14:48Leveling Up with Eric Siu · Tutorial
AI Loops Are Useless Unless They Do This
A 14-minute breakdown of how to turn recurring AI workflows into compounding business systems, with a live AEO/SEO loop as the proof.
June 23rdThe argument in one line.
AI agents are already choosing which businesses get the appointment, the sale and the purchase, so getting recommended by them is now the highest-return marketing work, ahead of any efficiency gain AI offers.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A local service business owner (plumber, installer, contractor) who gets leads from search and has never checked whether ChatGPT, Claude or Grok recommends you.
- An agency owner or marketing lead deciding how much of the team to replace with AI and how to talk about it publicly.
- A SaaS or software founder who wants to know why being listed early in agent marketplaces, connectors and plugins matters.
- A consultant or freelancer whose client keeps saying they do not see the value, and who wants to hear the buyer's side of that conversation.
- A hiring manager weighing whether to hire for core skill (sales, editing) or for AI fluency.
SKIP IF…
- You want a step-by-step AEO tactics checklist; the episode names the goal and the stakes but gives almost no implementation detail.
- You dislike loose, conversational podcasts; roughly a third of the runtime is stories about consultants, dating, assistants and personal anecdotes.
The full version, fast.
Consumers now ask AI agents to pick a newsletter platform, find three water softener installers or order funeral flowers, and the agent decides who gets the business. The hosts argue this is simply the next surface for AEO and SEO, that most businesses cannot even see the revenue they are losing because they never ask how a lead found them, and that agent platforms will soon sell ads and marketplace placement the way Google did. They also warn against gutting staff for AI: marketing output from unattended AI gets measurably worse, and buyers notice. Their conclusion is blunt: for most companies the biggest AI return is not saved hours, it is being the answer the agent gives.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostEric Siu
01:54cohostNeil Patel
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 08:56
01 · Get AI to recommend your business
Agents choosing newsletter platforms, connectors and water softener installers; why this is the next AEO and SEO surface; whether agent platforms will sell ads or optimization.
08:56 – 17:32
02 · Cutting staff for AI makes you look bad
A well-known marketer boasts about replacing staff with OpenClaw; a European ecom agency pitches itself for acquisition while planning to run on two people.
17:32 – 25:02
03 · AI cannot do your marketing alone
Reach drops when AI skills write unattended and recovers when a human writes; AI-driven content advice optimized for views over revenue.
25:02 – 27:11
04 · Feedback is a gift
Two consultants with opposite reactions to direct feedback, and why the curious one is the keeper.
27:11 – 37:02
05 · Pay X, expect Y
A $17,000-a-month content vendor renegotiates within an hour; a million-dollar agency whose owners take home $5,000 a month.
37:02 – 40:13
06 · No right or wrong way to build
A 38-year bootstrapped services firm with almost no acquisitions, plus McDonald's, TSMC and Nvidia as different paths.
40:13 – 50:42
07 · Monetize random content
Reacting to a clip on posting about any interest; why it works on interest-based feeds, where it falls short, and staying authentic to your personality.
50:42 – 57:16
08 · The AI compute boom
Meta's capex, demand outrunning supply, only 0.2% of people using AI productively, and AI build-out as a share of GDP versus railroads and highways.
57:16 – 1:00:18
09 · Agents are doing the buying
Autonomous ABM from a follower list, Forrester's 75% B2B prediction, and an agent that handled funeral flowers and a private dining booking end to end.
1:00:18 – 1:05:34
10 · Do you still need an EA?
Why a long-tenured human assistant still owns travel logistics when one AI mistake can wreck a day.
1:05:34 – 1:09:14
11 · The AI gap is widening
A clip on how far AI-native startups are pulling ahead of incumbents, and screening hires with an upfront AI-usage questionnaire.
1:09:14 – 1:11:58
12 · Hire for sales or for AI?
Teach a great salesperson AI or teach an AI-native person to sell; why both hosts land in different places.
1:11:58 – 1:16:01
13 · Be unreasonable with AI
Asking AI for things you would never ask a human, and checking a year of past predictions against what actually happened.
1:16:01 – 1:17:38
14 · The biggest ROI in AI marketing
Getting AI to recommend you beats efficiency gains; token costs are falling and most users do not need the frontier model.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The biggest return from AI in marketing right now is getting AI to recommend your product, not cutting hours or labor costs.
- A homeowner who Googled got a $7,600 water softener quote; asking Grok to find and schedule three companies got the same job for about $4,800.
- Most businesses winning agent-sourced leads have no idea, because they never ask customers how they found them and have no tracking for it.
- When an agent offers a bigger discount for a bigger purchase, buyers say yes without deliberating, which is why being the recommended option compounds.
- Agent platforms will likely not sell influence over organic answers, but they will tell businesses how many leads they sent and invite them to advertise for more.
- When an agent platform opens a marketplace, plugin directory or connector store, the first credible companies listed get a lead that is hard to take back.
- Announcing that you cut hundreds of staff because of AI hurts recruiting and credibility, even if the efficiency gains are real.
- An agency planning to run unlimited ad spend with two people is optimizing its own margin, not client results, and its churn will show it.
- If every agency runs the same AI tools the same way, every client gets the same mediocre result; outperformance needs something the tools do not produce.
- Content written by a human in their own voice pulled 15,000 to 20,000 views where AI-skill output pulled about 1,000 on the same channel.
- AI content advisors optimize for views, not revenue, and will push you toward formats that never reach your buyer.
- A service provider who treats direct feedback as a gift keeps the client; one who argues about how much value they deliver loses it.
- A business doing a million in revenue while paying its owners $5,000 a month would be better off as a job.
- Random-topic content now works because feeds route videos to interested strangers, but steady sponsor money still requires sustained coverage of one topic.
- AI build-out is projected at about 3.6% of GDP through 2032, compared with 2.24% for railroads, which makes the spending less extreme than headlines suggest.
- Forrester predicts AI agents will influence 75% of B2B buying.
- For enterprise sales roles it is easier to teach a strong salesperson AI than to teach an AI-native person how to sell.
- Working with AI means being deliberately unreasonable: ask for ten variations, proof it works end to end, and eight attempts to break it.
- Most everyday AI users are well served by models from six months ago, which is pushing token costs and wasteful spend down.
Be the answer the agent gives
WHERE AI PAYS
Agents now pick vendors and spend money for people, so being recommended by them is worth more than any hours AI saves you, as long as humans still own quality.
01Get AI to recommend your business
- Ask an AI assistant to recommend a provider in your category and see whether you appear, because agents are already booking appointments and placing orders.
- Add a how-did-you-find-us question that names AI assistants, since agent-sourced revenue is invisible to most businesses without it.
- Expect agent platforms to report leads they sent you and offer paid placement, the same path Google took with sponsored results.
- Get listed early in any agent marketplace, connector directory or plugin store in your category; early credible entries are hard to displace.
02Cutting staff for AI makes you look bad
- Talk about AI as raising what each person can do, because public layoff boasts damage recruiting and credibility with buyers who understand AI.
- Treat an agency's plan to run huge budgets with two people as a red flag: it optimizes the agency's margin while client results and retention fall.
03AI cannot do your marketing alone
- Keep a human editor on AI-generated content; reach in the episode fell to about 1,000 views unattended and jumped back to 15,000 or more with a human writing.
- Judge content ideas by whether they reach paying customers, because AI feedback loops optimize for views and will push formats that never sell.
04Feedback is a gift
- Treat direct client feedback as information to act on; vendors who argue about their own value instead of fixing the gap get replaced.
05Pay X, expect Y
- Agree on exactly what a retainer buys before work starts, and walk away when a vendor changes the price after it was agreed.
- If a business has run for years at a million in revenue with almost no owner profit, a salaried job with equity may be the better move.
06No right or wrong way to build
- Long, steady compounding is a valid strategy; a services firm with almost no acquisitions reached billions in revenue over nearly four decades.
07Monetize random content
- Posting about any genuine interest can find an audience on interest-based feeds, but repeat sponsor income requires sustained coverage of one topic.
- Pick content formats that fit your personality; trend-chasing brings views, while authentic formats bring revenue.
08The AI compute boom
- AI capital spending of about 3.6% of GDP through 2032 sits within the range of past infrastructure booms such as railroads.
- Plan for marketing to target agents and devices directly, including robots and assistants that shop on a person's behalf.
09Agents are doing the buying
- Agents can already turn a follower list into ICP-qualified outreach targets, so competitor engagement becomes a live lead source.
- Forrester's forecast that agents will influence 75% of B2B buying means inclusion in the agent's shortlist is the new first impression.
10Do you still need an EA?
- Keep high-stakes logistics such as travel connections with a proven human assistant, because a single AI error can cost a full day.
- A good assistant is someone happy in the role who proactively protects your time, not someone using it as a stepping stone.
11The AI gap is widening
- The capability gap between AI-native operators and incumbents is widening weekly, which makes AI fluency a real hiring criterion.
- State plainly in your hiring process that you want AI-native candidates and screen with a short questionnaire on actual usage and spend.
12Hire for sales or for AI?
- For enterprise sales, hiring a proven seller who is willing to learn AI is safer than teaching an AI-native hire to sell.
- Culture and willingness to learn decide whether a strong performer can pick up AI at all.
13Be unreasonable with AI
- Ask AI for what would be rude to ask a person: ten variations, end-to-end proof, and repeated attempts to break the result.
- Revisit your own AI predictions against what happened; the hosts found fewer humans needed was right, but no humans at all was not.
14The biggest ROI in AI marketing
- For most businesses, the biggest AI return is being recommended by AI, ahead of hours saved or labor cut.
- Most everyday AI use runs fine on last generation's models, so check whether a flat subscription would replace runaway per-token spend.
Terms worth knowing.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization. The work of making a business show up as the answer when people ask AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok a question or for a recommendation.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization. Another name for optimizing content so that generative AI systems cite or recommend it, used largely interchangeably with AEO.
- ICP
- Ideal customer profile. A description of the type of company or person most likely to buy from you, used to filter leads and target outreach.
- Autonomous ABM
- Account-based marketing run by an AI agent, for example automatically sending outreach to target accounts when they engage with a competitor's posts or ads.
- Connector
- An integration that lets an AI assistant use an outside service or data source on the user's behalf. Agent platforms list them in a directory, which acts like an app store.
- Capex
- Capital expenditure. Money a company spends on long-lived physical assets such as data centers and servers, as opposed to day-to-day operating costs.
