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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
How SEO Grew Up With Cameron LiButti
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- [00:04]
A
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. I am really back. I actually had some backlogs for everybody that was listening podcasts and I was going through an accelerated MBA program through Goldman Sachs. And you know that towards the end there was eaten up a lot of my time, but I am back in the saddle, if you will. I also, for anybody listening and been kind of following what I'm doing, I did buy out my other partners. So I now fully own EWR Digital and there's a lot of things that we're going to be talking about and doing. But thank you all so much for, for the support. Chris and I are actually having lunch after this podcast, so we're gonna go meet up. We're still on good terms, so still a client, but just kind of want to let everybody know the big step change happening and, and I thought it'd be a great time. I know I've done this periodically, bring on other agency owners to talk about kind of where they're at and kind of benchmark what's going on and how things are changing. There's actually a big agency conference coming up that I'm going to be going to. There's SEO week next week that I just don't have time for, but went last year. A lot of good guys there. Cameron, welcome to the show, buddy.
- [01:33]
B
Thanks, Matt.
- [01:34]
A
Hey, like, you know, I, I love having these conversations. Kind of like a fireside chat, letting everybody kind of see what's going on. There's just so much noise out there. There's so much that's happening. It kind of makes your head spin. Like new workflows, new new tools. It's constantly pivoting, new models coming out from an AI standpoint of like, which ones are the best, what to use. Like, you know, like cloth design just came out. Like, there's like, it's very hard to build a business with everything constantly changing. But it's fun.
- [02:09]
B
It's.
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A
It's fun. So why don't you tell the audience a little bit just kind of about your background as, as we kind of get into conversation, just kind of where you're coming from.
- [02:18]
B
Yeah, quick, quick background on me. I was actually an engineer. The marketing digital stuff was accidental. Just like starting the agency was accidental. I. Engineering consultant for right out of college, mechanical engineering and then I started helping a Buddy back in 2013, and we were doing that. You know, the thing back then that worked was we were selling supplements like crazy online. We were having fun. We got our hands slapped around 2016 over the remarketing lists, which if you have PPC people listening, they probably remember those days. 2019, I was talking to a doctor who was a friend, and he kind of jokingly said, you talk about marketing differently. And I said, I have nothing to sell you. And I'm just like a. Purely like a data guy who does this for myself. And he said, well, what if you helped me? And I was like, I don't know. So anyway, I helped him and my name became well known in that medical industry. And we've been partners with the. It's a national group of doctors ever since. And honestly, we've never done our own marketing. The podcast circuit for this year is new for us because we've just gotten so many referrals for the last seven years that it's just been all we can handle. So that's the. The short of it, the SEO piece was probably the most natural piece for me, being that I was an engineer. It just made sense back in that 201516 when we were transitioning from, you know, manual algorithm updates by humans into that. I refer to AI. I still. It's a bad habit, but as machine learning, because that's how I Learned it, right. TensorFlow on Google was my first introduction. I don't know if you ever played with that, but that's how I got into AI. Was teaching myself about, you know, all the probabilities inside a TensorFlow. And so, yeah, it was the most natural thing. And then I helped a doctor and it was just purely SEO. I remember he. He sent me a picture. We started working with him in July. He sent me a picture. And he sells hearing aids. Sent me a picture in December. They had this pegboard and he said it was the first time in 30 years that the pegboard was full of devices waiting to be picked up. And this was 2019. So spoiler, it was 98% Google Business Optimization. He had competitors, like dropping fake profiles on his. On his location to filter him out. Just a lot of like, cleanup stuff. And then obviously I've evolved from there. We do web dev. I'm not. I always joke like, I'm an engineer. You're hiring the engineer. I have people who are good designers and stuff. But we couldn't. Early in the early days, I was always trying to partner with developers and it was never going well. I was like, this isn't how you build a website. This doesn't, you know, and they just didn't understand the. The marrying of SEO and good web dev, good storytelling, good branding. So we brought that all in house, and that's what we've been mainly doing those two pieces for the last six and a half, almost seven years. Obviously, we have to do PPC now, which we are getting really great Results the last two years, I'd say there was a period in, like, that 20 to 22 where PPC was kind of. Google seems to have really dialed that in, so we're into that. And then now we're. We have to be an AI now. Right? We don't really have a choice at this point. We have to know about it and understand it and be ready. Yeah, that's the who I am.
- [05:47]
A
Yeah. No, I, I think coming at it from an engineering standpoint or even like a system thinking standpoint is really how. How to approach it. You know, quick background for anybody that's just coming on and listening. We had kind of the opposite. So we were doing web development, and then we. And then people quickly said, well, how do we get people to come here and buy from us? And so, so, so that. That led into SEO. I actually got introduced to the agency. I had sold a couple businesses and the podcast was around the corner for my house, and so I wanted to go meet Chris and check it out. And I was really like a paid ads guy, and the infrastructure of understanding paid ads helped me kind of understand what was going on with SEO. And that was really before they kind of lifted the curtain up and showed you everything that's happening, and now everything is out there to learn it in, I guess, the world of AI. And, and now we're really deep into the engineering and the math and, like, I feel like SEO has kind of grown up, if you will, from what it used to be, from, like, content, like keyword optimization. Like, there's a lot more that. That goes into it these days, and it's really exciting.
