Tesla's Flying Roadster DESTROYED Porsche's Supercar Launch

Eric and Neil open with Tesla's Roadster flying car, which they treat as a marketing stunt that keeps Tesla in the conversation. The AI fluency gap follows, with Karpathy's funnel, where most people barely touch an LLM, and agents that still misfire. Next is X Money and the newsletter debate, then a blog post test that a client took for human writing. The back half covers the rule of 28, Meta's 200-person AI team inside a 70,000 staff company, and why YouTube leads are hard to attribute. The show ends on Accenture's $29 monthly AI cap, Ramp's AI spend index and Bending Spoons' cuts at Evernote. Attention, trust and spend with a reason. Key takeaways ◾Accenture's $29 AI cap is smart, but proven high spenders should get exceptions ◾Meta built a 200-person AI team out of 70,000 staff, which Zuckerberg calls talent density ◾Tesla's flying Roadster is a stunt, and agents still need a human check Chapters 00:00 Tesla's flying car stunt 04:56 Is the Roadster $50,000 or $250,000? 09:48 Why Porsche lost its edge 12:22 Agents, not models 13:58 Agents still unreliable in marketing 17:19 Karpathy's AI-gap funnel 20:00 Agent slop and the cost of rework 21:00 Workflows as a service 22:08 X Money: 6% interest 26:34 The AI blog post test 32:08 Potato, SpaceX and GrokBot 32:41 Writing is thinking 36:34 Which channels are S-tier 37:55 Are newsletters dead? 41:24 Rule of 7 is now the rule of 28 45:17 YouTube drives leads you cannot attribute 47:47 Meta's 200-person AI team, talent over size 49:00 Neil's private equity mindset 52:08 Neil's debt: SOFR plus 2% 55:41 Failures: rockets, timelines and the metaverse 56:42 Accenture caps AI spend at $29 a month 1:00:14 Ramp's AI spend index: median is $11 1:02:09 Neil downgrades his ChatGPT plan 1:03:03 A 45-minute AI session that is worth it 1:04:49 Two-slice teams, not two-pizza teams 1:09:02 Bending Spoons: a private equity model 1:11:47 Evernote: 433 staff at peak, about 30 now Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:41Speaker 00

  But it's using like these, um, it's using these like air thrusters, basically, to flip it around, and then you can see it flying upside down here. Um, and, you know, there's all these like memes happening right now. Everyone's like, oh my god, this is crazy. And then, and then all these people, by the way, it's funny, because all the people are saying, oh, remember like, uh, people are saying, oh, Elon is like a stupid billionaire, he doesn't do anything, dah dah dah. And then he does stuff like this, and you just can't argue with it, right? And so, um, anyway.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  They say he's not an engineer.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's not an engineer, he doesn't understand physics, you know, dah dah dah dah dah. And, oh, it's the other people that do it. Okay, well, who hired those people and who had the vision for this, right? Um, but I just think this is crazy, and I looked at the stock price this morning. Did you look at it?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Uh, last I checked, I checked, uh, before market opened, but it wasn't moving much at all.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  One point one percent, not much at all.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, not a big one, but then, then you look at this one. So Porsche just came out with a car yesterday. They came out with their first supercar, and they picked the absolute worst day to reveal it, because it's the same day that the Roadster revealed itself.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I, I actually like the Porsche car. I think it looks really sick.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  It looks really sick, but would you get it? I wouldn't get it. I'd rather have like a flying car. Like, with your kids, what, what car would you rather play with? You probably wouldn't fly it with your kids, but what would you do?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Well, first off, let's clarify this. You cannot actually get the Tesla flying car. That is invite only, so very few people are gonna have it. Second off, Elon stated that, and, and to, to go back to your first question, I would actually get the Porsche. But, um, Elon stated that, and, and I have a Model Y, so I do love Tesla. And I think the Model Y is a great car and it's very practical. Uh, Elon stated that people are gonna think this is AI and fake, and like, it's gonna be so ridiculous. It was ridiculous. My problem with that Tesla Roadster is the same problem that I have with the Cybertruck.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  It's not practical. Like, forget the price point, whether he wants to charge 50 grand, or 200 grand, or 500 grand for the one that can fly, or a million dollars. It genuinely is not practical. One, it, it, you know.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Like the McMoore, bro? What the fuck? What the fuck? Yo!

• 3:05Speaker 02

  This thing invented infinite downforce!

• 3:09Speaker 02

  What the fuck?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Keep going, keep going. I want everyone to see this.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yep, people are reacting, but the reality is, is when are you gonna use all of these features? And what I believe, and this is just my hypothesis, it can't really fly and hold you and take you from destination A to B in the air. There's not enough thrust in there. If there was, he would have said, you can fly for 30 miles straight, you know what I mean? Or he would have done like for 20 minutes straight, or whatever.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Anyway, I just had to show you guys that reaction.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So it's just like, doing a backflip in a car or whatever, like, this is cool, just go on a roller coaster, do whatever you want, right? But it's just not practical for everyday use. I do believe in Tesla as a company. I think it's cool what they release. I prefer the Porsche design, which is why I would say I would choose a Porsche over, um, the Tesla. And if I was getting a supercar, the, the, the one, I forgot what this one's called again, uh, Roadster, right?

• 4:11Speaker 00

  No, uh, the Tesla's Roadster, yes.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the Roadster is not self-driving. I like Tesla because of the technology and the self-driving capability. You take away that, right? I don't need to do backflips in the car, no offense. Porsche, uh, Mercedes, BMW, a lot of those other manufacturers, they've, and you have a Porsche. They've really fine-tuned the comfort of the car, from the seats to the massage features, like all those little things that make it special. They've done, and they do amazing job. Tesla doesn't do a great job at those kind of things. They do a great job at the technology. If you can't actually use the flying technology on a daily basis, because it's not practical, and you're driving it yourself. For me, it's, it's not a car I would buy.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  But if Tesla wanted to unveil, uh, or unveil humanoid robots that'll clean your house, mow your lawn, and all this. I would be the first one signing up and putting a deposit, or even paying for it upfront, even if you had to wait five years. Because to me, that changes people's life. A car that flips upside down doesn't change people's life. Even the downward force, dude, like, when are you really gonna use that?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  So my take on this one is this. So one, most people aren't gonna get the Roadster, because it's a very expensive car, it's 250 grand plus, right? It's, it's, right now it's invite only, right?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  No, it's $50,000.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  The Roadster.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It's $50,000 starting. Go to their website. Go to their website right now, it's $50,000.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Roadster price.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Roadster performance is $50,000, zero to 60.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  So, so the AI overview on Google says this, right? And I'm not saying this is right, so look at this. Estimated price of 200K. And then four hours ago, Tesla Roadster price, 250K tops, but the highest level, right? And Tesla's reduced to three different versions, and the cost reserve is.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Let me share my screen.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  It's $50,000 to reserve.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Let me share my screen.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  You have 50,000 performance today, what it takes to reserve, and 250,000 for thrust.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Reserve, do today, do within 10 days, is $50,000. The thrust version.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Reserve it.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I thought you had to pay for the whole thing.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  No, to reserve it. It's a privilege to reserve it.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Reservations are not, are not final until payment is received. Reservation subject. If payment is not completed within 10 days, refunds or modifications will not be issued. I'm pretty sure you're paying for the whole thing upfront. It's 50,000 for the whole thing.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  No, I will, I, I don't think so. That's not how I'm reading this. And this is too nice to be only $50,000.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  No, no, but the performance version doesn't have thrust.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I don't, I just don't think it's $50,000.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  I don't think he's trying to make something affordable. I think he's trying to, it's a marketing stunt, in my opinion, right? Like, to me, you don't, to your point, like, I don't think you need, nobody needs thrust, right? But to show it off, where everyone's like, oh my god, this and that, right? It's a marketing stunt, and I think he's done a great job with the marketing stunt. So, while the Porsche might be a little more practical, I don't think it's practical either, because it's a supercar. Um, but I just think it, it brings, it brings him into the conversation. It's a mind-share type of situation, that's what I think it is. And I know you're focused on the numbers right now, but I think that's a lesson for everyone. Sometimes you have to come out with a good stunt.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you are right, at least according to Google AI overviews, which they're pulling from Tech Insider. The $50,000 performance version is an upfront reservation payment. Typically broke down by a 5,000 initial card payment, followed by, followed by a $45,000 wire in 10 days. Uh, they, they have not announced the actual price. So my other issue with this, this is just my personal two cents, I don't think they're clear on the pricing. Like, when you reserve some of the other cars, you at least know what you're gonna pay in total. I thought you would actually know what you're getting yourself into, which kind of sucks, but it's fine. I think a lot of people don't mind it at all. Um, the reason I like the, the Porsche is, again, if I'm self-driving,

• 8:15Speaker 01

  you're not really gonna use 0 to 60 in one second, or two seconds, or three seconds. Like, I have the performance version of the Model Y, it's pretty fast. My 0 to 60 is usually like eight or 10 seconds, or 12 seconds, because Los Angeles has traffic. And it doesn't matter what time of the day you drive, it's very rare that you're not, you don't have the ability to drive fast, right?

