Barry Schwartz SEO Pioneers
Barry Schwartz – SEO Pioneer
Barry Schwartz can always be found on social media and is one of the most well-known personalities in the search industry.
He has reported on the SEO industry for 20 years through his blog Search Engine Roundtable and newsletter. Including his other contributions, Barry has written 40,000 articles.
In his own words, Barry reads fast, he talks fast and he writes fast. He’s crazy about being super efficient.
I talk to Barry about how he founded Search Engine Roundtable and became one of the most influential reporters in the search industry
In this interview, Barry talks about:
02:42 How he discovered Alta Vista and started to experiment searching for things
06:22 How he discovered the SEO community
08:24 He didn’t see how big search would be in the early days
11:41 Getting involved in forums, finding search personalities and how search engines work
14:32 Early experiments with SEO and Google violations
18:52 Why he didn’t offer SEO services to clients
22:25 Sharing and learning in forums
28:07 Why Search Engine Roundtable started
29:39 The launch of Search Engine Roundtable and live blogging
33:55 How he has maintained the momentum to keep producing Search Engine Roundtable going by himself
35:34 How he has written over 40,000 articles
37:57 Love of search engines and love of the community
39:25 Building community
42:24 Most memorable fail where he got it wrong
44:00 Developing a personal brand
49:41 How Barry manages to source his breaking news stories
51:10 Efficiency and productivity, talking and reading very fast
52:39 Updating the design of Search Engine Roundtable
55:35 How the SEO industry has evolved over 20 years
57:31 Negativity and outrage in the industry on social media
59:48 Regrets from not sharing sharing stories and tips
01:05:39 What he would have done differently
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SEO Pioneers – Barry Schwartz Transcript
Shelley Walsh: Hello and welcome to SEO Pioneers.
Today I’m speaking to Barry Schwartz who needs a little introduction as the founder of Search Engine Roundtable. Barry has been tirelessly reporting on the search industry for the best part of 20 years. I’m very excited to be speaking to Barry and I’m sure he has a lot of really exciting, interesting stories to tell us today.
Hi Barry. How are you?
Barry Schwartz: I’m good. How are you? I love your interviews. Honored to be part of this pioneers journey. It’s not that I consider myself a pioneer, but I love your interviews and thanks for doing them. I appreciate them.
Shelley Walsh: Thank you. That’s really kind Barry.
So gonna jump go right back to the very beginning and I believe that you established a software dev company in about 1994, and then you started to be aware of search engines in the late nineties. So if you could just go back and perhaps talk me through those early years of setting up the software company and then how you actually became aware of search.
Barry Schwartz: Yes. So yeah, it was 1994. I was actually 14. I have a twin brother named Roddy. We were in high school together and he was a big computer geek and he was hacking websites together back in 1994, not using front page or any of those old tools, but using pure HTML and stuff like that.
I remember, Sometime in high school I went, we had some business class. It was basically the basketball coach had a business class that he taught because he ran his own camp, so he was like, I’ll teach a business class to whoever’s interested. So I went to that business class in high school and I’m like, oh, I’ll make a Rusty Brick business plan.
In high school I’m coming up with a business plan for Rusty Brick. I wish I had that it would be really cool to see. Look back at that business plan that was maybe one page. My brother was making websites and at some point like, you know what, I’ll go to meetings and you build it and I’ll try to sell it.
I think the first time I looked at search in a big way. It was funny. So in high school, probably, I don’t know, 10th or 11th grade when I was like 15 or 16 one of my teachers asked us to do some type of report on something, I forgot what it was.
I brought up Alta Vista and I did some searches for search and I found this big, academic paper on the topic he was looking to write about. So I downloaded it, I printed it out and I told him, Hey, I didn’t write this obviously, because there’s no way a 14 year old or 15 year old could write this academic paper.
But I found it, I thought you’d find it interesting. He was like, this is gold, how you find this. And I’m like, I used search and he had no clue what that was. And then he gave me like, I don’t know, an a for that report even though I didn’t write it cuz he was so happy with it. And then I’m like, wait, I can actually use this search engine to find out fun things.
I had one kid in my class who came from a famous family, so I did some searches and I found all this history around the family My humor is weird and sarcastic. So I kinda use bullet points to make the kid think like I’m stalking him and I know information about him that nobody else knows.
