Rand Fishkin: How to Win in a Zero‑Click World
Clicks are dying. Here’s how your brand still grows.
I just sat down with Rand Fishkin.
Cofounder of Moz and SparkToro with two decades shaping search, PR, and audience research.
In this episode you’ll learn
Two‑thirds of searches end zero‑click—how to win anyway
How to build a 200‑person amplifier list that compounds reach
Which KPIs actually matter: brand searches, subscribers, revenue—not pageviews
We dive into the details later in the conversation.
We unpack “brand beats traffic” at 17:50 and your amplifier plan at 16:13.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
08:49 Navigating the Zero‑Click World
16:13 Who will amplify this and why?
17:50 Brand Over Traffic: A Paradigm Shift
26:52 Effective Marketing Strategies for the New Era
31:53 Philosophy, purpose, and helping others
Listen
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Here’s the full transcript:
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (00:00.076)
In marketing, we always say like every answer is it depends. Where do you see the future of marketing going with the world of AI? You know, I think we all know that we’re in an AI bubble that will pop at some point. And PR, in my opinion, is the future of a ton of this kind of marketing. In an ironic twist of fate, when all the writers thought they were about to die, they’re now becoming one of the most important marketing tools again. I don’t want to sound professional. I want to sound weird and interesting. Traffic is no longer the goal. Brand is the goal.
You don’t really care about traffic. Traffic is a vanity metric. What you care about are...
Welcome to that one time with Adam Metwally, the podcast bridging the gap between health, hustle and happiness. I’m with entrepreneur and co-founder of Moz, Spark Turo, Snack Bar Studios and Alert Mouse, Rand Fishkin. Hi Rand. Hey Adam, that’s a long list of companies. Yeah, you’re a busy guy. So today I wanna talk to you about AI and marketing. AI is a hot topic in 2025 with...
wide variety of opinions on where it’s going to take us. So focusing on the marketing lens, where do you see the future of marketing going with the world of AI? I think AI for marketers will be a tool that many of us use by choice or by force. My hope is that the applications continue to improve. I suspect that will happen. also, you know, I think we all know that we’re in an AI bubble that will
pop at some point and that the backlash to whatever it is will eventually lead to, just as the internet did, lots of smart use case adoptions that are driven by value and not hype. That’s how almost all these cycles go. But in terms of marketing being changed by AI, I think most of the change has already happened.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (01:58.644)
And that is because you can sort of see the advancement of the models has slowed considerably. Unless there’s like a big AGI breakthrough, which I don’t think anyone’s expecting right now, we are almost certainly at a point where algorithms like Google’s or YouTube’s or Reddit’s or TikTok’s, they’re already very much powered by AI results inside of chat GPT.
and the other AI tools or search engines like Google and Bing, they’re already powered by AI. The AI is in your email, it’s in your social media, it’s in your browser. It’s just there, right? Because sometimes knowing which words come frequently after other words is really useful. And people have found lots of applications for those. And a lot of people have jammed them in where they don’t belong. So that’s my...
That’s my rough take on the space. What do you think will cause the AI bubble to pop? Like what, are you looking for to know that it’s starting to fall apart? I mean, if I knew that I would short the stocks on the right day and be a billionaire. Well, I mean, yeah, no, I think, uh, I think we will see it first in the, uh, in fallout from AI investment. So essentially big venture funds.
Public stock markets, big companies will do a big pullback on their spending just as right now, right? And especially over the last two, three years, they’ve all gone crazy over the, you know, over the top in terms of investment. I was talking to some friends from several big companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and they basically said, all of our projects, all of our budgets on stuff that we know our customers want got cut.
All of our teams got cut. Unless we can tell our bosses, bosses, boss that we’re using AI and then it gets approved like instantly approved, no questions asked like, you okay, wait, wait, wait. You were solving this problem for customers that they really needed. No, you don’t get to do that anymore. you’re using AI. You get money. It’s ridiculous, right? And so you get this just AI shaped warped world.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (04:21.614)
because of internal politics and priorities and yeah, man, that’s, how do we know when that ends? I mean, stock prices. Yeah. When you see the stock market take that big hit, whenever that’s coming, we all know it is. That’s when. So I have followed Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters. I’ve read those.