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Um, and I think the Porsche design, for me personally, I think it looks cooler, but I agree with you. I think Elon did amazing marketing stunt. The reason the stock isn't moving is most people don't care. Um, at least the financial people, and the reason being is it's not practical for people to pay based on the pricing that you're saying and the internet's paying. And two, it only fits two people. Three people aren't gonna use the features like a thruster. It's just like, I have a Maybach, you know the Maybach SUVs?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Right? My wife has one, and mother-in-law has one. You know they bounce, right?

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yep, I didn't know that, but I didn't even know you had two of them.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Uh huh, I have two, they're same exact color too. They bounce, and they have that feature, like, so when you're going off-road, you can get rid of the sand. So some people use it like when they're driving up Rodeo Drive, because they just drive slowly and the car just bounces, because it's hydraulics. But like, no one really uses that feature. It's just coming back to, if people barely use that, who the heck is gonna use a car that flips upside down, you know, like, who's gonna use those features?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  I'm just, I think my whole thing is, I like the, I like the design of both the Porsche or the, the Roadster, right? So he has a good design team, a good engineering team, and just combining together. And then this is also a precursor to me, that he's gonna combine the two companies at some point. I remember when he did it all in interview recently, and he's like, oh yeah, you know, at some point, right? And like, yeah, he's for sure gonna combine the companies, but this makes me even more bullish on the stuff that he's building with the Tesla or SpaceX. Um, but, look, I think it's a great marketing stunt. I think he has a mind-share right now. I think he, it's unfortunate for Porsche that they launched on the same day, because they, they have more mind-share now. Now, Porsche will be more, I think Porsche will be fine. I mean, they didn't do well as a company this year. Um, but I think he did a great job from a marketing stunt standpoint, so that's what it is.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  You know why Porsche didn't do well?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Well, I know the profitability is low. What happened? Economy is not doing well.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Economy is part of it, but the problem with Porsche is it stopped becoming as exclusive as a car. They started mass producing a lot of different models. It wasn't as special, so they're going back to it. Nike has the same problem with Air Jordans. Now Nike's Air Jordan brand was their flagship. You know what they did with Nike Air Jordans, right? Everyone has Air Jordans because they made them more affordable and they put Air Jordans on pretty much a lot of shoes and just mass produced it. It went from people waiting in line to wanting Air Jordans to, oh, they're just putting the Air Jordan label on any type of Nike shoe and just mass producing it. And it's all the way from really cheap to really expensive. And it made the brand lose the, lose the appeal. It doesn't mean that you can't recover, right?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Louis Vuitton once had an issue in marketing and they eventually ended up fixing it. This is reversible, but these things take time.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  You know what brand became cool again? Freaking Meta. I think Meta has become a cool brand again because Muse is great. I think Alexander Wang and then Mark Zuckerberg are doing the podcast circuit now. And they're like, they have a frontier model. You know, Muse is great. You know, their VR glasses are coming out too. And I think from like a year ago, they weren't doing that well, right? Now they're making a comeback. Google's making a, making a, Google was always doing well, but they're occupying more mind share now because they're, they're back on the frontier, right? So I think a lot of this stuff is just mind share. It's like you, you go up and down, up and down, up and down. And like, you know, a year ago, I think Tesla was showing us robots. Now it's showing us these flying cars, right? So it's always like the next thing, the next thing.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  The marketing is always the next thing. Seth Godin has always said, you know, today's amazing is tomorrow's whatever, basically. And that's how marketing has always been. So by the way, Neil, did you see this? I'm basically, I'm wearing this on branding, right? So this is from Meta Muse.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  They messed up on their marketing. I thought they had issues with the delivery.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I did, but so they gave me four, so my, my agent took care of it. Took care of the whole thing end to end, got me forty percent off and then got me another forty percent off coupon, right? So now our mutual friend Yaniv, and I'm here in Arizona, he's like, dude, are you sponsored by that? I was like, Meta Muse handled it. And then you see that backpack over there? That backpack is my tennis backpack, right? You see my two rackets over there? So he saw it the other day and he's like, this is amazing. So he had his Instinct agent buy it for him yesterday. The Instinct did all the research and I found him a twenty percent off coupon and bought it from him. So it's the beginning of agentic commerce. And I think it's been great, so.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yes, so I was talking to my team, I was in Madrid yesterday and I got back. And I was talking to my team and we were talking about L L Ms and marketers. Because what's happening right now in marketing is at least a lot of people and marketers are just like, they're using all these L L Ms to help them get a lot of tasks done. But when you look at the models that Claude has been releasing recently, at least when I'm talking to marketers, right? Forget engineers, and this is just specifically marketing. They're not really seeing improvements that impact their life anymore. Sometimes they're actually switching to older models because some of the older models are doing some of the marketing tasks a little bit better than the newer models.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  And what I'm getting at with this is when I look at L L Ms, I don't look at people paying for Chat G P T. And this is marketing specific. In marketing, I don't look at people paying for Chat G P T or Claude, the future. I see them paying for agents that just help them get the task done. We don't really care about the models, right? Like just i- in reality, as a marketer, if you have tasks done and your objective is to grow traffic or revenue or boost conversions, you don't really care about the model. You just want the objective achieved. And what you really want is an agent that is just good at achieving the task.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  And I think marketers, when you fast forward two, three years, it's going to get away from models and them talking about it. And then they're focusing on agents. And the reason I say focusing on agents is most agents really do suck. And we were talking about agents a year ago in marketing. They really aren't that great. And even right now, they're better, but they're not that great. And I'll give you a real life example because most people right now in marketing are using agents not to get complex marketing tasks done. They're using it more like a personal assistant that's helping them just get basic stuff done. So I introduced Eric to a physical therapist, right? A few weeks ago. And Eric has an appointment.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I was there in person, getting physical therapy done by Jovan, right? He was, he was pushing on my neck and back and all that kind of stuff. While your agent was messaging him to book an appointment. And he was breaking down his schedule and your agent was like, this is what time slots work for him. And he was just like, oh, I, these thoughts don't work. And the agent wasn't bad. It wasn't amazing. I saw the interaction firsthand. He's like, yeah, this isn't working out. He's like, I think he's using some A I or something to message me back.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  Just, just to help you here, I, I never used an agent with him. That was just with him and I, there's no agent involved.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Oh, there was no agent?

