Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Have you ever tried marketing on Reddit? It's super hard, but my guest today has nailed it. They've cracked the code for how to market effectively your brand, your SaaS on Reddit. And spoiler alert, since this episode was recorded, I've hired Paul to run some Reddit marketing for my business. So today I'm joined by Paul Zhu. I talking all about Reddit marketing, how he got started in Reddit and Reddit as a business, who he serves, what his ideal customers are and the kinds of results that they get, which are frankly amazing. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Paul where he talks about kind of Reddit from first principles, talks about AI a little bit, but also talks about just like, hey, how do you get your brand to stand out online in this era when a lot of channels that we all as founders really embraced are harder than ever and where Reddit may fit into your growth strategy. Let's dive into the conversation with Paul.
So we had an episode a few episodes ago talking about Reddit and the guest, Lars Lofgren said like, if I didn't have a soul, I would build up a, like a black hat Reddit marketing service and make a shit ton of money.
Like, are you soulless? Maybe? Is that, is that the situation here?
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Maybe. Yeah, that's, that could be it.
Or I have many souls. I'm pretending.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Like the, the Horcrux might be. No, so, so okay, let's, let's frame this. So you, your title here in, in Riverside is Reddit Marketer. I think for a lot of people that's like an oxymoron, right? Because like the, the ethos of Reddit is like, it's pure, it's community driven.
We had Devesh on from Grow and Convert and he was talking about like his whole thing. He's like, oh, right. It's like impossible to market, to like give us the pitch like from like when you're on a sales call and I'm, I'm there, you know, I run cast us. We're like a perfect fit customer for you probably.
So sell me and the thousand people listening on why we should consider Reddit marketing and how it works.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. So for your listeners, right, Maybe a lot of SaaS companies, I know for a fact that your customers, your users live on Reddit, right? Maybe the way that you can confirm this is look at your competitors. Are they being actively mentioned on Reddit? Are people complaining about the problems that your product or service solves? Reddit is the way it's nowadays, it's basically the only place on the Internet where people can actually be a little bit mean or a little bit upfront about their feedback.
If a product drops the ball, people will be unhinged about their thoughts. Right. Because it's pseudo anonymous. So, like, at the end of the day, people trust Reddit. People use Reddit as a way to get unhinged feedback and product reviews.
So if you're selling a product or service and you know for a fact your users trust Reddit, that's a perfect reason for you to be on Reddit and get your name out there.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the, the challenge to that a lot of times has been like, okay, Paul, I get it. Right. But, like, freaking, what about the, the moderators and the bots and, like, I'm going to get canceled and all this kind of shit? Like, tell me about that.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So the core with Reddit is content and value first, marketing and sales second.
So always go on to Reddit with the intention of giving back value. So give authentic reviews and comparisons between your product and your competitor's product. Right.
It's also a good way for you to help yourself figure out where you stand out.
Like, I mean, if your product is exactly the same as, like, 20 other products on the Internet, you're going to have a tough time marketing it regardless of what platform you're on. Right, Right.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Reddit or not. Exactly. So it's a really good exercise for yourself to get onto Reddit. Look at what people are complaining about, look at your competitors, look what people are saying good things and bad things about your competitors, and figure out messaging how you can stand out in all of this. All of this.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
And, like, without giving away your, like, secret sauce, like, generally, how do you guys work? Or if a founder's like, well, I just can't afford Paul. Or I don't even know, like, what your model is. But, like, I want to do it myself.
How can one think about, like, Reddit marketing?
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: And I'll give, like, my take on it, probably, and then you can tell me how I'm wrong. Like, one path is maybe what we do at Castos, which is like, I have an account that's just dedicated for Castos. I go on and I represent us openly, like, hey, Craig from Castos here.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Our support team does the same.
Like, hey, Jimmy from Castos, you might want to think about this, just answering questions and being helpful. We view it as our community. You know, we, we've had circle We've had discord, all this shit, and it's never worked. And now we're just like, cool. Reddit is our community. We don't have control over it in like, you know, in the podcasting world, it's like our podcasting is our, is the main subreddit where our community hangs out.
