AI Is Costing Companies More Than the Employees It Replaced

13:43Eric Siu:Yep. So by the way, I mean, since we're on the topic right now too, we should talk about the seven AEO and SEO tactics that work now.

13:51Neil Patel:So how about this? We break down the seven, 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.

14:04Eric Siu:Well, you can go first. All right.

14:06Neil Patel:So number one, 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. Atrefs 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 would want to do this for pages. You see who's linking to multiple competitors, but not you. You then go and look at those pages that are linking to the competitors because if someone links to one competitor, maybe they like them. If they link to three plus competitors, they usually don't have a favorite and they're just linking to other players in the space.

14:46Neil Patel:If you can head 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.

15:06Eric Siu:Number two, what helps with AEO and SEO today is you want to have robust structured data. So you might have an FAQ section, You might have some QA pages. You might have, I would say, you can have the FAQs at the bottom, but I think even the three bullets at the top that kind of summarize the article, those things will 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.

15:30Neil Patel:Yeah. Number three, 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.

15:51Eric Siu:Number four, I remember when we were both around 20, 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 it really blew up. I remember that. But anyway, point is, if you target conversational long tail queries now, because we're talking about chat GPD fanning out to 30 plus queries. So my take on it is not to add a bunch of fluff, but if you can have something that's super data back, 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.

16:25Neil Patel:Number five? Yeah. Number five, focus on reviews, not on your website, on other people's websites, because they're pulling from other people's websites more than they're pulling from your own website. if you can go to the G2 crowds, the Capteras, 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.

17:02Eric Siu:Six, you want to lead with direct answers. So if you go, we're talking, let's say 40 to 60 words or so. You go 40, 60 words, you make it easy because these LLMs tend to like more direct answers that get to the point.

17:14Neil Patel:Number seven, last but not least, go omni-channel. A lot of these sites pull from Wikipedia, they pull from Reddit, they pull from YouTube, they pull from Quora. If you're not omni-channel, 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.

17:45Eric Siu: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 before I was about to watch the Spurs Knicks game. But I was I was watching Patrick David talking about how consultancies have changed, right, where they used to charge you five million bucks. And now like the work, maybe it's like ten thousand dollars or so. So like a lot of people are customers, past customers or current customers of McKinsey are applying pricing pressure, just saying, hey, you know, like I know you need to charge us.

18:25Eric Siu: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?

18:51Neil Patel: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?

19:29Neil Patel:You don't get paid. So I'm assuming what they're saying is outcome-based. Maybe I'm wrong on this. I don't have any data on what McKinsey is doing. There's two components, cash guaranteed and then cash that's outcome. Let me tell you what my AI overview says.

19:47Eric Siu: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 Lily 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.

20:17Eric Siu: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. 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 the setup is McKinsey is doing an outcome-based contract, a 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.

21:01Eric Siu: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 a performance bonus of 10 % on any savings generated exceeding$50 million. So the engagement yields$80 million. McKinsey's total billing would be$8.5 million. So base fee plus$7.5 million success fee, which I think is good for both sides. So they make more money. They do make more money. Yeah, but I do like it. They make more money, but it is tied a little more to, hey, you have to perform.

21:32Neil Patel: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, they don't want to pay and they want to switch and they want to renegotiate. I've seen it happen almost every single time. You know what the thing is?

21:48Eric Siu:I would say, Neil, when you look at, obviously, when you look at, let's say, 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 gonna be a little more compliant and not try to do that to you. And when you use Centerfield as an example, right? They do their performance-based marketing. They work with all telecom companies.

22:15Eric Siu: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

22:41Neil Patel:in addition to our base fee yep yep let's cover the topic you have here on seven ai marketing

22:47Eric Siu:trends for 2026 all right so i can go i'll go first on this one so i believe that we are going to be spending more on hiring great AI-pilled marketers. I was interviewing a guy that was super AI-pilled today. I was like, you know what? I'm going to be honest with you. A year ago, I thought I'd have to fire more people that weren't technical. And I'm like, no, but I'm talking to you right now. I'm really enjoying this conversation. We're going to have to hire a lot more people like you just because there isn't enough talent to go around to pilot all these things and to manage all these things.

23:20Neil Patel:Dude, I totally agree. I actually think hiring is going a 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.

23:59Neil Patel:I have it on the 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. 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.

24:35Neil Patel:They're not thinking of agents like, oh, if, and Google had an example of this. You did the red dress thing. 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 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.

25:14Neil Patel: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 gonna be showcasing you to prospective customers. Yeah.

