The Price Of Knowledge Is Going Towards Zero

0:00Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

0:28Neil Patel:Did you see how core wholesale prices rose like crazy? What did? Core wholesale prices. No, I didn't. So core PPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, increases seasonally adjusted 0.8%, more than the 0.6 % gain in December and well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate of 0.3%. Are we cutting interest rates? The 10-year went down. So usually if the 10-year goes down, that means they believe that rates are going to start going down. But they're worried about stagflation at this point.

1:01Eric Siu:Yeah. I mean, the world's crazy right now. But honestly, like, okay, we can say that, right? But honestly, like, we should just say, okay, the world's crazy right now. Like, here's what we would do about it. So here's what at least I would do about it. I only think there's one way through it. Like, if you're curious and you're actually out there, you're curious, you're learning, you're experimenting, and you're actually even a bonus would be if you're out there teaching, you will be unstoppable no matter what. I think all the stuff that people are talking about, Oh, there's AI, there's layoffs right now.

1:27Eric Siu:All you can worry about is yourself. And the only way out is through. So I'm looking over a hill right now. There's a hill over there, okay? So there's this giant tidal wave coming over that hill right now. And you can choose to surf that wave or you can choose to not do anything and just stare at it and just get hit by it, right? But I would say the more curious you are, the more entrepreneurial you are, and you don't have to be an entrepreneur. You can be like an entrepreneur. You're gonna do just fine and you're gonna surf this wave. And that's why during this period of chaos right now, as the world adapts, I think there's going to be some job displacement, but I think in that long term, we're going to be okay.

1:59Neil Patel:Yeah. And when you look at like the overall wholesale prices, which is just another version of inflation, for anyone who's not sure what I mean by core wholesale prices, think of a business buying a product that they are going to resell to someone else. So you're buying, you know, I'm Best Buy, which is electronics company, if you don't live in the US, and they go buy a TV from Sony, and then they go and sell it to end consumer, right? So they get a wholesale price. They don't pay the sticker price for a Sony TV. If they did, there would be no margin, no profit for them. And on an annual basis, core wholesale prices accelerated 3.6%.

2:38Neil Patel:Now, is that some of that caused from tariffs and other stuff? I don't know. But the market didn't like it.

2:44Eric Siu:We should talk about this because I actually have a tweet that's related to this. So we're talking about inflation. We're talking about stack. Actually, no, we're talking about stackflation, which is actually you have no growth plus inflation. Really bad, okay? Stackflation is terrible. Now, we're talking about, okay, you know, blocks doing these layoffs over here. I just pulled this up. I saw this this morning as I was walking back from the gym. So this guy, Jeff, previously at Code2 and Goldman Sachs, so finance guy. I think we actually work with this company. This is a crypto company. Yeah, we worked with this company before.

3:17Eric Siu:Say Network, okay? So spoke with, this guy Jeff says, spoke with several YC founders, planning a layoff, all engineers below staff slash principal. Basically everyone under L5. This only became viable after Opus 4.5 in December. The block layoffs are a signal. The floor just collapsed. If you're early in your career, the next few years are everything. Your edge will be how well you integrate AI into the value you create. The fastest learners are about to compound at absurd rates. Maybe that's part of the reason why, Neil, I'm excited for you, me, our other kind of friends who love to learn. But point is, you're talking about inflation going up and you're talking about these layoffs over here.

3:57Eric Siu:So the headline I had for this one is the price of knowledge work is going to continue to trend towards zero because a lot of this stuff can do the work. But the people who are able to kind of converge their roles into multiple roles, they will make a lot more money and they'll be in even more demand. So again, if you keep compounding yourself, you keep learning your consequences, you're experimenting, you're eating the poo-poo, you will be fine. Yep. All right. Right. So we have this interesting one over here, Neil, on the new distribution channel as agents. So Google, I think, recently just launched their WebMCP.

4:31Eric Siu:So Neil, when you look at the ClickFlow website or you look at the Carrot website, Uber suggests is a good example or Answer to Publish is a good example. Because you have, I think for both of those, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you have versions where they can just use it, right? Like freemium version, they can get a couple uses, correct? Okay. So, or we can talk about booking flights on Expedia, for example, right? So if you're going to be running these agents, whether you're using like, I know Perplexi just came out with a computer use one, you can use Cloud Cowork to do work for you and you can browse the internet.