And then the other thing is we have our own subreddit, which really is just like an announcement board for us posting shit about our product.
But like, so, so, but it's really not. Like, that's not moving the needle. So like, that's the, that's the 101 kind of vanilla version, I think. Like, what's the, what's the super hyped up, like, trick, tricked out version of that?
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Okay, so like, just to address saying what you guys are doing, right? That's absolutely the right way of doing it. And the problem, but the immediate next problem is just the scale of it. Starting a community is super hard, regardless if you're doing a discord, Slack or Reddit. Right. It's just that kind of organic. How do you.
It's like a chicken egg problem, right? How do you start conversation? How do you get people into the door when you don't have anyone on there talking about it? So, like, just backtrack a little bit.
The way that Reddit started itself is literally like five of its founders talking to each other using different accounts. That's like built into the core story lore of Reddit is that it's okay to have multiple accounts on Reddit, Reddit specifically in their terms of service do not prevent you having multiple accounts talking about different things. Right? Like, we're all complicated animals.
You could have your main account just talking about professional stuff, maybe a little bit about your business, and you have an offshoot niche account talking about films or golf or whatever. The niche things that you're into. So Reddit doesn't prevent you from doing that. The only thing that it doesn't like is when you cheat the system and upload your own content, try to game this scoring system.
So like, for founders, it's okay to have multiple accounts.
The gray area, let's say is you start a couple accounts asking specific target question inside of your subreddit or inside of someone else's subreddit that your service or product can potentially contribute value towards.
So on Reddit, the specific term is called astroturfing, where it's essentially you're asking a leading question you know the answers to, and you're obviously like the front runner. If you answer the question the way that you do. So that's kind of like how you get ahead on.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: And this is like using multiple accounts. Right? So one account to pose the question, the other one would come in, answer it, and then other questions would upload or support that.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So like there's obviously, there's obviously ways to do that properly and at scale, but essentially that's the core of our service is we're trying not to just completely lie about what the capability of our customers. We're not going to completely exaggerate the solution. We're just helping our customers get their messaging out there. Right. If, if we see an opportunity where their solution really can solve the problem, we'll be there.
And going back to your very first point, there's like a weird thing where if you're an unknown brand, if you're a startup just starting out, nobody really knows you, nobody really trusts you, even if you have a lot of value to give.
Like the scale of, of you answering every single question is not there yet.
So a lot of the struggle for early stage startup is like, yes, you can say, hey, I'm Craig or Paul from XYZ Co.
But people's initial reaction to it is they don't trust you and you're probably trying to sell them something instead of organically engaging with the community.
So that's why anonymous accounts kind of helping that situation where it's like immediately you're not trying to sell them something and people can focus on your content first.
The irony here is once you're big enough, let's say you're OpenAI or next JS or Vercel, then you can start saying, hey, I'm the CEO of OpenAI at that point your community engaging, even though that the fact that you're showing up here, I'm sure you're doing marketing for your products.
So there's this weird duality on Reddit where if you're unknown, you try to stay anonymous, just give value anonymously. And once people know you or once your brand name is being mentioned lots of times inside of subreddit, then you coming in as yourself. CEO, Co Founder.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Yeah, Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, interesting.
You know, Castos is not an unknown name in the podcasting space. Not unknown, not super well known. You know, if I get to draw an analogy, it would be like in the CRM space there's this one called Attio, which is like a pretty new and up and coming one. It's like notion esque.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: I would get like, we're, you know, there's fucking HubSpot and Salesforce and all this. And like, you know, yeah, we are, we are a tenth the size of the biggest competitor.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Okay, gotcha.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: It's just podcasting is not a huge space. If you take out like Spotify, you know, like the biggest, the biggest company in our space probably does $20 million a year.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, that's actually.
