Autonomous SEO, the 1% Funding OpenAI, and Why You Can't Train Talent (Full Episode)

So, Neil, we're planning out this founder retreat that we do every year. And I was talking to this group. And in the beginning of the year, we're like, we're gonna go hard on these AI hackathons, these transformation, all these things. Everyone at the end of this, this is September now, we did this retreat in February. We're like, F all that, none of that works. Okay, we're just like, just unreasonably high just talent bar now, and you get everything that you need. And the thing is, one of the guys we're talking to, let's say he has like a 200 engineers, for example, right? Now, if you think about it, how many of the 200 do you think are acceptable from a talent bar standpoint? What percent?

Depends on the company. If it was Anthropic, it would be a very high percentage.

Yeah. I don't know. What kind of company? Most of us are in software, right? Software services, whatever. So it's like—

How old is the company?

No, you're able to pinpoint. I'm not gonna say anything.

You can gimme a random industry if it's in—

Let's say this company's been around for 15 years.

15 years. That means they probably don't fire a lot of people. Mm-hmm. A lot of people with them for a long time. Mm-hmm. Maybe they're happy with 5, 10%.

Okay. It's actually much higher, about 40%.

Okay.

Oh, okay. So, but, so someone else in the, on, on, on the call was like, well, like Okay, so what are you gonna do with the rest? Well, and then so what happens is, like, I'll give you an example. For us, in our Slack, we have a GitHub leaderboard, okay? It shows how much someone is committing, how much someone is merging, how much someone is reviewing. So these are all GitHub terms, it just shows how much you're pushing to GitHub, right? And so he has it for the engineers, and it's a public leaderboard, okay? And you can see who's shipping a lot, who isn't. And imagine if I'm an engineer that works for you, and I have like 2,000 lines of code in a week and I have no commits and no merges, right? That means I'm not really that active. And so he has a lot of people that are like that. I can see kind of something that are similar with mine. So, and so like, what are you going to do? He's like, you know, there's no, you might have to keep the top 40%, which are the good ones, but you might have to keep like another 20%, but the rest you're going to have to let go, right? And so anyway, that's, it's just interesting how we started the year like, oh, we're super like, you know, we're going to teach everyone this stuff. And Neil's always been a proponent of no, you're just the going to teach them. And I think everyone's waking up to trying to teach someone mindset, train them on mindset is not something you can do.

My big take is whether there's this new technology or not, I've always for many, many years just said hire really amazing people and it solves most problems. I did not come up with this. Venture capitalists from all the major firms tell their entrepreneurs the same thing. That's actually how I learned it. It wasn't through reading an article from a16z or anything like that. When I raised money for Kissmetrics back in the day, Tony— Phil Black, who was one of the co-founders of True Ventures, they did, I think, I know they did WordPress. I don't know if he was a personal investor in Uber, and they did quite a few other deals. I don't know if they were in Slack or not, but I know they did like Blue Bottle Coffee. They had some amazing hits. would always tell me, your number one job is just hire really, really good people who can do every little thing you have a problem in exceptionally well, and they know the solution. They don't have to learn it. They've already done it. They've already solved it, and they can teach you things, and you aren't the one teaching them new shit. And he's like, if you can hire those kind of people for every role, he's like, your company will succeed. Those people will figure out. That's your only job.

So there's 3 jobs of a CEO, and Neil doesn't officially have a title, but the 3 jobs of a CEO is one, talent. Okay, so talent recruiting, however you want to look at it. 2 is finance, keeping money in the bank or even closing big deals. Okay. And the 3rd one is your vision, right? It's really those 3 things.

Yes.

And so when I heard that when I was 25, because I like reading all these books, I'm like, no, that's BS, right? But the older you get, you realize how true these things are. And the older we get too. So Neil and I would go to these events, right? And you hear these people say, you know, everything about entrepreneurship is just mindset. And it is, but like what I've said before on this podcast is that you cannot train mindset and it's not on you to have to babysit and train someone on mindset. The people come in built with mindset. And like I've told you, by the way, we just, we hired a 15-year-old, right? I think I told you about that. That mindset's already there, right? He had that mindset starting in 2nd grade, for example. Now I'm like, I'm talking to, I don't care what age you are. There's a guy I'm talking to in his 60s right now. Mindset's there, right? Super on top of his stuff, super into the AI stuff as well. And so, You didn't start with this mindset. I didn't start with it, but we built ourselves into it. I'm not saying you and I are amazing. I'm just saying that, again, thinking that you can teach someone mindset is a fool's errand.

But I know you like doing your retreats and I get why, you know, these people are your friends and you guys have fun, but imagine how much time you would save if you didn't do the stuff like, hey, we're going to do all these AI bootcamps and all this stuff and just went to, we're just going to hire. And then you guys went to go have fun during that time.

We do have fun during it though.

No, but you would've just had more fun and less time wastage.

Well, here's the thing. You have problems, right? In life, you have problems. Don't overthink this one.

Yeah, but not really. I think people look at life as like you have problems and people like discussing with others to go figure out solutions. Most people's problems aren't really problems and there's already solutions that exist to solve them. That's how I look at life. Like seriously, that's how I really look at life.

Okay, so the reason I asked that question is because we all have problems and we always like to complain about our problems and you like to complain about your problems to people that understand, right?

No, I don't like complaining to friends about problems.

Well, you're different. You're like, you're different. Most normal human beings, Neil's not a normal human being, right? Complain about their problems. Like Noah, you talk about your problems with somebody else, right? Yeah, Noah's nodding, right?

People like that, but I don't. I've always been more just get to the point and solve it.

Because you're not like a introspective therapy guy. You're like, move forward, which is a good thing, right? Like a lot of people in VC now, like Marc Andreessen is like, move forward. What is it? Retard maxing, right? Just look forward. No introspection, just look forward. And I think you've always been like that to your credit. But I think most humans, you're not a very emotional human for the most part unless someone screws you over. I've known Naval for like 16 years now, but majority humans, they like to talk about their problems.

So yeah.

But it's fun. By the way, the reason I talk about this retreat too, I'm planning it this year, right? We're going to this, the Four Seasons Tamarindo, is a new one, by the way, 2023. And it's not super packed yet. It's like still 30, 40% capacity. See, now I might blow it up. I don't know, right? Probably not. But what are we going to do there? We're going to play tennis, we're going to play pickleball, we're going to talk about our problems. But it's like, oh, I can make this intro. Like, you never know, by the way, certain business deals that come out of that, it's always from like a conversation that's in passing, right? Yes.

Those are— one quick thing. You said the R word with maxing. You should probably explain what that is because most people won't and they're going to take it the wrong way. Okay.

So retard maxing is the act of not thinking about your past, right? It's not looking, thinking about introspection. It's not thinking about, oh, my past or ruminating on the past, right?

Correct.

It's just constantly thinking about moving forward every single day. And even if you make a mistake, that's okay, move forward. And that is how Neil has operated. I'm not saying, by the way, I'm not calling Neil the R-word. I'm not calling you the R-word. And in fact, I think the Overton window has passed. It's okay to say that more today. But anyway, my point is, Is it helpful to introspect in hindsight? Not necessarily, right? I think most of the time it's just helpful to get hit a few times and just move forward.

So. Like right now in today's world, I know so many more people that use ChatGPT as a therapist than I would've ever imagined. And people start going to these LLMs and start having conversations like they would with a human. So I understand why humans, you know, discuss their problems or issues and try to work on solutions. But what I'm noticing when I talk to the people that are using these LLMs for this, they're not actually doing it to be productive, to figure out a solution. They're doing it to complain and be like, this is my viewpoint, this is what happened, what do you think? They're not actually using it to be more Efficient's the wrong word, but like, they're not using it to move forward.

They're not advancing work.

Yes, they're not advancing work, or even their personal life. They're using it to someone like, kind of like a real human to complain to. And I'm like, what the heck is this?

So, you know, that, remember I was going through something maybe like 2 years ago, right? It was like, and then I kept, I realized when I was in this pattern, I was going into, I was using it as a therapist, right? Well, this happened over here in this relationship, this happened, this and that. And then, It just kept putting me in a loop and it kept agreeing with me. And then at the end of it, I'm like—

That's what it does.

I made no progress.

Correct.

It's perceived progress. Correct.

