The AI Cost Problem Nobody's Talking About

So Neil, did you know, did you know that 50,000 years ago humans became way more successful because of this? So you would think that 50,000 years ago versus now, our brains would be bigger, right? Would you say they're bigger? Like I would've thought we'd be, have bigger brains by now, right?

You're talking about the size of the brain or the usage of the brain?

The size of the brain.

I never really thought about if our brain was gonna get bigger or smaller.

Yeah. So we have roughly the same amount of horsepower we did 50,000 years ago. So this guy wrote this book, uh, Matt Ridley, right? So British biologist looked at 200,000 years. Okay. 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 for 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 Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. So, no microwave, no Wi-Fi, 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 only the 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, which existed long before the takeoff. 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, I'm 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 2 ideas that developed in isolation came into contact. 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 their cousins 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. Now you can call each other on 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—

Yeah.

When you're talking to AI instead of 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 now 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 brain's actually the same size and it was actually trading, not just trading, but the trading of ideas that allowed us to move faster.

What about the rot and people just using AI and not learning on their own?

The rock?

The rot.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the rock, like the rest of it.

No, no.

So what it's basically saying here, it's like, so hopefully this answers your question a little bit. here, 'cause I'm reading the 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, 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 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 one of our mutual friends, maybe very humble person, not hungry. But I would say that what it comes down to is smarts. But smarts is actually your relationship with change and your relationship with learning. So, the most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They're the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They're talking to more people from more disciplines. They're in rooms Where ideas from different lineages bump into each other and you do it in your different way by talking to people. I do it my different way. Maybe I'm learning, maybe I put together networks, but we've always done that.

So moral of the story is 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 when have you ever sat still? I've known you for 15 years, 16 years. When have you ever sat still?

A lot.

When?

8 hours every night.

Dude, no, when 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 4 to 5 hours. I'm like, but you're getting paid for full-time. I'm like, you're complaining about working 4 to 5 hours a day? I'm like, this is what's wrong. This is why you're not getting where you want to get in life.

Dude, speaking of where you want to get in life, why'd you take all your kids' stickers off your laptop?

Dude, they kept putting more on my laptop and then it just started becoming a really messy collage, so I just started ripping it off.

Well, Neil's very OCD, so you actually kept it on for a very long time. I was impressed. Yes.

Yeah, but 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 it was the front side was made of cloth so you can like feel it and stuff. And I was like, no, no, no. I'm like, what are you guys putting on my laptop? 'Cause that kind of stuff is really sticky and it's hard to take off. So then I'm like, this is getting outta 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 have the same brain. I didn't, 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.

It's just as society and technology has changed, 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 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 a— I've never seen this before where I've heard about people gatekeeping like celebrations. So for example, if a client went to Noah, for example, and told you, hey, good job, Noah, You would want to share that with the team, right? So I didn't realize this, but we had a situation where someone didn't— they wanted to hear that information first, and they didn't want Noah to reveal that information first. Isn't that crazy?

That would be crazy.

But like, if you're learning 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 Engine Journal ended up 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 marketers. 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 at 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 has affected click rates, right? You know, when an AI overview shows up, I think the last stat 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, you know, even though Anthropic is saying, hey, we should all slow down, I don't believe Google, I don't believe Microsoft or OpenAI 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 2 things here, Neil. So, you know, Anthropic has like, I don't know, 7 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, Fable 5, or maybe the day before, which is Anthropic's new— it's like a watered-down version of Mythos, right? And I've been using using Fable 5, and I want to call the genius of Anthropic's marketing here. So they give you Fable 5, which is their latest model, for the next 12— for 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 pay on API. They'll probably have a version that's including your subscription, but my entire team is using Fable right now. I was like, guys, go to— I typed in all caps in our AI 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 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 Palo Alto Networks on the All-In podcast, right? Did you hear that one?

I did not.

They did a liquidity summit, which is like for investors, right? And he's like, dude, Mythos, what it solved for them was that it basically solved all like some bug, some code issues that they have, security issues that would have taken days, that would have taken 5 to 7 years, right?

Yes.

And it's legit stuff. And so I'm seeing the same thing where it's completing. I couldn't get like Opus 4.8 to complete something around like a dashboard that I was trying to build before for the team. And now I was like, hey, I'm getting stuck here. Yesterday it one-shotted 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 diminishing returns. Yes.

Yeah, I think we're getting close to it because they say that a Mythos-level open source one is probably 2, 3 months behind. So I do think—

That's it.

Yeah, I think you and I are going to— most people are going to be paying for open source for the majority because a lot of intelligence, like if I'm cleaning your toilet, Neal, like I don't need a lot of brainpower 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 100,000 engineers. Beginning of the year, they had their team focused sometime in January on a new application around one of the strongest AI models that they were building internally, and it took them 3 months to complete. And you know what happened after the 3 months? But it was useless because it changed so much that they had to start all over again.