So you're in, honestly the sweet spot, right? You're like straddling the fence where you could do both. As in, you just look at the. His post history. Your goal really is every single week you're trying to get at least one or two posts ranked on the relevant subreddits, where your names are being mentioned either directly inside of the post or the comment section. Then the next step is for you under your own account, pseudo, anonymously engaging the community inside of the comments.
So, like, to get the illusion of people are actively talking about your brand and you're also there to like, engage the community when that happens. That's the, that's the sweet spot.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Cool. So I know, like, I know my audience pretty well because, like, I am my audience, which is really cool. I know what they're all saying right now is like, cool, what, like, what am I going to get, Paul? Like, we work together. You don't have to tell much, tell me how much you guys charge. But like, we work together. What's Castos going to. What's the result going to look like? In what time?
[00:12:09] Speaker A: Time frame? Yeah. Nice. So immediately we will start seeding conversations. Right? Our goal is to get conversations started on Reddit in a way that you, your name will be organically mentioned. That's the best case scenario. So I'll get to know your product, I'll get to know your competitors product, learn all the ins and outs and try to start conversations where people like, hey, have you tried, you know, estos?
And that's where either managed or yourself can come in and be like, hey, thanks for mentioning our name. I'm the CEO of this product that you just mentioned. DM me if you're interested to learn more.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
Okay, cool. And in terms of like, results, I'm sure it's all over the place, but like, I'm sure in a sales conversation you're like setting expectation with folks like, hey, know, this is like SEO. Nothing is going to happen for six months and then you'll, you'll start seeing leads trickle in like, what, what is that? What is that conversation like yeah, so.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: The conversation goes exactly like you said, multiple ways. Right. So people are using this service predominantly right now as like a counterbalance to their existing SEO efforts. So I'm sure, like all of your audience has heard of AI optimization. Reddit right now is kind of this weird front way of indirectly getting your content into LLMs. So LLMs are indexing pretty much all of Reddit's content, Google and OpenAI specifically. So your brand being mentioned in different context on Reddit +3to6month means that your brand will get baked into LLMs. So like we're helping, helping all of our clients track, monitor and essentially measure all of the efforts, but directly for leads. It's just the way that Reddit works is a little bit weird. Right? People see your brand name being mentioned, they would then go on to Google, research your brand and then click through and purchase that way. So our goal here is just like immediately after working with you, we'll get a couple posts Viral, let's say 100k plus views from that. We will try to see if there's traffic to your site gets lifted or your conversion or signups gets lifted.
It's not a hard science, right? We're not tracking links, we're not tracking referrals, but 100,000 views on a post. Twitter branding mesh. And that's got to work.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Something that's not nothing. You know, I think that's like, it's kind of in line with the ethos that I have these days about attribution and tracking, which is like, right. It's fucking hard. Like, we work with a really great marketer, his name's Mark Thomas, like, like they just don't get any better.
And I asked him about this, like, hey man, like, you're doing a bunch of shit. Like, how do you know what's working? He's like, well, I kind of look at trial starts and if that's going up, then I don't really care.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: I was like, yeah, like, I get that. I get that. Like, I totally, I totally grok that because it's so multivariate. Even if, even if Reddit is the only thing you're doing, or only if bottom of the funnel, email marketing is the only thing you're doing, there's a bunch of other shit that's already there in a brand that has unexpected interactions with that that I think it's just impossible to manage.
And I think that's where so many people just get hung up on all this stuff.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah. So, I mean, this is a wider topic for marketing in general. Right.
We're slowly moving towards the attention economy or we're already there where all that matters is just how many people are actively seeing or engaging with your brand.
If that's the case, then people like Cluli, where they get millions of views on their content and you hear about them, you know about them, and then you go onto their webpage and they are like one of hundreds of AI meeting note takers.
