The Future of SEO in an AI-Driven World | Michael Buckbee

Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits? The money, the ways to make it happen? The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Pepperell, Massachusetts. That's a fantastic name, Pepperell. Never been to Massachusetts. I need to, I need to go. No, that's not true. I've been to Boston. But I've definitely never been to Pepperell. Uh, anyway, I'm, I'm rambling. Joining me today, Michael Buckbee. Michael, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much. I also have been to Massachusetts but not Pepperell, so I don't know if that's a qualification.

Have you heard of Pepperell?

No, but now I'm intrigued. Let's just say I'm intrigued. That's a cool name.

Yes, yes. I started this a while ago where I would just look at the last 5 episodes and see who had one listen, one download. And, uh, yeah, I found some fascinating little towns. Um, cool. Yeah. So why don't you tell the audience, Michael, uh, I, I neglected to say what company you're with. I apologize. So, uh, tell us who you are and what you do.

Sure. Um, so my background is really in software development and marketing, and so I've done a mix of those things in a lot of different industries at a lot of different scales for a lot of different years. And currently I'm the co-founder of a startup called Noah toa, which, you know, there's a lot of different ways to pitch your thing. I think the best way to describe it to your audience is what we do is we try to wrangle the knowledge that's in AI services. So things like ChatGPT, what does it know about me? How does it work? What's it saying? And, you know, with that, there's both an element of wanting to keep things correct, like, is it saying the right things about my company? And then also there's an element of like, hey, you know, we're in a competitive landscape. How do I do better than my competitors? How do I show up best? How do I find people?

Yeah, I love it. So how did you come up with the name Noa Toa?

So I, I have seen a lot of companies get wrapped around trademark stuff. And so kind of coming up with an evocative name that doesn't really have any meaning that you can just own, but that's still easy to say. I've always found to be an advantage. And, you know, when we started this, even a lot of the terms that people were using have already changed. So Google has something now that's called AI Overviews, but that used to be called the Search Generative Experience. And then, you know, it was called the Generative Experience. And so all these names are always changing. But, you know, You know, what I'm really interested in is the underlying knowledge of what these services have. And so, you know, at a real base level, what we're doing is we're interrogating them, asking ChatGPT a question of like, what do you recommend for this? Or who is this? And then analyzing the answer. So we don't actually do really any AI processing in our service, which is kind of ironic. It's much more a kind of a watchdog to see what these services know and that knowledge and know what to, uh, So yeah, so really, Noa Toa is just made up and has no basis in reality.

Is that what I got out of that?

It has, uh, at least a little basis, as it's, you know, trying to be profitable, uh, and it's a creative name. So that's the best I've got for a—

okay, okay. So it wasn't referencing the, the, the biblical figure of Noah?

No.

Uh, it wasn't a play on Krakatoa?

Um, it rhymes with Krakatoa, but it's K-N-O-W, so.

Ah, okay. Ah, all right, now, now it's making a little more sense. All right, see, see. Okay, so, um, let's talk about how you got to this point of doing Noah's Ark. Like, what, what prompted you? Well, what, what did your journey look like that, that got you there?

Sure. So, um, I, you know, am a serial entrepreneur starting lots of different stuff, doing lots of different things. And, uh, the last, uh, service that I created with my co-founder then and my co-founder now, um, you know, you talk to a lot of the people that are in a similar spot. And so we had this network of other, uh, software as a service founders, and we were just kind of joking one day, uh, about ChatGPT, like, I wonder what it says about my company. And so we all put that in and we all found horrible mistakes, horrible things about us that just weren't accurate. And so I was like, oh, that's kind of funny. And that night I couldn't stop thinking about it. And then the next day I got up and I wrote a little script that just ran on my Mac that interrogated automatically ChatGPT for a couple of questions and then spit out spreadsheet that then, you know, could look at what the answers were and kind of track that week over week. And I did that for a couple other people in the group and sent it to them and just didn't really think that much of it. But what happened was I started to get a trickle of people coming back and saying, hey, Mike, we just had like 3 customers sign up and they all said they used ChatGPT to find us. Can I get an update of that spreadsheet? I'm like, ah, maybe there's something here. So, you know, the last year has really been automating that and making it a real application and making it an actual thing, you know, people could just show up and use and not like request things of me. But, you know, in a world of a lot of analytics and a lot of people trying to do more stuff, by far, I think the most accurate measure of like how well your marketing is doing is just sending an email to people after they sign up or that they, you know, buy something that says, hey, how'd you hear about us? And right, that, uh, I've seen across a lot of different industries and a lot of different places, um, perform much better in terms of like really understanding where your customers are at and how things are going than, uh, you know, a lot of the fancier tools.