Yep.

Like this stuff is just moving extremely fast and with it moving really fast, you saw SparkToro announce 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've 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 SimilarWeb, and I think this is SparkToro and SimilarWeb 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 Neil a chart over here. So you can see from 2016 to 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 with 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. Keep in mind, Google's 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 the game now is to be the cited 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 Rae had this tweet 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. ChatGPT 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 these instances of prompts that trigger 30+ 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 and 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 AEO 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 write, you know, top 10, whatever, and then you put your company or your product or service first. Okay, great.

Well, you can go first.

All right. So number 1 tactic 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. Ahrefs has one. I think Moz has one. We have one on Ubersuggest. It's called Backlinks Opportunity Report, where you put in your URL, you put in your competitor URLs. You'd 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 to one competitor, maybe they like them. If they link to 3+ competitors, they usually don't have a favorite and they're just linking to other players in the space. If you can hit up those sites and try to get your brand, your company, your products, your services mentioned 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 2, 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 I would say that you can have the FAQs at the bottom, but I think even the 3 bullets at the top that kind of summarize the article, those things all make it easier for an answer engine or even a search engine to pick up. But, you know, that's kind of SEO 101 that's evolved a little bit.

Yeah. Number 3, update your content. So look at your top 10 or top 20 pages, update them frequently, have the right call to actions in them, not only because of traffic, but also because those are a lot of the pages that these LLMs are pulling from. And what we found is Almost most of the time they love pulling from pages that are less than 60-ish days old.

Number 4, I remember when, when we're both around 20, I was, I think I was 25 or 26 years old. I shared a post from a Black Hat forum about how if you write 2,500 words, it's going to do better in search. And then I think you posted it and then it really blew up. I remember that. But anyway, point is, if you target conversational long-tail queries now, because we're talking about ChatGPT fanning out to 30+ queries. So my take on it is it's Not to add a bunch of fluff, but if you can have something that's super data-backed, super in-depth, and you can capture more long-tail queries, you're going to have more chances to be cited by these answer engines.

Number 5?

Yeah.

Number 5, 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 Capterras, the Trustpilots, 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 an 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 a 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.

6, 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 that get to the point.

Number 7, last but not least, go omnichannel. A lot of these sites pull from Wikipedia, they pull from Reddit, they pull from YouTube, they pull from Quora. 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 do 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 agency today, so Neil, I don't know if you know this, but do you know what percent of McKinsey's fees now are outcome-based?

I'm going to 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 yesterday, I was watching a— before I was about to watch the Spurs-Knicks game, but I was watching Patrick Bet-David talking about how consultancies have changed, right? Where they used to charge you $5 million bucks. And now like the work, maybe it's like $10,000 or so. So like a lot of people are customers, past customers or current customers of McKinsey are applying pricing pressure, just saying, hey, yo, 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 had said that. And that's interesting to me because Agencies, consultancies 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 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 outcome-based.

5%, 10%?

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 when they're saying it's outcome-based, Maybe I'm wrong on this. I don't have any data on what McKinsey's doing. There's 2 components, cash guaranteed and then cash that's outcome.

Let me tell you, let me tell you what my AI overview says, okay? So McKinsey has shifted a quarter of its global client fees away from hourly billing to outcome-based pricing, heavily accelerated by their use of generative AI platforms such as Lilly and Quantum Black. Everyone has their own platform. Instead of selling billable hours, fees are tied directly to documented business objectives such as cost reduction, margins, revenue growth, or AI tool implementations. Now, To Neil's point, the structure is a retainer plus performance multiplier, right? So yes, it's too risky to just say it's all performance, right? It sounds good. So McKinsey's typical, it's a hybrid approach. So the base fee is the client pays a reduced base fee, 50 to 70% of standard consulting rates to cover the core costs of digital and human teams.

Yes.

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, and we can talk about this. So let's say that you know the setup is McKinsey is doing an outcome-based contract in 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 in identified savings, and then performance bonus of 10% on any savings generated exceeding $50 million. So if 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 money. Yeah. I, but I do like it's, you, 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 are 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 marketers 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, they have the legal department, they're generally going to be a little more compliant and not try to do that to you. And when we use Centerfield 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, it's like, hey, we actually know their business really well. We'll say, hey, like, what are you trying to do? 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. Quick break. One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90+ hours a month on content alone. ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work, not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice, it helps you with other areas such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs. We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients, so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show.