So I feel like that's kind of the way that marketing is slowly moving towards. Just generate lots of, lots of impressions at the top and then just let people organically figure out what you are when they land on your landing page. And the way that you measure it is just if signups are going up, then you're doing something right.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: You know, we spent a lot of time and I think a lot of folks listening to this spent a lot of time in channels that have a lot of direct attribution and data outbound SEO, pay per click, all just like you do a thing, it has a result and that result, you know. And like I do agree, I think we're getting out of that into this.
Especially when you look at like just LLM or you know, AI SEO or whatever. Yeah, it's like, gosh, the pat. I think, I think what it is is the pattern of users, just like you said, is multi platform now.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's changing.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: There's like this, there's a zero click audience. Like you watch my YouTube channel and then you go to Reddit and look at stuff and then you go to my website directly. Yeah, like how the are we supposed to like measure all that? All that stuff's important but like optimizing for any of it I think is kind of silly because like it's just, it's not the point and that's just not how people operate anymore.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Correct. I 100% agree with you there. So like I'm super biased because I'm a Redditor and for the last year or so, last year and a half, I started noticing myself adding Reddit to the search queries. Right. Like if I'm buying anything, I'm adding Reddit to it. And even though that I know the brand already and most likely I'm going to buy it, I'm still going on Reddit just to try to dig up some dirt about the brand or like to know what I'm getting myself into.
So like you said, people are now doing multiple touches. They're watching YouTube videos, researching on Reddit, waiting until a sale goes on. Right.
That they're getting targeted during like a sales event with like meta ads. So like, I tell all of my customers this is like, it's not that Reddit is replacing all of these strategies, it's just becoming a bigger part of your overall marketing strategy.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I don't think it, like I saw a post the other day is like a Reddit positioning itself to be the search, like the search engine of the Internet or something. I was like, that is, that is so dumb because like, I mean, we are the 0.1% I think of people who use Reddit as like an input to create the content that would then be the search engine. And so I think, I think to believe that this is representative of the world at large. Like, no one in my house has ever even like been on Reddit, I don't think much less like, you know, contributed.
And so I just think that like, yeah, it's a thing, it's a slice, it's an input into LLMs for sure.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: It's a place where people go to get like confirmation of like what they're seeing elsewhere probably.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: But like, I can imagine a fairly common thing would be like, you see me on social or YouTube, you go to Reddit to check out my brand and then like you say you go to Google to search it. To search for it.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: So I bet that's a pretty common like customer path.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: That's absolutely a very common customer path. So I'll challenge your notion of like, that's not how the world is beginning to work based on like just the one anecdote. So the reason why I got into this whole thing with Reddit marketing is because my wife, I noticed my wife started using Reddit as like a core decision making source for all of her purchasing.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: So like, about this whole thing, like, kicked off my entire research into this is because, like, you know, she was researching some makeup or products about six months ago and I noticed her, she was reading Reddit threads like, you know, she's not a Redditor. She's already completely anonymously. She doesn't have a Reddit account, never be on Reddit, but she's now going on to Reddit for her product information because Google was driving a lot of the searches that she was doing onto Reddit.
And the second thing is like, there's a lot of YouTube content out there, especially around like storytelling, predominantly content that source all of their content directly from Reddit. It's just a matter of fact where B2B content comes from Reddit as well.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: So interesting when you say there's YouTube, like storytelling content that comes from Reddit, like, what do you mean?
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So for example, again, I'll use my wife as an example. She listens to this girl on YouTube that talks about like cold cases, goes into a whole entire story, like across like three or four episodes. She just deep dives into cases, criminal cases, and like the outcomes, the, the, the court cases.
All of her content and like all of her commentaries.
If you go onto Reddit, it's like one for one almost. So the way that she is like, oh, the commute or the, the people are saying this about this.
And if you like take her word for word and just searches on Reddit, you'll find the exact comment.
Someone said this like four months ago.
Okay.
Right. So if this is happening, we know.
So like, the way that I'm thinking about this is like, I don't know how, but eventually if you post things on Reddit, the distribution could be, you know, evergreen podcasts will pick it up. YouTube will pick it up. Right. Even pop culture will pick it up.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Okay.
