Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Chris Garrett. Why don't you give yourself an introduction and focus on the events or lessons you've learned from your work history that make you a trusted expert in your field. Right now
[00:00:19] Speaker B: it's difficult for me to answer anything that bigs myself or quite trusted expert in my field.
It's kind of a loaded question. But I've.
I'm 51 years old this year so I've. I've got a long work history. I left school when I was 15 and went straight into not work work but I had a lot of work experience in temporary contracts and I think for the first two years I was doing inputting into VT terminals though people of my age will remember green screens and input dumb terminals. But yeah, I've done. I've done it. Networking systems administration when just as the web was starting around 1994 I had to connect up the local community college to the Internet and we started off with 128k bit line for something like 2000 people.
We upgraded to a 2 megabit line later.
Yeah I mean all the local schools, libraries, community centers, teachers and all the students of the campus all using 1.2megabit line. But I had to learn everything like TCPIP all the way through because nobody at the college had ever done any of that and all my colleagues took one step backwards so I was left there on my own.
So yeah, I've always been a nerd. So I had my first computer when I was 8 and started learning to learning Bread Basic. So I'll be a programmer database marketer if you remember that the direct mail I got into the SEO game early 2000s AltaVista and Hot pot and Yahoo and all those things and I hung out with the UK SEO crowd so I'll not mention any names. But yeah, there was all the webmaster world crew and then Nick had a site called Threadwatch and then that's when I left working for marketing agencies and struck out on my own. And since then I've basically been blogging, content marketing and consulting and coaching. I did a stint working for Copyblogger Slash Studio Press for a long time, worked for Web WP engine for quite a while as a marketing director.
Now I've got various things on the go because I'm back in the UK. So we lived in Canada for 10 years and that was amazing but my dad passed away and my mother in law passed away so we're back in England now to look after the remaining parents. And so everything that I was doing over there had to go.
And that just had from zero and the UK government thinks I was living under a bridge for 10 years, so building up my credit history again.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: So let's talk more recently.
Like what's your current, current work look like? Is that an agency? Is it freelance, Is it software? Like what's that look like and what's new that you're implementing?
[00:04:03] Speaker B: What's new that I'm implementing is I'm working with essentially a startup part time, just like innovation. And it's one of those weird words that sounds like bs, but really that's what, that's what we're all doing, just trying things out.
And so I'm doing a lot of marketing/AI automation stuff, workflows like NA10 and using the OpenAI API and stuff like that.
So like this week I've uploaded about 13,000 Pinterest pins and a couple of thousand YouTube videos using APIs.
And then the rest of the time on consulting and coaching through my ChrisG.com site. So like stuff that is familiar to everybody, like content marketing, blogging, you know, traditional SEO stuff. So part of my week is taking up trying to get ahead of all the changes like the Google apocalypse of the last couple of years and the AI apocalypse and the rest of it is like helping people do traditional stuff like product launches and get their digital products together and you know, email marketing and stuff like that.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: What's some of the strategy or tactics that have been kind of put into your quiver, into your baseline that you use?
Things have changed. I mean, you've been here since Altavista. I came in in 2007.
So what worked then and what worked in 2015 and what works in 2025 are all different things. So in the past two years, I know that there are some things that stay the same, but what are some newer processes or frameworks or points of view that you've adapted that seem to lead to organic success when it comes to SEO?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: The interesting thing is the stuff that has always worked still always works.
It's like email marketing has got a lot more challenging in some regards because it's easier to ignore email now and the spam filters are better.
But at the same time, what, what works, works, you know, if, if you sign up for an email newsletter and you actually want to be on that email newsletter and you open it and you get value from it, you go reward them with clicking through and buying stuff. And that is just.
It's been the same for 20 years and how you acquire those might have changed, you know, like your organic SEO to a landing page.
Maybe that's not working out so well, but actually Facebook advertising for a lot of my clients does work out well. You have to know your numbers.
You know, you need to know what conversion rate you need and how much you're willing to pay and who exactly your target audience is.
