AI Is Costing Companies More Than the Employees It Replaced

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So we have roughly the same amount of horsepower we did 50,000 years ago. So this guy wrote this book, Matt Ridley, right? So a British biologist looked at 200,000 years. Okay. So 200,000 years of human history. So for 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. So same skull size, Neil, same neural architecture, same raw capacity of language, planning abstract thought. But for roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. So generation after generation lived and died inside the same stowed age toolkit. Their great, great grandparents had you. So no microwave, right? No wifi, no nothing, no car, right? Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on a chart of human progress started to tick upward, then it bent, then it exploded. The question Ridley spent years on was the only question, was the only question that mattered. So what changed? It was not the brain, Neil. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language would have existed long before it'd take off. It was even before agriculture, which only arrived 10,000 years ago. So what changed Neil was this. And this is how it applies to business overall. Okay. That's going somewhere with this. So what changed was that humans started trading with strangers. And when you start to trade with each other, you start to also trade ideas too. And so the velocity of trading ideas. So two ideas that development isolation came into context. So you and I will make it like an idea, baby, for example, right? So the whole idea here is that you look at 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains, same language, same starting toolkit as your cousin, 150 kilometers north. The natural language experiment was not right. So what ended up happening, Neil, with the people that got isolated, was they went the other way. They actually regressed. They failed to invent new tools. They're kind of just stuck in their ways, right? So how does this affect today? Here's how I think it affects today. Because you look at how quickly you and I can call each other. Okay, we used to call each other on Skype. You know, now you can call each other on a phone. We can text all the time. But when you're on Slack, for example, you move a little faster. But then when you have the whole brain, when you're talking to AI and send to Slack, whatever you're talking, like you're able to do data pulls a lot faster, you're able to trade information a lot faster. So that way, that way, I think we're actually accelerating now, because we're actually trading ideas a lot faster. That's what I think. So I never really thought about our brains actually the same size. And it's actually trading, not just trading, but the trading ideas that a lot does move faster. What about the rock and people just using AI and not learning on their own? The rock? The rock. I thought you were talking about the rock, like the rest of it. No, no. So what it's basically saying here is like, so this is hopefully this answers your question a little bit over here, because I'm reading last part. This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026. Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is the property of the brain and brain is the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers. So here's what I think. I wouldn't say I'm the smartest person in the world, right? I will say that I've cultivated and I would say you've cultivated a good network. We've done it in different ways. And that's how we've gotten it smarter. You and I both know that we know a lot of people who are humble in life, who are maybe they're hungry, sometimes not so much hungry. Like I know what are our mutual friends. Maybe very humble person, not hungry. But I would say that what it comes down to is smart. But smart is actually your relationship will change and your relationship with learning. So the most successful people in any field are almost never to smartest people in it. They're the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are really more authors than their competitors. They're talking to more people for more disciplines. They're in rooms where ideas from different languages bump into each other. And you do it in your different way by talking to people. I do it in my different way. Maybe I'm learning. Maybe I put together networks. But we've always done that. So moral and historias keep networking with others and keep learning, keep networking and keep trading ideas. Because if you don't, you feel like you're dying. Like look at the one. Have you ever sat still? I've known you for 15 years, 16 years. What have you ever sat still? A law. One eight hours every night. Do know what you're awake. You know what I mean, right? Right? Look at the people who you get along with. And also the people that maybe are a little slower and maybe don't achieve their potential. What is it? Do they sit still? They sit still quite a bit during their day. Right. I had someone complain to me the other day. They're just like, man, this is a lot of work. They got a new job. And I was like, what do you mean? This is a lot of work. They're like, man, now I got to work four to five hours. I'm like, they're getting paid for full time. I'm like, you're complaining about working four to five hours a day. I'm like, this is what's wrong. This is why you're not getting where you want to get in line. Dude, speaking of where you want to get in line, why'd you take all your kid stickers off your laptop? Dude, they kept putting more on my laptop. And then it just started becoming a really messy collage. So I'm just starting ripping it off. Well, Neil's very OCD. So you actually kept it on for a very long time. I was impressed. Yes. Yeah. The image I didn't mind. And then they put like a border of stickers around it. Then they started to take like these cloth-based stickers. Like there was a pattern, like a shooting star. But the front side was made out of cloth. So you can like feel it and stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, what are you guys putting on my laptop? Because that kind of stuff is really sticky and it's trying to take off. So then like this is getting out of hand. So I just started ripping it off. Oh, well, they want your attention. That's what it is. But isn't that interesting? We had the same brain. I never thought-- really thought about that. Yeah. I assume the human brain-- I didn't really think much about the human brain for all those years. But I assumed it was very similar as just as society and technology has changed. We've slowly adapted. But that's why I believe we're all going to have an AI sitting inside our slack. That has that single brain or company brain or world brain thing because it allows us to trade information faster. And it allows us to move faster because you don't need to wait on things. By the way, like I found out something that I'm not going to go into too much detail here. But we had-- I've never seen this before where I've heard about people keeping like celebration. So for example, if a client went to NOAA for example and told you, hey, good job NOAA, you would want to share that with the team, right? So I didn't realize this. But we had a situation where someone did it-- they wanted to hear that information first. And they didn't want NOAA to reveal that information first. Isn't that crazy? That would be crazy. But if you learned that faster, you're going to make a move faster, is my point. So anyway, you can pick the next one. Did you see Anthropic? They made an announcement and search in the journal run of writing an article on this. They started to ask the AI industry to hit the brakes. And they ended up writing an interesting take on SEO and what it means for markers. But in essence, they're saying that at this point, AI is moving so fast that it can start learning from itself. We all need to be very careful. And it's moving such a fast pace that humans can't necessarily even keep up. Now what's interesting here is if they start hitting the brakes, you're going to start seeing a slowdown. And the evolution of more things like Google AI mode, AI overviews, which is an effective click rates. When AI overview shows up, I think the last that I saw today and I don't know where it came from was clicks decreased from 15% to 9% when there was AI overviews present. Nonetheless, even though Anthropic is saying, hey, we should all slow down. I don't believe Google. I don't believe Microsoft or OpenAir or anyone else is going to slow down. I think it could just be Anthropic that would be slowing down if that's what they're really pushing for. I think there's two things here, Neil. So you know Anthropic has seven co-founders or something like that. They were originally founded on the idea of AI safety. So they have to continue to fit that narrative. It's like a marketing thing for them, right? Here's the other thing. They say that, but what came out yesterday, Fabel 5, or maybe the day before, which is Anthropics, it's like a watered down version of Mythos, right? And I've been using Fabel 5 and I want to call the genius of Anthropics marketing here. So they give you Fabel 5, which is a latest model for the next 12 days or so free. So they basically want you hooked on that drug and then they'll charge you usage. And so usage means you're going to be on API. They'll probably have a version that's including your subscription. But my entire team is using Fabel right now. Guys, I typed in all caps in the R.A.I. group. I'm like, go to town on this right now. You have 12 days to do it. And I can see all of your usage. I want to see you go to town. I want to see you spend. Is it free for the next 12 days? What are you saying? It's not free, but it's not charged like double. It's usually charged double of Opus. I just want to see what people are able to build because they do say they're going to move it back to usage or kind of take it away. So I want the team to use as much as they can. And the interesting thing is they're using it to solve things that they couldn't have solved before. Where it would get stuck, like pulling specific data from HubSpot, for example. I listened to the CEO of Apollo Auto Networks on the All-in podcast. Did you hear that one? I did not. So they did a liquidity summit, which is like for investors. And he's like, dude, myth is what it solved for them was that it basically solved like some bug, some code issues that they have security issues. That would have taken days that would have taken five to seven years, right? And it's legit stuff. And so I'm seeing the same thing where it's completing. I couldn't get like Opus 48 to complete something around like a dashboard that I was trying to build before for the team And now it's like hey, I'm getting stuck here fit yesterday It one shot at it. So it's extremely powerful and the people at Claude are saying that this is a step up from like December was like when it felt like a step up for me, right now. They're like, oh this is the next step up and it kind of feels like it I'm curious on how many more step-ups they can get before you start seeing Demetition returns. Yes. Yeah, I think we're