• 15:38Speaker 00

  It was just me, so apparently I'm an idiot.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but, or maybe his team did not understand or he didn't understand. But eventually he figured it out because they just moved calendar, but he thought it was an agent.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  And then I was like, oh, this makes sense. I'm like, yeah, Eric uses agents and A I all the time. And they're like, oh yeah, it's probably his A I. I'm like, yeah, this makes sense.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Neil, to, to your point there, like that, that, so that is, that, that is a good point because I'm not using an agent there because I know it's not, I'd rather just schedule it directly in some cases and it's not reliable. It's like, for example, I'm, I'm going to be in Turkey in two weeks, right? So I'm, I'm trying to schedule tennis and they keep hanging up on the agent, right? Or I tried to book my dad and I for his birthday like next week. And I think they booked a, I think it booked a reservation, but I'm not sure if it did. So to your point, it's not as reliable as it could be.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and the, the crazy part when it comes with agents is it can be off. Like we had a book a reservation for Avra for me because I do a lot of my meetings at Avra in Beverly Hills. It booked a reservation for Avra in New York City. And we said Avra Beverly Hills. Avra, New York City is not Avra Beverly Hills. There's not two in Beverly Hills, there's only one. And you know how I found out? I went to Avra, like, we don't have a reservation. I'm like showing them, right? Because, you know, I looked at it and then I'm like, wait, this is actually New York. It's my fault for not double checking.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  You know what it is? When it comes to all this stuff, right? Whether it's agent or like, you know, you know, human to human or whatever. It, it just comes down to humans just want things to get done for them, right? And from a business standpoint, humans just want people to either make money for them or save money from them from a business standpoint, right? But it's interesting because I was sitting in a meeting with some of our engineers earlier this week, right? And we had the fifteen year old in a meeting and the seventeen year old in a meeting, right? I was like, hey, fifteen year old, I was like, so, so what are you seeing, right? He's like, I see low agency in this room. I was like, I love it, right? So he's seeing that people aren't moving fast enough. He called it out himself at age fifteen, right? And then I went to the seventeen year old, I was like, hey, so what, what should we do about this? And you know what he said? He said, just F and do it. And I was like, I was like, exactly, just F and do it, right?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Now, I just thought that's funny because it comes from such young people that are, that have such high agency. But what I wanted to show you, Neil, is this, this, this tweet from Andre Karpathy. So I actually made something.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I do see it.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  This is like, only six billion of people have barely touched an L L M, right? They're like using it for like very rudimentary stuff, okay? Six billion people. Then you have one to two billion people, twenty percent, they use it as like a glorified Google, right? And then if you zoom in a little more, Neil, you see twenty million people, point two percent of the world, they use the frontier. They, they use agents to ship weeks of work, right? A lot of it's coding tasks. But then only five thousand people in the world, so point zero zero zero six, have internal frontier access, so swarms of agents that help like things with things like cancer, for example, right? So this whole thing is a funnel. Six billion, one to two billion, twenty million, and then five thousand. And so it just goes to show you, there's a massive gap when it comes to this stuff. And most people aren't going to look at the latest models, right?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  This ambition, access and all this stuff. And so keep in mind, like even if you're top, like top point two percent right now, which I would consider myself to be in, there's still like a, there's a tier above it, right? Which is only five thousand people that are at the frontier. So anyway, I took Andre Karpathy's tweet and I decided to just make like a little game, like video from it, and this is what it came up with. So food for thought.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, on a side note, I actually know why he thought your stuff was an agent or his team thought. You probably sent him a calendar link or like a link with your schedule.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I sent him a book. I sent him a reclaim link, which is not like AI or anything.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but most people outside of tech or don't know, right?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Uh, maybe eventually figured out, but it was either his team or him, uh, you know, cause I know they were talking about like his ability. Um, but yeah, going back to this, when it comes to the frontier models, dude, even as me as a marketer, it's too overwhelming now. I don't wanna pay attention to all the latest releases. It's not that I don't wanna learn and get better. It's at a point where it's just too overwhelming. Just give me the tool or the agent, whatever you wanna call it, that just completes a task. To me, I just look at this as very similar as SaaS. Software as a service typically was, you pay for some tool that will help you with reports or tracking or CRM or chatting with your team. Now, I wanna pay for software. You can call it agents, you can call it AI or machine learning or whatever. I just wanna pay for software that actually just helps me complete the task.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I don't need as many visuals. I don't need as many reports. Let me just type in what I want done and go and do it and do it correctly. But I think we're actually very far off from the agents being good in marketing and it's, it's taking time. And what we're seeing internally, cause I was talking to my, uh, uh, EMEA team when I was in Europe, cause I did Romania and I did, or I did Bucharest and I did Madrid. The, the, the big issue that we're having internally is we're paying for the tech. People are using it. Sometimes the tech, even though it's really powerful, it's creating so much slop, even with humans in the loop, because it's just doing, uh, uh, it's doing it wrong. Which they had to go and redo it or, or check the work, fix it, redo it.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  And that's causing more time than if they just did it manually in the first place.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think, um, you know, with any of this AI stuff, right? Like e- even if I show you a new agent or if I show you a new technology, if it's not reliable, people will just ignore it. So for example, OpenClaw. OpenClaw was cool in the beginning, but it came really, it became really unreliable. Now, Meta Muse again was built off of OpenClaw. Their whole thing is they needed to make it reliable, cause once it becomes unreliable, people just stop using it. Right? Like I've sent a lot of this stuff to the team, but they just don't use it anymore because it's unreliable, right? Now, I think what's gonna happen, Neil, is that you might inject your marketing taste, because you've been doing marketing for a while, same thing for me as well. And we're gonna be selling workflows as a service. So people could either rent our workflows, so we'll rent our workflows to them. Or we can manage it for them, which I think a lot of people are still gonna want you to manage it for them.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Because again, six billion plus people are barely using this stuff. One to two, like seven to eight billion people are barely scratching the surface. Um, and so if you're in the top point two percent, like of course they're gonna want your help, right? That's why Mark Cuban is so bullish on how, you know, he would just help people with AI implementation. He would even raise money today, right? And then Jason Fried retweeted that. He's like, if I wasn't working on Basecap right now, I honestly would just be helping people with that. Um, whether it's AI marketing or AI implementation, whatever it is exactly, uh, because the world is so behind. So, um, workflows as a service, I think that's gonna become more and more of a thing. That's why Grokbot is paying so many people right now to reveal their bots to the public, like five hundred bucks if you tweet about it every month, right? Uh, for each bot that you tweet. Uh, and then I think, uh, Twitter's also, X is also paying people five thousand dollars.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  If you post fifteen videos in the next like, you know, fifteen days or whatever it is, or thirty days, cause they want more people to post videos, right? So it's, uh, money's a good incentivizer. That's a side note too.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  You don't, you wanna know what I think is one of the best marketing campaigns that was ever done? And it was done by Elon, but it was not, um, Tesla. It's something actually way better that he did than the Tesla.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  What?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Uh, X money. Have you seen the returns on X money?

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Three percent cash back, six percent interest rate, ten million dollars guaranteed, uh, in which, you know, they're rich enough where X is owned by SpaceX. I wouldn't worry about, you know, them jacking ten million bucks if you have ten million or one million or whatever the number is or a hundred grand. So your money's secure. Six percent interest, right? Three percent cash back. Now, there are some caveats. You know, you gotta read the fine print. The three percent does not work on like Costco charges and certain things, so. But you can switch up credit cards for certain things, but the deal that you're getting, I'm like, this is too good to be true. If someone's willing to give you six percent on your money, why the heck would you wanna, you know?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It, it disincentivizes you to actually invest. Six percent guaranteed returns is a lot.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  But here's the thing, I agree it's a great offer, but I don't, I don't, I actually think it's under marketed. I don't think many people are talking about it, right?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So. No, no, it's not open to everyone, that's why. They, they, they're only doing limited releases, so they can't push it too hard and it's not available in every country. I think it's only available in the US and only a certain amount of people in the US.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  All the creator payouts right now for me, right? Cause they, they send money each month. It's all going into an X account. So they didn't even allow me to pick anymore, I think by default. It just keeps going to X account, cause they want you to use it, so.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think he would crush it in marketing if he did something a little bit different and I, I, I tweeted about it one time. And I don't think they'll do it. Instead of three percent cash back on the charges or six percent interest, I don't know how you legally do it. But, um, cause there's tax implications on this stuff. I don't know if there is on the credit card, uh, rebates. If I just got SpaceX stock, I would do that. I think to me, that is better.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  That is better than the actual cash back and I think that'll help more people succeed. This is not financial advice. But if you look at how many people spend, spend money on Starbucks or Nike or Apple or whatever. If your percentage back on the companies you love went into stock, I actually think it'll help, uh, it'll help with the wealth gap. Forty, fifty years from now, because they're forced to invest.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Oh, I think a lot more people would talk about it too. It's like, oh, he's actually not giving you money. He's giving you stock and not many people have done it. It's innovative. Again, it's, it's, it's occupying mind share.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think a lot of corporations would switch their corporate cards. So I know we're on Ramp. And I don't know what the heck Ramp gives us. And I don't even know why my team chose. Right? But I think they do it because of the software, right?

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Ramp's easy to use, yeah. The API is good.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think that's why they chose Ramp. And I, I know, I know this sounds bad, but dude, similar in your organization. I'm assuming you don't have to deal with the finances or the controls, so it's not really your problem. If I could get stock in SpaceX for every time we swipe our corporate credit cards, which adds up to being a lot, let's say you have a thousand plus people globally. It adds up a lot. A lot of people swipe credit cards. Give me the stock. I, I just know that, um, it'll be more of a pain for my team, cause they like the Ramp software or usage or however it works. I've never used Ramp myself, um, but I do have a Ramp credit card. And when, you know, Ramp emails me for like, hey, for your receipt or whatever, I just ignore it. Like I don't even do whatever it's asking.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  The Ramp API is good though, cause I can query whatever I want around the business, whenever I just wanna know it. So that's been better than like the other ones.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  But if you were able to get three percent cash back, but instead of the cash, it would be SpaceX stock.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Oh, I would just do that.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Would you forego the querying? Yeah, me too. And even if it was more work for my team, I'd be okay with it.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, cause it's, I'm not looking at it ultimately, so.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Correct. I think it would be a great deal. I, I think it would be a.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  It's a lot of opportunity.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer the Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. But going back to your point, Neil, around the agents, right? And so the, the, a funny thing this week, so, um, we were interviewing an SEO and I showed him like, uh, I showed him a blog post, right? I was like, this is, this is completely human written. I was like, and we're going through the blog post, he's like, yeah, this is like a, like an eight or nine out of ten, right? And I'm like, yeah, it's really good. So how many of these do you think we can do per week? He's like, you know, probably like two. And I'm like, okay, two. And then I'm like, but, but, so this quality, only two per week, right?

