Real founders own up to EVERYTHING, This new Chinese AI is absolutely insane, Google sees Over 5 trillion searches a year

0:00One of the keys to being successful in life is taking ownership of everything that you do wrong. And funny enough, Eric and I were just talking right now, we're talking about his personal life, we won't go into too much detail, but Eric was talking about how the problem isn't the other person, the problem's him. And he mentioned that every time, you know, he's in these kind of scenarios, it usually is him who's the problem and not the other party or person. And then we started going from there and talking about business and one thing I noted about Eric and I've seen this from him since I've known him for a very long time I've known you I don't 15 years now yeah even when you worked at Treehouse when you screwed up or anything went wrong you would tell me you screwed up and what you learned from it I ran that AppSumo deal and the CTO emailed me saying you just ruined everyone's day and then Chamath was the only one to come up and email me he's like at least you owned it because I said sorry to everyone I said sorry to the entire board and everything I apologize to every customer service person because we ran a big campaign which is a record for AppSumo at the time.

1:05And I didn't tell anybody. So nobody was prepared for it. So all these sales came in, but nobody was ready for it. Yeah. But Eric's always been good at admitting when he is the issue or when he does something wrong and he learns from it. Or even if you call him out before he's going to make a mistake. Like him and I have talked sometimes about him doing too many things at once. And he's just like, you could be right. I just have a gut feeling. I'm going to go for it anyways. And if it doesn't work out, I'll learn from it all over again. Yep, and it goes on both sides too by the way Anytime you're provided data and you're proven wrong You'll you have strong views, but you you have very strong views, but you hold them loosely the moment you have data You're like, oh, okay, like you can you instantly forget and you move on to the next thing But if you're not showing anything you won't change your stance, but you do change your stance and you will say my bad And most people don't they don't realize that unless they actually work with you extensively Yeah, I was talking to my co-founder on Friday because we're in the process of acquiring three companies right now.

2:06We literally have three under LOI right now. One will close in March. Two should end up closing sometime in May. So in total, we'll have done three. Call it by the end of May, maybe end of June if something goes wrong. And my team has their ideas on what to acquire, when to acquire. And we're pretty chill. Like, one of our leaders who heads up EMEA wanted to acquire this company in one of the regions. I haven't even talked to the founder yet or anything like that, we're an LOI. I'll talk to him before we close. I like talking to all the founders before we close and meeting them up. Sometimes I'm not able to meet them up before we purchase the company, but I'll do like a Zoom call or something like that, but I do like meeting them up shortly after.

2:54And they were just like, hey, we want to acquire these type of companies. We believe this will cause more growth than something else and I'll be honest with them. I'll tell them like well I haven't done as much M &A as you I go you know, I trust your judgment But what data do you have and I want to see the data because they're debating on what would move the needle more? And I look at certain things like like they'll tell me oh if you have a bigger media shop in this region It'll add more revenue. I'm like what data do you have? I'm just going countrywide and service-wide and looking at GDP and I'm looking at the data as we get tons of RFPs coming in and what countries are they requesting and which ones are we mediocre average at.

3:36And when I mean mediocre average, I'm talking about a head count, right? So I just go based off the data I'm seeing. And I believe you and I are very similar in which if someone shows this data and proves to us that we're wrong, we don't have this issue of like, oh man, you know, I'm right, you're wrong. We just care about it. Cool, learn something new. this is positive because that means we were wrong that means that opens up more opportunity for more revenue and let's move on well here's i think here's the real kicker for everyone just to wrap this up it's real founders or real i think real leaders for anything own up to everything and so if something goes wrong my company at the end of the day it's my fault if it's the wrong hire or someone's causing issues well it's still my fault because i signed off on it at the end of the day it's also my fault if i don't terminate that person right and in the past i think early founders at least early me, would be hesitant to terminate somebody because you want to give people a chance or whatever, right?