And there’s one that sticks out to me, which is just after the dot com crash, where he just says, we just lost 90 % of our value, but at the same time, our company has gone up with the intrinsic metrics significantly. So that’s the one thing that I’m looking for now. What happens if something uncouples from the stock price, but the company underlying it is still going really well?
buy a lot because what happened afterwards, you 10 years later, well 15 years later, it was a no brainer. This is why everyone who says, you know, I should really get into day trading and playing the stock market. 99.999 % of those people are going to lose a lot of money. And almost everyone who’s like, I’m not going to play stock market at all, but I am going to buy some index funds and just put my money to work there and leave it for 25 years.
They almost all make money. So short-term thinking gets you almost always short-term results. You know what the frustrating part is on that? The thing that sucks is the people who get attention and the people who get coverage and the people who whatever have like big TikTok channels or have viral posts on our stocks on Reddit. They’re the 0.01 % who got really lucky.
Right. Not that not smart. Like lucky. can you can look at pick your smartest stock investors, meme stock investors. The last 10 years, they have all been wrong 10 times for every one time they made a bunch. Crypto. need to be right once. That’s the thing with these. Yeah, you’re right. Once you get famous for it and that example gets passed around and then people jump on on board with that concept like, man, this must be a get rich quick scheme. Like, surely I can do that. Right.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (06:47.638)
It’s the same as the like old west wagons with the guy selling the tonic that’ll cure everything that ails you. What’s the difference between that and the entrepreneurial spirit in America though that is fail, fail, fail until one time where it actually works and then it works big. Similar attitude. Yeah. Interesting. I don’t, I don’t see those as necessarily being connected. I think.
entrepreneurial attitude of, I’m confident that there’s people who want this product. I am going to attempt to make that product and then market it and sell it. And you know what? there wasn’t as much demand for that product as I thought. So I’m going to try again because I sort of figured it out. I think that’s very, very different from chasing a meme stock or cryptocurrency or selling snake oil. the two things are almost entirely orthogonal. Fair enough.
You’ve coined the term zero click world, which I had not heard of until I dug into you. What does that mean and what are the implications of somebody who is looking to build a business? Yeah, yeah. So my colleague at Sparctoro, Amanda Natividad, basically coined the term zero click content and zero click marketing. She was the one who recognized that the
the world of zero click search, which I had been writing about for years. And I’m sure which you’re familiar with, right? You 2005, you search Google, you click on a bunch of results. 2010, sometimes Google just gives you the answer right at the top. 2025, Google two thirds of the time gives you the answer right at the top. You don’t have to click anything. So we’re in this world of zero click search. And Amanda realized, oh, that applies to everything. That’s true in email.
It’s true in content. It’s true in social media. You know, you’re browsing Reddit. You don’t want to click links that take you off of Reddit. You go to the comments maybe of an article. Then you go back to the story. You watch a video on there. You see some images. You keep scrolling. Instagram keeps you on Instagram. Facebook keeps you on Facebook. LinkedIn keeps you on LinkedIn. All these platforms work really hard these days to make it a zero click world.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (09:07.66)
that is fundamentally different from the first 25 years of how the internet worked and how digital marketing worked. And unfortunately, a lot of marketers and execs just don’t recognize this new reality. And what are the consequences of that? The big one is that, well, there’s sort of macro consequences for like the environment in the world, but there’s also consequences for individual businesses like yours and mine.
Yeah, let’s explore individually. Yeah. So, you know, let’s say, for example, that you want to promote this podcast, like you’d like to get the word out about it. In 2015, I’d be like, yeah, you know, say you had a conversation with, you know, Rand Fishkin, you put up like maybe a picture of us, you share some topics that we talked about. Maybe you even put up a clip or something and then you have a link to the podcast, right? Right in your tweet, your LinkedIn post, your
probably not Reddit post, but maybe Reddit post. The YouTube video, like in the description, the first thing is like, watch the full thing or listen to the full thing on, you know, whatever platform. In 2025, the thing to do is to put a label that’s like, here’s the, you know, here’s the name of my podcast. Here’s my guest. Here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s a short pithy 30 to 90 second clip, which I know you make lots of.