It's kind of like content seeding.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: It's content seeding. Exactly. Yeah.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
I want to broaden this out to AI a little bit and we may get into our working session here. I don't know if we'll have enough time.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: One fear I think that a lot of folks have is, you know, this concept of like, AI eating itself, Right. Like, AI is only kind of as good as like the inputs and the models that it's trained on.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: If, like, what you're saying I kind of see, right, is like these creatives, and I'm air quoting for people just on the audio version of this, are getting their content from Reddit and just repurposing it into a podcast format.
Does that worry you or are you like, whatever, there's enough content like this will all kind of like come out and be fine. Like, do you worry about AI eating itself and the, the amount of knowledge in the world kind of stagnating?
[00:23:34] Speaker A: I, I do. So I think all of the AI companies are worried about. So specifically, are you just talking about AI training itself on like, AI generated content?
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Is that the interesting. So I guess that's part of it. And then I guess the other part is like, are we as, I don't want to use the term content creators in like, the influencer world, but just like people who have thoughts, are we just not going to have original thoughts anymore? Because it's so easy to just take, I mean, sure, as like my YouTube strategy for a while. I'm on this like 100 days of AI kick right now, right? Like doing an AI video every day for 100 days. But before, my YouTube strategy was basically pull another YouTube video, stick it into Claude and have it like spin it. And I would just read that.
That's dumb, right? But it worked okay if, if the world basically does that.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: What do you think?
[00:24:34] Speaker A: So, like, I.
So I do. I have, I actually have lots of opinion on this. I think this has always been a problem throughout human history. So like, social media is a echo chamber in a way where algorithm decides what you get to see or what you don't. Right. So if an algorithm decides that your piece of content or that piece of content or that templated piece of content is worthwhile to show to millions of people, then like, who's to say, who's to say that that's not true or that's not correct?
On Reddit, it has the same problem, right?
The piece of content, the visibility of the piece of content isn't technically driven by a core algorithm. It's driven by people uploading and downvoting. But again, you can quickly see that it's an echo chamber as well on Reddit. So I feel like the fact that echo chamber exists both in algorithms, either LLM algorithms or social medias or people algorithms, where people just like to see content that they resonate with, it's a problem regardless. So if you get to a certain scale on Reddit, where you're trying to go viral, at the end of the day, you're kind of just giving people what they want to see.
Yeah.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: And I listened to this guy, his name's Callaway. I don't know if it's a first name or whatever, it's like Madonna or Pele or whatever, but man, I'm Dan hating myself. Both those guys are from the 80s.
Who's the new, like Rihanna maybe, or Beyonce. Anyways, his name is Callaway. He's like a social media guy, like how to do social media. Well, really smart, I think, but. But his take and kind of expanding this into like AI generated is it's just gonna. Everything is gonna become pay to play soon, right? Because AI will, will just be able to create so much content with AI and like two totally autonomous AI content bots probably that like, look at the algorithm, make more content, tweak their approach, all this kind of stuff to where the platforms are just gonna be like, fuck, I'M serving the AI stuff to this guy because Craig likes it and he watches the glass cutting fruit shit on YouTube. Like, I love it and my kids do, too. Like, why would they serve anything else to me if that's what I watch?
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: And his hypothesis is like, AI will be good enough, but have so much potential to create content that, like, the attention breadth will be such that that's just what wins. And then if you, as Paul, want your shit to be in front of people, you're gonna have to pay.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: I see. So, like, at the top, everybody will just be watching personalized AI content, and then. Yeah, if you want to get your message across, then you have to pay to. Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah. So, like. Yeah, but the weird thing is this, right?
The paradox of human experience is that our tastes change all the time, arbitrarily.
Okay? So here's my honest thought.
If AI can instantly personalize content based on our moods and our choice, day to day, second to second. Yeah. Then none of this matters. It's like, imagine you have AI that knows exactly what you're thinking about almost before you're thinking about it. But, yeah, nothing in the world ever matters.