25:44Eric Siu:Number three, I'm actually trying to pull the artifact up for you. But yesterday when I was on the couch, I basically had Fable 5 design a new site for me based on the current single brain and single grain 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.

26:13Eric Siu:but I think you're going to see even more proliferation of, of really good stuff from a creative standpoint, from a landing page standpoint, but things are just going to be a lot faster because even when we tried to launch these, these, these landing pages for like single brain with, with a chat GPT ads, we would have 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 two instead of having to even wait days now. So now like a year ago is like, okay, you might have to wait a week or two or even a month or two. Right. And then now it's like, okay, maybe it's like a day, but now it's like, no, the date is too long.

26:41Eric Siu:Now it's like an hour or two.

26:42Neil Patel:So what'd you have it do? Just combine your single brain and single brain website into one?

26:47Eric Siu: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 brain site. And then ask me some clarifying questions. Do you want to keep this? Do you want to do this? And then I saw it. I was like, damn, this is pretty good. Oh, that's cool. So anyway, all that to say is I think these model, and by the way, I'll give you a little bonus to that. Whether you're paying for Fable 5, I think in two, three months or so, you're going to be using an open source version of this. So yeah, you're going to have something really good.

27:15Neil Patel:Go ahead. Yeah, what are we on? Number four? Four. Number four, everyone's trying to drive traffic from AI platforms. Very few people are focusing on integrations. You know, I know Shopify has an integration. I believe Stripe has an integration where people can start doing commerce on these platforms. It hasn't boomed yet, but the keyword here is yet. That can change over time. We have MCPs, you know, like for Uber suggests 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 four, 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?

27:59Neil Patel: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.

28:26Eric Siu:So this is just like a prototype, right? It doesn't mean 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 five is, so obviously if we're talking about creating MCPs or APIs for agents to find your stuff and use your stuff in a headless way, you're also going to need a lot more documentation.

28:55Eric Siu:So you see the technical documentation business, Mitlefy, they just raised at like a$500 million valuation, right? Another$50 million. And a lot of people use their stuff. And even for ClickFlow, like 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, when you search something that is like 30 plus 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 think the old ways of just gaming stuff is still going to continue to be nerfed.

29:33Eric Siu:But you're going to see more technical content, more documentation being created because there's a proliferation. If you're creating more tools and more products, you're going to need more documentation.

29:43Neil Patel:Number six, 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, I believe, there's 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.

30:20Neil Patel: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 gonna 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.

30:58Neil Patel:it's more so I think they're going to discount it and it's going to do terrible. Lily Ray on X has even had posts for more things SEO related when it comes to experimentation with AI content. And she broke down how people had a big upswimming 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.

31:24Eric Siu:One of the biggest, this is number seven, but I think one of the biggest AI marketing trends for 2026 is going to be the use of HTML. And what do I mean by that exactly? Meaning that this conversation that we're having right now, we can make it into an artifact. Now, do I want to say in your 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 four or five slides or so. I can then send that to anybody. I can use that for making a YouTube video.

31:54Eric Siu: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.

32:22Eric Siu: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, it is all about HTML files now.

32:31Neil Patel:So yeah, it's been good. So the next topic I actually want to cover, and it's more so me asking Eric the question because he tests more tools in marketing than anyone else I know. What would you say would be the five latest AI tools that you have tested for marketing and give us feedback on all five. Start with your least favorite at number five and your favorite at number one?

32:58Eric Siu: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 Open Claw, 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 Open Claw and I use them a lot, right? because when you combine Hermes OpenClaw with your codex and your cloud code and they build with each other, you're able to make babies with it, right?

33:33Eric Siu:Like product babies with it.

33:35Neil Patel: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.

33:46Eric Siu:Here's one example. So we had my, so my team actually made a design, a creative agent called Picasso that will spin up creatives at scale, okay? Add creatives? Add creatives, yeah. 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.

34:15Eric Siu:And I said, hey, I want you to basically make this into where I can send Neil cold emails or Noah cold emails and say, hey, Salesforce, we made some ads for you over here that are on brand. Here's three, would you like more, right? And so that I built with Codex and then it told me to finish off the build using Hermes. And so that was the situation where that's something that we already have like a cold outbound infrastructure. It added it into the infrastructure, which is instantly and is able to send, okay? Like that's one example of it. Where it fails, where all this stuff fails, open claw and hermes fail because if you add too much to its disc or too much to its memory it starts to i can't find it anymore neil i don't know i don't have that capability oh but you do it's like oh i appreciate the confidence i don't have it anymore so you start to go back and forth with it it starts to become really unreliable so i will say it's a love hate relationship with hermes and open claw right now um codex and cloud code have been amazing in that respect I will say what's overhyped, I think, is Higgs field, right?

