The Price Of Knowledge Is Going Towards Zero

Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying, and second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more@HubSpot.com did you see how core

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wholesale prices rose like crazy? What did core wholesale prices.

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No, I didn't.

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So core ppi, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, increase the seasonally adjusted 0.8% more than the 0.6% gain in December and well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate of 0.3.

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So are we cutting interest rates?

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Uh, the 10 year went down. So usually if the 10 year goes down, that means they believe the rates are gonna start going down, but they're worried about stagflation at this point.

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Yeah, I mean, the world's crazy right now. Um, but. And honestly, like, okay, we can say that, right? But honestly, like, we should just say, okay, the world's crazy right now. Like, here's what we would do about it. So here's what at least I would do about it. I, I only think there's one way through it. Like if you're curious and you're actually out there, you're curious, you're learning, you're experimenting, and you're actually even a bonus would be if you're out there teaching, you will be unstoppable now, no matter what. I think all the stuff that people are talking about, oh, there's AI, there's layoffs. Right now all you can worry about is yourself and the only way out is through. So I'm looking over a hill right now. There's a hill over there. Okay, so there's this giant tidal wave coming over that hill right now. And you can choose to surf that wave or you can choose to like, not do anything and just stare at and just get hit by it. Right. But I would say the more curious you are, the more entrepreneur you are. And you don't have to be an entrepreneur. You can be like an entrepreneur. You're going to do just fine and you're going to surf this wave. And that's why during this period of chaos right now, as the world adapts, I think there's going to be some job displacement. But I think the net, net long term we're going to be okay. Yeah.

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And when you look at like the overall wholesale prices, which is just another version of inflation for anyone who's not sure what I mean by core wholesale prices, think of a business buying a product that they are going to resell to someone else. So you're buying, you know, I'm Best Buy, which is electronics company. If you don't live in the US and they go buy a TV from Sony and then they go and sell it to end consumer, right. So they get a whole sell price. They don't pay the sticker price for a Sony tv. If they did, there would be no margin, no profit for them. And on an annual basis, core wholesale prices accelerated 3.6%. Now is that some of that caused from tariffs and other stuff? I don't know. But you know, the market didn't like it.

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You know, we should, we should talk about this because I actually have a tweet that's related to this. So we're talking about, you know, inflation, we're talking about stack. Actually, no, we're talking about stagflation, which is actually, you have no growth plus inflation. Really bad. Okay. Stagflation is terrible. Now I, we're talking about, okay, you know, blocks doing these layoffs over here. I just pulled this up. I saw this this morning as I was walking back from the gym. So this guy Jeff, previous at Code 2 and Goldman Sachs, so finance guy. I think we actually work with this company. This is a crypto company. Yeah, we worked with this company before say network. Okay. So spoke with this guy Jeff says, spoke with several YC founders planning to lay off all engineers below staff, principal, Basically everyone under L5. This only became viable after Opus 4:5 in December. The block layoffs are signal. The floor just collapsed. If you're early in your career, the next few years are everything. Your edge will be how well you integrate AI into the value you create. The fastest learners are about to compound at absurd rates. Maybe that's part of the reason why. Neil, I'm excited for you, me, our other kind of, you know, friends who love to learn. But like point is, you know, talking about, you're talking about inflation going up and you're talking about these layoffs over here. So the headline I had for this one is the price of knowledge work is going to, it's going to continue to trend towards zero because a lot of this stuff can do the work. But the people who are able to kind of converge their roles into multiple roles, they will make a lot more Money and there'll be an even more demand. So if you, again, if you keep compounding yourself, you keep learning your constant cures, you're experimenting, you're eating the poo poo, you will be fine. Yep. All right, so we have this interesting one over here, Neil, on the new distribution channel as agents. So Google, I think, recently just launched their web m. C. P. So, Neil, when you look at, when you look at the clickflow website or you look at the carrot website, Uber Suggest is a good example or answer to publish a good example. Because you have, I think for both of those, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you have versions where they can just use it, right? Like freemium version. They can get a couple of uses. Correct? Okay, so. Or we can talk about booking flights on Expedia, for example. Right? So if you're going to be running these agents, whether you're using like, I know, Perplexity just came out with a computer, use one. You can use cloud cowork to do work for you, and you can browse the Internet. You want these agents, you want to make it very easy for them to, you know, ideally not do web browsing, but call on MCPS and just book a flight using, you know, whatever travel website you're using, or call on data from, you know, ubersuggest or answer to public or clickflow or Carrot. Right. Or spin up ads very quickly. So WebMcP was launched by Google. Okay. And I think, what are we talking about here, Google? I think Stripe also launched something I think called like to allow agents to interact with each other. So I think you're going to have a lot more. I think you even had a post on how like a lot of traffic coming to your website now is like what, 50% bots? Is that what it is?