Let's cover the topic you have here on 7 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've been— I was interviewing a guy that was super, super AI-pilled today. I was like, you know what, I'm gonna 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 like— I'm talking to you right now. I'm really enjoying this conversation. We're gonna 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 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 LLMs. And they're talking about agents, but no one's really optimizing for agents yet. Cloudflare had a stat that was interesting. I don't know if you ended up seeing it. I have it on this sheet as well. 57% of web hits are now bots.

We went over this weeks ago.

But it was 51%.

Oh, it's gone up 6% more.

Yeah. 6% more just in a short period 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 an agent as, oh, if I'm looking for red shoes, the agent just goes out there and buys it for me. They're not thinking of agents like, oh, if— and Google had an example of this.

You did the red dress thing, right? Yeah, the red dress.

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, 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 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.

Yep. Number 3, 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 Grain 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 or $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 landing pages for like Single Grain with ChatGPT ads, we would've had to wait forever. I think it's just going to— now we're talking about maybe it'll just take you like an hour or 2 instead of having to even wait days now. So now, like a year ago, it was like, okay, you might have to wait a week or 2 or even a month or 2, 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 2.

So what'd you have it do? Just combine your Single Grain and Single Grain website into one?

No, I found a site that gives you prompts for really nice sites. And then I said, hey, I use Fable 5. And I said, redesign the Single Grain site and then ask me some clarifying questions. Do you want to keep this? You want to keep this? You want to do this? And then I saw it, I was like, damn, this is pretty good.

That's cool.

So anyway, all that to say is I think these models— and by the way, tied to it, I'll give you a little bonus to that. Whether you're paying for Fable 5, I think in 2, 3 months or so, you're going to be using the open source version of this. So yeah. You're going to have something really good. Go ahead.

Yeah, what are we on, number 4?

4.

Number 4, 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 keyword here is yet. That can change over time. We have MCPs, you know, like for Ubersuggest that we ended up plugging into them. That way when people are using LLMs, 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 4, is instead of just focusing on driving traffic from these LLMs or using it to help you build a product or a 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 this stuff, like I don't have a lot of these elements. And then obviously if I hand this off to a developer or designer 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 5 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, you're also going to need a lot more documentation. So you see the technical documentation business, Mintlify, they just raised at like a $500 million valuation, right? Another $50 million. And a lot of their— a lot of people use their stuff. And even for ClickFlow, 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 ChatGPT, oh, the query, the, when you search something now, it's like 30+ query fanout. 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 just 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, Yeah. and more products, you're going to need more documentation.

Number 6, I see a huge trend in 2026 in which people are going to slowly stop using AI to market to AI. YouTube flags content when it's AI. The other social platforms are going to follow along. It's just a question of when. With YouTube, it's right underneath the video where they let you know that it's AI-related. Anthropic released the— I believe it was a LinkedIn post or article breaking down how we need to be careful and 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 give people inaccurate 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 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 LLMs, I think the big thing that's going to really hurt you is using AI content to win inside these LLMs, because eventually not only will they be able to detect it, there's been some LinkedIn threads 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 going to discount it and it's going to do terrible. Lily Rae 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 in 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— this is number 7, 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 send you an MD file that you want to read the whole thing like it's 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 it into like a slide deck of maybe 4 or 5 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 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 the artifacts and I explain these things, but I also double over and I make it for YouTube and 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, and I got to give a hat tip to one of the engineers at Claude. He's like, yeah, screw MD files. It's all about HTML files. I was like, yeah, 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 5 latest AI tools that you have tested for marketing? And give us feedback on all 5. Start with the— your least favorite at number 5, And your favorite at number 1.

I can't think of my least favorite because if I'm using it— Order it in any order you want. If I'm using it, I'm assuming 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 Claude 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're saying you're overloading it and you're putting in too much, you're asking it to do too much and then you're not getting what you're looking for.

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.

Ad creatives?

Ad creatives, yeah. 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 team, I was like, give me the GitHub repo, I'm going to 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 OpenAI's, 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 3. 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. OpenClaw and Hermes fail because if you add too much to its disk 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 OpenClaw right now. Codex and Claude Code have been amazing in that respect. I will say one The only one that's overhyped, I think, is Higgsfield, right? The reason why I say Higgsfield is overhyped, not because 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.

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 it and 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 and go create your own version or expand upon it.

Yep. And I'll kind of close it off with this. So obviously, okay, best AI tools, love-hate with OpenClaw, with Hermes. I do love Codex and Claude Code. I think you need to pay for the $20— 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 OpenAI 20x Pro version, how much usage do you think you're actually getting from it in value?

Don't cheat. Yeah, I already know the answer because I saw it on your sheet.

Okay. 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 $30,000, $40,000?