- Jevons paradox
- The pattern where making a resource cheaper or more efficient to use increases total consumption of it rather than reducing it.
- Executive assistant (EA)
- A person who manages an executive's calendar, travel and logistics. Here contrasted with handing those tasks to AI agents.
Things they pointed at.
00:00productMeta Muse
00:32productBeehiiv
00:32productSubstack
00:00productGrok
01:01toolCloudflare security skill
09:52toolOpenClaw
34:31productHighLevel
40:11channelGary Vaynerchuk on monetizing random content
51:31channelCheeky Pint podcast with Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang
52:41channelAll-In podcast (Ben Horowitz episode)
54:54linkAndrej Karpathy on AI productivity adoption
58:17linkForrester prediction on AI agents in B2B buying
1:05:36channelMarc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the AI adoption gap
1:12:00linkThorsten Ball, "Be unreasonable"
Lines you could clip.
1:16:03
“It is literally the biggest ROI we see is just get AI recommending your company and product.”
03:19
“Most businesses, they don't have the tracking, they're not asking questions, they don't really know that they got that appointment because of Grok.”
08:13
“Once they have the marketplace come out, you got to get on it like immediately. The moment you wait, someone else gets ahead of you.”
15:57
“If everyone's using the same tech to manage everything, you're not going to get great results. You're going to get mediocre results.”
16:52
“AI is not about eliminating jobs, about elevating capabilities. Which means people go up or out.”
18:15
“The moment I start writing again, instead of like 1,000 views, it's like 15,000, 20,000 views.”
21:33
“AI is just telling these guys to tell me to create content that won't make me a dollar in revenue and is not targeted towards my ideal customer.”
26:25
“When you get feedback, you should look at it as a gift. 99% of people do not look at feedback as a gift.”
33:16
“A business making a million dollars in revenue that makes no profit is useless. At that point, move along and get a job.”
1:12:06
“You have to constantly remind yourself that you're no longer working with humans. Things that would have seemed unreasonable or over the top or downright rude, you can ask for all of that now.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 08:56denseAgent recommendations as the next AEO/SEO surface
08:56 – 25:02denseAI layoffs, agency diligence and human-in-the-loop marketing
25:02 – 40:13steadyManaging consultants and vendor value
40:13 – 50:42steadyContent strategy and authenticity
50:42 – 57:16steadyAI infrastructure spending and demand
57:16 – 1:11:58steadyAgent buying, assistants and the AI capability gap
1:11:58 – 1:17:38denseWorking style with AI and where the ROI is
Word for word.
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metaphorstory
Metamuse is now recommending for our client's product as the best option on the market. Hey, I want to start a newsletter. Which platform should I use?
Please just choose one for me. And it says Beehive. Done deliberating.
I instantly put in $300 to get the discount, right? But I'm not really thinking about it. You have Claude Duet just came out this week.
Okay, Metamuse. You have Instinct. You have Grokbot.
You have OpenAI Dots. This is just the next surface for AEO SEO. Most businesses don't understand the revenue loss that they're going to get by not optimizing for this.
So Rob Hoffman says, MetaMule is now recommending for our client's product as the best option on the market. So you can see the Muse up here, right? And it's like, hey, I want to start a newsletter.
Which platform should I use? Please just choose one for me. And it says Beehive, done deliberating.
It takes 0 % of your subscription. Substack takes 10%. But to get listed number one, I'll tell you one example.
The other day, I was using my GrokBot. I was like, hey, I want to figure this and this out over here. I'm like, what should I use as a connector?
It's like, you should use this connector. I went to it, no problem. Oh, it's like, oh, for $100, you get five.
to $5 discount, but for $300, you get $30 discount. I instantly put in $300 to get the, get the discount. Right.
But I'm not really thinking about it. And even today, cause there's all this black October, like all these security issues happening right now. So I ran a cloud flare security skill and I was like, it's like, Oh, it's going to cost you a hundred dollars to run this audit on all of your products right now.
I'm like, do it. Right. So it's just like, it's just doing it now.
And, and I'm just like. Well, how do you get listed for these? You're going to have to do more AEO.
You're going to have to do more SEO. It hasn't changed, right? But I think getting recommended because you have Claude Duet just came out this week.
Okay, Metamuse. You have Instinct. You have Grokbot.
You have OpenAI Dots. This is just the next surface for AEO, SEO. It is, but most businesses don't understand the revenue loss that they're going to get by not optimizing for this.
And I'll share a really recent example. My co -founder, who you know, sold his house in Las Vegas and he's renting a house until he figures out, you know, where he's going to build his next house.
No, no, no. He'll stay in Las Vegas. Okay.
He got a really good deal. So like sometimes you just take the money when someone offers you a lot of money for something that you built in two years and you lived in it only for a few months. You're like, yeah, that reminds me of someone else I know.
Yeah. So in his new rental, he has a really good price. The landlord will not pay for stuff like curtains or water softener.
In Vegas, because of the weather, water softener is a nice feature. So he calls up a company. A company for water softener, he Googles.
Quotes him $7 ,600. And you said he Googled it? He Googled it.
Okay. All right. He used to use Claude a lot more, but now he's been using Grok.
because of the usability, it's just easier for him. Grok bought? Uh -huh.
Okay. So then he has Grok just find him more companies to schedule appointment, come to his house based on when he's free as well. Three companies come.
he got the cheapest quote uh four thousand something dollars i think it was 4 800 so less than five grand and he's gonna go with the company and sign up with them problem is is that company like most companies never really optimized to be shown in you know geo or you know optimizing for these bots but the ones who are and the ones who are getting pulled and are showing up are generating revenue that you can't really track like as a business you're not really most businesses they don't have the tracking they're not asking questions they don't really know that they got that appointment because of grok and if they optimize more for grok they can get more of those appointments and they can win more business or optimize for cloud or chat gpt or gemini or whatever it may be but businesses miss out on that it's just like the same thing with like the iphone duo people think about oh the cost i gotta you know if you're optimizing for grok oh this cost me money
Oh, Grok costs money to use. Oh, the iPhone Duo is $2 ,000, at least in the United States. People forget, yes, there's costs that all these consumers pay to use this, and some of them have free plans.
Some of these products cost money. But what's the cost of not actually optimizing your business for these new devices or channels? So if you don't optimize for Grok, even though it costs you money or Claude or Chad GPT, you're losing a lot of potential revenue.
Same with the iPhone Duo. How many businesses are not optimizing their web experience for the Duo? And Eric made a good point.
He ordered it. He's probably going to cancel it and wait for the next generation to come because. a lot of apps aren't compatible for it.
But if you don't adapt to these devices, and we already know based on how quickly the Duo sold out, and now the shipping time is I think Jan 25th roughly, you are screwed because if it's that popular and more and more people are going to purchase it, and it's an expensive device, that is ideal customer because they have money, at least for a lot of business owners.
So if you don't optimize your experience for these devices or for these channels, you lose out on a lot of revenue as business owners and marketers. so i have a couple things here so by the way the example neil just gave so let's say a water softener or let's just say a plumber for easy example okay so you go through Grokbot, Grokbot recommends a plumber.
I suspect that a Grokbot or any of these other tools, these agents will notify that company that, hey, we got you this customer. Would you like more? Would you like us to optimize it for you?
You know why? Because yesterday I was sitting on my Grokbot because I've been using that most of the time now. I'm like, hey, because I have a good relationship with the Grokbot team.
So they give me all the early releases, all these things, right? You're saying Grokbot will, you think they'll eventually notify people? Yeah, because it's not hard.
Because yesterday I was using Grokbot. I was like, hey, like I have a, good relationship with the Grok bot in the SpaceX team, right?
They hooked me up a lot. I would like a good relationship with the open AI team, the cloud, the partner, the creator team, and you know, so -and -so, you know, insert large language model here. It's like, okay, these people over here, you should email these people.
I've drafted this for you. You should also DM them on X. I've drafted it for you.
Do you want me to send it? Yes. Right.
That's not hard to do. Similarly on my Grok bot, I have a competitor ad thing. I've just made this for fun.
I was like, Hey, whoever engages with profound posts on LinkedIn or their ads, I want you to, if they're ICP fit, let me know. Earlier this week, it's like these four people engaged X amount of times over here. You should reach out with this angle over here.
So it's not going to be hard for Grokbot or any of these agents to put that together saying, hey, we got you this customer. Do you want us to get you more? Because more and more people are just going to use this more.
I think Meta is already reporting that they're making good money from this. Elon is like Grokbot's the biggest uses I've ever seen with anything. I think they're all just going to grow really fast.
I think they're all going to grow really fast. And I think they're going to do a version of what you're saying, but a little bit different. And you could be saying the same thing.
When they reach out to people, they will say, would you like to advertise on Grokva? Exactly. And would you like us to do it for you?
Correct. But even if you get someone for free and someone becomes a customer and there's a way for them to close loop, they'll be like, hey, by the way, we filled out this form for our customer. If you would like more of these leads, you can actually advertise in our marketplace or set up an ad.
Google back in the day, right? Google was already doing this. Like, hey, would you like more customers?
We're already sending this to you, right? So I think that was already default, like to be expected. But I think the next angle is like.
Usually Google would never offer a SEO services to you know for their own system, right? But I think now it's gonna be cost effective enough where any of these can offer a version of a EEO Geo, whatever you want to call it for the agents That's what I the reason and I think you'll change your mind on this the reason I don't think they'll do it is because they don't want they want game their algorithm no no not just games are out of them they want you to know as a user that whatever you're you're that they're sending to you is the best option it's pure it's pure and and i know you agree with that but i do see them doing it with the advertising portion google's version of it was when you used to do google searches back in the day when they had sponsored areas they would like want your ad to show here right they're using some text like that people click it you get into adwords or google uh yeah google adwords now it's called google ads i still say adwords even though it's chain free yes yeah and then you can sign up and then you go through the flow but i do believe when they fill out form they'll message me like hey we sent you four leads this this month you can actually get more of them from advertising in our marketplace they're not saying hey we will influence organic results they're saying hey you could just advertise here when people ask questions so you're probably right on that one i might just agree right now on that one um
I will say though, you're going to see more surfaces. They're going to attack more surfaces aggressively. So for example, Grokbot or ChatGPT, right?
They have, to your point, first mover advantage. Once they have the marketplace come out, you got to get on it like immediately. Once they have the plugins come out, you got to get on it like immediately.
You can't wait. The moment you wait, someone else gets ahead of you. So yesterday I was looking at the connectors for Grokbot.