And I remember when you were going through that, we were all telling you, if you have to, at least me and another mutual friend of yours, if you have to put all this stuff into AI, it's just not meant to be. But on the flip side, with your mom's passing, it's been more than a year now, right? You did ask, LLM's questions about the process, how it is like feeling, is this all normal? In that aspect, I thought it was very helpful for you from an outsider's perspective.

You know what was the most helpful? Did I— you saw the poem that—

Uh-huh.

That was the most beautiful thing. That's the best example of using it, right? 'Cause my mom, I had her fill out this book called Mom, Tell Me Your Story, right? At the end of it, she wrote in Chinese and then she knows I can't, like my Chinese, like you lose it or use it or lose it, right? So I had lost it already. So she wrote like 3 pages and I'm like, I can't read this, right? So I took screenshots of it and I put it in ChatGPT and it wrote the most beautiful poem ever. But what that reinforces to you is that, you know, human working with it. So my mom's work plus the AI was something that became beautiful.

Yes.

And I actually took it out and I framed it 2 times. But it was her wisdom and it's like, you know, I'm ending my chapter here, but like, you know, I hope you get married to someone amazing and, you know, you want her to believe in you, that type of stuff, right? And so That's how you use AI to actually advance work.

Yes, but I think a lot of people have to go through learnings and waste time, and then they go from there. Eric learns on his own. He learns pretty quickly. Even if I tell him something, whether it's true or not, whether my way is right or wrong, Eric will do it, and he'll learn within like a week or a month on what is more optimal in the future, and then he makes a mental note of it, and then going forward, he makes sure he doesn't make the same mistake over and over again, and I think that's the key, whether whether it's in entrepreneurship or marketing, you know, like when we run campaigns, you can now have AI make the mental notes for you, but you want to keep track of what's working, what's not, so you can fine-tune and get better. But the key here is when Eric used AI or ChatGPT 2 years ago for a personal situation, it starts hallucinating and siding with you. Even in today's world, AI still does hallucinate and it starts feeding you what it thinks you want. Maybe not as much as it did 2 years ago, but I still see it doing that in many cases when I look at conversations.

It's not hallucinating, it's a sycophant, which means it agrees with you on everything.

Yeah, there you go. That's actually a better way to put it. But yeah, it agrees with you and then you start drinking your own Kool-Aid.

Yeah, and it's like, oh, it reinforces more and more that you're right when you're actually wrong because you find a way to justify everything. And by the way, when I think about that interaction, In the moment, I'm like, yeah, absolutely, I'm right. But when I look back, I'm like, that was such a waste of time. And that was like 20+ hours spent on it. Like that time, like it didn't, the context window would fill very quickly. And so I had to start a new chat and I had to make a carryover chat and I just kept repeating over and over and it would actually end up driving you crazy, right?

Yeah.

So anyway, all that to say is like Neil and I, we're not saying we're right on everything. We're just saying you have to test these things. And ideally, if you don't feel like you're actually being productive, you're probably not being productive. Which by the way, you called out ChatGPT, OpenAI. I wanted to call out, what I believe is OpenAI's boneheaded GPT-6 Astra launch.

But before you go to that, you want to hear the most entertaining, going back to like the hallucination agreeing with you part example I have for GEO?

What?

I was talking to a global accounting firm, so they specialize in helping you optimize taxes for all the countries that you generate revenue from. And one of the guys I was talking with is a partner at this firm. It's a large firm. And he's just like, yeah, I got really pissed off. ChatGPT doesn't recommend our firm. He wasn't the founder. It's big. It's where the partners eventually just own and then you rinse and repeat and new partners come in. He's like, they don't recommend our company. And I was like, what were you typing? He's like, oh, I asked ChatGPT all these questions related to it. So I was like, this is a Zoom call. So I'm like, Do you mind screen sharing and opening up? So he opens up a ChatGPT instance and he starts with the question, and I'm paraphrasing here, but what are the 10 best— or not what are the 10 best— what are the best accounting firms that you would recommend if I'm a company that operates in multiple countries and I'm looking for a global accounting company that can help us optimize for taxes and they're headquartered in the US? And it lists out 5 or 10. It wasn't actually 10, it was less than that, but it was more than 5. It listed on a table some of these companies that they should outreach. Their company's more well-known, bigger than the competitors. So then he asked ChatGPT a follow-up question. Why didn't you recommend my company, Company X? We do X, Y, and Z. And then he's just like, you're right. I was just looking at the surface level. I didn't dig deeper. But when I dug deeper, it actually, you know, your company is more qualified and it breaks on all this kind of stuff. And then he asks other similar questions to, hey, what's the best firm to help me bring money over from the UK to the United States that can help me bring over money, not just with existing money, but going forward in the most tax-efficient way? And he keeps asking more follow-up questions. And every single follow-up question is listing his company as the number one slot and the one to choose. And he's just like, look, it's now starting to understand. I'm like, no, it's not starting to understand. It's just agreeing with you. And then I show him on my end, I'm asking the same questions. His company's not even listed.

Yep.

I'm like, you're just— it's starting to agree with you. And he had, no joke, probably like 16, 17 different prompts that he was following up with and it keeps agreeing with him in the future. I'm like, it's just learning based on what keeps you happy.

Yep.

Giving you that and feeding you too. But when other potential customers ask, it's not showing up. And this Zoom call, was me, my CFO, and one other people in accounting. So then I had my CFO go ask the same question on his end, same exact one that the other guy was asking. And then we had another person ask, and then he had one other colleague based in Chicago, I believe. So different office than his, also asked. None of us got his firm. And I'm like, even your colleague who works at your company isn't getting them. It's just agreeing with you. This is what happens. You got to actually optimize for it, not just keep asking follow-up questions and assuming that other people will get the same response that you're looking for.

But also, how long has AI been out for? 3 years? 3, 4 years? Okay, so 3, 4 years. So with Neil's example over here, I think there's a little lesson to learn as well. It's been out for 3 years, and even executives or partners at large companies still don't understand how this stuff works, right? And so it often takes time for people to catch up and understand it. And the world still doesn't get it yet, right? That it's a sycophant and it's going to listen to whatever. And so take that for what it is. So the new AEO is autonomous engine optimization. So this tweet was from Nick Eubanks, who was at Semrush before. And so, you know, the whole idea with autonomous engine optimization, Neil, is like, you think about us doing this podcast right now, okay? You think about, you do your YouTube channel, you do your Reels as well. I did the same thing from my side too. So that's a lot of outward-facing content, but also internally, all the sales calls that you have, all the customer calls that you have, all this stuff that you have internally, there are probably content spikes that should probably be created as pages for AEO SEO purposes, right?

Yes.

And so we were calling it autonomous engine optimization that actually sits inside of like ClickFlow, for example, right? Where it will create the content for you. And then it will still— the human in the loop will still draft it, and then publish it. But I think a lot of it's where it's going. And I talked to Tim Soulo yesterday, the CMO of Ahrefs. He's like, I hope that the world doesn't go in this direction. I'm like, I don't think it's going to go 100% in this direction, but I think people are lazy and people just want results. And so I think a good chunk of it's going to go in that direction. So maybe autonomous engine optimization is the new AEO.

Yeah, it could end up being. I think when it comes to all these vernaculars and terms, people are just going to stick to the basics that actually produce results. You can't get away from Facebook and Instagram ads, you can't get away from You can't get away from Google and ranking organically and paying for clicks on there. You can't get away from LLMs, both, you know, doing the paid and the organic. It just drives business. I was talking to Javi in the car before I drove here. I just did a podcast interview with someone in Beverly Hills. That's why I was early.

Oh, I'm like, why are you dressed? You're wearing a nice shirt today too.

No, the old white shirts that I had, they don't make them anymore. So I switched.

What brand is this?

Banana Republic, $17.

Oh, it looks expensive because it's heavier.

$75. Then they had like a 40% off sale. And then I had some coupons and I got 10 of them. And then they ran another promotion again. And I was like, I got another 6. So now I have 16 of them.

How dare you not tell me about the sale?

Yeah. So, and then I put in my phone number to get extra, you know, like if you SMS and you know when it pops up, I'm like, let me put it in, get the discount.

See, that's a discount. But that's selfish. You didn't tell me about the discount.

You could have. I didn't know you wanted white shirts because you don't really wear white shirts.

I do. Well, now that I play tennis more frequently and they require you to wear white or black, I need to buy more white and black stuff.