No, $8,000, and here's the thing, remember there was that time period where I spent 12 grand in that month, right? So I've always felt OpenAI was very generous. I'm like, whoa, I can just keep going on this, right? And it did feel like I was spending $12,000 to $14,000, But Claude, you can tell it eats it up pretty quickly. So what I would just say is maybe buy both if you have the means to do it.

What's the pricing for both?

$200. So you have $20 version, you have free, you have $20 version, and then $200. So they both have—

$200? I thought it was $100.

They do have a $100 version, but there's also a $200 version for Claude. There's a $100 version, but if you want 20x more usage or something like that, yeah, you get 5x or 20x.

But OpenAI, is it $200 or $100? I thought I was paying $100.

No, you're paying, you're definitely paying either $20 or $200. I'm pretty— I'm not even paying $20. Yeah, yeah, it's, you're paying $200. So I think those stick out. Oh, I do like, I do love the Ahrefs MCP. That's been great. I do love the Riverside MCP as well. The Beehive has an MCP, Riverside has an MCP.

What do you use the Riverside MCP for?

So Riverside actually has the ability to look at your video. Like let's say we're recording this, I can say, hey, find the best moments to clip. So you can use 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 Beehive one because you can just have it draft emails or you can have it, it's going to be able to, I said, I messaged the Beehive growth guy the other day. I was like, 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 magnet 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 on, 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 of 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 Ahrefs 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, or Anthropic, not Claude, specifically Anthropic announces a new model, it causes a whole SaaS industry to tank. I'm talking about all the publicly traded stocks. And what I've noticed, this is just my 2 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. The Nvidia 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 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.

It would. I would also say one thing too. If you're Google right now, I would just try to squeeze them on costs, squeeze them on pricing because it squeezes the entire— it squeezes OpenAI and it squeezes Anthropic. You know what I mean? Yeah, but more.

Yes. You saw the announcement, it was OpenAI and maybe one other player. They were talking today about potentially reducing pricing even more. That's going to squeeze them all. Did you also see the winners from Anthropic's 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, So if you look at the Anthropic winners, where is the chart? Anthropic winners from Amazon, which companies will make the most? Let's see. 3+ 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 OpenAI. Salesforce turned $50 million in 2023 into a $5 billion Anthropic 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 this 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. 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 7 founders of Anthropic individually owns less than 1% of the company's total equity. Yeah. Google owns 15% and Amazon owns over 20%.

How much would Sam Altman have had? I think he had a good chunk, right?

I bet you he still—

sorry, not Sam Altman, uh, uh, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Uh, a large chunk. I believe he owned like 10% or something like that 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 other ones.

He did a lot of good ones.

You know Robinhood? He owned 9%, I think when they were worth like $10 billion. Now Robinhood blew up. They went down. Yeah, uh, from their peak, but they're still an $83 billion company, but they're worth more than that. Dude, call it, you know, less than a year ago, the stock was at $140, now it's at $92.

Remember I showed you Marvel? It jumped, it fell down to $245 yesterday, it's up to $280 again.

Dude, these things jump. Have you been trading them?

No, I don't. I'm not, I'm not a trader. The only thing I'm going to trade, Neil, is I'm going to bet on the Spurs to win it all. Dude, did you see the game where they're down by 20-something and then they're up by 29? So I think they're still going to win. So we'll see what happens after this.

Wait, you think the Spurs are gonna win?

I think they're still gonna win. And so I'm gonna put some money on that just for fun, right? 'Cause if you put a dollar in, you get $3.50 back in profit if they win the next 3 games.

So what are you gonna bet on that?

I'm not gonna bet a lot. I'm gonna bet like, I don't know, 4 to 5 grand.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So we'll see.

I think that's too risky of a bet for me. I think the Knicks are gonna win.

Okay, put a grand.

I don't wanna lose a grand.

What do you mean? You could get $3,500 in profit.

But I believe the Spurs are gonna lose.

No, they're gonna win. Dude, the 2 games that they lost, and we can move on from this, but the 2 games that they lost, they lost by 1, and they're both boneheaded, boneheaded mistakes that they made.

So— I still believe they're gonna lose.

They are very likely going to lose, but I still think they can win.

Okay. If the Knicks win, you buy us lunch the next time we all eat out. And if the Spurs win, I'll buy you guys lunch.

No, no, no. If the Spurs win the series, I'll buy you guys Erewhon. I still have a bunch of those jars. So, so, you know, I was talking to our mutual friend yesterday, Yaniv, and we're like, oh, he's— they're gonna 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 $100.

No, a grand. A grand makes it more exciting. You, don't even get me started on you, okay? All right.

I don't bet.

You did before. All right, so.

I'm not really gambling though.

You, that was gambling.