It can cater to every single one of our desires and needs and predict what we need. But I'm benchmarking. I'm basically betting on that that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. Potentially not within our lifetime even, because that's going to take so much energy to get to that point. And the technology has to be so personalized and efficient that that's probably not going to happen anytime. So then now the marketer's job is like, how do we predict how people's tastes change?
Yeah, right.
That's never going to end.
People's tastes change arbitrarily. And algorithm is always going to lag behind that. And it's our job as marketers to predict where that trend is going.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
I want to ask about where you think we'll be at the end of next year. So we're recording this the first week of August 2025, the end of next year. I hear a lot of very smart people, like this guy Callaway and people who I think are very smart, being like, we got kind of six to 12 months before really changes.
And I don't even know what that means, but, but, but folks say that a lot. And I kind of get this Spidey sense of, like.
I mean, I. I was in middle school when the Internet, like, when AOL first came out, like, that's how old I am.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: And like I didn't see the change happening then because I was 12 or whatever.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: But, but like I'm 45 now and I like, I see I'm old and aware enough to see that this is a change. Like the world will not be the same in a year.
Which is I, I've gone from scared to cool and excited about that because like the fact.
Yeah. Well, and I'm, I'm participating in it. Right. Like I am, I am all in on AI. I spend most of my days learning and trying to, trying to utilize AI for, for my business and for myself.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: So I've gone from scared to excited.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: I guess first of all, like, where are you in that spectrum?
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: And where do you think that we're going?
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. So like I'm, I have it. So like I'm technical backgrounded.
So.
So in the news right now, GPT5 is about to drop. Right.
And if you look at the way that they're kind of teasing the announcement, building up to it. Sam Alma is tweeting mysterious things. GPT account itself is also like, you know, doing a bunch of marketing around it.
The way that I kind of look at it is like if GPT5 is such like a 100x improvement than the previous model, they wouldn't need all of this marketing.
The product was. Speaks for itself. Right. They would just casually release it, let people play around with it. It's like remember back like GPT 2.5 switched to 3.5.
People just woke up one day. 3.5 was a thing.
They didn't even announce 3.5 was releasing.
Did you even know that 2.5 was a thing? Like you went from, like, you went from I have never heard of GPT 2.5 to like GPT 3.5 is like this new thing that everybody knows now.
But now the fact that they're kind of like teasing GPT4, GPT5, I think they're, I think the six month improvement isn't as groundbreaking as before.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: A resource for, for maybe you and everybody else is like there's this website, AI-2027.com have you seen this? It's like a handful of like the big kind of AI guys put this together. It's like a prediction of what AI will look like in a couple of years.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: It's not super doom and gloomy, but it's like eye opening.
I want to ask a specific question. What is one underrated or kind of underdog AI player Because everybody's like, oh, fucking Claude and GPT and Gemini and stuff like that. What's one thing that you are like? Oh, this is not quite there yet or people don't know about it, but I like it.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: So I think Google is way underrated.
They're really bad at marketing their own product. I know that they just released a open world AI model.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I saw that yesterday.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: That's blowing my mind.
The fact that they didn't do any kind of marketing push on it is crazy to me.
It briefly got mentioned across my feed on X and I haven't seen anything since. So I'm just waiting to play around with that.
The company that I'm scratching my head around is Apple.
They seem to not have a AI strategy like period.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: But if the future is personalization and pocket AI models in your pocket and open source that like Meta just released, Apple is the only company, probably one of the only companies that can actually make that happen. Right. Like they have a billion rifles on the planet but maybe they're trying to be the, the, the second mover advantage where they just see all the mistake that people are making and then just come out with a inferior, with a superior product.
We don't know.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You know, I'll say who I don't think the winner is going to be is anthropic.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Oh 100%.
[00:34:00] Speaker B: I just don't like they. So in my sense, I agree with you on Google, I think it's all about context.
