Are You Just An AI Slop Cannon?

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2:07Eric Siu:Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. I think a week or two ago, we talked about the K-shaped economy, right? And so I wanna review what that is and talk about where that's going. And then I found another article yesterday talking about the headline is, you've been kicked out of the arena, you just don't know it yet.

2:47Eric Siu:Because everyone's talking about, you gotta be the man in the arena and all that, right? But people are just like, no, you've been kicked out of the arena, know you just don't know yet and I want to get your reaction to that okay so let me share the for my first screen here and I apologize I'm on a laptop so I hope this doesn't break Neil can you see this okay yeah okay cool so I'm gonna show the graph first so it says look this is the k-shaped economy okay so basically what you're seeing on the screen over here is you're seeing a line you're seeing a graph okay and then chronologically it's just like one line but then that line diverges into one that scales up.

3:23Eric Siu:The graph goes up and then the line graph goes down. That's where it splits off. That's why it looks like a K. So you have high agency, which is the bifurcation point where it's moving up. And these are high agency plus AI mastery people. Then you have low agency people who are managed by AI. So, and I literally think this is -

3:43Neil Patel:Before you go into it, do you want to explain high agency, low agency? because Eric here is not talking about ad agencies or marketing agencies. If anyone's listening and can't see the graph.

3:52Eric Siu:Oh, totally. Dude, I got to give you some insight. I spoke to one of these ad agency people too. He works with a holding company. So we should talk about that. But on the agency side, okay, high agency means that if you're a high agency person, that means that you're someone that's very proactive. You get things done and you just figure things out, right? Like, you know, everyone knows those people. You're very resilient. you're very um you have a very strong bias to action am i making sense there yeah you're you

4:19Neil Patel:execute you're a go-getter you don't procrastinate you don't wait for someone to tell you what to do

4:24Eric Siu:you just go and do stuff on your own and the world revolves around these people people are attracted to these people right um low agency is like okay maybe you just want to you're the exact opposite maybe you don't want to have a bias to action maybe you just want to chill right maybe you just want a nine to five which is okay right maybe maybe you're in a different phase of your life but that's lower agency you're you don't want to get things done that quickly um so his point here is that in 10 years there's going to be two classes of people so economists call it the k-shaped economy and the next three two to three years will decide which line you're on so i don't think there's a lot of time here right so um you're going to have an overclass that uses ai as a lever to build wealth automate income and make decisions at a speed that no human can compete with alone and then you're going to have an underclass that gets managed by it so imagine this like you need uh not you need um neil when um because you've worked as a janitor before right and i've worked um at like i think i've worked at a fast food restaurant no no no i worked at circuit city before you worked at you clean right let's see i clean toilets yeah you clean toilets right so so my my point is you know if you're a toilet cleaner in the future you're probably going to get managed by an ai right like early in your career like you know the data entry job that I was doing my first job out of college, I'd be managed by an AI.

5:36Neil Patel:So what this graph is just saying is there's a K-shaped economy, or what's the overall point?

5:42Eric Siu:The overall point is you're going to see with high agency people are going to like be the ones managing the AIs, and then low agency people will get managed by AIs. That's the entire point, because people are just growing so fast right now. Yeah, yeah.

5:56Neil Patel:Yeah, when I look at the K-shaped economy and like the graph, I look at even pre-AI, we were already heading to a K-shaped economy,

6:05Eric Siu:I think AI just accelerates it. Yeah, completely. And, you know, we kind of talked about this before, but, you know, I said that money amplifies your nature, AI amplifies your intelligence. And what's interesting is that, you know, a lot of people here see the same thing, right? And we're kind of talking about that right now. So to close out this point, he says, this guy Miles says, if you're reading this now and you haven't built systems with AI, haven't automated a single workflow, haven't used it to create anything that makes you money or makes you irreplaceable, you are currently on the wrong line that's not an insult you have the agency right you have the will your own willpower to change your trajectory right now but six months from now the gap will be twice as wide and a year from now it might not be crossable and i actually see that and what i'll say to everyone listening to this is if you're looking for a job right now and you're into this stuff both neil and i are hiring and we're looking for people with amazing agency because to neil's point earlier everything is a talent game more than ever now everything is a talent game that i I think the AI stuff actually reinforces the need for strong talent.

7:03Eric Siu:Because last week we did an episode talking about slop cannons. We need to hire people with good judgment. Everything is downstream of hiring.

7:10Neil Patel:One of my favorite AI quotes is actually from Eric. And he said it either a week ago or two weeks ago when we were recording the podcast. A brings out the best in you or the worst in you. And I 100 % agree with what Eric said. And I love that quote. And I've been using it. in which if you are a player and you're just a go-getter, you execute on your own, AI just makes you even better, more dangerous, more valuable. If you're lazy and you don't like working, AI brings out the worst in you in which you try to figure out how to get AI to do as much of your job as possible. And I see marketers being like, oh, look at this.

