth at Clay over here. So Gabrielle's like, okay, this is happening over here. Okay, this one gets 116 likes. Okay, Varun posted this, co-founder, 433 likes on it. Um, so they're just They have employees posting, they're cross-posting each other, and that's a flywheel that works for them. And then I ended up finding this company over here. I'm going to talk to them next week, I think. Vireo Employee Engagement, Employee Content. Here, let's look at this over here. Okay, so disclaimer guys, I'm going to talk to them. This was shared with me by Ryan at lunch. So this is content that drives pipeline, a done-for-you service for vertical SaaS companies to turn LinkedIn into their number one channel. So basically, they make your entire team content engineers, agentic deep research, human taste. I'll let you know how it goes, but I've seen some companies do this really well. EGC is the new UGC, make every employee generate pipeline in their sleep. So again, we'll see how this goes, Neil. I'll be the guinea pig for this one, and we'll come back to this later.

Yes, please report. By the way, remember you were doing that marketing experiment months ago, and we followed up on it maybe a month ago where you're giving away, it was either iPods, AirPods or gift cards or something like that to set up calls with people, with B2B companies?

Yeah, what we did on that one, I don't remember the numbers, but we were generating good meetings, so good, but it didn't make sense for us to continue to pay the agency. So we're paying them $5,000 a month, but they also wanted 10% of revenue for the first 12 months on every single customer we closed.

Wow.

That doesn't make sense, right? And so the moment we closed one, we're like, okay guys, we're out. And so Basically what we did, Neil, is we took all the sequences that were working well for them. We took all those and then now we have our own running on Instantly. And the thing is this, I'll tell you one thing, Neil. They tried charging one of our mutual friends 10 grand for the setup and they said the infrastructure costs 10 grand a month. Guys, the infrastructure using my OpenCall to set it up, $600 a month. Instantly, it'll set it all up for you. It'll buy all the email domains for you, all these things, $600 a month, not 10 grand a month. You can send cold email all you want. Just make sure the offer is really good. Make sure the copy is good. And then you can have the agent recursively test it over time. Um, and that's not to say cold email is, is, is great because a lot of people are spamming it now, but if you still have a really good offer today, you should still be able to stand out.

Yes. Yeah.

So, you know, I added, like, I went to my OpenCLaw while we were talking and I added a bunch of topics over here with these classics because we're running low on topics and we still have 10 minutes to go.

So, all right, let's do this. Let's do some classics.

Okay. So you pick, you, you pick the one of the classics.

7 marketing channels we'd bet on if we were starting over today.

My God. Okay, I'll start first. If we were starting over from today, knowing what we know, knowing that there's very strong reach with clipping right now, I would do that. If we're starting over, I would take this podcast, I would go straight on what we were talking about earlier, the clipping economy. How do we make sure we have someone who's really good with strategy, clipping the right content at the right time, TBPN style, 1-minute clips, we're posting it to X, we're posting it to LinkedIn, And then we have an ad at the very end of it. It could offer Neil's services or his products. Same for mine. We just rotate it over and over. And then we— because I do enjoy doing this, because this podcast forces us to stay sharp, I'll continue to do this. So it's kind of a, you know, 2-in-1.

We'll call it number 1. Eric's number 1 will be the channel would be podcasting, but make sure you're also using clipping with your podcast. Number 2, the channel that keeps producing and is getting uglier and uglier is email. And I don't know why companies don't focus that much on collecting emails. One of the most powerful channels that you can end up leveraging. And the reason being is it's in your control. You can show up in people's inbox. You're not relying on algorithms. It just keeps producing revenue. Now to collect the emails, you can do SEO. You can end up collecting emails through ads, like running Facebook ads or pushing it on your social profiles. But you should collect emails.

Yep. So number 3, I would go AEO. And when I say AEO, Neil, I don't know about you, but we're— the number 1 thing we get asked for quite a bit right now is Reddit, believe it or not. So a lot of big companies reaching out to us for Reddit, and that— the reason they want that is because they want to do better with AEO. They want their reputation to look better as well. So they're looking for reputation management. They want community management as well. And so I kind of lump them together. And when I say AEO, by the way, that does also include SEO because AEO is grounded on Google and it is grounded on Reddit, it's grounded on YouTube as well. So we can talk about those later. But because when you look at like an AEO result, the number one result gets a lot more click-through versus an organic SEO result.