And that I could get his social security number and his bank account and all this type of stuff. And that’s what SEOs joked about in the early days. You don’t wanna mess with SEOs because we could get everything about you and ruin your life. So I kinda did that before there was SEO when I was like a teenager.
Just as a joke because I thought it was funny. Nobody else knew how it worked. I think I found Ask Jeeves back when I was in college. I think it was like 99 or something like that. or 2000 or something like that. I think people were using, starting to use Google.
Then I’m like, oh, Ask Jeeves is way cuter. It’s Butler and so forth. I’m gonna use Google, I’m gonna Ask Jeeves. So those are like my first memories of using search in high school and college days.
Mostly for manipulation of people and to do well in school.
Shelley Walsh:
You’ve said before how you really fell in love with search engines. What was it, what you know really hooked you in? Did you fall in love with him straight away? Did it bite you? The bug?
Barry Schwartz: So not early on, it didn’t, I was still a teenager and I’m like, I think I thought it was cool and fascinating, but it was a lot of stuff that I couldn’t even read.
The stuff I found was really obscure stuff. There wasn’t much great content on the web back then. So for a teenager it was pretty boring. But when I started to go to college and then started to do a lot of development work, web development work and design work clients became more interested in it.
I think one client referred another client to me saying, back then in the late nineties if you knew how to turn on a computer, you were a computer geek and you knew everything about how everything worked on the internet. So they’re like, oh, this person knows the internet.
Ask Barry how search works. I’m like I’m not really sure. I know I use search engines, but I don’t know how they work exactly. So I did some searching and I found a bunch of online forums. I found a lot of papers and stuff like that. Obviously Danny Sullivan’s site and so forth.
And I just did a lot of research and found it fascinating, the SEO community and what they were doing. It was before it was called an SEO community, but it was just fascinating to see how SEOs were in the forums watching how Google’s changes were happening in real time by IP address.
This server was changing and the rankings were going here, the page rank scores were changing over there. Everybody was so on top of this stuff. And it was just like, I dunno, everybody was getting together just to watch how they would make the next buck on Google search or how they would see their rankings go up or down.
And it was just fascinating to watch the industry change so fast, especially in the early days, but it’s changing very fast these days as well. So I think that’s when I got hooked when I started to see how SEOs just like people who are in their basement just trying to make a buck off the internet or just trying to hack the internet. Because it was interesting watching them just obsess about it and be like, wow, this is something really interesting. So of course you do your own thing as you experiment yourself and you get hooked yourself.
I’m sure you have lots of stories to tell yourself about, like things you’ve discovered and hacks you found or weird quirks you found with Google or other search engines. And it was just super fascinating to watch you go through that same experience as Google and other search engines were changing and how that was impacting your science or your client sites.
I think that just got me hooked.
Shelley Walsh: Do you think because you grew up in a pre-internet, pretty much a pre-internet, pre-Google world when you first picked up on search engines, did you actually realize how important they were gonna be and how much it would change everything?
Barry Schwartz: No, I was too young. Like now with this whole AI ChatGPT generator of AI stuff from Google, Bard, whatever you wanna call it, I see how important that is. And I keep, I tell, I’m telling people, even like family and stuff and friends, this is big. This is probably as big a search, maybe bigger at one point in the future.
This is as big as, is almost as big as the internet. But when I was doing search back then, I didn’t know I was just a kid. I was literally, 16, 17, 18. I really did not know. I can’t, I’m not one of those people like that could say yeah I saw this coming. I think you interviewed Bruce Clay and he saw it coming, but he had years and years of experience.
I was just a little kid, I could be his son, I didn’t, I couldn’t, I cannot say that search was being that big. In fact, when Google IPOed, I’m like, there’s no way I’m gonna, buy their stock and make a bunch of money on it. Oh, 90, 90% of their income comes from just search ads.
I can’t go ahead and buy a company stock that just depends on search ads. And they’re not diversified at all. So I bought two shares just to have token shares. And that’s one of my best performing stocks, even though it’s only two shares since I started investing.
Although I did buy Apple when I was like 16. So that’s by far my best stock. But Google, I didn’t think Google would be big even when I was from the IPO in, which was what, 2004, 2005? This is even after I start covering it, which is pretty interesting. I thought they were big then in terms of search, but in terms of a big company that would change the world and everybody would depend on them.