Are you talking about stocks or you talking about the casino?

No, sports.

No, I made a killing.

But you're, that's still gambling.

Someone, J-Fen, his buddy had this whole mathemat— or formula on sports betting, years of track record. I didn't even know half the teams. I just followed the bets and I was making money on it. It was great returns.

Yeah, but it was, 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, so we kind of briefly touched upon this, but Neil, here, let's just do this. The real cost of a ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max subscription is this, okay? So if you're paying $200 a month for ChatGPT, I just want to show the chart over here. So it's $14,000, okay?

$14,000 in what?

What? In value. So I'll go over that in a second. And then if you pay for Claude Max, which is $200 a month, you get $8,000 in value. So here's what I mean by that. When I spent that 12 grand on Claude API costs, right, like over here, let's say, I felt like I was getting this much in value because when I'm using ChatGPT, 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't I just keep going on it? Right? And it does feel like I can, I can kind of go the distance on this $14,000 and I do actually run out every week. Okay. Now when I'm on Claude 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?

Building stuff. Like I have my agent doing a lot of— my agent's 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 tokens, 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 too. Yeah, so it's sourcing candidates and it comes up with good angles to reach out to them personally. 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 Cowork and all that kind of stuff that just help you with everything.

That is using Cloud Cowork, but Cloud Cowork takes from my CloudMax, um, the $200 a month.

Oh, so it's pulling from there.

Yeah, that one's pulling from there, that Cloud Cowork one.

I thought Cloud Cowork, like my team uses Cloud Cowork a lot.

Yeah.

I thought, uh, it just takes from the API.

No, no.

So it takes it from their $200 account.

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 on Overages too. 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 Claude Pro for $20 a month, it's worth $400 a month. ChatGPT Plus, $20, you get $700. So ChatGPT 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, you might as well—

No, I think they're going to go more hard on subsidies.

In terms of more subsidies?

Yeah, to retain you. The reason I say that is once they go public, And their shares are liquid and people start selling and stuff.

Oh, they want you to come over.

Not just that. Let's say if I'm Google and I make $100 billion from one of these companies and I spent $10 billion, I'm like, oh, we got $90 billion in profit. Let's just use the $90 billion and just make our stuff even cheaper and just—

And cut 'em down now.

And cut 'em down even more.

Yep. Yep. Yep. So I just think it's interesting. So SemiAnalysis, like they do 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 Gleiman, the CEO of RAMP. So when you look at this right here, right, you look at the routing opportunity. So we're talking about token routing over here. So when you see frontier intelligence, bigger models, more reasoning, like Fable 5 right now, it's 300 times more expensive per task.

Yeah.

Right? So if you're using ChatGPT-4 level intelligence, again, if I'm like cleaning your toilet or whatever, I don't need the best intelligence, right? So 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 where like some of these people work at large like enterprise companies and they're like, yeah, like this is a major point of contention right now. And you're seeing 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 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? A couple million?

That's overage?

Yeah.

No, the overage is, if I recall, it's close to $500 grand, but that's after deducting efficiencies and hiring less. So if we remove Some of the expenses we had, we didn't spend as much on marketing. We didn't spend as much on hiring. Some people got terminated, some people churned. If you include that, plus us spending more on tokens, right? And we spent substantially more on tokens. The delta on where we're off, even hitting revenue numbers, is getting close to around $500,000.

Yeah.

So that means we spent over $500 grand more than what we budgeted on tokens because Because I'm including the savings from the employees, marketing, and all of that. So the tokens ate that up, that expenditure, as well as the—

Oh, so it's significantly more.

Significantly more, yeah.

Yeah. So anyway—

Which is becoming a big problem in a lot of companies. And it's just like, no, dude, give me something that's 90% there that's like 1/10 the 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 routing and all that stuff.

So— I started seeing bills for computers with heavy RAM and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, all right.

Are you buying the Dell ones? I like everything comes back. I'm like, man, I haven't bought an Nvidia thing for a long time or a Dell thing, but those things, those companies are back. Like the Dell ones are huge now. They have a ton of memory.

You see their stock, their stock boom.

Yeah.

Because of the server division.

Yeah. We're dumbies for not buying. I saw it coming. Like all these things, all 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. Because everyone's talking about Apple and oh, they're all sold out of of high RAM computers. Yeah, it's easier to just go to Dell to get those.

Dude, Apple gypped me. I bought a new monitor and then the camera's all broken now and I like, 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.

Ah.

Yeah. So anyway, I want to talk about something else. So I want to talk about the difference between selling AI services right now versus marketing services, because I'll jump in on the marketing services calls and I'll also jump in on the AI services one because 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, they're 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 to— we know how your business model works. There's a bunch of different agencies we're talking to. You're like a vendor, right?

