Ep. 3013: Elon vs Zuck - $1B Compute vs $1B Humans

Speaking of trillion, because you just said the word trillion, if you think about Elon versus Zuck, Elon is spending $1 billion on compute versus Zuck is spending $1 billion on humans because Zuck is poaching all these people from like OpenAI or wherever, right?

Yeah.

These top AI researchers. Whereas Elon, did you see the new Colossus? He's good, like Colossus 2 that he's going to build. It's like an order of magnitude bigger than all of the other kind of data centers combined.

And he'll do it faster too, I bet.

Yeah. And then, but it's like he's betting more on compute. He thinks that that's real intelligence, right? Versus Zuck betting on humans. Now, who knows which one's right or wrong? This is just another reinforcement that there's no right or wrong way to do business. But it's just, it's so, you gotta have guts to make either of these bets and these guys aren't afraid to do it. It's funny because you see Zuck over here with a Thanos Uh, so these Infinity Stones over here are basically AI researchers.

So that's all the ones he's been taking.

Yep.

Yep.

And, and you know what's funny?

And he's paying each like $100 million or something like that.

What's funny is they're all Asian and Indian people.

Are they really? Yeah.

That's so funny.

The one thing to keep in mind with Elon, and I was talking to my brother-in-law, Heathen, about this yesterday night. What I admire about him as an entrepreneur, forget his views and what you think about that, right? If you just look at it from like an entrepreneur standpoint, like he has a diner here. I don't know if you've been to it.

Yeah, I want to go.

But the lines, the lines have been ridiculously long and sometimes it takes hours and hours just to get in.

Yeah.

But if you look at what he tends to do as an entrepreneur, he tends not to do what the status quo is. And a great example of this is when everyone's talking about software and AI, he's building that, But for years he's been building actual robots that can do stuff, not just fill up popcorn in the diner, but actually clean your house or live in your daily life. If you look at what he did with Tesla, you already know my opinion on the Tesla car. I don't think it's a great car.

I love the car.

I hate the car. I think the seats are crap and he won't put in more parts because he doesn't want to make the manufacturing more complex, but I'll give him credit for 2 amazing things that Tesla has done with the cars. The first is I think they have some of the best technology, and I think they're going to end up being a technology company that's licensing out that technology to all the other car companies over time, especially with like things like self-driving.

Mm-hmm.

The second thing that he did is he pretty much owns all the gas stations for electric. He has the infrastructure. You want to charge your electric car, it doesn't matter if it's a Chinese one or a German one or a US one, You're probably using the Tesla network in Europe and in America and probably in LATAM as well.

You know what's interesting too? So this retreat, so 3 people drove there, all 3 people had electric cars. None of them were Teslas. One was an Audi, actually 2 were Audis. And then there was my car, right? But when I used to have a Tesla, it was so easy to charge everywhere and it's fast charging everywhere, right?

No, it's still fast for Porsche. Porsche is compatible with their networks.

Yeah, but the thing, no, I've tried charging it in those networks. You have to find specific places. Like they're only opening up specific ones. Not every charging station is open to like an outsider car like mine.

But eventually I believe he'll change it.

He said that years ago, but he's still not active.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, and he'll make more money from it. He'll, he'll juice the revenue from it.

I think that's— I think the most impressive thing about Elon is not even just the, the tech, it's more so the manufacturing stuff, right? Like you, you look at how quickly he's built these Colossus centers and, but you look at the factories he's built for Tesla.

Yeah.

He's actually proudest of that. And I actually think that's harder. I, I don't, I don't think, I think that it would take me years and years and years to learn that. And the same thing for you too. And I, I still don't even think we'd figure it out. Yeah.

I don't know if I could actually learn that.

I don't think we'd figure it out. Yeah.

Yeah. But like, I look at like what he did with SpaceX is revolutionary. I think of what he's doing, not with Grok, but with the humanoids or whatever he wants to end up calling it, that'll end up being revolutionary, right?

Robots.

Yeah. He ends up focusing on stuff that is innovative and really, really hard to do.

He just wants to make humanity better, honestly. Yeah.