I’m going to put that as native content on these platforms for people to consume. And if they want more, they’ll go find and figure it out. I’m not going to even put a link in there. When I build my email list, I’m going to put the episode like, and the show notes like directly into the email. I’m going to put my, you know, the full value is going to be in the platform where it’s delivered. There’s not this sense of like, you need to click here every time to get something. And that is
you know, really, really different for software company marketing, especially B2B marketing of all kinds. It changed up how e-commerce marketing is done. It changed up how SEO and content and social media marketing are done. And to be honest, a lot of companies are still way behind. So if you want to get ahead, what would be some clear tactics that you would undertake now? Yeah. So this
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (11:28.536)
This is all the stuff that we call zero click marketing, right? It’s essentially how do I make things for platforms where my customers are natively that provides enough value that they take a next step in the, in the chain, right? And that, that next step is things like hopefully subscribing to you on, you know, a channel like YouTube or to your subreddit or to your podcast on Spotify or whatever.
Or it could be following you on a social network like LinkedIn or a, you know, blue sky or threads or Instagram or TikTok, Twitter for the, the small number of people who still use that. The things you do for SEO are really different, right? So instead of, instead of trying to, how do I rank number one for whatever best podcast for entrepreneurs, it’s how do I get on all the lists?
of best podcasts for entrepreneurs because that is what the LLM will pick up. And when Google does AI mode or their little answer or chat GPT answers it, they’ll put you like at the top of that, if you’re the most mentioned one with the highest recency and frequency. the list of tactics that change is a mile long and dependent on your channels and what kind of business you are.
In marketing, we always say like every answer is it depends. This is no different. The ones I’m giving you are not exactly the playbook that every person listening should follow. They’re examples of things that have changed. So yeah, yeah, makes sense. If you wanted to explore that more, what are some good resources that you like? man, I really wish someone were writing a book called Zero Click Marketing. That would be great, right? Are you writing a book called Zero Click Marketing? Wow. How’d you know?
That’s great. We’ll talk about it once you’ve finished it when you do the book tour. Yeah, yeah. I think that’ll be coming out like May or June of next year. So not too long. But in the meantime, we do have lots of stuff about this on SparkToro. We’ve got a few videos. You can go to YouTube and search for Zero Click Marketing and watch my presentation from a couple of conferences where I gave talks about Zero Click Marketing stuff.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (13:48.814)
It is not super popular to be talked about yet, but I have seen other folks, believe, I want to say Jason from Black Truck Media has been doing some stuff on zero click marketing. You can see some good work from Will Reynolds and the team at Seer Interactive talking about zero click marketing, what they’ve done, where they’ve had success. So it’s starting to get there in like the marketing and agency world. Yeah, I suspect more conferences and events will start to have things about this because it
You know, it’s not like a theory. It’s just this is just the reality we’re living in, right? You can anyone can look at traffic sources over the last 10 years and see the massive decline. Well, so I’ve got to let’s explore this specifically. So I’ve got two different businesses. I’ve got a content agency and I’ve got the podcast. So if you were consulting me on building the content agency’s marketing using zero click marketing as a priority, what would that look like?
