SEO 2.0: How to Trick Google and Rank AI Content ft. Greg Isenberg

Where do you see SEO going in the world of AI?

If Warren Buffett was an Internet marketer, he would be like, all about SEO 2.0. Right now, it's all about how do you take a stranger and make them a raving fan? If you can do those things, you win at business.

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Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we've got an amazing returning guest in. Greg Eisenberg is the host of the Startup Ideas podcast. He's got a holding company called Late Checkout, which does over $10 million in revenue per year. He runs the Boring Marketing company where he helps other companies do SEO. And in this episode, he's going to map out an exact blueprint that you can follow for your SEO in this new AI world that we're going into. He breaks down the SEO 2.0 strategy. We also talk about all sorts of hot takes that he has on Twitter and dive into why he believes those hot takes are true. And you're really going to enjoy this episode. So let's just go ahead and dig right in with Greg Eisenberg. Hey, Greg, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you on.

I'm ready. I'm ready for it.

Awesome. Well, let's just get straight into it. So you have a couple tweets out there right now that Nathan and I both had some conversations around and got us talking, and we thought these are some fun things to bring Greg on and talk about on the podcast. And the first one being the concept of SEO 2.0. So maybe the best place to start is just like, what's your definition of SEO 2.0? Where, where do you see SEO going in the world of AI?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people call it programmatic SEO, I call it SEO 2.0. SEO 1.0 to me is basically, I mean, it's, it's old school SEO. It's basically you go and create content pages, you get humans to do it, top things to do. In New York City, you go and, you know all the different Restaurants and bars and you review it and then you just sort of hope that, I guess, you know, you get backlinks from other websites and then that's going to generate traffic. And that worked pretty well for a long period of time. And there's quite literally dozens of billion dollar companies that rode the SEO 1.0 wave. You know, content companies, social networks like Reddit, these are companies that, you know, have great rank. And then about a year and a half, two years ago, I started thinking about, hey, if AI makes it easier to do two things. One is to get, you know, insights and data in a really efficient way, and two is creating content and creating web pages in a really efficient way, isn't that, won't that mean that you'll be able to just create like millions of pages and, and that, and rank for them? And that's really what I mean by SEO 2.0. I'll tell you why I think it's exciting to me and maybe to people listening is the same way that there's dozens of billion dollar companies and thousands of million dollar companies that have rode the wave of.

SEO 1.0. I believe the same thing is going to happen for 2.0. The people that are going to, you know, be able to efficiently create these web pages, get ranked, are going to do really well. And I know that there's someone listening, especially because this is an AI podcast that's, that's thinking themselves well, okay, but it doesn't matter because perplexity is the new Google. And if perplexity is the new Google, then, you know, you, ranking doesn't really matter on this search engine that no one's going to go to. And the reality of the situation is, you know, Google is not dead for, you know, I know a lot of people like to think that Google is dead, but Google is not dead. And there's still huge opportunities to, to start ranking.

You know, the, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of like, like an SEO 2.0 concept and like I just sort of being able to sort of mass make content is that I feel like the Internet might just get flooded with a lot of junk content. I mean, how much of SEO 1.0 in the, especially in the early days was people like writing articles, spinning the articles, and then it would just like change a certain percentage of words and they were doing it for the algorithm and they weren't really doing it for the reader? That's the first thing that comes to mind is like, doesn't it seem like that might just lead to a whole bunch of clutter and junk all over the Internet that nobody actually wants to read.

Yeah. So the reality is if you go and create AI content today, you're going to get penalized by Google. So AI Google has gotten really good at basically knowing if something is written by AI. So you actually have to do is you kind of have to like deke out Google. You have to essentially use humans for 20% and AI for 80%. And that's how you do it. And if you do it that way, there's no real way for, for Google to know as long as the content is high quality. Like that's what Google cares about. Google cares about high quality content. And if you can create high quality content and you know, and, and add some like human vibes to it, you'll still rank. And I'll just give you a few examples of what does it mean to make it more human. Well, one is Google knows if, like, if you put this article has been written by Nathan Lands or Matt Wolf and well, Google will know that this is like a human behind it. They'll go and search, what's the bio of this person? Is this a reputable person? So what a lot of people are doing in the SEO space is just creating content. It you, it just looks like ChatGPT created it. You know how? And I always notice it because it's always like the first word of every sentence is capitalized and there's like colons for days. It's like no regular person would have that many amount of colons.