Same with like Neuralink. If you look at what he's doing as an entrepreneur, I don't think And I'm not saying Zuck's done a terrible job. I don't think it's challenging to pay people a lot of money. I think it's challenging to do stuff that no one else has done.

I just wish before, you know, Elon does the next thing or whatever, he— someone releases a book on how he works, because that is worth studying for everybody in the world. You get what I mean? To work on so many different things and play Diablo and have 12 kids. Like how, how does it work? And that, that is worth, like, I wish one of the biographers revealed that.

Yeah. But if you look at his company versus the competitors, like if you look at Facebook, what Facebook's done really well is M&A.

Yeah.

Microsoft has done M&A really well. Look at GitHub, what they bought GitHub for. I believe it has roughly that much now in revenue annually or something like that. It was crazy. The numbers I saw, look at YouTube. They bought YouTube for what, $1 point something billion?

$1 billion.

And it did what, almost $10 billion in revenue last quarter?

I think more, it does more revenue than Netflix.

Yeah. So this is like, if you look at Google, they've done extremely well from M&A. So has Microsoft. So has Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. I know people talk about like, oh, WhatsApp, they haven't monetized yet. The user base, the amount of people that use WhatsApp is ridiculous. Majority of the world. But if you look at Elon, what has he done Well, from an M&A standpoint.

SolarCity?

Exactly.

Cousin's company.

All right. Like what he's done well is not M&A. What he's done well is build.

He likes doing things the hard way, it seems. Yeah. It's always the hard way. Maximum difficult. I mean, even when he plays Diablo, like I mentioned last time, Diablo 4, he plays on hardcore mode, which means if you die, you lose it all. And I think that's how he plays life too. Like, like might as well just go for it all. Yeah. So anyway, you guys can choose how to do it. You pay one person $1 billion or buy $1 billion more compute. That's how you play it. Yeah.

But what personality are you? I'm more of a buy it than build it.

I don't, I think I'm more of a build it kind of guy, but also, you know, it's interesting 'cause Single Grain was an acquisition, right? I think had I just been involved with the other 2 acquisitions, I think they would've worked out anyway. But I don't think I'm like against either, but I do like building stuff from scratch, so.

I would say when it comes to software or like SaaS, I prefer building. I don't prefer buying. I've bought a few, but I just tear apart the product and I'm just buying it for its traffic or its brand. I'm not really buying it for the tech. Yeah, same with Answer the Public. So I prefer building when it comes to SaaS. I tend to buy Buy when it comes to service-based businesses, but I don't understand service-based businesses as well as I understand software.

Yeah, so I think it just depends. There's no right answer here. Yeah, I don't think there's a right answer. I think because of my experiences, I have PTSD because I know humans are so, we're all different, right? And you add a lot of complexities each time you buy, but you have a good integration team for that. I think I do believe the future's going to be smaller teams, and so I'm a little gun-shy on looking at anything to buy right now. So that's where I sit.

Dude, randomly, you want to see a change I made with my team on the homepage?

What?

I forgot what they had it. I think it was something like digital marketing agencies believe Google and Meta own the attention, but LLMs is proving otherwise, right? They had something like that and the call to action was like something like let us help you be found everywhere. And I changed it. It took iterations. I was just texting my team yesterday and we were just doing it on the fly. Took 4 iterations of it and they all liked it.

Search is everywhere.

I like it. Yeah, there you go. And then I put marketers believe. I was like, why do we have digital marketing agencies? Like, oh, we get good traffic from that keyword. I'm like, we already have it on some of the other slides. So we removed that from the homepage. I'm like, just put marketers because we're not pitching to digital marketers and they know that. Or I mean, we're not pitching to agencies and they know that.

Yeah.

And I was just like, marketers believe Google and Meta own attention. And I changed LLMs to ChatGPT because when we talk to most companies, like even when I was in Hong Kong and ChatGPT is banned unless you use a VPN, it's not really banned, but ChatGPT is not available there and they all use VPNs to access it.

Yeah.

No one talks about LLMs. No one talks about Grok. No one talks about Perplexity. They just assume everything is ChatGPT.