If you can organically grow your list and then use look alikes and if you can use retargeting, all that stuff that actually works. You know, if you're paying even $5 a lead, even $25 a lead, but you're selling a $2,000 product, you're gonna do that all day long. So I mean that's old fashioned in some ways, but it's still working. And it's, you know, if you go
[00:07:41] Speaker A: back reunification, I, I think, tell me if you think this is wrong because I was talking to a guy who's like super PR on the ad side and he basically is like, hey, ads get attention and it either works or it doesn't. And then on the marketing side, you guys have been super focused on attribution and numbers and trying to quantify and qualify and fit everything into a report.
And that whole thing has gotten 10 times more messy in terms of attribution. And we've spent more time chasing after being able to claim that victory then actually broadening ourselves beyond SEO to look at cross channel to look at how can we, you know, SEO isn't publishing a blog post. SEO is creating content that can then get distributed elsewhere. And you know, social media, whether that's paid ads or organic social, that's, you know, amplification, that's getting eyeballs, that's attention economy.
So I think where we, I think I personally and I see other SEOs during the quote unquote golden age where all you needed to do was optimize for Google kind of narrowed our vision down so specifically that we thought that we could go alone in marketing and instead we need to broaden out and work as connectors to the bigger marketing picture and, and think of SEO as a component, a healthy component, a worthy component, but not the only component of all of the necessary attention gaining processes. Would you agree with that approach?
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think most of us know that we're not just SEOs anymore. I mean, I've never just been an SEO because I didn't think I could use that label accurately A lot of the time.
If you say I'm an SEO, people think technical SEO and they Think knowing all the algorithms and the dates of every Google algo change. And I'm a content marketer.
I started off as a blogger and then when I joined Copyblogger, I was allowed to call myself a content marketer. Um, the thing with, I think people who are purely SEO is the good ones, even if they say they're purely SEO, like digital pr, they're networking their blogging and content marketing, they're doing social media because it's like you say you're a pure SEO, what do you do all week?
I do link building. Well, how do you get links? Well, I wrote three link bait articles and I pushed them around my network and oh yeah, I pitched it to these websites and I went on Reddit and oh, I got 200,000 visitors from Reddit and it's like, you know, Reddit, social media and pitching it around. That's pr. And you wrote the thing that's content.
Oh yeah, I guess so. I don't know if how many people are purely SEO anymore. I, I don't really know if that's a thing.
But then if you only restrict yourself to one game plan, you know, you've got, you've got your book of strategies and you only stick to that, then you're going to miss out on lots and lots of opportunities. It's like you're saying sticking only to Google. Well, for a lot of companies that was profitable to stick to just Google, but now there's AI tools that people are increasingly relying on that look to Bing for their source info. Yeah, so that's not a wise idea, is it?
And then all the people who poo pooed schema and stuff. Well, if the AI tools are reading schema and getting rich data down, then you should be going back to and checking all that's correct.
And all the people who said, oh yeah, I'm a pure SEO. Therefore we have to have these bespoke content management systems. We're not going to use that WordPress rubbish.
Well, are they going to keep on top of everything that changes in this, you know, new world of AI bots and you know, cloud flares, blocking by default, that's kind of thing. So it's like a pure SEO also needs to be DevOps, they need to be content copywriting, you know, audience sentiment analysis.
So you either have to be one generalist or you have to be part of a team or you know, you have to really hyper specialize. And I don't know if the hyper specialization for SEOs is going to be very lucrative. Unless they can charge like lawyer rates.
It's a tricky time.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: You're absolutely right. Like the, the, the niche opportunity to be a high dollar technical SEO consultant is a very rarefied, you know, because you're going to have to be, you know, speaking, you're going to have to be dealing with million URL sites and getting, scaling up into that playground.
That's scary work when you're, you know, one technical SEO decision can cut your traffic in half or multiply it by two.
But I agree with that sentiment of, I've never seen a bigger disaster than when a client wants to build their own platform for their site. I had one where I came in and they're like, oh yeah, we're going to kill the WordPress site and launch our own version.
You know, we'll manage it. And they built it in Angular.