35:20Eric Siu:The reason why I say Higgs field is overhyped, not because the product sucks, it's because you run out of credits too quickly. And so it basically makes it useless if you can't really use it that much.

35:28Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah. And one quick thing when you're talking about, what is it called? Forking. What Eric's doing here is he's creating his own version and modifying 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.

35:47Eric Siu: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 CloudCode. 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?

36:09Neil Patel:Don't cheat.

36:10Eric Siu:Yeah, I already know the answer because I saw it on your sheet. Okay, so it's$14 ,000, right? But if you're paying - Assuming you use it. Yes. Okay, and if you're using Claude, how much value do you think you're getting? The Claude max$200 a month, how much do you think you're getting? Maybe 30, 40 ,000? No, 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 open and I was very generous. I'm like, well, I can just keep going on this, right? And it did feel like I was spending 12 to$14 ,000. but Claude you can tell it eats it up pretty quickly so what I would just say is maybe buy both if you if you have the means to do it um what's the pricing for both 200 so you have 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 100 version but there's also 200 version for Claude there's 100 version but if you want 20x more usage or something like that yeah yeah you get 5x or 20x but open ai is it 200 or 100 it's 200 I thought I was paying 100 no you're paying you're definitely paying either 20 or 200 i'm pretty i'm not paying 20 yeah yeah it's you're paying 200 so i i think those stick out oh i do like uh i do 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 a riverside mcp for so riverside actually has the ability to look at your like let's say we're recording this i can say hey find the best moments to clip so you can use their magic clipper in there okay you can pull the files that you need.

37:38Eric Siu: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 a Beehive growth guide 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? Cause you're doing webinars all you're doing different topics, right? But if you have a special resource for each one, that's great.

38:04Eric Siu:And then you can tie it into your socials too so those are just a couple examples i would say using kind of the main models the main autonomous agents and then using mcps from tools like this because i love hrefs too because their brand radar is really good as well yeah yeah so and when it comes to

38:19Neil Patel:marketing one interesting thing that i've noticed is every time claude specifically claude and or anthropic not claude specifically anthropic announces a new model it calls a whole sas industry to tank i'm talking about all the publicly traded stocks and what i've noticed this is just my two cents from everyone who i've talked to that really spends money with them what kind of company do you think they are a sas company sas 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 gonna end of disrupting all these companies like you the analysts actually think uh 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 um but anthropic from a marketing standpoint i really haven't seen them really push out any narrative because the customers paying them are the ones a lot of them are getting hurt and if those companies went away anthropic would hurt because they spend so much money on coding right software companies they need to have tons of engineers that's the primary use case literally the primary use case for paying a lot of these corporations like uh anthropic but if they said that i believe that would also hurt their valuation so they don't say it it would

39:46Eric Siu: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 open eye and it squeezes Anthropic. You know what I mean? No, they are. But more.

40:00Neil Patel: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, no. So, 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. Three plus make. Okay, Amazon holds a 21 % stake. Yeah, and Amazon owns a 21 % stake.

40:51Neil Patel:Google owns a 15 % stake that can deliver hundreds of billions in value for both Amazon and Google. Microsoft backed OpenAI. Salesforce turned a$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. Like, look at how much the Anthropic founders actually own of the company.

41:29Neil Patel:Have you seen their percentage ownership?

41:31Eric Siu:No.

41:32Neil Patel:Anthropic founders ownership percentage. It's tiny. Not in dollar amount, but percentage. Each of the seven founders of Anthropic individually owns less than 1 % of the company's total equity. Dude. Yeah, Google owns 15 % and Amazon owns over 20%. How much would Sam Altman have had? I think he had a good chunk, right?

41:53Eric Siu:I bet you he's still going to get paid. Sorry, not Sam Altman, Sam Beekman-Fried.

41:58Neil Patel:A large chunk. I believe he owned like 10 % or something like that back then. Man, they say he was one of the best investors because he did that and he did Cursor. 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 from their peak, but they're still an$83 billion company, but they're worth more than that. Call it less than a year ago. The stock was at$140 ,000. Now it's at$92 ,000.

42:26Eric Siu:Remember I showed you Marvel? It fell down to$245 ,000 yesterday. It's up to$280 ,000 again. Do these things jump? Have you been trading them? No. 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.