First, I’d have to interrogate what channels are you currently using to write to do your marketing like all word of mouth. We’re just starting, you know. So I think that’s actually excellent. That is great news because word of mouth is fundamentally a zero click marketing technique. And this is why a lot of people who’ve been reliant on these like click earning tactics are now figuring out like, hey, how do I get people to talk about this? So
Yeah, I work really hard with folks on like, well, I don’t, I don’t do any consulting, but if you contact me for consulting, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Although I’m happy to refer you to good people that I like, but I do strongly, strongly recommend that folks figure out the answer to a very hard question, Adam, which is who will amplify this and why? And I don’t mean,
you a generic answer like, well, other entrepreneurs who find the content compelling, that is not a good answer. You give me a list of 200 people, publications, blogs, media outlets, YouTube channels, subreddits, friends of yours who, you you know, have industry connections, people on LinkedIn, people with a popular Instagram account. Give me those sources of influence that are going to amplify this thing and tell me why.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (16:13.166)
Is it a personal connection because you know them and they like you? Is it because the thing that you’re doing makes them look good to their audiences? Do you have, I don’t know, some sort of an affiliate program? Do you have like some incentive for them to share? Is it an emotional trigger? You’ve got to have that great answer and that great list. That is the way to make these things pop off. And in terms of tactical stuff, like what you’re doing is
Promoting the thing by sharing the fundamental value Right, know native in the platforms and then giving away, you know a Sort of obvious path that is not just a link for people who want to follow up and get more make sense How do you know if it’s working? Remember we talked at during the quickfire round about brand searches as a KPI. Yeah That’s a great way
That is a great way, right? So like, you know, let’s say, right, the the the one thing podcasts like takes off, you will see people searching for TOT pod, right in Google and you’ll see, you know, and variations of that. If if Spark Toro does really good marketing, I can see not a bunch of clicks from like, you know, most of our marketing comes from LinkedIn, emails, threads.
blue sky and YouTube. That’s sort of like our channel selection. And what we see is when we have like a video where I show something cool in SparkTorrent or whatever, when that goes really well, reaches a ton of people, the next five to 10 days, a bunch more people search for SparkTorrent. They go to Google and they search for it. You know what the terrible thing about that is? In the old world, a CEO would be very tempted to be like, we should put more money into Google.
Right? Like, let’s go spend more on Google advertising, which is the dumbest takeaway ever. Google is not. They don’t deserve credit for any brand search they’ve ever sent anyone, but they take credit for all of them. Will they take credit for all the competitors jumping on the top? That’s I mean, in my in my view, there’s not much different about that. like, you know, Tony Soprano and his goons being like, whoa, whoa.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (18:38.242)
that’s a nice business you got there, it would be a shame if we were to promote all of your competitors right in front of your store, you know, like, pretty good accent there. Well done. I was technically born in New Jersey. It feels natural. like it. Yeah, it’s a very good point. It’s an it’s a really interesting concept. I’m I’m going to explore a lot more in the businesses I’m involved in. So basically, traffic is no longer the goal.
Brand is a goal. Exactly. If you think about how marketing worked in 1965, there was no such thing as traffic, right? Like you didn’t. And even today, you don’t really care about traffic. Traffic is a vanity metric. What you care about are sales and customers and customer retention and, you know, people buying from your store and then telling other people that they should buy from your store. That. Is.
completely different from trying to grow the number of visits that come to a website. The one thing I always hear when I talk about this is, what if you are an advertising-based business? Like, what if what you do is sell CPM ads on your website? In which case I would say, then you need to be competing with TikTok and Google and Reddit and YouTube, like, or you’re sunk, because they are trying to take all of that away from you.
You know, it’s sort of like there’s five million television channels and then the FCC has come in and said, no, ABC, NBC, CBS, they get to run the world for the next 50 years. And that is sort of what the Supreme Court in the United States and, you know, very frankly, the EU and almost most other countries, except with the exception of Russia and China, have said, right, is that.
Yeah, you get to dominate the internet. You five different companies, know, Fang, basically get to dominate the internet. That’s the world we’re living in. Yeah. So what is the primary North Star of what KPIs you’d look for if traffic isn’t the goal? Obviously sales, Like conversions, customer signups.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (20:54.688)
If you have something that’s a free sign up, like someone subscribing to your podcast, that’s a good one. If you have an email newsletter, that’s another good one. What I try to do is I try to segment it into pre-awareness or pre-brand touch, right? So like things like people who subscribe to, or sorry, people who see your content, impressions, views, know, watches of your videos, that kind of thing, listens to your podcast.
