New Year And Big Tech Shifts

Meredith 0:34

Happy 2026.

Meredith's Husband 0:36

Can you believe that? 2026? No.

Meredith 0:38

No.

Meredith's Husband 0:39

I don't know what happened to 2024. I I was still thinking it's 2024.

Meredith 0:43

I I still think it's 2023.

Meredith's Husband 0:45

So last week we talked about kind of highlighted what happened in 2025 in terms of SEO and AI.

Meredith 0:51

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:52

And this week, I mentioned last week, we're going to talk about 2026 and what to expect in the next year.

Meredith 0:57

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:57

Even though we can't, we don't, we have no idea what to expect.

Meredith 0:59

Clearly.

Meredith's Husband 1:00

Even the experts have no idea what is coming or how quickly it's coming. But there are there's a couple things you can do to prepare for that situation and put you

Will AI Take Your Job

Meredith's Husband 1:08

in a better spot. Oh. So at the end of 2026, you're in a good spot and you're not, you don't want to fall behind.

Meredith 1:14

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 1:15

You don't want to fall behind in this transition year. I'd say last year was like the the year that AI was introduced to the world.

Meredith 1:22

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband 1:22

Probably went mainstream, was introduced to the mainstream last year. Became a word. Yeah. Everybody knows AI. Yeah. This year, it's going to be a transition year. A lot of things are going to change. The way you do a lot of things is going to change. The way you think about things, hopefully, is going to change. That's what some of what we're going to talk about today.

Meredith 1:40

Okay.

Meredith's Husband 1:41

So one thing, a super common concern right now, is that AI is going to take everybody's jobs. Yes. I certainly understand that.

Meredith 1:50

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband 1:51

But a couple things that I think. First, it reminds me of like, you know, the Industrial Revolution, the technological revolution, like right before the Industrial Revolution, from what I understand, like 80% plus of people worked in in agriculture, in farming. That changed dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. Now, did those people go out of work? There were fewer farming jobs, but those people, their jobs changed.

Meredith 2:20

So you adapt.

Meredith's Husband 2:21

One aspect is at least this year, I would say your job is not going to be taken by AI. It could be taken by somebody who knows how to use AI. But if you're if you are the one using AI, your job is not really going to be at risk right away.

Meredith 2:39

Okay.

Meredith's Husband 2:40

Even even as an example. So one area that I think has been hit already is writers, copywriters, and just writers in general, right? So everybody says, oh, if you're a writer, you're going to lose your job. Now, I was on Reddit, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago for some reason. I was looking something up about some features with Chat GPT, and I came across a forum and it was all, it was writers. And were the writers saying, I'm I don't have a job anymore? No, they

Picking Your AI Toolset

Meredith's Husband 3:04

all use AI. So all so writers now use AI to help them write. I don't know exactly how, I don't know exactly what that workflow looks like, but that's my point, is that writers are not immediately put out of work. First, it's it's gonna shift to the writers who know to how to use AI.

Meredith 3:21

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband 3:21

And if you delay this, if you say, I don't need to know how to use AI, I don't want to use AI, it's not for me.

Meredith 3:28

I'm scared of AI.

Meredith's Husband 3:30

You're gonna you're gonna be a bit behind. You're gonna be in a tough spot.

Meredith 3:34

Is it like the cell phone?

Meredith's Husband 3:35

Kind of, yes.

Meredith 3:36

Why would I need to carry a phone with me all the time? I've got one at home. Yes.

Meredith's Husband 3:41

Okay, so we're gonna talk about how you can do that. Okay. Comfortably. Like not I don't you don't need to sit down and cram and and read the manual. That's one of the great things about AI, is the best way to learn about AI is just to set sit down. You can sat down if you want, and just ask AI.

Meredith 3:58

Sat your chef, share.

Meredith's Husband 3:59

Uh, you know, how do I how should how do I use you? Like you can you can talk to it like you would talk to any person. And that's a great place to get started. If you haven't done this already, I know lots of people listening. Yeah, like, no duh. Like, where have you been? But I gotta I gotta make sure we're all kind of starting.

Meredith 4:16

I appreciate it.