It's funny, I'm actually doing a search right now and I searched up the word as like, as an AI language model. And like, if you just do a search for that term, it's like insane how many results actually show up because so many people are so lazy that they literally leave as an AI language model in some of their content.

Totally. And the other thing that I'm really into from an, from an AI SEO SEO 2.0 perspective is creating things like tools and calculators and embedding it into the content. So those are things that, you know, maybe you're creating, you know, a piece of content around, you know, mortgages, let's say, and you embed a mortgage calculator into that piece of content. These are things that help you rank. And going back to AI, it's like, well, you can just use Cloud 3.5 Sonnet to code you up some of these tools and calculators, start embedding it into the content and then Just start really just outranking your typical SEO 1.0 people. So I think that.

Like, why have I been interested in this in the last year and a half and two years is just because I think that if it becomes so much easier to figure out which keywords to rank for and you know, what the content needs to look like in order for it to be seen by Google, when you create these assets, these are assets that pay forever. It's not like paid ads where if you spend $100,000 on your paid ads this month, chances are next month, like nothing is going to come from that. But when you invest in SEO, you know, generally it just is a compounding machine and it'll increase, you know, 10, 20% a month. And I will say the downside to SEO is you don't see results right away. So if you're an inside of vacation person like you, you might not love it, but once, you know, once it starts compounding, it becomes a beautiful thing and then you just have an asset that's paying you.

So kind of, I guess, kind of the idea would be like if you're just going out there and using AI to create content for the purpose of SEO, a lot of other companies are going to kind of do the same thing, but you can actually differentiate by going and creating tools that will give people a reason to click to your site. Right? I guess if, if you're creating a whole bunch of content, a lot of people are just going to use Perplexity or you know, the new Google AI to search and the response is just going to be right there on the homepage without needing to click in. But if they have a tool that they can use, they actually have a reason to click into your site other than just like the sort of summarized version that AI gives you. Is that kind of what you're getting at with it?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think like the new content has evolved. It's no longer just like static words and, and stuff like that. Right. So you have to think about, okay, what, where, what is the future of content and how do I create the most high quality piece of content? And it just so happens that when you create tools and calculators and things like that, people end up staying on the website longer. And that's a s, a signal to Google that, hey, this is something that's really valuable, therefore prioritize it. And you know, other things like video and you know, also keeps time on site, therefore you know, that's good for Google. And then you might outrank and these are all things that AI could help you create where, I mean, you could have created these things. Someone listening to this is like, but I could have created this stuff eight years ago. Yes, but it would have been really expensive. Yeah, like you would have had to hire a dev team to create, you know, all these tools on a monthly basis. You're spending 10 to $20,000 a month. You would have had to create, you had to hire an SEO firm just for thinking about what are the SEO key term, keywords I want to go after. And then, then you'd have to hire like a bunch of human beings to create content that would cost a lot of money. So all these things would add up. What I'm saying now is it's now a fraction of the price to do it and it allows you to compete with the big boys, which is pretty cool.

I do, I do wonder though, it feels like now that all that's so easy to make, that Google will have to lean more and more into authority, like looking for sites that are like, you know, the CNNs or the Reddit's or whatever, like Quora that, you know, like the recent Google Update, apparently they changed the algorithm where like they're highly focused on Reddit now and like people are now like trolling Reddit and putting content on there because Google, Google doesn't know what to do. They're like, well, trust Reddit, I guess, or Quora, you know, there's tons of real people there. And then now people are kind of gaming that. And then they're probably have another issue too, like, you know, in terms of programmatic SEO, have you seen like the Perplexity pages that came out?

Yeah.

Yeah. So apparently Perplexity's SEO traffic is like booming right now. And it's all from like literally the AI is creating all the pages. Right. And so now they have a situation where like okay, Perplexity is a new authority, but they're using AI to create all the content. So yeah, maybe, maybe Google's not dead, but maybe they end up serving up most of Perplexity's content.