- [07:06]
B
I see a lot of SEOs complaining, I don't know where Facebook groups and stuff about how they're attracting all this attention because of AI. I, as somebody who owns a business, I'm curious if you think this too, but as somebody who owns a business, I like that these CEOs and these business owners are aware of it now, because now it gives me, like, starting point to have a conversation with them and explain, like, yes, AI search is real, but that doesn't mean the fundamentals got thrown out the window in the last 12 months. They're, I would argue, more important than ever. And so I, I really leaned into that conversation. But you are, you know, I've get, I can't tell you how many times I get emailed forward from one of our clients. Like, hey, they said our client across the street is showing up in AI search more than us. It's just a really good, it's a really good cold email. Like I'm not going to send it, but if I was doing cold email, I'd probably send it to. We had one yesterday. She pulled it up. She's like, they say in the business across the street has more. And I took all of 10 seconds to just compare her ahrefs like, this is your data, this is her data. Please tell me where you're failing. And she goes, oh, oh yeah. Completely understand that. That's a legion email.
- [08:19]
A
Yeah, no, there, there, there's definitely a lot of that happening. I, I've actually seen a lot more negative SEO happen. Even though Google said that's not a thing, I believe it's a thing. I know it's a thing. I have some clients. It's a thing. You know, I, I think that you're right. The conversation's been elevated. I think a lot of times that conversation with the C suite is because paid ads can show a clear ROI or, you know, now attribution I think is certainly debatable on, you know, if you're running the person's name right, or the brand name, especially when you talk about the affiliates. Like so, so quick, quick story like where we can maybe really connect on Chris. Chris has actually a big supplement company that we help grow over the, the last couple years. And, and essentially we started getting into the affiliate world and we were more on the agency side and we started getting in the affiliate world and literally like we hired four different companies and it was all straight like scams basically where they were just like, you know, they, they're cannibalizing the search volume we already generated and then like attributing that to them. But I think that a lot of that conversation, you know, their last click attribution is really a thing and, and CEOs could understand that clear delineation. This came from this platform and hey, like this is what works. SEOs haven't done a good job explaining what they're doing, but now people are starting to ask questions. And so I, I think that there's going to be a lot more attention I think there's going to be a lot more money that moves towards SEO. I think that SEOs are going to get paid more for what they have to be able to do and what it's encompassing. And I think that, you know, SEOs growing into marketing and marketing and SEO are almost kind of like the architecture has been woven across the board together, right? Because you talk about social, you talk about paid, like it's all affecting everything, right? And then, you know, you add this AI layer to, to what's happening. And, and I mean, you know, I've been saying this for over a year now, like it's common, like whether you want to debate it or not, like whether you want to like put your head in the sand, it's coming and you got to understand it. And the more you like, treat it like a very, very intelligent person, it helps you do SEO better across the board. It helps you find things, it helps you see things. And so we've really leaned into whatever you want to call it, AI, SEO, geo. Hey, what? Like everybody's debating over that. I'm just like, let's ship.
- [10:59]
B
I don't care what you call it, we gotta win. You talked about attribution. That's a so harder so when I'm working. So we have a mix of clients, a lot of doctors, lawyers, engineer types. Smart, very intelligent people. Not, they're not like, just not their specialties, not SEO. And then we work. We have a handful of nine figure brands that we just do SEO for. Those conversations with the nine figure brands are interesting because you're talking to a marketing director that does understand SEO. Last year we had a nine figure brand contract with them. And he said we were the first agency to talk to him about not caring about the brand. And he said for years SEO companies would show up and say, hey, well look at all this traffic you were getting. And he was like, well I'm smart enough to know that 50% of that is brand traffic, whatever the number is, exactly a majority of it. And I was the first one to be like, well, you're failing here, you're failing here, you're failing here. This is where we're going to go win. He's like, you're that to me to show up and talk about attributions, like these are where the buying terms are. That's a conversation I like to have a lot with owners. We've had a lot. And then on the local side we've had a lot of clients come to us and say, we, I'm getting, you know, 4,000, 5,000 visitors a month. I'm like, your market can't support that much traffic. You're just ranking for blog stuff. You're getting, you're in Chicago and you're getting, you know, traffic from all over the United States. Not that that's bad, but that's not where your buyers are coming from. And there's been a handful of clients where we have cut their traffic in half by pruning and being more specific about their topical map. And their phones just take off, right? They're like, my phone is ringing all the time. And they'll see their traffic report, they'll be like, we're down 20%. What's going on? Like, because I don't, it's not that I don't care, but I'm not after that traffic. I want the, I always talk about, like the awareness level, right? I want the people that are most aware, ready to buy, that don't know your name yet. That's like an effective, for me, at the local level, that's the most effective SEO strategy. Again, not to say that there isn't. Informational search isn't important. Important. But if we're going to get cannibalized by AI search, which we can show up in those informational searches, get credit for them, but we know people aren't converting through.
- [13:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think that's just forcing the conversation to be what needed to always happen. Right?
- [13:30]
B
Like, right.
- [13:31]
A
Like your KPIs are traffic and you want to grow traffic and you're ranking for all these blog terms, that you're ranking for 5,000 blog terms. And like, you know, you're a local small business. Like, does that help you? Like, if that's the metric, you're going, oh, our traffic's going down.
- [13:48]
B
Right?