So, well, yeah, I mean, it feels like the fancier tools are just chasing this very ethereal, uh, uh, attribution model that is, is impossible. It's like nailing Jell-O. Yeah, you can't, you can't figure it out.

Well, you know, it doesn't matter how cool the graphs look if the data that's going into it is just wildly off.

So, well, it's also interesting, like, you know, you can ask that question, uh, how did you find us, but that, that even, that's just what they remember. That doesn't tell you what all of the things that you did that attributed them to finding you. To your point, I, we have had a couple of, uh, people reach out to us that had found us on ChatGPT, and, um, we, we were kind of surprised about that, like, because, um, not a lot of people— I mean, organic is, is a, a source of traffic from us, but that's a very broad term. Like, I I don't know how they found us. So it was surprising to me that they said that they found us through ChatGPT. But I, okay, so before we start this conversation, I want to get, so you have background in SEO or no?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For almost a decade, I was a director of demand generation and over a content team at like a public cybersecurity company with lots of traffic and lots of people and sales and things. Okay. And so, you know, that's, that's really my experience.

So I'm getting conflicting information from experts, um, as to the, the demise of, of Google Search, uh, you know, the, the, the no-click searches, uh, etc. So our SEO guy, who I, I think is brilliant, um, his statement was that it doesn't, it doesn't really matter, like, the AI coming on top of this, in that the, the way that the, the data is structured out there and what the algorithms say is important it hasn't changed the fundamentals, if you will. What do you say to that?

I think a lot of this is very industry specific. Okay. And I think a lot of this is very much tied to how much and what you do with content. Like, so, you know, I used to run a content team and how we would pick out what our goals to do is say, oh, well, here's the things we think our prospects are searching. And then, you know, we put that in a spreadsheet and we look for the high volume ones, right? Like, oh, well, way more people are using this term. There's 1,000 a month. This other one, there's only like 50 a month, right? So we're going to go out, we're going to write an article that goes after the 1,000-word one. Well, those articles that tend to have more traffic tend to be lower intent, that it's much more, hey, what is a thing? How does a thing work? That kind of stuff, right? And what we're seeing is those low-intent but high-volume, uh, questions and keywords get answered by the AIs. Okay. And so, um, there is a very clear pattern of the number of searches staying the same but the number of clicks through to websites decreasing for those type of informational, you know, uh, questions.

Okay.

So, um, if you have focused on that as part of your SEO, I think that's a danger.

Okay.

I'm not going to say it's wrong, but I do think it puts you at risk of— if your plan is to get traffic to your site from those keywords, I think you're in for a rough time in the future. And what we're recommending is people, you know, focus, I think, a little more human and they write a little more to what people want and a little less what Google wants and write more middle and bottom of the funnel content. And also with that, we recommend what we call, you know, face versus faceless content, which is, you know, content that has a voice, that has a point of view, and that sounds like it was written by an actual human versus faceless content, which is probably better served up by an AI.

Okay.

And I think that is a big change in strategy. Um, and it's not necessarily the death of SEO and it's not people are doing stuff like wildly wrong, but you know, the, the old days of there was like skyscraper techniques and like this other stuff of like how to choose what to do. I think are now outdated. And this is also sort of just setting aside ChatGPT or Claude or all these whiz-bang tech stuff. This is just Google. Like if we just focus only on Google. Google has made some really significant changes in what they're doing with search that as a small business, as a creative, you know, someone who's trying to make a profit, uh, you really need to consider moving forward.

So, okay, we're going to come back to that. You mentioned that, uh, you are familiar with Profit First. I'm going to, uh, ask you about that now.

Okay, we'll see how much I remember. It's been a little while.

Well, just, I mean, like, have you used it in your business? You know, have you met Mike? Like, what's your experience with Profit First?