Wait, when you play tennis, you can't, at a club, you can't wear a colored shirt?

It says you have to wear white or black. And so I joined this thing called Sunset Tennis Club about a week ago and I'm playing tonight again, right? And so it's like I need more white. And then I saw, the funny thing is I played on Wednesday and the guy was wearing like a completely beat up Lululemon shirt. And I looked at mine and it's the exact same shirt and mine's completely beat up too. It's like torn and all that. So I'm like, I need nicer shirts.

These are terrible for playing tennis. You want like athletic.

Yeah, I'll get like, but this is for normal wear.

Like what you would wear.

Yeah, normal wear. Yeah, like you would wear this to speak at a conference now.

Correct.

Yeah, and that looks way nicer than the Vuori one.

Buck Mason.

Buck Mason, okay.

Vuori were my pants.

Yeah, Vuori's very nice by the way. But I wanna call out one thing over here. So I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but the era of the self-improving product has arrived. So this is Amplitude, right? So this is a product manager from Amplitude. He's like, hey, we have an agent now for self-improving products. So for the past few months, it running on our own product. It finds problems, ships fixes, and measures where they worked. Here are some highlights, right? So he goes through it over here. I'm just going to call it like 2 of these and we can react to it. Wave, which is the product, found that most people ignore the suggestion cards on our agent homepage. They were generic. Wave personalized them to each user's recent work and had a working PR open in about 15 minutes. It drove a 160% plus increase in suggestions. Accepted during the A/B test. Okay, so that's one, right? So that was 5 days, 15 minutes, 160% card-driven sends. Okay, then the next one. Oh, this one, you'll like this one, Neil. So this search was one— this one was embarrassing. Okay, so this is, Wave noticed that when users search with only 1 to 2 characters, our docs gave zero results without explaining that it had a 3-character minimum. Wave rebuilt the search experience around this limitation, educating users to type 3 characters And searches that surface results went from 92% to 97%, 98% or so. So I think, you know, talking about autonomous engine optimization or talking about the self-improving product, a lot of people are talking about loops the last few months.

This is—

these are loops that are actually working now in the wild. And I'm glad that Amplitude is talking about this, but I think this is the future of doing— but by the way, I'm going to give one more because, you know, Neil's occupied right now. So Wave identified that when new users landed on a setup checklist with 5 next steps and no obvious first move, Most of them stalled. Wave swapped it for one guided first step. The experiment is projected to move onboarding completion from 6% to 9%. That's huge.

That's huge.

That's huge.

That's huge.

It's huge.

People don't talk about these gains in efficiency. Like those kinds of things change a business, not overnight, but it changes over time. It's all about the marginal gains, dude. In marketing right now, everyone's talking about this new thing and they think it's going to get them some more efficiencies. What is it called? I got the link. I should actually text it to you so you can pull it up and see it yourself. I'll text you right now.

This post is so good. I realized I didn't share this with my team. I just shared it with my team because I'm like, why don't we just have this for our products? In fact, why don't you have this for Ubersuggest? Why don't you have this for AnswerThePublic?

Yeah, that's true.

Obviously, right?

Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. You see these guys? I texted it to you. They're advertising a tier 2 platinum Meta ad account free. Fund it with credit card and pay zero processing fee because WAP covers it. If your account ever goes down, we get it reinstated by default. It's just like, I look at this and I'm like, are these people just pitching like shady marketers and just people who are doing a lot of gray hat stuff and just being like spam the crap out of Meta and Facebook? I'm like, I do not know how long this is going to last.

Yeah, WAP is, WAP is just have the marketplace where they sell like courses and they sell these types of services out there. And I don't know how they're valued at multiple And how they're doing all their revenue. I don't have a clue.

Well, they must be getting a kickback with their volume. That's the only way I know.

Mainly affiliate revenue, is that what you're saying?

No, kickbacks. If you drive enough money to some of these platforms, ad platforms, some of them actually give you kickbacks. They disguise it in different things. Some of them kick you back the money in like Ireland and places like that instead of in the US, but, or they'll count it, they'll call it marketing. But yeah, that's how some of them make the economics work.

So anyway, the self-improving product, we just talked about that, but let's go back to OpenAI for a second. So you saw yesterday on, you probably check X every now and then, but okay, OpenAI comes out with GPT-6, right? So I think the way OpenAI handled their GPT-6 Astra launch was very boneheaded. Do you know why?

Why?

Because all of a sudden, all of these AI influencers and YouTube creators, they got access, they all made videos, they came out yesterday.

Guess what?

Do you have GPT-6 access today? You don't. I'll tell you, you don't. I don't have it either, right? And so what it does is imagine this. Let's say you pay a lot of money for enterprise. Okay, let's say GPT. I'm making it up, right?

I have GPT-7 access. No, you don't.

You don't have anything. So you have the same thing I have. So my point is we pay, we pay legit money for this. And how is it that these influencers get access, right? And how is it that we create this stuff and we don't get it first? But anyway, point is we're left out.

I haven't checked.

I'm just saying that I think it's boneheaded to go with influencers. Smart move, right? But to not release it to the public at the same time if the influencers are releasing it that day, because it frustrates people that are paying good money for OpenAI's newest model. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

What I would've done is released it. I don't know if they ever, they won't release that model for free. It's paid, right? It's only paid?

I don't know.

Or do they have a free version? So if they had a, if they released it, what I would've wanted to do is I would've only released it on the paid models and been like, if you want the new model, upgrade to paid. And that, and all at the same time when all the influencers are out there, I think that would've helped. The company that did a really good launch with their product, amazing marketing recently was Dyson with their toothbrush. Did you see the toothbrush launch?

Yeah, I saw that. But like the challenge with that toothbrush, Neil's talking about this AI toothbrush that has cameras, right? My challenge with that one is you can't use your own toothpaste. You have to use their lather toothpaste.

It's sold out everywhere. You can't find it. Did you buy it? It's sold out. It's too hard to buy.

I was going to buy it the day of, and then I looked at the toothpaste and I was like, I'm not going to do that yet. I'm going to wait for the next wave. Because what if they explode in your mouth?

No, it doesn't. But the review—

You don't know that yet, it just came out.

Yeah, but some people had it earlier, like earlier access, and they critiqued it while they were actually brushing, but the reviews are amazing. And the first time I watched a video, I did not buy it. And then I got shown the video a lot more by other influencers. And I'm like, oh, I should go and buy it. Went to Amazon, not there. Went to Dyson then, sold out. And then I'm like, all right, forget this. I'm like, I'll just wait till someone has it.

Yeah. And then we'll wait for them to see, we'll see what they say, a real person, and then we can come back to it. But see, that's a good example of a launch, right? They gave it to a bunch of influencers and the product was available and then it sold out. But for ChatGPT, the influencers announced it and then it wasn't available. And then guess what? That actually wastes their mindshare for the day. Because they put all that, all the firepower into it. And then now it's the day, the next day. And you and I would probably be talking about how amazing it is. At least I would be. But nope, not happening right now. In fact, someone like me would probably be making a video on it today. So yes, it's their loss.

I agree with you, but I know this thing's coming out soon. I think for the websites like Best Buy, it's all saying like 9/8, but there was a moment where I was able to—

You're talking about the toothpaste?

No, the toothbrush. Yeah. I was able to Buy it. And then it ended up turning to, instead of buying it, like notify me.

Yeah. I almost bought it too, but there was only a pink version available.

Yes. Yeah, same.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't want the pink version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want the blue version.

So I was close to getting it and I was like, okay, worst case I can just get it for the girlfriend, right? But then it's like, you know, and then see how she likes it. If she doesn't like it, then I won't buy it. But yeah.

That's a good idea. You should go get the pink version for your girlfriend.

No, you get it first. You get it for your daughter and so you can get 2 customers on it.

My kids are too young for it.

Okay, well get it for your wife.

No, she won't care for this. Half the time she has electric toothbrush, half the time she just uses the handheld. She'll be like, you use it first and then let me brush too.

The problem with the handheld is I brush really hard, right? It causes your gums to recede and then you have to like repair it.

I thought you got that fixed.

I did get it fixed. That was 5 years ago. And then I brushed so hard again and started receding again.

Mine tells me don't brush too long. So the problem that I have is—

Your OCD.

They're like, don't keep brushing. They asked me how long I brush. I said, on average, I brush 4 minutes. 3 times a day. They're like, that's too long. Slow down how many minutes you brush.