- [13:48]
A
Like, who cares about your traffic? Right? Like, I'm like, what are the events happening in GA4? Like, what are the events you have set up? Like, let's get to the buying signals, like you said. And I think one of the best things that happened was when they started breaking apart content into different categories and then they just started throwing informational search out there in Google and say, hey, like, you're going to show up for this. It's going to build your brand. That's great, but that's not the goal of a lot of businesses. And, and there, there are a lot of people have posted charts on social media that their brand traffic's going way down. But the revenue, which you should always be talking about, that's the conversation with the CEOs is going up, and so it's kind of like a moot point. You know, it's just like, yeah, we're, we're driving more revenue. Let's look at different numbers. Like, you've been trained to look at things that are not useful. And so I think that that aligns the conversation better. And now people are starting to understand it more, and there's that kind of level of curiosity to AI. And, you know, I mean, there's a lot of, like, very curious CEOs out there about AI. And the conversation for us is more moving into, you know, how is it moving into the workflow, how is it moving outside of marketing? And I think marketers in a really strong position because we were impacted first. You know, now legal review, you got hr, you got all these other areas that AI is dipping into, but it impacted marketing and knowledge work first. And so, I mean, I was even talking to some engineers and like, they're like, oh, yeah, we were, we were doing this, we were doing that. And I was just like, I'm in this, like, all day long, every day, multiple windows open. Like, you know, and you're, you're like, oh, like I wanted to, you know, do something on a spreadsheet. And I was just like, okay, like, that's cool. And, and I think that there's, I think that there's going to be a lot of people that like, that if you're an engineer or you're a developer, that you're going to get some compound leverage in what's happening, at least in the short term. I mean, I don't know where, where the future goes. And, and you see the numbers kind of straight up. So, I mean, we'll, we'll see. I, I think it's, you know, I think it's adoption faster than even the Internet. And look what happened with that, you
- [16:10]
B
know, so, so we're trying to build. This might be a little outside the scope of really what you usually talk about, but if, if the people listening are familiar with what I call, like our agentic harnesses, but essentially it's a folder, right? This is. People use this big language. I'm coming from the engineering world. I'm sensitive to this because I think people try to speak like this to talk over you. And when someone says like a harness, it's just a folder system with a set of instructions. And I just show all of the people this all like, it's just a folder. There's an agent folder, there's a memory file and you can make them more advanced. But at the core that's what it is and you set up some routines and cron jobs and some automations, but that is really what an agent is. And then you plug in different intelligence. And so I'm getting to it, to my point, but I just like baseline understand what this is. So let's say you have, I don't know, a keyword research agent. That is you've given it its ahrefs. Maybe you've given ahrefs API, you've given it some other gets, backlink data, search data. You can build that agent when you run it. Maybe you can interface it with it in many different ways. Let's say you're interfacing it through Claude and when you interface it, it goes out and does those things. And, and, and so the way that my company is transitioning as you talk about workflows is we're trying to make a company wide agent harness, meaning that every area of the business can plug and play with different intelligence. So we have like visual regression AIs where we're looking to see if a client change. Right. Our clients like to have access to their site. And so we run that once a day. It just visually looks it over, compares it to the day before. It says hey, something visually no longer makes sense. It pings a developer.
- [17:56]
A
Right.
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B
It's just watching, it's not making changes. So we're trying to build these types of agent harnesses across the business that as you have a lot of people listening here that do SEO, understand how buried in data you are all the time, how many spreadsheets and historic data and you're trying to look at trends and how do you make better decisions and, and so that's where we're implementing AI is not making decisions but surfacing some issues faster so that we as the experts can make those decisions quicker. So yeah, maybe a little outside the scope, but that's a workflow that workflows. It's kind of pretty much touching every area of our business at this point. The hardest one to be able to crack has been design it just they do it but they don't do it like, and this is dependent on your clients. Like if you want to order a Fiverr website, AIs can pretty much they're all going to do better than that now. But if you're, I'm assuming with you definitely with like my company, we, if you're going to order or you're going to work with us for a website, you're not. You're going to get a creative director, you're going to, you know, you're going all in on what your hopes and dreams are. And so AI really is not quite there yet. On the design side, it looks good to an untrained eye, but if you show that to a creative director, like, ah, it's not quite there. But other side, the technical, the data side, we are finding a lot of use cases right now.
- [19:11]
A
Yeah, a lot of these AI generated websites, you can kind of tell they have a certain look to them unless you really feed in and it ingests a lot of the client data. And so the ingesting of the models per the client and you know, then the clients come in and say, well, oh, I actually don't like the voice, I don't like the posts on social, I don't like my website language, need to redo it all. And I was like, well, okay, well, AI is not going to give us the leverage here that we were looking for. And they're like, no, I'm looking for a total revamp. And it's like, okay, well yeah, you need a creative director, you need to do all these things. But if you're like trying to like keep going with what you got, like there, there, there's some, some really good opportunities. I, I really liked actually where you were going. Like, So, I mean APIs, like, they're so helpful. Like there's, you know, the secrets, there's the keys, like talk, talk for baseline for people. Basically you're just giving it tools and access to do all this stuff and then you can build like, you can build different skills or a way to, to utilize this data or orchestrate what's happening with the agents. I would love for you to build on what you said because I think that that's where the real conversation's going is like, okay, like if you want to build this, this layer that everybody's going to talk to, you probably need to start using GitHub, right? Like you need to start dropping some stuff in here so, so people can talk. You might need to start using Claude Cowork or you know, like Codex is really for like a power user if you're a big chat, GBT person or cloud code. Like, but, but how do you get the whole company elevated? I think is that next conversation where, where I think it's going to go
- [20:55]
B
into like, so my being an engineer, I love AI so much that on the side I do help and consult on AI doing actually a class next week with A local sales company about it. You brought up GitHub. So I. The hardest part about AI right now is that it's, you know, we all hear the 80, 20, you know, they're 20% is 80% of the work. Those people are off and running because they are creating their own ecosystem that just ops them, right? Overpowers them. But what does it look like company wide? So we have 14 people here. How do you set standards so that everybody's not running in a million directions? I just read an article this week about somebody at Amazon. Their entire job is to find agents in Amazon and he said they are finding every team. It's so easy to stand up an agent. I mean I explained to you it's literally a folder system. It's so easy to stand up an agent for a semi technical person that the company is just running wild and it's turning into just this mess of spaghetti. So to me it's, it's actually an opera, it's a comp. It's a weird personality that has to solve for this because not only do you have to be an operations person, which are people people, they're not technology people. You also need to have a technology person and IT like mind and those people usually don't cross over very well. And, and so the thing that I have focused on a lot in my business is what is the operational structure, what is the org structure? I think, I think we're the businesses that get out ahead are going to have Org charts that mix both people and agents into them and have very clear definitive like this is where the agent stops or this is where the human starts or vice versa. So you, you know, you brought up GitHub. I that's the best way I know how to do it right now you can put these folders folder, right? You just put a folder into GitHub and then a bit of a technical term. But even my non technical people have to have IDE. So the IDEs that we use are either Anti Gravity from Google or VS code, which Anti gravity was built on VS code, if that matters. But these are development environments and so people see this, non technical people see these tools and they're like I, that is. Nope.