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51% of website traffic in general are bots now?

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Yeah. So you know, this guy Akush is just saying that Andrej Karpathy said that the new channel, the news distribution channel for software is agents. Agents will just browse your marketing site. They watch your demo video. Uh, they, they don't watch your demo video, they don't click through to your onboarding flow. They call your cli. So that's your command line interface. Okay. That's like using a terminal. They hit your MCP server, they read your docs programmatically. If none of those surface areas exist, your product is invisible to them. Look at how fast this moves. MCP went from 0 to 97 million monthly SDK. So software development kit downloads in 12 months, 10,000 plus active servers, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, Cloudflare all adopted it. By December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP. Oh, I didn't even know that. To the Linux foundation because the standard had already won. Running an MCP server is now compared to running a web server. That's the new baseline for product discovery. What do you think about this?

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Yeah, I agree.

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You're just too tired right now.

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I am tired, dude. I'm like, not daydreaming, but I kind of am.

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I can tell you don't have anymore. It's okay. I'll carry us through the rest of these 30 minutes, so. Okay, I'll. I'll talk about it more. This is good. Neil can't.

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Neil, I've been up for 27 hours at this point.

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Did you. So you just landed, right?

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No, I landed a while ago, but I'm working both time zones, so it's just.

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That's on you. That's on you. Yeah, see. By the way, we should. I'll take a little quick detour here. So, Neil, did you sign up for the peptide company I was telling you about? Literally, it's called the Peptide Company from our mutual friend Jacob. Yeah. So did he give you the sleep peptides? Pinolon, Efavalin? Are you trying them right now?

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I'm traveling. He seems. No.

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Oh, that's unfortunate. Okay, so anyway, I'll give it. Give this to everyone. Like, we can take a little detour here and then come back to talking about distribution channels. This is not health advice, by the way. But I was taking pinal on, and that's. And I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but that is a peptide. And basically it. It gives me super deep sleep and it leveled up my hrv, which is my. My stress level. So you want this to be higher. So to like 107, which is pretty good. And it brought my heart rate down from 45. Resting heart rate down to 40, which is really good. So all that to say with people. People that are tired, like Neil, who does traveling. There's a lot of travel hacking that you can do, right? And one of my other travel hacks too, is to also not fall asleep until you're in the time zone and then fall asleep in the right time. So that way you don't have jet lag. But Neil never listened to me for that one. He just kind of works both. Both time zones, so that's. That's why he's dead. Right now.

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And you have an app that helps with it. I don't know what it's called, but you.

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It's called Time Shifter. So it tells you the right times to sleep and all that. Sometimes it's pretty brutal. It tells you to fall asleep immediately. When it's like in the middle of the day, I'm like, how do you do that? Right. Sometimes you need special stuff for that. But I'll leave that part alone. Okay, so coming back to this distribution channel piece. Okay, so 85% of enterprises are expected to have AI agents deployed. These agents need structured, programmatic access to your product. Okay. They need CLIs, MCP endpoints and machine readable documentation. A beautiful react dashboard is worthless to an agent trying to pull data into workflow at 3M. So the way I look at this right now is, yes, think about mcps. Yes, think about building for agents. These. Yes. Also, if you want to distribute your repository from a marketing standpoint, put it on GitHub. Right? That's what Corey Haynes did. He did a really good job with that. But at the same time, you still need a dashboard for humans. So the stuff we're building for pay for performance right now, Neil, we do have a dashboard for like the outbound emails we're sending, the outbound sales calls that we're doing. Okay, that's one side of things. But even internally, we need a dashboard to manage all of our agents. You need some type of dashboard, some type of control system to see what they're doing and how they're performing. Right. And I will tell you, these agents are just continue to compound every day. And like, even, by the way, Neil, even when I went to the gym today, I didn't realize I was running 10 different workflows. So while I was at the gym and when I was sitting next to my CTO yesterday, when we were flying back, by the way, we're sitting row 26, economy. Okay, it was great. So he, as he was talking to me, he spun up a couple of different things, but by the time he landed, he's like, dude, I just pushed something to GitHub that would have taken two days to do. And I got it done in the middle of our conversation. So I think one, you know, AI efficiency is crazy. That's one. The second one is build dashboards for your agents. The third one is, yes, you want to be looking at building discoverability. You want to make discoverability easy for agents because you're going to have a world where agents are doing a lot