That’s at the very top. Then the next layer down is like they’re aware of your brand. They follow you, subscribe to you, click some button that’s like, want more of your stuff on whatever platform that is. Could even be your website if they subscribe to your blog or newsletter or whatever. And then it is conversions and sales. And you could probably think of brand search as being that like top of funnel.
You know, between the impressions and awareness and the subscribes, right? So you’ve got these layers. You want to kind of build out your, your marketing funnel as a, as a visualized KPI tracker. And then you monitor those things over time. And you can get a really good sense for like, Hey, are we having problems with conversions? That’s going to hit sales or no, or we’re having problems with awareness. like we’re not getting as many people to see our stuff at the very top. That’s the problem.
It’s not super different from the traffic driving era. It’s just that traffic is no longer well correlated with performance. I did this blog post that did very well video that did very well earlier this year that was just showing a ton of company examples of traffic going down while revenue goes up because they are disconnected in the zero click era. Just quickly though, I love doing these podcasts.
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Metwally — That One Time Podcast (23:16.948)
small kickback. These are two very easy ways for you to support us as we continue to grow the podcast that we absolutely love doing. Thank you for your support and I’m back to the episode. What is the fastest way to increase the LLMs odds and the AI overviews from mentioning your brand? Yeah, so AI overviews are using a lot of what’s called retrieval augmented generation. And so being in
in a lot of the top search results still really helps, which means kind of classic SEO things. Like how do I not just appear at the top, but also be in the top results, which is a little bit playing the PR game. And PR, in my opinion, is the future of a ton of this kind of marketing. Like PR drives SEO, it drives brand awareness, it gets you all the mentions that get you into the AI tools. you know, and then, and then when it comes to
Chat GPT or Perplexity or Claude, those kinds of places. It’s how do you get your brand mentioned in the documents that have the words and phrases relevant to the prompt that the user entered. And that again is usually a PR thing. Like we talked about earlier, there’s some ways to spam it and manipulate that. But there’s things that you should do.
as fundamental step on your own website, right? So like if people are asking LLMs, hey, does SparkToro support India? We don’t, but we should, if lots of people were asking that, we should probably have a page on our website that’s like, here are the geographies that we do support and that we don’t support. And like, we’ve had lots of people requesting these so that someone doesn’t get confused, right? They ask that and then they’re like, the LLM gave me a hallucinated answer. I’m going to go sign up for SparkToro. Then I’m disappointed. Then I complain about it.
That sucks for us. It sucks for them. We don’t want that. Right. So yes, you should be your website still matters. It’s still important. The zero traffic era has not ended the importance of a website. Anyone who tells you that is full of baloney. I saw a fast company article that literally had that as the headline last week and pissed me off something fierce.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (25:35.342)
So just ignore that. That is not true. You still need your website. You still need a place you can own and control. You need a place where people can come to and you can sort of own the experience. And you need that because all the information on your site is feeding all these models and search results and all that kind of stuff. If you’re prioritizing content placements, what are the priorities here versus like in-house blog, top media, forums, Reddit, Quora?
Structured docs, you spoke about that before. I don’t actually understand in detail what structured docs means. Sorry, just the structure of the content that you put in these documents, either on your own website or other people’s sites. You know, like I have the question and answer format, the FAQs work really well for a lot of this stuff. Anyway, I don’t want to focus too much on that and I am not the expert here. There are people who are way more, you know, I know how to do SEO for AI.
Like those folks, know, Brittany Muller or somebody like they can tell you exactly how that works. What I can tell you is there’s sort of two things you might care about. if what you are aiming for is the, want to influence people which will then influence sort of everything else, you’re looking for the places your audience pays attention. Right? And so that...