Yeah.

So I'm like, we should just nail it head on and just focus our messaging purely around ChatGPT.

Yep.

And yes, we can do Perplexity and all the other ones, but ChatGPT is what everyone's talking about. So we should just focus on that.

That's what we call the first mover advantage. Typically first mover, if you have a good product and you're, you're, you're known as the brand in the space, you're going to get the attention. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Niels. 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 AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. And you know what's interesting? I was looking at our traffic stats, just website traffic, and whenever we talk about like, uh, AIO or ChatGPT optimization or like any of these LLMs or whatever, it's always 5 to 10 times more traffic than anything else that we publish right now. So I'm just like, guys, Why don't we just keep doing that? Like, forget all the other stuff, right?

Same with social content.

Yeah, just forget about it. Oh, and by the way, I was reading something, a bunch of SEOs were complaining again, haha, right? They're complaining again on X.

About?

They're complaining about how traditional SEO is dying, but there was a silver lining to it. The silver lining is they've never been busier than ever right now. So we have some mutual friends, maybe some mutual enemies as well. in there and they were just saying that they'd never been busier because when things get tough with traditional SEO, people are like, they want to get that traffic back. They want the same thing back. And it's no different than this SaaS founders retreat I was at where everyone wants to get their traffic back. I'm like, guys, like it's on its way down. Don't abandon it, but it's a sunk cost thing where you don't, just don't, it's okay if you spent money on it, it's time to move on.

Yes. When Eric says move on though, because I think a lot of people are going to—

Not throw it away.

Use it in a wrong context. He's not saying SEO's dead. He's not saying Google is dead. He's saying that you need to adapt with the platforms and you need to be there when people ask questions to Google in AI mode or whether it's in the AI overviews. But also you need to be there whether it's Perplexity, Grok, or ChatGPT, not just for bottom of funnel, but also top of funnel, middle of funnel, and you need to adapt.

Yep.

What he's saying is throw away your mindset of, oh, I spent all this money on traditional SEO and I'm losing traffic. What Eric is specifically saying is that's fine. A lot of those factors are very relevant to optimizing for AI and LLMs. Adapt with it, don't fight and go against the grain.

And you know, we talk about search everywhere optimization, it's a term you coined, but it's more so you need citations everywhere. So I had that group, that SaaS group, I was like, hey guys, just go to ChatGPT right now, search for what's the best marketing podcast. 7 out of 8 people, Marketing School was at least number 2, if not higher, right?

Yeah.

And so, but what's the reason for that? It's because we're cited on YouTube, We've been publishing, we're over 3,000 episodes on Marketing School. I don't know if you know that.

Wow.

Yeah. You publish all the time on your YouTube. I publish all the time on YouTube. We're publishing on Twitter. We're everywhere, right? It's not just links anymore. And you actually published something on X today. I don't even know if you know this. You scheduled something.

Yeah, I was like, I don't know what I'm posting.

But basically it does talk about how like, yeah, you need to have like some type of brand reputation. There's sentimentality around your brand as well.

Oh yeah, we did one on how ChatGPT evaluates brand mentions.

So why don't you talk about that? 'Cause I think this is related to this.

Yeah, so I had a post on, a data post that my team ended up creating. I can't see the footnote. Oh, there you go. I can see the footnote in it. So looked at over 100 sites in 14 different verticals to see why ChatGPT recommends certain brands more than others. And we wanted to really look at brand mentions and we looked at domain authority. It doesn't really have too much of an impact on ChatGPT. So if you get mentioned on a high domain authority versus low domain authority, Not too much. Context, like what is the context of that you're being mentioned in? That has a high score. The thoroughness, if someone just says like, oh, NP Digital or Single Grain is good, but without being super thorough and giving reasons why, the thoroughness does matter. Age, the age of the business and the more people mentioning you over time, that's helped. Quantity was another one that was really high. Okay. Relevance of the site, a little bit lower. That was medium-ish. I think that's going to change over time. Sentiment had a high rating as well, is what they're saying about your company, positive or negative. So if you had to pick the main factors, you want to focus on context, thoroughness, quantity. So a lot of these brand mentions and sentiment, they want to be positive. Those are the 4 main factors to focus on when it comes to brand mentions to get ChatGPT to cite you more often.