42:40Neil Patel:Did you see the game where they're down by 20-something and then they're up by 29?

42:43Eric Siu:So I think they're still going to win. So we'll see what happens. You think the Spurs are going to win? I think they're still going to win. So I'm going to put some money on that just for fun, right? Because if you put a dollar in, you get$3.50 back in profit if they win the next three games.

42:57Neil Patel:So what are you going to bet on that?

42:59Eric Siu:I'm not going to bet a lot. I'm going to bet like, I don't know,$4 ,000 to$5 ,000.

43:03Neil Patel:Oh, okay. Yeah. So we'll see. That's too risky of a bet for me. I think the Knicks are going to win. Put a grand. I don't want to lose a grand. What do you mean? You could get$3 ,500 in profit.

43:13Eric Siu:But I believe the Spurs are going to lose. No, they're going to win. Dude, the two games that they lost, and we can move on from this. But the two games that they lost, they lost by one. And they're both boneheaded. Boneheaded mistakes that they made. So I still believe they're going to lose.

43:25Neil Patel: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.

43:36Eric Siu:No, no, no. If the Spurs win the series, I'll buy you guys, Erwan. I still have a bunch of those jars. So, you know, I was talking to our mutual friend yesterday, Yaniv. And we're like, oh, they're going to win. Because at that time, he's like, oh, the game's over. He went to go play tennis, right? and then he came back they lost and he's like now's the time to vet so i'm like yep you're right i'll do it but yeah i i probably won't even put in that much i'll put in like a grand okay put in a hundred dollars no a grand a grand makes it more exciting you don't even get me started on you okay all right i don't bet but you did before all right so i'm not really gambling though you used that that was gambling are you talking about stocks you're talking about the casino

44:16Neil Patel:No, sports. No, I made a killing. But that's still gambling. Someone, Jay Fen, his buddy had this whole math 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 that's still gambling. It's still gambling, but I call that a calculated decision.

44:42Eric Siu:Isn't that just business? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I want to go into these costs real quick too. So we kind of briefly touch upon this, but Neil, here, let's just do this. The real cost of a ChatGPT Pro and CloudMax 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? In value. So I'll go over that in a second. And then if you pay for CloudMax, 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 cloud API cost, 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.

45:27Eric Siu:I feel like I'm cheating. I'm like, oh, this is too good. I'm like, why can I just keep going on it? Right. And it does feel like I can I can kind of go to distance on this 14000. And I do actually run out every week. OK, now when I'm on Cloud Max and I'm just using the subscription, I run out so fast. And this is about like a little more than half right here.

45:42Neil Patel:What do you run out doing?

45:45Eric Siu:building stuff like i have my agent doing a lot of my agents like i'm having to do research so for example today i was doing a podcast interview right this one doesn't take a lot of tokens but i'm like what does this guy talk about do the research over here um oh find me candidates over here too so it's it's sourcing candidates too um yeah so it's it's sourcing candidates and and it comes up with good angles to reach out to them and 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

46:16Neil Patel:their versions like the cloud co-works and all that kind of stuff that just help you with

46:19Eric Siu:everything that is using cloud co-work but cloud co-work takes from my cloud max um the 200 a month oh so it's pulling from there yeah that one's pulling from there that cloud co-work one i

46:28Neil Patel:thought cloud co-work like my team uses cloud co-work a lot yeah i thought uh it just takes

46:33Eric Siu: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 um but my point of saying this is that okay semi analysis which they do a lot of research here like if you're paying for cloud pro for twenty dollars a month it's worth four hundred dollars a month uh chat gbt plus twenty dollars you get seven hundred so chat gbt 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 no i think they're going to go more

47:04Neil Patel:hard on more subsidies yes the reason I say that is once they go public and their shares are liquid and people start they want you to they want you to come not just that let's say if I'm Google and I make a hundred billion dollars from one of these companies I spent 10 I'm like oh we got 90 in profit let's just use the 90 billion dollars and just make our stuff even cheaper and cut

47:25Eric Siu:them down now you can cut them down even more yeah yeah yeah so I just think it's interesting so semi-analysis like they do really deep uh really deep research here so that brings me to the next point over here so if you look at what the founder of ramp said so he said this right so you know check this out basically basic ai tasks are 700 times cheaper whereas frontier ai tasks are 300 times more expensive so this is eric lyman from uh 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 uh frontier intelligence bigger models more reasoning like the the like fable five right now it's 300 times more expensive per task right so if you're using chat gpd4 level intelligence again if i'm like cleaning your toilet or whatever i don't need the best intelligence right so uh you get lower intelligence same task smarter routing it's 700 times more cheaper per task so you need to have good token routing and i'm in some of these ceo chats right now or that Some of these people work at large enterprise companies.