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of the work you do. But the key here is because, dude, I was just in a heated debate about agents. Like, 24 hours. It was. It's a big company. I was at their offices. I can't mention the company, but they own some of the biggest cars that we all see in Los Angeles and in all places all over the world. So. And they own more than just cars. They really massive company. So when you think about it, we're talking about agents and deploying at mass scale, and they were just like, oh, we want to do agent for this, we want to do agent for that. And they were showing me some of the stuff that they're building and. And their biggest problem wasn't the ideas. It wasn't actually even building the agents. They didn't have checks in place for how the agents were doing their work. I thought it was a smart idea to have a team continually go and build all these agents and get a lot of work done. And this group would help other departments internally create agents, so then that way they could be more efficient. So think of it like as a centralized hub that just helps a lot of different teams in an organization build agents. And I was like, the biggest problem here isn't the building part. If you're not actually checking the quality of the work, it could be costing you a lot of money. I'm like, you guys need to figure out how to put that within your processes and systems, dude.

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That's okay, Neil. I did this like two days ago. Okay. So I've been building my. My openclaw has been sitting in my telegram. So it's really only been working with me as almost like my chief of staff, you know, assistant, if you want to call it that. It has a lot of context around the business, the goals. It's hooked in with a bunch of MCPs. Okay. I added it into Slack two days ago. I added it into some of the private channels that we have. And people are working with it back and forth now. They're asking questions, they're querying data, they're asking for strategies. They're asking it to build things, right? I'm like, holy crap, I've just opened up this machine. And so to Neil's point, I do think you need a human in a loop to kind of fact check and check the data as well. You need a human in a loop to continue to fine tune it. The problem is I was building all these things out of, you know, my own entertainment, but now it's time for me to kind of release some of my babies into the Wild and let my team work with it. Right. I'm still like, I think there's one thing to have a personal assistant, but when you have the personal assistant that knows what you want to hit and your goals and knows how you work and your team is querying data like for example, oh, hey, we created all these programmatic SEO pages around ChatGPT ads a few weeks ago. How's that going right now? Give me a four week table. Boom. Like literally in a couple seconds it's spun out and everyone can see how things are going. Oh, what, what should we do about that? It seems like, what are next steps here? Well, you know, it's not performing over here and you're not driving any conversions here. You should do this. And I'm like, oh, hey, SEO person over here, what do you think about this idea? And it's just happening in real time. Right? And it's amazing. And then I added to the sales channel too. Hey, how have we been doing with, with, look at our gong and look at our HubSpot. How have we been doing in the last 60 days or so? What trends are you seeing? Right? And then if it starts to repeat something, report something wrong. The, the, it's okay because the salespeople jump in. But the key thing, Neil, is that now they're starting to engage with it more and they're having conversations with it and it's moving things along that is the key.

11:35

Yeah, so on a side note, I just got this email. It's one of the best marketing emails I've gotten in a long time. Check this out.

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Look, I'm so boring, guys, that Neil's starting to check his email in the middle of the conversation.

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No, no, no, this is popped up. So I, I, I have a OCD where I always had to have zero inbox. I don't know why. Um, so this is to my dev email. You know, I'm, I get forwarded all my dev stuff when it comes to all the tech emails. So that way I can see what my team is doing without asking them what they're doing. And we use Claude, of course. But look at this subject line. Reduce your cloud API costs. They're trying to send me an email that helps me save money, which would hurt them, but in the long run it would make me more loyal to them and cause me to spend more money over time. I would use it more. So build efficiency with Claude. You're building with Claude now let's optimize your implementation. Here are four ways to reduce costs without sacrificing quality, learn more. And then they just break down a lot of different examples. I was like, that's a great marketing email. It's very rare that a company does what's beneficial for you and hurts them in the short run. And this hurts them. This would make them less money, but in the long run it would make them more money and have a much loyal customer.

