We Did 320 Predictions, And The Results Just Came Back..

0:00Eric Siu:So Neil, I did something funny with AI the other day. I basically had it look through the last six months of our YouTube channel. I used the YouTube API for this. And I asked it to look at the predictions you made and the predictions I made and score us over time. How do you think you did with your predictions?

0:17Neil Patel:I have no idea. Call it six out of ten, seven out of ten.

0:21Eric Siu:Okay, so check this out. So it basically, okay, so let me, I basically, here's the prompt that I use for everyone here, okay? So if you use the YouTube API for the Marketing School podcast over the last six months, how has Neil's predictions been versus Eric's predictions over time, right? And it looked at 320 videos over the last six months, okay? And it looked through all the transcripts. Okay, so where Neil was right, number one, SEO isn't dead, it's shifting to transactional and revenue keywords. Okay, that's number one. Number two, AEI is overhyped in the short term. The verdict is yes, he's correct.

0:57Eric Siu:Number three, you still need humans in the loop for paid media. Creative is the mode. Yes. And then number four, economy is starting to turn around, partially right. And then number five, multiple AI platforms will win. So it scores you on these things. And then it basically gives me, it looks at your things and it looks at my things too. And so basically, here's the key takeaway here. And I'm going to give you a couple of YouTube API use cases, but I just thought this would be funny to mention to Neil because he's traveling right now. So, Eric, where he's been wrong. So, number one, I said Madness will take over in 2026.

1:33Eric Siu:I overshot. Okay. Well, AI beat human IQ in 2026. They're actually right on benchmarks, but framing was sensational. Okay. And then I said UBI is going to happen. Deflationary utopia timeline. Right. Too early. So, where I'm generally wrong is I will overshoot my predictions. Right. Now, for you, where Neil has been wrong, Neil underestimates the speed of AI displacement and then downplaying the coding revolution, right? So it gives all these quotes here. So overall scorecard, to your point, Neil, you said six out of 10. It said Neil is right, batting about 65%, okay? Strength is market structure calls.

2:07Eric Siu:So multi-platform, SEO shifting, not dying creative as a mode. He reads the macro correctly. Weakness is he's consistently six, 12 months behind Eric on AI velocity. Eric, I'm batting about 72%, My strength is technology trajectory calls are generally correct. He's a practitioner, not just a commentator. His best calls come from firsthand usage. Weakness is he's tendency to extrapolate personal experience into universal timelines. The excitement runs ahead of the adoption curve. Okay, here's the main thing for everyone. So the pattern, AI does a good job with patterns. And this is what I'm trying to give to everyone here.

2:39Eric Siu:You use a YouTube API, you use an X API. It will spot the patterns for you and you can get better from it. And Neil, I never thought about it this way, but it says the meta pattern. why this podcast works, Neil, is Neil is right about what persists. So SEO, creative, multi-platform. Eric is right about what's changing. Agents, coding, K-shaped work. Together, they cover the full picture better than either does alone. That's probably why the podcast works. Isn't that funny?

3:03Neil Patel:It is. And my favorite part out of this whole thing was how it states you are sensational. I thought that was entertaining because it doesn't matter if you're sensational or not, but it was just funny how it picked up on that. And it was like, you know, but it was spot on. And I figured roughly what my batting average is because I said six or seven, I believe, right? And I was right in between, 6.5. Yep.

3:28Eric Siu:And by the way, like if Neil's at 65%, I'm at 72%, neither of us is really that much better than each other. That's why this thing works, right? And Neil's has a lot of experience. I have a lot of experience. That's all to say that we're going to be wrong a lot of times. Like three out of four wrong is still a lot. And so any podcast you listen to, you have to kind of apply your own level of experience and thinking to it. But my point of saying all this, like the way I use this for YouTube, we use it to generate new ideas. We use it to look at other competitive channels, to look at ideas they're coming up with.

3:57Eric Siu:When you leverage a YouTube API to X API, do these things and you combine them, it actually helps a lot from a content generation standpoint because these things are really good at pattern recognition.

4:06Neil Patel:What I've learned over the years, and I think this has helped us actually do quite well. if you look at the batting average here, right? So call it three out of 10 times, we're both wrong. All right. Eric and I love to be proven wrong. So when we have ideas on what we think work for marketing, we love when people internally or externally want to challenge us, not because it's a fighting battle, be like, I'm smarter than you, or I have more experience. It's actually none of that. It's more so great. Prove me wrong. Because if the data shows that we're wrong, we're really happy because we found a new channel, a new avenue for growth.

4:47Neil Patel:And I think that's the biggest mentality shift that marketers need to have. You're going to have ideas on what you think works or doesn't. But if you disagree with someone, be open to looking at data and people who are trying the stuff that you disagree with, because you'll be shocked at how many times you'll find some winners in there. And it's not because you're wrong. It's more so because algorithms change. So what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow. And what doesn't work today may work tomorrow.