- [23:14]
A
Like Ubuntu, like let's spin up some Python, right? Like there's, there's all these layers from an engineering standpoint that you have to put together, right to utilize these things in these environments. And it's new for a lot of marketers.
- [23:27]
B
It's very new. And so we've pushed so my SEO, which was interesting, my SEO team was more excited about the IDEs than the development teams. We develop internally, we develop all in WordPress. If we build outside of WordPress, we'll partner with an agency. That's usually when we're getting into larger clients. But the WordPress developers did not, do not want to touch the idea. They're like, I don't know what this is, I don't know how to use it. I know how to move block and code editors around inside of Elementor or whatever they're using. Where the SEO team. On the SEO team we have non technical SEOs, which means like the link builders and the content writers, those people end up on the SEO team and then obviously we have the back end technical SEO people. But the non technical SEO people took to it right away because they recognized how easy it was to fix a lot of their spreadsheets or connect to something and look, use an API to pull data faster. Like I was doing this all manually. Now I can just connect, pull it in, I can push it up into a spreadsheet or I can write an app script with this, put that into a spreadsheet. So it's given that they've just sprinted away with it. It's been incredible. Like super proud of those that team. Disclaimer on the ID when you get into it. Again, a little outside the scope of this, but learn what a env file is really fast. Like if I give you one security protocol like understand like don't share it,
- [24:55]
A
don't share it in the, in the field because then it'll go to whatever place is processing it. So I think the next layer after this. Cameron. Yeah. Is like, I mean this is where we're at, right? Right. Like if people want to know like where we're at, we're exploring setting up some of the open source. Like there's, there's new stuff that's just come out that it, it like it doesn't take as much setup as it did in the past and putting it on a server where all the data stays and you're talking about like legal clients or you know, Hippo with doctors and stuff like that. A lot of these clients you've got to, you got to use the enterprise tier to get the data terms of, you know, terms of service where they're not going to do anything with the data. But keeping it on your own server, keeping all that information in house is where kind of legal and medical that, that, that's like in these regulated industries that's really what their big concern is. Because I mean, think about these, these major LLM companies or AI companies, what you want to call it, technology companies have everyone's data. And I mean, you know, like, oops, oh, those keys are gone. Like now I gotta go reset all the keys in the env file. And also the weird thing is you even set these rules sometimes. Okay. And then like you've got a reminder like, hey, remember not to do this. Like, don't do this. Like, it's like a really intelligent individual. But also it's weird how they sometimes, even if you set rules, sometimes they forget them or make mistakes or how it's. I think memory, I think memory is the next big conversation as well. Like, so where stuff's housed and how, like so how are you. What is your data memory structure? That's an interesting question.
- [26:39]
B
So that's is why I don't like people working in their. I don't like people working in the, the chat windows because of that. So, so anybody who's listening, if you work in a chat, you'll be half an hour in and then it just seems to all forget. If anybody's played with Open Claw when it first came out you, that was when you felt it the wor. Like you'd be, you'd be 45 hour hour in and all of a sudden it just like it was like someone erased its memory. It's like what it, it compacted?
- [27:09]
A
It just compressed it. Yeah, it just compressed it all. And it just like, you got to be familiar like anything you talk about. Like you should be closing out those sessions to keep it really tight. And that's what I've seen on like enterprise setups. Like it's very, very tight on very. Yeah.
- [27:26]
B
So we'll build the folder structure. So SEO this, SEO. So I'll build. I have an, I have an SEO audit folder, right? And so that has inside if, like it's a template. So you go in there, it has an agent file that tells the agent what it needs to do. You have a, you know, have a dot ENV file that has the, the API keys that we might connect to. It has a memory file that's general memory. So when I, when I fire that off, I'm in an IDE with the folder structure open. I use Claude code in my ide. My team uses all of them, but I particularly use that one. I'll open a cloud code window. Right? And so what I will. Let's say something happened with that audit the last time I didn't Like, I can use that claude code to edit the instructions of that folder, but I'm not going to work in that, that window. When I go to actually run an audit, I'll open another window. So I do this all the time. I'll have a cloud code window open. I'll be running an audit, and something will happen that I didn't like. Obviously my instructions were off or wrong or it just wasn't there. I'll go back to the window that's coding the agent. I'll change it there because it has all that context. And then I will switch back to the audit windows. I'm not overlapping, I'm not mixing. It's its memory on what it's doing. But the folder system is all getting updated in real time, so the folder system stays tight. So yesterday I built, I was trying to figure out prototyping. So one of the issues we run into is directionally, like, how do we get clients to agree to a web design faster because it takes so much time. You got to go through discovery. Then you have to design and like two to three weeks, they're going to see design how, how cool would it be? They're excited. You know, 48, 72 hours later, you're like, hey, is this kind of the direction you were? Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that. Well, so I was building an agent that helped do that. And so, you know, I was opening multiple windows. So the first agent I built it, the second agent, I tried to run a first pass at it. It messed up. And then I was like, all right, this is where you messed up. So it was editing itself and I opened a third window. Now it has none of the context of the previous two. It only, only has the context of the memory file and what it's written. And so you can keep it clean and you can test. And so these are like little things. If you don't spend time in AI, you don't find them. You like the sales team that I know, they just sit in their chat window and he's like, it just forgot. I'm like, you got to get out of the chat window. It's too memory intensive on, on the like anthropic or open it. They're not going to, they're not going to have that persistent memory the way you can build. Build it yourself. So that's a little bit on memory, how we do it, how I do it.
