Your Brain Hasn't Changed in 190,000 Years

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So you would think that 50,000 years ago versus now our brains would be bigger, right? Would you say they're bigger? Like I would 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, pining, abstract thought. But for roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. So generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great, great grandparents had used. So no microwave, 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.

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 context so you and i will make it like an idea baby for example right so the whole idea here is that you look at 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity.

They had the same brains, same language, same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural language experiment was now running. 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.

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, you're able to do data pools a lot faster. You're able to trade information a lot faster. So that way now I think we're actually accelerating now because we're actually trading ideas a lot faster. So I never really thought about our brains actually the same size and it's actually trading, not just trading, but the trading ideas that allowed us to move faster.

What about the rot and people just using AI and not learning on their own? The rock? The rot. Oh, I thought you were talking about the rock, like the rest of it.

No. No. So what it's basically saying here, 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 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. We've done it in different ways. And that's how we've gotten smarter.

You and I both know that we know a lot of people who are humble in life, who are maybe they're hungry, sometimes not so much hungry. Like I know one of our mutual friends, maybe very humble person, not hungry, but

I would say that what it comes down to is smarts. But smarts is actually your relationship with change and your relationship with learning. So the most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They're the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows.

They are reading more authors than their competitors. They're talking to more people from more disciplines. They're in rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other. And you do it in your different way by talking to people.

I do it in my different way. Maybe I'm learning. Maybe I put together networks. But we've always done that. So moral of the story is keep networking with others.

Keep learning, keep networking, and keep trading ideas. Because if you don't, you feel like you're dying. 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. When you're awake, you know what I mean, right? Right? Look at the people who you get along with and also the people that maybe are a little slower and maybe don't achieve their potential.

What is it? Do they sit still? They sit still quite a bit during their day, right? I had someone complain to me the other day. They're just like, man, this is a lot of work.

They got a new job. And I was like, what do you mean this is a lot of work? They're like, man, now I got to work 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. So I'm just started ripping it off. Well, Neil's very OCD. So you actually kept it on for a very long time.

I was impressed. Yes. Yeah. The image I didn't mind. And then they put like a border of stickers around it. Then they started to take like these cloth based stickers.

Like there was a pattern like a shooting star. But 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 started ripping it off. Oh, well.

They want your attention. That's what it is. But isn't that interesting? We have the same brain. I never really thought about that. Yeah, I assume the human brain, I didn't really think much about the human brain for all those years, but I assumed it was very similar.

It's just as society and technology has changed, we've slowly adapted. But that's why I believe we're all going to have an AI sitting inside our Slack that has that single brain or company brain or world brain thing because it allows us to trade information faster and it allows us to move faster because you don't need to wait on things. By the way, I found out something that I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but I've never seen this before where I've heard about people gatekeeping celebrations. So for example, if a client went to Noah, for example, and told you, hey, good job, Noah, you would want to share that with 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. Isn't that crazy? That would be crazy. But like if you learn that faster, you're going to make a move faster is my point.

So anyway, you can pick the next one. Did you see Anthropic? They made an announcement. And a search in a journal ended up writing an article on this.

They started to ask the AI industry to hit the brakes. And they ended up writing an interesting take on SEO and what it means for markers. But in essence, they're saying that at this point, AI is moving so fast that it can start learning for 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 in the evolution of more things like Google AI mode, AI overviews, which is an effective click rates, right? When an AI overview shows up, I think the last stat I saw today, and I don't know where it came from, was clicks decreased from 15% to 9%.

When there was AI overviews present, nonetheless, you know, even though Anthropic is saying, hey, we should all slow down. I don't believe Google. I don't believe Microsoft or OpenAI or anyone else is going to slow down. I think it could just be Anthropic that would be slowing down if that's what they're really pushing for.

I think there's 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 Anthropic's new, it's like a watered down version of Mythos, right? And I've been using Fable 5.

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But I don't think you will. Back to the show. And I want to call the genius of Anthropics marketing here. So they give you Fable 5, which is their latest model for the next 12 months.

for 12 days or so free. So they basically want you hooked on that drug and then they'll charge you usage. So usage means you're going to pay on API. They'll probably have a version that's including your subscription, but my entire team is using Fable right now.

I was like, guys, 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 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 um pulling specific data from hubspot for example um

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 bug, some cold issues that they have, security issues. 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.

I'm curious on how many more step ups they can get before you start seeing diminishing returns. Yes. Yeah. I think we're getting close to it because they say that a mythos level open source one is probably two, three months behind.

So I do think that's it. Yeah. I think you and I are going to work. 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. 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. This stuff is just moving extremely fast. And with it moving really fast, you saw SparkToro announce new data on Google Zero Search click data. It's now up to 68%, no clicks from a Google search.

So only 32% of searches are actually causing clicks. Yeah, I saw a version of this. I saw it from Rusty Brick. I think you might have 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%. Today, it's 68%, which is what you're talking about, which is crazy. You look at this. This is a decade out.

It used to be 55% of searches had at least one click. Now it's only 32%. Yeah. Keep in mind, Google 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. 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.

ChatGPG has dramatically increased the number of fanout queries that they're using. So fanout query, just so everyone knows when you're searching something, it will show the different queries, like the long-term queries that they're using. I'm now seeing these instances of prompts that trigger 30 plus fanout queries, which means that SEO still matters, guys.

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

Yep. So by the way, I mean, since we're on the topic right now too, we should talk about the seven AEO and SEO tactics that work now. 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. Well, you can go first. All right.

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. 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. 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 summarized the article, those things all make it easier for an answer engine or even a search engine to pick up.

But, you know, that's kind of SEO 101 that's evolved a little bit. 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.

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 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. 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. 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. 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 we'll leave it at that thank you all for listening and we will see you all tomorrow