4 minutes, 3 times a day? That's crazy. All you need is 2 minutes.

No, I can't. There's not enough time to clean teeth fully in 2 minutes.

That's why his teeth are so white. It's almost like you have veneers, but you don't.

No, my teeth are crooked.

Veneers are really expensive. I learned that veneers are like $60 grand and people get loans for that.

People get veneers in Asia.

Yeah, but like, I don't understand.

It's not $60 grand. It's really affordable.

I, well, I've heard here around here is $60,000.

Yeah, because this is Beverly Hills.

Yeah.

Go somewhere else and it's half the price.

Yeah. But also that's a permanent thing too.

Well, veneers, they shave down your teeth and they put fake teeth over it.

I'm saying, so it's permanent. You can't undo that.

No, you can't undo it.

Yeah. Anyway, I saw something interesting post from Andrew Warner recently because you and I have been working, you know, I believe that we're putting a little more effort into our YouTube channels, at least I am. So It's interesting to me because—

Edward Warner, MixerG?

Yeah, MixerG, because he started a new YouTube channel, right? And so he has 50,000 subs. Okay, so you have like 1.6 million or something like that. I have about 200,000, something like that, right? But the subs don't really matter because in the last month, he posted the numbers here, he got 937,000 views, right? This is, you know, in aggregate and then 58,000 watch time and then 12,000 subscribers added, right? I think these are great numbers.

Let me guess, he's talking about the next new hot thing and that's why it's doing well.

Exactly. So that's the first takeaway in terms of how he's grown his YouTube, right? Exactly. We talked about this on the podcast. It's the views. If you hit a trending topic, like you're going to win. Like my GrokBot, my last few videos, it's like, it's not bad, right? If I get it over 10,000 for a video, I'm like happy with it for long form. So my GrokBot for business won 14,000 views. The other one's like 12,000. So he said, 5 things that helped my new YouTube channel take off. 1, info calls. Jesse Pujji taught me how to have frequent informational calls with people who do YouTube well. In one, I learned to turn on ads. That's a big one. So whenever you don't turn on ads, like they're not incentivized to show you as much, okay? And he learned how vidIQ can be a good thought partner, okay? The second piece, so, is around data. So choose rich, show me how to look at the minute-by-minute view data that YouTube gives to help me cut fluff off. So you just look at retention metrics like 30-second retention or 3-second retention for short form. And then X, he says X is the best indicator of what the world will talk about. So whenever you see what people are talking about, like open call agents, you attack it quickly, right? If you're attacking trending topics. And then 4, you lean into not knowing. So just like learning from other people, bringing them on. And then 5, PR, having other people promote it. And he says, you know, what didn't work is talking about YouTube on X. That doesn't work that well. So, but like you and I have been doing YouTube for a little bit and I will just say, I'll share my learnings first and then Neil can share his learnings. Yes, if you're talking about trending topics, like whenever I talked about NFTs when they're hot, oh my God, 100,000 views, right? If I talk about dating and finance, oh my God, 600,000 views, right? Right. And so you can talk about wide TAM topics or you can talk about trending topics, but they might not necessarily drive views, leads for you. Okay. So you have to keep that in mind. And then the second thing I'll say around this is that people are like, oh, okay, the packaging does matter, like your YouTube and your thumbnail and your headline. But honestly, if it's a trending topic, it doesn't even matter. You can have the crappiest thumbnail in the world, you're still going to get like an 8%, 9% click-through rate.

Yep. You know, when I look at social media, I bet you Eric actually knows more of my social stats.

Bless you.

Thank you. Eric knows more about my social stats than I do. And I know this because last time we did a recording here, or was it the time before, you were talking about one of my videos. I didn't know the views. He knew the views. He even told me what my average views are on the other videos. And I looked and I'm like, oh, he's actually right.

Yeah.

That's how little I check on views. I look at all this stuff when it comes to social media. I think markers have it off. Thinking about the views is just a waste of time. We measure internally revenue from all the social content we create and what actually drove the revenue. We also look at leads that come from all the social content and how much revenue that generated. So the leads for us is more top of funnel. The bottom of the funnel is revenue. And then we map it out to which topics produce the best results and we just double down on those and we don't care if it creates 1,000 views or 50,000 views, it's all about the end result. And we found our business to grow faster operating that way than just focusing on views. And I think that's a big thing. Even with clients, we try to take them from, stop looking at your total search traffic, look how much revenue your search traffic drives. And we have case studies, no joke, like real case studies of large companies worth billions of dollars where we show half the traffic, more revenue, double the traffic, less revenue because you got the wrong type of traffic. And it's really hard to get marketers to get away from top of funnel traffic and shares and view metrics instead of just looking at things like what is actually producing results. Because your CEO doesn't care if you have 1/10 the search traffic, he'd rather have 1/10 the search traffic and double the revenue from that channel, especially if it is profitable.

You know, I was interviewing someone this week for like an SEO role, right? So I was like saying, and this guy worked at like Smartsheet, for example, or like Drata, right? Like these are, you know, good enterprise companies, right? And I was like, so what's your biggest SEO win? He's like, he couldn't give me a number, right? And he's like, oh yeah, you know, the share of voice went up, blah, blah. But like, what, how did that affect revenue? How did it affect pipeline? Oh, you know, I just don't know. But I'm like, but this is your most impressive SEO win, right? He's like, yeah. I'm like, Well then how do you not know these numbers, right? And so, but my point with that conversation is like, this is the majority of most marketers. They think about the vanity metrics up top because it absolves them from the responsibility of having to go deeper in terms of driving pipeline and leads and revenue.

Yes. A new thing that I learned, so all of our executives in all the countries need to know how our ideal customer found us. Example of this is Javi who runs LATAM for us. Got a lead, one of the biggest companies in Latin America, and he asked them how they found us because it's required for internally, we track it all. And he said, they found us from Claude. And then he follows up with, what did you ask? And then it was specifically around paid ads on Google and SEO, and Claude recommended us for that as well as if they wanted GEO, we can do all 3 with them and do it combined. And they talked about The efforts and the results because we have some data on this, but it also mentioned other agencies. This is helpful for a few reasons. One, you can ask these engines these questions too, and they told us, yeah, we hit up you and the other agencies that recommended for this RFP. So, if Eric asks the same question, he may get different results from Claude, but there's usually some overlap. We now kind of have an understanding of the other agencies that are competing with us in the pitch. So that was really helpful. 2, we've noticed a trend from a lot of our executives. 6 months ago when they asked, where are you finding us? Most of them would say ChatGPT or Gemini when it came to these LLMs or AI overviews or Google, right? So a Google version or ChatGPT. We're starting to see companies are starting to say Claude more frequently. It's not that Claude has a massive market share of people using Claude to just do searches or ask questions like they do with ChatGPT. It's that a lot of businesses have been buying Claude for their employees, and their employees are now also using it to answer questions related to things that are not related to execution. Because a lot of the people that I know who use Claude use it to be more efficient in execution within their job, But because the company's already paying for corporate accounts, people are starting to also use it to search or ask questions even though they also have ChatGPT subscriptions. So we're starting to see an uptick in B2B, I'm sorry, not B2B, we are both, you and I are B2B, but businesses finding other businesses through Claude where we did not see that as frequently 6 months ago.

Yeah.

We've seen a big change in that for us.

It changes. I mean, the, it's interesting because Claude took the mindshare the last few months or so, and then everyone kind of, you know, moved over to that. And what's to say they won't in the future, right? So it might go back to OpenAI, might go back and forth. That's just like a side thing. I think when it comes to sales in general, what you mentioned around how did you first find us, right? How did you first hear about us? That should be one of the first sales questions you ask. In fact, because when you starting, I was like, hey, cool, nice to meet you, right? By the way, how'd you hear about us? Right?

Oh, cool.

Well, you heard from Claude. Okay, well, what prompt did you use exactly? What did you see exactly? And then by the way, like you could even ask like, would you like us to do it for you? Right? But by the way, recently, I've been talking to my sales team about this, but I think the way to get larger deals is actually having that extended sales conversations now where you're just being curious about how all their work goes. Like, what are your priorities overall? What are you trying to do exactly? But because if you just try to— You're talking about with With potential customers. Because if you're just trying to force one solution down, you're actually losing the fact that maybe they're looking for multiple things. If you just try to force like the one thing that you know, versus having a conversation.