• 28:08Speaker 00

  He's like, yeah. I'm like, it is completely AI generated, right? And, and so we're getting to the point now where we still have a human loop editing, but it is using these workflows.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  I'm confused. Was it actually human generated or was AI generated and you, you were just tricking him?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  I was tricking him, yeah. So because there's preconceived notions. If I say it's AI generated, he's gonna say, oh yeah, you can't do that, right? Um, but when I was like, yeah, this is completely human written right now, let's just go through it together. He's like, yeah, he's like, oh, this is so good, right? Da, da, da. And even our editors on our team, like, they're using it now. They're like, this is so good. And so I think the workflows are, are getting there, but most of them are unreliable. Like we have this talent workflow that's been really good for us too, but it's like a seven out of ten, but this one, this one's actually really good. But it takes a long time to refine this stuff. Um, and oftentimes you're gonna have to keep upgrading it too. So that's why those of you that are listening and you have an agency right now, your job's not going anywhere, because again, who's gonna maintain this stuff? Who's gonna upgrade it? Who's gonna optimize it? So, um, like, but we're getting to the point now where we're not even talking about models. Like I don't care if it's Grokbot.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  I don't care if it's Meta Muse. I don't care if it's like, you know, OpenAI dots. Um, as long as it's useful, great. If not, then you're, you're in trouble, right? Um. But yeah, go ahead. What do you have to hear, Neil?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Uh, this is the wrong chart, but this is human versus AI and purely by written by AI. And you can see the difference on time on page. We actually did experiment. Uh, I don't have the actual numbers, but we noticed there's a difference on time on page when we said human written content versus AI written content versus AI or written modified by a human. Same article. We just changed the the thing and it was actually written by a human, right? That was not the chart that was showing there, but we found that if it's written by a human and it states that, and this is like right by the title. So this is like above the fold, right? When people can see it, it's not all the way at the bottom.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  It affects read time because people have preconceived notions on if it's AI.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  You're spot on with that.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Even if it's not, they just assume AI sucks, move on.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yep. And um, the the editor who's, uh, so one of the editors on our team who's very, very detail oriented, right? She's like, this is exactly, once she started using the workflow, she's like, I see my job is completely different now. I'm like, so what are you now? She's like, I'm no longer just an editor, right? Um, and that that's the world that we're going into. By the way, we we're using our our mutual friend Sayed, uh, WP Vibe, which is growing very quickly. So I don't know about you, Neil, but I'm still on the outdated WordPress. But if I want to use the WordPress MCP, I connect it with WP Vibe, which just gets the content out a lot faster. And then we combine it with our our our workflow. So that's that's been good for us.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, that's, yeah, that's awesome. I'm on the newer WordPress from my understanding, but I don't know. Uh, what we're using, but Sayed didn't mention me, uh, he didn't email me about that, which was pretty cool.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So anyway, they're growing quickly. But by the way, remember I've been talking about Jev the last few weeks or so? Uh huh. So Jev added the ability to scan images very quickly. Okay? So I was, I was playing with it yesterday. I was like, dude, you know what you can do now, Neil? Like, let's just take sales from an outbound standpoint, right? So Jev, just so everyone remembers, it is a classifier, right? So you can classify information very quickly, like text, but now you can look at images for very, um, very cheap. So imagine you can watch like six thousand images for like, you know, a fraction of a penny, right? Now it can do that. And so I'm like, okay, from a sales standpoint, I can just say, okay, I'll reach out to um, one company, let's say on.com, right? And I'll say, hey, look at your competitors, Lululemon, and look at Vori over here. Look at, look at their ad libraries, look at the the offers that they're putting out there and look how many creators are putting out there.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Would you like us to do this for you? Okay. By the way, here's some creators for you. Okay? You can do that for very cheap pennies on the dollar now, right? That's one example. Another example from a sales standpoint is I can say, oh, um, hey, on.com, it looks like Lululemon's kicking your butt on the on the serps right here. And here's some screenshots. Here's exactly what we would do and it would cost you nothing to do that. So if you're in sales, like it doesn't make sense for you not to use this. But from a marketing standpoint, you can look at all your competitors, Neil, and be like, hey, what, what, what offers are they running? How many, how many uh, ads are they running? Um, and what what have they been running for a very long time? And you can get that in seconds now, um, for very cheap, right? And so I just think if you're younger right now, you should be going all in on this stuff.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Neil and I were a little older, you know, we're kind of becoming dinosaurs now, but I'm like, still a little bit tuned in where I I I kind of know what's happening, so.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Eric's becoming less of a dinosaur than me.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  But we're still dinosaurs.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  More, yes. This is like when I saw the Tesla roads turn on the marketing stuff that they were doing, like, you gotta see it to believe in this, why we needed the audience, because everyone would think it's AI, right? And he said that, which I agree with him. If the audience wasn't there, I'd be like, this shit's AI. Like, no, straight up, I think you would agree with that, right?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Uh, if, at least if most companies did it and there wasn't an Elon Musk there, people would genuinely think it's AI.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Uh, but it's just like, I'm like, oh, I'd rather have, I I remember the old days when I had a Mercedes S-Class. The ride was very smooth. It accelerates nice and slow. It's very comfortable. Like, it's an old man's car. I'm like, yes, I like the old man stuff.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Dude, you know what we should talk about over here if we could on on this topic? So this um, this gal Potato, um, who works at SpaceX, because we're talking about SpaceX right now, so let me pop this up for you. So um, so Potato, she's like a popular uh, Grokbot developer now, so she's at SpaceX, right? She was at Cursor before. Look, it's called SpaceX SI now. We should talk about SI versus AI too in a second. So Potato here, she's like, I love writing. I never let agents write for me. Whether it's docs or tweets or shitposts or even prompts, okay, maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents. There's a simple reason for that. I still strongly believe that writing is thinking. It's a skill I hope to never give up. It's also important to me that whatever I say is always authentic, mistakes and all. My favorite posts are the ones I just full send without any editing. I suspect it also helps with prompting, da, da, da, da, da.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Uh, knowing the right incantation, word incantations, uh, incantations to get an agent to produce a desired desired goal almost feels like spell casting. As models get more capable and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that could output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie. There may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain computer interfaces, but until then, I'm writing every word. And so that goes back to the point that I find that, so wh- whenever I feel I can put my full name behind something and it's not backed by AI, um, you know, there's a certain human element that AI can't copy and the AI still continues to struggle at that today. So I mean, I'm just saying that the best, you know, there's an argument that if you're a, whether you're a best marketer or a best writer, you're not relying on AI to create your content.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you're you're not relying on AI to create the content. I think having AI create content is, it it it just doesn't work and it's not even just text written. It could be images, it could be videos. Um, I'm I'm not saying you can't use it. So I'm a big believer with you about not having AI write content. When it comes to just content in general, whether it's text or videos or images, I get you can use AI, but I would say more than ninety percent of the time it's not worth using. And the prime example of this is Sora. Everyone's like, AI can create amazing content. Well, if it created such amazing content, why weren't people using that instead of Instagram? They decided not to. They had to shut it down because people didn't care for AI content. They wanted human created content.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Dude, the amount of people that would text me on how they're creating AI content studios and they're trying to raise money. And they'd hit me up and just be like, hey, can I get a C check of twenty five grand or a hundred grand or whatever? Look how many views I'm getting on all this. And I wouldn't give any of them a check because I was like, I don't think this is gonna last. Not from the aspect that people can't use these tools, because you can always use them to create it. It's just, I don't see the engagement there. It was like Coca-Cola and using AI for their polar bear commercial. And people started getting mad at them and they got a lot of backlash for it being insensitive. They just thought the content, the the commercial wasn't as good versus it looking like a real polar bear.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  You know what I'll say? Uh, early in the year, I wrote some X articles. Some of them got like a million views or a couple hundred thousand views or so. Those were completely written by me, right? Now I have someone on my team who is um, repurposing a lot of stuff and you can tell it's AI generated. And these X articles, they do okay, right? They're still getting like ten, fifteen thousand views. But he has to keep retweeting it, retweeting it, quote tweeting it over and over to like slowly jack the views higher and higher on each one. Whereas when it's something that it's fully backed by me and it's like I've clearly thought about it, it takes you, like Neil and I know, we've been writing for such a long time. It takes you hours, right, to write something really good. And some days you have to keep going back and editing it. But that raw human thing, people can tell, right? And you can also tell when it's AI generated too, so.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Look, time will tell with a, with a lot of this stuff and I just feel we're coming to a point where in marketing material, whether it's uh, blog posts as jobs to promote a art, a a service or a product or whether it's a TV commercial or just an Instagram post, people want that emotional connection and they feel that connection more when it's human written, not by any human, by a human who genuinely has, as Google calls it, the E E A T, experience, expertise, authority and trust. When they have that and that person creates the content, like someone who's really good at what they do, you could just tell the difference.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  This is why I think YouTube's gonna continue to be special and it's interesting. I scrolled by one of Cody Sanchez's um, uh, reels yesterday. She she does a good, good job with the reels, right? So she was rating kind of the marketing channels, um, in terms of money making. And I think she rated uh, YouTube as S tier, um, and then email as as S tier as well, which we'll talk about email in a second. Um, but the reason why YouTube is is so high, what do you think the reason is?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Um, she probably does really well on it for her and she gets tons of views. I do think, I wouldn't say YouTube is a S tier. I wouldn't say email is a S tier. I think channels, and I know you agree on this, the quality drastically depends on the industry you're in and what you're selling. Because some of these channels are really amazing for B to B enterprise. Some of them are better for B to C. Some of them are, many of them, actually majority of them are terrible. If you're selling something for ten million dollars plus minimum, you know, contract size.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what I think is this, I think YouTube is special and Neil's right, like it it it's highly dependent on your industry. Like if you're selling consumer stuff, all in on TikTok, right? Um, that's one of the channels. But anyway, so YouTube to me is special because it's the channel where they're spending a long time watching your videos, right? It's not just like one clip, like each, each video, like if you do a webinar, for example, like chances are people are gonna watch like, if it's like an hour or two hours, they're gonna watch, you know, fifteen to twenty minutes or so, which is a very, very long time. Um, and so to be able to capture that attention is very valuable. Now, um, I think uh, YouTube is is interesting. Now, the other thing that too, she listed email as S tier. So one guy, uh, his name's Dan Shipper.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  He thinks that email newsletters as we know it are dying, right? And I know you're gonna have a reaction to this, so I'm gonna pull this up real quick. Um, so he says email newsletters are dead. Let me, let me pull this up real quick and then I want to get your thoughts first. You can react to this first. So here, Neil, do you see this?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yes, now I can.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so Dan Shipper says with over one hundred twenty thousand subscribers, Shipper argues newsletters are dying because AI filters email so well that getting into inbox no longer guarantees reader attention. He predicts full agent management of email within a year, urging publishers to integrate directly into AI systems like Slack Agents for Alerts. Others echo the shift with Brent Bishore, who has a has a great fund that I've been in his conferences, Capital Camp, praises AI digest for personal use, but warning of harm to newsletter business while creators see chances to prioritize unique voices and build agent-friendly ecosystems. So what are your thoughts on this one? He says, "The newsletter is dead."