Obviously now they’re a whole totally different company, but it’s always fun to look back and say how, dumb. I was, I guess in the early days.
Shelley Walsh: I always find it really interesting, I was brought up in a pre internet, pre Google world where you actually had to go to libraries and talk to people in person and things.
I see that as a good thing that I’ve been able to see both sides. Whereas obviously, if you are born today, you have no idea. You have no concept of a life pre-internet. And so I think for me it’s been interesting. I’ve really watched that transition of the revolution, like the digital revolution.
I always find it really fascinating that the majority of people are walking around and they don’t have that concept of the digital revolution and how much it has changed everything.
Barry Schwartz: I just, I agree. I grew up, my father had the old computer with the phone that you put on the receiver that made that noise to get on through the internet. It was like a really prehistoric internet. So I grew up with the internet maturing, which was I think a really great time to grow up.
Shelley Walsh: When did you start to get involved in the forums? You said that you were having a look at the beginning just to do some research, is that right?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, so I guess I did some research. I discovered some early forums I guess was Jim’s world, Crea8site forums, Webmaster World, Jill Whalen’s forum High Rankings and then later these other forums came up, like SEO Chat and other ones. And I think that I discovered personalities, some that you’ve interviewed, like Mike Grehan. He had a book out I think at that point. Yeah. Mostly covering how search worked, the patents behind it and stuff like that.
I think I read Shari Thurow’s book which was a white hat book of how to do SEO, which was really the fundamentals around making sure your sites are easy to crawl and you have good content, you get links to your site. So I remember those books and they were like some of the early people who actually produced content outside of Danny Sullivan around that topic.
And then after I read Mike’s book, I’m like, oh, this is fascinating. I dug into all these search patents, which I think a lot of early on SEOs did. They printed out these search patents, trying to understand how link graphs work and how search engines crawl the web and all this type of stuff.
But I was a 19 year old doing basketball scrimmages. And I’m sitting in the stands waiting for my turn to go on the court. I’m just like reading patents while I’m waiting to get on to play basketball. And following the forums, people, the Google dances in the old days, people coming up with these hacks to see like the early sandbox days where people were like, if you put in this query, you could see the pre sandbox results.
If you put it in this quick way, you could see the post sandbox results. It was just super fun. So I think it was like 2001 or so when I started to get involved on a day-to-day basis in the forums. Forgot which one was the first forum I went to. I think if I’m correct, I think Jill Whalen actually banned me early on.
Because I was dropping links to a tool I made called Google Count, which then Google sent me illegal cease and desist to stop using the name Google which was one of the first, I think it was the first rank tracking tool that used the original Google search API to do it in a legal way.
And then Digital Point came out with their free tool, so that killed that business. And then you have all these other toolmakers like Fishkin, SEO Moz and so forth that came out afterwards. So those were like the early days of me getting into the SEO space.
Shelley Walsh: Just to slightly diversify I find it really interesting that you’re not a practicing SEO.
When you were learning all this knowledge, did you never think about getting into SEO yourself? Were you experimenting yourself?
Barry Schwartz: For sure. I was. I definitely experimented. I think early on, I did a lot of things to experiment. I tried the content stuff.
I think the things that worked were very interesting. Sean from Digital Point made this digital point co-op network, which is basically like a private blog network but like a link thing where you link the more links you link out to, the more links you get.
So I created that and I started using it and I was able to literally rank for mesothelioma one of the most competitive keywords back in like early two thousands. I was like ranking number one for that keyword. I didn’t really monetize it too well. At one point when Adsense came out, I was like see if I can actually make some money on it.
But then I removed it quickly because I just wanted to experiment to see how these things actually interacted. So you see somebody talking about something in a forum you wanna see if it actually works when you report about it. So I did a lot of that. I remember early days when people would create like doorway pages
So they call ’em doorway pages where you create a page that says city name and then the keyword you wanna rank for. So let’s say it’s, web design in New York, or web design in the city, or whatever it might be. So I went ahead and hacked together, I don’t know, probably like 20 different content templates with the city name and with keyword term and put it on my website.
It worked for a minute, then it stopped working after Google figured it out across my site. I forgot about it that those pages were there. And then I get an email, I think from Matt Cutts I have people at Google that wanna ban your website for doing this.