- [30:09]
A
Yeah, no, I think that that's a good, best practice. I would say also don't keep your inv File open because like it can sometimes copy and pull from that accidentally. Like there's some bad, like for me, I dove into AI right away, but as kind of, I don't know, influence or whatever. I didn't talk about it. Like, I didn't talk about it. I, I was, I, I'm like, I need to understand this stuff before, before I say anything. So I went back and took a lot of classes. I did a lot of education to build like the transistor foundation. Like how does it work? Like what goes into it? Like you got to know a lot about programming. Not, not like you don't need to know how to code, but you need to know how programming works and how engineers think. And so being an engineer like you, you got this like, you know, a head start for a lot of people. But I mean I, I think everybody felt it too. Like when you take a non technical person and you're like, oh, here's how we have Facebook set up and there's like three tiers, like for almost everybody I've talked to, they're like, what? There's three different logins and three different permission sets that do like that, like you said that that transition of thinking this way and then this like wasn't happening. I think even early on now I think it's getting better and better. It's more intuitive. But you like right now like, like you're talking about everybody, like individuals that are like power users building their own ecosystems. Absolutely. And it's like, okay, so you have a couple people that are off to the races and then you're like, okay, other people are getting left behind. How do we get on a system that like everybody can use it? And we were starting to do like custom GPTs or gems or whatever you want to call it to build those kind of little data lakes for clients and stuff like that early on. But then there's like the step change of okay, like let's go fully agentic. Okay, like what do we want to give access to? And all the horror stories, which there's actually a paper I, I really want to read that just came out of like, yeah, basically they, they let the agents run loose. But I mean that's basically what Open Call was, right? Like a bunch of people that don't know how, how these things work or what, how to set up rules. Just sort of like, here's my credit card and like, you know, here, here's access to like my email and like everything and just like, let's see what they do, right? And Then there's cron jobs running in the background and like, crazy things are happening. I. I don't know how much of that was essential, sensationalized, but, but, you know, like, what was it that, that platform where they all talk like, you know what I mean?
- [32:45]
B
Like, yeah, where they, they, yeah, they let their agents go wild and create like a social media. And like, it looked like they were plotting against us. Then it came out that people were like, figured out how to make them post. Like, it was w. It was a wild 72 hours.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So that I, I think, I think a lot of people are really unsure of AI and they don't understand how it works. And I've heard some, like, different things. And, you know, even in the past, we, you know, we had a couple people on our team when it came out that really weren't comfortable with it and we had to part ways. And, you know, I think that what's funny is now some of those people are. I can tell because they got the dashes and their posts right. Like, But I don't know, I think it's a really crazy world right now. And I, I think I would go back to saying the marketers that can understand how to use this and use it early are going to have a huge advantage. And what I'm seeing is I'm getting a lot of requests like you to move outside of marketing, to move into more operations, to move into applied AI in different areas. And I mean, it's kind of like SEO, right? Like, you do it in this industry, you do it in this industry. It's still the basic foundation. And so now you have this kind of AI layer that you understand, and when you look through that lens or those glasses, if you will, you can apply it to almost anything once you understand, like, how it works or what the workflow is. And I mean, one of the data points that was just shocking. And I believe I've shared it in the past, but 71% of businesses are still operating like the industrial era. And an example of that is copying and pasting spreadsheets. And I've had people show me their workflow of their job, and they're going into this database and they're copying this and they're pasting it here, and then they're grabbing that or something with a screenshot and they're sending an email here. And I was like, okay. And I was like, what else are you doing? And I'm like, no, that's my whole job. And I was just like, okay. So then I'm like going back to their. The owner and I'm like, okay, so I know you really like this person. Like, what else can you have them do? Because we can just automate this whole thing.
- [35:03]
B
Yes. I talk about that a lot with friends when they're like, well, I don't even know what to use AI for. I'm like, be curious. Like, that to me is so. So I had a buddy, this was early on. He was the first person to build a company with AI just to see if he. He's a real psycho in a loving way. Like just a real special human. And he used replit. This was early. So it's 26. He built this in. He started building it in late 24. Yeah. And so they. Did he make this really clear? He does. His regular company that he owns does over $30 million a year. He just did this for fun to see if he could automated the whole thing with AI before AI could really do any of this. And he built a little business that did $500,000, almost completely automated. The only thing they couldn't solve for at the time was graphic design. And so they had. They had a graphic designer in doing the work. But other than that, all the cold, email, cold everything. It was a market that didn't have a. There was no leader in it. So he just tripped over it. And it was a great. But he coded up an entire CRM with replit. It was the first time I saw somebody really do business with AI And I was like, okay, we are past the this is cool phase. This can help me write a blog phase. This is. This is like real now. And then, obviously, we all know once, December 5th, with the opus release, it was like that, this is. This is real now. And all. All of us that have been playing with it, who were. Who were using it, but still could see where there were holes. Kind of started seeing those holes get closed. And a friend got a preview. He has a job that has government contracts. He got a preview of. He got a preview of it this week. Yeah. At work.
- [37:01]
A
Yeah, I've heard that. There's a couple people I've talked to that are kind of. Yeah.
- [37:05]
B
And you don't know, like, Anthropic is obviously very good at pr, so you don't really know, like, is it really as great as they say they are? And he said it's pretty incredible. It is. It is essentially for people who don't know, so there's. They call it a RALPH loop. It was essential. Essentially a set of instructions. Yeah.
- [37:26]
A
Yeah, there's a harness. There's a harness out there. Yeah. And everything. Yeah.