But you already know this, dude, you've been doing sales for years. It doesn't matter what you're selling. I know you're selling more AI stuff now. The first thing you would have all your people do, including you, is you hear them out and understand all the problems because then you can discover where you can help them.

Yep.

Versus just going in and selling a solution.

And that's most salespeople. That's the lesson for everyone here. Most salespeople like to force their solution down. Like remember you met one of the salespeople from like another agency last year at the, maybe 2, yeah, a year ago at the Global Marketing Summit, the YPO one, remember that?

Okay.

That person only knew how to sell her solution and didn't try to learn the other solutions that we had. And thus didn't ask good questions and learn the entire problem set. So I think in sales you have to be more like a doctor. You have to understand all the things that are happening within their business and then have a, have an extended conversation. And so I think the patient salesperson actually ends up winning more. Patient, patient conversation, not, not patient with like—

It's all problem solution selling, right? Exactly. So you're trying to understand someone's problem and then you end up selling them a solution that works for them and is customized for them. But the really cool part about Listening is, is sometimes people tell you that they have a problem A, but really A isn't the problem. The root cause of it is B. If you solve B, you'll solve A as well. If you solve A, it doesn't solve B and it creates other problems that you didn't think about.

Mm-hmm.

Right. But so understanding is super important. Like I had someone hit me up the other day who's like, I want to work with you and we have We are in the kitchen space. So they deal with like Moen or Kohan, I don't know all the faucet names. And they work with them to get into other architects and other designers and builders to recommend their products. So their job is to get other people who sell the products to recommend them over the competition. And he was showing me all the stuff that he was trying to do. And he's like, yeah, I'm struggling with GEO and I'm struggling with Facebook ads and it's not working. And I was like, you should just go to account-based marketing. And he's like, oh, would you help us with account-based marketing? I'm like, no, but this is what you should end up doing. I'm like, the other channels are a waste. You're trying to figure out these channels that don't really matter too much for you, but account-based marketing will be much more effective.

Yep.

And then they shifted focus. They thought how they're actually leveraging these channels, like ChatGPT is off. Instead, it's the channels aren't the right fit for his business.

Yep, totally. Now, did you know that 80% of Anthropic and OpenAI's revenues come from 1% of the customers?

It's way less than 1%, but yeah, yeah.

So this is actually new data from Ramp, right? So they have a lot of credit card data. So you can see here, top 1% of businesses, right? And then you have everyone else. This is the majority of their revenue. And then you have the next 9% and then everyone else. This is the standard Pareto principle.

Yeah, but for them it's even skewed because there's only so many large corporations and there's a lot of people who'll give them, I don't know what their fees are, $20 a month. What's the lowest entry? Is it $20?

$20, yeah.

Yeah, so there's a lot of people that'll pay $20. There's a fraction of 1% that can spend millions of dollars with them and that fraction of a percent is where they're making all their revenue.

And this is really risky if you're one of these companies, right? Because it's like this concentration risk, I've never seen this before, right? The companies in the top 1% skew heavily towards the tech sector. So you have like Microsoft, for example, right? You have Meta, for example, you have Amazon, which they're kind of building their own models. Meta's built a model that is already like a 5.6 equivalent from like a ChatGPT standpoint. And so here's the thing. If you look at NVIDIA, they just bought Hugging Face for $13 billion. If they're in on Hugging Face, which is an open source company, right?

They're also one of the investors too. I don't know if you knew that. And Hugging Face, NVIDIA is one of the earlier investors.

NVIDIA also has money in OpenAI, and I'm sure in Anthropic too, but they're gonna just go for everything, right? And so you have Meta going open source, you have NVIDIA going open source as well. So then what happens to these companies, right? And I still think they're gonna be fine, but the question is, is Anthropic a multi-trillion dollar company right now?

They're supposedly trying to go public at over $2 trillion.

$2 trillion, yeah, bigger than SpaceX is. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, like it's risky, but hey, I still love using these products, don't get me wrong. I'm just like, this is kind of a little scary.

So it's, I agree with you, it's extremely scary, but their client concentration isn't bad. Think of a services business. So flip it around. Don't look at the majority of their revenue coming from 1% of the customers. The way bankers will look at this is that 1% isn't 5 companies or 10 companies. So when you look at how much of their revenue comes from the majority of the companies that actually they generate revenue from, the concentration isn't as bad.

So what Neil's saying is it's not that bad. Also, these companies are fairly stable. My thing is, as the other models, like if in a year Nvidia's models are pretty much up there, right? I think there's always, again, there's always going to be room for frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI. But as Meta is basically catching up, right? All the money they're spending, like first, maybe a year ago, everyone's like, what's Mark Zuckerberg doing right now? It's like, oh damn, they're actually catching up.

So yeah, because the way people look at it, like let's say someone in finance, Yes, 99% of the revenue comes from people who pay small amounts. All right. Or 1% of the revenue comes from people who pay— what was it? 80% of the revenue comes from—

80% comes from 1%.

So they'll look at 20% of the revenue comes from 99%. They'll be like, okay, here's that 99%. We don't have to worry about that. They'll look at the 80%. And then within that 80%, it's not like one company makes up 20%. It's still a large number. Because they have millions of customers and that large number, it's spread out. Yes, you can have some outliers in there, but I bet you it'd be very rare if Anthropic had more than, call it 10% of their revenue coming from one customer, if I had to guess.

Yep, we'll see how it plays out, but I want to call something, this piece out. So this is AI productivity as it relates to writing, so content generation, for example, okay? So Tomasz Tunggu is the VC that is still at Redpoint Ventures or Theory VC now, okay? So he wrote a post, AI productivity doesn't mean what I thought it means. So if you look at this chart over here, Neil, what this is explaining is the post that he's written, he has a blog, he's been writing for a while, right? And so you can see what AI is actually doing is it's helping the weakest posts gain, right? The strongest posts aren't getting that much better, but the weakest posts out there, they're becoming significantly better. So it means it's just raising the floor a lot higher. And what he's learning from this is that it actually means that We're doing— it raised the ceiling of the same amount of work, which means it actually still increases human effort. It doesn't shrink human effort.

Yes.

So we're going to be doing more still.

Yeah, I think we're entering into a new era where people are less of the narrative of AI is going to kill human labor. There's going to be no need for human labor. I don't know what's going to happen 10 years from now, but people are making this bet in the short run, which is like, oh, we're going to have mass unemployment over the next few years. And you have really smart people on both sides, and I don't know who's right. I just know I haven't seen it with the companies we work with, and we work with a lot of large enterprises, I can't name one off the top of my head that really is laying off because of AI. Even in engineering, most of the companies I know are actually hiring, they're not laying off.

Did you see the post from Iconiq on headcount? So Iconiq's a VC firm, right? And so they were talking about, here, let me just pull this up for you. So basically, if you're a hyperscaler right now, you're adding a lot more headcount, right? So you're adding 133% more headcount in the first half of 2026. But if you're in the 50 to 100% of growers, right, in terms of your growth rate, you've cut your hiring by almost in half. And so it just depends on kind of where you're at. If you're a hyperscaler, you're going to be adding a lot more headcount, but—

Cut your hiring or cut your staff by half?

Your staff.

So they're firing.

Yeah. Okay. So no, sorry, sorry, sorry. This is headcount growth. This is headcount growth.

Headcount growth. So they're cutting how many new jobs they're looking for. So instead of looking for 100 jobs, if they're only growing at 40% a year, they're now only looking for 50 jobs. So they've slowed down hiring.

Can you see—

Or open roles.

So I'll explain because it's probably a little hard to see. So I'm showing a chart over here and basically the hyperscalers are at the very top in the red. So you can see in 2023, 2024, it actually went down. The growth rate went from 119% to 65%. People are like, oh my God, you know, AI is going to destroy a bunch of jobs, right? 2025, it shoots back up to 112%. And then 2026 first half is 133%. This is the hyperscalers up top. Now, if you're in the 50% to 100% growth rate band, you're in the yellow over here. Am I making sense so far?

Yes.

Okay, 2023, 2020, 2022, 2023. So 47%, then in 2024, it goes to 35%, and then 2025, it goes to 46%, and the first half of 2026, 25%. So you can see these lower bands over here are actually hiring less, and it kind of maps to some of these conversations I've been having with other entrepreneurs where they're talking about the language they're using is like not hiring as quickly, right? But when you look at the news from all the big companies out there, they're hiring a lot more.