Meredith's Husband 4:17

So there's a few different options when it comes to AI.

Meredith 4:20

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 4:20

Chat GPT. Yes, you got Gemini, you got perplexity, you got Clawed, Claude, Anthropics. The company Anthropics has one called Clawed. So the two most popular, well, the number one most popular right now is ChatGPT.

Meredith 4:34

Right.

Meredith's Husband 4:35

I think number two is perplexity.

Meredith 4:37

Oh, never even heard of that.

Meredith's Husband 4:38

Perplexity is, I'll get into how you how you can start trying these out. I don't really care for perplexity. Right now, things might change. I use primarily chat GPT and Gemini. Primarily Chat GPT, and I use Gemini for for some things.

Meredith 4:53

Okay. And and they're also inside Chat GPT, there are different modules. The thinking module, the quick module.

Meredith's Husband 5:03

Yeah, those are slightly different, for my my understanding, anyway, is those are slightly different models. So won't make those are not, we're not gonna talk about those today. That's getting like too deep. We will talk about, however, inside Chat GPT, you can create what they call a GPT. So it's like your own personal GPT. You can also use projects, which is similar but different. And then in Gemini, it's just like projects, but they're called gems.

Meredith 5:30

Oh that's nice. Gems.

Meredith's Husband 5:32

Yeah.

Meredith 5:32

I like that.

Meredith's Husband 5:33

And perplexity and Claude probably have something similar. I don't really know. Like I said, I don't use those as much. But my advice is you want to pick one. Pick one that you like. Or you

Give More Context Get Better Output

Meredith's Husband 5:43

could, you know, have a couple. I use a couple. And in my case, it's it's a professional choice that I kind of need to stay up to date on both of them.

Meredith 5:50

Right.

Meredith's Husband 5:50

But you're you're probably gonna use just one. And it might it's gonna come down to which you prefer. So my advice is sit down, get a couple accounts. If you don't already have accounts with ChatGPT and Gemini, get one for each and just start chatting with it. Which one do you like better? That if the one that you like better is the one you should news, use. News. If you if I tell you, like, for instance, Gemini is the best, you need to use Gemini, it's the best, and you use Gemini and you hate it, you're not gonna use it. So you first obviously, I hope this is obvious what I'm saying here. Pick one you like. You're gonna need to like it.

Meredith 6:23

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 6:24

Start with simple questions, and then and then you'll go deeper. It's just a conversation, it's just gonna happen. One tip I can give you here is the more information you give it, the better its responses are going to be. Correct. Absolutely bar none. Like one of the things, in fact, probably the thing that makes AI great right now is the fact that it has been given so much information to bar none. Okay. Nobody knew, like before these current AI models came about, you know, this large language model that all these chat models are built on, nobody really expected it was going to work as well as it had in producing something that can be really smart.

Meredith 7:06

Wow.

Meredith's Husband 7:07

So, like I've talked to engineers who helped develop this, and they're literally like, who knew? Like, yeah, we didn't know it was going to be this good. Like, turns out it's awesome. So the more say, and and so my point is the same rule applies when you are using Chat GPT or Gemini as a user. The more information you can give it about you, the better and the more useful it will be. Like if you sit down and just say, hey, uh ChatGPT, what should I blog about? It's gonna give you a crappy answer. If you say, I'm a family photographer in New York City, and I specialize in kids with neurodivergencies, what should I blog about? It's gonna give you a better answer. If you say my typical clients are XYZ, they live in this area, they go whatever, you know, details, details, details, the results are gonna get better and better and better.

Meredith 8:35

Correct.

Meredith's Husband 8:36

Now you can you don't need to start with a huge number of details. You can start with a simple question and then and then add details. That's fine. But just my point is the more information you can give it, you can't give it too much information because one of the strengths about AI is it can consume all the information you can give it in a nanosecond.

Meredith 8:54

I know.

Meredith's Husband 8:55

And it will remember it.

Meredith 8:56

Yeah, sometimes.

Meredith's Husband 8:59

Yeah, that is one of my my next tips is like I I mentioned, you can create a GPT or you can create a project. So at least in chat GPT, I'm not and Gemini is the same way with

Projects Memory And GPT Setup

Meredith's Husband 9:10

gems, but it has a memory within a project.