- [37:31]
B
This does it on its own. You don't need the RALPH loop anymore. It is, it is. That's how he described it. He's like, I don't have words exactly. But it self heals meaning like it is.
- [37:40]
A
Yeah.
- [37:41]
B
You give it an objective and it knows to kind of keep circulating until it meets it and corrects its code base on its way. So we'll see. I don't think they have the compute capacity to re release it. I don't. You know, I know they're claiming it's a security threat, which it probably is, but also they don't have the compute for it. So we'll see, we'll see what happens with it. I know companies like his are, they're, they're getting it previewed right now.
- [38:07]
A
What, where do you think the future is going? Like where, like with knowing all this, like the, the question that I have started to ask and you know, like people are sensationalizing stuff, but not really because like, I mean some of the questions like that I've asked just to the chatbot, right, like not to clock code or anything like that. Like, like what is going to be the uptake, right? Like who's going to actually really use this and how many people and how quickly is that compression going to happen? Because I've, I've really seen when people jump on it, boom, like they catch up really quick, right? And so I'm going, okay, how many people are going to catch up on this? And then what does the world look like? And then like, okay, the people that don't, what does that world look like? Right? And I'm going like, the future like from a workflow standpoint is constantly changing. And I think marketers have an advantage because it's always been constantly changing. So when I tell my team, like, here's a new, here's the new workflow, like they're not going to like flip out, right? Because at other companies, like you go, we're going to change this. There's the whole like psychology and you know, like community culture that, that like we're not changing sort of thing. But I feel like marketers are like, okay, like this, this is going to change. Like this is the new tactic, whatever. I don't know what, what are you seeing? Like kind of what, what would you predict in your crystal ball if you were to look forward?
- [39:34]
B
So I, I, I am very optimistic as an engineer. I have robots sitting on the other side of the wall because at some point I will go back into robotics because I love it. But if I am looking at. So my, my biggest concern is that like the use and eyes of the world. So I'm older, millennial and we have the 20 years of experience. So AI is just like a superpower to us. But we've put in all of the reps all of already. So this just makes us that much better. So I have a lot of law, I'm in Chicago, so I have a lot of law firm friends. And so one of their concerns are how do we train the, the kids coming right out of law school. We don't. All that like busy work we just gave them to get reps is just done by AI can be done by AI. So where I'm not optimistic is like what do we do to train people to get to that point in their career where they are experts? If AI is capable of doing that dirty rep work cheaper, how do we build? How do we make the experts of the world in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. I don't, I know AI is going to continue to get better. I don't foresee. I don't think we land on the like the complete, you know, utopian side of it. I think it still has, it still has to be aimed at directionally by experts in humans. And, and so it's for me the, the negative or the question I have is how do you get the young people up to where they need to be? Because once like you said, once you get to like our stage, like the people at my company that are experts are flying. It's the people that quite weren't quite experts. They don't know enough to ask the right questions yet. They're the ones struggling with it. They're like, I don't know what to say say. And so we're. I'm trying to. A lot of what I think about is how do I build education for my team around like how do you build a website with AI? So we're testing, we are a WordPress company, but we are testing other platforms because we know the AI stuff is coming and then obviously we see step functions. So maybe it just continues to get better and better. Where it gets. You don't have to be in the idea.
- [41:47]
A
I think people are going to build stuff that you can just off the shelf, plug it in and so that, that those that waterfalls or, or that orchestration's already kind of pre built. There's a. What was it? There was Goji or something like that someone showed me that it's, it's interesting. There, there's a bunch of like little tools out there that are not like core. They're like, certainly like satellites that people are playing with, but people are trying to build some of these things, like off shelf, and you can like plug in and do different things. And it really comes back to like, what is your mental model? And like, how do you look at these things and how do you understand? And like I, we spent a lot of time on prompt engineering. Okay. And even before that, when you talk about the reps, it's like, how articulate can you be, whether it's an SOP or just communication, like, so like communication, how clear can you be? And if, if you're putting in, you know, poorly designed prompts and you're not communicating well, the AI, as smart as it is, it can understand like misspellings and this, that, but it can't understand exactly what you mean. So I think the core skill set is almost like communication, right? And like, even if you're like, okay, good plan, mode, whatever, like, you need to describe exactly what you want and those nuances of where you got the reps in, of what good looks like are so important because if not, you're just like, oh, looks good building. Right? And I've done like, oh, looks good building. I've burned a bunch of tokens. And then I'm like, ah, that's not what I wanted. Right, right. Like, so you got to like, slow down and, and really like understand everything and read every line of code and like, you know what I mean? Like, not every line of code, but like, you need to know what, what, what is happening. And then like, I've started to like, you know, I, I work a little different than you, but like, I'm color coding, like, you know, the, the different sessions and like I have labels and I have like, I build little things on like, where I'm at, like token usage because, you know, like, you don't want it because it every time. So for everybody listening, another pro tip out there is if you don't, if you want to, like, token management is important. And so like also good best practices, if you, if you don't want that information to be compressed, which it will just happen, but it will forget some stuff and you want to kind of orchestrate how you want that to happen a little bit more. Like, know that when you're typing, it looks at everything that you put in that field. So like you said, going to the other fields, making the change and then it's instantaneous. So you can see the change in the next window. That, that does make a lot of sense. But like, I don't think people understand that. It's like you have this huge conversation and then you've changed topic. It has to read everything context wise before it gives you the answer. And it's burning tokens to do that. And so like that's, that's even like with this tool, like a lot of these other tools. That's why we're even going, okay, well we're going to need to build our own open source, which. That's crazy. So like whether Ms. Mythos is like, like who knows. Right, Right. But today, the technology today.
- [45:02]
B
Yeah.