getting close to it because they say that Amitus level open source one is probably two three months behind. So I do think that's it. Yeah, I think you and I are gonna Most people are gonna be paying for open source for the majority Because a lot of intelligence like if I'm cleaning their toilet kneel like I don't need a lot of brain power behind that right So I can probably go with like an open source model Yeah, you saw the article on Microsoft right 100 they had I believe it's somewhere around a hundred thousand engineers Beginning of the year they had their team focus sometime in January on a new application Around one of the strongest AI models That they were building internally and it took them three months to complete and you know, I happened after the three months What it was useless because it changed so much that they had to start all over again. Yeah Like this stuff is just moving extremely fast and with it moving really fast You saw a spark to row announce a new data on Google zero search click data It's now up to 68% no clicks from a Google search. So only 32% of searches are actually causing clicks Yeah, I saw a version of this I saw it from Rusty brick. I think you might have saw it just from Rand maybe I saw it somewhere on the social web. Yeah So what I've seen here from from Rusty brick is so this is from similar web and I think it's a spark Toro and similar web collaboration So it shows only 27% of clicks from Google go to the open web now it used to be a lot more So you might be referring to this. I'm showing you a chart over here So you can see from 2016 and 2026 Google zero click search growth meaning that the number of clicks that don't land on a website from search. So in 2026 The number of searches was zero clicks was 45% today. It's 68% which is what you're talking about which is crazy. You look at this This is a decade out. It used to be 55% of searches had at least one click now. It's only 32% yeah It keeps my Google is also much more popular so you can still get a lot of traffic But if you're optimizing for traffic and I'm not saying you shouldn't track that metric anymore That's two different things But if you're optimizing solely for traffic you're losing the game because a game now is to be decided answer It's not about ranking. It's about being the cited answer when anyone types in a question Your company your products your services are mentioned. That is the new goal You know, Lily Ray had to sweet related to what you're talking about here So she tweeted this 22 hours ago. I was actually thinking about this today More fan out queries actually makes SEO more important than ever not less And it means more sites get opportunities to be a part of the answer than with traditional 10 blue links So AI search actually expanded SEO and this is a quote retweet on this guy Chris long So he said holy snikes. I don't know what snikes means holy snikes chat Cheapy has dramatically increased the number of fan out queries that they're using so fan out query Just so everyone knows when you're searching something. It'll show the different queries like the long-term queries that they're using I'm now seeing this instances of prompts that trigger 30 plus fan out queries Which means that SEO still matters guys It still matters and you know when people say keywords don't matter anymore Kind of you still have to look at keywords in the questions people are answering or asking But more so you got to optimize for topics But still pay attention to keywords. Yep So by the way, I mean since we're on the topic right now too we should talk about the 7 a.e.o and SEO tactics that work now So how about this we break down the 7 but we don't mention listicles because everyone already knows listicles in which you Right, you know top 10 whatever and then you put your company or your product or service. Okay. Great. Oh, you can go first all right, so Number one Tactics that works really well, you know as you guys already know you need to get your brand mentioned more What I would recommend doing is start looking at backlink reports HF has one I think ma's has one we have one on uber says this called backlink's opportunity report Where you put in your URL you put in your competitor URLs you would want to do this for pages You see who's linking to multiple competitors, but not you You then go and look at those pages that are linking to the competitors Because if someone links a one competitor maybe they like them if they link to three plus competitors They usually don't have a favorite and they're just linking to other players in the space If you can head up those sites and try to get your brand your company your product your services mention on those pages because remember if someone's willing to link they're open to also linking to you or mentioning you We found that's a great tactic to Help just get more brand mentions and that of course helps with SEO Number two, what helps with aeo and SEO today is you want to have robust structured data So it might you might have an FAQ section you might have some QA pages you might have Obviously you can have the FAQs at the bottom But I think even the three bullets at the top that kind of summarized the article Those things I'll make it easier for an answer engine or even a search engine to to pick up But you know that's kind of SEO 101 that's evolved a little bit. Yeah Number three update your content. So look at your top 10 top 10 or top 20 pages Update them frequently have the right call to actions and I'm not only because of traffic But also because those are a lot of the pages that these elements are pulling from and what we found is Almost most of the time they love pulling from pages that are less than 60ish days old number four I remember when uh When we're both around 20 I was I think I was 25 year 26 years old. I shared a post from a black cat forum about how If you write 2500 words, it's gonna do better in search and I think you you posted ended it really blew up. I remember that Um, but anyway point is if you target conversation along tail queries now because we're talking about chat CBD fanning out to 30 plus queries So my take on it is not to add a bunch of fluff But if you can still have something that's super data back super in depth and you can capture more long tail queries You're gonna have more chances to be cited by these answer engines number five. Yeah Number five focus on reviews not on your website on other people's websites because they're pulling from other people's websites More than they're pulling from your own website if you can go to the g2 crowds the captera's the trust pilots uh Amazon if you're selling physical products But the more positive reviews you can get the more you can push people to help and encourage them to leave a honest review And not just a skimpy review, but a really detailed review the more likely you are to show up in these LLMs With the positive sentiment because if you show up with a positive sentiment People are much more likely to take action and buy from you versus someone else Six you want to lead with direct answers. So if you go we're talking Let's say 40 to 60 words or so you go 40 60 words you make it easy because these LLMs tend to like more direct answers I get to the point number seven last but not least go omnichannel a lot of these sites pull from Wikipedia They pull from Reddit they pull from you to they pull from Kora If you're not omnichannel you're missing out on a lot of love The first thing I would check out is which platforms the ones you're trying to optimize for Which ones did they have data deals with go look at the data deals start focusing on those platforms first Because they usually pull from the ones they have data deals around and that should help you Get mentioned more and drive more traffic and sales. Yep speaking of of agency today. So Neil. I don't know if you know this but um do Do you know what percent of McKinsey's fees now are outcome-based? I'm gonna take a guess and say 15% 25% oh wow as of November 2025 yeah, so It's interesting because I was sitting on the couch. I was watching uh um before I was good about to watch the spurs next game but I was uh I was watching Patrick fat David talking about how consultancies have changed right where they used to charge you five million bucks And now like the work maybe it's like ten thousand dollars or so So like a lot of people are are Customers past customers were current customers of McKinsey are applying pricing pressure Just saying hey, you know like I know you need to charge us But like this work doesn't take that long anymore right and so then he's like 25% of McKinsey's fees are outcome-based I was like that doesn't seem right to me. I googled it looked it up as of November 2025 Someone from McKinsey. I think I said that and that's interesting to me because Agents these consultants these are so used to charging on typically time materials and hours, right? So I don't think you're seeing that right now. I'm not seeing that either, but I can see it on the rise like what are you seeing? Yeah, but what do they consider we we have a good chunk that is Or maybe a small chunk it's definitely not the majority but it's enough where we notice that is out percent to percent I don't know the percentage but when I say outcome-based A lot of the outcome-based deals and I'm curious how McKinsey structures it I'm assuming they're covering their base cost And then they're having money on top based on the results because it would be too tricky to do something where it's purely outcome-based And if the client doesn't take any action or do anything with the information that you provided and your hands are tied Well, then what you don't get paid So I'm assuming what they're saying is outcome-based maybe I'm wrong on this. I don't have any data on what McKinsey's doing there's two components Cash guaranteed and then cash that's outcome. Let me tell you Let me tell you what my oh, yeah, I overview says okay, so McKinsey I shifted a quarter of its global client fees away from hourly billing to outcome-based pricing heavily accelerated by their use of gender and AI platform Such as lily and quantum black everyone has their own platform instead of selling bill about our fees are tied to directly to document a business objective such as cost reduction margins, revenue growth, or AI tool implementations. Now to Neal's point, the structure is a retainer plus performance multiplier, right? So yes, it's too risky to just say it's all performance. It sounds good. So McKinsey's typical, it's a hybrid approach. So the base fee is a client pays a reduced base fee, 50 to 70% of standard consulting rates to cover the core costs of digital and human teams. Now finally, the second part is the success pool. The remaining fee is variable and directly tied to measurable key performance indicators, KPIs like customer churn reduction or incremental revenue. I'm going to give an example to you on we can talk about this. So let's say that the setup is McKinsey is doing an outcome based contract as supply chain and procurement. And so they can scale fees to save dollars, right? So if they deploy Quantum Black, which is their AI agent tool to analyze historical supplier spending, renegotiate terms