• 40:09Speaker 01

  I don't think the newsletter is dead. I don't think it's, but I do think it's not as effective as it used to be. I'm not too worried about AI adjusting placement. They've always had algorithms and things that affect inbox placement. If your content's really good, your placement's really good because people want to end up reading it. I do understand that email solutions like the Gmail's Outlooks, etc. are summarizing emails more and more, which can affect newsletters. And if you look even here, Eric pulled this up. It was a Grok summary instead of going through the whole thing, right? People summarize a lot. If your content's really good for the people that do matter for your ideal customer profile, majority of them, in my opinion, would read it instead of summarizing it.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  I just believe the models of how you make money through email newsletters aren't as good as they used to be. And we're in a world now where you sadly still need to do email. You still need to do SEO. You still need to do YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and paid ads and LinkedIn, assuming your ideal customers are on all these channels. And you've just got to surround them. That's the new world that we live in. Because if someone wants it in a quick digestible format, they can get it from maybe an AI summary. If they want the long version, maybe they get the newsletter. If they just want quick soundbites from you on what's popular based on data that you have to release, they can get it maybe from some shorts or some images that you post on Instagram or YouTube or LinkedIn.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  If they want some quick thoughts, maybe they just read your X article or your LinkedIn post, right? You've got to adapt to where people are and you have to use all the channels that your ideal customer is on in today's world. And I don't think any channel actually performs better than it used to. I think the channels actually perform worse and worse over time because they get more competitive. And that's even before AI. Like when you had paid advertising, the reason they perform worse and worse over time is you have more competition, it costs more, you've got to figure out new offers, versions and all that kind of stuff. It doesn't mean that some businesses aren't doing better with their paid advertising over time or you're not making it more profitable. It's just that when a new channel comes around,

• 42:21Speaker 01

  it does really well, it's usually not competitive and the ROI is massive. As time goes on, these great channels get competitive, which reduces ROI for most companies.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  So we've been saying this since the beginning of this podcast, the the the argument that you have to be on the channel. And we said, you know, the in marketing, it used to be the rule of seven. People would have to see your brand seven times before taking an action. As this podcast went on, we're like, okay, maybe it's the rule of fourteen now. And then maybe today, it's maybe a few years ago, it's like the rule of twenty one. Today, maybe it's the rule of twenty eight, right? So the whole idea is that you have to kind of be everywhere. Now, to Neil's point too, if the more time you spend doing, I don't care if it's a newsletter or a blog post, the more time you spend writing it, the more time you spend doing research, the more tender, loving care you put into it, the better it's going to be. And if you're known for that, then you're ultimately, people are going to open you a lot more, right? And people aren't going to want to read a summary because at the end of the day, the summary is just like a quick soundbite, just like a reel is or like a short is.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Eric has a spot on. We did a study, this is older though. I think this is like a year or two, yeah, two years. So December twenty twenty four, so roughly two years. How many times does someone interact with a brand before they buy? Both B to C and B to B? If you look, if it's less than a hundred dollars in B to C, roughly eight times, B to B, three times, but it starts moving up. It can go all the way up. Eric said twenty something. Look at this, for ten thousand dollar plus price points, twenty-three times before they buy. The rule of seven no longer exists. I think the average here is what, like fourteen or something like that? I don't know what the average number is if you just take all the data, but it's much larger than seven.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  That that number doesn't exist much at all anymore. People just need to interact with brands.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  We should share a story around this. So Neil and I were grabbing a gelato last week, right? And there's a guy that walked to us and it looks like, I think his name's Casey, but he has like a tax company, I think in in LA, right? And then the here's the most fascinating thing to me was he looked at Neil and I thought he knew us from marketing school. So he turns to me, he's like, I watch your AI content. He turns to Neil, he's like, you're an OG. That means he doesn't, he didn't even know about the marketing school podcast, right? And so when we do this podcast, we're like in many places. Some people know us from the podcast. Some people know us from Neil being in the space for a while. Some people know me from the AI content or whatever. But it just goes to show you that you never know where people are going to find you from or how people know you. And so you've just got to be out there. That's what marketing is.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was great. And I remember when we met him, he gave you feedback too on AI, not your, not really your AI.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Onboarding for one of our things.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, correct. So and it was great because he was telling, he was just talking about like how he just wants to, I believe it was like get it and just use it and it requires some work. The guy wasn't being negative. He was being helpful and giving Eric feedback that can improve his,

• 45:12Speaker 01

  that can improve his revenue usage.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  It was one of our tools.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and I thought it was just really good. And that feedback was genuine. It wasn't like he was trying to hate. He actually gave way more compliments than anything else. The guy was really kind, but that's, you know, all these interactions add up and you don't know where you're going to get them. Just like someone could end up hiring you because they see you on a podcast and then they see you or they listen to your podcast, they see you in person, they watch some of your videos. It all adds up. It goes down to the rule of whatever it is, eleven, fourteen now, whatever the number may be. And on top of this, when we met him up, I forgot his name and I was curious what he did. I didn't even say anything to Eric. Eric sent me a screenshot of him and what he does and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, cool. This guy's in finance.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  I didn't look into him, right? Somehow he popped up for me later and then I'm just like, oh, I guess he's just this, right? And I sent it to you, but his name's Casey and he has a tax advising company in LA. So he seems to me like he'd be really good at taxes, so.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Uh huh. But it was cool. I'll check it out too now and, you know, see what his services are. But this is what happens when you just keep interacting with people and seeing them all over.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, like I'll call something else out too, like the the YouTube channel for for, and I've said this a couple of weeks ago, I'm sure the same thing for you, Neil, but it does drive leads for us because sometimes when people come to us, they they might say that they come, they came through Google or they might came through, might have come through LLM. But when I talk to their sales team, it's like, well, no, it's it's like a variety of things. Like they might have like, they've watched your YouTube video or they might have listened to the marketing school podcast and then they came through LLM. So you you kind of, you kept figuring out attribution like it. It goes back to the Ajo quote. It's like, you know, I know my marketing works, right? Fifty percent of my marketing works. I just don't know which fifty percent. And that's more truer today, I think, than ever.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  And it's not because of technology. It's not that we can't track everything. It's a, A, the platforms don't let you track everything and they don't want to release the data. And B, a lot of these reasons on why this is happening isn't because of platforms choose to be like this. It's because there's much more strict data and privacy laws than there used to be, call it ten years ago. That just makes it harder for the platforms to share everything and track everything. And then also the platforms now.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  I was saying also now the platforms are competing. Like which tech company doesn't have an AI offering or a LLM, right? So they now also don't want to share data with each other and they want to block each other off.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a competitive thing, right? So competitive modes. So like, by the way, ten, fifteen years ago, probably fifteen years ago, Neil, when you can open up your Google Analytics and you see every single keyword that will convert for you, those were the golden days. You just don't have that anymore, right? So.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're like, you can now see the data in Google Search Console. It's just not as good because it doesn't have conversion data in there.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Nope, it gets worse and worse. But by the way, I was watching the Meta interview. So it was Mark Zuckerberg, Alexander Wang, and then he was on the with the Stripe co-founder, Cheeky Pint, right? I was, I was, I was listening to that one.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Stripe co-founder?

