Your Brain Hasn't Changed in 190,000 Years

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So Neil, did you know that 50 ,000 years ago, humans became way more successful because of this. So you would think that 50 ,000 years ago versus now our brains would be bigger, right?

0:35Eric Siu:Would you say they're bigger? Like I would have thought we'd have bigger brains by now, right? You're talking about the size of the brain or the usage of the brain? The size of the brain. I never really thought about if our brain was going to get bigger or smaller. Yeah. So we have roughly the same amount of horsepower we did 50 ,000 years ago. So this guy wrote this book, Matt Ridley, right? So British biologist looked at 200 ,000 years. Okay. So 200 ,000 years of human history. So for 200 ,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. So same skull size, Neil, same neural architecture, same raw capacity for language, planning, abstract thought.

1:10Eric Siu:But for roughly 190 ,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. So generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great, great grandparents had used. So no microwave, right? No Wi-Fi, no nothing, no car, right? Then somewhere around 50 ,000 years ago, the line on a chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent, then it exploded. The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. So what changed? It was not the brain, Neil. The brain had been the same for 190 ,000 years. It was not language when it existed long before the takeoff.

1:42Eric Siu:It was even before agriculture, which only arrived 10 ,000 years ago. So what changed, Neil, was this? And this is how it applies to business overall, okay? I'm going somewhere with this. So what changed was that humans started trading with strangers and when you start to trade with each other you start to also trade ideas too and so the velocity of trading ideas so two ideas that develop in isolation came into contact so you and i will make it like an idea baby for example right so the whole idea here is that you look at 10 000 years ago rising sea levels cut tasmania off from mainland australia a population of roughly 4 000 humans was now isolated on an island with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity they're the same brains same language same starting toolkit as or cousins 150 kilometers north.

2:23Eric Siu:The natural language experiment was not right. So what ended up happening, Neil, with the people that got isolated was they went the other way. They actually regressed. They failed to invent new tools. They're kind of just stuck in their ways, right? So how does this affect today? Here's how I think it affects today. Because you look at how quickly you and I can call each other. Okay, we used to call each other on Skype. Now you can call each other on the phone. We can text all the time. But when you're on Slack, for example, you move a little faster. But then when you have the whole brain, when you're talking to AI instead of Slack, whatever you're talking like you're able to do data pools a lot faster you're able to trade information a lot faster so that what that way now i think we're actually accelerating now because we're actually trading ideas a lot faster that's what i think so i didn't i never really thought about our brains actually the same size and it's actually trading not just trading but the trading

3:07Neil Patel:ideas that allowed us to move faster what about the raw and people just using ai and not learning on their own the rock the rot oh i thought you're talking about the rock like the rest no no uh so

3:19Eric Siu:So what it's basically saying here is like, so this is hopefully this answers your question a little bit over here because I'm reading the last part. This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026. Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is the property of the brain and brain is the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers. So here's what I think. I wouldn't say I'm the smartest person in the world, right? I will say that I've cultivated and I will say you've cultivated a good network.

3:47Eric Siu:We've done it in different ways. and that's how we've gotten smarter. You and I both know that we know a lot of people who are humble in life, who are maybe they're hungry, sometimes not so much hungry. Like I know one of our mutual friends, maybe very humble person, not hungry. But I would say that what it comes down to is smart. But smart is actually your relationship with change and your relationship with learning. So the most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They're the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors.

4:16Eric Siu:They're talking to more people from more disciplines. They're in rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other. And you do it in your different way by talking to people. I do it in my different way. Maybe I'm learning. Maybe I put together networks. But we've always done that.

4:29Neil Patel:So moral of the story is keep networking with others.

4:32Eric Siu:And keep learning, keep networking, and keep trading ideas. Because if you don't, you feel like you're dying. Like, look at me. When have you ever sat still? I've known you for 15 years, 16 years. When have you ever sat still? A lot. When? Eight hours every night. Dude, no. When you're awake, you know what I mean, right? Right? But look at the people who you get along with and also the people that maybe are a little slower and maybe don't achieve their potential. What is it? Do they sit still? They sit still quite a bit during their day, right?

5:02Neil Patel:I had someone complain to me the other day. They're just like, man, this is a lot of work. They got a new job. And I was like, what do you mean this is a lot of work? They're like, man, now I got to work four to five hours. I'm like, but you're getting paid for full time. I'm like, you're complaining about working four to five hours a day. I'm like, this is what's wrong. This is why you're not getting where you want to get in life. Dude, speaking of where you want to get in life, why'd you take all your kids stickers off your laptop? Dude, they kept putting more on my laptop and then it just started becoming a really messy collage.