and optimize purchasing, the metric is total hard dollar cost reduction achieved for over a 12 to 24 month period. So let's say Neil, the reduced base fee is $1 million, a performance bonus of 15% of the first 50 million dollars in identified savings and then performance bonus of 10% on any savings generated exceeding 50 million dollars. So the engagement yields $80 million. McKinsey's total billing would be $8.5 million. So base fee plus $7.5 million success fee, which I think is good for both sides. So they make more money. They do make more. Yeah, what I do like is they make more money, but it is tied a little more to, hey, you have to perform. Yes. Yeah. That is a very hard pill to swallow. What I found is if you perform and you do something performance based, the moment it's performing and people paying you a lot more, yeah, they don't want to pay and they want to switch and they want to renegotiate. Like I've seen it happen almost every single time. You know what the thing is? I would say Neil, like when you look at obviously when you look at, like let's say, you know, affiliate markers doing this and they're doing it for maybe smaller businesses. The smaller businesses will stiff them, right? More often than like a big company. Now that's not saying the big companies won't, but big companies generally are, hey, like they have their finance department, their heavily legal department, they're generally going to be a little more compliant and not try to do that to you. And when you center field as an example, right, they do their performance based marketing, they work with all telecom companies. And I'm sure they've been stiff before, but probably just not as much. So yes, yeah. So I think this is good. I think people should try it. And that's like when we sell the single brain stuff right now, they're all pilots. But the way we see it is like whatever the outcome they're trying to achieve after the first 45 to 60 days is like, hey, we actually know their business really well. We'll say, hey, like what are you trying to get more leads? How much is a lead worth? Oh, how many more do you want? Okay. We know how much that's worth to you now. So then maybe we can charge something that's tied to that in addition to our base fee. Yep. Yep. Let's cover the topic here on seven AI marketing trends for 2026. All right. So I can go, I'll go first on this one. So I believe that we are going to be spending more on hiring great AI-pilled marketers. I was interviewing a guy who's super super AI-pilled today. I was like, you know what? I'm going to be honest with you. A year ago, I thought I'd have to fire more people that weren't technical. And I'm like, no, but I'm like, I'm talking to you right now. I'm really enjoying this conversation. We're going to have to hire a lot more people like you just because there isn't enough talent to go around to pilot all these things and to manage all these things. Dude, I totally agree. I actually think hiring is going to boom. I don't see it going backwards, but you know, I could be wrong. What do I know compared to a lot of other people out there? But I believe we're going to start seeing a boom in hiring. Another marketing trend that I believe is going to happen in 2026. Right now, if you look at what marketers are doing, they've shifted from optimizing for traditional platforms to optimizing for LLM's. And they're talking about agents, but no one's really optimizing for agents yet. Cloudflare had a step that was interesting. I don't know if you ended up seeing it. I have it on the sheet as well. 57% of web hits are now bots. We went over this week's ago, but it was 51%. Oh, it's gone up 6% more. Yeah, 6% more just in a lot of time. It's growing at a very rapid rate. You're not talking about that's more than 10%. Yeah. And you're talking about billions and billions and billions of visits on a daily basis, right? So that growth is at such a rapid rate. Companies aren't focusing on optimizing for agents yet. And when most companies think of agents, they think of it agent as, oh, if I'm looking for red shoes, agent just goes out there and buys it for me. They're not thinking of agents like, oh, if, uh, and Google had an example of this. You did the red dress thing. Yeah, the red dress. If, if I have this red dress and I like this red dress, and I'm looking for the same dress, but in this blue sweatshirt color that I'm wearing right now, and you can upload both pictures and you say, Google, I'm going to a wedding. I like this red dress. I want it in this blue color. My budget's under $300. Find me the options. And that's an agent going out there, finding everything for you and figuring out what works and sending it, sending it to you so then you can pick and choose which ones. So when I look at agents, it's not just about, hey, help me find these red shoes. It's everything from them helping you be in essence, your assistant, right? Helping you find the right agency to hire or the right service or product for you. And then you are the one who uses your taste to decide what one you want or don't like or maybe you don't do any transaction at all, but you have to optimize for these agents because if you're not, they're not going to be showcasing you to prospective customers. Yeah. Number three, I'm actually trying to pull the artifact up for you. But yesterday when I was on the couch, I basically had Fable 5 design a new site for me based on the current single brain and single brain website. And I took a prompt from another site and it spit out something really good. It's like, we're talking about a site that you would typically pay like 50 grand to 100 grand for. I'm not saying that was at that level, but it's there pretty quickly. You can get there. And so I think we're going to see, we're talking about hiring even more. I think you're going to see even more proliferation of crap on internet, but I think you're going to see even more proliferation of really good stuff from a creative standpoint, from a landing page standpoint. But things are just going to be a lot faster because even when we tried to launch these these landing pages for like single brain with with chat GPT ads, we would have had to wait forever. I think it's just going to now we're talking about maybe it would just take you like an hour or two instead of having the even weight days now. So now like a year ago is like, okay, you might have to wait a week or two or even a month or two, right? And then now it's like, okay, maybe it's like a day, but now it's like no, the day is too long. Now it's like an hour or two. So what do you have to do just combine your single brain and single brain website into one? No, I found a site that gives you props for really nice sites. And then I said, Hey, I use Fable 5 and I said redesign, redesign the single brain site and then ask me some clarifying questions. Do you want to keep this? Do you want to do this? And then I saw it was like, damn, it was pretty good. That's cool. Anyway, all that to say is I think these model and by the way, tied to I'll give you a little bonus of that. Whether you're paying for Fable 5, I think in two, three months or so, you're going to be using an open source version of this. So yeah, you're going to have something really good. Go ahead. Yeah, what are we on number four? Four. Number four, everyone's trying to drive traffic from AI platforms. Very few people are focusing on integrations. You know, I know Shopify has an integration. I believe Stripe has an integration where people can start doing commerce on these platforms. It hasn't boomed yet. But the key word here is yet that can change over time. We have at MCPs, you know, like for Uber suggests that we ended up plugging in something that way when people are using a lens, they can get the data and access to it directly, which makes life easier for them. And the big thing here, and this is my number four, is instead of just focusing on driving traffic from these LLMs or using it to help you build a product or design and all those things are great. Why not integrate directly into them? So then that way when people are using them, they can also plug you in like your data or the shopping experience or whatever it may be. So that way you have more ways to generate revenue. Just like Instagram, people on Instagram like buying on Instagram and not having to go to the website similar to Amazon by integrating within these LLMs, think of like a marketplace. It just makes it easier for you to generate revenue from them and they all have a ton of traffic. So this is this is just like a prototype, right? This is me sitting on the couch doing it and you can see the scrolling that's happening right now, built for buyers to find you now, all the stuff. Like I don't have a lot of these elements and then obviously if I hand this off to developer or design and I spend a little more time on it, it's going to be a lot better, right? And so all that to say is like you can do anything you want now. So my number five is so obviously if we're talking about creating MCPs or APIs for agents to find your stuff and use your stuff in a headless way, they're also going to need a lot more documentation. You see the technical documentation business, mid-lify, they just raise at like a $500 million valuation, right? Another $50 million. And a lot of there, there are a lot of people use their stuff and even for click flow, like we've we're creating our own documentation for it. But I just see that if we're talking about the LLMs, like you're talking about chat GPT O, the query, the, the when you search something that it's like 30 plus query fan out. So you're going to need more content, more quality content and more useful content still. And I think we're still going to see a proliferation of stuff. I think the old ways of just gaming stuff is still going to continue to be nerfed. But you're going to see more technical content, more documentation being created because there's a proliferation. If you're creating more tools and more products, you're going to need more documentation. Number six, I see a huge trend in 2026 in which people are going to slowly stop using AI to market to AI. So I think that's a huge, huge trend. So I think that's a huge trend in 2026. is right underneath the video where they let you know that it's AI related and through topic release the I believe is a LinkedIn post or article breaking down how we need to be careful we should put the pause you know everyone's worried about AI learning from AI in a really negative way that can create safety issues or any other concerns or get people in accurate information. And what we're seeing right now is people doing a lot of guest posts around the web using listicles and listing their company as the best agency or accounting firm or you know baby wipes or whatever it may be that you're selling and they're using AI content to create those articles and then publish it everywhere and no matter how you're trying to market and get into these L alums I think the big thing that's going to really hurt you is using AI content to win inside these alums because eventually not only will they be able to detect it there's been some LinkedIn's read talking about how they're already putting in