Yep. So again, it's not just based on like links still matter, but like you look at the internet now, if you're an LLM, you're crawling a bunch of different things, you're multimodal, and you want to try to be as in as many places as possible. And by the way, a lot of this stuff now is just republishing. You're republishing short-form content. And when I think about SEO now, when our blog posts, we're more aggressive now with the transactional, you know, bottom-of-funnel content like programmatic SEO, right? Because we're just like, Why not go for it? Why not have more shots on goal? It's no different than organic short form. Why not have more shots on goal? So I was kind of lighting into my brand team yesterday because I pulled up Opus. So our 80-minute conversation, there's actually a lot more moments that we miss that my team doesn't publish, right? Whether it's you say something interesting or I like, I'm like, some of these are actually good and some of them are like duds. They're not that good. But then when I look at the ones that we manually choose sometimes, I'm like, that's not even a good moment. Like, why is that even being published to Instagram, right? It's got to be something that you're willing to share with your friends or share with your mom or something like that. And so why would you not use something like an Opus or like an Overlap or something like that? Anyway, I did ask again, what's the best marketing pod to Grok? We're number 2 again. I don't know why we're constantly number 2.

Who's number 1?

Amy Porterfield. Yeah, you see, you knew that.

Yeah.

Okay.

She has a good podcast.

Okay, who do you think is number 1 for ChatGPT?

Amy Porterfield.

No, Marketing Over Coffee. And I don't know why this one's like—

I don't know.

Yeah, I've never heard of this one. John Wall and Chris Penn. Marketing School with Neil Patel and Eric Siu is number 2. GaryVee Audio Experience is number 3. But Gary's constantly still everywhere, you know?

Yeah.

So, and then I searched for it on Claude too, but—

How's he adapting to the AI role? I don't hear much about him and AI.

So, you know what's interesting? I look at his YouTube channel from time to time and all of his content, you know how they've repurposed him speaking, right? It's always social media is in there or AI is in there. So I think he's trying to capitalize on driving social media or AI traffic to drive more leads for his business. business. That's what I think.

So he is talking about AI?

Yeah, he is basically like, if you're not using AI, you're screwed. And then he has to talk about VeeFriends a little bit too, because he's pumping that. But I think he's mostly focused on his business now.

Yeah. Good for him. He's also had quite a few exits. People don't realize that about Gary. They look at him as a social media personality.

Great operator.

He's an amazing operator and he's done very well building companies and flipping them. And flipping them for a lot of money. And I wouldn't say flip because it sounds bad, but more so building them and exiting them to a strategic buyer like American Express or whoever it may be.

Resi. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, people don't talk about that.

I think he's very good with people too, right? He has a— I have a guy that used to work at Single Grain, Raghav, that works. And I talk to Raghav all the time and he's worked there for a long time. So he treats you like once you're in with him, he treats you really well. But what I noticed, and like, it's not like I'm close to Gary or anything, but he'll message me every now and then and say, hey, just hope everything is well, like on Instagram, right? And I I think that level, I know a couple people from like my high school that do that just to check in. That goes a long way. I don't do that personally. I should do it more, but I'm just not like that. But on Claude, who do you think is number 1?

We are. Yes.

Why do you think that?

I just guessed 'cause the way you asked, I was like—

Oh, the way I asked, okay.

Yeah, I was like, okay.

Gary Vee is number 2 though. And then number 3 is like call to action from Unbounce. But we're constantly number 1 or 2. Why is that? The only solution, the thing that makes sense to me is we're cited in a lot of different places. Uh-huh.

For a long, long time. Many, many years.

Yeah. And that is a moat. If you can stay consistent for a very long time, because Gary constantly appears here too, you're going to have an edge over other people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I haven't checked out his social profiles lately, but I didn't realize he's pushing out AI content. I still thought he was pushing out a lot of motivational content.

No, I think he's locked it in a lot more. Yeah. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. And we'll see you tomorrow.