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, Stripe co-founder. It's, there's Patrick Collison and it's, there's, it wasn't Patrick. It's the other Collison brother. Maybe it's Jonathan, John Collison.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were saying the Stripe co-founder's name is Cheeky Pine. I'm like, what the heck?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Oh, no, that's, that's, so it's funny because on that podcast, I'm sure you saw this on on Instagram where Mark Zuckerberg drinks like the Guinness and he's like, so you know what I mean? That one, right? That's the podcast. So I was, I was listening to it.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  That's the name of the podcast.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So guys, just keep in mind, Meta bought Scale AI for fourteen point nine billion or something like that, forty-nine percent of the company did the deal, right? Initially, everyone's like, oh, my God, if it's a good workout or not. It seems like the bet is paying off now. But what I want to call out is when they built that super AI team, super intelligence team, they were very methodical about how they did it. Because Meta has many employees, right? Tens of thousands. So Alexander, the former CEO of Scale AI, was like, look, you know, we're going to do like two hundred people. So he manages like two hundred, his team's two hundred people right now. And Mark Zuckerberg was just saying that, you know, what matters ultimately is that talent density big beats big teams for AI. So they had to make a lot of adjustments.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  But in such a big organization, the thing that had, that is capturing the most mind share right now is that two hundred person organization. And I think we're seeing more and more of that today. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency, again, www dot singlegrain dot com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, every time I think about that acquisition that he ended up doing,

• 49:51Speaker 01

  if it was me, and I know we've talked about this on the podcast, I would just would never do it. You, I believe, would do it, right? Like if I just look at your personality.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  I think you would, Neil, because here's the thing. It's if it's one percent of your market cap, why would you not at least put a one percent bet? I know you to make these bets and that's not even a big bet for you.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  That's true. I'm looking at fourteen billion as a lot of money, but if you wanna look at it from a perspective, I still don't know if I would have spent fourteen billion just being quite upfront. I am, my mind works more like private equity when it comes to business and entrepreneurship than it does like a traditional entrepreneur who wants to innovate. And

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I, I don't think my mind, the way it works, is the best for people who wanna innovate. Cause if you look at what I've done as a company, I've never really built anything that innovates, right? Just being very transparent.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  I would say back in the day, Kiss Metrics and Kiss Insights and all that, I would say that was like, it wasn't that innovative, but it was like, it was considered ahead of its time, kind of a little bit.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  But that was my co-founder.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  He was always the one who liked. That was always Heathen. Heathen likes innovate. Even when he sold his last company to Dropbox, he was trying to do something that was really innovative. He likes doing things that people haven't done before. If I look at all the business decisions I made in my life, even when I was partners with him, I tend to stick with things that are more like a person who's in private equity. My mind just works that way. And I'm not saying private equity is good or bad. I do believe innovation dies with private equity. That's just my personal two cents. Others may disagree.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  But it makes money.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  It makes money, but that's the way my brain works as an entrepreneur.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  So what Neil's saying, by the way, I just wanna reinforce this. There's no right or wrong way to entrepreneur, and I think we've learned that as we're a little older now, now that we're both in our forties. There's like Mark Zuckerberg might do it this way. And so here's the thing, I, I learned this listening to him, right? Mark Zuckerberg on this podcast. So his whole thing is like, I'm just gonna keep playing the long game, cause I'm not gonna sell this thing, right? And so, um, one thing is he does go around asking his peers. So this is how he got the deal done. He went to Alexander, he's like, he just started talking to him more and more, saying, hey, do you just wanna have a chat? And he's like, hey, what would you do with this company, right? And so Alexander sent you like pages and pages of stuff and like, tells him what you do. And then Mark is like, dude, we just need to like figure out how to work together. But Mark goes around to all his peers and like, you wouldn't see this, Neil, I don't think you would do this, right?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  I don't think you go around to your friends, you, you've never, certainly you don't go to me and like, what would you do with my company, right? But Mark Zuckerberg goes around doing that quite a bit. Yeah, exactly, right? Like just different personalities. But that's how he got this deal done. Um, and everyone's different, like, you know, our, our president, love him or hate him, from what we've seen, like he does go around asking people like what they would do, I think. And, and then he like, figures out what he wants to do from there, whether it's a right or wrong decision, so.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think you and I do go asking our peers for advice, right? Yaniv is a perfect example of this. When we were refinancing our debt, one way corporations grow is they have corporate debt and you can use it to just go buy and gobble up more companies. Private equity does this, you know, Apple has debt, Google has debt, they all do. And the bigger you are, the better your terms are. Like, uh, my debt is two percent plus sofa at this point. It's more, it's interest only too. So it's, which is very financially favorable, right? And when you're looking at the overall cost, I think sofa, when I looked it up yesterday was three point eight eight.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  So call it five point eight eight interest only on corporate money, that is really cheap. The lowest I know I can get is one point seven five plus sofa. Cause we're, we're not gonna be rated grade AAA like Google or something like that. So their debt is always gonna be cheaper, cause they probably spin off about one forty, one sixty ish billion a year in, uh, net or profit a year. And I hit up Yaniv and I got feedback on him because I know who he was talking to when he was doing debt. So Eric and I do go to other entrepreneurs and get feedback on specific instances within our organization. Like, what do you think about this company that I'm looking to buy, or I'm looking to go in this direction? What do you think about that?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  But it's very rare, uh, at least for me, that I go to someone being like, if you own my company, what would you do? Like, I don't go that broad. I go to the civic people that have expertise for something specific that I'm trying to do. And I already usually know what direction I want to go in before I start getting feedback around that area. And I may learn that I shouldn't do it, or it's bad for me. Uh, Eric's giving me feedback as well, like I've had offers from people to be, uh, majority owners in my company. And Eric's like, you won't do well with this, you're wasting your time. And then I still go down the road and I talk to people. And then eventually, when I get on the phone with them, and I remember one person telling me, I think they're based out of Colorado or Denver or something like that, and they were trying to give us some money.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  And I was asking him, if I wanna expand into ten more countries tomorrow, how would this work? And they were just like, well, we need to look at the financials and make sure we can afford it. And I'm like, but we can afford it based off our cash. Well, if we add debt to the business, for us buying a portion of your company, we just have to make sure we're in line with the ratios and the bank approvals. And that was the moment where I knew I'm like, oh, this won't.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  They're gonna slow me down. Yeah, it's gonna slow me down. That's your reaction. Yep.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm like, because anytime like a bank or someone tells me I can't do something, I'll figure it out. I'll use my own money or I'll put in money or you know what I mean, right? Or like on.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  And you'd rather do that to grow a little slower and it would be more enjoyable.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Well, in my case, I believe I would grow faster, but I would have less profit if I didn't. Right? So I would have less cash flow, but I would have a bigger company in the long run and I'm okay with that. Like you and I are very similar.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  My point is you, you're okay with the trade off. That's my point.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yes, Eric and I are really okay with suffering in the short run. So short, short term pain for long term gain.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Yep. And that's exactly what, what Zuckerberg was doing. And he's like, he's willing to suffer, right? And like, by the way, when they made the bet, he wasn't sure it was gonna work out, like while they were kind of figuring out muse and all that. Excuse me. He's like, dude, we're putting a lot of compute into this, we're putting a lot of investments, and then magically it worked out. So good for him.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but the, and not everything works out. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. I can list so many failures. You know, how many failures that Elon Musk have of rockets not going up there or sadly exploding. Hopefully lives weren't lost in any of this stuff. I know Musk doesn't want any lives lost. Uh, or like, you know, hey, we're gonna release a roadster. It's gonna come out in a few years or a truck within a few years and the timelines are just off. I remember them talking about SpaceX and how you're not gonna have to fly on airplanes. I'm still waiting for that. And that was a long time ago when they told us that. And Zuckerberg with, uh, uh, what is it? What was it called? The metaverse, right? That's why he changed it.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the meta.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we interact. I'm like, who the heck wants to wear these goggles and interact with their friends in some virtual? Maybe the new younger generation wants it, but I think us older generation people, which I would classify you and I in, we actually like seeing our friends in person and hanging out. We don't wanna do it virtually. We actually wanna see them in person. But all these people have had failures. What does Meta talk about the metaverse anymore? To me, it's a dead project, whether they say it's dead or not.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  You know what? I mean, look, even Jeff Bezos, right? The Kindle, when they had the TV, I think the Fire TV or whatever. Or when they launched the phone, that didn't work out for them, right? There's always things that don't work out. And it's the failures that make you into, that forge the greatness, right? So Accenture, they found out that most of their, I think they're averaging like a thousand dollars per head in terms of AI spend. So they're limiting employee AI spend to twenty nine dollars per month per employee. What do you think about that?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  I think it's really smart. And there's two reasons. One, a thousand dollars really adds up. I'm assuming you're talking about a thousand dollars a year, not a month, right?