Yeah, my guess is, and this gets into like antitrust territory, but my guess is they are going to start suppressing Perplexity pages. I think that if you're out there and you're listening to this and you're like, okay, I, you know, I would love thousands of visits coming to my website every single month. The thing to think about is how do you create the most high quality content in the most efficient way? And if you're able to create high quality content. The CNNs of the world and the high, you know, the trusted great backlinks that you want are going to, are going to come after you just organically because you, you've created high quality content. And then of course you, you have to do some things. Like for example, not many people know this, but you know, if you submit your startup to Product Hunt, Product Hunt is actually a high trust worthy site. Like the number one reason you should submit to Product Hunt is for SEO. And so there's a bunch of things like that that you can do that you know, I've learned over the years that are worth doing too.

Now.

What do you think that like in the future people are even going to like click into the links anymore though? Because I feel like obviously even Google's going in the direction now where if you ask IT questions it just puts the answer on the homepage or people can go to chat GPT or Claude and ask their question and you know, get an answer. And I don't know if I'm just like, I'm in an AI like tech bubble where that's just sort of become my habit or if the rest of the world is starting to do that as well. I don't, I don't totally know, but I feel like I find myself clicking into links less and less because the response is just right there for me. So like, do you think the incentive to even do SEO is going to go away over time?

I think that the searches that are going to do really well on like the perplexities of the world, AI search are going to be very information based searches. So it's like, what is the weather today in Miami? You know, Hurricane Beryl is coming. Is it going to land in Houston? And I think it's going to do an incredible job at like going through the Internet and just boom, here's your answer. But there's a huge sub, there's a huge segment of searches that aren't as simple as. Let me just pull in the information. That almost reminds me a little bit about, you know, going old school. It's like you walk into a library, you don't, it's not like there's just one book in the library. There's like different books in the library. Or you know, you go, you turn, you turn on Netflix. It's not like you go into one channel and then it, you know, just knows what you're looking for automatically. Sometimes it's nice to have some sort of interface that allows you to jump off to different Places. So I think that the future of search is going to be a lot more like perplexity than it is current day Google. But I think the idea of I'm going to jump around two different places a la library, a la Netflix, a la, you know, linear TV isn't going anywhere.

Okay, so is that the game plan that people do now is like you throw out tons of AI content and then you go back with humans to improve the content that's actually ranking and actually make it good? Is that the kind of the playbook that people are doing?

I mean, that's the playbook that a lot of people who are doing well in the space are doing. So I think the first thing I always think about is like, okay, who, who's my ideal customer?

Yeah.

And then based on that, it's okay, so I want to attract these people and then what do I want these people to do next? And for you, it's probably join the newsletter, I'm guessing.

Yeah.

Because that way you have their. Okay, once they're on the newsletter, it's like, then you can send them the podcast. Right. And then they, it's, it's all about how do you, how do you take a stranger and make them a raving fan? Like, that's the game of business in a nutshell. Everything else doesn't matter. Right. If you can do those things then, and you can do it profitably, you win at business. Like that's the most barbarian way of saying what business is. Is that so? I feel like if Warren Buffett was an Internet marketer, he would be like all about SEO 2.0 right now.

Well, I also feel like with AI you have this potential to almost take this reverse route because you can create so much content at scale with AI, Right. So you could al always go and create a ton of different content pieces on a bun, a bunch of different AI related topics. It all would make a good sort of lead into your. Your opt in, figure out which content drives the most leads in and then sort of double down on that content. I guess that would be another approach as well. Sort of cast a wide net, figure out which, you know, which piece of the net catches the most fish, and then hone in on that.

You know, I think that's right.

Cool. Well, the other thing I want to talk about with, with SEO too is the, the fact that large language models and AI could make SEO a lot more personalized. Right. I think you mentioned that in your SEO 2.0 tweet is that we're going to see SEO and you know, the, the search results get a lot more personalized and tailored to the individuals. So how do you see people sort of leaning into that with SEO?