And then it turned out that Google couldn't actually fetch, crawl or index all of the job postings for their nurse site that they were concerned about. And so everything cool that they thought that they could do by doing it with programming, they just blew up all of their progress because they didn't understand that Google couldn't parse that spa. You know, they didn't build it in a responsible way. And I've never seen more pain than when sites try to home grow their, their website, their marketing website solution.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah, you have to really know exactly why you're doing that. I mean, it can work out really well. But the amount of times that I've told clients during their onboarding that the contact forms not even working and it's because it's like end to end, bespoke just for them. And it turns out that it's like the form's going to localhost or something crazy like that. And it's like, well, it works for me because it does. It's on your machine.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of not invented here sentiment as well. It's like to be truly an expert, you have to have written all your tools and developed all your platforms and you know, you just, you don't have to do that. It goes back to how do you know it's working if you can't attribute it? Well, is your bank account growing or is it thinking? You know, it's like if you get into a traditional newspaper and in three weeks you start seeing a spike and then in six weeks you have a definite bump in brand awareness without a link, then that's still a good thing. It's not one of your Google sheet metrics.
But the days where we could just say we'll do six months of link building, we'll acquire this many thousand links and line go up, that's gone.
You can't just pour money into link acquisition and say that's SEO. But at the same time, if all you're doing is log analysis and stuff that we were doing 20 years ago, that ain't going to work either.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm curious, what's your playbook look like? I was talking to Matt Brooks of seot.
You hit it on the drive by of optimizing for Bing. I personally have always loved Bing Webmaster Tools.
But what.
Let's pretend it's 2008. How do you optimize for Bing? Like what's in your playbook, what's slightly different or what's your approach, or what's moving the needle more? Or what are the, you know, fundamental checkboxes that you're looking at?
If you're being more aware that LLMs, there's at least three major LLMs that use the Bing index.
So what's on your plate that you've seen working? I've got a couple that I can bring to the table, but I want to see if our cards match.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd definitely like to hear what's working for you because what I've had to do is make sure that all of my clients are just registered with the Bing Tools just because of the feedback that it gives you is actually nice and the UI is nice. And you know, Google Search Console, I've had to use the API to get good stuff out of it. You know, you have to use Looker, you have to use the API and you have to export to spreadsheets. But I actually liked Bing Tools, but it's always been hit and miss. The stuff that I thought would be for sure work in Bing hasn't always worked out that well. And what mainly works for me is seeing what has worked for the client in the past and just doubling down on that.
The other thing is when they can actually attribute success in Bing to something that they did, it's usually they've got a link from a site that's already doing well in Bing.
And it doesn't seem to be like a, you know, we used to do like Google PR Tools toolbar, you know, the green. The green bar.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with that or like anything that Ahrefs or Semrush tells us. It just seems to be that Bing favors that site. So getting a link from that site to your other site seems to and is that correlations not causation or is it um.
But it doesn't seem to be like it's not old school stuff like keyword stuffing. It's. It doesn't seem to be that they prefer any sort of, you know, freshness. It doesn't seem to be like anything to do with how many words you've got in your headline. It just seems to be that if they're favoring a site already and you get a link from them, it seems to give you a boost.
And I'd love to hear if you think that's bs but that seems to be what works.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: I think I'll jot that down to test further.
There's three things I've got in my tool chest. The first is the IndexNow capability.
If you are not if you are on WordPress and you haven't installed the IndexNow plugin, slap yourself on the forehead because it's stupid easy to configure. You add the plugin, you set up the Bing Webmaster tools and it's immediately going to start pushing your items into the index on Bing, which is half of the battle of getting into LLMs.
There's an app for that, there's a plugin. So that's the dead simple one.
The second one is if you want to show up in chat GPT's localized map search for a location that's a combination of being indexed.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Duh.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: The second one is being in being verified Bing business which is an extra process but it's postcard based. It's pretty painless.
And then local backlinks are the are the the winners. The fourth one which is a little more variable, it's barnacle slash social. So remember that Bing since 2010 has confirmed Dwayne Forrester confirmed this social signals matter for rankings in Bing.
So if you have an article and you have five social media channels TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Pulse, put your one article on blast onto your six channels with links and then look for your secondary tier of do you have a substack? Do you have a subreddit?
Do you have a medium?
