Jev Is A MASSIVE Deal for Marketers

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric shows the Jev use cases he is running for his teams, from classifying every Instagram follower to scoring hooks and offers across competitors for a few dollars. Neil explains how his Muse agent now writes the follow-ups on M&A deals he first discussed two or three years ago, and why he gives Meta access he would never give the AI labs. Eric predicts Google and Apple will each ship their own Muse, and they compare it with OpenClaw. Then the story of an AI answer nobody checked and why Neil told them he would fire the person, followed by the core idea: AI is leverage, and leverage on a bad position just loses you money faster. They close on an $80M real estate pitch Neil walked away from. A practical episode on putting AI agents to work. Key takeaways◾Classification at scale now costs dollars, not an analyst's week◾The deals you close come from follow-ups on talks two or three years old◾AI is leverage: it multiplies good judgment and bad judgment equally Chapters00:00 Jev use cases for marketers02:50 Neil's AI writes his M&A follow-ups06:02 Prediction: Google and Apple ship their own Muse07:53 OpenClaw vs Muse11:13 'I would fire you': AI output nobody checked13:07 Slop cannons in an AI-native company13:54 AI is leverage15:11 The $80M real estate pitch17:12 Location, location, location

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. So Neil, I want to pull this up for you real quick, just to give also you some ideas for how your team can can use this whole Jev thing. Have you have you heard about Jev yet or no?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you told me about it.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Oh, I did? I didn't remember. Okay. So here, let me show you some Jev use cases here.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  All right, you see my screen?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Okay, just just so you guys can see the screenshot here, this is DoDo. Okay, so DoDo is working. And then it uh

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Do you want to explain what DoDo is? Because people, if they don't listen to the last episode, they won't know.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, DoDo is my Meta Muse bot, okay? And it looks like this. And this is just the Meta Muse icon, actually. So earlier I had mentioned that I wanted to classify, so I have about 116,000 followers on Instagram. And so I was like, hey, I want you to do a call and see who is actually influential. And you know, who's a founder, who's an investor, who's an entrepreneur. You know, just like who who's in travel, who's in hospitality and all this stuff, right? To see if we can, you know, somehow collaborate or whatever. So Jev said, hey, this will cost 116,000 stage one calls, so $2.34. And they would do another run, which total would be $3.35, right? So what am I showing you here? What Jev is, just to back up a second, is Jev is a classifier, okay?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  So when you have, um, let's say, Neil, you have like a thousand people apply to work at MP Digital. Do you want to sort through all those people? And even if you had a human sort through all those people, it wouldn't be that accurate, right? It was just, one, it would take forever. Two, it wouldn't be that accurate, because at a certain point, as a human, like, I would just start to try to game it, right? Because I don't want to review all of them. What Jev can do is it can say, oh, uh, you know, let's only talk to people, let's only shortlist people that have two promotions at two different companies. And have an average, you know, three-year tenure for mid-senior level people. Or you can just say what I said earlier, like, hey, have Jev scan all the people who follow you on Instagram, founders, investors, influencers, recruits. Hell, even use it for people that you want to date, right? Maybe there's someone really interesting that follows you, right? Based on the values that you have, you could have Jev classify that for you, right?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  You could have it scan all the all the stuff that you bookmark on Instagram and scrape, you know, all the hooks, the offers, and creators that they use. You can use Jev to scan all of your external content to determine your best content spikes. Then draft the best, then have Jev evaluate the content quality, enforce content guidelines, and avoid duplicate content. So to me, this is a major unlock from a quality AEU, SU, um, scaling standpoint, right? Because the problem with AI is like, if you're just creating a bunch of slop, you're not actually comparing it to what you've already published and what your quality guidelines are, right? So that's a big deal to me, especially considering, Neil, we spend all this time creating this content, right? We already did this before. Hours and hours a week, we spend time creating this content, but we're not maximizing it. This can help us maximize it, right?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Scan all your customer calls for case studies, objections, churn risk, et cetera, right? And I mentioned this earlier, just scan all inbound and outbound recruits. Run them through your talent evals to shortlist people at lightning fast speed. So anyway, that's the power of this.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Have you ever used Muse to connect to your email and start sending out emails for you?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  So I've been doing it with all of our M and A deals. Because if I look at almost every single M and A deal that we've done, it tends to be deals that we've talked to two, three years ago. We couldn't get a valuation that made sense for us back then. And then two, three years later, they accept the valuation terms that we're willing to offer. And I don't blame people for this. Every entrepreneur believes in their company. And if they have a bad year, they can fix it, and the next year is going to be super amazing, and they did all these things. As entrepreneurs, if you don't drink your own Kool-Aid, I don't know if you're meant to be an entrepreneur. I hate to say that, but it is true, you really need to have some sort of delusion.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  It's called naive optimism, Neil.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  There you go. And I like people who have naive optimism. So I had an issue in which, this is just me, I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. I never really trusted Anthropic and OpenAI. I still don't. Like, I trust a Facebook, a Microsoft, a Google. I'm not saying some companies do evil things and others don't. Just for me, like Meta was in a lawsuit for child stuff. I know the settlement was in 11 digits, so over 10 billion or something like that. I think it was, I know it was under 20, it was 16, 18, 14, something. And I know there was some caveat if they can get some of the other platforms to join along and make the changes, the settlement's cheaper for them. Whatever, maybe. Either way, it was a lot of money.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I trust Facebook more with my data and Google more with my data and Microsoft more with my data, and even Amazon than I do with a lot of these up and coming startups, even though OpenAI and Anthropic aren't really startups from a valuation perspective. I just don't trust them with data. This is just me personally, like I trust Facebook.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Facebook being a publicly traded company, there's more regulation, it's global. They're going to get their butts sued if they do some funny business. And I'm okay willing to take that risk with Facebook, but I'm not willing to take that risk with OpenAI or Anthropic. Definitely not like a DeepSeek or anything like that, but I will for Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. But this is just my personal two cents. I don't know how you feel with that.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  So wait, were we talking about trust? I'm trying to figure out where you're trying to go with that.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  No, like, um, I'm now having it do a lot of my follow-up emails, and I'm getting a lot of responses from it, so it's actually working out well. But I'm able to do so much more with AI these days than I was months ago due to the fact that I trust Facebook and I'm allowing it more access than I would with the other, you know, AI platforms out there. But that's just me.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  That's fair.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I trust Nvidia. If Nvidia wants to do something and get access to my data, I don't have an issue with that. But for some reason with Anthropic and OpenAI, I can't. On the flip side, if Grok wanted access, I also trust him for some reason. And I'm not saying Elon's better or worse than any of those people, has nothing to do with it. It's just for me, corporate trust, Apple's another one. I would actually put Apple at the top of the list. If Apple had a Muse, I would let it have access to my bank account. Straight up, I wouldn't be worried about it if it was Apple.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So let me see.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I wouldn't trust Facebook with my