4:29But it actually hurts everyone else. So just understand that there's downstream effects to everything that you do, and real founders are okay owning up to everything. Now, conversely, I actually gave Noah here a quote before. It's a Charlie Munger quote because I wrote a post today on how SEOs are becoming obsolete today on LinkedIn, and I knew people would start coming at me, and then people started coming at me, right? And then I'm like, oh, man, I went to Grok, and I'm like, what's that Charlie Munger quote again? So the quotes basically like if your job is dependent on you to not understand something you're not going to understand and most people want to protect their jobs So they don't want to understand the fact that the world is changing, right?

5:02But that that is also an example of somebody not willing to own up to not necessarily them But the world is changing the data is changing you better own up to it Or you're gonna be in trouble and I was talking about that new Chinese AI madness, so You brought up an interesting point before you talked about the Charlie Munger quote So you have much more managing experience than I do. For those of you who don't know, I don't have any direct reports underneath me. And it's usually always been that way for most of my life. I'm a terrible manager. See, you own up to it. Yeah, but you mentioned one thing in which if you keep around bad apples, it affects other people on the team.

5:40And I know you're doing a new project right now called Carrot with a K, not a C. What's the website? Carrot.ai? Dot AI. What did I say? IA? Dot IO. I think you were gonna say IO and then you thought AI and then you switched it. Yeah. Alright, so have you had the issue on that team or any other team where you've had bad players and you kept them around? That team doesn't have an issue and people on the agency side notice how that team's culture is very different. Because it's very like I think I told you this already when my CTO and I show up to the office We're there. We're both there at the same time 730 a.m.

6:15Right. And usually he's there until seven. My eyes hurt to like start at 430. My eyes hurt like hell. So I have to go home. But basically, we're there the whole time. We're talking the whole time. We're texting every day like weird times. Right. And I'm sure you do that with Mike as well. You text me a weird times, too. But my point is that culture is very much a culture of accountability. And we're willing. We've basically permeated that culture throughout single brain now where today we did it all hands. I said, hey guys, we're going to be making some adjustments and some of you are going to be comfortable with it.

6:44Some of you aren't. But at the end of the day, I want you guys to all know that I'm doing what's best for the team. And I'm going to make sure that you continue to work with the best people. Because I have no interest in cutting a bunch of people just for efficiency's sake. I just want to make sure we have the best people so we can all come to work happy and excited. How's that working out? Good. People are excited. And then I talked to all the A players first ahead of this. They're like, yeah, I'm here for it. I'm pumped for it. I'm here for the long game, right? And so I can tell who this freaks out.

7:10but it is the right thing and yeah there's there's uh i'll just look we'll come back to this in a month i have more things to announce i'm cool i'm actually curious in a month the what you learned and then what ended up happening with the a players b players i don't need to ask about the c or d players yeah i mean look unfortunately there's some people that have been with me for a couple years and they've been very loyal and we're going to be making some changes that's all i can say um and so the and by the way like i look at you too you will take care of the people I look at anybody that's been a lifer, for example, like Noah, I've known for eight years or so.

7:44Like, I will always help Noah whenever I can. There's Zach, who I just spoke to yesterday. I will always help him whenever I can. Raghav, who works, he's Gary V's right-hand man now. I'll do whatever I can to help these people. I think you're the same way, too. So even if you do need to rotate someone else out, you'll help them. But that's also you owning up to maybe a mistake that you made or just taking responsibility. And even if you say you're a bad manager, it doesn't matter because you still realize that Everything that happens in the company is still your fault at the end of the day It is anything that good that that's good that happens is because your team.

8:15Yes anything good is team anything bad is you Yeah, it sucks, but it's the reality. Yeah, and if you don't want to own up to that then don't be a leader. Yep So okay, can we can we talk about madness real quick? Yeah, let's talk about madness So basically I got access to this this new Chinese AI. This is like another deep seek moment now. It's not a frontier model It's not like a new LLM or anything like that, but it is a fantastic AI agent And so the way I want you guys to think about Manus is chat GPD operator is an agent, right? Manus is an A player where if you tell it what to do, it's like no problem boss I got it and it just figures everything out and it goes above and beyond Chat GPD operator is a C player employee you ask it to do something and it will give you one response And I'll give up okay, and what I mean by that is C players typically will need a lot more help they'll need a lot of hand-holding or they'll give up, and then someone else needs to carry them, right, which is usually another A player, which is why A players get upset having to work with B and C players.