It's like, oh, we have these four marketing plugins over here. I'm like, that's such a good opportunity. for any marketing company to get more of their software in there fast now.
Cause I've seen some in there where like, I'm like, Oh, this is like some YouTube influencers product over here. Like why is this product in here? They're just in bed with a lot of these people right now.
And if you have a good relationship with them, you're a creator or you're like a notable company, they're happy to partner up with you. So you should do it now.
Just fall over there. You okay, Noah? Noah looks like he's okay.
I was just watching a well -known internet marketer, okay? And he was talking about how he cut from like hundreds of employees down to like less than 100 right now, right? And...
What is the reason for that, you think, Neil? He put on Instagram that he's at 300. I'm just calling on Neil because I know he's not paying attention right now.
So I'm calling on Neil because this internet marketer had a couple hundred employees, cut down to less than 100, and says that AI is doing everything for him right now, okay? That AI is doing like 20 to 30 times more. And don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest proponent of AI.
And Neil, you'll like this. So this guy was saying like, look, you know open claw so he's talking about open claw right he's like open claw is doing the work of like a bunch of other people right now and it's better than him at copywriting okay i have a lot of problems with what's being said so i i respect this internet marketer again you know this internet marketer in fact you've spoken at this person's events before um so let me just ask you Does it make you look good or bad as an entrepreneur when you talk about cutting hundreds of employees and talking about how AI is making you much more good or bad?
It doesn't make you look good. And you shouldn't do it. As much as I love talking about AI, I don't like talking about having to cut people.
In fact, I think that AI is not about eliminating jobs. It's about elevating capability. And so you look at this person, okay?
Or being way more efficient and getting more done for the same... Which is elevating capabilities, is it not? And so...
If AI is elevating capabilities, it doesn't help you. It doesn't help you with the recruiting when you say, hey, we've cut this many people and then we're looking at cutting even more people and we can do this and that. But I also think this person's credibility was hurt too.
When they say right now, this interview only happened recently, when they say they're using OpenClaw and it's replacing employees. It's like, bro, first of all, OpenClaw sucks and it's unreliable, okay? Number one, that shows that you don't really know that much about AI.
There could be some security issues that you have to worry about. And there's even more security issues as of... this Black October, right?
Which we can talk about in a moment. So more security issues came out? Oh, major security issues of the internet.
I'll update you in a moment. You probably have someone on this already. No, I don't use it myself, so I don't have to worry.
I'll tell you in a second. So anyway, all that to say is he's talking about how he uses AI so much. He's cutting employees.
That doesn't make him look good. He's talking about how OpenClaw is doing the work. OpenClaw sucks now, so that ruins credibility too, right?
And then the other thing is they... He's talking about how it's better than him at copywriting. Okay.
So that's not good either. Cause I don't think you can say that. Okay.
So like AI is really good. Why can't you say that? Cause if you suck at copywriting, it's probably better.
This guy's good at copywriting. You can't be that good at copywriting. If he says open clause better than you know, this guy, he's, he's a good copywriter.
In fact, he's well known in the industry for solid copywriting. Do I know him well? Well, you know him decently.
Well, yeah. But I'm not going to name names right now. He'd be that good of a copywriter then.
He's a good copywriter. You're telling me OpenClaw is better than most... He said that, but he's exaggerating.
But that ruins credibility with someone that knows AI. I'm not going to say I'm amazing, right? But I know that one, OpenClaw sucks.
And I know that he's good at copywriting. And I know that if he says that OpenClaw is better to him at copywriting or AI is better to him at copywriting, that he's full of it. That he cannot say that right now.
And he's also full of it when he's kind of talking about cutting employees. Even if you are, you don't say that openly. So I have a lot of problems with this because...
I think internet marketers coming into the AI space right now, AI is trending, right? You see all these people selling course and I have nothing, no problems with courses, right? But this is what makes internet marketers look bad.
When you start to talk about shit that you don't understand and it just makes all internet marketers look bad. Yes. I went through the same thing this morning on my 10 30 call and I was just like, are you serious?
It was about the 10 30 call. So my 1030 call, there was a agency in Europe that one of my team members found that said we should look at this company to potentially acquire them. When my team member says we should look at this company, it doesn't mean we should buy them.
What someone may tell them in that organization versus what I find or someone else may find as we continually do more diligence, we may end up finding out things we don't like and then you just back away. So today we definitely backed away. So this agency has been around for a little bit less than 10 years.
they focus on ecom thank you for the water uh you do provide good service for this building uh the and i was making a joke there because sometimes some of the people inside the building don't provide the best service true so i was talking to them about their agency they have they had 30 something plus people they recently did a round of layoffs they're in the low 20s and Their goal within next year is to be at 8 to 10.
I said, how is this possible? They said they have low churn. And they said...
8 to 10 in revenue. 8 to 10 people. So next year, their goal is to have 8 to 10 people.
So they went from 30, they're already into the low 20s. I see. So next year, if we buy this company, by the time we take it over and we're running it, by the end of next year, let's say it takes six months to buy, but by the end of next year...
they would have cut down the employees even more to 8 to 10. And I said, how is this even possible? Do you guys have high churn?
They said, no, we have really low churn, which is false because they lost quite a bit of revenue. So if you look at it from a revenue standpoint, no, they actually have quite a bit of churn, but they're figuring things out. And they're just like, we have this technology.
We figured out how to use AI. They specialize in e -com marketing. They're just like, we don't need all the people.
We can scale up to infinite amount of ad spend with just two people. I'm like, this is impossible. They're like, yeah, technology, AI, everything can do it for us.
We don't need tons of headcount. And I was like, and I asked this guy more detailed questions. I was like, so what happens if it was like a half a billion dollars in ad spend a year or a billion?
Like, yeah, we're pretty sure we can do it with two people, maybe three max. Right. And I was like, how so?
Because we manage a lot in ad spend and they're just like. And we definitely don't have two people or even 10 people on ad spend management. We have way more.
I don't know what the number is, but we have a lot in just paid ad. And they're just like, you know, the technology is really good. You barely need any people.
I'm like, well, that means you're just letting the technology do everything. And the humans are just checking to make sure it doesn't screw up. So I was just like, then why does someone need to pay agency for that?
This is why your agency isn't growing as fast. You're providing mediocre results. And this is why you're losing clients.
This is my opinion, at least. I didn't tell them all of this, but this is my opinion. I'm like, this is why you're losing clients.
This is why you lost three of your four biggest clients in the last year. Hence, when they said they had barely any churn, I'm like, well, you lost three of your four biggest clients. To me, that's not very little churn.
I don't need a spreadsheet to figure that out. But I took it as you're just using AI to do the work and optimize for your profitability. You're not optimizing for the client's result.
If you were, you wouldn't just focus on gutting everyone in your company and only have two people and just be like, yeah, I can streamline it all. Well, if everyone's doing the same thing through technology. Why will your campaign perform better than all the other people's?
It won't. You need to do something outside the box. I'm not saying every person can do that.
I'm not saying technology can or can't do that. I'm just saying if everyone's using the same tech to manage everything, you're not going to get great results. You're going to get mediocre results because you're doing what everyone else is doing.
And we know this in marketing. You have to do something special. And, you know, the guy wanted to sell to us.
And I was like, yeah, I'm not buying. I told my guy right away. I'm like, this is just a waste.
He's just trying to use AI to cut all his employees. And he's like, yeah, from the last few years, our profit was decent. It's gone down.
But now, next year, our profit's going to be amazing. And when I asked him what the biggest struggle in your business was, he's like, closing new business. And I'm like, yeah, no crap.
Because you have a terrible reputation. You're not going to get the referrals. You're not going to get tons of RFPs.
Because all you're doing is just trying to streamline work. Maximize your profit. He's like, human cost is my highest cost.
And then just pocket all the money. I'm like, this is not a business I want to buy. That's the worst way to look at it.
When people say, oh, I just want to cut more humans, cut more humans. No, like you want to hire again. AI is not about eliminating jobs, about elevating capabilities, right?
Which means people go up or out. That's how I view it. And my company, you're either up or you're out.
And people, a lot of people are meeting the challenge. But when you, by the way, guys, when you're trying to sell a company, people can see that you reek of desperation, right? So you can smell it immediately on the call that he's just trying to.
offload and trying to go for an exit. Usually, by the way, if you're trying to just sell for an exit, it doesn't end up that well. If you try to build for long term, it usually ends up better and all the people end up courting you.
You might want to put it in front of you a little more. There you go.
That brings me to another point, Neil. I don't believe that AI can handle marketing work alone. I'm going to give you a few examples and I'm curious to hear a few examples on your side.
even for my youtube channel okay so my youtube channel when i let the skill just do its work without me implementing my taste for five to ten minutes or so it's really bad like i posted a few videos recently where i just let the skill do its thing and i i thought it learned from my recent videos it didn't learn right now same thing with our ad creative that we do for clients we can't just let the ai do its thing same thing for our aeo seo content we just can't we still need to have an editor in the loop right um same thing with our x content so max who's actually on this call right now he manages my my x account from time to time um or like a good chunk at a time, when he was just using his X skill that he forked off of mine, he can see that the reach was going down.
But he starts writing again in his voice this week, boom, the reach goes back up. And then same thing with my videos that I cross -posted from YouTube. The moment I start writing again, instead of like, I don't know, 1 ,000 views, it's like 15 ,000, 20 ,000 views, right?
Which is pretty decent for a video on YouTube, like especially for B2B. So all that to say is you still need the human in the loop. And for anybody that goes to you right now and says, oh, AI's already figured it all out, you should probably run in a different direction.
Because as much as I like it right now, and as much as I want it to be like that, it's not that right now. Yes. And I, you know, take my hats off to Eric on this one, because Eric was in a very different camp a year ago, in which when AI technology came out, he saw a lot of opportunities.
And he believed that it can disrupt in many ways. And he still believes that. But Eric isn't stubborn in which just because everyone's talking about something like ai and marketing what it can do he won't just blindly say yeah this is what's going to happen here's the end of all humans you won't need as many of them he'll adapt with whatever he learns or time and eric was i would say more more extreme AI a year ago in my personal opinion than you are now, it doesn't mean he's using the technology any less.
He's quickly used it and adapted and figured out where it's weak and where it's strong and that's the key. I know Eric's not employed, but that is the key when you're hiring marketing employees in AI. You don't want them to drink the Kool -Aid.