You know, like I said, I'm part of a number of entrepreneur founder startups. Most of them, you know, not venture-backed, but bootstrapped. We're bootstrapped currently. So that's just a very different calculus than, you know, if we had gotten, you know, $5 million in VC, you know, on Monday, like, oh, it's just a different thing. And so Um, you know, a lot of people talk about it in terms of just trying to, and this is my summation, which may be wrong, but, um, to really think about it, uh, in reality versus, you know, what, what you need to survive, what you need to keep going, what needs to happen, and much less on hopes. And, you know, I like to think I'm a practical person that's trying to do practical things. And I think it ties in well with that, just as sort of a philosophy.

So yeah, I think, I think you're right. Have you read Mike's book?

Yes, but it has been—

okay, I'm not quizzing you. I'm not quizzing you. Yeah. I recommend everybody read the book because Mike's just a great guy and his stories are fascinating. And I had him on this show and he recounted one of the stories from his book about like when he was just busted, broke, and his daughter, uh, he told his daughter she couldn't do her horse, uh, riding lessons, and she had run into her room and come back with her piggyback. And, and like, even in telling that story on our show, he, he just like rushed through it. He said, I have to rush through it because even now I start to tear up. I mean, like, it's a real emotional, really emotional story to him. And I think that's what made it so impactful was his story about like, as a business owner multiple times, he figured out that making money had never been important enough to him to focus on it. And I think you nailed it on the head as, as a philosophy, if you will, being intentional about making money and having that mindset is, is critical. Whether you use Profit First as a tool or some other tool, it doesn't really matter. The intent of saying I'm doing this to make money, not just to, you know, make more sales or create jobs or whatever is critical. But somebody like you that's maybe pre-revenue, it's not a real practical tool for sure. But yeah, I don't want to go down the whole VC route.

I have my own set of horror stories from that, but yes.

Well, maybe we will. I think that one of the problems with the VC model that I have participated in as an investor, and I've had clients that have received VC and advised them, I think one of the problems with VC is that that money actually amplifies certain problems and covers up others. Whereas if you're, you know, I did a software company many moons ago, And I spent 2 years and we generated revenue, but ultimately I decided that it wasn't going to work. And my fundamental problem in that was I had not proved the need in the marketplace. It was something that I perceived as a need and it was very clear value proposition, but the people that actually used it didn't see it. So I had to sell them that they had a problem. And then sell them on the solution, right?

Yeah, that's tough.

Yeah, right. And so that was, that was my first mistake. The second mistake was that I, I did not start simple enough and iterate. I tried to build out a software as the end, end goal with all of the user interface and features that I envisioned. Rather than starting with the most basic. And I remember an advisor who was, who was helping me with it. He said, anything you do in an app, you can do in Excel. And if you can't do it in Excel first, then there's no reason to build the app. Right.

And I was like, oh, well, that's basically what we did, which is that we made a CSV file that, you know, people could get started with and then, you know, it grew.

Right. And so I'm curious. Your, your experience or, or, or thoughts on taking other people's money. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

I think, you know, two things like you sort of laid out, hey, can we start simple or do we need to have, you know, a full thing? And I think a lot of that really depends on the market. Like there's certain mature markets, there's less mature markets. With AI search, we're in a less mature market, and that less mature market means there's more opportunity. And I think you can start simpler, whereas, you know, and I think there's a lot— we have a lot of competitors right now. We are trying to ship more features. We're trying to do more. And at the same time, I think there's still a lot of questions around like, how viable is this? What's going to happen? All these different things. I think taking money for this type of thing, just as you said, has a benefit and a detriment. The benefit is it would allow us to hire more devs. We could do more work in that area. The downside is because it is changing so fast, it's also a lot easier to, you know, run entirely the wrong direction. And, you know, and it's when the direction is unclear, it doesn't matter how fast you accelerate. So, yes, you know, I, and I think that's the biggest danger where, and that's most of my experiences working with venture capital things has been not even that it was a bad idea, but either the timing was wrong, that some underlying technology just wasn't there, or the market wasn't ready yet, or other things. And the end result was people spent a ton of money and even worse, a ton of time, just literal, you know, human years of effort on something that ultimately, you know, you just kind of had to set aside. And, you know, that's, that's my own concerns with it more than anything else.