- [45:03]
A
Is mindblowing. Right. And if you can say, okay, I'm going to put that on our own server and I'm going to have, I'm going to, you know, sovereign. My, my, my information is going to be sovereign. It's going to be my information. It's not going to be processed. Like everything you put in chat, gbt by the way, never goes away. Everybody. So, you know, like c. What was, you know, what was Facebook a surveillance tool? Right. I don't know. But like what I would tell you is like once you have like this has been unleashed, like the, like it's like Pandora's box. Like it's out of the box and now like all this kind of, you know, inference and cross training of these models, it's scary. Like actually I'm like legitimately like scared. Like, like there's so much good and then there's like so much bad that could come of all this. And like, I think the only way to be prepared is to like understand it and know and not like put your head in the sand, but it's so powerful and like it's democratized now and everybody has access to it. You just gotta go learn it.
- [46:07]
B
So we're considering, I'm curious if you. This has crossed your mind as an agency owner. We're considering building our own cluster so that we can manipulate model weights and then we'll have our agentic harness that is bigview. Right. But right now we use cloud, we use Gemini, we use Codex. But instead of using those models, we use our open source model that we host on our own computer cluster. That is the model weights are manipulated by us. In this instance it would be for marketing. Uh, and we're considering doing that because I think we will get, we will eventually get to clients that are concerned about their data. I mean we don't I mean, SEO data is, they're not concerned about that, but we'll probably get into a situation where there is client data passing through a website that they're worried about, and we need to tell them or explain to them how we secure that or we keep it safe. And, and so that's one of the things I'm considering this year. But, but the governance. Yeah, the leaps that just keep happening, it's hard to commit to. Like, I'd have to have a person on staff that can continually update model weights of a model to keep it. Like, it's a, it's a question is it's a hard thing to solve for. We're considering it, but I, I think bidview has to be a little bigger to hire the appropriate person to come in and help us manage a system like that.
- [47:33]
A
That. Yeah, I mean, we've looked at like, Kim Key 2.5. And like, we, we've, we've looked at some things. It was, we haven't looked at it for us as much. I have, like, two things to say about what you just shared. It was mainly for clients that want to set up their, their own setup. Right. Like, and that's where a lot of the conversations have come in. Like, okay, you understand this. We need to, we need to inject this layer into our team. How do we do that? But we're in a regulated industry, so, so what do we do about that? There's also, in Texas, there's some laws that are about to go live. Like, there's a lot of things that are going to go live in September. So I think a lot of conversation, like, even nationally, like, so it's about governance, it's about AI policy, what's happening with this data? I think, to your point, like, a lot of clients, like, I'm like, no, you gotta get, Give me your old client list and we'll upload it to Facebook and we'll make like a lookalike audience. Right. And they're really leery of that. Right? They're really leery of that. I go, I understand why you're leery, but I'll tell you, they have all the data and they are. And they're only gonna, they're, they're only gonna hash, match it if they have it. And they have it. They already have it. Like, they, like, so if it, you know, if, like 80% of the emails match, like, you know, okay, you gave them 20%. But like, these big companies have so much data. I, I'm actually more concerned with what, what it, like quantum computing, right? Like, at that point, like, like, you know, you, you don't, you don't have any. So, so, okay, so you just assume like, it's all out there. But, but I do think that like, you know, you could put, you can say, don't train the model. Like, I would encourage everybody to go kind of look at that, look at the terms of service. Put the terms of service in LLM and then come up with your own policy for vendors of what you want them to do with it. Who knows what's happening now what you're saying with Amazon makes perfect sense, you know, and I think that a lot of these companies don't have policies and they're just spinning up all kinds of stuff and then others are like, don't use it at all. And so like, where's that happy medium? And I think that that's where the next conversation is going to be is around governance. I think we hit on a lot of things that I think we'll see over the next six months or year. But to your point, like, yeah, I haven't totally thought about that because, like, the overhead to do that, it hasn't been an issue from, from clients yet.
- [50:08]
B
Right.
- [50:09]
A
And we're trying to be as, you know, like, like responsible with their data as. As possible, you know, And I don't know, I think, I think what are the relationships that Google has with Gemini, right? Like, they already have all that data. Like, okay, Mantis has everything from Facebook and the whole, you know, like, like we'll, we'll use Mantis. Well, here's the interesting thing. They still, on the engineering side, on the silos, we're running like, we were trying to like, run some Mantis ads, and then it was like saying that these ads, like, are not going to work and, or if you like, even use, like, if you use whatever the. I. I'm sure it's Mantis, whatever they're calling it meta AI, like to generate images in Facebook. They're down promoting their own images. Like, they haven't turned on. Like, so I was like, oh, let me use their images because, you know, anything new that you come out with, right? It'll kind of give it an extra boost. So I started using it and I was like, oh, it's like de. Promoting like my post because I'm using their own video image generator. And I was like, okay, but if I, if I use like a chat GPT or whatever, you know, like, it'll do fine. I'm like, yeah, so, so So I mean, I think this stuff is really just moving so fast that like once that curve maybe starts to s curve flatten out, we can kind of see, see what's happening. But man, the world's going to look really, really different at that time. And I mean, I don't know, like, is SEO going to be a thing? What does that transform into? What does marketing look like? Like, I think that good understanding of branding and marketing and those fundamentals, like those reps, like, I think we're going to be in a really good position. But yeah, that's what's happening. Sorry, I'm like going on a spiel here, but that's what I'm hearing from Law Associates, like you said, and I've read some articles that the new, like the people that are just coming out of school, like, there's not really a need for that person to do that because AI can do it. So then you're like, well, do I hire that person? Okay, well they gotta have this knowledge of AI. Oh, I don't see that. But they don't have the knowledge to be here. So there's going to be a threshold of a lot of hires that are coming out of school that like, do you really want to hire that person? Like, no, you really need that five years, like when the recruiters come get you of whatever you learned. And how are those people going to make the jump? You know, I don't know. I think it's real world experience, so. And then everybody's getting fired. So then you got a bunch of people out there doing their own thing. Like, but that's where most of the small business owners are. Like the world, like from a system thinking standpoint, like all these things have like, you know, second line effects and third line effects. Like I don't know what's going to happen, to be honest.