5:34Neil Patel:So I'm just started ripping it off.

5:35Eric Siu:Well, Neil's very OCD. So you actually kept it on for a very long time. I was impressed.

5:39Neil Patel:Yes.

5:40Eric Siu:Yeah.

5:40Neil Patel:The image I didn't mind. And then they put like a border of stickers around it. then they started to take like these uh cloth based stickers like there was a pattern like a shooting star but it was the front side was made of cloth so you can like feel it and stuff and i was like no no no i'm like what are you guys putting on my laptop because that kind of stuff is really sticky and it's hard to take off so then i'm like this is getting out of hand so i just

6:02Eric Siu:started ripping it off oh well they want your attention that's what it is but isn't it interesting

6:07Neil Patel:we have the same brain i didn't i never thought really thought about that yeah i assume the human brain i didn't really think much about the human brain for all those years but i assumed it was very similar it's just as society and technologies change we've slowly adapted but that's why i

6:23Eric Siu:believe we're all going to have an ai sitting inside our slack that has that single brain or company brain or world brain thing because it allows us to trade information faster and allows us to move faster because you don't need to wait on things by the way like i found out something that i'm not going to go into too much detail here but we had uh i've never seen this before where I've heard about people gatekeeping like celebration. So for example, if a client went to Noah, for example, and told you, hey, good job, Noah, you would want to share that with a team, right? So I didn't realize this, but we had a situation where someone didn't, they wanted to hear that information first and they didn't want Noah to reveal that information first.

6:58Eric Siu:Isn't that crazy? That would be crazy. But like, if you're learning that faster, you're going to make a move faster is my point. So anyway, you can pick the next one.

7:07Neil Patel:Did you see Anthropic? they made an announcement and a search in a journal running an article on this. They started to ask the AI industry to hit the brakes and they ended up writing an interesting take on SEO and what it means for markers. But in essence, they're saying that at this point, AI is moving so fast that it can start learning from itself. We all need to be very careful and it's moving at such a fast pace that humans can't necessarily even keep up. Now, what's interesting here is If they start hitting the brakes, you're going to start seeing a slowdown and the evolution of more things like Google AI mode, AI overviews, which is an effective click rates, right?

7:50Neil Patel:When an AI overview shows up, I think the last stat I saw today, and I don't know where it came from, was clicks decreased from 15 % to 9 % when there was AI overviews present. Nonetheless, even though Anthropic is saying, hey, we should all slow down, I don't believe Google, I don't believe Microsoft or OpenAI or anyone else is gonna slow down. I think it could just be Anthropic that would be slowing down if that's what they're really pushing for.

8:21Eric Siu:I think there's two things here, Neil. So you know, Anthropic has like, I don't know, seven co-founders or something like that. They were originally founded on the idea of AI safety. So they have to continue to fit that narrative. It's like a marketing thing for them, right? Here's the other thing. They say that, but what came out yesterday, Fable 5, or maybe the day before, which is Anthropix, it's like a watered down version of Mythos, right? And I've been using Fable 5. Quick break. Look, I know what you're thinking. Another AI content tool. Great. More garbage content on the internet. And I thought the same thing.

8:51Eric Siu:That's why we spent years building ClickFlow differently. Here's actual feedback from a user. It's sophisticated, grounded in real language, authoritative, but not academic. You've hit the sweet spot. That's not AI slop. that's content that you would actually publish. ClickFlow also helps with things such as internal linking, building FAQs, and reporting on the content performance. If you're skeptical, you can just go to clickflow.com and try it for free for 14 days. And if it sucks, just cancel. But I don't think you will. Back to the show. And I want to call the genius of Anthropics Marketing here.

9:21Eric Siu:So they give you Fable 5, which is their latest model, for the next 12 days or so free. So they basically want you hooked on that drug and then they'll charge you usage. And so usage means you're going to be Bayon API. They'll probably have a version that's including your subscription, but my entire team is using Fable right now. I was like, guys, I typed in all caps in our AI group. I'm like, go to town on this right now. You have 12 days to do it and I can see all of your usage. I want to see you go to town. I want to see you spend. Is it free for the next 12 days is what you're saying? It's not free, but it's not charged like double.