You want them to adapt to whatever is best for the strategy, for the clients, for the results, instead of just having tunnel vision and just being like, this is how it's going to be. And it doesn't mean that AI in a year from now won't be better and be able to do a lot more stuff. And Eric may go back to saying like, oh, wow, you don't need X, Y, and Z for this.
You can just use AI because as technology changes, show should. how you interact or do your strategy or do your marketing. The interesting thing that I see with AI is it creates a lot of Buy it.
And I'll give you a real life example of this. Eric was talking about my Instagram profile on how I'm doing like clone type videos where there'll be like two or three of me. And he's like, oh, they're getting pretty good views.
And he was looking at my stats. And Eric was right. I don't look at my stats on Instagram that often.
I thought I got like, you know, 100 ,000 or 500 ,000 views a month. And Eric's like, no, you get a decent amount of views. And I looked at my Instagram analytics and I think I sent you a screenshot of it.
I think I was getting like 11 million views or something like that in 30 days. oh, actually people view my stuff on Instagram. And some of the guys I work with were like, we need to do more clone videos.
I'm like, why do we need to do more clone videos? Keep in mind they also take longer to create. I don't have an issue of putting in time.
But they were using AI and AI gives you feedback on what's working and what's not. And AI was pushing them to do more clone videos like this is a good CMO versus a bad CMO versus a mediocre CMO. This is a good entrepreneur versus a mediocre entrepreneur versus a bad entrepreneur.
And Eric knows this. How much revenue am I going to generate from those videos? Exactly.
So do I care if I get a million views or zero views? No. Exactly.
So I was like, AI is just telling these guys to tell me to create content on shit, excuse my language, that won't make me a dollar in revenue and is not targeted towards my ideal customer. So why the heck am I going to record this content? And I remember I had to create 30 videos that day because of my travel schedule.
And it ended up being that I ended the day with 27 videos because I refused to create videos on stuff that is useless. And it also pisses you off when you, it's like, at least for me, I shouldn't speak for you. But if I see it on my list, when people used to generate the topic ideas, I just get more and more pissed off as I see more and more of it.
And then I just don't want to record anymore. So yeah. Yes.
And I got so pissed off that I had a talk with them. And Eric knows me really well now. I know that you know this person really well too.
When I get mad, I usually don't get mad. But like when people are wasting my time and it just keeps me in recurring thing, I just, I just go off. And I don't have a temper, but I'm very direct.
Oh, you just don't let up. Yeah, I don't let up. You don't yell, but you don't let up.
And I was just like, why should I keep paying? I was just very direct. And then I was like, I pay X dollars a month.
This is what I'm getting. And I'm like, I don't see the value. And then it went into, you don't see the value in our work.
You're belittling us. And I'm like, no, no, no. I'm just telling you very direct.
that if i can't get y i'm going to look for other solutions i'm not saying your time is not more valuable or less valuable that is your decision i'm just telling you as a consumer paying you x dollars i'm expecting y if i can't get y i'm going to look for other solutions so Why should I? And it went down a track of, hey, you're a client of mine.
And this is a lesson for anyone who's a consultant or an agency owner. There's like, you're a client of mine. You don't understand all the value we create and how good we make you look and all this.
That is the perception of the person providing the service. As a person paying for the service, I'm paying for X. If I can't see X and someone else is providing me Y, but I don't care for Y, but they think I should care for Y, that means there's a disconnect.
And that means usually they're not going to continually get paid. And I'm going to go find someone who can get me X. Now, their whole philosophy on creating social content for me is you look good.
This builds your brand. You know, look at what your brand can do for you. And my response, and Eric knows this, is I don't care how my brand looks.
Of course, I don't want it to look bad. From a perspective of I don't care how big my brand gets My goal is not to be a Tony Robbins or LeBron James and those are big examples But bigger examples in my space would be a Gary Vaynerchuk or Alex Hermosy or Cody She has a big brand as well Cody Sanchez. I'm not trying to optimize for my brand.
I'm trying to optimize for revenue I'm not saying the Gary Vaynerchuk approach does not drive revenue I'm saying for my business, that approach doesn't work for me. It doesn't mean it can't work for Gary or someone else.
I'm just saying for my business and what I'm trying to do, it doesn't fit in my playbook and it doesn't work for me. So I'd rather stick to what I know that works for me and double down on that and ignore the rest. Because as you guys all have heard Eric and I say on this podcast, there's no wrong or right way to do marketing.
You have to figure out what works for you. So there's two ways to win as a consultant. actually two approaches to being a consultant okay so we have this one consultant right now helps us with linkedin 1 ,000 comments, 1 ,500 comments, 2 ,000 comments.
Amazing, right? A lot of engagement. He's good.
He's very young, too. He's 18 years old. But whenever I give him feedback, it's very direct.
I was like, hey, man, I don't know if this is going to work because you're getting all the engagement in the world, but it's not driving us any book meetings right now, right? And we're going to have to end engagement. So this is also one way to handle the engagement early, right?
Like you just start to nip in the bud. But every single week, he's like, hey, man, thanks for the learnings. I'm trying to get better.
I'm trying to get better. I'm like, he is getting better. He's trying, right?
But there's no look at all the effort that I'm putting in. You know, understand the value of this.
If you have to fight like that, it's just not going to work, right? Now we do have another consultant that we worked with and he's probably going to listen to this, right? Hello.
So what happens with that one is like, he's asking for more money, but at the same time, the results aren't getting better. In fact, the results are getting worse. And then if you look at them, if you look at the thumbnails that are being posted, they're more and more AI generated.
And there's not a lot of thought that are going into them, right? So you have two different camps here. You have the 18 year old who's like, I'm going to get better.
And I understand if I'm going to be fired. Okay. Which is the right attitude.
I trust he's going to figure out in life, no matter what. Then you have the other attitude where it's like, you just don't understand, you know, we're not getting, wait, can we go back a bit? Yeah.
Eric just said he believes he's going to figure out what, uh, he's going to figure out things in life. I know what you mean by that, but for everyone listening, why is that the right attitude? And what do you mean by that?
Yep. So when you get feedback, you should look at as a gift 99 of people do not look at feedback as a gift he sees it as a gift and you can see genuinely he's like oh yeah that's good right there's no like he's not getting defensive about it right so he has a curious and adaptable mindset and that's exactly what you need to win as an entrepreneur yes and when eric says he'll win in life he's not necessarily saying he's going to win eric's organization he's just saying generally in life this person has the right attitude to do well.
Exactly. Now the other attitude is like the example that you gave me from, you know, someone that we know. Right.
And it's, it's defensive when you're defensive like that, you're not in the headspace to want to get better. And if you don't want to get better, then no matter how good your coaching is or how good my coaching is, you can't get better. And you're always going to be adversarial.
And if it's an adversary relationship, we might as well just not work together. Yeah. You're going to hear another interesting one.
So one of the guys that helps us out. we pay them 17 000 a month so call it 200 ish thousand dollars here we've been paying them for so many years okay all right so and they help us with content and stuff like all right and this is for me personally right but it's through the company they're helping the company but you know they're they're working with me they're coming to my house and all this kind of stuff which makes life somewhat easy which is why i haven't changed as much but 17 000 a month is a good amount of money so I try to get more stuff done out of them for giving them more money.
All right. So I was like, I need more videos. I want these kind of pieces of content.
They're like, okay. And we I met the guy for breakfast. And then the guy's like, all right, this will be another 10 grand.
I said, okay, sounds good. Let me just run it by a few other people in my organization. I ran it through them right then and there.
I was texting them. This was on a Saturday. But I can get a hold of my co -founder anytime or the CEO.
I'm like, yeah, what do you guys think about this? Because I was not 100 % sure. So I just want to run it by people before I commit to anything.
They're like, yeah, why not? So they agreed upon it. Fast forward.
an hour they're like i thought about it i don't know if i want to do it for that amount i think it's way too much work i want more money i'm providing so much i'm like i didn't come up with a price you came up with the price you're changing on me so that a pisses me off right yeah an hour later dude yeah and this is like come on dude and then it goes into arguing about hey you need to be more grateful look at what we're doing look how make me look like you need to realize something i just asked you don't give me a speech on why i should pay you more or why you should be grateful yes i i really hate that and i always try to tell people you should charge whatever you want to charge i will pay whatever makes sense for my business if it doesn't align that's okay i have to do what's best for my business and you have to do what's best for your business and keep in mind not everything works out for everyone and we should just be understanding that's the way the business world works i wish i could charge people 10 million dollars yeah you know all day long for contracts and just make more profit it won't work like that procurement comes in and be like no your margins are too high this is what you need to charge and technically i don't even get to quote 10 million dollars for all these campaigns they beat you down well in advance and you know get you down and down and
you against seven other companies but as we're going through this at one time i was just at my place and we were creating content and we were going over this thing that was ten thousand dollars and they negotiated for them and i'm like look dude if you're telling me you want 12 or 14 i can't tell you yet because i don't know what it looks like so we settled on the first month they'll do it for additional and i remember sitting in my place as we were recording it they did one They came back a week later to do three more and they started discussing how, you know, it's a lot of work.
I need to see the value and I don't, I don't appreciate what they're doing. I'm like, this is just a business relationship. I pay X, I get Y.
I like the people, but I pay X, I get Y. And if it doesn't work out for me, it doesn't work out for me. If it doesn't work out for you, don't do it for me.
It's that simple. So I had a clear talk with them. I said, you guys have been doing business, right?
Like, yeah. Like, how long? And they were just like, we've been in marketing, running our own marketing company for, I think it's almost 10 years now.
And I said, okay, what's your take home? So they're all sitting there. They're like $5 ,000 a month.
We do over a million in revenue. So I was like, You're telling me you do all this work and you only make $5 ,000 a month, sometimes $7 ,000 a month.
They're like, yeah, but look at what we build. This is amazing. Let's get a job.
Yeah, you nailed it. That's what I just said. Why don't you just guys go get a job?
You've been doing this for a long time. You've been making roughly all this money. And they're like, you don't get it, dude.
We put all these systems and processes within our organization. We're ready to scale now. I was like.
well if you didn't have the systems and processes that means you were doing the work mainly yourself right they're like yes so i was like though so in theory your profit margin should have been higher because you were doing the work without the systems and processes and giving to other people which would have cost you more money yeah and they're just like my i had a dexus scan that day And I was joking with them because, you know, when they measure your head, they're going to bring your blood sugar up.
No, no. You know, when they measure your body, it tells you like your bone density and stuff. It doesn't actually tell you like how powerful your brain is or anything like that.