- [53:06]
B
And yeah, I mean one people will have different reactions to me saying this. We live in the United States, so obviously we need infrastructure improvements pressing and pushing. Obviously the technology people are some of our brightest. They have been, they went there because that's where the largest economic gain was. And so if they get squeezed out, people are going to go look for where the other large, those intelligent people, where are the other large economic gains going to be? And in the United States, these are, these are all these infrastructure projects that we don't ever get around to because we don't have the human component capacity to do it. So now that's not to say that though that generation that does get pushed out, they're not going to re job into that, but some of them might, but there might be, you know, over time it resorts itself out into ways that we, it's hard for us to fathom because we're just. I'll be 40 this year, right. So when I grew up, it was like, go be an engineer, go learn how to work on computers. Right. That was the whole mentality. And so that's where we all went. I mean, if I look at all of most of the people that I grew up with, it's engineers, doctors and lawyers. Right. Like those are the, those were the places we went. We're seeing AI actually increase the need for doctors because it's able to do and read results faster. So. Right. The big argument five years ago was our radiology is dead. And then we saw the opposite of that. We saw we need more radiologists because the AIs are able to read more, more of the test faster. And so now people are using radiology for tests that we never thought about. So it's increased that need. Obviously we talked about the problems with the lawyers. And then on the engineering side, if you're thinking like physical engineering, we need, we need so many of those people right now. Maybe not the computer engineers. That seems to be the direction of where the jobs are getting compressed, but it'll be a reshifting of like how that white collar, like that upper class, white collar careers get shifted, I think. You know, I don't foresee AI. Even if it's as great as it is, it's going to take a long time for a person to be comfortable walking into a room with an AI that diagnosed you. Right. Like, yeah, it's going to be a long time before we get to that. And the nurses are obviously understaffed. And I don't, I, I don't care how good your humanoid robot is. I just don't see humans outsourcing that to. Right. So these are, they're, the jobs are there, they're, they're underserved now. It's going to be just a rebalancing of there's only so many people, right. To be able to do these types of. Yeah.
- [55:43]
A
Wow. I think that's wild. I think it's a great place to kind of end. We'll have to have you back on. I think I, we'll see what the comments are from this podcast. We went on script, you know, but I would, I like your point. Like, that makes a lot of sense that a lot of the knowledge worker people are going to gravity gravitate to the, where the biggest gap in the economic gain is and they're going to seep into those roles. Like I've seen that in oil and gas because oil and gas is so typical. Those engineers get laid off and some of them come back next cycle, but a lot of them don't. They go into other things and they add a lot of value in these other things with the cross industry discipline. And so I can, I can absolutely see like a distribution. Right. Happening from all these people that are getting laid off from Facebook. Like where are they going to go? Like there's going to be a distribution across a lot of these companies and then that's going to bring them up to the next level. And it's kind of, the world is flat and kind of get, it gets, you know, it gets layered. Layered around. I love that. I love that. Okay. So Cameron, for, for, you know, I'm glad that you, you teed up kind of what you did and the kind of clients you work with at the beginning of the call, tell anybody that's still listening, like how to get in touch with you, how to like, you know, where, where you kind of put some of these thoughts. You know, any, anything you would like to share and also anything you would like to add to this conversation that you feel like we, we haven't covered, but I'll turn it over to you.
- [57:11]
B
That was a fun, no fun conversation. I think we, yes, we drifted, but it's funny how these conversations with me tend to drift. I think this is my fault. But you can find me@bidviewmarketing.com if you email us that it goes to me and our account manager. I do like to post on LinkedIn, although I am not somebody who writes with AI so I don't post as much as I probably should, but I am actually writing my post when I do post that. And then a couple weeks ago I did start an AI business podcast. We call it the AI Business Lab. You can find it on YouTube right now. And it is not about the, the, it's not about AI. It's about how a business owner should think. A lot of, kind of what we talked about here is like, how do you operationally introduce AI to a business? We do talk a little bit about the nitty gritty details, but I don't think that's what business owners care to know. Like they're, they want if, if AI solves revenue problems, they'll do it. If they, they're not going to do it because it sounds cool. Right. So we try to stick to those topics. Sometimes we drift. But he's, he comes from the aeronautical defense arena, my partner in that. So he has some pretty cool. He's. He's the one who got access to Mythos, so he had some pretty cool. He has a completely different viewpoint point on a lot of things than I do coming from the business side and the marketing side. So, yeah, those are the few places you can find me. And I, I'm, I'm available. So thank you, Matt, for having me on.
- [58:44]
A
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, there's a lot more like def. Like, as I've moved more into AI, a lot more defense contractors and people reaching out. I mean, this is a powerful, powerful tool. Everyone that's listening, you know, if you want to grow your planet with the most powerful, strongest, like awesomest tool in, in. Well, guys, I missed it. I messed up. I messed up. Like, you know what I'm trying to say. But there's like, I spill. We have at the end. But if, if you're looking for that, like, you know, you should really keep listening to this podcast. Go check out what Cameron's doing. Like, I think the world is changing. I just recently again took over EWR Digital, so I, I have full control of that. We're actually spinning out some of the companies that, that we have inside that. We're moving some things around, we're starting some stuff. So if you have any interest in what we're doing or getting involved, we are also raising some money. I mean, AI is absolutely powerful and it's going to be doing a lot of really cool things and we have a lot of long term clients that want to get involved. And so, yeah, if you have any interest, reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn. And until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.