So, yeah, that's definitely where the world is going. I mean, it has been going there even pre AI, like in, you know, Google started collecting data around, okay, we know your location is in Miami. Therefore if you write weather, it's going to bring up weather Miami, it's not going to bring up weather Kyoto. So what AI has done is it is just made that just put that on steroids. So what the next evolution of that is is agents basically coming to me with, hey, you need to know this piece of data for this reason. So the way search works today is it's very what I would call lean forward. You have to lean forward to get data. And I think probably where we're going to go in a few, you know, in the next few years, it's going to be way more lean back. So instead of me searching for what's a great, you know, sushi restaurant in Miami beach, it's going to know that it's 6pm my time. I haven't made any dinner reservations. I live in Miami Beach. I, it knows I love sushi and I usually have sushi on, on Tuesday nights and, and it, and it hasn't done that. And I haven't, you know, it's just like weird and knows me so well. And it's like, hey, you know, there's this new, you know, sushi restaurant that is open. I think you're going to like it. Say yes if you want me to make a reservation for two. Oh, by the way, your friend Jamie's in town. Do you want me to add them to the calendar invite? And that's like literally the direction of where we're going.

Yeah, I could see that. But I also think that, you know, that description. I think to some of us, like the early adopter techie types, that sounds really exciting. But then to a lot of people, that also sounds like more of a dystopian future where all these companies have so much data and, you know, information on us. How do you see these companies sort of balancing the data privacy concerns, trying to feed people exactly what they want when they want it.

The reality around data and privacy is people are okay giving away their data and privacy if it makes their lives way more convenient. So if the product ends up working and it makes our lives way more convenient, then they're clicking the terms of service and they're not reading and scrolling with the terms of services, and they're just going and making their lives convenient. Why? Because life for the majority of. For night, for everyone is very difficult, stressful, overwhelming, no matter how wealthy you are from the top to the bottom. And I think that if I just, I just believe actually that a lot of these products are going in the direction that they're going to make the lives way more convenient. So of course there'll be, you know, let's put it this way. Google is way bigger than DuckDuckGo, you know. Right. It doesn't mean DuckDuckGo is in a great business and a great product, and there's a subset of people who care about privacy first, but there's a greater amount of people that are just like, I've got a baby, I'm holding a baby. On this hand, my boss is calling me. On the other hand, I need a Google search this, and I'm not going to DuckDuckGo to do it.

Yeah, I always feel like I care about privacy, but as soon as you give me some kind of convenience that makes my life easier, I'm like, yeah.

You know, yeah, give it to me. Yeah. And I think, you know, where the world is probably going to go, and AI plays a role into this too, is AI is going to scrape a lot of data that exists on the Internet. So it's going to know probably my address, that I live in Miami Beach. And maybe what, what happens is it finds out that a friend of mine wants to send me an invitation via mail to a wedding, let's say, and it's just going to be like, hey, do you live at 123 Main Street, Miami Beach? Yes or no? And so I think the future of a lot of these products is what I call contextual onboarding versus upfront onboarding. Upfront onboarding is when you ask for a million things upfront, your phone number, your, you know, where you live, all these things to, and then you say yes to, you know, each of those things. I think that with, with respect to search and other products too, but let's just talk about search for a second. As the, as it gets to know you, it's convenience. So it's going to be like, hey, do you want us to do this thing for you? All you have to do is press yes. And we have this data because it's scraped.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, all of the companies could get access to the data if they wanted to.

I think that whether you believe in SEO 2.0 or not, play with the tools, like go and create AI content, human layer it, add a calculator to it, add a tool, like just go and like try things out and just see how you feel with it. And, and, and through that you're going to learn in your niche. Oh my God. You know, this type of calculator or this kind of tool works. And to me, like, I, I, I invest in things when I can see like a crazy amount of upside return. And this is something to me that's like, not a lot of like it's not going to take you that long to learn this, this sort of stuff and to test this. But the return, the return on investment if it works is so large.

So I want to, I want to talk about some of your, your, your spicy takes. You had another tweet where you gave like 25 different spicy takes. Nathan and I actually talked about it and we pretty much agree with all of your spicy takes. But I thought there was some fun ones that we can dive into because they're obviously more nuanced than, you know, the single sentence for each take that.

You put, by the way, for context. Whenever I do those spicy takes things, I like how I'll like drink a massive like cold brew or something.

Yeah.

Or like an energy drink and just like bang them out in like 10 minutes, press tweet and then just like go for a walk and then see what happens in like 30 minutes.