As Benioff put it on TV, he was with Dario, the Anthropic CEO, and I think it was on Cramer. He was talking about, hey, AI's crushing all this stuff and staff and all that. He's like, everyone, they were talking about how they're hiring like crazy. All of them are on Slack. All of them are using Salesforce. And he's just like, they're all a few blocks and they're adding more seats and increasing usage year over year, not decreasing.

Yeah. And Salesforce has good free cash flow. By the way, the SaaSpocalypse, man, is going up. Yeah. See, it's a good bet. But anyway, so—

I still think it's not over. I think it'll take like another 6 months to— 6 months for things to adjust to a year.

Well, we had said this is a year trade.

Yeah.

So, okay. But I want to go a little deeper into this and we can continue on. So if you look at, if you're growing at less than 25%, your headcount growth is 3%. So minus 1 point. Okay. If you're 25 to 50%, your headcount growth is—

Sorry to interrupt. What do you mean What do you mean minus 1 point? Because you're at 3, you're still growing at 3%. I don't understand the minus 1.

No, because a year before the growth rate was 4% and then this year so far, year to date is 3%.

Okay, so it shrunk down. You're still growing, but you're only growing at 3% instead of 4%.

Yes, correct. And so like mostly they're not adding as much. Right. And so this one over here, by the way, you look at it went from 16%.

What's the percentages? Sorry.

This one. Sorry. This one's if you're growing at 25 to 50% as a company, you So you went from 16% last year and then this year to date so far you're at 10%. So you dropped 6 points, which is pretty significant.

So you're growing your headcount by 10%.

Correct.

But it's 10% on a bigger number as well.

That's correct. Well, I mean, we don't know what the whole sample size looks like, but yeah.

Okay.

Read the rest if you don't mind. And then if you're growing that 50 to 100%, you were 46% last year and now it's 25%. So down 21 points.

Were they growing at 25% the year before? Because I'm assuming their growth is slowing down and that's also causing—

We don't know that. I don't have that data. Yeah, but we have to pull the ICONIQ report. This is like Saster did this, but like you can see that the hyperscalers are more or less continuing to push more. But I just think it's interesting that when we talk to friends that have, you know, maybe companies that are growing at a decent rate, the language is still very much, we're not looking to add as much, but they are looking to add more AI-pilled talent. I'll tell you that much. Everybody is. So yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's that. So let's move back over here. So, all right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer the Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Let me show you this, Neil. What do you think is the one X factor to getting to product market fit? And do you want to define what product market fit is? And then I'm going to show you some data.

So Eric Ries in The Lean Startup and Sean Ellis back in the day, they had this thing where it came to product market fit. You would look at how many people, how many of your customers were extremely satisfied and couldn't live without your product, and they would run a survey. It's probably a terrible way of defining it, but based on the data, depending on how many of your people really love it and can't live without your product, you tend to have something called product market fit. And in essence, what they're really looking at is if a product has really high usage and people keep needing to use it, you're more likely to have product market fit than if you don't have that.

In essence, really product market fit is just people find your product useful.

Yes.

And the majority of people find your product useful. And Y Combinator has this batch outcome data. Okay, so Y Combinator, they backed Airbnb, they backed Dropbox, other companies that you know. A lot of them.

Yeah.

When you think about this, companies that entered a batch— so a batch is like a class, okay, for startups joining, right? So companies that entered a batch with 10+ user conversations per week found product-market fit within 6 months on average. Okay. Now, on the flip side, companies with fewer than 2 user conversations per week took 18+ months or never found it. So it's the frequency of user conversations. It's the most predictable variable for PMF, product-market fit timeline. And this is interesting because there's a company that I backed, called Levels. They do the continuous glucose monitor. When I talked to the CEO, I can tell he was doing a customer call with me, right? Just the way he was asking me questions. I was like, how many of these have you done? He said 4,000 right now. Did they necessarily, you know, hit rocket ship growth? Not necessarily, but I do think they found product market fit. But that's the amount it takes. And this is one thing I'm training our engineers on right now. It's like, hey guys, it's not just ship a bunch of stuff. You actually have to talk to our team internally. You have to talk to customers as well. And that's not something you're used to doing. But now that you can do more, You're expected to know how to talk to customers. You're expected to know how to do marketable moments as well. But most people don't know that you actually need to talk to people. I remember Neil, back when I first met him, when I would call him, his voicemail would go to, this is Neil from Kissmetrics, right? So he was actually talking to customers all the time. You want to talk about that?

Yeah, I always talked to— I even, I still talk to them right now. And the reason being is if you talk to customers versus don't talk to them, you're only going to learn so much. Your team can tell you one thing, a customer's going to tell you something else. It doesn't mean the customer's right. Actually, I genuinely believe in most cases, not all the customer's right. And in some cases, your team's going to be right, but people have different viewpoints. And if you don't talk to people, you won't understand what is the real truth and what needs to be changed and what needs to be fixed.

Yep.

And that's why I love talking to people. But you talk, if you go back to when Steve Jobs was around, he talk about how if you ask your customer what kind of phone they may want or device, they'll tell you something, but it's not really what they want because they don't always know what they want. So, you have to be careful when you get feedback as well because sometimes the feedback is based on their limited understanding of that subject, and it could be skewed. Like, back when the iPhone first came out, If someone were to ask me what kind of phone would I want, I'd be like, oh, the BlackBerry. It's really cool. That is what I would want. Like, uh, like, uh, before the iPhone came out, right? I would be like, a BlackBerry. You don't need anything more than that. You have a mouse, you have apps, you have a keyboard. This is great. If you look actually at an iPhone, I don't want a BlackBerry anymore. iPhone is great. But I couldn't envision that until I actually saw the product. And by the way, you know, Apple has a new phone coming out on Wednesday.

The flip phone, are you getting it?

The foldable.

Yeah, I know. Not the flip phone, the foldable, you're right.

Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to get it.

Well, I'm Chinese, so I might get it because Chinese people get it. I'm just kidding. I'll probably still— I'm used to— here's the thing, this is interesting, right, Neil? Because back in the day when the iPhone first came out, I had a BlackBerry and I was looking when the iPhone came out, I'm like, why would I need this? This is so stupid, right? So what might happen is with this foldable phone, comes out, we might look at it like it's really stupid and we'll probably still end up getting it anyway.

I may get it. I'm curious because a lot of these phones are made in China and whoever the manufacturers are for, somehow they always have leaks and you can actually see like what it looks like. I don't care for the design as much. I hope it looks better than what people are showing online. So we're going to have to wait and see, but they already have the molding. I'm curious to see how it works and I'm curious to see if you can watch like a movie better. I'm curious to see the size when it folds and fits in your pocket. I'm more interested interested in what Huawei has, the foldable—

Huawei?

Huawei.

I'm more—

wow, my bad. I'm more interested in their foldable tablet. And if Apple comes out with the foldable tablet, which they're saying is a few years from now, that I would buy.

It doesn't look like this, does it? It looks—

That's what it supposedly looks like.

I'm looking because you're dimensioning this and I saw it trending on, on X, and so I'm like, oh, that's what it looks Like, um, so to me, I don't know what it is.

That's not that appealing from a design perspective. I don't know why.

You know what I mean? This looks like a Chinese phone to me. I mean, it is built in China. Yeah.

Like, it's like they're trying to create an iPad out of a phone.

It does look like an iPad. It's an iPad phone.

But I don't— do you really want that?

No, I have an iPad right here.

Yeah.

I'm good on this.

So it's like, I don't know if I'm going to buy it. Well, 'cause I don't really use my phone for anything other than emails.

Like that? Yeah, I don't know about that. This is my first time seeing it.

Yeah, so, 'cause I only use my phone for phone calls, uh, sometimes doom scrolling on Instagram, but not that often. Uh, funny enough, a lot of the people who log in from my Instagram, you know, like my employees doom scroll on my account and I can tell.

Because the algorithm changes.

Yeah. And I was like, what are all these car videos? Or like, what are all these fitness videos?

But you know me, dude. Am I really that into fitness? No, no.

So then I get the most random thing and I can tell who did it. 'Cause sometimes like there'll be videos of women. I'm like, oh, I'm like, I know who it is 'cause they're single.

Right. That's funny.

And then some of them are like cooking and I'm like, oh, I know who did this as well. Yeah.