I’m like, honestly, I totally forgot about it, but if you feel like it needs to be banned, fine, I’ll remove it. He knew it wasn’t ranking anymore but it was a clear violation of Google’s guidelines. Although when I did initially, there were no guidelines. I’m sorry I did it initially.
But it was me saying, all right, how can I test what people were doing in the SEO. I did a lot of that in the early days to see what people were saying and the forums actually gonna actually work and it didn’t work for a little bit until Google, it was like a cat mouse game as like people did this Google quote audit, got rid of it.
So I remember getting that email from Matt we redesigned the site three years ago. And now you would never do that. You’d never do anything like risky like that on a website.
But yeah, I mean I think those are some examples of stuff that I’ve tried and of course producing content on a daily basis, making websites that have public facing stuff. You have to think about how you can make those pages search user friendly. All the basics around seo. The basics of SEO really haven’t changed from the early nineties or late nineties to today.
You wanna make sure you create web pages and have good content that can be crawled by an index. Back in the old days, people created pages where you click on a URL every single time you clicked on. Let’s say you clicked on a category page for, I don’t know, blue sneakers. Every time somebody, a user clicked on that blue sneakers link, we would create a new session ID and a new url, and that would confuse the heck outta Google.
Because every single time somebody clicked on that blue sneaker category page, you would’ve infinite number of URLs. Those are the old ways, CMSs or content management systems and e-commerce platforms. We create webpages. They would create webpages using dynamics user session IDs, and that would create havoc for Google and search engines.
It’s like most common sense now, but back in the late nineties, nobody even thought about that. It was just like programmers building websites that work for users and users didn’t really care about the URL back then.
That was doing SEO and in the early days, we would build websites that would be search engine friendly. And that was novel in the early days. Now, we didn’t do SEO for them in terms of doing link building or content marketing or any of that type of stuff. We just made sites that not only were their backends efficient for the companies, but also making sure the front ends were actually delivering experience that search engines could crawl.
Shelley Walsh: So did you never experiment with offering SEO to your clients or did you not want to, was that not a path for you?
Barry Schwartz: I think once or twice we did. But I did not want to, I think we did it some clients said, please, we need help, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, I don’t have the time to do link building. I don’t wanna hire a link building company. I don’t wanna do content marketing. We are good at building out software.
A lot of our software applications on maybe 30% of them have front facing stops. You have to make sure the front facing stop that Google could crawl or search engine could crawl our search engine friendly, but at the same time at the same time you have to also, I’m reporting on it and I don’t want my reporting to be biased in any way.
Meaning there are many examples of Google coming out with a statement saying, this technique that SEOs have been using forever for a long time is no longer something that, or this is something that is against our guidelines. Like one example is guest blogging. Back in the old days, guest blogging was the number one SEO link building tactic you could do.
And when Google came out with that, I remember reporting, this is what Google said guest blogging, I basically said, this is not allowed. And then you have other SEOs who are doing blogging that have a business that sell SEO and they’re saying, yeah, Google said it. Guest blogging is a no no, but if you do it this way, then it’s okay.
Because that’s the way we as a company do it. That’s okay. And you’ve seen this happen over and over again over the years, but Google would come out with a statement saying, this is against our guidelines, and so forth. And they would then go ahead and be like it’s against the guidelines.
You can do it this way, but if you do it our way, we’re an SEO white hat company, we do it right. And I felt like I couldn’t really report on Google in an unbiased way if I actually performed SEO services for customers. So that’s one reason. The second reason is I also felt like I want to make sure the SEO community could actually trust me. I wanna make sure the SEO community could Trust me. And I wanted to make sure that Google at the same time, or the search engines can actually trust me as well. So I’ve had SEOs tell me things that I would never reveal, not even here. I’ve had Google tell me things and show me things that I would never in a million years, reveal even on here.
And this is gonna go on for the past, 20 or so years now where I’ve hope I be, I hope I’ve earned the trust of the SEO community and I hope I’ve earned the trust of people who work at search engines, Google and Bing and I think that comes from making sure to one report of things in unbiased matter.
To make sure that the people that you’re sourcing, you do it in the right and most ethical way possible. So I think that’s some of the reasons why I don’t do SEO.
Shelley Walsh: Okay. That’s really interesting. So just going back to Sorry, just taking you back a little bit back to the forums.