But I was making a joke because the density for my head is extremely high. Like I'm in like the 98th or 99th percentile. You put more brain in it?
Is that what you're saying? No, no. It just means it's more like tough, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it doesn't mean my brain is bigger. I get what you're saying.
Right? But I was just joking with them. I'm like, dude.
am i in a one percentile with my head yeah and i was just messing around yeah yeah right yeah and then they're joking around they're like does this mean you're in the uh you're not in the one percentile with the rest of your body like they're just joking around with me like my muscle and i'm like yeah i am weak no one knows this when the first thing i ask you i'm like do i look skinnier because i'm trying to gain weight right yeah uh and they're just like look dude we're not as smart as you.
I'm like, dude, first off, I'm not that smart. But they're like, we're not as smart as you. We don't know how to just optimize business.
I'm like, this is simple. If you collect a million in revenue, you're telling me you have three main partners, which are the three guys who run the company. The rest are outsourced employees.
I'm like, how the heck are you not making money? Why don't you guys just go get a job? You can easily get a job for 10 grand a month.
And then they got, the main guy got pissed at me. He's like, dude, I'm worth way more than 10 grand a month. I'm like, okay, 15 grand a month.
I'm just making up a number here. And he's like, I'm worth way more than 15 grand a month. You're belittling my marketing experience.
I'm like, you're taking this the wrong way. I'm telling you, if you're making $5 ,000 a month and this is what you've been making for a long time, call it seven max, and you times it by 12, this is less than 100 ,000 a year. That's below poverty.
In LA? It is hard to live off of that. No, you're below poverty line in LA.
I did not know that. So I'm like, if you're making that for many years, and when I say many years, this is the max I've been making for like five, six years. I'm like, why are you continually doing this?
You're better off taking a job. They're like, I'm worth way more. Well, a business making a million dollars in revenue that makes no profit is useless.
At that point, move along and get a job. Yep. By the way.
Okay. So I'll give you the numbers here. So low income housing.
Okay. Low income housing limits 70 ,000. So you can qualify if you're like a 70 ,000 income, you can qualify for low income housing, not poverty line exactly, but, um, poverty line would be actually like one person household, 16 ,000 a year.
So a little different that's federal poverty line, but to qualify for low income housing, but going back to your point though, at a certain point, look, I get it. Like you and I both support entrepreneurship, right? Like go for it.
Absolutely. But if you're going for 10 years and you're still ready to scale and you still hasn't quite happening, the traction quite isn't there. There's no shame in getting a job.
There's plenty of places that would love to hire you where you can make 15, 20 grand a month or so if you got the experience. And you can get insurance and all this other stuff and don't have to worry about all this other stuff. Dude, not just that.
You know, there's a lot of talented marketers. There's even a lot of marketing companies. I was talking to someone who is interested in joining the workforce and they were an entrepreneur.
And I said, you should go work for a company like High Level because they're blowing up in the marketing space. They're like, why? I'm like, okay, other than the company is growing really fast, good product, doing well.
I'm like, what people don't realize is if you work really hard for a company like that or Uber or Airbnb, OpenAI, et cetera, one, you can make money by rising. Two, that helps you with whatever you want to do in the future. Three, these company shares are worth money.
if they 10x 20x in size and decide to sell or go public or whatever outcome they do or they do um they can say private like stripe and still buy out uh employees right from their stock options or however that works you can become a millionaire even as a entry job or a middle job without even climbing the ranks. And people tend to forget that.
And it's just like, if you're really skilled at what you do, like the guys who I was giving the feedback on, they're really good at editing. And it's just like, wait, this is a great skill set. People will pay you for this.
Why don't you just go get a job and make money in other ways? Imagine if a company like an OpenAI absorbed their editing capabilities. OpenAI is probably different.
They already have that, right? But they would get paid a good amount. They get stock options as well.
Like A16Z. A16Z has their own production team. Eric Tornberg's media company.
I did not know that. Yeah. And that's why they're doing well in media.
Yeah, exactly. So like there's a lot of value in what he's doing. I think he just has to reposition it.
I think because editing's dime a dozen. How many people do you see in your DMs? You don't check your DMs much, but I see my DMs.
Hey, brother. Hey, brother. Hey, brother.
They want me to edit for you. Hey, brother. Hey, brother.
You're looking for an editor, right? It's all the same people over and over. Anyway, that actually brings me to another point because yesterday I sent you a text message.
You're like, no clue, right? But this actually ties in with it because you know of an agency that's been around for 30, 40 years or so. And you said they've always done good work.
They haven't done like a lot of acquisitions, right? You know who I'm talking about now? I know who you're talking about.
Yes. But the number you are telling me wasn't. That's not revenue.
That's profit. Oh, yeah. Sorry.
So my mistake on that one. Yeah. Well, now you can't reveal it to me.
So you have to text me afterwards. So, yeah, because I was I was talking to a friend of space. Yeah.
But you should have a ton of people in India, but yeah, talk about that company because that is an example of a person that just kept going, kept going, kept going. And that's a good, by the way, that's another contrast where it's like, you've done acquisitions. Gary Vee does things a certain way.
This person, this entrepreneur is just like growing it for a very long time. There's a, there's an entrepreneur I know in YPO has an agency. I think they do two or 300 million a year, but he's just done it for a very long time with his brother.
Yeah. So You're spot on.
So there's the agency guy that I ended up learning about because they became a customer and became friends with the owner. They're a different kind of agency. They're not a marketing agency, but they also can provide marketing services, but that's not their core capabilities.
They pretty much try to do everything. Think of like a mini Accenture. Okay.
And I was talking with, um, uh, the founder, uh, you know, they're really into Silicon Valley and all that kind of stuff. Think like a West coast entrepreneur. They've been doing this for call it 38 years.
If I had to guess something like that, maybe more, um, our entire lives, almost our entire lives. And they're, they barely did acquisitions. Uh, I don't know how many acquisitions they did, but call it less than five.
And when I was talking to the founder, I was just like, how'd you grow? They're like, after 10 years, you start getting more included into more larger pitches. Assuming you did work good work in the first 10 years and bigger brands just get to know you more.
And then you just keep doing it for a long time. And they do billions in revenue, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. I don't think they hit a billion yet in profit, but close.
And I'm not going to reveal the agency name, but people can look them up. and get some of this information because you know how like people apply for these awards like ernst young you know business of the year or inc magazine or inc 5000 or whatever it's called so a lot of their financials are public it's not like i'm revealing something someone can't just google it may not be up to date but plus or minus 10 15 20 either way at this point what's the difference if someone does 2 billion or two and a half or three billion or four like you know they're a large company yeah I think it's still independently owned.
I haven't checked, but it just spits off a ton of cash. I'm willing to bet it is independently owned because for such a large organization, very quickly, the website's very AI for it. Everything's AI on the website, right?
And that takes a founder's mentality to do that. By the way, we should talk about this real quick. So we just earlier, Neil and I talked about how...
There's no right or wrong way to do business. So you think about this. Oh, how did McDonald's get founded?
Well, Ray Kroc actually stole from these two people that grew and he started a burger shop in Arcadia, my hometown. I don't know if you know that. I didn't know it was in Arcadia.
It was a burger shop in Arcadia. It wasn't called McDonald's yet. No, I know that.
Yeah. But then McDonald's, the spinoff of San Bernardino and then Ray Kroc found this thing and he makes a real estate play, right? Then you have this guy who started this business.
He's been doing it for 40 plus years and it sounds like he's mostly bootstrapped it and gone along the whole way. Then you have - Morris Morris Morris Chang I think from TSMC he started that company when he's 55 years old in 1987 so I was one year old at that time right but there's so there's no right or wrong way to do or you have Jensen who just slogged away at gaming first couldn't quite make it work almost bankrupted so many times but somehow made it work right so whether it's business or marketing there's no right or wrong way to do it which actually then leads me to want to talk about the Gary V piece because I actually I pulled up this video Neil and I'll share it to you And then you can, you can talk about what's happening on the video.
So what Gary's saying here is the trend for 2026 is the monetization of random content. Then we can react to this.
Get t -shirts sold. Sponsor Star Trek con. All that.
Same here as various. This is about where we are now. We're now.
We're now in a place where I, Garrett Mara. First ever around. And even though all my followers.
Not AIL. When I. About.
Why this is a good surf. Surf chalk. Or whatever the hell I learned about.
That con. Why. I believe forever.
Ever. Not past. Past.
Ever. I just. Chat.
The first video is them learning how. So. Not only their past.
The rise. The rise. You're curious.
You're. You're on training. My brother.
Does not know how to ride. I probably. But if he's.
He started making content, 39, about his journey. I'm learning, here's my Romanian brand social content. First, Massimo, I post something funny about spit one out.
You're like, that's, and you find yourself later. getting 5 ,000, about a very, why not all the time that you're generally, you're not just going ramp up, but obviously the now did better when all of you start putting out. What do you think?
I think he's spot on. And the reason that works today is the algorithms of social networks are very different than they were when we first started. When we first started, you had friends, people followed you for a specific reason.
You had friends and followers. Uh, technically when you first started, it was friends. Then it became followers, right?
Because it would usually be people that you know, and they would follow you for. something specific entrepreneur content marketing content for you and I self -help cooking lifestyle whatever it may be now the way the algorithms work is if you post content your followers and your friends don't necessarily see it they try to figure out how the engagement is and who the video is right for and they try to show it to more of those people versus just the people that follow and that's what I mean when I say he's spot -on in which if you're interested in surfing The way the algorithms work, even if you don't have any followers who care about surfing, they'll go and find the people that should see it.
And if they engage with it and it does well, they'll continue to show it to more people who are interested in surfing. And eventually that can lead you to make money around that topic. Um, I do agree.
You can make money from it, but if you want to make large sums, call it 5 ,000, $10 ,000, and you want the money to be consistent. You can't, and Gary's not saying this. Uh, I don't want to assume he's saying this, but you can't.
And he of course knows this, uh, really well. You can't just post one surfing video to get those sponsorships, to continually get those contracts around specific things like surfing. You would have to start producing more and more of that content.
So then that way you get. paid from a surfing company if you posted one video on surfing and it did really well but you stopped talking about surfing it's very rare that you're going to get companies reaching out to you offering you money for surfing related content but just post on anything you're interested in and then from there you'll grow your reach and then you can figure out what you want to double down on so what i would say with garyvee saying post random content is It works as long as you're authentic, right?