See how many people disagree or agree with what you just said. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, you had one, one of the spicy takes and I actually commented on your post about it was you mentioned like tools like Otter that, that are going to be like a note taking assistant are probably going to flop. And I'm curious why you think that. And the reason I ask is because I actually use otter. I actually agree that it's going to flop, but I think it's for a different reason than you mentioned in your tweet. So I'm curious why you think so.

So, and our team, by the way, we like 120 people on our team and like we use otter in all these meetings and whenever I'm in there, I'm always like, it's me. It's like I like stare down the otter. You know, I'm kind of like, you don't like me and I don't like you. And I think a lot of people have that feeling with respect to an AI not speaking at it gives the convenience to the person who wants to write notes, of course. So you can be like more present in the meeting. Like, that's the, that's who people, people who like tools like that. That's what they say to me. They're like, yeah, like I just want to be present in the meeting, therefore this is going to help me, you know, be present. And it's like, homie, can't you just do two things at once? Like, you know, I remember being in the third grade taking notes, you know, in a classroom. You know, I think what people don't like about AI note taking tools and this, I do believe this is 90 plus percent of people.

Is they can't be free. They can't, you know, maybe they want to swear and they can't, they don't want to swear. And I think it hurts more productivity than it does help productivity. That's my spicy take with it. And I also just think that, yeah, the only person that enjoys the otter is the person who is supposed to be taking notes. And I also think, yeah, I'm just, I'm, I don't, I, I think go take notes, man. Just go take some notes.

I mean, at the end of the day too, if, if you're sitting there taking notes, that's sort of turning it into a multimodality sort of engagement, right? You're, you're listening and you're also writing. And because you're doing both, you're gonna help lock a lot of those concepts in.

My take is there's going to be a backlash on, on this sort of stuff. Like, I feel like people now are kind of just like politely smiling and they're like, that's cute. But I think in a year or two people are going to be like, hey, hey, do you mind just, I mean, you're starting to see it a little bit. But you know, I'm starting to see like, hey, do you mind just like removing that recorder from, from that meeting? I think you're going to see instances of that.

50X, I'll tell you.

So here's my sort of killer use that I love using Otter for. I actually go to like a lot of conferences to make content around them for my YouTube channel. So, you know, I was at Cisco Live and I was at Augmented World Expo and Google Bill or Google IO, Microsoft build all these events and a lot of times I'm sitting in these conferences while they're speaking and it's hard to take all the notes on everything they're talking about. So I usually open up Otter on my phone, just set it next to me on my chair and Let Otter actually record the entire, you know, keynote or panel or whatever I'm sitting and listening to. And then I'll take like the summary and the transcript and I'll pull it over into a cloud or a chat GPT and say, hey, I need to make a video about this. What are some of the talking points from this presentation that I should bring up in this video? And it will actually help me sort of like outline, rough draft, a presentation about the keynote that I just saw. And I found that to be really helpful saying that. I also agree it's probably not going to be around for a long time and it's going to flop. But I think the reason is more because I think it's just going to be a feature instead of an actual app in a lot of these devices. I think we're going to see Google just roll it into Android as part of the operating system. I think we're going to see Apple Intelligence just roll that kind of feature in. And I can't see companies like Otter existing when it's just like a native built in feature of these devices.

So. Well, where I'll agree with you is in the, what I'll call like broadcast setting. If like you're in a conference and there's tons of people around you in groups of larger than 10, something like Otter, super important. Like I can see it being super valuable, super important. But when within the context of I'm a company and I've got all these meetings and a lot of the meetings are just.

Hanging out or talking about one issue.

And they're smaller, like maybe the average meeting is four people. That's where I think Otter is gonna, is gonna really flop.

Yeah, yeah, I can see that take too. I mean, I don't use it on like zoom calls and things like that. So it's not actually one of the use cases I've actually used it for. I can definitely see that take.