Meredith 9:14

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband 9:15

Or within a GPT. If you just create random threads and then ask it to, you know, what did I say about such and such, it won't know. It literally will not have access. So if you create a a GPT, and technically that's what you probably should do, however.

Meredith 9:30

Can you describe a GPT?

Meredith's Husband 9:32

So a GPT is like your own personal chat GPT. And you go in and you give it instructions, you tell it how you want it to respond, you give it a personality, you assign a role to it, essentially. It's like hiring a uh you want a financial planning assistant. Okay, that's the role like, and then you can give it and say, I want you to base all your information off this book. I like the principles in this book. Because there's a whole lot of you know, financial advice out there that is probably garbage.

Meredith 10:00

Right.

Meredith's Husband 10:00

And if you give it again, if you the more information you give it, like I want to base your answers off of the principles in this book, it will do it'll do that. Okay. Projects, I use projects. And the only reason I use projects instead of creating those GPTs is on mobile, you can't use the GPT feature. You can only use projects. Projects are similar. There's internal memory in a project. So everything inside a project, it's like I have one project and it is called my you know, financial planning assistant. And I have a project called my health coach, and it does nutrition and extra and all this stuff. Right. And so anything where you want to maintain sort of like memory. If so, I have a business assistant.

Meredith 10:44

Things I can do for my wife.

Meredith's Husband 10:46

Yeah, that's a great idea.

Meredith 10:47

Ice cream my wife loves.

Meredith's Husband 10:49

Yes. So the reason you do this is just for the memory, the memory aspect. And this is and this is a a frustration that I have with Chat GPT. And I don't think I'm alone. A lot of times when you ask it a question about something you've already talked about, it will come back and it will give you the wrong information.

Meredith 11:07

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 11:08

And the reason for that, at least in my conversations with Chat GPT, the reason for that is let's say I explain something I want to do. Let's call it Project XYZ. Here are my plans for Project XYZ. And I'm going over it and I'm detailing it with ChatGPT. And then those plans change. If I ask it about the plans later, ChatGPT has no way to distinguish like the newest conversation from the oldest. So it might go back to Oh, really? Yeah.

Meredith 11:34

Within a project? I mean, or within a chat?

Meredith's Husband 11:36

Within a project, yeah. And a chat. And if you do this online and it goes out and it searches the web for like, say, how to use Facebook advertising, it might probably will pull something from that's like old information. You're going to need to say, hey, use it's it's 2026, January, use the most current. Okay. So anyway, that is a frustration.

Meredith 11:58

Currently. Yes. But probably by the time this airs, we'll be fixed.

Meredith's Husband 12:01

Currently. So one way that I have found to get around that is do you know the show Star Trek?

Meredith 12:07

Yes, I've heard of it.

Meredith's Husband 12:08

My father was a massive Star Trek fan. Okay. And so I've seen the show a lot.

Meredith 12:13

Makes sense.

Meredith's Husband 12:13

All right. Yeah, doesn't it?

Meredith 12:15

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 12:15

I've seen the show a lot. So in that show and in those movies, if you've seen them, the captain of the Starship Enterprise.

Meredith 12:21

Oh, yes.

Meredith's Husband 12:22

He almost keeps like a, I don't want to call it a diary.

Date Stamps And Version Control

Meredith's Husband 12:25

Captain Kirk. Captain Kirk, that's it. He talks to the AI system that he has on. It's an AI system. It's a computer system. He just talks to it. And he does that, gives it updates. He's feeding it information. When he does that, here's the good part. When he does that, he starts every single one by saying, uh, captain's log, star date, such and such and such and such. And he gives the, and they don't use month and date, they have like numbers for their dates.

Meredith 12:50

Right.

Meredith's Husband 12:50

That is a great thing. That's a great way to start your chats. You don't have to stay like Starship Enterprise Captain, whatever he says, but give it the day. Give it the day and the date.

Meredith 13:00

Really?

Meredith's Husband 13:01

Yeah. Because otherwise it's it's not going to know.

Meredith 13:05

Oh, where where the point is.