• 6:37Speaker 00

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• 7:11Speaker 01

  The bank account, though.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer2Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So let me make a prediction here, okay? So all of these, Google, Apple, they will all have their own version of Muse. Because remember, back in the day, Neil, when I was talking about, earlier this year, when I was talking about OpenClaw and Hermes? This is just OpenClaw and Hermes. In fact, the Muse architecture is built off the OpenClaw, uh, architecture, right? Like, a lot of the ideas, like they call like a soul dot M D file and all that. So here's the thing, and there's no right or wrong here, right?

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Like, remember, guys, early days, I was like, January, I was on OpenClaw already, right? And then Hermes came out, and I was on Hermes, right? And so it's not saying that there's a right or wrong here, because there are no solutions, only trade-offs, right? So the trade-off here is if you use Hermes and OpenClaw early, you're taking a lot, a lot more risk. Because you're setting it up yourself, and you don't know what's going to happen, it could delete all your stuff, right? And I've seen that happen, but that was a risk that I was willing to accept, right? It was the uncertainty piece that we're talking about a little earlier, right? Now, with Muse and GrokBot, you have a lot more certainty. And I think people should certainly be using both Muse and GrokBot, because I'm just using both those now, I'm just getting stuff done. And the funny thing is, Neil, we had a conversation earlier this week, talking about M and A, right? Almost a lot of the stuff that we talked about, I built it in, and I'm having Jev just classify, um, you know, M and A deals that I might be potentially looking for.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  But keep in mind, Neil has some different patterns that he's talking about here, where he's like, hey, what he typically sees is, like, for his deal sizes, usually he's not going to get a deal done for two to three years. So he can observe, and he could probably make look-alikes off of that using Jev. And so the world is his oyster now, by having a GrokBot and a Muse, plus a Jev to classify everything. And you know all I do, Neil, when I wake up, I have anxiety, you know why? Because I don't want to talk to anybody yet, I need to get the agents going first. And then I'm good for the rest of the day, I just need to make sure to get everything they need. Because I know they're reliable, and they just get shit done now, pardon my language. I still use Hermes, just not as much anymore, but GrokBot, a Muse man. And and and like, once Google comes online, Apple comes online, I'm just going to be on those things all day. And you're probably going to need like a super meta agent managing all of those.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Dude, I didn't tell you, I didn't tell you this. So if I'm not mistaken, OpenClaw did a deal with OpenAI, right? And I actually forgot about OpenClaw, like, literally, I forgot about it until you just mentioned it. But yeah, Muse is pretty much alternative to it, right? Like, when I thought about Muse, it never hit me about OpenClaw. But there was something interesting that, uh, I interacted with yesterday. So I was at SocialNext, which was a conference in Vancouver yesterday, okay? And you saw a lot of startups, you saw a lot of mid-sized businesses, even some enterprise businesses. Someone came up to me, and they were complaining about their, uh, someone on their marketing team.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  There, someone on their marketing team was selling, uh, this company is a large company. They're also based out of San Francisco, but they have offices throughout most of the parts of the world. And and they were complaining to me how they were using AI to help them manage their ads, okay? And the AI spent 100, I think they said 112,000 Canadian. So I don't know what that is in USD, call it like 75, 78,000 USD, I'm rounding here. And it only brought in 3,000 to 4,000, uh, Canadian dollars in revenue. So call it, let's just call it 3,000 USD, okay? I know it's probably a little bit less than that, 2,000 something.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  But either way, you know, they were blaming the AI for this, like, no joke. They were blaming AI for their failed ad campaign, and they were pissed. And they had an internal meeting, they told me, he met up with his boss, and they're discussing what AI solutions they should use instead, because it messed up. And he said, what would you do? And I said, do you want my honest answer? I don't want to be, I don't want to come off as rude. Or do you want me to just sugarcoat it? I'm like, what do you want? As a, he's like, no, I want the real answer. I'm like, I would have written you up and potentially fired you. And he's like, why? I didn't mess up the AI mess up. I'm like, no, you're the one who told the AI to manage the campaigns. You set it up. It's your responsibility. No one held a gun to your head and said, you have to use AI to help you do this.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  You could have done it manually. And no one said you shouldn't use AI. But if you're in charge of it and you didn't keep track of it. Because I said, in reality, when did you check the campaign to see if it was performing? He's like, after we spent over a hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, that's the problem. You could have checked the first day, the second day, third day. I'm like, how many days did it go? And he said, it went for roughly forty days. I'm like, this is your problem. You didn't supervise it. You didn't check. I'm not saying AI is good or bad. You could have caught it early on enough and realized there's something wrong. But you decided not to pay attention. This is your fault. It's not, hey, how do we, uh, what AI system should we use instead in the future?