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. Hubspot's inbound conference is back. It's going down live in Boston from September 18th through the 20th. Join us for our session on how to revolutionize your approach to content creation.
Hear about AI forward marketing and sales strategies from the head of strategic marketing at OpenAI. Get ahead of the curve on content creation with the co-founder and CEO of Hagen. And there's so much more. Visit inbound.com to see the lineup and grab your tickets today. Hey, welcome to The Next Wave Podcast on Matt Wolfe. I'm here with Nathan Lands. And today we've got an amazing returning guest in Greg Isenberg. He's 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. He also talked 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 Isenberg. 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 of 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 your definition of SEO 2.0. 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 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 in data in a really efficient way. And two is creating content and creating web pages in a really efficient way. Isn't that me? Multamine, you'll be able to just create like millions of pages 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 the 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 for Plexity is the new Google. And if for Plexity is the new Google, then, you know, you ranking doesn't really matter on the 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 start ranking. You know, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of like, like an SEO 2.0 concept and like, AI 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 readers. 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 Google has gotten really good at basically knowing if something is written by AI. So what you actually have to do is you kind of have to like, decode 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 Google to know. As long as the content is high
quality, that's what Google cares about. Google cares about high quality content. And if you can create high quality content, and add some 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 buy of this person is this a reputable person. So what a lot of people are doing in the AI SEO spaces is just creating content. It just looks like chat GVT's 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 cold ins for days. It's like no regular person would have that many amount of cold ins. It's funny. I'm actually doing a search right now. And I searched up the word is 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 more languages, 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 clode 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 and you know what the content needs to look like in order for it to be seen by Google. What 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's 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 of SEO is you don't see results right away. So if you're an instant notification person like 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 stuff like that, right? So you have to think about, okay, 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 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, this is like,
but I could have created this 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 would have hire an SEO firm just for thinking about what are the SEO key words 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 had to lean more and more into authority, like looking for sites that are like, you know, the CNNs or the reddits or whatever, like Kora, that, you know, like the recent Google update, apparently they changed the algorithm where like they're highly focused on Reddit now. 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 Kora, you know, there's tons of real people there. And then now people are kind of gaming that. And then the program, 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 perplexes 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, perplexes are a new authority. But they're using AI to create all the contents. Yeah. Maybe Google's not dead, but maybe they end up serving up most of perplexes content. Yeah. My guess is, and this gets into like anti-trust 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 hunting 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. I want to take a quick moment to tell you about the my first million podcast on the Hub
Spot Network. It is amazing podcasts. And they recently did an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk where they talked to him about investing and how he spends his money and how much money he keeps for his safety net. And it's a phenomenal episode. I love this show and I highly recommend that everybody checks it out as hosted by Sam par and Sean Perry. And it truly is the audio destination for business professionals. So listen to my first million wherever you
get your podcasts. 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 is going in the direction now. Or 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 in 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 barrel 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 know,
it's not like there's just one book in the library. There's like different books in the library. Or, you know, 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 a Google. But I think the idea of I'm going to jump around to different places, ala library, ala Netflix, ala, you know, linear TV isn't going anywhere. Okay. So is that the game plan that people do now is like, throughout 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's my ideal customer? And then based on that, it's, okay, so I want to track these people. And then what do I want these people to do next? And for you, it's probably joined the newsletter. I'm guessing. Yeah. Because that way you have their, okay, once you'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, this, this potential to almost take this reverse route because you can create so much content at scale with AI, right? So you could also always go and create a ton of different content pieces on 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. But well, the other thing I want to talk about with, with SEO 2 is 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 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, 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, you know, in the next few years, it's going to be 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 6 p.m. by 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 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 news, you know, sushi restaurants are just 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 can 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 their 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 people 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 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, they'll be, you know, let's put it this way. Google is way bigger than duck.go.
You know, right. It doesn't mean duck.go 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 duck.go to do it. Yeah, I always feel like I care about privacy. But as soon as you give me some kind of convenience and makes my life easier, I'm like,
yeah, you know, 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 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?