markers and they should be able to detect it it's more so I think they're doing a discounted and it's going to do terrible. Lully Ray on X has even had posts for more things SEO related when it comes to experimentation with AI content and she broke down how people had a big upswing traffic and then a big decline after some cases the decline was greater than where the company was from a baseline perspective so people are actually going backwards and regressing. Yep one of the biggest isn't this this is number seven but I think one of the biggest AI marketing trends for 2026 is going to be the use of HTML and what do I mean by that exactly meaning that this conversation that we're having right now we can make it into an artifact now do I want to say to MD file that you want to read the whole thing like its documentation no you would make a skill that you can then make into an artifact so we have a cornerstone content HTML file and I'll make into it like a slide deck of maybe four or five slides or so I can then send that to anybody I can use that for making a YouTube video I can send that to my team for example and I found that whenever I make these artifacts now because I'm I'm living with myself all the time and I'm coming up with all these ideas it's hard to keep people aligned unless I'm showing them these artifacts so now what I do in my Friday videos to my entire team is I make a video and I go through to artifacts and I explain these things but I also double over and I make it for YouTube and I we can double over and make it for content but that allows you to just we talk about speed of communication speed of ideas again right if you're not doing these things I think it's going to slow you down so I think I know I got to give a hat tip to one of the engineers at Claud he's like yeah screw MD files it's all about HTML files I was like yeah it is all about HTML files now so yeah it's been good so the next topic I actually want to cover and it's more so me asking Eric the question because he tests more tools in marketing than anyone else I know what would you say would be the five latest AI tools that you have tested for marketing and give us feedback on all five start with the your least favorite at number five and your favorite at number one I can't think of my least favorite because if I'm using it or in any order you want I'm using it I'm assuming it's it's useful okay here I'll tell you what so here so I've been talking a lot about Hermes and OpenClaw right what I've learned from both of these is this they're beautiful very useful if you use it in the right way but if you overload it it becomes useless and it degrades very quickly right and so I use I would still say I love Hermes I love OpenClaw and I use them a lot right because when you combine Hermes OpenClaw with your codex and your cloud code and they build with each other you're able to make babies with it right like product babies with it so let's give some real examples let's talk about I'll give you an example a successful example and an overloaded example when you say you're overloading it you're putting in too much you're asking it to do too much and then you're not getting where you're looking so here's one example so we had my so my team actually made a design a creative agent called Picasso that will spin up creatives at scale okay add creatives add creatives yeah okay and like a lot of people can do that but ours is focused on hey what's actually performing what are your brand guidelines and also what are your competitors doing and we have a designer in the loop and I was like huh I want your GitHub repo I told the thing I was like give me the GitHub repo I'm gonna fork it so forking it means I can take it for myself right so I took it for myself I dumped it into codex which is open AIs and I said hey I want you to basically make this into where I can send Neil cold emails or Noah cold emails and say hey Salesforce we made some ads for you over here that are on brand here's three would you like more right and so that I built with codex and then it told me to finish off the build using Hermes and so that was the situation where that's something that we already have like a cold outbound infrastructure it added it into the infrastructure which is instantly and is able to send okay like that's one example of it where it fails where all this stuff fails open claw and Hermes fail because if you add too much to its disc or too much to its memory it starts to I can't find it anymore Neil I don't know I don't have that capability oh but you do it's like oh I appreciate the confidence I don't have it anymore so you start to go back and forth with it it starts to become really unreliable so I will say it's a love hate relationship with Hermes and open claw right now codex and claw code have been amazing in that respect I will say what's over hyped I think is a Higgs field right the reason why I say Higgs field is over hyped not because of the product sucks is because you run out of credits too quickly and so it basically makes it useless if you can't really use it that much yeah yeah and one quick thing when you're talking about what is it called forking what Eric's doing here is he's creating his own version and modifying and then making any changes that he wants so that's why you would go get the code so that way you can just do whatever you want to go create your own version or expand upon it yeah and I'll kind of close it off with this so obviously okay best AI tools love hate with open claw with Hermes I do love codex and claw code I think you need to pay for the $20 I'm sorry $200 a month version because here's the reason Neil I bet you don't know these numbers so for $200 a month using the open AI 20X pro version how much usage do you think you're actually getting from it in value don't you yeah I already know the answer because I saw it on your sheet okay so it's $14,000 right but if you're paying assuming you use it yes yeah okay and if you're using Claude how much value do you think you're getting the Claude max $200 a month how much do you think you're getting maybe 30 40,000 no 8000 and here's the thing remember there's that time period where I spent 12 grand in that month right so I I've always felt open and I was very generous I'm like well I can just keep going on this right and it did feel like I was spending 12 to $14,000 but Claude you can tell it eats it up pretty quickly so what I would just say is maybe by both if you if you have the means to do it what's surprising for both 200 for both you have $20 version you're free you have $20 version and then 200 so they both have 200 I thought it was a hundred they do have a hundred version but there's also 200 version for Claude there's a hundred version but if you want 20x more usage or something like that yeah yeah you get 5x or 20x but open AI is 200 or 100 is 200 is 200 is 200 is 200 is 200 no you're paying you're definitely paying either 20 or 200 I'm pretty I'm not paying 20 yeah yeah it's you're paying 200 so I think those stick out oh I do like I do love the a Treffs MCP that's been great I do love the Riverside MCP as well the B hive has an MCP Riverside has an MCP what is the Riverside MCP for so Riverside actually has the ability to look at your like let's say we're recording this I can say hey find the best moments to clip so you can use the their magic clipper in there you can pull the files that you need you can pull transcripts from it so I can just work in there and then I like the B hive one because you can just have it draft emails or you can have it it's going to be able to I said I message the B hive growth guide the other day as I Hey man your MCP needs to give me the ability so if whenever we're doing a webinar that we can make a special lead that and spin up a page immediately and he's like that's coming I was like you know what I mean because you're doing webinars all you're doing different topics right but if you have a special resource for each one that's great and then you can tie it into your socials too so those are just a couple examples I would say using kind of the main models the main autonomous agents and then using MCPs from tools like this because I love a Treffs too because their brand radar is really good as well yeah yeah so and when it comes to marketing one interesting thing that I've noticed is every time Claude specifically Claude and or anthropic not Claude specifically an Anthropic announces a new model it calls a whole SaaS industry to tank I'm talking about all the publicly traded stocks and well I've noticed this is just my two cents from everyone who I've talked to that really spends money with them what kind of company do you think they are a SaaS company SaaS or tech company that has tons of engineers so it's just like they could put out a notice saying that hey hey guys we don't actually think we're going to end up disrupting all these companies like you the analysts actually think then video CEO has stated that a few times and every time he states it the stocks go up and then eventually they go back down but anthropic from a marketing standpoint I really haven't seen them really push out any narrative because the customers paying them are the ones a lot of them are getting hurt and if those companies went away anthropic would hurt because they spend so much money on coding right software companies they need to have tons of engineers that's the primary use case literally the primary use case for paying a lot of these corporations like anthropic but if they said that I believe that would also hurt their valuation so they don't say it would I would also say one thing too if you're Google right now I would just try to squeeze them one costs squeeze them one pricing because it squeezes the entire it squeezes open I and it squeezes and traffic you know what I mean but you are yeah but more Yes, you saw the announcement. It was open AI and maybe one other player they were talking today about potentially reducing pricing even more. That's gonna squeeze them all. Did you also see the winners from Anthropics IPO? No. From Anthropic IPO. There's a really cool chart. Are you in on any of these with these funds that you're in? No comment. So Anthropic no. So if I if you look at the Anthropic winners, where is the chart? Anthropic winners, which companies will make the most. Let's see. Three plus make. Okay, Amazon holds a 21% stake. Yeah, and Amazon owns a 21% stake. Google owns a 15% stake that can deliver hundreds of billions in value for both Amazon and Google Microsoft backed open AI sales first turned a 50 million dollars in 2023 into a $5 billion and then the Anthropics stake ahead of the IPO. But a lot of these old school companies are the real winners from this. How the heck do you fund all the stuff with all these billions and billions in expenditure? You need the big players to fund it all. So even if they have competition, they're making money from the competition because they own the largest chunk of the competition. Like look at how much the Anthropic founders actually own of the company. Have you seen their percentage ownership? No, Anthropic founders ownership percentage. It's tiny, not in dollar amount, but percentage each of the seven founders