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  It's how'd you use the AI and why did it do it wrong? What inputs did you give? What instructions did you give? And I'm like, this is all the person who's behind the technology. And I'm like, this is the problem. I'm like, you either need to learn how to use it right, or you need to go into a different role. Or don't use the technology at all and do it manually.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  I'm actually curious, how did they react to that?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Uh, they went from, they first asked me for advice in a picture to they got my advice and they walked away.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it went from, they were so excited to meet you, get a picture to, hey, I would fire you.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I told them the truth, like, I'm just being honest. I wasn't trying to be mean to them, like, I know I sounded mean at that moment. But if I tell them a bullshit answer, like, yeah, dude, the AI is wrong. I hate to say they're not gonna learn and improve in their life. I think I gave them the right response for them to improve as an individual and do better in the workforce. I think it would be a disservice if I lied to them and be like, give them a pat of like, it's all right, dude, next time. You know, I'm like, no, and, and this is a billion plus dollar organization, not a market cap. I'm talking about a revenue, they're much more than a billion dollars. But of course, your boss is pissed off and I would be pissed off too and I would fire the person.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yep, because you know what? It's the boss's fault now.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  It is the boss's fault. The boss looks bad.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Yep, and then guess what? It rolls all the way up to the CEO for permitting the boss to make a hire like that and to tolerate. So everything kind of goes up, right? And so.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Eric is right, normally, yes, but at this size of organization, when someone does like six, seven billion in revenue, it's too small to roll up to the CEO, but either way, they're looking bad.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm just saying that everything that happens is because of the CEO's decisions downstream.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yes, you're totally right. So even though it doesn't roll up to the CEO, the CEO put this mindset in the organization, use AI. And this is why they were all AI forward and AI pill, like, yeah, use it. We're all AI pill, look how much we do with AI. Being AI pill does not mean you're actually creating good outputs. It just means you're using AI heavily and you're all about AI, but it doesn't actually mean you're effective and productive with AI. There's a lot of people who use AI and actually get less done, or sorry, they get more done in a day, but they produce less results because they're working on crap that has nothing to do with their main KPIs. But it does start with the top because that came from there, but I still don't blame the top. The top never said, don't check your work until forty days later.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  So this goes back to the same thing I was mentioning earlier in this, this podcast, right? This, like, even though I pushed the AI native this at my company, I'm finding I'm spending more time today talking about things like slop cannons and slop grenades, right? Um, and having to create workflows to, to kind of fix that. And the good thing is, by the way, I can have Jeff, again, here comes Jeff again, I can evaluate all these things before I have to review it. And by the way, if it keeps calling out the same people over and over, that's not a good thing, right? And so, the one thing, the other thing I've been saying, Neil, is think about this, let me ask you a question here, right? If you apply leverage to a poor real estate investment, what happens?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  You owe the bank money and then you're screwed.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if you apply leverage to a good real estate investment, what happens?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  You make more money because you can keep lever, take your money, reinvesting it and compounding.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  And Neil knows where I'm going with this. AI is ultimately just leverage, right? Leverage is something that you apply to something, whether it's like a good investment or you apply, if something's good, it amplifies, it makes it bigger, right? Just like we talked about intelligence. But if you apply to something where it's, it's not that good, it, it gets even bigger, right? And so that's why it's, Neil, I have been talking on the phone about this, but it, it does put a spotlight on, on, on people. And, and so here's what I'll say. I've been like, going back to my, my YouTube channel as an example, right? My click through rates before were like three point five percent, four percent on a YouTube video, not good, right? Now they're like seven, eight percent, which is double the click through rate, which is like a hundred people see it. You know, four people might click, now it's up to like seven or eight people, right? Which is great, but going back to what Neil said, it's applying, you know, spending the time, like,