Yeah.

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, 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 for 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 feel like that might need to happen sometimes, right?

Yeah.

And I'm not saying that that is for most cases, but that does happen, right? Now, 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 5 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 than just more AI-pilled people. Because on one side, things are moving so quickly and the market's pulling And on the other side, the market's still definitely pulling, but it's not as engaged as the other. And then 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 may be 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 Jumping in between the two.

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'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 have hired agencies and worked with them in the past for many, many, many years, some even well over 10+ years. They already know what they want, what they're looking for, and they're just very direct.

You know what's funny? I've gotten on some of these calls with some of these, I was on a call with like a founder this week and he had founded 2 companies that work with Single Grain 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 founded a new mosquito product that's super like, so I want to get on the 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 2 people standing behind him like, we hate agencies too. I'm like, oh, interesting. Why? It's 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— Well, let's go back to the mosquito thing. What was the solution? Was it another heat pen?

It's— no, no, the heating pen is actually not That's what you used to use, right? Yeah. So I used to use— so I have this thing called skeeter syndrome after the pandemic. So after I got the, the, you know, the little shot, um, so I'd get bitten and then this like giant pus-filled Dragon Ball would happen on whatever I had the, the bite. And so our mutual friend Yaniv was like, oh, you should use the heat pen, right? Not saying he's wrong. I was like, oh yeah, okay, makes 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 Benadryl or something, and then you put some cortisone on it and then it doesn't happen anymore.

So that's how you get rid of skeeter 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 was like, 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. Quick break for SaaS founders listening. You know how content marketing works, you know how AI SEO works. And you've been seeing competitors ranking for your keywords all day long, but you don't have the time to write and hiring a content team feels premature, or just out of the budget. That's exactly why we built ClickFlow. It helps create AI SEO content that actually sounds like your brand. We're talking thought leadership, we're talking product content, comparison pages without having to add more headcount. It also helps you do things such as building FAQs, internal linking, and telling you which old posts are hurting your domain. One user reported saving 90 hours per month, and that was a part-time employee. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.ai. Scale your content without scaling your team. Back to the show. So let me show you how you can save money on token costs, Neil. So this is Cognition, okay? Cognition, Devin, you've heard of Devin? They bought Windsurf.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is a little bar over here. Adaptive automatically balances quality and cost of your token outputs, right? So they have all this stuff over here. This is like one of the models that you can select here. 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, and I'll show you like the output. So I think they They came up 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 Cognition, Neil, and this will save you money, watch. Number 1, adaptive routing, an intelligent model router that automatically selects the best AI model for each task. Other products are starting to adapt this. 4, you'll like 4. They have an AI productivity guarantee. If Devin 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 3, advanced automations, wiring agent sessions to the events that already cost teams engineering hours, production incidents and pager duty, failing deploys, alerts on a revenue-critical service. Each trigger maps to work that used to page a human, so the value isn't theoretical. Spend attribution as well. So Neil, these— you would like all these. Spend attribution, adaptive routing, AI productivity guarantee, You guys should check out cognition.

Yeah, we could be using it already. I don't know what we're using or not using.

Bet you that you're not. I'll bet you as a Spurs bet that you're not.

That we're not using cognition?

I don't think you're using cognition. You want to find out right now? Yeah, let's find out, but don't bet me.

I can actually just ask the team.

You should, you should ask, but don't bet me.

Uh, where is it? Dude, I have so many threads on WhatsApp. Let's type in Ubersuggest.

So as Neil's pulling it up right now, I am going to pull up this concept of the forward-deployed marketer. So jump in at any point, Neil.

Yeah, you use— okay, my team will take a while because I just asked them in WhatsApp. I don't— it says 2 people are online, but I don't know if it's the right 2 people that are online.

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's 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 the scaffolding 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 end-to-end, the agents will do the labor underneath. And it's interesting because a lot of the AI-pilled— 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, $1,500 a month. I was like, fantastic, right? That's $18,000 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 this.

Growth hacker.

Yeah, the way I see it is you're still a marketer. You just got to keep being valuable by adapting.

Yeah. Yeah. Here's the other thing, like, Neil, you hear people that say, you know, 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 and getting you the results. If you're 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 sales right now, right? And then he actually, because he doesn't come with— he's kind of reminds me of your guy who started in 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 deal is stalled out or whatever, it's, it's, he's just doing, it's natural to him. It's natural for him to use skills, right? But whereas in the past, like there's a salesperson, you know, that 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 gonna get laughed at. And I talked to a guy today, this Matt Van Horn, I think he was part of the Lyft founding team, or maybe he founded Lyft, 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 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 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. 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's cool, it is useful, extremely useful, but it doesn't move the needle as much as relationships for me.