• 58:14Speaker 00

  I think it's a month.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  You sure? Thousand a month.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Some of it was going up to a month. So I, I don't think they were saying everyone was, but because they saw some employees going up to like a thousand plus a month, they're, they're setting the limits on it. And let me pull up this post for you so you can actually see it. So let me share my screen. All right, Neil, do you see this?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  You're right, a thousand monthly, took me.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  And now twenty nine dollars a month per person.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you've been promoted to consumer. Okay, go ahead, continue.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's smart. Um, even in my organization, I've heard direct hand from engineers that I trust and to get poached from other bigger corporations. That they're just like, a lot of these models are just expensive. And some of the older ones ju- do just as well. And I don't know why people need all these advanced models to do basic stuff. Cause that's the reality. Most people are paying for the most advanced models to do the most basic stuff. And it doesn't make sense. And then the next thing is, is there's so many open source solutions now that can get a lot done for free. You don't need to end up spending an arm and a leg. Yeah, you may need a better PC or computer or setup. But that's much more palatable for corporations than it is to spend a thousand dollars a month.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Dude, you know what I'm just thinking about right now? Like because Anthropic and OpenAI haven't IPO'd yet, right? So when companies really figure out how to optimize this, I wonder how it affects them down the road. But that, that's a completely different conversation. So.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Uh, they released a revenue recently, right? You saw the OpenAI revenue.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Sixteen billion on Anthropic Q3, I think. Yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Correct. And then they're like, they're gonna get to a hundred run rate.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  But the, the interesting thing when they call revenue, revenue is not always all revenue. Some of these players have deals with other providers who provided them a lot of the infrastructure, money, or whatever maybe, where they're getting a percentage of the revenue. So i- it's like eBay. eBay, uh, Eric May sells some Pokemon cards on eBay. Okay? And these Pokemon cards that he had since he was a kid may go for a thousand dollars. eBay's revenue from that is not a thousand dollars, even though that product sold on eBay for a thousand bucks.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  It's GMV.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yes. eBay's stake or percentage that they may keep, maybe five percent of making up. I don't know what eBay actually takes. So let's call it five dollars. eBay's real revenue is five dollars per transaction or for that transaction. And it's the way these guys are reporting numbers and tracking them and putting it out to market varies a lot. Because they're not public, they can do whatever they want. But the moment they're public, people will look at how much is your real revenue and what are you collecting?

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Well, actually, I mean, again, we don't have to go deeper into it, but I think I was reading something in passing where Anthropic's uh, gross margins are like eighty, eighty-five percent, but then, you know, operating revenue is like eleven percent or something. But let's go back to the one thousand dollars real quick. So I think there's, there's caveats for this. Okay? So again, Accenture is saying, okay, um, they're seeing some employees spend a thousand dollars a month, which is a lot of money. Um, and they're converting everyone to twenty dollars a month. Now, Rapp, we're talking about Rapp earlier. So Rapp actually has an AI spend index. Okay? So the median spend is eleven dollars. Okay? So they're saying, okay, we're gonna give you like three X the median spend, which is like, if you do the math on it, it's like, okay, that's pretty good, right? Um, and so I think as long as you're slightly above the median spend and then, but you're not limiting your best people.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Maybe your best, as long as your best people can justify and they can prove that they're driving revenue or they're saving money on it, then great, right? But there has to be a process for it. Cause you can't just let everyone YOLO and do whatever you want. Now, the cool thing about Rapp too, Neil, this is not a Rapp sponsorship, but the cool thing is you can connect your, your accounts. And then you can see how much people are spending on average in your company, who's spending the most. And then I think you just need to have conversations with those people. So I don't think it's like a, I think it's cool to blanket, like set a limit for everybody. But then the people who do wanna take it to the next level and are proving value, you should let them do it. So I think it's a yes and situation.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I agree with you. And even though Accenture is saying it's limiting to twenty-nine dollars, if someone would bet me a million dollars, I would bet that Accenture is not limiting every single employee to twenty-nine dollars. And there's some people who can get exceptions if you wanted to go over, like engineers or people like that. Cause they must have some engineers doing some projects and they're okay with them spending more. But just as a general corporate policy, they're just saying, hey, twenty-nine dollars is your limit. And then for certain departments, it's certain people and roles, they have no choice but to spend more and that's okay.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  I, I agree with that. There needs to be a corporate policy for these things. Cause remember what I just said earlier? If you have six billion people in the world that are just barely using this stuff and you have one to two billion that are using it as a glorified chatbot, what do you think's gonna happen in a company like, like Accenture where they have, you know, tens of thousands of employees? The vast majority of people are not gonna be using it in a smart way and that's gonna be costing the company too much money. But there's gonna be point two percent of people that are using it in a smart way. You let those people spend more.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Dude, did I tell you I downgraded my ChatGPT subscription?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Your own?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, my own. I downgraded.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  I love that you spent the time to actually do that. Well, how much are you paying a month now?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I don't know how much I'm paying. I believe I was paying around two hundred dollars a month before. I could be off on the number, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around two hundred. Cause I would always get an email from my assistant being like, Neil, can you go get me the receipt? They didn't email it to you. We need it for accounting purposes. I'd be like, alright. Uh, and then I downgrade. I'm like, man, I'm like, I now really only use ChatGPT as a glorified search to do like research and stuff. And I'm like, why the heck am I on the highest plan for this? So I downgraded it. I think it's like twenty dollars a month or twenty-nine or something like that. I could be off on the pricing, but I know it's not fifty a month and I know it's not free. It's that pricing that's in between there, but it's not the highest plan.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Dude, I love my ChatGPT now. I was driving to see my dad last week, right? So when you drive to Arcadia, it's good, it's like forty-five minute drive, forty, forty-five minutes. I just called Dudu and I was just talking for forty-five minutes. And it's like, okay, what about this? What about this? Okay, can you move this forward over here? Can you advance this over here? This is like, we were just going back and forth.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Isn't Dudu your muse?

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  They're both called Dudu. So Dudu is Muse and Dudu is also my dot too. They're both called Dudu. So uh, they're, anyway, so that's my OpenAI dot. And like, it, it, it's really good because I'm like, oh, we're trying to make these ChatGPT plugins right now. Okay, we're trying to do this redesign over here. We're trying to do this over here. Oh, can you hand this over to Sean over here? Can you do this, right? So I'm like, I'm just going back and forth with it. It's like you just talking to like an employee on your team for forty-five minutes and it's just getting stuff done. So um, that to me is worth it, but I'm not on the five hundred plan. I'm only on the two hundred dollar plan.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  There's a five hundred dollar plan?

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  They just added a five hundred dollar plan. Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, dude, I should actually check to see what plan I'm on. I, I know it's the cheaper plan.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  I'm sure yours is twenty-nine dollars.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  I'm on plus. What's plus?

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Hundred dollars?

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Plus twenty, twenty-one.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  Uh, well, yeah, they brought it down a little bit.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is great. Uh, let's see all plans. Oh yeah, you're right. So, oh, they have an eight dollar a month plan? Expand access.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  No, at a certain point, saving money is not worth it.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  That's diminishing returns.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Uh, Eric knows me really well. I'm like, ooh, I can save even more.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Okay, so this guy, uh, how do you pronounce his name, Neil?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  So Jai?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  So Jai? Yeah, I, I have no idea, but it sounds right.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  Okay, alright.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  I should know how to say his name, but I don't.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should know how to say it. So, so this guy says, I got a lot of pushback for saying that one product manager and one engineer can now be the entire team. Now, Dan Shipper has a, has a name for it, the Pirate and the Architect. Right? So it used to be, remember um, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, he used to said, he used to say uh, two pizza teams, right? We wanna have two pizza teams. Now today, it's two slice teams. Okay? So you can only get two slices for the team. So let, let me play this video real quick.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  And I've started to come to you is you really wanna use very, very, very small teams. For a long time, the standard for team size was the, the two pizza teams. So that's like eight to ten people. That's what Jeff Bezos came to. I think in the AI age, I, I call it a two slice team. Like you want one or two people max. You can get so far so fast with one or two people that anything more, there's a lot of coordination overhead and there's different visions and it just doesn't work. One or two people is really, really great. And I think the, the composition that works for us, and I, I think it's starting to work for other people, is I call them pirates and architects. So one person on the team is the pirate. They are slot cannons who are absolutely obsessed with finding value. That's, that's me. Like I'm just out there just doing lots and lots of stuff and I'm throwing it away and it's all messy, but I'm gonna find something really interesting. And then architects are people who are like looking at a messy system, like maybe something that I built that's completely, if I coded and trying to help shape it into something that's valuable and beautiful and extensible. And pairing those types of people together, I think is very, very powerful in AI.