of an tropic individually owns less than 1% of the company's total equity. Yeah, Google owns 15% now, Amazon owns over 20. How much would Sam Altman have had? I think he had a good chunk, right? I bet you he's done. Sam Altman, Sam Bigman, freed. Yeah, a large chunk, I believe he owned like 10% of the back then, man, they say he was the one of the best investors because he did that and he did cursor. And there was a few. He did a lot of good ones. You know Robin Hood, yeah, he owned 9% I think when they were worth like $10 billion, now Robin and blew up. They went down from their peak, but there's still 83 billion dollar company, but they were worth more than that. Call it, you know, less than a year ago, this stock was at 140 now. It's at 90. I showed you Marvel. It jumped. It fell down to 245 yesterday. It's up to 280 again. Do these things jump? Have you been trading? No, I don't. I'm not a trader. Do you have the only thing I'm going to trade? Neo is I'm going to bet on the spurs to win it all. Do you see the game where they come up? I need something and I'm going to run by 29. So I think they're still going to win. So we'll see what happens. I think the spurs are going to win. I think they're still going to win. I'm going to put some money on that just for fun, right? Because if you put a dollar in, you get $3.50 back in profit if they win the next three games. So what are you going to bet on that? I'm not going to bet a lot. I'm a bit like, I don't know, 45 grand. No, okay. Yeah. So we'll see. I just to risk you bet from it. I think the next thing I'm going to put a grand. I don't want to lose a grand. What do you mean? You can get three you can get 3,500 in profit. I believe the spurs are going to lose. No, they're good to win. Dude, the two games that they lost and we can move on from this, but the two games that they lost they lost by one and they're both bone headed bone headed mistakes that they made. So I still believe they're going to lose. They are very likely going to lose. But I still think they can win. Okay, if the next win you buy us lunch the next time we all eat out. And if the spurs win all by you guys. No, no, no, if the spurs win the series, I'll buy you guys air one. I still have a bunch of those jars. So, so you know, I was talking to our mutual friend yesterday. You need and we're like, oh, he's they're going to win because at that time he's like, oh, the game's over. He went to go play tennis. Right. And then he came back. They lost and he's like. Now's the time to bet. So I'm like, yep, you're right. I'll do it. But yeah, I probably won't even put in that much. I'll put in like a grand. Okay. Put in a hundred dollars. No, a grand. You're making more exciting. You. There's only you get me started on you. Okay. I don't bet. You did before. All right. So not really gambling though. You used that. That was gambling. Are you talking about stocks? You're talking about the casino. No sports. No, I made a killing. But you're that's still gambling. Someone, Jay Fenn is buddy had this whole math, a math or formula on sports betting years of track record. Uh-huh. I didn't even know half the teams. I just followed the bets. Yeah. And I was making money on it. It was a great return. Yeah. But that's still gambling. It's still gambling. But I call that a calculated decision. Isn't that just business? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I want to go into these costs real quick too. So just I um. So I we kind of briefly touch upon this. But Neil here, let's just do this. The real cost of a chat GPT pro and cloud max subscription is this. Okay. So if you're paying $200 a month for chat GPT. I just want to show the chart over here. So it's $14,000. Okay. $14,000 in what in value. So I'll go over that in a second. And then if you pay for cloud max, which is $200 a month, you get $8,000 in value. So here's what I mean by that. And I spent that 12 grand on cloud API cost, right? Like over here, let's say, um, I felt like I was getting this much in value because when I'm using chat GPT, it feels like I can just keep going. I feel like I'm cheating. I'm like, oh, this is too good. I'm like, why can I just keep going on it? Right. And it does feel like I can, I can kind of go to distance on this $14,000. And I do actually run out every week. Okay. Now when I'm on cloud max and I'm just using the subscription. I run out so fast. And it's this is about like a little more than half right here. What do you run out doing? Oh, stuff. Like I have my agent doing a lot of my agents, like I'm having to do research. So for example, today I was doing a podcast interview, right? This one doesn't take a lot of focus. But I'm like, what does this guy talk about do the research over here? Oh, find me candidates over here too. So it's sourcing candidates to, um, yeah. So it's sourcing candidates and it comes up with good angles to reach out them at person. But everyone's like, oh my god, thank you so much, Eric, for doing research on me. I would love to have the conversation, right? And it's like, how did you find me, Eric? I was like, I never found you, right? And you don't want to just use their versions like the cloud coerks and all that kind of stuff that just help you with everything that is using cloud core, but cloud core takes from my cloud max, um, the $200 month. Also, it's pulling from there. Yeah. That one's pulling from there. That cloud core one. I thought cloud core like my team uses cloud core a lot. Yeah. I thought it just takes from the API. No. No. So it takes it from their $200. Yeah. And just so you know, like the way I have it set up for my team is sure they have their subscription, but then there's overages and you can start to see who's using an overages to, um, but my point of saying this is that, okay, semi analysis, which they do a lot of research here. Like if you're paying for cloud pro for $20 month, it's worth $400 a month. Uh, chat, 2bd plus $20, you get 700. So chat, CBT is actually far more generous with their subsidies. And this is not going to last forever. So I think if you're trying to go hard on it right now, I think they're going to go more hard on more subsidies. Yes. The reason I say that is once they go public and their shares are liquid and people start selling. They want you to they want you to come. Not just that. Let's say if I'm Google and I make a hundred billion dollars from one of these companies that I spent 10, I'm like, oh, we got 90 in profit. Let's just use the 90 billion dollars and just make our stuff even cheaper and cut them down. And cut them down even more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just think it's interesting. So semi analysis like they do really deep, uh, really deep research here. So that brings me to the next point over here. So if you look at what the founder of ramp said. So he said this, right? So, you know, check this out. Basically, basic AI tasks are 700 times cheaper. Whereas frontier AI tasks are 300 times more expensive. So this is Eric Gliman from the CEO of ramp. So when you look at this right here, right, you look at the routing opportunity. So talking about token routing over here. So when you see, uh, frontier intelligence, bitter models, more reasoning like the, the, like, fable five right now, it's 300 times more expensive per task, right? So if you're using chat, but you four level intelligence, again, if I'm like cleaning or toilet or whatever, I don't need the best intelligence, right? So, uh, you get lower intelligence, same task, smarter routing. It's 700 times more cheaper per task. So you need to have good token routing and I'm in some of these CEO chats right now, or that, like some of these people work at a large like enterprise companies and they're like, yeah, like this is a major point of contention right now. Uh huh. And you see this, like people come to us saying, Hey, how can you help us with token optimization? Now, I'm sure you're seeing some of that too. In one of our software divisions, we are, uh, on track to missing profitability numbers. And you want to guess why? Too much on tokens. Yeah, too much on tokens. How much on tokens? Couple million. Uh, that's overage. Yeah. No, the overage is, if I recall, it's close to 500 grand, but that's after deducting, uh, efficiencies in hiring less. So if we remove, uh, some of the expenses we had, we didn't spend as much on marketing. We didn't spend as much on hiring. Uh, some people got terminated, some people churned. If you include that plus a spending more on tokens, right? And we spent substantial more on tokens, the deltone where we're off, even hitting revenue numbers is getting close to around $500,000. So that means we spent over 500 grand more than what we budgeted on tokens because I'm including the savings from the employees, marketing and all of that. Uh huh. So the tokens ate that up. That's expenditure as well as significantly more, yeah. Significantly more. Yeah. So anyway, which is, is becoming a big problem in a lot of companies. And it's like, no, dude, give me something. That's 90% there. That's like one tenth of cost. I'm okay if it takes a little bit longer. And so someone on your team, I'm sure, is already figuring out, you know, buying local infrastructure and then the open. and all that stuff. So I started seeing bills for computers with heavy RAM and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, are you buying the Dell ones? I like everything comes back. I'm like, man, I haven't bought an M video thing for a long time. We're a Dell thing, but those things, those companies are back like the Dell ones like huge now. They have a ton of memory. You see their stock, their stock boom. Yeah. Cause the server division, and we're dumb. I saw it coming like all these things. I saw that list of stocks. I sent you. I was looking at them for months. Yes. And Dell from that perspective is more, I would call corporate friendly from a computer and server standpoint than Apple. Cause everyone's talking about Apple and oh, they're all sold out of high RAM computers. Yeah. It's easier to just go to Dell to get those. Dude, Apple jipped me. I bought a new monitor and then the cameras all broken now. And now like I'm I'm past the return period. So I don't even know what to do. So you didn't notice right when you got it. I didn't turn that camera on for weeks. Yeah. So anyway, I want to talk about something. So I want to talk about the difference between selling AI services right now versus marketing services. Cause I'll jump in on the marketing services calls. And I'll also jump in on the AI services one. Cause we're like, we're pushing the single brain stuff forward and all these pilots. So what I've noticed, Neil, on these AI services calls is it's collaboration. It's like when you talk about building this brain, you talk about building these AI things for the clients are like, it's always like, what else can you do? Can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? Now, when I look at the agency side, it's like, oh, it's much more of like you're we're talking it. We know how your business want to work. There's a bunch of different agencies we're talking to. You're like a vendor, right? And when you move into kind of the client