So you said AI is taking jobs, not just making people more productive. Companies want profits. The idea that AI frees you to focus on your passion is pure fantasy for most workers. You know, I, I, I kind of agree with this. I feel it's a situation where everyone in AI right now, they can't say that though. There's an odd thing there, right, where you just, you feel like you can't say the truth about the thing because it leads to like, okay, well, you know, does this change capitalism? Like I'm a capitalist. Like does capitalism make sense in the future? Does our current government and economy make sense in the future where, yeah, you can use AI for most things and maybe everyone doesn't have to work the same way. Is that kind of like the, the gist of. Is that how you see it as well?

Or sometimes I'm scrolling Twitter and I'm seeing like these tweets where it's like, AI is going to make, you know, there's going to be more jobs. You know, it's making more jobs. And I'm like, what are you smoking? Then like, honestly, I feel like I, I'm living in a completely different planet. I'm like, okay, there's this new paradigm shift that has basically made it 100 times easier to do basically anything from creative to software to marketing to all these different things. So that's happening. Everything has become easier. At the same time, companies are looking to become more profitable and especially larger companies, especially VC backed companies who are trying to exit or get acquired and publicly traded companies whose only job is to increase shareholder value. Once they get comfortable to the point where people are using these tools and they're becoming way more productive, they're not going to be like, oh, hey, let's go hire another thousand people. So, yeah, I just think that people are, are going to be way more productive. And if people are more productive, there's going to be less of those types of jobs.

So what do you think? The, the just like, very theoretical. Right. What do you think the job market looks like in several years from now?

There's a lot less engineers, there's a lot less designers. I think there's a lot less marketers. I think the top 1% ends up getting paid 10 times. I think the middle gets stripped out. I think that's what happens. I think the, the middle of these white collar jobs becomes stripped out. You're either junior and you're like very low paid or you're senior and you're very high paid. You know, I wish I didn't, I wish I wasn't saying this.

I agree with you.

Yeah, I think we both agree.

Yeah, it's hard to say. Right, because we don't know the answer. Like, we don't know the answer for those, those people, like, what do they do like, and how do they earn a living? And yeah, sure, the tools will make their life better, but they also still need, you know, food on the table.

Right, right, exactly.

So do you think this, I mean, obviously none of us know where it's all headed, but do you think this leads to like a UBI scenario? Do you think, like, where do your Predictions lie. If you had to make predictions, I.

Think it's important to just share your opinion and it's okay if your opinion changes over time in and as you learn about a particular topic. And I think that if more people do that, like the better society is as long as you can be open minded about. Okay, the data has changed. Therefore my stance on something has changed. As far as like, do you know, in a situation where.

Millions of people are out of work, is there some sort of ubi? I mean, I don't want to speak for Sam Altman, but like, why is he creating World Coin if he isn't thinking about that? That UBI is going to be a more important part of, you know, as a mechanism to, to pay certain people. You know, what do I think? I stop there. Like, I don't know how. You know, I'm not a politician, I'm not an economist, I'm a technologist that knows where the technology is going, where, where it goes from there. Like, I'm not. It's above my pay grade.

Yeah, you have to be like a philosopher, psychologist, everything, right. Like, it's like how, how do humans, you know, interact or how humans live if they don't have work and how does that work and how do you feel motivated and especially if other people are getting 10x right, and they're living this amazing new life and then you're kind of like living in your virtual reality world or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think there's going to be uei. I think we'll. People will find different types of work and be productive to society. What that work will look like, I think will be different, very different than what it is today. I think that the wealth disparity unfortunately will grow. And that's why I think it's important for everyone to just to stay ahead. That's why this podcast is great, right? Like, learn, get your hands dirty and.

You'Ll never have to worry if that's the case because you'll always be one step ahead of, of other people. People don't put in the work. People just don't put in the work. Right.

Even when the work is.

They much rather watch, you know, episode 124 of Love island than episode 20.

Is that tonight?

You know, I think that's true. I think it, you know, it's. People want to, you know, we talked about this before. It's like life is hard, right? And it's like if you want to numb, you want to numb your brain Sometimes, but sometimes, like, sometimes you've got to keep your brain stimulated in order for you to, to stay ahead.

Yeah, I mean, along that same lines, I'm going to actually jump ahead to one of your other hot takes because it's very relevant to what you just said. You said more young millionaires will get mented over the next 10 years than any point in history. They'll watch YouTube, listen to podcasts and learn to take ideas into reality thanks to AI. It'll make many people jealous. So I mean, there you just kind of mentioned there's going to be a growing disparity between, I guess, you know, the haves and have nots, the people with, with a lot of money versus people with not a lot of money. But also to sort of counteract that point, it also sounds like you're saying there's no easier time in history to make money.