9:12Let me give you an example. So I asked it to do, I said, ChatGPD operator, what are the examples of, I want you to do a deep analysis of the top agency holding companies out there. I'm going to name two. Give me a list of all of them, right? And that was my only prompt, just one sentence, okay? What it did was it did a Google search, and it found two other agencies, and it said, here are the four agencies. It gave up right there. I dumped it into Mattis. It said, okay, boom, boom, boom, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Okay, here's the six agencies. There's WPB, there's Omnicom, there's Interpublic, which is, you know, they're merging, right?

9:45And then there's Havas, there's all these other agencies. And it's like, okay, here's the market cap total. Here's how much revenues are. Okay. Oh, I need to think more. Thinking, thinking, thinking. So it's showing a chain of thought, right? Then it produces, I think, 15 documents for me. And in each documents, maybe call it three, four pages or so. And there's graphs, there's tables, everything. And it does complete analysis that is the difference between an A player versus a C player now I have a bunch of other examples to give you but I just want to tell you that it is the amount of work it can do for you I showed my SEO team today they're like oh my god this is gonna save me probably at least 15 to 20 hours a month and it's gonna decrease our cost by quite a bit too so give me an example of how it can help you with work like a real-life example that you guys are you gonna use so okay I don't know if I told you this last week, but Gaetano posted something, you know Gaetano, right?

10:33Okay, so Gaetano's great at SEO. He posted something to X. He's like, the types of keywords that convert in B2B SaaS are not the head tail keywords. So like, you know, one phrase or two phrase keywords. He's like, it's the long tail five to seven phrase keywords. I'm like, what do you mean? So I responded to that. I was like, what do you mean? Right? Like, give me an example. And he wrote how to integrate NetSuite effectively into whatever. Right. That was an example. I was like, but I need more examples. So I hit the grok button. I hit the the xai button right grok And I was like give me five to seven examples.

11:02It gives me five to seven examples I took that and I dumped it into Manus and I said, okay Now I want you to give me do a hundred of these right and then it basically without I just said do a hundred for me And it basically mapped out. Okay Boy, why didn't you just have grok try to do a hundred because at that point? I was already migrating over and wanted to see what man is would do and then but man is can completes the whole thing So it gives me 50 or 100 keywords. It says, okay, here's all the commercial intent. Here's like the different stages, right? Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel.

11:33But it also says, these are people that are looking for strategy. These are people looking to make a transaction. So without me asking, it basically classified all the keywords for me. And then I said, okay, that's great. Take a look at the singlegrain.com blog, and I want you to understand what our blogger guidelines look like, okay? So what it did was it analyzed the entire thing. It wrote out a brand new set of writer guidelines, which are more accurate than what we have right now. And then I said, it created one blog post for me. That blog post, it followed the writer guidelines, 2 ,100 words.

12:04I said, use a lot of data, use a lot of statistics, use a lot of links, and then also do subtle call to actions to care at dot AI. Okay. And then I ran it through a duplicate content or an AI content checker. It was like, this is mostly human. And so my point is this still gets you 90 to 80, 90, 85 to 90 % of the way there. You still need a human in the loop. But now I can actually have it do 50 to 100 of these posts based on these long tail keywords that follow my writer guidelines And it does you know complete it? It maps out the process to that it's following and so to me This is a lot more complete than an operator because it's functioning like an actual worker If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast That's where framer comes in and it totally changes the game Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together No issues with versions or miscommunication.