5:17Eric Siu:Yeah. So your relationship with change, we've said this already, your relationship with change and adaptability has to be really strong in this era. And I'll tell you what, Neil, I just came from a call where I was arguing with this head of growth from a well-known AI startup. And he's like, I challenge you on this. I'm like, well, I pushed back on this. He's Indian too. So I knew it would be fine. Like, because the bickering that we do on this podcast, right, we bicker all the time. And it was just like that. We're bickering. I was like, I just want you to know I'm not mad. And we just kept going on.

5:42Eric Siu:It was a public. There are other people in the room. I'm like, you're wrong here. And now we're pulling up data, proving each other wrong. But in the end, we respected each other more for it. Like that's also part of it too.

5:52Neil Patel:And it's really cool because as marketers, you should be open to when people share data or experiments, even if it's a really small sample size, don't push it away. Look, because no joke, you can always end up learning something new. And I was giving a talk in Toronto. I don't know if we talked about this a while ago. I forget the exact revenue numbers now, but there was a company that grew from like a million to call it 20 something million and monthly reoccurring revenue within like a matter of like three, four months. It was a really short time period. Crazy growth. And sometimes when people are doing these kinds of things in the leveraging affiliates, a lot of their tactics are aggressive.

6:33Neil Patel:And a lot of the way in their messaging is aggressive. So people could be looking at it like, they only grew because it's shady. And that could be the case. But when I look at companies like that, and Eric looks at companies like that, what we look at is, how are you able to scale that fast? Okay. Yes, maybe the ads were over-promising. Maybe they're pushing boundaries on areas Eric and I would not want to push on. But oh, the root behind this or one of the root causes for growth is not the sensational type of marketing because you were doing that three, four months ago. It's actually used AI to create 4 ,500 ad variations every single month.

7:11Neil Patel:And now you can say, okay, that's not that hard. Let's just use tools and crank out 4 ,500 ad variations. But if you're not doing it in a systematical approach and you don't have some reasoning behind what you're creating, you're just going to create 4 ,500 ads. A lot of them will be duds and you'll lose money on a lot of your ads because bad ads means inefficient advertising. But we start looking at the processes and what people are doing. We then take those tactics and implement it in legitimate businesses and legitimate strategies and we don't push too aggressive and we don't promise the world.

7:43Neil Patel:And we found over the years, because we met a lot of these people at these masterminds. That's caused a lot of, I would say, our growth over the years. I met a ton of them at War Room, right? Just people being really aggressive with forced continuity.

7:56Eric Siu:Yeah. What I would say is, by the way, you want to explain forced continuity to people? I don't think many people know that.

8:01Neil Patel:Sure. So to give you context, this was maybe more than 10 years ago or something like that. Eric and I would be sitting down in a round table. So a mastermind, think of like a group of marketers all getting together and people talking about growth. there were some marketers who talked about like yeah i took a business from zero to a hundred million i know that's more common in today's world with ai 10 years ago that was not that common you're like zero to a hundred million bootstrap no venture capitalist how oh i sell anti-wrinkle cream okay what makes your cream so unique oh just the same stuff but check this out we do a free trial and then uh we charge every single month so i was like but how does that convert why would most people does not pay.

8:44Neil Patel:They're like, oh, we just say it's a free time. We keep charging people every single month until they cancel. That's forced continuity because you're charging people when they don't realize they're being charged. To me, that's not an entrepreneur who is good or clever. That's just someone being unethical, especially in marketing.

9:01Eric Siu:To me, that's a, I mean, to be fair, Neil, I would say that's a short-term thinking entrepreneur, not a long-term thinking entrepreneur. Very entrepreneurial still. We've always said this on the podcast ever since we started this podcast close to 10 years ago now neil do things do black hat things in a white hat way so the black hat things that work often they're they're innovating quite a bit right and if you figure out how to do it in a white hat way which is clean then you're going to get the best of both worlds and so that's why neil and i were always trying to learn we've just always found too that when you try to do things short term it never ends up working out

9:31Neil Patel:dude the first person that actually told me on the black hat thing the white hat way was ryan dice because when I first met him, I flew to Austin and everyone was doing like a soap opera series with email marketing, which is a way to like drive people through different emotions. And then eventually got cosmic convert or doing a tripwire where you get someone to buy something really cheap. That's an amazing deal. And then you upsell them on higher price items to boost your conversion rates and your LTV. Both those models work. So when I met up Ryan in Austin, I remember him saying, he's like, look, dude, this whole space with info marketers, it's a shitty space.

10:09Neil Patel:But some of these marketers do some really clever stuff. Take those tactics and apply them to legitimate businesses and legitimate offers. Quick break.

10:18Eric Siu:If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads and have personalized landing pages to convert your customers at a much higher rate on LinkedIn, check out Carrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T dot A-I. Carrot allows you to do things that LinkedIn ads does not allow you to do right now. Check it out. There are publicly traded companies such as SEMrush and Sitecore that are using this right now. And you can use this to get ahead because if you don't use this, it will take you weeks, if not even a little longer than that, to make these ads. Because again, you cannot do this on LinkedIn.