7:53Neil Patel:It created a website for me. It's creating content for me. It's doing outreach to try to build links for me. And they're like, this is great. Look how much of my job I automated. And then they're telling me like, yeah, this technology is amazing. Everyone needs to use it. But then I see what they're doing with their time. They set up a lot of these systems and tools to help them out. So that way they can go run around and take photos or go travel or hike or whatever they want. And I'm like, so you're telling me I don't need to pay you? Now, the people who are showing me this are friends and they don't really work for me.

8:31Neil Patel:But it's just like, if they show that to me and they were working for me hypothetically, I'd be like, so you're telling me you want to get paid to not work? And yes, it's great how you can use AI to do a lot of stuff, but you should be using your time for other things that AI is not as great at. And when people have the attitude of, oh, I just automated everything so I don't need to work. It's just like, those are people who are just going to be replaced. and they're not going to be backfilled. And AI really does bring out the best in people from what I've seen and the worst. And people need to have the right mentality in which it's a great tool.

9:07Neil Patel:It can do a lot of what you're doing and make you more efficient and do even some things better. But that opens up a lot of time for you to do other things. If you decide to use that time to do other things like personal stuff and expect to get paid for it, You're in for a reckoning.

9:26Eric Siu:Dude, you know what's crazy? I was getting a haircut before I flew out to Florida on Sunday, right? And this is the first time I got a haircut before I was using Open Claw. And so with my barber, typically we just kind of, you know, I'd be, you know, doom scrolling on my phone. And we'd be kind of, you know, talking about whatever, like small talk, or, hey, what video games are you playing right now? Blah, blah, blah. How's your family? Right? That type of stuff. This time, as he's talking to me, I'm not doom scrolling. I actually ended up shipping like when I say shipping like the my open call was doing a bunch of tasks so he cuts my hair takes 30 minutes or so in that 30 minutes I pushed it to do seven tasks right whereas before I well like these are like tasks like a typical human would do right um whether we're like strategizing on things or like doing a prd or something like that right um I'm like holy crap and I think it's like before I'm going like Neil talking about AI being an amplifier before I'm going to bed, I'm like on my phone, like it's like 7pm because we're done with dinner and all that.

10:23Eric Siu:Right. And then literally until 1030pm, I'm on open call. I'm just pushing stuff. Right. And so I'm saying that I've never had more fun at work, but also like I've never worked harder either because the entire thing feels like a video game now. And I saw David Hensel. So David Hensel, you know, he we used to play a game together. So he was I was 12 years old or so. And he was like, I think he's like 21 years old or something like that. We played a game called EverQuest. and I'm like dude this is just like EverQuest he's like it's exactly like EverQuest it's like World of Warcraft right I'm like holy crap you can literally build whatever you want whatever you want and it's only going to get crazier from here and um that's why it's so exciting so I I literally show them all open claw and a lot of them are using cloud code some of them are like maybe one or two people are just on chat GPT but we all feel behind and that's every single day but we all know that there's no time to slack off like now's the time to press like even harder yeah

11:17Neil Patel:And when you look at OpenClaw, a lot of people are telling me like, oh, I can't use it because I don't have a Mac Mini. Well, you can just spin up an AWS instance and just pop it on there. You don't need a Mac Mini.

11:27Eric Siu:I would be scared. That's the only one word of caution there. I'd be concerned with the security items there. No, no.

11:33Neil Patel:You sped up a whole new instance and a whole new account on AWS.

11:37Eric Siu:Yeah. So the way I have it set up, right, when you put it on AWS or like a virtual private server or something like that, There's a lot of security issues around it. And even the way I have it set up right now on a Mac Mini, it's not bulletproof. So I would just say with OpenClaw, like it's nice and I use it. I'll use it for my own stuff, but we definitely wouldn't use it for clients because there's too many security issues. And so we want like a SOC 2 compliant version, and which is something that we're actually actively working on building right now. And we just want to manage it ultimately because people like your clients, ultimately like our clients, they don't care if it's OpenClaw, clothes claw or like whatever it is exactly right they just want outcomes they just want outcomes

12:18Neil Patel:yeah and if you're going to use it on an amazon instance you shouldn't be using it for anything sensitive anything customer facing you should just be using it for testing and experimental experimental stuff in my opinion and wait for open ai who has a deal eric called it on our last podcast you remember you were saying like yeah the open claw founders in san francisco probably doing a deal with, you know, like one of these big companies like OpenAI or Anthropic or one of them, I forgot which ones you were naming, or Facebook, and he ended up doing a deal with OpenAI. And I'm waiting for OpenAI to release a version that's safe for us to all use.

12:55Neil Patel:And then it's on. Yeah, we'll see.

12:58Eric Siu:I mean, it's, you know, we at SingleGrain right now, we're already working on a SOC 2 compliant version. And there's a handful, like Manus, for example, which is owned by Meta. but they kind of have their own version of like an agent as well. So I think a lot of these are moving into this space. So we'll see what happens. But the one thing I wanted to call out too, actually, this will be interesting, Neil. And then I want to come over to this article. So I met with someone at one of these, Google. Okay, so I met with someone at Google and he actually manages some of these hold co relationships, these traditional agency hold co relationships.