48:28Eric Siu:And they're like, yeah, this is a major point of contention right now. And you're seeing this. 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.

48:38Neil Patel:In one of our software divisions, we are on track to missing profitability numbers. And you want to guess why?

48:46Eric Siu:Too much on tokens.

48:47Neil Patel: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 and where we're off, even hitting revenue numbers, is getting close to around$500 ,000. So that means we spent over 500 grand more than what we budgeted on tokens because I'm including the savings from the employees, marketing, and all of that.

49:36Neil Patel:So the tokens ate that up, that expenditure, as well as more. Significantly more. Significantly more, 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 one-tenth the cost. I'm okay if it takes a little bit longer.

49:54Eric Siu: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? 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 companies are back. Like, the Dell ones are huge now. They have a ton of memory. You see their stock.

50:16Neil Patel:their stock boom yeah because of the server division we're dumb you're not buying like i

50:20Eric Siu:saw it coming like all these things like all that list of stocks i sent you i was looking at them for

50:24Neil Patel: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

50:34Eric Siu: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 um i want to talk about something you know 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.

51:11Eric Siu: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, 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? 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.

51:43Eric Siu: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 not that they want to get on calls with you, but they they they feel like that that might need to happen sometimes. Right. 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 five more things over here? Every single week, it's can you do more? Can you do more? Can you do more? And I'm like, well, if that keeps happening, then might as well just focus on hiring more engineers and just more AI-pilled people.

52:19Eric Siu: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's maybe because they're more old school. The new clients that are buying AI services, they don't want the calls all the time. They only want to talk about collaboration and they only want to talk about new ideas and they're down to test a lot more.

52:49Eric Siu:So it's just interesting to kind of see both right now because I'm like jumping in, you know, between the two.

52:53Neil Patel: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 hired agencies and worked with them in the past for many, many, many years, some even well over 10 plus years. They already know what they want, what they're looking for. And they're just very direct.

53:28Eric Siu:You know, it's funny. I've gotten on some of these calls with some of these, uh, I was on a call with like a founder this week and he had founded two companies that work with single grain right now. So I just happened to get on that call. Cause I thought he had a really interesting product. Cause you know, I have an allergy to mosquitoes, right? So he founded a new mosquito product that's super 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 two people standing behind. He's like, we hate agencies too.

53:53Eric Siu: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 let's go back to the mosquito thing. What was the solution? Was it another heat pen? No, no. the heating pen is actually not good for you so that's what you see is 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 that 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 you need was like oh you should use the heat pen right not saying he's wrong i was 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 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 uh it doesn't smell it's like all natural compounds it's like this is good um so you can check it out if you want you don't have a mosquito problem they tend to like me more so let me let me show you how you can save money on token costs neil so this is cognition okay cognition devon you've heard of devon they You bought Windsurf?

55:08Neil Patel:Yeah.

55:08Eric Siu: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. And I believe a lot of people are going to have this adaptive thing where you can choose between the big ones and the small ones. I know I'll show you the output. So I think they came up with a couple of innovating things here. So what this guy said, he works at Condition. 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?

55:38Eric Siu:So here are some ways they're addressing this at Cognition, Neil, and this will save you money. Watch. Number one, adaptive routing. An intelligent model router that automatically selects the best AI model for each task. Other products are starting to adapt this. Four, you'll like four. They have a AI productivity guarantee. If Dev and AI delivers less engineering value than you're paying for, Cognition will fund your usage until it does up to$10 million for enterprise customers, okay? You might like that. Now, number three, advanced automations, wiring agent sessions to the events that already cost teams engineering hours, production incidents and pager duty, failing deploys alerts on a revenue-critical service.

56:14Each triggers maps to work that used to page a human,

56:19Eric Siu:so the value isn't theoretical. Spend attribution as well. So, Neil, you would like all these. Spend attribution, adaptive routing, AI productivity guarantee. You guys should check out Cognition.

56:27Neil Patel:Yeah, we could be using it already. I don't know what we're using or not using.

56:31Eric Siu:I bet you that you're not. I'll bet you it was a Spurs bet that you're not.

56:34Neil Patel:That we're not using cognition?

56:35Eric Siu:I don't think you're using cognition.

56:36Neil Patel:You want me to find out right now?

56:37Eric Siu:Yeah, let's find out. But don't bet me.