Do you have more owned distribution points?
Did you make it into a slide deck that you can put on SlideShare?
Look for Barnacle opportunities and owned distribution points which you should which also do have a small benefit on Google. But I have seen that work.
I partnered with Michael McDougall the right thing Agency to work on A print shop and definitely seeing outcome of those links from those barnacle sites coming in as well as you know oh, we have to have a link from a main domain name. It's not just that game anymore. There's, there's more to the picture of link building than you know, either it's the holy grail of like a organically one editorial post or you're just posting to the same content farm everybody else is. Whereas like calculators and then cement and then like you know, you see those content farms where you're like okay, I'm looking the backlink profile. This site is publishing about everything.
So obviously it's a paid guest post farm PBN network but people just kind of ignore that. We have so many options now for owned by distribution and just because you own it doesn't mean that it's not worth anything. In fact it's an opportunity to build secondary audience. You know whether that's developing your own subreddit which then also has its then resurfaces for those queries as a potential secondary source substack in medium. Those sites also can pull up LinkedIn Pulse has with fluctuations articles that weren't ranking well on people's blogs being posted as LinkedIn Pulse articles from authority sources has shown up in Google. So there's, there's secondary and tertiary benefits to that approach as well.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Do you think it's one of those urban myths or do you think it's true that getting a lot of people to use edge of view your site helps?
[00:23:41] Speaker A: I don't know. I mean if you think about the browser wars and how we were gaslit for a generation of SEOs that no, we don't use behavior signals. Yeah exactly through like clever obfuscation of like no, it's not a ranking factor, it's not a rank. It's not in the algorithm. Well the decks that they were released in the lawsuit show yeah ABC the C is user behavior.
I do not recall if anything's come to light from Bing or associated of their use of user signals or behavior signals.
I wouldn't count it out.
But also trying to find a legit number of people who have what a certain PC laptops to go use the Edge browser legitimately like kind of scarce, scarce pool but maybe yeah I've just
[00:24:45] Speaker B: seen a lot of it's people basing their browser sniffing and the traffic and saying when we did well in Bing we started getting a lot of edge browsers and is it people with Edge are making it rank or is it
[00:25:05] Speaker A: the Ranking, that's an easy answer for me to knock out of the park. It's the default browser for PCs.
So of course if it's a default browser, they're not going to spend it. They're not going to go to Google or even realize that it's new, not Google that they're using.
Like I just helped a friend get onto a webinar. So yeah, let me open up my Google. And it was not Google, it was Edge. Yeah, because she had a HP laptop.
Also Firefox is the default browser
[00:25:40] Speaker B: or
[00:25:41] Speaker A: the default search engine, sorry, Bing is the default search engine for Firefox.
So like both of those.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: Do you think people seeing cause and effect the wrong way around?
[00:25:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. I think that that would be my first approximation.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of a black box Bing and nobody really talks about it.
And a lot of people don't put energy into it because it's not sexy for getting clicks. And you know, if you go to LinkedIn and you talk about Bing versus ranking highly in Google, it seems like most people could gravitate towards the Google threads. But I think being is going to get more important. There's people who, you know, going to be never Googlers. But also like all of the AI companies seems to be talking about having their own browser.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah, they're going to have their own browser. It's going to be like the.
We're going to see a fracturing of the search spectrum again.
And I think the competition couldn't be more welcome. I am seeing potentially rumors right now that there may be some significant HCU reversals from the June algorithm update. Still early days. I've seen Glenn Gabe posted earlier about it.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: We'll see, we'll see.
[00:27:07] Speaker A: But maybe with the announcement of to AI browsers, maybe they'll finally take seriously the crap level of their goog enough results and start, you know, reversing some of the ground that they've taken away from publishers, the ground that they've taken away from quality sites in their recent crusade.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it actually improved the results, but everything they did nuked a lot of publishers without actually improving the search results. And then the AI slathered on top seems to, I mean did you see the one the other day? It was like the AI result said search Google.
They have searched Google and they got the answer from the AI telling them to search Google.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Oh yeah, I did see that. That is Aurorbos, you know, the snake eating its own tail.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: That's my way of saying it.
