Do NOT Sleep on X Money!

Eric and Neil start with X Money, which pays 3% cash back and 6% interest, and argue that the offer is under marketed and would get more people investing. They test an AI-written blog post on a client, who took it for human writing, then cover a time-on-page chart that compares human and AI content. They debate whether writing is thinking and whether a real name still beats AI copy. Dan Shipper's claim that newsletters are dying, from a writer with over 120,000 subscribers, leads to a debate on email, AI summaries in the inbox and whether YouTube is S-tier. They close on every channel getting more competitive over time. Human voice still earns the trust. Key takeaways ◾X Money pays 3% cash back and 6% interest, but the 3% has fine print ◾A human byline near the title held readers longer in their time-on-page test ◾Eric and Neil dispute Dan Shipper's claim that newsletters are dead Chapters 00:00 X Money: 6% interest 04:07 The AI blog post test 10:01 Potato, SpaceX and GrokBot 10:33 Writing is thinking 14:26 Which channels are S-tier 15:47 Are newsletters dead? 17:06 AI summaries and the inbox 18:46 Every channel gets more competitive 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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• 0:34Speaker 01

  You know, you want to 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 Tesla. It's something actually way better that he did than the Tesla.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  What?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Xmoney. Have you seen the returns on Xmoney?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  3% cash back, 6% interest rate, $10 million guaranteed. In which, you know, they're rich enough where X is owned by SpaceX. I wouldn't worry about, you know, them jacking 10 million bucks if you have 10 million or 1 million or whatever the number is or 100 grand. So your money's secure. 6% interest, right? 3% cash back. Now, there are some caveats. You know, you gotta read the fine print. The 3% 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 6% on your money, why the heck would you wanna, you know?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It disincentivizes you to actually invest. 6% guaranteed returns is a lot.

• 1:41Speaker 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?

• 1:48Speaker 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.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  All the creator payouts right now for me, right? Cause 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 because they want you to use it, so.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think he would crush it in marketing if he did something a little bit different. And I, I tweeted about it one time and I don't think they'll do it. Instead of 3% cash back on the charges or 6% interest. I don't know how you legally do it. But, um, because there's tax implications on this stuff. I don't know if there is on the credit card rebates. If I just got SpaceX stock, I would do that. I think to me, that is better.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 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. It'll help with the wealth gap. Forty, 50 years from now, because they're forced to invest.

• 3:03Speaker 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.

• 3:13Speaker 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?

• 3:27Speaker 00

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

• 3:30Speaker 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 because 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.

• 4:14Speaker 00

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

• 4:21Speaker 01

  But if you were able to get 3% cash back, but instead of the cash, it would be SpaceX stock.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Oh, I would just do that.

• 4:28Speaker 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.

• 4:32Speaker 00

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

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Correct. I think it would be a great deal. I think it would be a killer opportunity.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  But going back to your point, Neil, around the agents, right? And so the, the 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 10, 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? 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.

• 5:15Speaker 01

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

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I was tricking him, yeah. So because there's preconceived notions, if I say it's AI generated, he's going to say, oh yeah, you can't do that, right? 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 10, but this one, this one's actually really good. But it takes a long time to refine this stuff. 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 going to maintain this stuff? Who's going to upgrade it? Who's going to optimize it? So, um, like, but we're getting to the point now where we're not even talking about models.

• 6:04Speaker 00

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

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I, 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 an experiment.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  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 I 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 full, right when people can see it, it's not all the way at the bottom. It affects read time because people have preconceived notions on if it's AI.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  You're spot on with that.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 01

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

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Yep. And, um, the, the editor who's, 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, it just gets the content out a lot faster. And then we combine it with our, our, our workflows. So that's, that's been good for us.

• 7:43Speaker 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.

• 7:56Speaker 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? 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 6,000 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, 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.

• 8:41Speaker 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 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. Neil and I were a little older, you know, we're kind of becoming dinosaurs now.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  But I'm like, still a little bit tuned in where I, I kind of know what's happening, so.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Eric's becoming less of a dinosaur than me.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  We're still dinosaurs.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I'm becoming more, yes. This is like when I saw the Tesla roadster and all that 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 straight up, I think you would agree with that, right?

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 01

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

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 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.

• 10:14Speaker 00

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• 10:49Speaker 01

  And stuff.

• 10:50Speaker 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 Uber Suggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, you know what we should talk about over here 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, Grok bot developer now. So she's at SpaceX, right? She was at Cursor before. Look, it's called SpaceX SI now. We, we talked about SI versus AI too in a second. So Potato here, she's like, I love writing. I never let agents write for me.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  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. 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 can 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

• 12:19Speaker 00

  whenever I feel I can put my full name behind something and it's not backed by AI, 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, a, whether you're a best marketer or best writer, you're not relying on AI to create your content.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you're, 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, so I'm a big believer with you about not having AI write content. When it comes to

• 13:03Speaker 01

  just content in general, whether it's text or videos or images, I get you can use AI, but I would say more than 90% of the time it's not worth using. And the prime example of this is Sora. Everyone's like, it 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. 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 25 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.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:05Speaker 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 10, 15,000 views, but he has to keep retweeting it, retweeting it, quote tweeting it over and over. He's like slowly jacking 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 sometimes 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.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Look, time will tell with, uh, 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, those jobs 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.

• 15:26Speaker 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. But the reason why YouTube is, is so high, what do you think the reason is?

• 15:49Speaker 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 an S tier. I wouldn't say email is an 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 $10 million plus minimum, you know, contract size.

• 16:21Speaker 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? 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, 15 to 20 minutes or so, which is a very, very long time. 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 too, she listed email as S tier. So one guy, uh, his name's Dan Shipper.

• 17:04Speaker 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. 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?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yes, now I can.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Okay. So Dan Shipper says, with over 120,000 subscribers, Shipper argues newsletters are dying because AI filters email so well, uh, that getting, uh, 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. Uh, others echo the shift with Brent Bishore, who, uh, 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's just, the newsletter is dead.

• 18:01Speaker 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, um, email solutions like the Gmail's, the Outlook's, et cetera, 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.

• 18:47Speaker 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 just gotta surround them. That, 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 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.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  If they want some quick thoughts, maybe they just read your X article or your LinkedIn post, right? You, you gotta 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 gotta figure out new offers, conversions 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, it does really well.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:25Speaker 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.