So let's talk about Noa Toa. Yeah. How, how does, how does this work? So me, let's say I, I come and I say, Michael, I know some people have found us through ChatGPT. How can you help us?

Sure. So I think step one is we have some assumptions. You know, we make some assumptions. One of them is that people are still people, even with all this AI stuff, and that they're trying to accomplish things. And so, you know, something that comes up in SEO a lot is search intent. Which is, hey, what is this person actually searching for? Are they looking for apple pie, you know, a recipe, or Apple Pie the movie? You know, whatever, whatever it is, right? And we think that there is that same intent is expressed, expressed in AI. And when you type into ChatGPT, hey, what's an apple pie recipe? And so based on that, what we do is we take all of the keywords that a site currently ranks for, and we do what we call like a deep classification of them. And what that does is it breaks them out into like, you know, are these people that are look— that already know about you and they're looking for like more information? Is it new people that are looking for a solution? Is it something else? And we take all of those intents and we take them and we turn them into questions and then let you choose like, oh, well, out of these, here's the ones that make sense. You know, we mentioned before, some real content strategy changes where Maybe we don't want to even attempt to go after these informational ones at the top. We want to go for the ones that are closer to the bottom of the funnel that are a lot more like, hey, what's the best solution for this? Or what's the best way to do this? And track those. And then from that, across ChatGPT and Google's Gemini and Claude and all these different services, we ask those questions and then look at the responses to see what comes back.. And that gives you sort of a baseline, one of which is it shows you where you stand now. And two, it shows the format and kind of what they're looking for. A real interesting thing, and I think something that the AI services have done a very poor job in messaging, is how often this data is updated. Where, you know, if you look at the versions of it, well, ChatGPT had 3.5 and they only just now announced 4.5 and some other versions. They've actually had something like 20 updates in the last 2 years where either the data's really been updated or how it makes decisions about what to recommend has been updated. So there's actually a lot of volatility in this. And if you look at the old responses, if you ask like, hey, what's a good service for XYZ, it would just give you a list. And now it actually breaks out, oh, this is the best for this category. Here's the key features in this category.. And so the people that are having the most success with our platform are able to go in, look at that format, and then write their content to it to say like, oh, we're actually the best for, you know, small business or for creatives or for, you know, industry professionals in this niche. And that's something that's real different than, you know, what's come out before.

So at the, at the end of the day, you're giving me recommendations for my, my content, my SEO, like this is, this is what I need to change, update, focus on.

At this point, I think it's less recommendations and, you know, things are changing very fast. It's hard to know where you stand. I think we're giving you a foundation to start making those decisions.

Um, okay, so perfect. Is it an ongoing service or is it a—

okay, so every week we update those numbers and you can see a report of like, hey, we're doing better, we're doing worse. We also have some tools that in the same way Google has a bot called Googlebot that comes and indexes your website and then that indexed information shows up in Google. So when people search in Google, they can find it. We have a similar tool that checks if all these different AI services can access your website. And do the same thing. So there is a language piece of this as well, which I think is interesting, which is that we talk a lot about, oh, Googlebot, it indexes your website. And we talk about AI services like ChatGPT. We talk about, oh, they scrape your website. They take all your information. And I am not an AI purist. I do not recommend putting all of your information into the AIs and just hoping for things. But I do worry that creative professionals in particular, um, are not— I'm not going to say overly concerned, but they aren't discerning in where and how the AI services are interacting with them as a brand, as a business, as, you know, creative output, where, um, I think there are a lot of lines in there and, you know, we just want people to be educated about where where and what they should do.

So, so can you— so can you give us a use case as an example?

Sure. Of somebody who's worked with, um, a marketing site. I don't know if there's a good example from— you think as a good creative professional we should use as an example, just as a category?

No, no, but marketing's fine.

Yeah. Okay. So, um, most everybody has a website, you know, right? And on that website it has just some basic business information about you. Here's where you can find more information about me, here's how you can get in touch, here's how you can do, you know, just what I'm about, the kind of things I solve or the kind of things I create. That's valid information that you want to have in ChatGPT and Claude and all these other services. And I think what people don't want is to be replaced. What you don't want is your book that you've written to be spit back out buy any of these services to replace what all the hard work you put into it. And in general, the services are very concerned about that as well, where they certainly want to read all this information and they want to have it come back. But there's a lot of safeguards in there to make sure it's not a substitution. Excuse me.