Yeah, yeah. I'm not convinced that the helpful content update actually provided more helpful content.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: No, but no, it's a misnomer.
That was not what it was intended to do. What it was intended to do. It's done quite well, which is squash certain sites that intended to make money off of ranking content in Google and creating and publishing content that then ranked and then displayed ads they targeted very hard at it with, you know, maybe their targeting got too broad because there were certainly a class of sites that could be labeled as exploitative of like, you know, birthday sites for celebrities. Like, you don't need that many sites. But at the same time, like once you release that beast, like, yeah, you kind of don't realize, oh wait, you've. We've created and perpetuated an ecosystem where we incentivize people to create content because it makes advertising, you know, so like,
[00:29:28] Speaker B: yeah, some of the parasitic stuff that was, I can't say the word gregarious.
You know, it's like business sites that were doing lawn care articles.
That makes sense. But yeah, there were. They created like made for adsense that they were behind. The people who were building sites were organic to make money from AdSense. And then they told everybody, no, you're not supposed to do that anymore.
And then they've made it so that once you go into Google, you never leave.
So what are we supposed to do?
[00:30:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that that is the, the trap of them. Their desire to become the answer engine turns them into a desire to be a destination.
And the more that they are the destination, the less of the original bargain and agreement, the devil's deal that they choose to honor. Because that was, you know, 2005, 2000, even to 2010, people were still arguing over the efficacy of, hey, we're publishers. Why should Google get to display our content for free? And that they slowly took so much ground with, oh, we're going to, you know, do featured snippets and you know, those are pulling, you know, like, so we, we were, we were definitely a boiling frog. We are frog soup at this, at this time.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Any proper journalism now is not being funded by human beings subscriptions and only really the tabloid through to the misinformation can be free.
So we're actually as a society going to lose out.
And that means that only oligarchs can own newspapers.
And even substack is problematic in many ways. So I don't know where the content to feed the AI training is going to come from. It's like if you look to just Google and Gemini.
They create podcasts using virtual voices with hallucinated content.
And then people get them to be transcribed by AI and summarize the transcription.
Where are the people in all of this?
Where does the money come from?
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Yeah, where's the information gain?
The more that that happens. It's all from the same training base.
And you know, at best they are allowing more hallucination because they're trying to allow more creativity. But it, there's a difference between the human expression of creativity and AI because AI just doesn't have a genuine context. So it just makes stuff up.
You know, like we're, it's funny because like humans are creative because they make stuff up, but it's stuff they made up that has value because it ties in, it connects and makes sense at a higher level versus literally just completely fictional, like detached from reality type of stuff. So it's challenging because you have these drunk 6 year old AIs holding court on stuff that they, it doesn't truly understand. It doesn't truly. But it can say anything and say it really well. So it's kind of like
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Ellen must be in like an abusive dad telling Grokoff for being too woke and then he dials it all the way over to the right as it were.
Yeah, so it's even answering as if it is Elon Musk now in the first person.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: So yeah, that's gonna be, that's, that's another huge problem of oligarchs playgrounds with these things as these powerful tools that are disseminated to millions of people are seeing the unhinged output of a beta test. Like there's, there's no test, there's no such thing as a beta test in these LLM updates. You know, they just have to release them live and oh well, that was wrong. And then they, they change it again. It's, it's like unhinged, you know, but
[00:34:04] Speaker B: we're not going to know how far the film is on the scales in the future. It could be more subtle. So it's going to reflect the, the owner's worldview but in more subtle ways. So around election time. That's going to be a nightmare.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: It's going to be interesting in the next cycle with, with the announcement of a new political party and the owner of that political party also owning a massive LLM and social media platform.
That will be interesting to watch.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Well, at least he can't be president right now.
Currently.
Currently.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I'm, I'm. What it's it's definitely a train wreck viewing situation.
I don't know if it can get much worse hopefully.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Well, it can get worse because there's a whole generation of kids that are going to schools that are actually encouraging students to use LLMs now of course get worse.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: I, I'm.
Yes, it can and is.