Ironically Google has the context of all the shit we all do in Gmail and Docs and all this kind of stuff. Right. It has the work context and it has Google and YouTube.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: That's a pretty solid data source and they don't have to pay for it.
ChatGPT and OpenAI to me have the distribution.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: It's the first thing people like. When people talk about AI, it's ChatGPT.
And so I think that they will own the consumer experience. I think they'll be the place where people go to talk like a therapist and all this kind of stuff. They probably also will own a lot of the standards like mcp. Like I don't know if they developed MCP or whatever, but I think they'll be all if like at the head of the table when people are deciding that kind of. Yeah, because they'll probably have the most users.
I think Meta obviously will have the like the social experience with and like that maybe like real life with like the Ray Ban, the glasses and Stuff like that.
And I think Claude and Anthropic will just get stuck in developer world and that'll be a really solid business but. But it won't be amazing. I actually think, and I agree, like in terms of personalization, Apple, you know, could really win if they, you know, have an on phone model where security is just not an issue.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: I think, I think Apple could buy Anthropic though.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Interesting. I, I would love to see that. Some kind of merger.
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Right. Just to kickstart them off. I, yeah, I, I don't know. Like it's these open source models because chat GPT or OpenAI just came out with the open source model as well yesterday.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: Two days ago.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Yeah, the tweet from Sam Alma was like, this could run on your phone.
But that's not true. You can't run this on your phone. You can barely run it on an M1 laptop. Like if you have M4, it's pretty good.
So we're not there yet.
And if going back to your original question of what will happen by the end of next year or through 2027, I want to see a full native model.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Cool. Okay, solid. I'll give, I'll give. One thing that I'm just like total fanboying over right now is Manus.
It is, you know, like there's haters, right? It's Chinese company, whatever. I don't care. It's in, it's in Singapore, so whatever. It's actually interesting. I did some research on it. It's kind of divesting itself from the Chinese government because it realized this is like a limitation for some folks. Yeah, but the thing that I like about Manus is it's like an agent. It's an agent first. It's not fucking chatgpt where it's kind of dumb and just goes, does and does stuff. It's like agent first LLM experience.
And so like all the stuff that you really want ChatGPT to do, it's like, oh yeah, no problem. Yeah, so, so that's my go to for really complex stuff that revolves like, involves like analysis and research and all that. It's just like you tie it all into one place.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: That's a really good point. And I think the consumer, the white consumer hasn't really understood what an AI agent is yet.
I know in tech everybody talks about AI agents, but if I ask my wife what AI agent is, she has.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: No idea what is an AI agent to you?
[00:37:20] Speaker A: So a lot of people think that it's A workflow, but it's not. AI agent is the first instance where you give it some kind of expected output and it will go figure out how to achieve that output.
So think of it as like you're hiring like a junior junior anything. You tell it, look, I want this outcome. Go figure it out on your own how to get there.
An AI agent will is the first instance where you can tell a computer what you expect as an output. And it will piece together all the information, input, output transformation, and figure out how to give you that.
And not a lot of people are even using AI engines that way. They're using it as like, okay, I have some data. Let me prompt it a few times. Let me do like design a workflow, bunch of transformation.
So that's why they design all of these complicated NAN workflows and call it. This whole thing packages together as AI agent. I think that's the long way of looking at this.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: I totally agree. I've been in my hundred days of AI thing, I've been putting together nadin workflows, but they're really just workflows. They're just workflows that have AI involved. Right? It's take this thing and do this thing and do this thing and then spin it out over here. And AI is only the bit in the middle.
Only with agents. I mean, to me, agents are a thing that has memory and tools and AI Exactly. Like as arms. And it can have many of each of those.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Yep, exactly. Cool. I mean, like, so the last point on that is throughout, again, this is prediction.
There's direct correlations between numbers, tools that the agent has access to, and the quality of its output.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: It's actually negative, like inversely correlated.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: It's inversely correlated. So, I mean, that kind of also tells you a lot about our current capability.