How integral do you think the forums actually were to the industry? Because, you were learning, this is where you were actively connecting with people in the early days. Do you think they were really important to actually establishing the industry?
Barry Schwartz: Yes. It’s a no-brainer. I think you speak to any early SEO. I think almost all of them came from learning stuff and sharing stuff in the forums. And most of those early SEOs have taught the SEOs of today what SEOs all about. Obviously these people like Bill Slawski, rest in peace. He was so all over the place on SEO forums.
Teaching people every single day, not with just like a one word or two word response, but literally paragraphs of responses. Helping people understand it. John, Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, Heather Lloyd Martin, Detlev Johnson, Brett Tabke. You name it. Like these industries. This industry has a list of names of people who spent countless hours over the years.
A lot of the people you actually probably interviewed as well, I think John Mueller. He spent so much time in the forums. Most of the people like Todd Friesen, you interviewed Greg Boser, these are all people who were literally sitting in the forums with forum on one screen and their SEO projects on another screen and just privately, like going ahead and saying, oh, this worked for me, this didn’t work for me, and this is how they, the SEO community kind of grew up. And it returned over the years, but I think these are the SEOs who taught the next generation of SEOs who taught the next generation of SEOs.
And I think those forums are very instrumental in the community growing. I don’t know if that’s with every, for every industry, but definitely with SEO it was like, you didn’t become an SEO in the old days without going to the forums. Some people were lurkers that just didn’t respond to people or didn’t post anything.
But you ask them, they’ll be like, oh, I read something on, the Jim’s World Forum or the old WebmasterWorld forums. And that’s where I learned to do this and that. I think everybody goes back to the SEO forums days, in the early days.
Shelley Walsh: We obviously don’t really have the same forum based culture now because I think social media took away quite a lot from that.
But do you think we could still benefit from forums now?
Barry Schwartz: I think so. The problem is people, at least this age, they’re just not used to long-winded responses. And it’s a shame. It’s just the new world we live in. People want quick answers to everything, and that’s why you get feature snippets in Google. That’s why you get big chat responses.
TikTok is so popular cause somebody does a dancing video with an answer and I don’t, this type of hack or that type of hack. People just want the answer in a very short way and short way to consume it, even if it’s not necessarily the best answer for that question.
So you don’t learn the insides and outs by just being told what to do. You have to be taught what to do and you don’t really, you don’t really get taught in a tweet, you don’t get really taught in a TikTok video. You don’t get taught how to do something in a featured snippet. You get maybe what is part of the answer there, but you don’t necessarily get the full way to understand.
Like in the forums we were taught how Google Bot crawled, we were given like, oh, download this script to understand and put into your database a way to see every single time Google bot crawls so you could actually pick up on their IP addresses and just to drill into how it’s working and how it’s crawling through your website.
Understanding, patterns and stuff like that. If you couldn’t understand, you would read Bill’s blog or you would read something that Bill posted in the forums. I don’t think a lot of the generation, especially the newer generation, they’re obviously the exception of generalizing and I don’t want people to be upset, but it’s the new world.
People just really wanna get content. They’re very fast and short answer and Google is showing that with feature snippets, which is funny. And I always joke around how Google ranks feature snippets, short little like two, three sentences. But yet when it comes to writing content, they want it to be really deep and detailed.
But now you need to have these fancy headers with big quotes and stuff. Because people don’t know how to consume content and the truth is, there’s just so much content on the web, so I don’t necessarily blame them. Like back in the old days it wasn’t so much content on the web, but now it’s just what do you consume? How much time do you have? And just so much out there. I think the current generation is missing out on not having the forums that we had in the old. Although Webmaster World is still pretty popular, still pretty active. Some of the Black Hat forums, like Black Hat World is pretty popular as well, although content is not always so great there, but it’s there are some nice threads there.
And like the local search forum from Troy Hawkins acquired several years ago is still pretty active and still pretty good. And then there’s the forums that Google manages, which they probably, one of the reasons why a lot of the forums died is because Google has their own forums now. But those are just really weird things.
But there are a lot of top contributors or top experts, I forget what they call, what their titles are. That volunteer, who don’t get paid by Google and Google takes ’em on a summit every year or so. So they do have good forums and good answers.