is somewhat self serving, right? But that’s like what tools like Spark Toro show you, you know, you do audience research, you describe your audience to us. And then the tool comes back and it’s like, okay, they participate in these channels, they pay attention to these social accounts or YouTube channels or subreddits or whatever, right? So like that list, similar web has some tools that can help you do this, you could custom buy the data from a clickstream provider. There’s not to be honest, there’s not a ton of people in audience research software. So we’re a little bit on our own there. The second one,
is if you are exclusively like you don’t care about influencing real human beings, you just want the LLMs to pick you up. Then you don’t care. You don’t care where the like who cares if your audience reads the New York Times sports section. If the New York Times sports section writes about you, the LLM will pick that up. Right. So one, you know, the the let’s do PR in the places our audience pays attention. That’s connected to influencing people and sort of, you know, Google cares more about that because they have a lot of relevance algorithms.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (28:02.274)
But if you just want the LLMs to pick you up, any document on virtually any website will help you, which is why you see a lot of spam in subreddits that one subscribes to or YouTube channels with two views or that kind of thing. Got it. Got it. So wrapping this part up, what do you think is the most undervalued approach right now for marketing in this space? I do think a lot of people try to
take the existing things that they’re doing and force them into getting coverage, right? So like, hey, I’m gonna pitch, we came out with like the new version of our software. does this thing a little better than the old version. Customers are gonna like this new feature. Okay, let’s try and get a bunch of press and media and coverage and like find influencers who’ll talk about it. To be honest, I don’t like that approach.
I don’t think it works well. think instead you need to go back to the product drawing board and make things that fundamentally have a marketing spin and angle to them, like a hook that makes people want to talk about it. You know, think about it. Yeah. Hunter.io actually did one that I liked. Do you know those guys? They like, you know, help you find people’s emails. I them all the time. That’s my little secret. Yeah. Yeah.
So Hunter put, we can put this in the show notes or something, but there’s this AI email quiz that they put together. The headline for it is test your AI radar. See, you tell us whether this email was created using AI or whether a human being wrote it. It’s clever, it’s a fun little quiz. And you’re like, ooh, hi Dana, I saw your recent LinkedIn update. Okay, that sounds like AI to me. Oh my God, I got it incorrect. The correct answer to human, now I’ve written by hate, you know?
And then it shows you another one, right? So you take this little quiz and the reason they do this is because it’s very worthy of being talked about. Like people talk about it. You see a bunch of people sharing it. You can see like people talk, media coverage, all that kind of stuff, right? Because it is fundamentally interesting and it, it matches the zeitgeist. Like everybody’s talking about, can you recognize AI and email, all that kind of stuff, right? What they’re doing with it is promoting their
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (30:28.18)
AI help in email authoring and they’re trying to show you that it’s hard to tell the difference. Yeah, yeah, doing it in a secondhand way. It’s clever. It’s clever. It pretty much sums it up, right? Yes, it’s a product hook that is worthy of being talked about. There’s a reason people would want to amplify it. There’s a reason media would pick it up. There’s a reason YouTube channels would, you know, cover it. There’s a reason people are talking about it on podcasts like you and I are right now because it has this hook.
Yes, it’s meant to be product promotional, but it works. Nice. That’s a good way to wrap that up. Look, I’d like to also wrap up with a few closing questions to just generally explore the philosophy of life. What’s one thing over the last two years that you’ve changed your mind on? my gosh. I used to be a huge believer in donating to nonprofits and my...
my reading and studying of that field, especially because, my my old company sold and like we we got some money. So we we started doing some charitable giving and that kind of stuff. And the more I dig into it, the more I think you need to be nearly a professional analyst to give money to charities in an effective way. And as a result of that, I I have like largely stopped
giving to lots of organizations with with one real exception, which is give directly. They’re just a money that they’re just an organization that gives money directly to people without means, mostly in South America, Central America, Africa, some parts of rural Asia. They started tragically, they started a program here in the United States, because there’s lots of people who hear who need it. But
Yeah. And they have like a very research driven methodology around how effective they are. So yeah, effective altruism is hard. Yeah. I think I prefer to give really hyper locally if I’m going to give because in that way you kind of see, you see it in your community. If you give to a, if you give to a, a vegetable garden in the city, you see.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (32:47.938)
You walk past it every single day and you see it as opposed to something on the other side of the world that goes through 20,000 intermediaries and only gets 10 % to the person who needs it. Yeah, yeah. I like that. What’s a purchase you’ve made that’s improved your life a hundred times more than its costs? I do love this Sony camera. What have you got? You know, if you search for how does Rand make videos on Google, you will see
my entire setup, all the models and makes of everything I’ve got, which was recommended to me by a video expert named Phil Nottingham from the UK. He worked at Wistia for a while. Yeah, I recommend checking that out. Nice. So check out all the details on... How Rand makes videos. It’s the number one Google result because it turns out I’m pretty OK at SEO. That’s good. We like that. And one of my last questions for you is...