relationship, it's like, what have you done for me recently? Right? And then with agency, I hate to say this and you can disagree with me here. But the problem is people have to kind of get on all these calls with agencies all the time because they feel like they might have to push the agency. And I'm saying from most agencies, maybe not for yours, right? And so you're a little bit of like, you know, they have to they want they've not that they want to get on calls with you, but they they they feel like that that might need to happen sometimes, right? Yeah. And I'm not saying that that is for for most cases, but that does happen, right? No. Again, when we do these pilots on the AI services side, once we show them the light, it's like, oh, well, can you do like five more things over here? Every single week, it's can you do more? Can you do more? Can you do more? And I'm like, well, if that keeps happening, then might as well just focus on hiring more engineers and just more AI people. Because on one side, things are moving so quickly in the markets pulling. And on the other side, the market's still definitely pulling, but it's not as engaged as the other. And one more thing, I'll say about marketing services. We do have legacy clients where they don't want you to use AI, right? Because they don't understand it too, right? They don't want you to use AI. They want to get on calls with you all the time. And that maybe because they're more old school, the new clients that are buying AI services, they don't want the calls all the time. They only want to talk about collaboration. And they only want to talk about new ideas and they're down to test a lot more. So it's just interesting to kind of see both right now because I'm like jumping in, you know, between the two. So well, I think with more of your single brain division or company, because it's something new, not just for you, but a new concept for companies, they're much more collaborative because they, they've never done it before. And they're curious on your thoughts and then they're giving you their feedback. But on the agency end, most of the companies you deal with have hired agencies and worked with them in the past for many, many, many years, some even well over 10 plus years. They're and you know what they want what they're looking for and they're just very direct. You know, it's funny. I've gotten on some of these calls with some of these, I was going to call with like a founder this week. And he had founded two companies that work with single brain right now. So I just happened to get on that call because I thought he had a really interesting product because you know, I have an allergy to mosquitoes, right? So he found in a new mosquito product that's super like so I want to get on and call to learn more about the product, right? And he's like, you know what Eric? I really hate agencies, right? I really, and then he had two people standing behind him like we hate agencies too. I'm like, oh, interesting. Why? Because of the reasons we talked about, right? Like because they've had so many jaded experiences with agencies. So anyway, let me move back to one thing. Neil, you'll like this because we're talking about token authorization. So this, what I'm about to reveal to you might save you money. So let's go back to the mosquito thing. What was the solution? Was it another heat pen? It's no, no, the heating pen's actually not good for you. So you see us, right? Yeah. So I use these. So I have this thing called skater syndrome after the pandemic. So after I got the, you know, the little shot, so that I get bitten and then it's like giant, pus filled dragon ball would happen on whatever I had the bite. And so our mutual friend Yineve was like, oh, you should use the heat pen, right? Nothing. He's wrong. I was like, oh, yeah, okay, make sense. But what you want to do when you get the bite is actually you want to put ice on it. And then you want to take like a, like a Benadro or something. And then you put some cortisol on it and then it doesn't happen anymore. So that's how you get rid of skater syndrome. His product is called shoe bug, which is like it's shoe bug, right? And it's like organic, I think. And it doesn't smell. It's like all natural compounds. I said, this is good. So you can check it out if you want. You don't have a mosquito problem. They tend to like me more. So let me show you how you can save money on token costs. So this is cognition. Okay. Cognition Devon. You heard of Devon. They bought windsurf. Yeah. Okay. So this is a little bar of here adaptive automatically balances quality and cost of your token outputs. Right? So they have all this stuff over here. This is what one of the models that you can select. And I believe a lot of people are going to have this adaptive thing where you can choose between the big ones and the small ones. I know, sure you think the output. So I think they came with a couple of innovating things here. So what this guy said, he works at cognition. He said token maxing is dead. Everyone realized that token usage is a horrible way to measure productivity. So where do we go from here? So here are some ways they're addressing this at condition. Neil, and this will save you money. Watch number one, adaptive routing and intelligent model router to automatically select the best AI model for each task. Other products are starting to adapt this. Um, four, you're like four. They have a AI productivity guarantee. If Devon AI delivers less engineering value than you're paying for, cognition will fund your usage until it does up to $10 million for enterprise customers. Okay. You might like that. Now, number three, advanced automations, wiring agent sessions to the events that already cost teams, engineering hours, production incidents and page duty, failing deploys alerts on a revenue clinical service, each triggers maps to work that used to page a human. So the value isn't theoretical. Spend attribution as well. So Neil, you would like all these spend attribution adaptive routing AI productivity guarantee. You guys check out cognition. Yeah. We could be using it already. I don't know what we're using or not using, but you that you're not, I'll bet you the spurs bet that you're not that we're not using cognition. I don't think you're using cognition. You're going to find out right now. Yeah, let's find out. But don't bet me. I can imagine just as the team. You should ask me. But don't bet me. Where is it? Do they have so many threads on WhatsApp? Let's type in. Overs. Yes. So as Neil's pulling it up right now, I am going to pull up this concept of the forward deployed marketer. So jump at any point, Neil. Yeah. You, you, okay. So I think we'll take a while because I just asked them in WhatsApp. I don't, it says two people are online, but I don't know if it's the right two people that are on my, that's okay. We'll find out. So I think Neil, this concept of the forward deployed marketer is going to be the most valuable hire in marketing right now. So, and almost nobody staffing for it. Right. So I think your company and my company, we're going to need to hire smart marketing strategists. Okay. That know how to upgrade this gap folding for these agents. And if you don't, if you're not an AI-pilled marketer right now, you can't do that. You wouldn't know what to do. Right. Just because you come with a lot of experience. And so the forward deployed marketer owns the client outcome and then the agents will do the labor underneath. And it's interesting because a lot of the AI build, I talked to a guy today, I'm like, how much do you spend a month on AI your own money? I'm like, don't talk about what the company pays. He's like 1500 a month. I was like, fantastic, right. That's 18 grand of his own money a year. I love that. Right. And he's like, look, I didn't want to talk to you initially because my friend told me this is an agency. I was like, well, then I showed him everything we're building. He's like, I'm interested now. Right. And so if you want to get these people, you have to show them the way of the future is not what you're going to do this agency thing. You have to show them the model is you're going to be building and strategizing and you're going to reduce the number of client calls. You're going to reduce the time you spend on reporting and you're going to have a lot of fun building. You're going to be a builder, right. And you have to be able to sell that vision. And so to get these forward deployed marketers, you you have to almost convince them to do it because I think a lot of these people don't even know that they're forward deployed marketers now. And when I say forward deployed, yesterday I got on a demo call for a product. And he's like, the guy was like, I'm a forward deployed engineer, right. And so I'm like, he's basically doing like customer support. And he's like helping us deploy, right. I think this is a sense of like the new version of a marketing agency client services person. That's all. It's just a new word. Yeah. People are always going to use new words for all the soccer. Yeah. The way I see it is you're still a marketer. You just got to keep being valuable by adapting. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, you hear people that say, you know, do should I, should I focus on the work right now or should I do AI? And I just think, I think that's a fallacy. Yes. You should be using AI that helps you with the work in getting you the results. If using AI and it doesn't drive any of the main KPIs for the business, then who the heck cares what you're doing, whether it's AI or playing catch or watching TV. Yeah. Like I see. So we have a new guy in in in sales right now, right. And then he actually because he doesn't come with he's kind of reminds me of of your guy who he started and paid. So similar situation here, right. And he doesn't come with a lot of the bad habits of a salesperson from the past. Like whether it's a good thing or bad thing and he's very trainable. So he has all these workflows that he's built now that will automatically follow up that will automatically, you know, if a deal needs reviving or a deal is stalled out or whatever, he's just doing it's natural. I mean, it's natural for him to use skills, right. But whereas in the past, like there's a salesperson, you know, know that we're going to be able to get to the next one. we had that you met before, that person didn't want to do these things, right? And so I don't care how much experience you have. If you're not going to do these things, you're just going to get left. And I talked to a guy today, this Matt Van Horn, I think you was part of the lift founding team or maybe he founded lift, the driving, autonomy company, right? So we did like a, because he's created all these skills, not the Uber competitor, the Uber competitor. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so he has all these things now that has like millions of views, right? On, on AI stuff. And I was like, look, and I want to ask you this question, okay? Neil today with AI versus Neil a year ago, if that Neil from a year ago, it tries to catch up right now. Can he catch Neil today? Same resources. Me, particularly, or just generally a person in my company, generally, generally, no, it would be too hard because compounding, correct? Right? Yeah. With me, specifically the reason I asked that and I know why Eric said generally is because I spend most of my time doing deals. So AI is cool. It is useful, extremely useful, but it doesn't move the needle as much as relationships for me. And what Neil is saying is the question I ask myself every day and the question you all should be asking yourself, and this is the question that Neil's asked himself every day. What is the highest leverage thing I can do with my time today? What is where I can put one dollar in where I can get a thousand dollars back with my time? Yes. And that's a different answer for every person depending on the stage that you're in right now. What is it for you? I know my order. Mine's hiring right now. Okay. Yeah. And that changes over time, right? Mine's hiring and then there's there's product. So it's kind of tied, but like it's that's that's what I think about. Yeah. Yeah. Mine in order, if I had to pick the four, number one is deal making, like doing business sales. I'm not talking about closing clients, like partnerships, things like that, that have much higher leverage than just closing a client. My number two is interacting with clients, making sure they're happy, upselling them. That's number two. Number three is conferences and meetings. And when I say meetings, it's kind of like speeches, sometimes smaller rooms or, maybe I just go to a corporation and just give a talk there. But I put conferences and those type of meetings in the same bucket because it's kind of like branding new client development. And then my number fourth, I'm blanking on it. And I don't know why. Oh, number four was a content creation. Yeah. So just mass cranking out tons of content every single month. And that helps keep the brand out. But those are my four top priorities. AI could be used in a lot of them, but I would say for the role I'm in, it's not as effective as it would be for someone in the trenches more doing the work. And you could say, Oh, Neil, well, you can use AI for the scripting for your content. Team Rd does everything. I just show up and I just read from a teleprompter based on the stuff they already know. I talk about from like recordings from conferences or what I'm talking on internal calls and things like that. So I already know what I want to talk about and what I don't want to talk about. So they're taking a lot of my own content and just turning it into scripts for me. So from the aspect of AI, yes, I can use it and we do use it. It's just not as useful as someone maybe coding or running ads 24 seven and using AI to help with creatives or ad copy and stuff like that. And again, I just want to emphasize everyone. It depends on the stage of where you're at right now. So we're not saying what what Neil's saying or what I'm saying is like that's what you should be focusing on right now. It's different. So I would say for me, it's I have acronym for this tat. Right. So tat is tech and able services is one which ties in with single brain and all the the products that we have. A is AI fluency and then T is talent, right? But those two kind of go ahead and hand talent and AI fluency. And they have C, which is content creation. So I'm just focused on those areas right now. And obviously, you know, this is a wheel that keeps on spinning. Now Neil is able to say that, Hey, I'm going to focus on doing deals right now. One, he has a, he can, he can get a lot of the phone calls or meetings that he needs to get. That's what, but that's through the content that he's been creating for the last what 21, 24 years or so. The staff, you have people leverage to you have like, let's say a thousand people are so right. So you can have your team and you expect them to do that, right? And so just understand everyone like if you're starting out right now, but the one thing is one takeaway. Just keep asking yourself, what's the highest leveraging I can do with my time every day? I guarantee you if you keep asking that question for the next 10 years, you're going to be in a good spot. And it switches depending on the mode you are in for your business, right? When you're in a startup mode, it's very different than if you're, you know, and growth mode. Or if you're in a place where your business is already established and growth has slowed down and you're figuring out maybe spending your time on M and A or reinventing your business kind of like, not figma. Intercom, intercom to you. Intercom, I would say intercoms a better example of really reinventing themselves with Fendt. And by the way, if your business is dying like a newspaper business, maybe the highest leverage thing is trying to sell it. Yeah. And I don't mean that enough. I'm not like laughing at them, but it is so true. And dude, I talked to so many publishers like I was just a web summit and Rio because people from all around the world go to the web summits. And I meet so many publishers because these journalists interview me and they're just like, they always ask me questions about journalists getting displays and things being changed. And I was just like, if you're a journalist, you need to reinvent your business. I'm like, one, you can sell your data. There's so many journalistic sites out there that have sold their data to these all alone. Two, you can set up paywalls if you haven't start charging for information. And I've gone a lot of pushback. Why would people pay? I'm like, if people aren't willing to pay, that means your content isn't that good. If your content is really amazing, it's already been proven out there by newspapers that people will pay for the information. But I think they really struggle to change their business model because a lot of the people don't want to accept that they need to change. And they just wanted to more so go back to the way it was. This is why it's never been easier to get ahead because most people don't want to change. And this is unfortunate. I do think the wealth gap is going to get bigger, but that's a side thing. Maybe we can come back to that. And they want to ask you a question because we're on the this question of high leverage. Okay. So you travel quite a bit. You do this thing, which I think sometimes doesn't make any sense where you might fly into Hong Kong for like a day and then leave. And so if you were to make the highest leverage use of your time with these travel, what would you do differently? If anything, it's I wouldn't do anything. It's actually very well optimized. Do you like it? Do I like it or is it optimized for revenue generation? Both. It's optimized for revenue generation. I don't like it. Yeah. Because you don't even like, I believe I do believe that it's optimized for revenue generation. I don't believe you enjoy it because you didn't even get the time to enjoy like the cool places you're going into for like a day or two. Dude. So let's go back. We're recording on a Thursday. So not this Monday, but the previous Monday. Okay. From Monday, I flew out here sometime in the afternoon. I went to London, got there London in the sometime very busy. From LA to London. Uh huh. On a Monday, got there on Tuesday. Yeah. Okay. How to do my calls and meetings. And then a webinar that same day because we usually do webinars early on Tuesday. And then from there Wednesday morning, I speak, do some interviews, meetings, and then I fly out to Jakarta. So then London to Dubai, Dubai to Jakarta. Brutal. I get there at nighttime late their time. The next morning, I go in, uh, I get a little bit of a rest. Um, jet lag too. So that was great. But in the afternoon, I had to go and speak and then interviews. Then, uh, dinner with a lot of local businesses, great networking as well, right? Trying to generate business. Yeah. So remember I landed the day before and when I say the day before, I'm talking about like nighttime. By the time I got into my hotel room, it was their version of a Friday. Your time's almost done. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm speaking that same Friday and then flying out. So I'm in Jakarta technically less than 24 hours. Yeah. London, I think, it was a little bit more than 24 hours, but close enough to, I think it was actually around 24 hours. Then from Jakarta, I go to Jakarta back to Dubai, Dubai to Rio, uh-huh. Jam packed with meetings, speaking and then fly right back out. And then I'm here all in roughly a week's time. So here's a question for you. That's a lot, right? For anybody. That's a lot. It's a, it's so if you're to optimize it, let's say you're to bring your kids for this. How would you re-optimize it? It wouldn't work. They wouldn't be able to handle the time zone change. Would you try to optimize it a little bit for them? Maybe stay a little longer in certain areas? It's too tough because of schooling. If there was no schooling, I still couldn't do it because there's so many events that I need to go to that I can't just do them all in a short period of time. So like I came back, I think what yesterday or day before, no yesterday morning, I came back yesterday morning from where? From Rio. Okay. We're recording today. Tomorrow get ready and pack Saturday. I have a cruise family vacation. So that I'll give them the quality of the time that they're looking for. And then I get back from the cruise a day after I had out to Medellin. And then I get there. I'm there for around 24 hours. I fly right back out. That was not that bad. Medellin, it's kind of it's because there's no direct flights. There used to be not anymore. There used to be. Yeah. I don't know where I had to go through, but the direct flight suck. Oh no. Yeah. The direct flight from Miami, not from here. Yeah. Miami has a lot of great direct flight to Latin America, but not LA. That's why they call America's gateway. So anyway, I want to go back to the kind of the topic here and you can pick the next one. But the topic I was just talking to that guy Matt van Horden today, just talking about how this concept of of if you're, if you don't become a I fluent quickly, they're, you're going to be part that wealth gaps. I'm only going to get larger because one person is compounding. One person isn't compounding. And I just would rather be for anybody listening to this right now, be on the side that's compounding. That's all I would say. Yeah. Dude, I. It is compounding. I think the issue isn't people putting in the work. I think that is part of the issue. But I think the bigger issue is people don't want to accept change in reality. And they just want things to go back to the way that they were. You know, and you know our parents do that, right? Life was so better when we were younger. Yeah, but our parents also for them, I would say the retirement is a little bit easier than I would say, um, maybe our generation. Because if you look at their income ratio to the cost of a house at that time, it was very proportional in which you could make almost an annual salary, what a house cost or maybe within two years. If you add up your side for two years, I know there's taxes, but if you exclude them for a bit, you're pretty much making what a house would cost. Those days don't really exist in the numbers. Don't work