So I had a YouTube consultant reach out to me recently. She said, Oh, all you need to do is just copy what all the other people are doing. Look at all these other, I'm like, but I don't want to, it's not authentic to me, but in Neil and I are a little older now, right?
So maybe younger versions of us would post, you know, random, uh, Neil's journey to getting bulk books, right? Like bulking up, for example, that could be a fun journey, right? And I bet you people would follow, like people would follow along for that.
Um, or me trying on my journey to get better at tennis, right? So these are all interesting things and it's not the say that I don't like posting about it.
But I think if you're younger right now, definitely do it. I think if you're older, you have a business already, you know, maybe you could just focus if you're a little more established, you can just focus on one niche. But by the way, when you're younger, what do you have?
You have a lot of what? Time. You don't have money, but you have time.
So you might as well just try everything, right? You don't need to try to figure out how to place yourself in the niche, especially if you're listening to this right now and you're like 20 years old. You don't need to worry about that right now.
You kind of need to just test a bunch of things and figure it out. And we said this before, you . And AI has never been more pro spaghetti against the wall versus anything else that I've seen.
Dude, you're so right. I remember I was going to a conference called Web Summit. and it was in canada this was a long time ago they have different versions of it some of them are called collision although i think they're changed collision and got rid of that name and just now they call them all webs and i remember this was a long time ago and this is when gary vaynerchuk was talking about more about uh not creating content for the sake of creating content for social like Consider documenting your life and just living your life having someone follow you around.
Uh -huh And it makes it easier and you did that for a while I think no follows you don't follow me and then when he almost got ran over by car where he almost ran to God I'm like, I'm not doing this anymore Yeah, so my first time was at web summit and I did not know my team had sent someone to just record me some guy comes up he's like, hey, what's up and He just kept recording like what the heck is this and I don't know if it was like a random person And he just kept doing it.
And I remember people would come up to me, ask me questions, and he would just try to record it all. And then he was giving me feedback. I'm like, what the heck is this?
What's happening here? Like, oh, yeah, we're trying this thing that, you know, Gary V talks about. And I don't think Gary V is actually wrong.
I think he's right. That is a more efficient way to do it. But I also believe that works well for Gary V.
And it gels with his personality. For my personality, and it doesn't mean Gary's wrong. But for my personality, I personally did not like it.
I like my privacy. Eric knows this. I'm an introvert more than extrovert.
You would agree with that, right? I keep a lot of my life private. I did not like it at all.
I told the guy very kindly to stop recording. And he's like, no, I was hired. I'm like, I'm the owner of the company.
You'll get paid for the day. You no longer have to work. You'll get paid for whatever they promise you.
I'm done recording. And I'm like, I don't want to be rude. I'm just more of a private person.
I do not like a camera following me around. It's just me personally. I'm like, but you can go home, chill with your family if you have family and you'll still get paid.
and we would recommend you you're a nice guy i'm not trying to be rude this is just not me you have to figure out the type of content and the type of marketing that resonates with you and i think a lot of brands get that wrong especially when they're creating social content they just try to hop on with whatever the latest trend is and that's a great way to get views but that's not a good way to generate revenue so let me show you this neil so this is from a you're talking about um being authentic your brand right so what i'm showing on my screen right now there's this bakery called astoria chicago okay so what it says it's a it's a cake okay it says you know never supporting me but asking for my resources is crazy right there's a lot of people like that in life right so this one got 130 000 likes it was posted on likes it was posted on october 14th which is pretty recent right 759 comments but 130 000 likes you have to imagine it's probably got millions of views
But it's like, this is authentic to them. Astoria Cafe and Bakery, right? This is actually creative marketing.
Or by the way, if you can't figure out how to be more creative, guys, Groons. There's a little Shrek on this Groon right now, right? These are ogre gummies.
So each one is shaped like an ogre, right? So there's creative ways to do it that are authentic to you. But don't just say, you know, all of a sudden you're like a water bottle brand that became a skateboard brand.
Maybe that's not so authentic. No, it's not authentic. Reading that reminds me of dating in today's world.
That is exactly a dating thing. But the funny thing is, it's both genders are commenting and saying that they're blaming the other side. I have a friend, really nice guy, super successful.
I don't know how much he's worth, but let's call it 500 million to a billion. He's somewhere in that rate. He's retired.
Kids are grown up. Wife got sick, passed away. I don't know how many years later.
Let's call it five, six years later. Decides to go on his first date. And he's just looking for a nice, kind person around his age.
How old is he? I don't know. If I had to guess, late 50s?
Okay. That he can just take care of. He didn't date for the longest time.
His wife was like high school sweethearts. Yeah. So he never went on a date outside of just dating his wife.
He never really knew how to date. He never knew how to date other than dating his wife. Yeah.
And, you know, he still wears his wedding ring because he's sad that he lost his soulmate. Yeah. So he goes on a date for the first time.
He doesn't know how dating works. You know, I haven't been in the dating scene forever, so I don't either. And he was just like, did you know, he was talking, he's like, did you know people Google you before they go on a date?
And I was like, yeah, I can see it. I was like, when I was younger and I was dating, I'm like, people would say stuff about me. And I figured out that they Googled me, right, to know about me.
And he was just like, he's like, the first date I went on, he's like, the person asked me if I would help them out. And he's just like, help them out? Wait, what?
that that doesn't sound like if they're around the same age gap that that person would ask for that no they're around the same age he was dating people around google and then figured out his net worth and yeah okay he didn't show him their house or anything like that he took him to like a normal restaurant he met him on some dating app they straight up asked him like hey if we keep going on dates can you help me out and give me money rent in los angeles keep in mind even people in their 50s 60s 70s not everyone owns a home in los angeles it's an expensive city to live in And he got really turned off by that.
I would too. It's just like someone's just asking you for money and you barely know him. And he was just telling me, he's just like, is this what dating has turned into?
And I was like, dude, I don't know. I haven't dated in, I don't know how many years, 10 plus years or something like that. So I text one of my other friends who is.
uh single and they're just like they responded with two letters of and i'm like what is this lingo so then i google uh you know like text messaging lingo of and i couldn't go to the answer and then i texted him back i'm like dude i can't figure out what this of is i know lol or like you know tbh you know to be honest and so they're like of means only fans of course like only fans has changed and i this is terrible but like people's expectations from day one is uh just really crazy well you're talking about search right now so this actually is a good segue to our next topic neil on the next aeo although people are worried now with all these llms uh and their ai spending you saw facebook stock tank this week because of their their they beat up no they beat quarterly earnings but i'm 110 sure i'm sure you're right i just want to look at it uh it went down this week because they announced quarterly earnings but zach also announced how he's spending more money on ai and infrastructure and uh the whole market has been
uh tanking when it comes to like the core weaves and neoclouds and all of them because people like you guys are overspending very debt field so actually here's a good thing so not a good thing i listened to this by the way i i did analysis i'm going to show you in a moment but um so i listened to a podcast with mark zuckerberg alexander wang and uh i think i told you uh patrick John Gollison from the Stripe, from Stripe.
Yes, the beer. Yeah, the cheeky pint, cheeky pint, right? So what Alexander, I think, oh no, Mark Zuckerberg and Alexander made a good point here.
So Alexander from scale .ai, right? And he's like, dude, in this type of situation, you can't actually project this out. You can't forecast this out.
So I think I told you. Forecast what out? the data center spending all the heavy spending that they're applying right now this is like a winner take all situation or like a winner take most um where you can't actually say i'm gonna wait to see how the numbers pan out you actually just have to spend on the data set the capex right now for the data centers right and so what happened with alexander wing is that he whenever they had executive meetings the cfo would pull him aside and say hey man like it doesn't work this is gonna be really bad for her meta right and kept pulling him aside, like, Hey man, like, are you sure this is going to work?
Right. And then Mark is Mark. The good thing with Mark Zucker, by the way, that is a CFO's job, by the way.
Totally. Yeah. She's, she's not wrong for it.
They're both doing their job. Right. But Mark, this is when it's helpful to have the founder involved.
Mark is like, Hey, we're going to do this. We're all in on this right now. Let's go for it.
Which is why you see the, the, the CapEx is so high for the data center spinning, which they think they still need more at this point. So yes. And the part that I don't.
have a grasp on everyone talks about so on the all -in podcast you had uh ben horowitz was on i think the latest episode yeah and he was talking about how he called andy uh jesse jesse from amazon the ceo and i think it was something like oh yeah we'll get caught up by 2028 and jesse was just like No, we won't. There's way more demand.
We will not be caught up in 2028. I believe what Andy is saying because AWS is one of the biggest providers and for him to say that they don't have enough, there's way more demand than what they can handle by 2028. The part that I don't know when it comes to AI and even marketing, we are now marketing on ChatGPT.
right we're now marketing on cloud we're now marketing to grokba we are now marketing to agents slowly like muse and stuff like that that will go and do uh tasks for you what happens when ai gets integrated into it's already starting with your toilet i saw some devices on the toilet on my toilet you use my toilet no no but there's there's toilet devices that now have ai yeah yeah there's fridges that are coming out that have ai enabled in them so you can start there'll be screens some fridges already have screens but you can start ordering groceries on fridges you can start start marketing there, start analyzing the ingredients in your fridge and tell you what to cook.
Analyze your stool. Yeah, that's for the toilets. What happens when you have the robots, right?
Just out there, like all the humanoids or whatever they end up looking like. How much more compute are you going to need? or data centers forget can be how many more data centers you can need to just run all of it, right?
And I don't think people actually know if we need a lot more or a little bit more. I Yes, we need more than what we have now. But I just think it's a big unknown.
But the flip side on it is I do also think it is going to change the life we market because everything offline and online is going to be purely digital. And you're gonna have to market to everything you're gonna have to market to that robot that when the robot goes to the grocery store. and does your shopping for you that it should buy your products versus someone else's products even if yours is 10 cents more well let me give you my reasoning and then we can i think this is gonna be an open conversation right yeah so we discussed this before so andre carpati right so There's only 0 .2 % in the world, only 20 million people in the world that use AI and they're actually getting productivity.
So a lot of people using it for coding, right? Verifiable work such as coding or math, for example, right? And only 5 ,000 are at the frontier.
Then you have the rest of the world, right? Now, the other thing is you see this iPhone over here. Why do we need an 18th generation?
Not even 18th, there's like pro and all this. So this is like the 2024 generations of this stuff, right? Why do we need so many?
Because humans have always wanted more. Humans needs are never like... Neil, you look at yourself right now.