9:51Eric Siu:It's usually charged double of Opus. I just want to see what people are able to build because they do say they're going to move it back to usage or kind of take it away. So I want the team to use as much as they can. And the interesting thing is they're using it to solve things that they couldn't have solved before where it would get stuck, like pulling specific data from HubSpot, for example. I listened to the CEO of Palo Alto Networks on the All In podcast, right? Did you hear that one? I did not. So they did a liquidity summit, which is like for investors, right? And he's like, dude, Mythos, what it solved for them was that it basically solved some cold issues that they have, security issues.

10:28Eric Siu:In days that would have taken five to seven years, right? And it's legit stuff. And so I'm seeing the same thing where it's completing. I couldn't get like Opus 4A to complete something around like a dashboard that I was trying to build before for the team. And now it's like, hey, I'm getting stuck. Yesterday, it one-shotted it. So it's extremely powerful. And the people at Claude are saying that this is a step up from like December was like when it felt like a step up for me, right? Now they're like, oh, this is the next step up. And it kind of feels like it.

10:54Neil Patel:I'm curious on how many more step ups they can get before you start seeing diminishing returns. Yes. Yeah.

10:59Eric Siu:I think we're getting close to it because they say that a mythos-level open source one is probably two, three months behind. So I do think - That's it? Yeah. I think you and I are going to - Most people are going to be paying for open source for the majority because a lot of intelligence, like if I'm cleaning your toilet, Neil, like I don't need a lot of brainpower behind that, right? So I can probably go with like an open source model.

11:19Neil Patel:Yeah. You saw the article on Microsoft, right? I believe it's somewhere around 100 ,000 engineers. Beginning of the year, they had their team focus sometime in January on a new application around one of the strongest AI models that they were building internally. And it took them three months to complete. And you know what happened after the three months? What? It was useless because it changed so much that they had to start all over again. Yep. Like this stuff is just moving extremely fast. And with it moving really fast, you saw SparkToro announce new data on Google's zero search click data. it's now up to 68 % no clicks from a Google search.

11:59Neil Patel:So only 32 % of searches are actually causing clicks.

12:02Eric Siu:Yeah, I saw a version of this. I saw it from Rusty Brick. I think you might've saw it just from Rand, maybe. I saw it somewhere on the social web. Yeah. So what I've seen here from Rusty Brick is, so this is from SimilarWeb, and I think it's a Sparktoral and SimilarWeb collaboration. So it shows only 27 % of clicks from Google go to the open web now. It used to be a lot more. So you might be referring to this. I'm showing Neil a chart over here. So you can see from 2016 to 2026, Google zero click search growth, meaning that the number of clicks that don't land on a website from search. So in 2026, the number of searches with zero clicks was 45%.

12:39Eric Siu:Today it's 68%, which is what you're talking about, which is crazy. You look at this, this is a decade out. It used to be 55 % of searches had at least one click. Now it's only 32%.

12:50Neil Patel:Yeah. Keep in mind, Google is also much more popular, so you can still get a lot of traffic. But if you're optimizing for traffic, and I'm not saying you shouldn't track that metric anymore, that's two different things. But if you're optimizing solely for traffic, you're losing the game because the game now is to be the cited answer. It's not about ranking. It's about being the cited answer. When anyone types in a question, your company, your products, your services are mentioned. That is the new goal.

13:19Eric Siu:You know, Lily Ray had this tweet related to what you're talking about here. So she tweeted this 22 hours ago. I was actually thinking about this today. More fan out queries actually makes SEO more important than ever, not less. And it means more sites get opportunities to be a part of the answer than with traditional 10 blue links. So AI search actually expanded SEO. And this is a quote retweet on this guy, Chris Long. So he said, holy snikes. I don't know what snikes means. Holy snikes. Chat GPT has dramatically increased the number of fan out queries that they're using. So fan out query, just so everyone knows when you're searching something, it'll show the different queries, like the long-term queries that they're using.

13:54Eric Siu:I'm now seeing these instances of prompts that trigger 30 plus fan out queries, which means that SEO still matters, guys.

14:01Neil Patel:It still matters. And, you know, when people say keywords don't matter anymore, kind of, you still have to look at keywords and the questions people are answering or asking, but more so you got to optimize for topics, but still pay attention to keywords. Yep.

14:18Eric Siu: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.

14:26Neil 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.