5:00Eric Siu:You want these agents, you want to make it very easy for them to, you know, ideally not do web browsing, but call on MCPs and just book a flight using, you know, whatever travel website you're using or call on data from, you know, Ubersuggest or Answer to public or click flow or carrot right or spin up ads very quickly so um web mcp was launched by google okay and i think what are we talking about here google i think um stripe also launched something i think called um like to allow agents to interact with each other so i think you're gonna have a lot more i think you even had a post on how like a lot of traffic coming to your

5:37Neil Patel:website now is like what 50 bots is that what it is 51 of website traffic in general are bots now

5:42Eric Siu:Yeah. So, you know, this guy, Akush, is just saying that Andre Karpathy said that the new channel, the new distribution channel for software is agents. Agents don't just browse your marketing site. They watch your demo video. They don't watch your demo video. They don't click through to your onboarding flow. They call your CLI. So that's your command line interface. Okay, that's like using a terminal. They hit your MCP server. They read your docs programmatically. If none of those surface areas exist, your product is invisible to them. Look at how fast this moves. MCP went from zero to 97 million monthly SDK, so software development kit, downloads in 12 months, 10 ,000 plus active servers, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Cloudflare, all adopted it.

6:20Eric Siu:By December 2025, Anthropik donated MCP, oh, I didn't even know that, to the Linux Foundation because the standard had already won. Running an MCP server is now compared to running a web server. That's the new baseline for product discovery. What do you think about this? Yeah, I agree. You're just too tired right now.

6:37Neil Patel:I am tired. Dude, I'm like not daydreaming, but I kind of am. I can tell you don't have it anymore.

6:45Eric Siu:It's okay. I'll carry us through the rest of these 30 minutes. So, okay. I'll talk about it more. This is good.

6:51Neil Patel:I've been up for 27 hours at this point. So you just landed, right? No, I landed a while ago, but I'm working both time zones. So it's just.

7:00Eric Siu:That's on you. That's on you. Yeah. See, by the way, we should, I'll take a little quick detour here. So Neil, did you sign up for the peptide company I was telling you about? Literally, it's called the peptide company from our mutual friend, Jacob.

7:13Neil Patel:Mm-hmm.

7:14Eric Siu:Yeah. So did he give you the sleep peptides, Pinelon, Epithala? Are you trying them right now? I'm traveling.

7:22Neil Patel:Did he bring them to you? No. Oh, that's unfortunate.

7:25Eric Siu:Okay. Well, anyway, I'll give this to everyone. We can take a little detour here and then come back to talking about distribution channels. this is not health advice by the way but I was taking Penelon and that's I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly but that is a peptide and basically it it gives me super deep sleep and it leveled up my HRV which is my stress level so you want this to be higher let's so to like 107 which is pretty good and it brought my heart rate down from 45 resting heart rate down to 40 which is really good um so all that to say um with people people that are tired like neil who does traveling um there's a lot of travel hacking that you can do right and one of my other travel hacks too um is to also not fall asleep until you're in the time zone and then fall asleep in the right times that way you don't have jet lag but neil never listened to me for that one he just kind of works both both time zones so that's that's why he's dead right now and you have an app that uh

8:21Neil Patel:helps with it i don't know what it's called it's called uh it's called time shifter so it tells you

8:25Eric Siu:the right times to sleep and all that. Sometimes it's pretty brutal. It tells you to fall asleep immediately when it's like in the middle of the day. I'm like, how do you do that, right? Sometimes you need special stuff for that. But I'll leave that part alone. Okay, so coming back to this distribution channel piece, okay, so 85 % of enterprises are expected to have AI agents deployed. These agents need structured programmatic access to your product, okay? They need CLIs, MCP endpoints, and machine-readable documentation. A beautiful React dashboard is worthless to an agent trying to pull data into workflow at 3M.

8:53Eric Siu:So the way I look at this right now is, Yes, think about MCPs. Yes, think about building for agents. Yes, also, if you want to distribute your repos from a marketing standpoint, put it on GitHub, right? That's what Corey Haynes did. He did a really good job with that. But at the same time, you still need a dashboard for humans. So the stuff we're building for pay for performance right now, Neil, we do have a dashboard for like the outbound emails we're sending, the outbound sales calls that we're doing. Okay, that's one side of things. But even internally, we need a dashboard to manage all of our agents.

9:22Eric Siu:You need some type of dashboard, some type of control system to see what they're doing and how they're performing. And I will tell you, these agents just continue to compound every day. And by the way, even when I went to the gym today, I didn't realize I was running 10 different workflows while I was at the gym. And when I was sitting next to my CTO yesterday, we were flying back. By the way, we're sitting row 26 economy. It was great. So as he was talking to me, he spun up a couple of different things. but by the time he landed, he's like, dude, I just pushed something to GitHub that would have taken two days to do and I got it done in the middle of our conversation.