Look, go back 20, 30 years. Do you think you would have ever needed more? But yet today you still want more.
Don't you want more? Your demands are higher, right? Not just that, dude.
I used to have an iPhone before and it would go for three, four years and I wouldn't get another one. Now I'm like, I need one every single year. Why?
So, cause we're insatiable with our demands. So our demands is going to get higher and higher. And so if only 0 .2 % of the world's using it like this right now, I believe that we're going to need more compute.
And the problem is like, if you're entropic, for example, because they didn't press hard while open, I kept pressing hard on more compute. They got constrained until they did the SpaceX deal. And that would have been catastrophic for them.
I think if they didn't do that. deal yes yeah so that's how i see it at least and then you're you're you're the gary sat in that seat before i said neil's a numbers guy right so i think this actually makes a lot of logical sense yes yeah but i do believe we haven't seen even how much compute where or data centers we really need to run i think we're idiots in the future that for sure i agree on dude here's something interesting heathen sent this to me yeah um that's uh neil's brother -in -law yeah so check this out I'm gonna turn it sideways so you can see total capital expenditure boom percentage of GDP canals 0 .66 % uh -huh railroads 2 .24 % which is by the way railroads are the AI back in the day uh -huh electrification 0 .5 % highways 1 .13 % telecom and fiber 1 .1 AI build out till 2032 keep in mind we haven't even got there yet It's saying side percentage of GDP, only 3 .63%.
It's not crazy or out of whack. Yeah. Is it going to be 3 .63 or 3 % or whatever?
Maybe it's going to be big, but you need it for running everything. Think about it. When the internet first came out, you and I never knew how big the internet would be.
Right. And it became what it became because of Jevin's paradox. Right.
And so, um, and by the way, like all this other stuff is becoming possible now. Like earlier, I just talked about the concept of autonomous ABM. If your ICP engages with your competitor's ads or the posts over here, you can automatically send them a cold, cold outbound, right?
Or if they engage with anything like, by the way, I did this with my GROK bot the other day. I'm like, Hey, look at all my followers right now. Tell me who are M &A targets.
Tell me who are recruit targets. Tell me who are ICP fit. It's like you have 581 people that are ICP fit.
There's a CMO of Dosipo, CMO of this company over here, CMO of this company. These agencies over here seem to be like a good size over here. So these are things that I couldn't have done before.
And then I was like, Oh, do it. Lily Ray's X profile. How much is that going to cost to scan all her 120 ,000 followers?
Well, if you remove less than 100 followers, that will cut it down from $25 to $15. Okay. Scan it.
And then it starts reaching out to people for recruits. Like, and they're like, I'm interested, but how did you get my, my information? Right.
But like that, that is the world we're going into. It's going to be a world of more and more abundance. Just more.
Yes. Yeah. By the way, Neil, did you see that Forrester predicts AI agents will influence 75 % of B2B buying?
Yeah, I didn't see that percentage, but I agree with it. And I would say the same thing when it comes to Google results and algorithms. It already influences so many purchases because the companies who optimize are the ones who are.
Not chosen, but they're the ones who are included in that process. Did you buy anything yet through an agent? I have not bought anything through an agent.
Really? Yes. Interesting.
So not one thing. I've had agents give me feedback on what I should buy. And then I go and pick.
But I've never let the agent go and purchase. So I have a loved one that's having a funeral for one of her family members tomorrow. And I wanted to get flowers.
And guess what? Amanda Muse handled the whole thing. It's like, well, the funeral is happening near here.
here so and I was like give me the best thing it's like well you get this easel over here it looks really nice right because I remember when you came to my my mom's thing you saw all those easels that's the first time like why does everyone have one and then I had the smallest one right I didn't even know that was a thing so anyway you you get like a big easel I didn't know that was a thing yeah it's called an easel right and so and then they called me after I was like hey like just want to make sure we're gonna deliver by this time it handled the whole thing now I'm I'm doing the YPO global AI summit in two weeks right in Istanbul We're going to do a speaker's there.
I was like, hey, I don't want to figure this out. You know where I'm staying from my hotel. Can you give me three locations that are close by and make sure there's a dining room?
Boom. Someone responds to me. Yeah, you know, it's going to be $60 a head.
Cheap, right? And you get the private dining room. I'm like, sounds good.
Let's just book that one. But I don't have to do the work. It's great.
It's like an assistant. Do you have an assistant anymore or no? You haven't had one in a long time, right?
I was just going to say you. Me. I haven't had one in a long time because I think it's very difficult to work with my speed.
So yeah. Yeah. But how about you?
I've had one for a long time. I don't know when I haven't. You, but you know, a long time ago, I haven't had one, but it's a period of time where you didn't have one for a while.
Yeah. And now you've had one for a while. For a long time.
Like it has to have been over like five or six or seven or eight years easily. Yeah. Um, the, the reason I choose to have an assistant is, and it doesn't mean AI can't do this.
My business operates and I don't know how many countries call I think it's around 28 There's just too many people too many things going around too many people trying to get on my schedule for different events and stuff like that It's just easier having assistant deal with everything versus me Using AI and a is not perfect and it screws up and then I have to deal with it like I'm going for a conference Monday and I'll show you example of this.
Okay. I don't tell her to do this never did She just is her name's Marina. I'm going to oh, yeah Dallas for Event called level up by high level and then I'm going to Milan for event called intersections And she says she gives me a flight time when it's going cars already booked Party she tells me you know what I'm going to time Yeah, just everything, what I need to do.
She also tells me, she's like, hey, you're going to have some time during this event. You're going to have a dead day in Mexico where I'm not doing anything. And she's like, it would be really good if we record X, Y, and Z during that time.
This would be super helpful. So can we please record it then? So what I would say is this, if like Marina is Neil's assistant from, because Neil travels a lot and there's a lot of logistics around that and she's reliable and she's proactive.
You need someone that's been in that role for a while and is happy in that role. I was talking to our mutual friend, Yaniv, about this. You need an assistant that's been there for a long time, knows the ins and outs of being an assistant, and is happy to be an assistant.
You don't want someone who's maybe, well, one, you don't want someone who's incompetent, but two, you don't want someone that wants to do something else because that's not going to be helpful. No, because then you have to switch them out. You have to find someone else in a year or two.
But she's happy with her job. She gets paid well. uh she's in a different country so the currency exchange is even uh better for her more advantageous like she's chill i'm happy i don't disturb her every day i don't actually really disturb her much at all maybe like two three times a week i'll ask her for something but usually she just Put stuff in my calendar and pings me when I need to do something.
And that's the thing. This job is different than the demands that you might have on your CEO, for example. And so this one is just like, hey, just make sure you get logistically.
Just make sure it happens. That's it. You nailed it.
Most my stuff is logistics related and I do not. Even though AI is amazing, I do not trust, bless you, I don't trust AI with logistics yet. Because one mess up with that, dude, your day's done.
Yeah, your day's done and it just costs so much money. And like she'll do things like she'll know if I'm going to make my connection on a flight and know if it needs to be changed and to figure it out before I land and just be like, here you go. You got a new ticket.
Go to this counter. That's the only thing I miss about not having an assistant. It's that piece.
It's like the little details. Yeah. Because sometimes I'll actually miss it.
you know what i mean so and with logistics is super important because every country in my organization optimizes for their own numbers their growth and a lot of times they'll be like oh uh yeah neil's gonna fly in town we're gonna do a whole day full of meetings so just fly him out at night and she'll be like no i need to know all the meetings and the times we're not just flying him out at night unless i have him he's taking the quickest flight out after the speech unless you can actually show me which meetings because sometimes what will happen people like oh I tried booking them, but I couldn't get these because of the time.
So time. Yes. Wasting my time.
And she's like, no, he has a family. He needs to get back home. So you have a month's notice.
And if you can't figure it out, and then I'm booking him at the closest flight back after his speech. See that last meeting. That's worth it.
Yes. Yeah. So different expectations.
And I'm not saying. EA versus no EA. I'm just saying for me right now, not needed.
And I'm not saying Elon Musk, by the way, Elon doesn't have an EA, but I bet you he does have many marinas helping him guaranteed. Yeah. Cause I would, I agree with you.
Cause Marina is not really my EA. She does not deal with like, Hey, you need laundry or you got this appointment. Your kids are doing something that's like, I have none of that.
Yeah. And I don't see for me, I don't think I need that. Right.
But if I was traveling a lot and I had a lot of event, which is if I was back to traveling 200 days a year, I would absolutely love to have a marina. Yeah, mine is more like it's all logistics all personal stuff like, you know, like oh I want to watch Toy Story 5 tonight with my kids cuz you're doing something else No, no, but none of that.
That's just like I picked my own calendar or like, you know, you went for physical therapy Yeah, right for your tennis elbow. Hopefully it improved. It did it did improve.
It was really good. Yeah, it's great Yeah, painful though, right? Yeah, I'm like, oh my god, this is like a hardest massage ever, but then it feels better after yeah Like when I booked physical therapy, I just took the doctor myself and book it myself or same with like my gym appointments for trainers or whatever.
Like I don't use assistant for any of that. So yeah, we're on the same page. Like that type of stuff.
I'm like, I used to like, yeah, I'll just have my assistant do, but then you get weight and there's like delays and all that. I'm like, why don't I just do it myself? But a Marina type situation with logistics.
Absolutely. So we have one more thing we can go through here. This is from my, my good friend, Mark Andreessen on X.
Okay. So, so who lives by here, you know that, right? He does.
He lives in Malibu. He has like a $200 million compound. He has many compounds.
He bought more, but I think he had the record for the most expensive home sale or something like that. I believe it. Here, so watch this.
This is the biggest Delta between I would say with the early adopters versus what kind of everybody can you slow it down, please? Yeah. Sorry.
Um, and by the way, you know, what's funny, he naturally talks at like two X kind of like me. So anyway, I'm going to repeat the video here, but this is Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz as well. Okay.
So Mark Andreessen, here we go. This is the biggest Delta, but I would say what the early adopters understand as well, uh, versus what kind of everybody kind of, um, and I think that's, you know, through the individual level, but it's especially, uh, And the early, the AI native early stage startups have a completely different view on what they can AI than the, than the, than sort of, you know, typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception.
And, and I think that that gap is as wide as I've ever seen. And then it, that gap seems like it's gapping throughout, which is AI is just racing ahead in capability, even a week by week. And so the leading edge entrepreneurs and technically deal with like they're, they're, they're getting, they're just, they're, they're just by the week, they're getting sort of steadily more advanced than, than it's, it's, it's the biggest delta I've ever seen.