There are a lot of forums on the internet, but I think people consume more things on social media like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and so forth.
Shelley Walsh: Did you start Search Engine Roundtable as a summary of the threads in the forums? Is that right?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, so what I noticed is like a lot of people are posting things in informed threads. So a forum thread would actually go off on tangents. So you might have a forum thread that talks about, I don’t know, whatever a topic it is. And then somebody would actually go ahead and say we’ll branch off to another topic.
And there will often be lots of gems in a thread that maybe had a hundred posts in it. It might be a lot of little gems in there that people who are too busy to reap every single post that anybody made would not, would miss. So my concept was maybe if I hopefully find these gems, I can go ahead and highlight them at a higher level and pull them out of a hundred page thread and just pull out the most important, or I think the most novel ideas from that thread into one topic.
That’s why I built Search Engine Roundtable. To be a good SEO you have so much time in the day you need to actually do the job, but at the same time, you also need to read forums. So what if I pulled out a lot of, got rid of a lot of noise and just kinda highlighted the most important stuff that I found in threads.
And I did that. And I probably missed a ton of stuff, but that’s why I created SER. Because I’m going through the threads anyway. I’m like, I’ll just highlight what I think is the most important stuff and I still do that today. Although it’s not just forum threads, it’s tweets, it’s anything that’s really like public on the internet and social media.
That is what I cover.
Shelley Walsh: So you launched at SES in 2003, is that right?
Barry Schwartz: I think. Yeah. In December I went to SES Chicago, I think was the first conference I went to. I felt maybe I should do some live blogging and so forth. But I figured also, I’ll go to the sessions that people are speaking at and not everybody is going to, these sessions are too far, they’re too busy, they can’t afford it.
And I’ll just highlight what people are saying. I did something called live blogging. I wasn’t the first to do live blogging, I don’t think. One of the first, I think and I basically live blog, what people were saying in these sessions. And I, people I thought maybe the conference would be upset because people aren’t taking away money from the conference.
But the conference loved it. Eventually they actually said, you know what, here’s a press pass. You can come for free. I used to pay for years. I paid to go to these events out of my own pocket just to cover it and live, blog it and let people have it for free. And then they’re like, wait, why are you paying for it?
Why are you paying for this? Here’s a press pass. Come for free. Obviously they didn’t pay for the flight to the hotel, but they paid for me so that I didn’t have to buy a $1500 ticket, the event. So I did a lot of live blogging, which was good because it promoted the conference and it also promoted SEO.
It also got a lot of information out there from maybe case studies that people produced and so forth. So I think I started with that in December, 2003 at SEO Chicago. I remember correctly.
Shelley Walsh: Can you remember what the date is of your very first post?
Barry Schwartz: December second in 2003.
Yeah, it’s December, 2003. Second of December 2nd, 2003. It was just like a welcome to, I actually called it the Rusty Brick blog back then.
Shelley Walsh: So when you started out with your idea for Search Engine Roundtable, did you ever envisage it would become as big as it has or go for as long as it has?
Barry Schwartz: I never envisioned it to be big. I dunno if it’s big even now. It gets tens of thousands of visits, but that’s still a very niche type of blog.
I never, I guess I never envisioned it to be what it is now. Like I don’t think I thought about it that way. I just thought, hey, I’ll just keep notes about what I’m learning about SEO, both at conferences and on the forums. And I made it public for everybody to access and eventually people started reading it, commenting.
I think it’s how every early blog started. It’s like people just said, this is my diary, this is my online diary that people could read. And eventually some blogs became very big over the years and some. I think most early blogs became very big. In fact, I remember Brett Tabke invited me, I don’t know, 2004, 2005, I forgot what year it was to speak at one of the web Pubcon super sessions with some of the big bloggers.
I’m like, why are you inviting me? But I guess back then everybody, any new early blogger was big. And that was my first time really speaking at a big event.
I think there were like five thousand people in the crowd. And I have that photo somewhere.
Shelley Walsh: So you didn’t have any kind of vision or plan of what you were gonna do with the blog? It was just literally just recording your thoughts.
Barry Schwartz: That’s it. I was basically just keeping track of what’s the best way to keep track of what I’m reading and share it. And that’s how I did it.