this is a bit of a doozy. If you could know the absolute truth to one thing, what would it be? Gosh, I’d really like to know whether the universe will experience heat death. I know that’s but if sometimes I
Sometimes I wonder whether, like how pointless or point, you know, sort of purposeful the lives that we’re creating are. And like, you know, we’re all trying to do, hopefully, good things for the next generation of human beings that come after us. yeah, part of me, part of me gets really hopeless when I think about the fact that, you know, it’s
some point in the, granted, know, multi-billion year future, there will be nothing, right? The atoms will be scattered so far across the universe that nothing will exist at all. That really breaks my heart. I’ve seen some quantum physics stuff that suggests that maybe that’s not true and, you know, maybe the universe will not die that heat death and that continued existence of a civilization is even possible. That’d be great to know.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (35:00.404)
So what’s the heat death for someone who doesn’t know? this is like the basically molecules, you know, the concept that the universe is expanding and that eventually it will expand so much that the the atomic material right that pulls apart. Yeah, like all the little pieces that make up everything in every world and every galaxy will be spread so far across the cosmos that there will be nothing.
But there can be no life. There will be no planets. There can be no stars. There’s no gravity to speak of. It’s the heat death of the universe, right? Essentially, there’s no heat. There’s no warmth because there’s no friction for molecules being near each other. Damn. That’s such a...
sad way to end the podcast, right? And that’s why that’s why I want to know that it’s not true. I want the real answer. Right. That’s so funny. Well, why do you think we’re here? that if I knew it would not be that. But why do you think we’re here? Why do I think we’re? Oh, I mean, that it always seemed weird to me that people are like, oh, people are, you know, whatever need religion to tell. It seems extremely obvious to me that we are all here to help each other.
and to help the next generation. Like people exist to help other people and animals and our environment. Like we’re here to help. We’ve been given all the tools and resources to do it. And yeah, I think there’s just some, you know, snake oil chicanery that has convinced, unfortunately, good marketing that has convinced good people to do bad things. Good marketing, but bad product.
Yeah, right. Unfortunately, people always say like, hey, a better product will always succeed. That is not true. I know I talked about like product being really important, but especially in something like, you know, politics, you can with populism, which is historically always been a worse product, you know, anything populist stuff, you can really take advantage of people’s psychology with marketing and get them to do, you know, to vote against their own interests, the interests of their children, the interests of the things that they care about.
Metwally — That One Time Podcast (37:16.302)
thanks to messaging and tribalism and all that kind of stuff. so, yeah, we’re here to help each other. If we keep that in mind, if we vote that way, if we live that way, donate that way, work that way, it all gets better. Yeah, nice. I like that’s a good spot to wrap it up. Is there anything you’re excited about at the moment that you want to let the listeners in on? If you want to try out Spark Toro, is it’s free for everyone to try.
at sparktoro.com. If you are interested in indie video games where you play a chef in a magical version of 1960s Italy who fights boars and chickens and celery and brings back your ingredients to your kitchen and then makes your fancy spaghetti alla carbonara or whatever it is, you can check out snackbarstudio.com. And if you want a better version of Google Alerts, you can go to alertmouse.com. Great. And where can people find you if they’re interested?
I am in all those places, but I’m most active on LinkedIn where I’m Randfishing. And if you enjoyed this episode, please go to YouTube, search that one time with Adam Metwally, click subscribe, like the video and leave us a comment. Thanks, Rand. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me.