That's funny. So you can tell who last used it basically.

Yes. 'Cause they accidentally forget to switch back to Yeah, that's funny. And then the best is when some of my videos start turning into Portuguese and I'm like, I know who's doing this.

Yeah, that's funny. So can you explain, Neil, what digital PR is actually and how does it help with AEO SEO?

Looking like, uh, oh dude, I had to show you something before I go into that. Wow. Because we're talking about iPhones.

Yeah.

Huawei.

H-U-A-W-E-I.

Uh, with screen Uh, okay, check this out. Look at what Huawei's doing. This is cool. They're starting to put screens in the back. I would buy that.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, because you can see, well, like when you're in the camera and all that kind of stuff, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's because the camera is better on the back than the front.

That's cool. But like, what else would you use it I just don't know.

But like that doesn't, if it didn't increase the dimension of my phone, I think that's a cool feature that I would pay for. So digital PR, to go back to your digital PR question, sorry for the sidetrack, but I had to show you that because with all the iPhone releases, people are talking about the Chinese phones and how they're already better and ahead of where the iPhone production is.

We'll push in on that for a second, right? Because here's the thing, when I showed the ByteDance team how we work inside of Slack with AI, They laugh at me, right? Because they were already doing that like a year or two ago, right? Because they have this thing called Lark, L-A-R-K. And the funny thing is when we show Americans how we use it, mind blown, oh my God, right? It's so amazing, right? And so they are, I would say like, we don't know a lot of these things, but they're ahead in a lot of cases and they're making do. They might not have as much energy. Well, no, no, they might not have all the AI tech, but they have much more energy than us. So they're making do with whatever that they have. So I'm saying, you know, whether it's the United States or China or any other country, you don't want to underestimate them because look at the phones, they look like they're They're better than ours.

I remember, I believe it was the All-In interview with Travis, the ex-Uber CEO and founder. He ended up talking about China and he's like, they move so fast, they copy really quickly. And he's like, what's crazy is not only do they copy super fast, but what's interesting is after a while they've copied everything, then they start innovating and producing more than what you're producing. And then you're starting to look at them and be like, wow, we should copy this.

Yeah. And here's the thing, how we're talking about mindset again, okay? The mindset of that culture, because I'm from that culture, right? I know how it is. You're working all the time, you're studying all the time. It's 996, sometimes 997 in terms of hours, right? 9 AM to 9 PM, 7 days a week. But there's only so many companies that do that. So if they keep compounding that advantage, how do you beat that at a certain point, right?

It's tough. Even with AI, they're still working all those hours with AI to get even more done.

Yep. So I wonder, have you looked into this as a parent, Neil? Have you looked into how we rank with mathematics versus China?

We're terrible. We're probably in the bottom, you know, 10%, 20% bottom.

I don't know.

I know we're not in the top. If I had to guess, I don't even think we're in the top 10% globally for education.

Okay. So let me give you the rankings here. I'm using Google AI mode for this. Okay. So it basically for K-12, okay. Singapore is number Okay. Okay. I'm pointing at myself because I'm yellow. Number 1 is Singapore. Number 2 is Macau.

Okay.

Number 3 is China. China, sorry. Number 3 is Taiwan.

Okay.

Number 4 is Hong Kong.

Okay.

I'm half Hong Kong, half Taiwanese, right?

Okay.

Number 5 is Japan. Number 6 is South Korea.

Okay.

Number 34 is the United States.

There you go. Right?

How do you beat that education system? How do you beat that work ethic? Because we get distracted by all these things, right? All these other things in the workplace.

Yes.

And that's— we'll just leave it at that. Yeah.

But what people forget about the US is it doesn't mean the US is screwed. It means the average is screwed. The US has amazing mathematic programs, sadly, for people who are privileged and have money.

Yeah. Yeah. And so this is, this is the thing. The rich will get richer. And not only that, the rich will get richer because they have intelligence. Like you have infinite intelligence behind them too.

Dude, the school I go to, my kids go to, I've met some really interesting people there. It's a great school. Quite a few of the parents are from China. And when I asked them, what made you move? They're like, school. We moved to the US to go to this school here. And I'm like, wait, what? And one of the parents I was talking to, they got one of their kids in. So, one of their kids went here, one of their kids was still in school in China. They would fly back and forth. This is dedication. The kid now just got into the school that's nearby another amazing school.

They're older.

So, and then now both their kids here and now they're full-time just living in the US.

Well, you know how it works. Our university system is better, right? But our K through 12—

No, this is for K through 12.

Okay. Well, we just kind of—

But this is for private school. That's what I'm saying. The privilege, right? Like if you have money, but the competition for these schools, even if you have money for every— I don't know what the ratio is, but some people joke that it's harder to get into than Harvard because everyone has money. Everyone has letters of Like, it's extremely hard. People move from all over the United States.

Supply and demand.

And this is the interesting thing that I found. A lot of the parents that I've talked to move their primary home, even if they live in Southern California, closer to the school. So in other words, they're changing their life for the school. Yep.

This is interesting. I didn't know this was true, Neil. So, uh, and then we can, we can move on to the, the digital PR thing. But compulsory schooling, do you know what this is? So the US mandates 12 to 13 years of compulsory education. China legally mandates 9 years primary and lower secondary with roughly 40% of upper secondary students sorting into specialized vocational tracks, which I believe that should be how education is because I do believe at age 9 or 10 for you or me, we probably could have started going into business or marketing because we just hired a 15-year-old, right? And I can tell like he, it's your brain might not be fully formed yet. You might not be fully developed, but he's already got the capabilities to do it. And I believe we should change to just 12 to 13 years of forced education.

No, Alpha School already did it. You see their entrepreneur program.

He's from Alpha School.

Oh, he's from Alpha School. They have an entrepreneur, they have, I think, 3 different versions when you're older. One of the versions is if you don't make $1 million by the time you graduate in revenue for your business, they'll refund your whole tuition.

So when people join the company, you're required to put, there's a photo sharing channel that we have where you share like introductions, right? So he joins and say, hey guys, I'm 15 years old. Here's the computer I built, blah, blah. My goal is to make $1 million by the time I'm 18. I'm like, fuck yeah, because that gets everyone else to like have to step up as well. I'm like, if he can come in and do it, you better have that motivation as well.

It's really cool to see that.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, but I just, I hope there's going to be more Alpha Schools and you know more about Alpha School than I do. We should talk about that real quick because I think the marketing behind it is genius. It's like, I know this guy, Nat Eliason, he kind of runs the Million Dollar Program, right? Where he's like, hey, like if you don't make $1 million or whatever, you get your tuition back or something like that, right? I think that's great marketing because it's training kids to lean into their entrepreneurial tendencies. And that's not saying everyone's going to be an entrepreneur, but it's to say that age doesn't matter. And I think that's a great alternative to standard schooling that we have. But did I miss anything there?

No, you nailed it. What's really interesting on how they do marketing, they pre-market before they go into a city. So let's say Las Vegas. I know Las Vegas well because I used to live there, but my co-founder, Mike lives there currently and he has 2 kids.

Oh, he has 2 now?

I didn't know that. So Alpha School has it where they start marketing everything that they're doing in their programs and they're creating all this content. They're putting around the web, they're doing podcast interviews to get the brand out there. Then for them to come to your school, they're looking at demand. They get the community to help. Oh, you love what we're doing? You like this? Are you willing to put down a deposit and be one of the founding families? Oh, cool.

Founding families.

Yeah. Yeah. Can you help us recruit more? Because unless we have X amount of founding families, we won't open up a school in that area. So then you are now marketing Alpha School to all the other parents, because if you have kids, your kids play with other kids.

And you're incentivized because you have money in there.

Yes. So now you are marketing Alpha School for them. You don't get a discount or any— from my understanding, you don't get a discount or people don't care for them. It's not substantial enough where it'd make a difference. You're going out there and doing this just so you can have this within your city. It's pretty much creating evangelists before they enter in your city, and this is causing them to create enough of a waitlist and a deposit before they enter. And the moment they enter, they're filled up because they've already done all the marketing ahead of time before they spent the money on the building, the rent, the teachers, and all of that. So now you don't have a business model that's just juicing up tons of cash This is high-status marketing.

That's what FOMO marketing, high-status marketing, and you'll do anything for your kids.

And there's only so many slots. A school isn't like—

A big school.

No.

Yeah.