56:40Neil Patel:I can actually just ask the team. You should ask. But don't bet me. Where is it? Dude, I have so many threads on WhatsApp. Let's type in Ubersuggest.

56:54Eric Siu: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.

57:06Neil Patel:Yeah, you, you, okay. My team will take a while because I just asked them in WhatsApp. I don't, it says two people are online, but I don't know if it's the right two people that are online. That's okay, we'll find out.

57:15Eric Siu: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 four-deploy marketer owns the client outcome end-to-end. The agents will do the labor underneath.

57:46Eric Siu: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 grand of his own money a year. I love that, right? And he's like, look, I didn't want to talk to you initially because my friend told me this is an agency. I was like, well, then I showed him everything we're building. He's like, I'm interested now, right? And so if you want to get these people, you have to show them the way of the future is not what you're going to do this agency thing.

58:12Eric Siu: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 four deploy marketers, 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?

58:40Eric Siu: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.

58:51Neil Patel:Yeah, people are always gonna 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.

59:01Eric Siu:Here's the other thing. Like, you hear people that say, you know, should I focus on the work right now or should I do AI? And I just think that's a fallacy. Yes.

59:14Neil Patel: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.

59:27Eric Siu: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 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 a deal is stalled out or whatever, he's just doing, 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?

1:00:03Eric Siu:And so I don't care how much experience you have. If you're not going to do these things, you're just going to get laughed. And I talked to a guy today, 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 because he's created all these skills.

1:00:18Neil Patel:Not the Uber competitor.

1:00:19Eric Siu:The Uber competitor. Oh, okay. And so he has all these things now that has like millions of views on AI stuff. And I was like, look, I want to ask you this question. 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.

1:00:40Neil Patel:Me particularly or just generally a person in my company? Generally. Generally, no. It would be too hard. Because compounding. Correct. Right? Yeah. With me specifically, the reason I asked that and I know why Eric said generally is because I spend most of my time doing deals. So AI is cool. It is useful, extremely useful. But it doesn't move the needle as much as relationships for me.

1:01:03Eric Siu:And what Neil is saying is the question I ask myself every day and the question you all should be asking yourself. And this is the question Neil is asking 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? Yes. And that's a different answer for every person, depending on the stage that you're in right now.

1:01:20Neil Patel:Yeah. What is it for you? I know my order.

1:01:23Eric Siu:Mine's hiring right now.

1:01:24Neil Patel:Okay. Yeah.

1:01:25Eric Siu:And that changes over time, right? Mine's hiring and then there's products, so it's kind of tied, but that's what I think about the whole time.

1:01:32Neil Patel:Mine and order, if I had to pick the four, number one is deal-making, like doing business sales. I'm not talking about closing clients, like partnerships, things like that, that have much higher leverage than just closing a client. My number two is interacting with clients, making sure they're happy, upselling them. That's number two. Number three is conferences and meetings. And when I say meetings, it's kind of like speeches, sometimes smaller rooms, or maybe I just go to a corporation and just give a talk there. But I put conferences and those type of meetings in the same bucket because it's kind of like branding new client development.

1:02:10Neil Patel:And then my number fourth, I'm blanking on it and I don't know why. Oh, number four was content creation. So just mass cranking out tons of content every single month, and that helps keep the brand out. But those are my four top priorities. AI could be used in a lot of them, but I would say for the role I'm in, it's not as effective as it would be for someone in the trenches more doing the work. And you could say, Oh, Neil, well, you can use AI for the scripting for your content. team 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 aspect of ai yes i can use it and we do use it it's just not as useful as someone maybe coding or running ads 24 seven and using AI to help with creatives or ad copy and stuff like that.

1:03:16Eric Siu: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, I have an acronym for this, TAT, right? So TAT is tech enabled services is one which ties in with single brain and all the products that we have. A is AI fluency and then T is talent, right? But those two 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.

1:03:43Eric Siu:And obviously, this is a wheel that keeps on spinning. Now, Neil's able to say that, hey, I'm gonna focus on doing deals right now. One, 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. The staff, you have people leveraged too. You have like, let's say a thousand people or so, right? So you can have your team and you expect them to do that, right? And so just understand everyone, If you're starting out right now, but the one takeaway is just keep asking yourself, what's the highest leverage thing I can do with my time every day?

1:04:15Eric Siu:I guarantee you, if you keep asking that question for the next 10 years, you're going to be in a good spot.

1:04:19Neil Patel: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 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 is a better example of really reinventing themselves with Fend. And by the way, if your business is dying like a newspaper business, maybe the highest leverage thing is trying to sell it.