Meredith's Husband 13:07

If I give it an instruction ABC today and I change those instructions and give it instructions ABC next week and they're the same but modified, it's not going to know the difference. When I go and ask it about those instructions later on. So if you just start by saying, you know, Monday, January 5th evening, it's it will be a whole lot easier in the future for it to go back and find that information.

Meredith 13:30

Do you have to put the year?

Meredith's Husband 13:32

No. Well, you maybe. Actually, it's probably a good idea. I didn't I didn't think about that until the new year. Uh I was going to say you will thank me for this tip later, but you probably won't because you won't run into the issues that will happen if you don't do this. I learned this the hard way.

Meredith 13:48

I won't run into the issues that you can see.

Meredith's Husband 13:49

Start off chats with with what day it is. I did ask it. I just started a random chat one day, and I said, Do you know what what day it is? And it's ChatGPT said, uh, well, I can I can determine with very high accuracy exactly what day and time it is. I said, what day is it? And it said it's it's Thursday evening. And I wrote back, I said, it's Sunday.

Meredith 14:13

You didn't say oops.

Meredith's Husband 14:16

I was thinking. Anyway, my my point is you get around that. You know, that's just an example. Okay, so now back to my point about what are we trying to do for 2026. Yeah. The goal, your goal should be by the end, and you're if you're not doing this already, your goal should be by the end of 2026 or somewhere during the year, your chosen AI companion is going to be your new personal assistant. And hopefully more, hopefully your business assistant and your, you know, whatever. But a good way, and this that sounds overwhelming, I know.

Meredith 14:48

I just want it to clean.

Meredith's Husband 14:49

Yeah. It doesn't do that yet. Now that's I know that sounds overwhelming, but start small. I would say, I'm gonna pull this back to SEO now. How can you

Make AI Your Assistant In 2026

Meredith's Husband 14:59

do this in with your website and for SEO and and search visibility? Start with blogging. Okay. We've talked about blogging a ton on this podcast. And most recently I've said, okay, in fact, if you were doing a good job with your blog, you were never blogging for uh quantity. You were after quantity. Quality. Quality, yeah. Right. The other cue. But now more than ever, do not, if you are still thinking about blogging in terms of how often do I need to blog, do not do that. Like, do not do that. Really? You want to think about what do you want to blog about. Okay. Ask ChatGPT to help you. Give it as much information as you can. I'm a family photographer in Brooklyn. I focus on families who live in these area codes. They have kids at these schools. They tend to do this and this for professions. These are my strengths, etc. It'll start to give you ideas. We want to look for a theme. Look for a theme that is not explaining what you do as a photographer, but something that you know your target audience is interested in that you can write about, that you can give them advice about. Find a theme somewhere in there. Use ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever to help you flesh out that theme. And I would say just plan like six blog topics for the year. And you can probably do this within an hour. Might be able to do it within 10 minutes if you're familiar with ChatGPT already. But that's your blog for the year. Now you can fill that in with smaller posts like you know, random recent shoots and stuff like that. But there you go.

Meredith 16:32

Resources.

Meredith's Husband 16:32

There's plenty of other ways to pick themes and stuff to write about. But this is a good one because it's going to help you work towards that goal

Blogging Strategy For Real SEO

Meredith's Husband 16:40

in 2026 of using AI as a like a personal assistant, a work assistant in this case. And if you want a little deeper advice into like how to use AI with your blog and for SEO, you might need to do differently. I do have a crash course, AI plus SEO crash course, on a new site that just launched last week. New platform. The site is not 100% complete yet, but the the bones are there. If you can go to the homepage, MeredithHusband.com, scroll down, look for AI crash course. It's about what we've talked about here, but just goes into more depth. Like this is an episode, it's about 15 minutes long. That course is like 17 hours. No, it's a little over two hours.

Meredith 17:20

A dozen different and you can stop and start it.

Meredith's Husband 17:24

Yes. And I keep I do my best to keep that updated. So like with the stuff we're talking about here was not in the original lessons that I released. I I will keep it updated. As long as you have you purchase and have access to the course, you get all the updates as they meritushusband.com.

Meredith 17:40

Who's he? He's awesome.