13:33Eric Siu:He works directly with some of these CEOs. So I think you would find this interesting because this is your space. So I want to get your reactions to some of these and kind of go from there. Are you ready?

13:43Neil Patel:Mm-hmm. So to be clear, this is a person you met that is a Google employee. Mm-hmm. And then he deals with all the agencies and he specifically deals with the agency CEOs and stuff like that.

13:55Eric Siu:Yeah, some of these agencies hold co-CEOs. And I think there's a handful of these types of people, but very smart guy. And I've known him for a while. So I was like, okay, so what's the deal right now? And I was just, I'll kind of fill you in on the conversation. I was just like, okay. He's like, dude, Eric, the churn right now, these hold co-says their churn is 20 % annually. It's more like 30 % and the churn is going up. And so he's like, when I talk to these hold co-CEOs, I'm like, what are you guys going to do about this churn? Because the churn is really high, right? And none of them have a plan.

14:25Eric Siu:I'm like, none of them have a plan? He's like, yeah, none of them. All their plan is to grow top line right now. It's just continue to grow top line. And he's like, the problem that I see with a lot of these agencies is that they're not AI native, right? And so he's like, you guys are like, you know, AI native, or at least he perceives me to be, right? And so he's like, they're going to have, because the way they're structured, they used to throw people out. The problem was a labor arbitrage. That arbitrage is not going to work as well in the next, you know, five, 10 years or so. And so he's like, and also I'm like, I was like, hey, entertain me here.

14:58Eric Siu:Cause he used to work in tech. He used to work in SaaS. He used to work in e-commerce. I was like, hey, you've worked in all these industries. What percent of these people do you find impressive on the agency side? He's like, honestly, I don't look forward to having most of these conversations. Maybe only 5 % of people are impressive on the agency side, which we've kind of joked about, right? I was like, okay, well, entertain me here. On the e-commerce side, on the startup side, on the software side, what percent of people are generally impressive, right? He's like 15 % to 20%. So that's three to four times more.

15:27Eric Siu:So I'll pause for a second. What are your reactions to this so far?

15:30Neil Patel:Yeah, I could see how startups and smaller business are going to be more innovative because they don't have all the legacy, archaic bull crap to deal with or politics. So they can do more innovative stuff. But the first reaction I get when you're telling me all of this is, this person doesn't seem to enjoy their job. They should go find a new job. Could be, could be. But that's my first reaction. On the churn metrics, it depends which companies you're talking about. But you have to keep in mind, some of them are publicly traded. So I doubt that they're fudging their numbers on churn. He may not be talking about all publicly traded companies, and I'm assuming that is the case.

16:11Neil Patel:But the publicly traded ones, I don't think they're churning at high numbers, like 30 % and stuff like that. what people tend to forget and this is the big thing about agencies um and i saw eric on an x thread about this you were debating with someone okay uh about this conversation yeah yeah so the thing with agencies is agencies are hired for people more than anything else so if you're a company, a big organization like Procter & Gamble, and you're looking to figure out things, you're hiring Accenture or McKinsey to help you with AI in many cases. You agree with that statement, right? If you look at Accenture and McKinsey, their businesses in some areas are struggling, but the AI parts are booming.

17:03Neil Patel:And we see the same thing in marketing. People, and it goes back to the topic Eric and I talked about earlier, where it's all about hiring and the quality of people that you're recruiting, right? You just want amazing talent. So a lot of companies, what they do is they hire agencies because they have amazing talent. Not all agencies do, but the ones that do have amazing talent tend to do well because people hire you for the people and they want you to just figure out their problems for them. I'm not saying that'll always be the case, but that has been the case historically. And I believe that's going to be

17:38Eric Siu:the case over the next few years at least. I think that's always going to be the case. People want something to just do to work for them, something or someone. But he made some other interesting points here. So he's like, one, you know, I'm like, so what do you see agency people as? And so they are hiring from the people, right? But he's like, now there are no longer any differentiators. He's like, these agencies are just literally like budget managers. And I was like, okay, so explain, like, why do you think that? He's like, dude, I shared this in the thread, but he's like there are software companies in india that will go to like an agency like maybe a proctor and like oh you're proctor and gamble you're working with this agency over here what what's your you know what are they charging you right it's like could be you know 10 15 20 sometimes 5 in terms of ad budget um you agree with that yes uh-huh okay so he's like oh let's say hypothetically some some agencies charging like you know uh 10 or 15 he's like okay well oh, if you're paying 10 % or something like that, how about we just charge you 4%, right?

18:38Eric Siu:And he's seeing these upstarts in India with whatever software that they have, they're taking hundreds of millions of dollars of budget away. And he's like, dude, he's like, this is just gonna continue to happen on the AI native side. I'm like, so what are people gonna do? He's like, unfortunately, and he does, I think he does like his job. He works with really smart people, but he's like, dude, even people at Google, very smart, they don't wanna rock the boat and they don't wanna change anything, right? And so they'd rather not rock the boat and say, hey, these things are changing. They're just like, let's just keep it how it is.