It's not, it's not like where you can fit 1,000 kids and all these cities have a lot of kids. So you got to get in and it is FOMO because if you're not in there, you're going to miss out. So you better go and help them early on.

And you'll do anything for your kids.

Yes.

How much does it cost a year? $65,000? Is that what it is?

I think here's like either $60,000, $70,000. It depends. They base the pricing, not just a blanket pricing. It's based on the city you're in because rent costs more, let's say in Beverly Hills, they're working on opening one up than it would in East Hollywood. Right. So they base the pricing based on their costs as well.

I think this is interesting because the promise, I believe someone can correct me here, but it's if your kid doesn't have a million-dollar-a-year business by the time they're 18, they'll give you all your money back.

Not million-dollar-a-year from what I understand. No, from my understanding, you have to generate $1 million in revenue.

By the time they graduate.

Yeah, I don't think— I could be off on this.

Oh, so aggregate revenue.

Aggregate, yes.

I see. That's still good though.

That's still really good. It's not about if they hit $1 million or not, it's about teaching them the skills and the grit and the grind.

And then they'll be able to do whatever they want.

Yes.

And so I believe whether it's Alpha School or something else, I think this will start to trend upwards more. And do I think it's going to be a privileged thing? Yes, I do. But I think it's good if you can afford it. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. Digital PR, Neil. So what is digital PR actually and how does it help with AEO and SEO?

Sure. So think of getting websites. Let's say you're a business that sells, I don't know—

Massage oil.

No, not massage oil. That's a bad example. I know more entrepreneur topics. What do entrepreneurs Computers? Sure, computers. Let's say you sell like these AI computers with tons of RAM.

Servers, whatever.

Servers and all that kind of stuff. Your ideal websites to talk about you would be Entrepreneur, Forbes for like the business and the executive types. Also for, it would be CNET. I don't know too many of the tech sites. CNET, TechCrunch, Ziff Davis.

Ziff Davis, yeah.

Right? Some of those websites talking about you. So digital PR is like, all right, how can we get these websites to talk about you, review you, build relationships with the journalists? But it's also going out there and be like, oh, they have a listicle on this, or this webpage breaks down the best servers for running your own instance of some new LLM that's hot. I don't know what the latest hottest LLM is.

Astra ChatGPT-6. Okay.

No, I'm talking about on your local device and not using—

Oh, Quin.

Okay, Quin. So then if they have an article just for that and they're mentioning some of the servers that you can do, you'd be like, hey, these servers aren't actually set up for running Quin as efficiently because you're talking— the memory usage is just the bare minimum. So when you're doing X, Y, and Z, you actually need this much. We actually have a computer that solves loves this, check this out. If you can include it in this article, that'll be great. It's like the new version of link building. If they link, great. If they mention your brand, great. You just want to be included everywhere where people are talking about products or services that are ideal for you, and you want to make sure they're mentioning and talking about you in a good way. But it's not like old-school link building where it's just like, hey, can you just include a link? You want them to talk about your product and service and dive into it and break it down and talk about why it's better than some of the alternatives. Like the more, it's just like a PR person pitching a magazine to get included and do an exclusive or just getting an article or a mention in there. It's kind of similar, but you're doing it online and you're optimizing for the mention. And of course, why not get links at the same time? Because everyone's like, you just need mentions anymore. Well, if you get a mention and a link, that's better than just getting a mention. Yep.

So go ahead and finish that.

So when it's— when you're doing that, relevant sites, very detail-oriented on how they're describing you, getting the mentions, getting the links, all of this stuff really influences LLMs. And the key, and this is the pattern that we're seeing shift, Eric and I have been on this talk track for a long time before everyone's like spray and pray and just get any website to mention you. Now people are trying to focus on getting the right type sites that are industry-related mentioning you and talking about you because everyone knows that it's easy to get Joe Schmo guest posts on whatever random site, get them to mention you. It's not as effective, we believe, in the long run for a good website. And if you're really good at digital PR, you're not just going to be like, let me just get placed anywhere. You're going to be like, what are we trying to get mentioned on the LLMs for? Oh, the best computer for running, you know, your own instance of Kimia, or did you say it's Quinn or Kimia or whatever?

Kimia is fine.

Yeah, whatever one you want.

Yeah.

And if you know this is booming, you can get a lot of business for it. You're asking these questions to LLM, you're asking, you're looking at the sources that they're already citing, this exact article and URL, and you're hitting those people up and trying to convince them to include you as well, because that's the quickest way to get mentioned on that list.

So what I would say with all this is that just SEO back in the day was Google, right? There was no LLMs or anything like that. Today you have these ultimate pattern recognizers, whether it's Astra or, you know, ChatGPT, Anthropic, whatever it is exactly. What are they going to look for? You don't think they can get around the fact that you're just spamming a bunch of other websites like that might have worked before, but now it's like, okay, they're going to look for patterns, right? It's like, oh, does the site look relevant? Oh, are other people talking about that website? Oh, can I see what text is surrounding a link coming back to you? Obviously you would just choose that.

Or the other people included, because if they're random junk sites, you know that, oh, It doesn't help us much at all.

And so it's just a better pattern recognizer than what Google was before. And Google's Gemini is pretty strong on its own. And so you got to think like, if this is evolving, like what naturally would they be looking for? And digital PR, you might say, oh, this is nothing new. It's like, it is nothing new, but what's old is new again, right? And this is what works out well. And so even a year or two ago when people were spamming their own websites with a bunch of these like, you know, comparison or listicles, that worked really well because the LLMs didn't catch up yet. Now they're catching up more. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but they're getting smarter and smarter the day, and I have Asterisk 6 on my iPad now, so I'm going to go work on this right after we finish.

Dude, one last thing before we finish, because I know we're about time, and we actually finished really well on time because we went—

No, we have a couple more. I have one more episode.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, we started at 03. But when we started talking about LLMs back in the day, you and I were like, they're much more sophisticated than traditional search. Yet marketers believe that you can use the same old spammy tactics that you used 10 years ago because they're not sophisticated. So you're like, wait, you think you can use the old-school tactics to spam Google? And you know they stopped working on Google because Google got more sophisticated. These LLMs are more sophisticated than Google, and they're evolving at a very rapid rate. You don't think that you're going to go through all those same learnings again? So why not just skip the spammy stuff and just do the Right stuff from day one because it's going to last long and you're going to do way better in the long run. But yet marketers, for some reason, it doesn't click for a lot of them when they already know LLMs are much smarter.

So we've been doing this podcast for, it's got to be like 11 years now or something like that, right? Some 11 or 10 years.

Okay.

We've always said this in the beginning, do the black hat stuff in a white hat way. Okay. This is the perfect example of that. It takes a little more effort, but it works a lot better than just spamming everything. And yet people still do the same thing over And I want to clarify what Eric's saying.

He's not saying use black hat tactics. He's saying learn from the black hat tactics and do them in legitimate long-term strategies. He's not saying do the black hat tactics on legitimate businesses. He's saying learn from the black hat strategies and do them in legitimate ways. Even if it takes more time and money and energy, it's more worth it in the long run because the results will continually compound. Versus having a short-term effect where you're getting that like dopamine and then it just goes away because it doesn't work anymore.

Yeah. And by the way, a perfect example of this, I've looked at, you know, whether it's Neil or myself, the evolution of our marketing over the years. There'll be some years where like I'm good at YouTube and then some years where I suck. And then there's some years where I'm good at this channel and then the same thing for you. Like it kind of ebbs and flows, right? But the one thing that we've been consistent with is that we've been consistent, right? That's the one advantage. It's just, this is how you outlast other people by just continuing to do. And by the way, when you try doing the Black hat stuff, we've like experimented early days. I'm not speaking for Neil, but in the early days, I've tried the gray hat stuff. You lose everything for all your efforts. You might as well just do it the right way. It compounds a lot better. And you learn as you go through your career, the 5, 10, 15 years goes by really quickly. And then you see the benefit of compound interest.

Yes.

And even by the way, I'll look at Neil's traffic, right? Neil, people were poo-pooing on Neil for losing his traffic. Doesn't matter because he's built so much infrastructure around all the other stuff that it doesn't matter. Right? And that you're impervious to just one channel going down, whereas everyone else has been on one channel with all the black hat stuff and they lose it all. So that's the lesson. Keep being consistent. That's how you win at marketing.

Yep.

All right. Goodbye.