• 16:05Speaker 00

  when I have my, my, my little AI skills, create these, these thumbnails, the first pass doesn't work, the second pass doesn't work. Sometimes, sometimes I need to go to the third or fourth pass. Well, I might spend five to ten minutes, but the performance is a lot better. And I'd rather spend that time than kind of just like waiting, uh, for, for the work, the work to be done, right? So my, my point of saying all this is that, sure, use AI. But at the same time, you can't just sit and, and, and not do anything, right? Which is kind of what happens, uh, is, is happening right now. When I'm, when I look at my brand team and they're kind of like, they're kind of trying to figure out what to do. But also, if your boss comes in and kind of does it for you and then hands it over to you and you're still not doing anything with it, that's also not good too, so.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Dude, someone pitched me an interesting real estate deal, uh, two weeks ago. Uh, I met him up with him on the, the rooftop, you know, Waldorf, uh, which is actually right across the street from you, I believe. And, uh, this person had eighty million dollars worth of real estate that they bought back in the day. It was all office buildings, they paid quite a bit of it down, then they did a refinance. And they're in cities where people are starting to go more virtual and not show up. So maybe they paid a little bit more than eighty or a little bit less. I forgot what the exact number is, but I know they were trying to sell it to me for exactly eighty million dollars because that was a loan amount, right? And they're like, hey, will you just take over the paper? And I knew I could refinance some stuff and I can get some cheaper rates than what they were getting.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Wait, Neil, where, where is it?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Uh, there, quite a bit was in Cleveland, Ohio, there was, uh, some in Cincinnati. There were some in Philadelphia, so they were scattered more on the East Coast. Uh, but it was just commercial office buildings and their occupancy rate was just terrible. But the buildings were in really good condition and they didn't need to be renovated or anything like that. So they were just like, hey, you know, you want to tax deductions, we can get you bonus appreciation, you should just take over this property. And I'm like, you guys just pulled out a ton of money in less than twelve months. Your occupancy rate keeps going lower. I'm like, I'll buy it from you for the price before you pulled out all the money and just, you know, you had to put in, they're like, no, why would we do that? I'm like, okay, then you keep it.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  And I can see now, I got hit up again, they're like, hey, are you a little bit more flexible on the deal? The buyer's willing to, uh, the seller's willing to, uh, make some concessions. And I'm like, no crap, I'm like, you put leverage on something that's terrible, you still got a turd. It doesn't matter. And I'm like, who wants to end up dealing with that?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what Neil was saying is that if, if it's a turd and you polish it and you put leverage, you make it a more powerful turd, it's still a powerful turd, right?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  It's a turd that's on fire. Yeah, it, it just smells even more now, right? So that, that's, that's what it is. And by, by the way, the reason I asked Neil where the location was, because, is, look, if it was, the terms were good and it was like in Florida, for example, maybe Florida's not a good example, but let's say New York, for example, right? New York, like, their real estate's gonna be good. Florida, like, most of the people are coming into the office, I believe, but you know, it's a little more chill vibe, but you have hurricanes coming in and out. So, um, you know, I think it just depends on the location too. So, but like, a lot of the terms, but like, location is part of the, I see it as part of the deal, so.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Dude, he's spot on, but yeah, it's, you know, when you're creating a business or you're marketing, location, location, location.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Hard to fade, hard to mess with.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  All right, well, anyway, guys, that's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.