Did it 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 respect to search and other products too, but let's just talk about search for a second. 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 great. 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 through that, you're going to learn in your niche. Oh my god, you know, this type of calculator, 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 sort of stuff and to test this. But the return, the return on investment, if it works is so large. So I want to talk about some of your, your, your spicy
takes. You had another tweet where you gave like 25 different spicy takes and 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 tape 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 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, 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 an our team, by the way, we were 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 note taking 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 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, homey, 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 don't, I think go take notes, man, just go take some notes. I mean, at the end of the day, too, if you're sitting there taking notes, that's sort of turning it into a multi-modality sort of engagement, right? You're listening and you're also writing. And because you're doing both, you're going to help
lock a lot of those concepts in. My take is there's going to be a backlash on on this sort of stuff. 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 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 built 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 in 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. 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. And in groups of larger than 10, something like otter super important. Like I can see it being super valuable, super important.
But 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 you may be the average meeting is four people. That's where I think otter is going to really flop. Yeah, yeah. I can see that take too. I mean, I don't use it on Zoom calls and things like that. So it's not actually one of the use cases I've actually used it for. So 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. 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? You feel like you can't say the truth about the thing. Because it leads to like, okay, well, does this change capitalism? I'm a capitalist.
Like this capitalism makes sense in the future. Our current government and economy makes 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 gist of here's how you see it as well or sometimes I'm scrolling Twitter and I'm seeing like these tweets where it's like, hey, 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, man? Like, honestly, I feel like 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's become easier. At the same time, companies are looking to become more profitable and especially larger companies, especially VC back 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 higher another thousand people. So yeah, I just think that people 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, 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 middle of these white collar jobs becomes stripped out. You're either junior and you're like very low paid or your senior and you're very high paid. 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. We don't know the answer for those
people. What do they do? And how do they earn a living? And yeah, sure, the AI tools will make their life better, but they also still need food on the table. 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 and real time. 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 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 YZ 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 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 it goes from there? Like, I'm not, it's above my pay grade. Yeah, it's to be like a philosopher, psychologist, everything, right? Like it's like, how do humans 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 tinnix, right? And they're living this amazing new life. And then you 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 UBI. I think 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 easier, they much rather watch episode 124 of Love Island than episodes
20. Is that tonight? I'm not way. 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 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 minted over the next 10 years than any point in history. But 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. And then when you want to create something, now you've got AI tools and no code tools that you can actually just go and press some buttons, not have to have gotten to Stanford and study computer science with 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 move 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 billboards and there's like no marketing. And then if you go in 2024, New York, of course, there's like your eyes 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 and a lot more like 2024 kind square. And if you need, if you want to stand out, you know, those are where the young, young millionaires are going to mintin. And, and I think what, 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 halves, the halves, nots, I do feel like it's going to equalize things in a way where you don't have to be de-smart as 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 it 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 they're like, you know, people really want to make it, AI is going to help them make it more they were 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, 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, we're 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 were 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 they're 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 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. Yeah. And you know, from an opportunity perspective, like there's probably opportunities to create more like climate friendly, clean, carbon neutral AI technologies. So if, you know, we were talking about duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, go 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 to create,
like what is the green version of public complexity 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, you know, 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 that'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 just, 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, 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 at any time 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 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 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, yes, 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 going to, I was going to say perplexity, per, uh, prompt because I was like, I want something
unbiased, right? So it says this, uh, the ecological impact of a single chat GPT prompt is relatively small, but it can add up significantly, when considering the massive scale usage, here's the breakdown. Each chat GPT 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 chat GPT's water usage is particularly
noteworthy. For every 20 to 50 queries, the system consumes about 500 milliliters 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 chat GPT is considerable. The system runs on estimated 30,000 GPUs, which requires significant power to, uh, to operate compact. 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 washing one load of laundry. And if current growth trends continue by 2027, chat GPT'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's, 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 either this side or that side and there's no in between. There's no gray, like gray is dead now. And that's just, it's just being applied 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 understand the tools. You just got to go build some stuff and go and create stuff that people are going to love that's going to put smile on their faces. It'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 word we have on the show. And I appreciate you joining us. Thanks for having me.