Absolutely. I mean, you're connected to the Internet and so you have access to a library of the smartest people on the planet basically in your pocket. So, and then when you want to create something now you've got, you know, AI tools and no code tools that you can actually just go and press some buttons, not have to have, you know, gone to Stanford and studied computer science with, you know, all these well known people and you can just put stuff on the Internet and then literally billions of people have their credit cards on the Internet and you can sell to anyone. It used to be that, you know, my dad had a store and he had a store and in this, you know, little area and if more people moved to the area, there'd be more people and if people left then less people would buy at the store. You know, now the store is everyone and you don't need to go and spend two years building a building. You can spend two minutes to build a building. So I think there's going to be a lot of low quality and medium quality startups, content communities that are going to exist and it's just going to feel like, it's just like how in marketing, like if you go, I saw like a video of like 1919 in New York City and there's like no, no billboards and there's like no marketing. And then if you go in 2020 for New York, like, of course there's like your eye is constantly looking at a million different marketing. You know, I think that's going to, that's the world we're headed in in terms of the Internet. It's going to look a lot less like 1919, a lot more like 20, 24 Times Square. And if you need, if you want to stand out, you know, those are where the young, young millionaires are going to minted. And, and I think, why, why are they going to be young? It's because they, the young people are going to be native to the tools to create the stuff.

Yeah. One thing I feel like, you know, even though this technology is going to create a, maybe a bigger divide in terms of the haves and haves nots, I do feel like it's going to equalize things in a way where you don't have to be the smartest person to use AI and make something cool. So like a lot of times I feel like it's going to matter more about like how motivated is the person.

Right.

Yeah. They didn't go to Stanford, they didn't have the highest gpa, but they can, if they're motivated, they'll still be able to use AI tools and build a company and build stuff. Right. So I mean, I find that personally inspiring and like, you know, if people really want to make it, AI is going to help them make it more than ever before.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think if you're motivated and you're ambitious, you're going to do well. You have nothing to worry about.

There's one last topic I wanted to talk about before we let you go, and that's the climate issue, because you mentioned that there's going to be a major climate backlash against AI. It's going to become the current thing to talk about. And Nathan and I, even before this call, were actually talking about that. We both agree with you on that. I think that's going to be the big narrative. But when you made that hot take, like, what was your perspective? Where are you coming from on it? When you wrote it?

Every major wave of technology, computers, the Internet, social, mobile, crypto, there's been a point in time where those technologies get so big that there becomes a climate backlash. If you look at the maximums of the like, if you were to plot out, you know, number of articles, let's say that have the climate backlash, every peak has gotten higher. So we saw this, I think in 2021 with crypto, there started to become a huge backlash that and people started saying, you know, if we shut down Bitcoin, like we can power like, you know, all of Ukraine and all the, you know, different places. Right. So, and I think that someone is going to start telling the story that these technologies take compute. And compute isn't free. It requires electricity. It requires the actual GPUs, and that affects the environment. So for me it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And from an opportunity perspective, there's probably opportunities to create more climate friendly, clean, carbon neutral AI technologies. So if, you know, we were talking about DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo versus Google, I think that if, you know, that was the, you know, riding the privacy first trend. I think there's also a climate first trend. So I think that there's an opportunity, like what is the green version of perplexity look like?

Yeah, it feels like, unfortunately this makes, you know, it's going to get political for this reason, which I hate, you know, because there's obviously a divide of like, okay, are we going to stay only on Earth and are we going to solve climate issues by kind of being more efficient and having less people and less waste? Are we going to solve climate problems by using technology to solve those problems and going to other planets? Right. And so a lot of the techno optimists, like, you know, we believe like that obviously AI, you know, if it takes more energy, that's okay. Like the AI is going to help us solve the problems. It's going to help build the technologies we don't even know exist yet that are going to solve the problems. And you can't get out of it just by having less, you know, plastic straws or whatever. But obviously there's a huge divide there and it gets really political. And so, yeah, I hate that. Unfortunately, AI is probably going to get pretty political in the next year or so, and I think it will.

