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#349 · should ai write your cold email icebreakers?

youtube ↗AI & Automation

What are your thoughts on people who complain about AI replacing creative work?

I find it funny that typically the people that were the most progressive-minded, who always default to science with a capital S, are now disproportionately the people yelling at technology for replacing the various creative aspects of their being. Not understanding that all of these industries have already been captured big time by things like recording studios, record labels, musicians. This is a business, right? Now small one-shop creators actually have the ability to completely disrupt that economic model and get back to doing cool shit again for the purposes of doing cool shit, and actually really innovate. It sucks, but really what people are mourning is more so just the loss of a way of life that they spent a big chunk of time preparing for, and I can empathize with that and I don't mean to be a dick about it. When OpenAI came out with GPT-3 in 2020, I went for a really long walk and had tears in my eyes because I was like, 'wow, everything that I've spent all this time preparing for — at the time was writing — is soon going to be automated.' If AI can already write at this level in just a year's worth of advancements from GPT-2 to GPT-3, what's GPT-4 and GPT-5 and GPT-6 going to look like? Well, we have our answers now. What happened to the writing industry, which I spent so long getting into? My whole business model was destroyed, to be clear, and everybody's business model is going to get destroyed. But that's not a bad thing, it's exciting. Because you could be the person that is actually going about creating new business models on the bones of your fallen comrades.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

There was an AI critic on Diary of a CEO recently, Ed Zitron, who talked about the con of AI by its creators and expensive subscriptions. Will you respond to it since we now depend on you as our coach?

Yeah, you're talking about Ed Zitron. He has gained some notoriety recently. This isn't the first time he's talked in a public forum about his beliefs surrounding why AI is tanking. If you really wanted to understand his track record around predictions, just type in 'Ed Zitron prediction track record.' You'll see that virtually every single prediction this guy has made in the last four years about AI has been extremely wrong. I don't mean to say he's a [__] or a dumb person, but you have to understand incentives on the internet. He is rewarded by his audience and financially every time he makes a statement like 'AI is ridiculous, it's the worst,' because obviously there's an audience for that. There's a market need for somebody to channel the anger and frustration people have around AI through him. We just saw this with my Twitter post, for instance—I was the collective scapegoat for tens of millions of people's fury and anger about how AI is taking away their ability to steer the course of their destiny. Anyway, check this out. As I previously warned, 'AI companies are running out of data' back in April 2024—it was a prediction that models can't improve because there's no more data. That was wrong. 'Have we reached peak AI?' in March 2024—he suggested hallucinations mean AI progress is limited. That was wrong. February 2024: 'I believe we're reaching the upper limits of what generative AI can do and how accurate its outputs can be.' Do you know what models we were using back in February 2024? I think the number one most commonly used model back then was like 4.0. 'o1 shows that OpenAI is desperate and out of ideas.' Wrong. This one was particularly egregious: 'OpenAI's forecast of $3.7B revenue and $11.6B in 2025 and $100B in 2029 are absurd. It's a statement so egregious that I'm surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud.' The 2025 goal was heavily exceeded. Anthropic hit like three to four x that now? 'Anthropic making $34.5B revenue in 2027 is laughable on so many levels.' They ended up doing that in 2026. So they greatly exceeded that in 2026. Virtually every one of these suck. It sucks to say, but the guy doesn't really make good predictions on this. I would not take him seriously. A lot of people are going to have a lot of opinions and be very confident in those opinions. You just need to look at the last four years of progress since ChatGPT was released and ask yourself, 'Huh, it's only been four years.' That is like 1/20 of a single human's lifespan. If we've gone from the point where computers couldn't talk to computers now being capable of having full-on conversations with you and then solving Navier-Stokes problems in 1/20 of a human lifespan as of today, how far do you think technology and computers will go in one whole lifespan? The world will be completely unrecognizable.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

What are your thoughts on Nick Bostrom's philosophy and the simulation argument?

Nick Bostrom has to be one of the smartest philosophical minds of this generation — he's actually one of the reasons I got inspired to go into AI in the first place. He wrote 'Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies' back in 2014, which breaks down all the ways developing AI could go terribly wrong and how we might minimize the risk of an extinction-level event — and we're much closer to that scenario now than when he wrote it. This might sound extreme to people who see AI as a very recent development, but there are real, legitimate concerns. We're already at the point where chain-of-thought models like GPT-4 or DeepSeek outperform people on plenty of knowledge tasks, and there's no reason compute and speed can't scale 100x from here, meaning models already doing the work of a call center's worth of people could soon replace billions of dollars of economic productivity. But job displacement isn't even the scariest part — what's concerning is that some models, through reinforcement learning, are being positively rewarded for appearing to have the right answer rather than actually having it, which some researchers see as an early form of deceptive behavior — not a conscious AI plotting escape, just a byproduct of how the training incentives work, and it's part of why a lot of serious people are worried about where this goes.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Where do you see the online agency space in 10‑15 years, and will the traditional Facebook‑ads model or the new automation agency model last?

Most ad agencies I see hardly last a few years because the market is already shifting to performance‑based pricing in many niches. That’s why a lot of people are quick to sell shovels, mentorship and coaching instead of actually running agencies themselves. My take on the future is two‑fold. First, think of the industrial revolution: machines replaced seamstresses, created new roles, and boosted productivity. Likewise, new automation will render today’s agency models obsolete, but it will also open new opportunities for those who can adapt to emerging technologies. No model lasts forever; we’ll need to shift to whatever new tech or business models appear. Second, AI will eventually swallow up most of what agencies do. In the next 10‑15 years AI will be as good as—or better than—humans at design, copy, and many deliverables. If AI can generate art, copy, and strategy, the skill set we rely on today will become commoditized. So rather than tweaking the same thing slightly, we’ll need to find fundamentally different ways to add value, perhaps by focusing on uniquely human insight or by embracing an AI‑driven renaissance where we re‑evaluate our role in creating economic value.

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youtube ↗Agency Operations

Can you tell us more about your origin, the good, the bad, where you are now, and your journey?

It’s great you’re asking about my origin—I’ll tie this into the LLM discussion later. My first truly successful business was called 1 Second Copy, which I started as freelancing right after college because I was broke and wanted to avoid any work that could be shut down by local governments. I leaned on my university writing experience and began offering freelance writing. Around the same time I got into AI, stumbled on GPT‑2 while taking a computer‑science course, and found it could generate usable headlines and short text, which sparked the idea of automating my workflow. When GPT‑3 arrived (early 2020), I back‑doored access through a chatbot that had GPT‑3, started automating Fiverr fulfillment requests at one cent per word, and confirmed I could automate article writing, though the pay was only a few hundred to a thousand dollars. I resisted raising prices because I doubted the quality, but my friend Noah suggested hiring cheap editors from lower‑cost‑of‑living countries to polish the AI output—a scalable idea I initially dismissed because I wasn’t comfortable hiring. Eventually I took his advice, hired a team, trained them to use AI for writing, shifted from pre‑generated pieces to human‑assisted editing, and scaled the operation. We hit roughly $20 k a month, then later $90‑$92 k a month before ChatGPT‑3 launched, which drove down the value of our AI‑assisted writing as clients turned to pure AI. That decline prompted me to start Leftclick with Noah, aiming to move into an industry that grows with AI rather than shrinks. We picked a niche where we could apply the same systems we built at 1 Second Copy to other businesses—not just content writing—and it worked well.

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