10:00Eric Siu:So I think one, you know, AI efficiency is crazy. That's one. The second one is build dashboards for your agents. The third one is, yes, you want to be looking at building discoverability. You want to make discoverability easy for agents because you're going to have a world where agents are doing a lot of the work.

10:14Neil Patel:You do. But the key here is because, dude, I was just in a heated debate about agents like, uh, 24 Hours. It's a big company. I was at their offices. I can't mention the company, but they own some of the biggest cars that we all see in Los Angeles and in all places all over the world. And they own more than just cars. They're a really massive company. So when you think about it, we're talking about agents and deploying at mass scale. And they were just like, oh, we want to do an agent for this. We want to do an agent for that. And they were showing me some of the stuff that they're building. And their biggest problem wasn't the ideas.

10:56Neil Patel:It wasn't actually even building the agents. They didn't have checks in place for how the agents were doing their work. I thought it was a smart idea to have a team continually go and build all these agents and get a lot of work done. And this group would help other departments internally create agents so then that way they could be more efficient. So think of it like as a centralized hub that just helps a lot of different teams than organization build agents. And I was like, the biggest problem here isn't the building part. If you're not actually checking the quality of the work, it could be costing you a lot of money.

11:30Neil Patel:I'm like, you guys need to figure out how to put that within your processes and systems.

11:35Eric Siu:Dude, that's, okay, Neil, I did this like two days ago, okay? So I've been building, my open claw has been sitting in my telegram. So it's really only been working with me as almost like my chief of staff assistant, if you want to call it that. It has a lot of context around the business, the goals, It's hooked in with a bunch of MCPs, okay? I added it into Slack two days ago. I added it into some of the private channels that we have. And people are working with it back and forth now. They're asking questions. They're querying data. They're asking for strategies. They're asking it to build things, right?

12:03Eric Siu:I'm like, holy crap. I'm just like open up this machine. And so to Neil's point, I do think you need a human in the loop to kind of fact check and check the data as well. You need a human in the loop to continue to fine tune it. The problem is I was building all these things out of my own entertainment. But now it's time for me to kind of release some of my babies into the wild and let my team work with it. Right. I'm still like, I think there's one thing to have a personal assistant. But when you have the personal assistant that knows what you want to hit and your goals and knows how you work and your team is creating data, like, for example, oh, hey, we created all these programmatic SEO pages around chat GPD ads a few weeks ago.

12:39Eric Siu:How is that going right now? Give me a four week table. Boom. Like literally in a couple of seconds, it spun out and everyone can see how things are going. Oh, what should we do about that? It seems like, what are next steps here? Well, you know, it's not performing over here and you're not driving any conversions here. You should do this. And I'm like, oh, hey, SEO person over here. What do you think about this idea? And it's just happening in real time, right? And it's amazing. And then I added to the sales channel too. Hey, how have we been doing with, look at our gong and look at our HubSpot.

13:05Eric Siu:How have we been doing in the last 60 days or so? What trends are you seeing, right? And then if it starts to repeat something, report something wrong, it's okay because the salespeople jump in. But the key thing, Neil, is that now they're starting to engage with it more and they're having conversations with it and it's moving things along. That is the key. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So.

13:23Neil Patel:On a side note, I just got this email. It's one of the best marketing emails I've gotten in a long time. Check this out.

13:30Eric Siu:Look, I'm so boring, guys, that Neil's starting to check his email in the middle of the conversation.

13:33Neil Patel:No, no, no. This is popped up. So I have an OCD where I always have to have zero inbox. I don't know why. So this is to my dev email. I get forwarded all my dev stuff when it comes to all the tech emails so that way I can see what my team is doing without asking them what they're doing. And we use Cloud, of course. But look at this subject line. Reduce your Cloud API costs. They're trying to send me an email that helps me save money, which would hurt them. But in the long run, it would make me more loyal to them and cause me to spend more money over time. I would use it more too. I would use it more.

14:09Neil Patel:So build efficiency with Claude. You're building with Claude. Now let's optimize your implementation. Here are four ways to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. Learn more and then they just break down a lot of different examples.

14:20Eric Siu:I was like, that's a great marketing email.

14:22Neil Patel:It's very rare that a company does what's beneficial for you and hurts them in the short run. And this hurts them. This would make them less money. But in the long run, it would make them more money and have a much loyal customer.