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14:27If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school go to shopify.com slash marketing school shopify.com slash marketing school and on a side note when you are checking for duplicate content running through copy scape you'll probably get better results yeah i didn't know that so you still use copy scape i still use it from all the ai checkers we've checked out copy scape usually has a higher hit rate for duplication yeah let me tell you another one do you like this with your Do this with your kids.

15:08I made, you know, Minecraft? The video game? Yeah, you know Mario, right? Obviously. I know Mario. So, okay. I said make me a Super Mario game that has Minecraft elements in it It made me a game and then I could like mine the blocks and then I can put blocks everywhere and I can just jump around and stuff And you can deploy it so you can deploy it to a temporary server And then you can use cursor to finish off the coding That was what was missing for people like you and me And so you see people making like flight simulator games now fighting games now and things like that and I'm like, whoa This is insane, right?

15:36You can also, I'll give you one more example. So I gave you the stock example, I gave you the SEO example, I gave you the game example, I did another one. This one you can do with Grok or ChatGPT, deep research, it's fine, but I just said, show me the complete content strategy for clutch.co. They rank for all these agency keywords, I want to rank for them too. And it basically did a complete breakdown of what the content gaps are, and the cool thing is it can log into your Ahrefs account, It can log into your Samrush account or your ubersuggest account and you utilize those tools and do the research for you Oh awesome.

16:09Yeah, by the way people are paying$20 ,000 for invite codes right now Wow, I was about to ask you how much it costs. I hook you up with one. Yeah, but you can't share with anybody else Yeah, but it's free right now. So I've been I've been pestering this guy cuz our way This is a Chinese AI right? It's a Chinese AI. So they're based in Singapore in China right now So I I'm attack I'm talking to the founder and On X right now. I said hey, are you taking money right now? I have an angel invested in years, right? I'm like, hey Are you taking money right now? He's like no we're not more focused on the product right now We just want a great product great boost up the whole thing I Looks like it.

16:43Yeah, but it's such a great UI and then I have multiple friends looking to invest as well But I'm like holy crap man He's like yeah, it's insane to demand that they're getting right now and everyone at X is talking about it obviously Yeah, that's where I first learned about it. Yeah, it's crazy Once you start using it, like, oh, I'll give you one more. Dude, I'm so excited about this. Literally, Saturday, my day, it was like 10 a.m., and then all of a sudden, it was like 3 p.m., because I was just on this thing. Wow. I took all my financials. I also, you know how your agency probably has utilization planning.

17:16You have all these random documents for how to run your agency, right? I took all these documents. I just threw it in there. I was like, you are now the COO of my agency. What are the top three things you would do? and it said okay here's um organizational planning here's all these things i said that's too much stuff because it made 20 different artifacts for me and each artifact had 15 to 20 documents in there i'm like dude i'm not going to read all that right and it basically said okay here's the highest leverage thing you can do right here here's the other things you need to do wait what were they what is organized because i earlier i mentioned we're going to be making some changes right so organizational um organizational management and transitions right like all these things like it actually mapped it out perfectly and it knows who i'm talking about on my payroll and everything because I uploaded an org chart.

17:56Well, let's go back. So we've been talking for a while. You've been making changes for a while before this. Did it come up with a similar recommendation organizationally? Yep. Yep. Oh, cool. Yep. Yeah. So it came up with similar recommendations and I also told it what I'm planning to do and it's like, yeah, you should be doing this. And it's like, you probably took too long to do this. So yeah. All right. What was another change it gave you? Another one would be around, oh, it actually narrowed down, I mean it was looking at gross margins and everything, right, and it's like hey, we need to ideally, like we need to optimize this and make it better, here's a total plan to do it, and it's like 15 to 20 pages, and I'm not a detail-oriented person, so I was like, okay, this looks good at a high level, but I would hand this off to an operations person, for example, to take on, or a client services leader.