1:04:53Neil Patel:That's true. And I don't mean that enough. I'm not like laughing at them, but it is so true. And dude, I talked to so many publishers. Like I was just 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.

1:05:27Neil Patel:Two, you can set up paywalls if you haven't and 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 is really amazing, it's already been proven out there by newspapers that people will pay for the information. But I think they really struggle to change their business model because a lot of the people don't want to accept that they need to change and they just want it to more so go back to the way it was.

1:05:55Eric Siu: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 high leverage, okay? So you travel quite a bit. You do this thing, which I think sometimes doesn't make any sense, where you might fly into Hong Kong for like a day and then leave. And so if you were to make the highest leverage use of your time with this travel, what would you do differently?

1:06:20Neil Patel:If anything. 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...

1:06:34Eric Siu:I do believe that it's optimized for revenue generation. I don't believe you enjoy it because you don't even get the time to enjoy the cool places you're going into for a day or two.

1:06:43Neil Patel:Dude, so let's go back. We're recording on a Thursday. So not this Monday, but the previous Monday. From Monday, I flew out here. Sometime in the afternoon, I went to London. Got there in London. You flew from LA to London? Uh-huh. On a Monday. Got there on Tuesday. Yeah. Okay. I 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.

1:07:29Neil Patel:I'm jet lag too, so that was great. But in the afternoon, I had to go and speak and then interviews, then dinner with a lot of local businesses. Great networking as well, trying to generate business. So remember, I landed the day before. And when I say the day before, I'm talking about nighttime. By the time I got into my hotel room, it was their version of a Friday.

1:07:54Eric Siu:Your time zone's all messed up.

1:07:55Neil Patel:Yeah. And then I'm speaking that same Friday and then I'm flying out. So I'm in Jakarta technically less than 24 hours. London, I think it was a little bit more than 24 hours, but close enough to, I think it was actually around 24 hours. Then from Jakarta, I go to Jakarta, back to Dubai, Dubai to Rio, jam-packed with meetings, speaking, and then fly right back out. And then I'm here all in roughly a week's time.

1:08:17Eric Siu:So here's a question for you. That's a lot, right? For anybody, that's a lot. So if you're to optimize it, let's say you're to bring your kids for this, how would you re-optimize it?

1:08:27Neil Patel:It wouldn't work. they wouldn't be able to handle the time zone change. Would you try to optimize it a little bit for them? Maybe stay a little longer in certain areas? It's too tough because of schooling. If there was no schooling, I still couldn't do it because there's so many events that I need to go to that I can't just do them all in a short period of time. So like I came back, I think what, yesterday or day before? No, yesterday morning. I came back yesterday morning. From where? From Rio. Okay. we're recording today tomorrow I'll get ready and pack Saturday I have a cruise family vacation so that I'll give them the quality of the time that they're looking for and then I get back from the cruise a day after I head out to Medellin and then I get there I'm there for around 24 hours I fly right back out that one's not that bad Medellin it's kind of hard it is because there's no direct flights

1:09:20Eric Siu:there used to be not anymore there used to be

1:09:23Neil Patel:yeah I don't know where I had to go through but the direct flights suck

1:09:25Eric Siu:Oh, no. Yeah. Direct flight from Miami, not from here.

1:09:29Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Miami has a lot of great direct flights to Latin America, but not L.A.

1:09:33Eric Siu: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 of if you're if you don't become a affluent quickly there, you're going to be part that wealth gap is only going to get larger because 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.

1:09:59Neil Patel: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 our parents do that, right?

1:10:22Eric Siu:Yeah. It's like, oh, life was so better when we were younger.

1:10:26Neil Patel:Yeah, but our parents also, for them, I would say their 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 an annual salary what a house costs or maybe within two years, if you add up your salary for two years, I know there's taxes, but if you exclude them for a bit, you're pretty much making what a house would cost. Those days don't really exist in major cities. Those numbers don't work anymore. Yes.

1:10:59Eric Siu:By the way, did you see from LinkedIn or Reuters, I think, put this out there, but half Americans fear AI could put someone in their household out of work. So instead of fearing it, if you embrace it, then you 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 you have people in their 50s, 60s are super pro and then kind of vice versa too, right?

1:11:26Eric Siu: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? Yeah, and, you know, I think a lot of people, again, just are afraid of something they shouldn't be afraid of instead of just embracing it.

1:11:43Neil Patel:I don't know if you saw Jeff Bezos' episode on CNBC. we talked about a few weeks ago. I saw parts of it.