And one stat to keep in mind, we looked at the highest converting channels. So whether you want to call it AEO, GEO, SEO, or whatever you want, but let's specifically about the LLM marketing side, like GEO, which is what Eric's also talking about. It converts more than 2.5-ish times than the next channel. The next highest converting channel for marketers is typically SMS. Underneath that is email, and then it gets into paid advertising. So, okay. And number 4 from my end, going live on social platforms. I don't want to pick a specific social platform to go live because you should go live on all of them. I think there's a lot of platforms that can do that, whether it's Riverside or StreamYard or Restream. I don't know all the names of all these platforms. I don't know which one we use on a regular basis, but we keep switching over time. What I do know is going live, we do this with our webinars all the time, it produces really good revenue.

Yeah, I mean, we're live right now. Does it produce a lot of revenue? Don't know about that, but I'll tell you what, we're live right now. So next one, number 5.

Or let me rephrase, when we do webinars, it produces a lot of revenue. And ours is we pick specific topics, we promote it through the social channels, we promote it through email blasts, and then we go live at a scheduled time. So it's not— when Eric and I are going live here on our podcast, it's just randomly going live. It's not scheduled or anything like that or pushed out or promoted.

All right, number 5.

Yeah, yeah, number 5.

Number 5. I think Neil's computer is about to die. He's like chopping out. Okay, so number 5. So number 5 is X. The reason I love X right now is because of the articles. When I write articles or when I write a post, I can spin up 100,000 views, 300,000 views, and it actually drives good leads. The other thing I'll say, Neil, when I wrote a post about that, that TBPN post, their main producer liked it and followed me. You know what I did? I immediately DM'd him. I said, hey, are you available for work right now? Because I want to do that for the stuff that we're doing right now. And so it's very opportunistic. So I think X increases your— people like to say it increases your surface level of luck. I do think it actually does that. The more you publish, the luckier you get. And I do tend to think that the smartest people, especially with AI psychosis, are hanging out on X right now.

Number 6, right? Number 6 would be the second highest converting marketing channel out there. I briefly discussed it, SMS. I don't know why people don't collect phone numbers. It doesn't matter if you're B2B or B2C, it works well. We collect phone numbers. Again, it works well. And you shouldn't just call people, you should also follow through text messaging. Just make sure you have the right permissions to do so.

Great. Number 7. So you can double dip here a little bit. So with LinkedIn, the cool thing is X has articles. LinkedIn also has articles too. So whatever article you put on X, just throw it on LinkedIn too. Whatever. So I use LinkedIn as just a repurposing platform now because I don't have— once you kind of lose the luster of the reach, like whatever you publish takes off, and then once you lose that superpower, it's really hard to get that back. At least from what I've seen. And I also don't want to spend the time being the reply guy and just reply to a bunch of people. So I just use that to repurpose articles. We use it to repurpose our YouTube videos. We use it to also clip this type of stuff too. Not as much though, but I do find LinkedIn's pretty good for driving business once you have the reach. It's just that we already have enough stuff going on right now, so I'm good with it just kind of, you know, keeping the lights on. But here's what I'll say. The people that do really well on LinkedIn, if I were to start from scratch today, Okay. If I were to start from scratch, I would go hard on X and LinkedIn especially. Yep. All right.

So what's the next topic that we want to talk about? This will be the last one. What was that?

This will be the last one.

The last one. SEO is dead again, or SEO is dead again. Why are we doubling down anyways? All right.

This is not bad, right? So, okay. Since the beginning of me learning SEO, so I think I started learning SEO in maybe 2011, 2000, maybe 2010 or so. Neil's a little earlier earlier than I was. Um, so people have said always SEO is dead. I remember Gary Vee did a video, SEO is dying, right? And like, oh, it's so dead. And then Bill Gurley, SEO is dead, right? All these people, SEO is dead. And so here's the thing, they might say, okay, sure, you know, Google is, uh, Google search is declining or whatever. No, it's not. It's actually going up. Their profits are going up as well. And so the search engines are healthier than ever, right? Gemini, for example, is one of the best models out there. Sure, your website traffic might be declining, but remember this, the LLMs, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to say, they are still grounded on the search engine. So really good SEO still directly affects how you convert or how you show up in the LLMs. And that's why it's still very important.

Yeah, SEO's not dead. GEO is not dead. You know, AEO, whatever you want to call any of these, is not dead. And they have changed though. It's what is dead is optimizing for clicks, but from a revenue perspective, we're still seeing a lot of growth from SEO and GEO and channels like that. It's just people still focus on the old metrics like, oh, my clicks are down. Well, if your clicks are down, but your revenue's up from those channels, you should be really good in which you should be happy and then you just move on.

Yep. All right, guys. So that is it. Let us know if you want Neil and Eric to be the Marketing Bros Podcast Network. Let us know in the comments. And that being said, we will catch you all later. Goodbye. Have a great weekend.