Yeah, yeah, I've been hearing a lot of this stuff about like, you know, the climate issues and how much power all of this uses and all of that kind of stuff. But I've also been seeing both sides of the narrative. I've also been seeing a lot of articles and reports and stuff that say it's way overblown too. I've seen things saying that in 2020, when everybody was in their homes and like everybody started playing video games more often, that used as much compute as what AI is using right now. Right. And then there's also the sort of narrative of like Nvidia and Qualcomm and all these companies that are making the processing their number one goal anytime they give a keynote is to talk about how they're trying to make it more efficient and bring down the energy usage and get more and more powerful compute, but for less the energy use. So I do think a lot of these problems will be solved. But I also think this is going to be like the narrative, the popular narrative against AI. But I also think a lot of this, there's solutions being worked on right now.

It is going to get more efficient. The graphics cards are going to get more efficient. But there's a reason that like Elon Musk is like doubling down on building, you know, factories and stuff in, in Texas, right? Like aligning himself with like people who are like more pro energy and like have more energy, you know, consumption is. Because that's probably where things are going to go. Like. Yeah, in the current state, yeah, it doesn't use too much energy. But when we get to AGI, as I. Yeah, you're probably talking about massive amounts of energy consumption, probably the likes that humanity's never seen before.

So this is really interesting. I asked, I prompted perplexity. I said, what's the ecological impact of a CHAT GPT prompt? I was gonna, I was gonna say perplexity prompt because I was like, I want something unbiased. Right? So it says this. The ecological impact of a single ChatGPT prompt is relatively small, but it can add up significant significantly when considering the massive scale of usage. Here's the breakdown. Each ChatGPT query is estimated to produce approximately 4.32 grams of CO2. But here's where it gets really interesting. I didn't realize, but I mean, silly me, that there's water consumption with chat with this. So ChatGPT water usage is particularly noteworthy. For every 20 to 50 queries, the system consumes about 500ml of water, equivalent to a standard bottle of water. This water is primarily used for cooling the data centers that power the AI model. So really interesting. And then there's more and then there's energy usage. So the energy consumption of ChatGPT is considerable. The system runs on an estimated 30,000 GPUs, which requires significant power to. To operate. So to put this in perspective, 15 queries are equivalent to watching one hour video. 16 queries consume as much energy as boiling one kettle, 139 queries use as much energy as watching one load of laundry. And if current growth Trends continue, by 2027, ChatGPT's electricity consumption could rival entire nations like Sweden, Argentina and the Netherlands.

Well, I think the important part of this whole conversation is that people have conversations about it, right? Because I think, I think when it comes to AI, right now the pro AI people want to pretend like these negatives don't exist and the anti AI people want to act like solutions can't exist. And I think the important thing is that we. I don't feel like AI should be this divisive topic. I feel like it should be a topic that we're all talking about and collaborating on and figuring out solutions together, both on the pro and anti AI side. How do we find this middle ground that's going to make everybody happy, that's going to solve a lot of these problems? And I think one of the frustrations that I've had recently just being so deep in the AI space is it's also binary. It seems like everybody's either I'm totally against AI or I'm totally for AI, but I believe there's a spectrum there and you can land anywhere on that spectrum.

Well, I think that's just the bigger issue with human beings, especially now, is like, you have to be. You're either this side or that side, and there's no in between. There's. There's no gray. Like, gray is dead now. And, and that's just that it's just being applied to, to AI. So let's leave it on a positive note.

Go create some stuff. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you are listening to this. You've. You, you understand the tools. You just got to go build some stuff and go and create stuff that people are going to love, that are going to put smile on their faces, that's going to add value to their lives, make them happier and healthier, and contribute to making the world a better and happier place. And you can do that now.

Well, on that note, you make a lot of great content. Everybody needs to go. Follow Greg on Twitter x Great content there. What's the name of your podcast again?

The Startup Ideas Podcast.

The Startup Ideas Podcast. Go check that out. Well, thanks so much for joining us. This has been an amazing conversation. I'm sure it won't be the last mode we have on this show and appreciate you joining us.

Thanks for having me.