And if you kind of extract, play from that, like, you know, if that's what happens, then there's just, there are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally, you know, kind of more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past. And then that's going to be because the founders are going to have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past.
You know, had I had, you know, Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God, like, you know, it's like, Ben, like, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape? We would have built the whole damn internet. leading entrepreneurs now are going to have so all that i mean it's crazy to hear him say that because they just started a new fund the frontier fund right so they're talking about but like no it's not a new fund sorry it's they renamed the crypto yes you're correct thank you for that so I do see this happening right now.
And that's where my anxiety has been coming from for the last, really since last December. So it hasn't been a year yet, right? The gap is widening every single day.
And so even with the new people joining the team now, I'm like, guys, like, this is why I say, like, we're not trying to eliminate jobs, but we're trying to, this elevates capabilities. And because the gap's getting wider, that means someone who's super enabled, if you're very enabled and I'm not, then you can see it. And that's not a good thing ultimately, right?
But that's where I think there's a lot of anxiety that's happening in the job market right now. But dude, there's like the ability now where you can take your phone and you can scan this and you can basically make a physical version of this now.
Imagine what your kids can do. Like legit, like what do they call it? CAD?
CAD modeling? I forgot, yeah. But you don't even have to do the money.
You just take a picture of a device and we go 360 and you just be like, okay, sounds good. And then you 3d print it, right? Why wouldn't your daughter do it?
Why wouldn't your son do it? So our, our kids, your kids already, I don't have kids yet, but our kids will be way smarter than us, way more capable than us. And we're just going to look like dinosaurs, right?
But this is why I also think you cannot, you can't afford not to hire people who are super AI native. So I had today, someone from, from, from Procter and Gamble answered me all these questions. I posted it to Twitter, didn't reveal the name, but I'm like, Hey, what percentage of, of, uh, Tactical work is done by AI today.
10%. How much you spend monthly out of pocket in AI spend? $20.
Okay. And then I use this primarily for research. And this person has worked at a large company for 15 plus years, hands -on experience, and it just doesn't work.
Can't keep up. Right. For what you're looking for specifically.
No. Yeah, exactly. Can't.
Right. Cause there's probably some rules that are a good fit for them. It's just not what you're looking for.
Exactly. Right. And I think you have to understand what you're looking for.
And so what we do in this situation now is like, if you're looking for AI nativeness in your hiring process, you just apologize upfront. So in our, our thing, we'll apologize saying, Hey, I apologize for this. We're looking for a very specific individual.
Here's seven questions for you. And then we'll just evaluate. Yeah.
Yeah. And I, I, I, I think that's a good approach.
The caveat here is just know what you're looking for. When we interview salespeople, we do not care. on how ai savvy they are or they're not we more so care on how good they are on the phone relationships yes but we really care how good they are on the phone from you know how organized they are how good they are at pitching and things like that we believe this is just our philosophy we can teach them the ai stuff it is For us, it's harder to go get that person who's amazing at AI and teach them sales.
It's easier to get the person who's good at sales and then give them the technology and be like, this part will make your job easier. Here you go. And we'll have people walk them through all this stuff.
But we don't want to teach them sales. We want the people who are already great at sales and then we'll teach them what they need on how to use AI to do their job better. But the reverse for us is we found it to be really hard.
So I agree. So sales is actually a really good example. sales is such a very like soft skill and the way Neil sells is different than me but I know we're both good at sales right in our own respects but it's very it's a very hard skill to pick up right so but I still think you need both I think you need someone who's like into sales and because here's the reason remember you met a sales person that we had maybe a year and a half ago right and that person was very used to selling deals at like a agency that product eyes their services right yeah do they still with you no No, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't work because that person was really like a bull.
I guess East coast agency. Yeah. Bulldog in terms of like following up, getting on top of the state, like pushing the pace, right?
Like everything you need from a salesperson good on the phones as well. Couldn't pick up the AI stuff. Therefore it wasn't understanding where we're trying to go.
The new guy we have now understands kind of both. And it was, it's really had soft skills, both on the sales side and the AI side. And he's combining everything together, which your deal size ended up being a lot bigger.
And so I believe, on what you're selling too like if you're selling flowers different yes but for enterprise sales i think it's still easier to hire someone who's amazing at sales that you can teach ai to assuming you can actually teach that to them because some people just don't want to change or learn culture bingo that's not but if they're good at ai and you have to teach them sales i think that's a recipe for disaster because it's harder to get someone who's not good at sales to be good at sales versus getting someone who's good at sales it's easier to find that person who's good at sales and is willing to learn AI and has a right attitude.
Like your 18 year old. My point is I'd rather go for both and sit through the pain a little longer if needed. Now you can't sit forever with the pain, but I do agree, right?
Like I think you can't just hire someone who's good with AI and say, learn sales. That's not going to work. With actually many different roles, not just sales.
And last thing we can call out here, I think this is a good place to close. So this guy, Thorsten Ball says, Don't forget you're no longer working with humans and I think you'll like this piece So this is not saying we're looking to eliminate humans guys It says, be unreasonable.
You have to constantly remind yourself that you're no longer working with humans. Things that would have seemed unreasonable or over the top or downright rude, well, you can ask for all of that now. So I want you to test this again, end to end.
Again, give me irrefutable proof that this now works. You couldn't ask a human to do that before, right? Give me 10 variations of this UI.
That's right, 10. Explore different design approaches, different color schemes. Show me how they fix this as Apple, at Google, at Teenage Engineering.
What would this designer do? Fix this bug. Find the race condition.
Eight times at least. Try and break it. So the whole point now to work with this stuff is you have to be unreasonable.
And it's okay because these things aren't going to get mad at you, right? So last thing I'll call it, Neil, remember earlier in this conversation, you're talking about how much I talked about, I think we're talking about marketing school, right? in the beginning of marking school it says uh the early evidence suggests eric wanted ai to replace substantial amounts of work but replace all humans was never the case so i never wanted to replace humans guys i just want to make that clear neil never wanted to replace humans but uh it was always about judgment accountability and retain and retraining before calling it a change but you you should go rerun the analysis you're less you're still more bullish on ai but you're less, I don't know what the, I'm not even trying to figure out the right way to put it.
I'm just trying to figure out how to say it. You're less about how much AI will have an impact on humans compared to before. I believe before, forget replacing humans.
I believe this is just, you know, me, us doing the podcast together, that you felt that it would take. A higher percentage of the work and do more than what it currently is able to do right now, a year later. So this scan in the last 12 months using Jeff guys, using a classifier here.
So here's what it said. So, so the honor answer, the honest answer is AI doing most of the work. Yes.
I explicitly said that fewer humans needed for the, the same output. Yes. I did say that, um, AI doing literally everything with no humans.
No. Um, and I believe, yeah. And I believe that you wouldn't need humans.
Yeah. So this is good by the way, cause we can always, we can always like. look at look at like what we did say and what we didn't say but it doesn't mean that what you said isn't true i just don't think it's going to happen anytime soon maybe 10 years from now or five years from now but i still think it's a really big deal though bigger than anything yeah but the difference is when we start talking about ai and marketing call it a year ago ai was if you look at the models they were evolving so fast and there was big differences from the models now when you look at the changes i know they're improving but it's not as drastic of improvements per model i don't know if you would agree with that or disagree with that like if i look at the models that would come out a year ago and a month later you would have a model and be like wow this is so much substantially better now you look at a model and they're like wow this new model so much better but as an end user for a lot of the stuff that people use ai for there's no
difference in the market. For day to day, yes. And so last thing I'll say here, and then we'll end, but guys, it has the actually, so AI had a hard takeoff December 2025.
It's still October 2026 right now. So it hasn't been a year yet, but that was a big deal in December. And it kind of like was whatever until May and June, and then Astra came out and like these other ones came out.
And then now it's kind of like waiting for the next big. thing to come out so but it's not even the next big thing i agree that it's going to change leaps and bounds but what people are using it for like the majority of people the vast majority yeah vast majority and you had this percentage in one of the old episodes it's already good enough for the 0 .01 or whatever percentage was in there i agree there's going to be a lot of changes even for the 1 % there's gonna be some leaps and bounds especially for the people who are building coding and stuff like that But mostly usage that we see in marketing is people just using AI to ask questions and help it find products or do research on something and If you want to make the most money as a marketer, it's not like oh you can use AI to do this and just save a lot of hours It's actually the biggest ROI we see in AI in marketing right now is just getting AI to recommend your product or service.
That beats everything else out more than being like, I optimize this efficiency here and I cut around 12 hours of spend and we save this on labor. It is literally the biggest ROI we see is just get AI recommending your company and product. For the vast majority of people, for businesses right now, all you should care about is does it make money for you and does it save money?
Vast majority of business. Now, that being said, as we advance towards this point, 0 .2 % of people that work like this will become 1%, 5%, 10%.
And then everyone will start to utilize more of this frontier intelligence. But right now, most people are good with like a, you know, what we had six months ago. So anyway, guys, token costs are also going down because people don't need the latest tokens for most things.
When I was doing a webinar last week, one guy was like, Oh, I'm spending like $500 a day. I'm like, dude, just buy yourself a chat cheaply max account. He's like, Oh, I didn't know that.
I'm like, so there's gotta be so many people that are spending this in an unnecessary way. Cause someone else on the webinar was like, yeah, I was spending like $10 ,000 a month on my. and then, you know, Eric, watching one of your stuff helped me cut it to $3 ,000.
I'm like, how many people are spending like this? So that means deflationary, like the token costs are going to come down, but people are going to know how to spend better. Dude, last thing before we go, when I was interviewing marketers around like six, seven months ago, and I'll talk to them about their AI usage and spend, you know, when people show me big numbers, I'd be like, oh, this is cool.
Show me what you're doing. Because a lot of times they were just waste, but I actually want to see. And some people were doing cool stuff.
Now, if someone tells me they're only spending like $20 a month or $50 a month or whatever, I'd be like, cool. That doesn't mean they're not. doing a lot because $20 a month these days actually goes a very long way compared as long as they can show you yes yeah anyway guys that's it for today and we'll catch you later
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open is a montage of agents making purchase decisions: an assistant told to just pick a newsletter platform, a connector upsold from $100 to $300 without a second thought, a $100 security audit approved in a word. The episode then spends 77 minutes arguing that whoever the agent names gets the money, and most businesses are not even measuring it.
How they asked for the click.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