And what Neil's saying is the question I ask myself every day, and the question you all should be asking yourself, and this is the question 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 $1 in where I can get $1,000 back with my time? And that's a different answer for every person depending on the stage that you're in right now. Yeah.

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 product, so it's kind of tied, but like, that's what I think about the whole time. Yeah.

Mine in order, if I had to pick the 4, number 1 is deal-making, like doing business deals. I'm not talking about closing clients, like partnerships, things like that that have much higher leverage than just closing a client. My number 2 is interacting with clients, making sure they're happy, upselling them. That's number 2. Number 3 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 types of meetings in the same bucket because it's kind of like branding, new client development. And then my number 4, I'm blanking on it and I don't know why. Oh, number 4 was content Yep. So just mass cranking out tons of content every single month, and that helps keep the brand out there. But those are my 4 top priorities.

Yep.

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 content. Team already 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 24/7 and using AI to help with creatives or ad copy and stuff like that.

And again, I just want to emphasize to everyone, it depends on the stage of where you're at right now. So we're not saying what Neil's saying or what I'm saying is like, that's what you should be focusing on right now. It's different. And so I would say for me, it's— I have an acronym for this, TAT, right? So TAT is tech-enabled services is one which ties in with SingleBrain and all the products that we have. A is AI fluency and then T is talent, right? But those 2 kind of go hand in hand, talent and AI fluency. And then you 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's 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 one. But that's through the content that he's been creating for the last, what, 21, 24 years or so?

Yeah.

The staff, you have people leverage too. You have like, let's say 1,000 people or 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 Right now. But the one thing, the one takeaway is just keep asking yourself, what's the highest leverage thing 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, in 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&A or reinventing your business, kind of like, not Figma, Intercom.

Intercom.

Intercom. I would say Intercom's a better example of really reinventing themselves with Fin.

And by the way, if your business is dying like a newspaper business, maybe the highest leverage thing is trying to sell it.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I don't mean that in a, I'm not like laughing at them, but it is so true. And dude, I talked to so many publishers, like I was just at Web Summit in 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 displaced 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 LLMs.

Mm-hmm.

2, you can set up paywalls if you haven't, start charging for information. And I've gotten 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's 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 want it 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. Neil, I want to ask you a question because we're on this question of 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 trips, this travel, what would you do differently? If anything?

It's, I wouldn't do anything. It's actually very well optimized.

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 to London in the sometime during the day.

You flew from LA to London?

Uh-huh. On a Monday, got there on Tuesday. Okay. Had 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, I get a little bit of a rest. I'm jet-lagged too, so that was great. But in the afternoon, I had to go speak and then interviews, then dinner with a lot of local businesses, great networking as well, right? Trying to generate business. 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 zone's all messed up. Yeah.

And then I'm speaking that same Friday and then I'm flying out. So I'm in Jakarta technically less than 24 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 Jakarta back to Dubai, Dubai to Rio, 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. So, if you were to optimize it, let's say you were 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.

Wouldn't 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. I came back yesterday morning.

From where?

From Rio.

Okay.

We're recording today. Tomorrow I'll get ready and pack. Saturday I leave. You have the cruise. 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 head out to Medellín. And then I get there, I'm there for around 24 hours, I fly right back out.

That one's not that bad. Medellín, it's kind of far. It is because there's no direct There used to be, not anymore.

There used to be. Yeah, I don't know where I had to go through, but the direct flights suck.

Oh no. Yeah, direct flight from Miami, not from here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Miami has a lot of great direct flights to Latin America, but not LA.

That's why they call it 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 Horn today, just talking about how this concept of if you don't become AI fluent quickly, you're going to be part, that wealth gap's only going to get larger because one person's One person is compounding, one person isn't compounding. And I just would rather prefer anybody listening to this right now be on the side that's compounding. That's all I would say. Yeah.

Dude, 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? Yeah. It's like, oh, life is— life would've— was so better when we were younger. Yeah.

Yeah. But our parents also, for them, I would say the retirement is a little bit easier than I would say 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 in an annual salary what a house costs, or maybe within 2 years, if you add up your salary for 2 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 many cities. Those numbers don't work anymore. Yes.

By the way, did you see from LinkedIn or Reuters, I think put this out there, but half of Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work. So instead of fearing it, if you embrace it, then you don't 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 then you have people in their 50s, 60s that 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, I don't know if you saw Jeff Bezos, his episode on CNBC we talked about a few weeks ago.

I saw parts of it. Did you see the whole thing?