I try not to be pessimistic about these things but sometimes it just comes out.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: Yeah, well, all we can do is fight it with not slop but you know, while the slop's being rewarded it's, it's tricky not to.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: I've been playing around with, you know, understanding and leveraging, you know, conversations like these, you know, retrofitting my own site SEO arcade.com from being a keyword research tool to you know, creating my own white label podcasts as a means a backbone like yes, use LLMs but based off of real conversations between two subject matter experts. That way you have information gain in your content and it's not just an LLM citing a training database of information.
That way you're presenting a new opinion. You're, you're also creating a new ecosystem of links. So I, I think that's, I, I see more and more value in the human to human conversation range. And as much as AI would love to step in and, and you know, have that chatbot to chatbot conversation be of value, it's just not.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's the human creativity is making connections where you wouldn't think a connection could be made.
It's like if you talk to a copywriter that's only ever used in an LLM they're going to think it's all about hooks and headline structures and using yellow highlighter. But a human that read scientific advertising 30 years ago and reads like Seth Goddin book this year is going to make a connection and it's going to say something that even the best AI tool isn't going to be able to find a connection between because it's a human brain making random firing connections, possibly over caffeinated.
So I think, yeah, I think human conversations and even though we're still in a pandemic and I probably shouldn't have said that because it's a key word that'll get you demonetized.
I think face to face and in person is going to become even more valuable like live experiences where you know that it's not a hologram, you know, it's not a virtual character, you know, it's not AI generated is going to become more valuable and like tangible Stuff that, you know, it's imperfect but human was involved in the making of it. I think it's become going to be more valuable.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: I think it reminds me of. One of my favorite science fiction series is Dune. And I just read all five books from the series.
And the theme, it underlies, everything about the future was this concept of the Butlerian Jihad, of the fight against an AI system where you are no longer. Because the universe was almost destroyed and humans were almost destroyed by AI they have a prohibition from making machines that emulate the way the human mind works.
And I think that at some point in our society we are going to face a reckoning and have to make that. I hope that it's more on the capitalistic side. I hope that it's more on the expression of these things have more value.
So we, you know, the companies seeing profit see AI not as a substitute but as an inferior product. And we're able to produce, continue to produce human content and, and as a society add more value to it. But at some point it, it may become kind of a cultural construct, an artificial thing of. Yes, we could choose to have an, a truly generative AI overlord situation, but we're not going to do that. We're going to choose as a society to face away from that destruction. Yeah, I would love to see us join together and overthrow that concept. But there are those who are in the opposite, you know, transhumanist side of trying to rush all AI production. And it's like you, you stood on the shoulders of geniuses and spent so much time thinking if you could, you never stopped to think if you should.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: I mean, Science Fiction 100 Years has told us to.
I mean, I think there's stories going back to ancient times about people creating beings that then rebelled against the masters. But you know, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, the Matrix, it all, all tells us to don't be overly dependent on AI but at the same time, we've got people in Silicon Valley who actually believe we should, that that is a, an AI overlord inevitably coming. And so you should be nice to AI now because it'll remember the ones that were nice to it. So you should be nice to it
[00:40:49] Speaker A: and I should own it. It's. It's kind of coming, so I'm going to make it is.
[00:40:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: So to kind of step back from the dystopian soapbox for a moment and pull things to a close here you're working with LLMs yourself creating tools.
What are some of the things that as far as ethical application because it's one hand in the other. Right. Like I'm using. I'm going to use AI after this conversation to get the transcript to make a recap of it.
So I'm not opposed to the use of these tools in order to benefit or speed the creation of thoughtful content.
So what are some of the coolest processes or guidebooks or ideas or things you, you've been able to automate or save time on that have helped you make a bigger impact with your marketing that hasn't brought about the end of the world?
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I would like these AI companies to be more ecologically sound.
Don't like how much water they're using and how much energy they take. And mentioning no names. There are certain companies that actually lobbied to have the environmental rules in places change so that they're allowed to do whatever they want.
That said, I don't believe it's that binary. There's a lot of people say it's unethical to use AI at all. Well, first of all, they're not actually AI, so, you know, it's not artificial intelligence.
Using crammarly is an unethical to fix your writing.