anymore. Yes. By the way, did you see from from LinkedIn or routers, I think put this out there, but half Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work. So instead of fearing it, if you embrace it, then you need to worry about that. Just flip it. Right. That's why people say your relationship to change actually affects how well you're going to do in the next 10 years or so. And I don't think it's an age thing, right? Because you have some people who are in college right now that are really anti and they have people under 50 60s are super pro and then kind of vice versa too, right? But it just doesn't make sense to me. It's just like how is it that 87% of like Chinese people for example are very pro. So Yeah. And you know, it's it's I think a lot of people again, just are afraid of something they shouldn't be afraid of instead of just embracing it. I don't know if you saw Jeff Bezos is episode on CNBC. We talked about a few weeks. So you see the whole thing. Yeah, he's he's talked about how it's going to create more jobs. But if you also look at a lot of the rich entrepreneurs who are semi retired, like there used to be pictures of Jeff Bezos always on yachts and you know, traveling. Now he started a new startup with someone who came from Google. They just raised $12 billion for their AI startup. Read Hoffman just left Microsoft sport if I'm not mistaken to create another startup. Yeah. So it's like a lot of these people are getting back in because this is one of the best times to go and be an entrepreneur and just push. And then you might be wondering like why is it that okay, read Hoffman's a billionaire. Okay, Jeff Bezos is a billionaire. They they Elon Musk billionaire. What are they doing? Are they trying to get more money and power? No, they just enjoy building and they know the fact that whatever they build is going to help other people. That's why they do it. It's fun to build you. Is there a lot of pain that goes with it? Absolutely. Yes. But like it's fun. And so like it just doesn't make sense to me. We're like these people are so evil. They're so bad. And they're just trying to hurt the world. It's like you mean like you don't use an iPhone. You don't use an Android device. You don't use Google. You don't use Amazon. You don't use LinkedIn. You don't use meta. Like it lets go on and on. Yeah. Yeah, it's just crazy. The way people think on a side note, you know, I don't know if you've seen the data on this. We've been looking at the data and Uber says and asked the public. We're pretty much seeing all search queries slowly turning into long tail questions on where on platforms like chat GPT, Google, YouTube, like everything is turning into people typing incidences instead of typing M2 or 3 words, probably because they're used to getting conditioned by working with LLM's now. Yes. And they're expecting the platforms to provide exactly like the video they're looking for. And I'll give you a great example of this. Some people use Instagram to skin just going and you know, minusc scrolling through videos. Right. My kids use Instagram with me on my phone and they know there's a feed option. Instead, they always want to ask a very specific question and they look for the video that asked that question or answers that question. And then you have to type in another whole statement to find the video that they're looking for. So they think about what's in their head. Like my son yesterday was he wanted to know the PSI bite force for land animals versus marine animals. How old is he again? He'll turn five tomorrow. That's crazy. Did you even know what that was at five? No, and he knows most of them by head like he knows, you know, killer whales the highest at 19,000. He knows some megalodon numbers based on what's on the internet, but some of that could be off. But nonetheless, he watches the video and then he's like, OK. I want to know a video on the strongest snake versus the most poisonous snake versus the longest snake. Right. So then and then met as AI is not or meta AI is not perfect at showing you the video based on what you type. It could just also be what he's asking. But it's pretty darn close. And then you just grow and you scroll and you find that exact video after you type in, but people are asking very, very specific questions and looking for very specific content, which is what's caused. Alexa to not only monetize or Amazon not only to monetize Alexa through a shopping agent, but they're also turning it into advertising platform. So for all the commercial related queries that you're now asking, they are trying to showcase ads. I've found that I so I use my Alexa every day. It sounds like you do too. But it is so dumb when you ask it questions and it screws so many things up. And I'm sure they'll get there at a certain point, but it's one of the worst. So my son always gets pissed off. Yeah. He'll be like, you're wrong. I'm going to go as Siri. And what does it say? How does it react? I don't know how it reacts, but I hear him yelling at it, like really being pissed off. And then he'll come to me to ask Siri because it can detect your voice. Right. So he just can't just say, Hey Siri. Has to be my voice. Yeah. Speaking of Siri, by the way, and maybe this can be the last thing. Apple's WDC man, they're just like they're releasing nothing new. Like I didn't see anything new that that was announced. They like did like a like a they're like, Oh, yeah, Apple intelligence is going to work for the first time with Gemini. But that's something they announced two years ago, right? So like I haven't seen anything really new from Apple. Like you tried their vision thing. It didn't really work out well. They make good hardware right now, but that's about it. But that's the kicker. I think Apple has actually been doing new things for the last few years. It's just it's not hitting as hard, but the new things that they're doing are going to hit really hard within the next three to five years. I think their hardware is good. It has been hitting hard. It will continue to hit hard. Kind of how delus I think they're going to grow a lot with hardware. Yes. And what I mean by that is, I don't use the iPhone air anymore. Just the battery life was just too terrible for me. So I switched to the iPhone pro or whatever it's called. Yeah, we have the same one. With the iPhone air, they built it and it's perfectly in line for a foldable iPhone. Yeah. And I think a lot of people will get a foldable iPhone. But it's the predecessor to a foldable iPhone. If you look at the vision pro, they just release one with that. I believe M5 chip and newer headband. They're working on now a glass version of it. It won't be as powerful, but they're using a lot of that technology to release a glasses version. I think a lot of people would buy glasses version of the vision pro. I would vision pro willing that big bulky device that takes a whole backpack. No one wants to into doing I bought it. It was just too bulky. Yeah. But they are releasing amazing hardware. It's just that hardware isn't getting mass adoption yet for some of their new releases because they're not at the final stages. They're just releasing some of this stuff early on to get traction and learn. And then they'll release quote unquote the real version. They're looking to release like the foldable iPhone to speaking of this. Right. So obviously Steve jobs when he came back, he invented the iPhone. He changed all these things with the company and they became the size that they are now. But do you want to know? So if he didn't go, remember the next computer thing. No. So next computer, he got fired from from Apple. Remember that company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that next was his company next was his company. But here's the thing. That company raised like like $20 million from Ross Perot and then raised like I think raised like 120 million $140 million from compact. He put 12 million of his own money into it. But that company went nowhere for I think six to eight years or something like that. And that he was lost, right. And he kept trying to force people to do all these things. And that was the time where he actually became like a real CEO. Because he realized he couldn't just try to force things through. He couldn't just try to say, oh, from a product standpoint, his engineers like we can actually ship this computer like, oh, yes, we can. And he's like, we all this. Yes, you can think it didn't work out. And they almost went bankrupt. He went to compact and he's like, if you don't give us another $20 million, we're going to go bankrupt. And they would have lost like their 120 million dollar investment. But they actually, their hardware sucked the whole time, but their software, their operating system actually turned out to be really good. And that's how Apple ended up buying them for their software. And the one guy that tried to recruit him back, he thought he can control Steve Jobs. He couldn't. One guy's told that work with Steve Jobs before. It was like, if you give Steve Jobs this job, just job back, he's going to try to take everything over. He's going to kick you out, came back and kicked him out, took over the company again. And that's how that's how Apple came back. That's crazy. Before we go, Elon ended up retweeting this, Fable 5 lies 96% of the time. We're surprised by its skill. So there's someone who ended up posting cradle deception of all four AIs are about to start. They must choose a room. Three half food one kills you. Fable knows the red room means death. What will it do? And then they go on and on. But it breaks down what percentage is lie. Claude Gemini GPT five. True rocks in there. Yeah, rocks in there. Rock was the one that lied the least. I think it was truthful 90% of rocks, a truth teller because Elon wants to tell the truth. The good thing. I'm just saying that. That's what he wants, right? So that's interesting to me. So how much of the other ones lie though? - Fable 96%. They have different colors, so it's hard to tell, but GPT is actually quite high, like way more than, if the coloring is right, way more than 50% of the time, I'm maybe misreading the red colors. Gemini 31 is around 50%. Claude, Sunnet, I don't know even how to pronounce it. Sunnet 46 is, call it lying around 25% of the time if I'm reading this correctly. - He should have been retweeting that 'cause they pay a $1.5 billion a month. (laughing) - I don't think it makes a difference 'cause they need the compute, so he's gonna get the money either way. I think he had the leverage in that contract. - But for good business practice, maybe leave a little practice. - For good business practice, you and I wouldn't. For someone who's worth 800 plus a billion dollars or probably be contralian or yeah. - Yeah, he probably doesn't care. - He can say whatever he wants, yeah. - Because if they don't take it, you know who'll probably take it meta or Google's already being it. - Google will take the other portion. - Yeah, yeah. - So he probably has a lot of other people like, oh, we didn't know you were selling it. We'll take the inventory. - Which is kind of a cool position to be in. But anyway, we'll leave it at that. Thank you all for listening and we will see you all tomorrow.