Uh, is that primarily because they're worried about copyright infringement, or—

yeah, I mean, okay, I think bluntly, yes, that these are, these are capitalist corporations. They are worried about copyright. And I also don't think that's a business they want to be in. Like, you know, yeah, you know, yeah. And there's a lot of good reasons for it. Um, something that leaks a lot are what's called the system prompts, which is that, like, hey, I go to ChatGPT, I type in something And what actually happens is there's a system prompt, which is literally just like paragraphs of text that they have written that give information about how the model should work. And then it adds your prompt at the end of it, and then it sends it to the AI model to get the response. I've looked at tons and tons of these. The most recent one that was leaked was Claude's, and they actually had in there 4 books, never quote more than 25 words. Out of any book in a row. So, you know, you can give a quote. So it has to know all the words in the book, right? Has to have it all indexed. So no matter what someone asks for, it can give the relevant portion. And that's a tricky thing. I mean, you know, so there's been a lot of, let's just say, bad pirating websites that have been indexed— excuse me— that have been indexed by these AI services. In order to get that information that now they can hand back. So if someone's looking for like, oh, what's a Profit First? You know, you may come up in that result. It's the— and the reason for that is that they did that, but it's never going to be a substitution that it's as good as just like, you know, right? Getting— so, and that's what I mean by lines. You know, I don't think people should put everything into these. I don't think, you know, you should necessarily trust all these AI services to do what they're doing. But, uh, from a very practical ground level, as of right now, they are not, you know, enough to, you know, there's an equation there, you know, in the same way there's an equation with Google, like, is it worth them indexing my site and sending traffic? Um, and it's different for AI, but I think it's still something where it's of benefit to people. That are trying to get customers, that are trying to have their name out there and how the trends are going. Again, just looking only at Google, you need to be there if you want to be found, if you want to be part of the discussion, if you want to get, you know, new customers from these channels.

So, so you, you, I think, had mentioned that you have some thoughts on how that would be utilized in the podcast industry. Sure. Was that my imagination or did you say that?

I, I think it's all industries, you know, like, because at the end of the day, this is just becoming the interface to search, um, right? So, you know, if you look up, hey, what's the best podcast for entrepreneurs? Let's take that as an example. That might be something that you want to rank for. So my recommendation to you, if we were sitting down, would be Hey, what we need to do is repeat this message in as many different channels as possible. So I want to make sure my website can be reached by all these AI bots. I want to sort of clearly state, hey, I think we're one of the best podcasts for, you know, entrepreneurs. Here's the reasons why. Here's my unique take on it. You wrote a book. I mean, these are all awesome things and reasons why. And then I would take that same information and You know, in traditional SEO, there's always this worry about a duplicate content penalty, which is that like, oh, if the same content shows up somewhere else, it lowers the rank for both of these things.

Right.

And that's really out the window now. So now, you know, my recommendation is you take that same article and you're publishing it on LinkedIn. You're taking that same article, you're making it into a YouTube video. You're doing all these different things to get that same message out about like, hey, Here's why we're the best for this niche in this way. And, you know, a focus on, you know, creation that's lower in the funnel and then a focus on distribution to get the message out there as many times to get the AI models to read it in as many different places and to sort of come to a consensus. They're like, oh yeah, we should be recommending Christian's podcast for this.

So I'm going to ask an interesting question. Well, it's interesting to me. Google had a feature called a knowledge panel. Uh, and a couple of years ago, that was like the— for an individual, it was like the gold standard. Like, if you had a— if Google had created a knowledge panel for you, then you're known. Um, it sounds like what you're describing there is, is essentially reaching that threshold with AI, uh, for whatever your business, yourself, Yeah. Is that a fair comparison?