10:47Neil Patel:So again, go to www.karot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

10:51Eric Siu:Dude, you want to speak of a... So I was speaking of arguing this week. I was debating someone. No, we can call this an argument. So here's the thing. We have the single brain website up, okay? And so this person who's a marketer, she was debating with me and she's like, this is AI slop. We have to redesign this page. And so here's what I said. I just said, hey, do you know how well this page converts right now? Like good or bad? She's like, I don't know. She thought I was trying to trap her or something. And I said, no, I'm just curious. You want to change this. You want to allocate resources to redesigning this.

11:24Eric Siu:How do you think it converts right now? She says, I don't know. Okay. So then here's the thing, Neil, that page, singlebrain.com, which is for sure AI, it looks AI generator, right? Doesn't matter.

11:35Neil Patel:Wait, pull it up and share your screen. We're on up here.

11:37Eric Siu:I'm going to share my screen. Neil, I'm going to get your feedback on this. Okay. So, and Neil will give his honest feedback. You know, I'm not telling him to say positive or negative things here. Take a look at this. You see this? Yeah. Okay. So this is single brain. Same headcount, 3X pipeline, 2X deal size, half the cycle time. Secure AI revenue agents. So that's what it does. Okay. So we build a managed team of AI agents that run your revenue operations 24-7. They source leads, write outbound, create content, recruit candidates, and get smarter every week. Work with us. I'm assuming you're pitching this to B2B companies.

12:08Eric Siu:Correct. This is B2B. These are revenue agents. And you scroll down. Your team spends time here. Here's the numbers over here. Here's your agent team over here. and then this is enterprise grade by default because we run it on NVIDIA, their enterprise runtime. So all that to say, okay, does it look AI generated? Yes, but would you qualify this as AI slop?

12:28Neil Patel:No, so I would only make a few main tweaks to it. I would reduce the white space, like there between the logo and the headline and between each section, there's a decent amount of white space. And I would also add more call to actions. But other than that, dude, this page isn't bad at all.

12:47Eric Siu:It's not bad for being AI gender. And I actually agree with Neil. Okay. So it took me like an afternoon to make this deal. Cause I didn't want to wait like six weeks to get a page up. Okay. Once we got this up, you know who came in? We got Vodafone came in. Okay. Enterprise company. They went through this. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't matter what it looks like. Like ready? Like this is all you need. And then we had, who else? We had Jim pass now known as well hub. They came through this too. So if it converts multi-billion dollar companies, who gives a crap, right? Just get it out right now and optimize it.

13:17Eric Siu:Come on, man.

13:18Neil Patel:If you're looking at the YouTube version, you'll notice when Eric was sharing, there's things like the logos aren't centered and stuff. And you'll notice that I did not say I would fix the logos here that I'm not saying you shouldn't fine tune those things, but most of those things do not have an impact on conversion. Your number one goal is speed and optimize for ROI. then someone else can go in there and fine tune the copy and adjust and tweak and a b test but it's like to me you you said you did this in a week and how many hours it took dude i did this

13:50Eric Siu:in two hours on my open claw and getting it up and launch it puts it on versell it it connected to my domain so i didn't know you know when you have to do like the whole like c name and like it did all of that stuff so it's got it set up on a domain and it got it live that's a great

14:07Neil Patel:website for two hours yeah if someone has an issue with it tell them to create go create a better one

14:12Eric Siu:in two hours exactly and here's the point neil said this guys we're not saying don't optimize and don't like design matters at the end of the day but in the beginning right now because the clock speed is so fast and you can you can roll these things back quickly you might as well just get it out now start collecting data and then optimize it don't say i'm going to take four weeks or eight weeks and do this because the human clock speed has changed it doesn't work anymore Human versus AI. Dude, I've been talking. My cloud cowork has been sourcing all these people. I've been talking to all these people from WPP.

14:40Eric Siu:Did I tell you about this yesterday? I think I did. No, not WPP. You didn't tell me about that. Oh, yeah. You told me a little bit about that. I've been talking to these holding company people. And by the way, these are like, we're talking COO, GM level, like, you know, executive VP. So they're high up at these companies, right? I'm like, so why are you guys looking to leave, right? And they're like, yeah, you know, we think the holding company model is done. And, you know, I like a lot of these people have said, oh, there's there's only so much I can take where I need to keep outsourcing to, you know, other countries for$20 an hour.

15:10Eric Siu:That's what the model is. I'm like, OK, cool. And they're like, yeah, we're not just we're not AI forward enough. OK, cool. So you must be very AI forward. What are you doing right now? Like, oh, I love ChatGPT. I pay$40 a month for ChatGPT. I make these agents that I was like, there's no$40 a month plan for ChatGPT. What are you talking about? Right. And you know what they do? They hide behind the whole like, oh, WPP. They only allow us to use these, you know, closed models or like, you know, we can't use all these other things, whatever. I'm like, just show me something that you built. You talk about these agents.