You know, if I give one of these tools a list of unorganized text and say, can you make it into a table? That's not unethical. And I don't think that's doing anybody out of a creative job.
That said, I was absolutely amazed by the. I can't remember the name of the tool, the, the music creation tool that you just say what you want and out comes pretty good music. That is.
Yeah, I mean, I was startled by that. And I really feel sad for proper trained, you know, obsessed musicians that that is going to be used in favor of actual musicians.
And when I was a teenager, right up until my late teens, I still wanted to be an illustrator. I even sent some samples off to a Hallmark card company. And at the time I thought it was a rejection, but it was really encouraging. When I looked back at the letter, it got back and so sliding door situation. In a parallel universe, I would be horrified by AI, generative AI.
But yeah, for I'm using it in many ways, like Instead of watching YouTube videos, reaction videos, or news YouTube, I'll get to summarize and I'll see if it's worth watching. But then I will watch.
I just don't watch the ones that are a waste of time and clickbait.
So, yeah, repurposing my own material, I've got a rag database that really impressed me that are trained on my own transcripts and my own writing.
If I ask it a question, it gives me an accurate answer back. You know about my own stuff. So that's not a plagiarism bot. That's my own stuff that I'll repurpose in future for things like I could use it for LinkedIn posts. It's still my material and I'll still edit it. It'll still be my voice in the end. Yeah, I'll probably not have as many EM dashes, but yeah, I think there's a lot of ways that you can use AI to save time.
I'm really cautioning people against this idea of deploying live Vibe code because I've been saying for a while AI tools are really helpful in domains that you're well versed in.
But don't try to use it in a domain that you don't know very well because you don't spot the inaccuracies and the hallucinations. I'm a programmer so I can, I can see when it's going off the rails.
But people who are publishing like vibe coded WordPress plugins are opening up their site for a hack or downtime or corruption or I'm really nervous about Vibe. People just Vibe code coding and publishing live and even worse like their, their automation agents being given full like root access to things that I think using it for auto complete is brilliant and sometimes it's good even a whole module but it's a lot better a function that you tell it I want this input and that output and you test it and you actually have some expertise. You know, it's like I asked Chat GPT like early on for it to give me a Commodore 64 basic program and it hallucinated even that. Commodore 64 basic hasn't changed since the 1980s.
How could it hallucinate an answer for that?
[00:46:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like even a mid journey prompt. I'm wary because I was working with a company called Metaflex Glove and I asked it for visual showing hand pain and I ran it by because we have got an on staff guy who's like a doctor. I'm like I'm nervous about using anything that actually shows bones or cartilage or ligament.
He said, well you should be because those lines of showing pain actually it's on the wrong side of the hand because you don't have those pain receptors on the back, they're on the front. So if there was pain from arthritis it'd be on the front tendons. And I was like, oh.
And he's like, also there's an extra thumb bone.
I knew I was wary of it. I'm like, I don't know why. I was always wary of machine generated and anatomical images of ever using them
[00:47:43] Speaker B: because, well, talk about anatomical. People are going to get into a lot of trouble with the mixture of like adult anatomical plus like Disney IP and you know, really litigious companies that apparently the new Croc was jailbroken day one so they can get all kinds of stuff. There's going to be a lot of court cases I think and that could go so many, so many bad ways.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that's going to be really interesting when the pockets that are making the most off of ip, you know, starts making headway against a machine generated image technology because what they've gotten away with so far is astonishing. Like you go to mid journey and you can pretty much just type in most IP that you know about and it'll make a version of it that is almost indistinguishable from products. So that is one thing to keep an eye on but also keeping an eye on time.
Give a shout out to your company where people can find find you. Is there a particular social platform you hang out on Most?
[00:49:04] Speaker B: Yeah, Chris G dot com.
There's still a lot of Chris G's out there that are mad that I got that dot com back in the day.
And yeah, YouTube at Chris Garrett. That's what I've just started.
It's a 12 year old channel that I used to use just to share stuff with family, like videos of the pets and my daughter. But I've repurposed it to be digital marketing and digital product creation and stuff. So that's my new channel. So chrisg.com is the main place though.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Love it. Thanks so much for your time.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me.