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You know what it is too, Neil? The subject line is really good. When it says, reduce your API costs. Any entrepreneur that's looking at it, any finance person is looking at it, it's like, hell yeah, right? Dude, My API cost for Anthropic this month already, it's like $3,500. I'm like, oh, damn. So I need to do something about that to optimize it. But you know what's going to happen in the future, Neil? You might get that email as a human and say, hey. And then there's going to be be a link saying, hey, do you want me to just do it for you? And you just click it and it does it for you. Right. Or the future is going to be. It's just going to be sent to an agent and the agent's going to be like, hey, I spotted this over here. There's a way to save costs by 80% or so. Would you like us to do that? Actually, my agent does that now. It's like, hey, you're spending on all these stupid costs over here. You're right, this model's too expensive. You should use this model over here. I'm like, that's good, right?

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So, yeah, yeah, no, it's great as long as it does it accurately and good. And I think that's a problem that we face right now with AI in which it can make recommendations, it can help you save time, it can help you save money, but in that process, it makes a lot of mistakes from what we see. But I bet if you compare January 1, 2026 to January 1, 2027, the amount of errors will drastically get reduced.

15:18

Yeah. And by the way, the cost per token is going to drastically reduce as well. You know what's kind of crazy to me? It's anthropic or OpenAI. They're kind of raising for the next round, like the next training run. Right. They're spending all the money because here's the thing, it's, it's. They know the price per token is going to drop, but they know they also have to have the best model, like a very competitive model. So they're just raising for the next round. The next round, the next round. Like, I don't know when that's going to stop, but it's exciting to watch from the side. And I actually, Neil, I, I, I've been messaging Apple, they're. I've been trying to do the math on whether it makes sense to buy the Mac Studio Ultras, like the new ones that are coming out I think next week. And so you can buy a fully loaded one for basically ten grand and. Cause I want to run these models locally, right, For a lot of the things. Cause it's, it's, it's going to be a lot cheaper, right, if you do it that way, especially the work that I'm talking about doing now. So I'm like, okay, well if I buy two of these Mac studios running Kimi, which is a Chinese open source model locally, I'm going to save a ton of money. Like, I'm going to be making money like pretty quickly, right? But if I were to buy five of these Mac Studio Ultras, that probably would cost me 50 grand or something like that, like out the gate. And so do I want to buy it? I'm like, well, the chips update every year or two years or so. Like the chips in two years are going to be even crazier, right? And so I'm like, okay, well, instead of paying the 50 grand up front, I can pay basically eight grand to lease five of these. I'm just giving you a simple example. Eight grand to lease five, five of these Mac Studio Ultras for 24 months. So two years. Okay. Are you following? Yeah.

15:46

I didn't know they have leasing programs.

17:11

That's a way better deal.

17:13

You're not going to keep this stuff for five years.

17:14

It's gonna be way better tech in a year, right? And so like I was working with my open claw on like coming out with the math where it's like, yeah, you should just lease these things. Because my, one of our mutual friends yesterday's like, why don't you just buy it? I'm like, because this stuff becomes outdated so quickly and I want the latest technology running my st, especially if it's for our own stuff and also if it's helping clients because clients are going to want stuff local, isolated to one computer.

17:16

So yeah, I think leasing smart, unless it slows you down a lot and then it's just a cost analysis. Because to do leasing, typically you got to fill out financial paperwork and all this kind of stuff.

17:36

It's really easy. It's really easy.

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Oh, okay. If it's really easy and it doesn't slow you down. But like if something was going to slow you down a month or two, it's just like, eh, I'm not saying spend the 50 grand, but maybe you go and you, you buy one of them for ten grand and you lease the rest.

17:48

That's exactly what I'm going to do. So I'm going to buy one for ten grand and then the other ones I'm probably just going to lease. It just depends on how this scales. Like if this one, this initial pilot test goes well, like, we're going to be off into the races. Guys, thank you for joining us and we will see you, we'll see you next time.

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