I think it's very similar, which is that, you know, a phrase that's come up a lot for us is ChatGPT is now our most popular and least well-trained representative of our company, where people are constantly asking ChatGPT all sorts of questions about it. And, you know, it's not quite as distinct as having a knowledge panel, which was the search feature that was there. But certainly, you know, you go to ChatGPT right now and ask, who is Christian Brim? You know, does it come up with the right information? Does it recommend the right things? And, you know, again, no atoa. We're trying to think about knowledge. We're trying to get the right information to the right places. And I think that is very important. And there's a lot of aspects in there that are beyond search. You know, we deal with a lot of software-as-a-service businesses. And a big thing with those is stuff like HIPAA compliance, or can you operate in the EU for GDPR? Are you SOC 2? You know, all of these, you know, acronym certifications. But there's that for every industry, like, hey, I'm looking for someone in my town for help with, you know, getting something done. That's, you know, that's not necessarily a search of like, Hey, what's the best thing in this area? You know, it's this sort of underlying knowledge that's still important to impart because it has these ramifications for, well, if I'm looking for software and they don't work in healthcare, I can't use them. I'm never, they're not even going to make my list.

So, right. Okay. Uh, now I'm going to pivot again. Sure. Um, where do you see, uh, where do you see Noa Towa, if it's successful as you envision it, where do you see it in 3 years? What does it look like?

I think it looks like a service that has more and more knowledge of, you know, your brand, your business, and it's able to help you more and more proactively in terms of both figuring out what you should, you know, address in these different services, where to distribute that information, and, you know, what to write on in lots of different ways. A challenging thing that I've always struggled with is that I feel like, oh, I should be able to write a thing one time. And then, oh, that's good. When what I really need to do is take that same message and, you know, every, every week, turn the dial a little bit and have a little bit of a different perspective on it or describe it in a different way or a different facet. And, you know, that's how I actually learn about stuff is I don't read it one time and go, okay, great. Well, that's in my head forever. You know, you know, like Profit First, like a lot of that is accumulated, you know, culturally through talking to other people or like, oh yeah, I started to implement Profit First in my business and it's been really well. And so, you know, it's the accumulation of all these smaller factors. And that's how, you know, we want to be a part of helping, you know, businesses and brands and sites, you know, execute on that in a way that doesn't make them go nuts. Because it is— it's a daunting— it's a daunting perspective thing to have to do.

Yeah. And I don't— I mean, I was reading an article this morning that, you know, some guy said, you know, that was in the space is like, turn AI off. Now, like, you know, and I'm like, well, of course that's not going to happen. But I think that much like, uh, the transformation of the world, the society, what, you know, virtually everything that the Industrial Revolution had, uh, this, this is something that is going to fundamentally change, society. And, and that sounds grandiose, but I don't, I don't think so. I think that it, it is going to change fundamentally a lot of things, but the problem is we can't predict it. It's unpredictable. I don't care what anybody says. That's my opinion. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like if you, if you're going to go back to the, the, the guy that owned the, the horse and carriage pre-industrial revolution and, and ask him to predict, you know, Wi-Fi and, um, you know, yeah, the internet. No, there's no way that— there's no way. And I think we're in a similar situation. We, we can't.

Yeah, I, I agree with that. And but I do think there's a time horizon on this, which is— sure, I think we've seen two very large societal impacts from technological changes, which is, one, the introduction of the internet, and two, the introduction of smartphones. Like, that— those have had impacts on society. We're still all people. We're still all here, you know, have kids we're trying to raise in the right way and do all these things. I still read a lot of books. I still do a lot of stuff. It happens that I read the books on my phone now when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store instead, you know. So there's changes and there's not changes. I think we're still in the infancy of, uh, AI having lots of these changes, and it is changing a lot of things for the worse. I think it is a big struggle in a lot of cases. I think it's scary even for my own stuff. Um, but I do think there's a lot of benefit of it as well. Um, you know, you mentioned industrialization, you know, part of that was that there's a lot fewer people working on farms now, you know. Like there used to be, you know, 90% of people worked on farms. And at the turn of the century, it was like 30%. And now it's something like 3%. And, you know, there's a lot more people that are doing, you know, creative work. There's a lot more people that are doing, I think, interesting work because of that automation. Certainly even in, you know, creative areas, like, you know, it's still nice to have a spell checker. Yes. You know, at some level that's doing intellectual work. Yes. A grammar checker is doing intellectual work. And in the area of software development, AI tooling has just exploded as a useful thing. People debate a lot about it, but I personally found it incredibly useful and oftentimes not even in writing code, but understanding it to be able to say, like, hey, just what does this do? And, you know, this, this is an interesting— this is off the topic of AI search, but You know, my wife and I were part of a book trivia thing at the local library, which was like, hey, read these 4 books, go there, answer questions about them. And the team that answers the most questions wins. And we beat everybody. We beat everybody because I cheated, quote unquote, with AI. And how I cheated was I bought all the books DRM-free. I spent probably way too much money on them, but I bought them all. Even if they were on Kindle Unlimited, I bought them all. So this was legal. I took the books and broke them out chapter by chapter and had AI generate questions for me based on that. So this wasn't added to the index. It wasn't anything else. It was like a local AI that kind of did this. So it spit out questions. And then I used a different tool to generate like a super mini niche website that just let us study this. And so it just randomized all these questions and built this study guide and that was a very efficient way to do that. It wasn't, you know, out of bounds.