And that number isn't super high. It's like a dozen tools. Right? If you're giving an agent 20 tools, the quality of its output will go down because it starts being confused about the context, about what tools it should use.
If our future is actually these autonomous AI agents that can run a whole business by itself, I think that number has to be like hundreds, right?
At any given moment, a founder has access to hundreds of different services and platforms and products. We have the context of knowing which one to use.
So I don't think AI agent is there yet.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
I'll tell you the thing I'm most excited about with all of this is robotics.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: It's just like I tweeted over the weekend we were sitting at the beach and I was like, oh yeah, we're in the appetizer phase right now, I think, where it's like, oh, ChatGPT can write a blog post for me. It's like, who cares, right? But the second that the robo taxi is live in Providence, I'm selling my car.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
[00:40:31] Speaker B: Because I can just bring the Robotaxi. It can take my daughter to skating or I can go with her and I can work on my laptop and we can just do stuff and like the cost of a car goes out and the time of just being fucking. It's the summer right now and I spend three hours a day in the car taking my kids around places. I was 10 minutes late for this call.
Not to mention the humanoid robot doing our laundry. And like that. That's where like, I think AI in its current form will replace a lot of jobs or will slow hiring. And I think that, like, to me that that's what's going to happen is like in a year, I think we're going to have quite a bit of unemployment and that's really going to be bad.
I think from there I think robotics are going to really change our lives because it's not like those jobs just won't need to exist. Not that AI is doing those jobs. It's just like those jobs just like the need for those jobs will go away.
Manufacturing, truck driving, cleaning, you know, the guys working on the bathroom over here, like we're not years away from a robot being able to lay tile.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: I don't think I see, I, I don't know. I. So like, for example, famously Elon Musk tried to go 100 robotic in his factories, right. And then he scaled back on it. And then you also hear companies like Klarna try to go full on AI customer service. Is it Klarna or Carta, I can't remember one of them. And then they had to pare back on that as well. So I don't think we'll ever go.
Well, I don't want to say ever, but in the next decade or so I think will get to maybe like 60 or 70% autonomous.
But then there's always edge cases where you're going to need a human intervention and input. The best case scenario is we merge the two.
So where you need 10 people before, now you only need two people or one person kind of just monitoring a army of bots.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Managers, I suppose.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: Yeah, bot managers. I mean, the thing I worry about is, okay, you had you needed 10 people for this job, now you only need two. Are those eight people really going to level up, evolve, find new to do?
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:59] Speaker B: Are companies gonna care about that? Is there going to be that much more economy that's created in the world?
I think that's the.
I don't feel great about that, but I think that's kind of the question is like, are you going to take the 80% of people that you don't need anymore or call it, call it 25%.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Are you going to call it the 25% of people you don't need anymore and find new work for them? Have them. They're going to have to go out on their own and do other shit.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, look at the young people today, right? Like, I do not.
I.
They're, they're having a really tough time.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: So I think.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: So if you're, if you're right out of school, 22, 23, right now it's a really hard to find entry level jobs even if you're like a developer. Right. I hear stories how you've gone through computer science programs. You can't find a job. That's not the case 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago. If you're graduating with a CS degree, you'll find a job wherever you are in North America. So that's. In a sense that's already happening.
People are figuring it out, I think.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that that's. People figure it out. Cool. I think that's a good place to land.
Paul, this is super. Folks who want to check out kind of you and what you guys do with Reddit marketing, like where is the best place to connect?
[00:44:22] Speaker A: Yeah, so find me on Twitter.
My handle is pxue.
You can find and follow me.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Awesome, awesome, we'll do it. And Paul, thanks so much for coming on. You're definitely coming back for a follow up where we're going to design like an automation workflow. Oh, that's terrible because we were just talking dog shit about it. No, I want to vibe code, a tool that we'll use internally for content updating.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: And so I'd love to have you on to kind of work through that.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: I'll be very open to that.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: Awesome. Okay, thanks, Paul.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Thank you.