18:43Yeah. Well, speaking of AI, you saw how Google ended up releasing their new search numbers? No. So, ChatGPT or OpenAI talked about how they're getting 3 billion prompts or searches a month, whatever you want to end up calling it. So Google shortly after did an announcement and they announced that they get over 5 trillion searches a year. The last time they gave a number was 2016 and to give you context, if you look at it from a daily basis, in 2016 they were saying they're getting 8.5 billion searches a day. The current number is over 13 billion searches a day. When chat GPT is at 3 billion a month, Google is at 13 billion a day.

19:32I just want to give context here. So basically, they're getting 32x more. So if we do 5 trillion, so 5 ,000 billion, right? So 5 ,000 billion divided by 12 is 416 billion per month. And if you divide that by three, then you're basically getting 32x. So that's the difference between Google versus ChatGPT right now. Which is interesting, I didn't know these numbers. Yeah, so it's 32 times the difference. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Which I mean, but it's still... I think we both agree that it's pretty impressive ChatGPT's growth rate. I mean, three billion is nothing to sneeze at. It can't be 32. That seems...

20:06Small? I think... Well, I mean, five... Each trillion is 1 ,000 billion, isn't it? I'm one two yeah okay so let's say there's 30 days in a month so that a hundred million

20:2413 billion one two three one two three divided by 100 Neil has to get the numbers 130 times wait how's 130 times 13 billion a day versus three billion a month no but you said five 5 trillion searches a year right so 5 ,000 divided by 12 would be 416 5 trillion plus divided by 365 No, but the 5 trillion searches a year Yeah divided by 365 days Okay, so we have that's 13 point a day 13.69 Okay, that 13 6 9 okay, but that's strange. Why is my math wrong there? 5 ,000. Okay, we agree on that. 5 ,000, and then you divide it by month, right? You get the months. So how's that? You do 5 trillion divided by that, that's...

21:15416. 416. 0.66.

21:22Well, it's okay. Yeah, it's a lot. That's right. It's 416 divided by 30 again. Then you're at 13.88. Yeah. But you said ChatGPT is 3 billion a month. Yeah. So 416 divided by 3. It's not you're right it 138 so the division never was wrong. Yeah. Yeah, it's 130 plus time 139 139 basically But yeah, cool at least we got use if you use 365 days instead of doing the month It's pretty much yeah, it's I mean I think our main point here without those we can get rid of the math stuff. The main thing is Google is still very big And but it's also impressive what these LLMs are doing wait and growing Google still big and growing a lot of people want to talk about How it's dead.

22:03It's not an opportunity to drive traffic 130 times more. By the way, when we talk about this, when we say website traffic is dying or traffic's going down, we're not saying we're done doing it. We're still gonna keep optimizing the crap out of this until this thing's dead. So again, guys, we look at this as cigar bots, and all of you that like to argue with me on LinkedIn, we're still optimizing for this stuff. But it doesn't mean that it isn't starting to slow down a little bit for website traffic. And when we say it's dying down, we're not saying it's going to zero. What we're saying is if you look at a whole pie of 100, and right now it makes up 20 of your traffic, or 30 or 40%, it may go down 10, 20, 30 % over time, but there'll be other channels that pick up because the other channels are gaining in popularity.

22:44It doesn't mean that your Google traffic is going to necessarily go down, like if you look at a visitor base instead of a percentage, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to go down from a visitor standpoint, but what you should be seeing if you're doing marketing right, is the other channels driving more awareness, traffic, and sales, Whether it's direct or indirect. Dude, AOL is not even dead today. Yeah, it was still around. AOL has never completely died. No. I would actually love to buy that business if someone sold it for cheap. Get so much traffic still. Wait, on a random note, how much traffic do you think AOL gets right now?

23:14I don't know. Still like tens of millions. Global rank, 108th most popular website. Like I said, I would gladly buy. So is that tens of millions or? 270 million per month. Wow. See, AOL is still alive. I would probably monetize it better than they can. No offense, AOL. So, yeah. Anyway, that's where we're going to end it today. Thank you all for listening. Please don't forget to rate and subscribe. And we'll see you tomorrow.