And what was the prize that you put this much effort into it?

Um, my wife's sister was one of the competing teams.

I see.

And so there was a lot of family pride in this and there was a lot of, but yeah. And, uh, I think I got a $15 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. So it wasn't, this wasn't about the money. This was, this had, you know, deeper stakes. Yes. And, but I think it was really interesting because, you know, certainly there's a manual way to do that. I could have hired people to read these books, write questions. I could have hired someone to write a special website for me, but that's way too much. That's thousands and thousands of $1,000. But, you know, to prep myself for this, you know, fun, fun activity, I was able to really rapidly do this. This is like an hour or two of work. So that's a change. And I think that's a positive change in terms of learning, in terms of like what's automated and what's not.

Did you, did you tell your sister-in-law how you beat her?

Yes. So if she wants to be on our team next year, So all's well that ends well. So yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, to your point, I think, I think all technologies give us efficiencies that give us extra bandwidth, right? But I think that the interesting thing about the human condition is that we always seem to find a way to fill the bandwidth, right? Like it, I mean, it's I go back to like telephones and, you know, landlines and back when you had to pay for long distance and all of this. And so like what's happened is not that the technology exploded, people didn't spend less on their phones. They're spending the same amount for telecommunications., maybe even more. But, but that, that's kind of my point is, is that we, we don't take those efficiencies and shrink what we do or spend. We, we use those efficiencies and just do more.

Yeah. Uh, I think the other piece of this is there's a quality aspect, which is that, you know, I, I don't, I am not particularly worried about AI taking over over like all the writing and doing all the, the art in the world. But I do think, and even something closer to me, all the software development, right? What I think it does is it raises the waterline so that the average project now is of higher quality, or you can say, correct, average project has more features or looks better or works better than it did before. And, you know, it's still up to humans to be the part on top, which is, you know, we're orchestrating this, we're adding the extra thing. And sort of, this is by definition, which is AI pulls in all this information and gives you the consensus of it. Like, oh, here's the best way to do this. It's not the best, it's a better way to think about it. It's the most common way, you know? So, um, the most widely agreed upon way. And you, there's lots of tricks to get different, you know, kinds of answers. But I, I think that's really how I view things, which is that It's still not to the point where you could get a perfect article that's amazing out of any of the AI services that's better than one that someone sat down and worked on. You know, my hope is that that's how people take this, that they use these tools to improve their baseline, to improve how quickly they can do this stuff, to, you know, more quickly, you know, have different viewpoints and You know, I do think, I do think the industry is moving that way and I'm hopeful for those reasons.

So, yeah, and you and I may be completely wrong and we are subject to our AI overlords in 5 years and, you know, who knows?

Yeah.

How do people find more about Knowatoa and what they do, Michael?

Sure. You can go to Knowatoa, K-N-O-W-O-T-A. .com, noatoa. Uh, you can put your website in and it will give you a free report like the deep classification, uh, like we talked about. And, you know, put it through, uh, 10 questions through ChatGPT on the free plan. And, you know, if none of that works, uh, you can email me, um, mike@noatoa.com. Um, I do respond to my own emails. And we have a newsletter that talks about this. Um, I, you know, trying to keep the theme I try to write the newsletter in a way that if you're listening to this and you read the newsletter, you will know I wrote it, right? Right. Directly, that this was not like spit out. Um, and I just hope that everyone, you know, considers these tools, considers where they can take advantage of them, and, uh, really just want to see people succeed.

So I love it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast. Share the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message and let us know what you want to hear, and, uh, we'll get rid of Michael. Until then, ta-ta for now.