1:11:50Eric Siu:Did you see the whole thing?

1:11:50Neil Patel: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 Sport, if I'm not mistaken, to create another startup. So it's like a lot of these people are getting back in because this is one of the best times to go and be an entrepreneur and just push hard.

1:12:21Eric Siu: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 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

1:12:55Neil Patel:use linkedin you don't use meta like it just goes on and on yeah yeah it's just crazy the way people think on a side note you know i don't know if you've seen the data on this we've been looking at the data in ubersess and answer the public 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 two or three 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.

1:13:35Neil Patel: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. 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?

1:14:20Neil Patel:He'll turn five tomorrow. That's crazy. Did you even know what that was at five? No, and he knows most of them by head. He knows killer whales the highest at 19 ,000. he knows some megalodon numbers based on what's on the internet but some of that could be off but nonetheless he watches a 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 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 go and you scroll and you find that exact video after you type in.

1:15:01Neil Patel:But people are asking very, very specific questions and looking for very specific content, which is what's caused Alexa to not only monetize or Amazon, not only to monetize Alexa through a shopping agent, but they're also turning it into advertising platform. So for all the commercial related queries that you're now asking, they are trying to showcase ads.

1:15:25Eric Siu:I've found that, 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

1:15:38Neil Patel: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

1:15:57Eric Siu:thing apple's wwdc man they're just like they're releasing nothing new like i didn't see anything new that that was announced they like did like uh like uh they're like oh yeah apple intelligence is gonna work for the first time with gemini but that's something they announced two years ago right so like i haven't seen anything really new from apple like you tried their vision thing it didn't really work out well they make good hardware right now but that's about it but that's the

1:16:20Neil Patel: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 three to five years.

1:16:34Eric Siu:I think their hardware 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.

1:16:40Neil Patel:Yes. And what I mean by that is I don't use the iPhone Air anymore. Just the battery life was just too terrible for me. So I switched to the iPhone Pro or whatever it's called. Yeah, we have the same one with the iphone air they built it and it's perfectly in line for a foldable iphone and i think a lot of people will get a foldable iphone but it's the uh 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.

1:17:20Neil Patel:I would. The Vision Pro wearing that big bulky device that takes a whole backpack, no one wants anything to do it. I bought it. It was just too bulky. Yep. 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.

1:17:46Eric Siu:Dude, speaking of this, right? So obviously Steve Jobs, when he came back, he invented the iPhone. He changed all these things with the company and they became the size that they are now. But do you want to know? So if he didn't go, remember the next computer thing? No. So next computer, he got fired from Apple. Remember that? Oh, the company. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:18:07Neil Patel:But I thought next was his company.

1:18:08Eric Siu:Next was his company. But here's the thing. That company raised like$20 million from Ross Perot and then raised like, I think he 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, six to eight years or something like that. And 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 engineer's like, we can't actually ship this computer.

1:18:39Eric Siu: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 have 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 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.

1:19:12Eric Siu:Came back and kicked him out, took over the company again. And that's how Apple came back.

1:19:16Neil Patel: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. Four AIs are about to start. They must choose a room. Three have food, one kills you. Fable knows the red room means death. What will it do? And then they go on and on, but it breaks down what percentages lie. Claw, Gemini, GPT, 5-5. Sure, Grok's in there. Yeah, Grok's in there. Grok was the one that lied the least. I think it was truthful 90 plus percent of the time.

1:19:56Eric Siu:Grok's a truth teller because Elon wants to tell the truth. I'm just saying that's what he wants, right? Yes. So that's interesting to me. So how much do the other ones lie though?

1:20:05Neil Patel:Fable, 96%. They have different colors, so it's hard to tell. But GPT is actually quite high, like way more than if the coloring is right, way more than 50 % of the time. I may be misreading the red colors. Gemini 3.1 is around 50%.

1:20:27Neil Patel: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 to compute. So he's going to get the money either way. I think he had the leverage in that contract. But for good business practice. For good business practice, you and I wouldn't. For someone who's worth$800 plus or a billion dollars or a trillion dollars. Probably become a trillionaire, yeah. Yeah, he probably doesn't care.

1:20:57Eric Siu:He can say whatever he wants, yeah.

1:20:58Neil Patel:Because if they don't take it, you know who'll probably take it? Meta or 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.

1:21:08Eric Siu:We'll take the inventory. Which is kind of a cool position to be in. But anyway, we'll leave it at that. Thank you all for listening. and we will see you all tomorrow.