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  So I think this is interesting, Neil, because we have um, we have our agent builders team right now, right? And then everyone has their own project. So most people are just working on their own, on a project. Maybe, maybe there's someone else paired with them. But we have one team where there's four or five people on it. That team is the slowest one. Because there's so much drag that comes from coordination and so, so has so much, like, you know, if you have five ideas, I have five ideas, someone else has five ideas, and then Noah has five ideas too. That's twenty ideas. And everyone wants to get their ideas forward, right? Um, so I like, I like this whole idea of a pirate and an architect because I'm probably more of a pirate where I just like throwing spaghetti against the wall. And then you do need an architect that can help you shake this stuff into like a, like clay into like a little like castle.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  Or something like that. Um, but I do, I have found firsthand experience that when you've, when you have, start to have more than two people building these things, it starts to get really complex and there's politics start to build even at such a small size. So.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Dude, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm with you. Uh, I do like the smaller teams. I was talking to one of my team members the other day. They're like, you used to run Uber Sess back in the day. How'd you do it? I was like, with very few people. Fewer people means faster deployment. I do think in product and engineering and design, a lot of that stuff is definitely true. I do believe, uh, when you start getting into complex situations like finance and banking, small teams don't work out. Like Bank of America found out that through Claude, that there's tons of bugs. So they hired a thousand contractors to fix all the security bugs. You need a big team and you better crank that out really fast and fix all those bugs, especially because it's related to finance.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  But on the flip side, for some business cases, you know, when you're doing, let's say a merger and acquisition and you're trying to buy a company, you know, you, you can't buy a company with a two-person team. And I know the example there, they were not saying for M and A, but you'll need a finance person, you need a legal person, you need a person who actually knows the business really well. Uh, someone who understands maybe account management, if it's in marketing, someone who understands, you know, just looking at, um, their delivery and seeing if they actually have a really good product or service to churn rate, right? That gives them some data on that as well. Someone in sales to analyze their sales process and if they do a good job. Cause then you can figure out where to fix a lot of this stuff, but that usually requires more than a two-person team.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  But I know in that video, they're mainly talking about, you know, building products.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think it depends, right? Like earlier, we're just talking about Meta having two hundred people on that super AI team. By the way, they have seventy thousand people. Two hundred divided by seventy thousand is point zero zero two eight five seven. I have my calculator.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  They have how many people on the, the team?

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Two hundred people on the AI team, two hundred people, um, out of seventy thousand employees total at Meta, right? And then even the way Mark Zuckerberg was talking about, it's like, yeah, it's like this, this elite team and they just want to move quickly. And to your point, like two hundred of seventy thousand is, is really not that much, but that's what it takes to move lightning fast, right? And he wants that team to move lightning fast. Um, so there's that, but then I wanted to bring you up another thing over here. Cause we're talking about private equity. Okay. So bending spoons, would you say bending spoons is kind of more like a private equity type model?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  It is purely a private equity type model, hence Berkshire Hathaway popped in money and then the stock popped like forty, fifty percent in one day.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  So check this out. So bending spoons. Okay. I don't know if you saw this, but this guy Federico who works at bending spoons are based in Milan. So, uh, you know, Italian guy, right? So today we're laying off a large part of the air table team. So remember they bought air table and I think they got a good, like a decent deal on it. Um, so what bending spoon does is they bought Evernote, they bought air table, they, what else did they buy, Neil? Do you remember? Oh, okay. Uh, Vimeo, Evernote, Eventbrite.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Evernote, yeah.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  AOL.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  They're on the right side.

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  AOL. We transfer, yeah, meetup. Yeah. So they buy these struggling tech companies from the past. They used to be iconic tech companies, right? Like Eventbrite, um, meetup, AOL, Evernote, right? So he's like, look, today we're laying off a large part of the air table team. This is not a reflection of their work, but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better. For air table, better is about to look like a new core team shipping your top request monthly, upgraded, did, you know, this and that, new performance at infra teams. Okay. To everyone leaving, thank you. If you're hiring, these are excellent people and worth the call. So before you react, Neil, let me tell you why this is such a tone deaf, um, you know, post.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  Because instead of like, I even posted here, I was like, I was like, dude, where, where are all these people that you're laying off? Like, give me a list of those people, right? Um, and, but it's like, it's just like, yeah, you know, these are excellent people and worth the call. I was like, how do I know who to call? Um, and this is like, why are you even announcing your new product features when you're talking about a layoff? Like those should be separate things.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Totally agree. I'm like, this is a terrible message. I don't know who wrote this. Uh, I'm assuming they're at bending spoons.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  He leads product at bending spoons.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  I, I, I just looked up how many employees air table has. This is from a Google AI overview. It says eight hundred or so. Uh, I'm, I'm guessing they're laying off more than fifty percent is my guess. I don't have any stats or data, but when they say a large part, bending spoons model is you got, you increase profit. This is what private equity does. And this is why people say private equity is not the place where, this is where companies go and their innovation dies. And I, I really do agree with that, you know, and people always talk to me about innovating and we have a lot of people on our team who try to innovate. And my co-founder and I are like, so if you're telling me this is going to be a, a new thing, is anyone doing that?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  And usually because of AI, people move so fast these days, they're like, yeah, there's these other companies that are doing it. They're really tiny. And my co-founder and I usually just shoot an email and it's like, let's just see if one of these companies will sell to us. It'll be easier.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  Yep. By the way, Neil.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  That is not where you go to innovate.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  So let's call something out real quick. Okay. Evernote back in the day, right? So Evernote used to be like the number one note taking company. Okay. So Evernote's peak headcount was roughly four hundred thirty-three employees. Guess how many people are running Evernote, um, today?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Thirty.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Exactly thirty. Okay. So that's seven percent. They cut, they cut ninety-three percent of staff. Okay. And they're doing, that is their playbook, right? Air table. Like, by the way, the core air table team, they're all on a hyper agent now. So they spun that off from air table and they sold air table, right? So the core air table team, they're already in a hyper agent. They've already sailed off to somewhere else. So they're okay with, with, you know, cutting the rest. Um, so anyway, that's the model. Cut ninety, ninety-five percent or so, just have twenty to thirty people running it. And then the thing, the way they run bending spoons is they have, um, different product manager, different engineers. They're kind of working on different projects and they're just kind of moving around. Um, so it's, it's, it's interesting for them, you know, so.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's interesting as well is when you're publicly traded, most people can't cut too deep. Okay. But their model and the public markets know this is buy companies that aren't high flyer growth companies anymore and just gut them. And then you just take a cash flow pay, uh, model, right? Money is money. People are happy with just cash flow. If you're publicly traded and let's say you're focusing on something that's core, like a Microsoft, a Google, a Lassian, whatever it may be. If you announce that you're cutting ninety-five percent or ninety or eighty percent, the market will be like something's wrong and it can actually hurt your stock price more. Bending spoons is in a different model. The market accepts it and they're like, oh yeah, this is great. Cut, cut the fat. This is what we expect.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  This is interesting. Neil, Neil's right. So Berkshire put, uh, thirty, three hundred thirty million into it yesterday. So sparked a share rally. So by the way, year to date.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I just said, they put it a while ago.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Reuters said it's one, one, one day ago. So this is probably some wrong Google overview or whatever, but, um, market cap thirty-two billion, they're up twenty-five percent in the last six months or so. So not bad for what they are.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  Are you sure, Neil? Here, let me show you this to you. Like either I'm wrong or.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  October thirteenth. It's October thirteenth.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Oh, three days ago, three days ago. Yeah. So this is just like later news. Bending spoons skyrockets forty-one percent as Berkshire Hathaway makes three hundred thirty million. Okay. I see. Oh, and this was from their CEO, Abel, Greg Abel, right? So.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. The reason I know the dates is a lot of times when I see this, I'm like, man, you know, I, I, I, no one knew that they were going to do it or also it'd be insider trading. I then go and look at the options chain and I'm like, oh, if I put in money at this price, how much would I have made? I was just curious, right? So it was pretty good.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Anyway. All right, guys. So that is it for today. Um, we hope you have a great day and we will see you tomorrow.