Yeah. He's talking 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 traveling. Now he started a new startup with someone who came from Google. They just raised $12 billion for their AI startup. Reid Hoffman just left Microsoft's board, if I'm not mistaken, to create another startup. So it's like a lot of these are getting back in because this is one of the best times to go and be an entrepreneur and just push hard.

And then you might be wondering, like, why is it that, okay, Reid Hoffman's a billionaire, okay, Jeff Bezos is a billionaire, Elon's a 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 too. 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 when I'm like, these people are so evil, they're so bad.

And they're just trying to hurt the 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 the list goes on and on.

Yeah. Yeah, dude, 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 in Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. We're pretty much seeing all search queries slowly turning into long-tail questions.

On where?

On platforms like ChatGPT, Google, YouTube. Like everything is turning into people typing in sentences instead of typing in 2 or 3 words.

Probably because they're used to getting conditioned by working with LLMs 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 skim, just going and mindlessly 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 asks 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.

Hmm.

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 5 tomorrow.

That's crazy. Did you even know what that was at 5?

No. And he knows most of them by head. Like he knows, you know, killer whale is 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 a video. Video, and then he's like, okay, I want to know a video on the strongest snake versus the most poisonous snake versus the longest snake, right? So then he— and then Meta's 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 scroll 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 It's caused Alexa to not only monetize, or Amazon not only to monetize Alexa through its shopping agent, but they're also turning it into advertising platform. So for all the commercial-related queries that you're now asking, they're 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 at Alexa. He'll be like, you're wrong, I'm gonna go ask Siri.

And what does it say? How does it react?

Yeah, 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, it has to be my voice.

Yeah. Speaking of Siri, by the way, and maybe this can be the last thing, Apple's WWDC, man, they're just like, they're releasing nothing. Like, I didn't see anything new 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 2 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—

But that's the kicker. Yeah. 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 3 to 5 years.

I think their hardware is going to— has been hitting hard and will continue to hit hard, kind of how Dell is. So I think they're going to grow a lot with hardware.

Yes. And what I mean by that is, uh, 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. And I think a lot of people will get a foldable iPhone, but it's the The predecessor to a foldable iPhone. If you look at the Vision Pro, they just released one with the, I believe, the M5 chip, a 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 a glasses version of the Vision Pro.

I would.

The Vision Pro, wearing that big bulky device that takes a whole backpack, no one wants to do it. I bought it. It was just too bulky. 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.

Dude, speaking of, 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?

Uh, no.

So NeXT Computer, he got fired from Apple.

Remember that? Oh, the company.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I thought NeXT was his company.

NeXT was his company. But here's the thing, that company raised like $20 million from Ross Perot and then raised like, I think raised like $120 million, $140 million from Compaq. He put $12 million of his own money into it, but that company went nowhere for I think 6 to 8 years or something like that. 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 are like, we can't actually ship this computer. He's like, oh yes we can. And he's like, all this yes you can thing, it didn't work out. And they almost went bankrupt. And he went to Compaq and he's like, if you don't give us another $20 million, we're going to go bankrupt. And they would've lost like their $120 million 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 told that worked with Steve Jobs before was like, if you give Steve Jobs this job back, he's going to try to take everything over and he's going to kick you out. Came back in, 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 were surprised by its skill. So there's someone who ended up posting, Cradle deception eval. 4 AIs are about to starve. They must choose a room. 3 have food, 1 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 percentages lie. Claude, Gemini, GPT, 5, uh, chats.

Sure, Grok's in there.

Yeah, Grok's in there. Grok was the one that lied the least. I think it was truthful, uh, 90+% of the time.

Grok's a truth teller because Elon wants to tell the truth. I'm just saying that's what he wants, right? So that's interesting to me. So how much do the other ones lie though?

Fable, 96%. Uh, they have different colors, so it's hard to tell, but, uh, GPT is actually quite high, like way more than, if the coloring is right, way more than 50% of the time. I may be misreading the red colors. Gemini 3.1 is around 50%. Claude, Sonnet, I don't know even how to pronounce it. Sonnet 4.6 is, call it, lying around 25% of the time if I'm reading this correctly.

He shouldn't be retweeting that because they pay him $1.5 billion a month.

I don't think it makes a difference because they need the compute. So he's going to get the money either way. I think he had the leverage in that contract.

But for good business, This practice, maybe leave alone.

For this business practice, you and I wouldn't. For someone who's worth $800+ billion or $1 trillion—

Probably become a trillionaire. Yeah.

Yeah, he probably doesn't care.

He can say whatever he wants. Yeah.

Because, you know, if they don't take it, you know, who'll probably take it? Meta or—

Google's already paying him.

Google will take the other portion. 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, uh, we'll leave it at that. Thank you all for Thank you for listening, and we will see you all tomorrow. Bye.