I Posted stuff on a blog. Again, like I
think a lot of people did that and didn’t have any vision for it, and I didn’t have any goals for it. Blogging was so new that nobody really knew what it would do. But it’s just a very good way. I figure if you write something, you remember it, like one of the tricks is when you’re learning something is to write it down.
Yeah. Remember it. So that’s how I remember stuff by writing it down. So that was the plan. And still, even today, I don’t really have any specific goals or plans for Search Engine Roundtable. It’s just, keep doing what, I don’t really stop doing what I do. I just keep doing what I do without stopping.
Shelley Walsh: It’s going to be 20 years in December since you started that blog. How have you managed to keep the motivation with doing it all by yourself? Actually, have you used any other writers to help you?
Barry Schwartz: I have. So I’ve tried that. One is early on, I’ve initially tried to get some people like Bill and Ammon and so forth to actually say, Hey, you wrote this blog post this thread in this forum. Do you wanna go ahead and cover it? And you’re also in the forums too. If you find good stuff, you wanna go ahead and write about it.
Early on, people started doing that and they stopped and it was just hard to do for certain personalities. So at one point I was like, you know what forget it. I’ll just do it myself. Because being consistent in doing that, especially if there’s no real revenue model for it and you’re not paying them, you know what it is.
I hired Tamar Weinberg, a year or so, to do it as well. And she did it for a while. I basically said, write about this thread, or write about that thread. You can see a bunch of blog posts from her.
It really is just me for the most part. And I can do whatever I want there. Although I do occasionally mean occasionally, like maybe like a few times a year, have a Glenn Gabe or somebody else write a blog post on search and a round table. But rare, rarely do I have anybody else contribute these days.
Shelley Walsh: Do you know how many posts you have written on Search Engine Roundtable?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, it’s 32,157 to date.
Shelley Walsh: That’s pretty impressive. All for one person.
Barry Schwartz: I did the math like a couple months ago, at search engine land, I think I did over 8,000 posts there and probably 3000 on search engine watch. So I’m well over the 40,000 mark.
Shelley Walsh: How many posts do you write in a day?
Barry Schwartz: On average? Anywhere from five to 10. But they’re short. Like I, a very short post. It’s not like I’m writing a huge, massive article.
Shelley Walsh: Wow. Over 20 years. That is impressive.
Barry Schwartz: Most of it’s this person said this and I quote them and some more content and information and context around it. Most of its, a lot of it’s, John said this or Gary said this, or this was announced, or this threads going on.
So it’s mostly just Regurgitating what other people have said.
Shelley Walsh: I’ve done a lot of writing for a living and I know it’s really hard even at that level. Just pushing out that much every day.
Barry Schwartz: For me, it’s not, it’s just something I do.
Some people find certain things to be hard. Like I find I don’t know, fishing hard. I dunno this is my entertainment. Literally this is my hobby. I love doing it. I love writing stuff about search. And people don’t really understand that. I love doing it. I don’t necessarily do it for the paycheck.
I make a little bit of money on it, but thank God my main company really compensates me and we’re able to do well with my software development company. But this is my hobby. I probably spend, I don’t know, two hours, three hours, maybe max a day on it? Not that much, although it sounds like a lot, but it’s not.
Because I do it from 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM.
Shelley Walsh: Oh, you’re like the only other person in the world that gets about 5:00 AM like I do then I thought it was the only one.
Barry Schwartz: Yeah you get a lot done, right?
Shelley Walsh: Oh, yeah. It’s where it’s at. 5:00 AM is where it’s at, for sure.
Do you approach your reportage from love of search engines or actually love of the community?
Barry Schwartz: That’s a good question. I think it’s really both. Like bridging the Google announces this, or Google does this and this is what the community thinks about it, or this is how the community’s reacting to that. I think that’s the angle I try to cover. Or community did this, or SEOs found this hack and this is how Google search engines are approaching to stop that.
Google announced this new feature. I don’t know, whatever it might be. Now this is how SEOs or maybe the Pay Per Click community are leveraging it to make more money or to rank better or to whatever. So I think that’s the difference between reading. Let’s say Google just announced X, Y, and Z and that’s it.
It’s more about this is what the community thinks about that announcement. This is how the community’s reacting to that announcement. And the same thing goes the other way.
I love how the community and how much everybody shares in the community. Reporting on it, it makes it easier to report on the industry when people are sharing so much.
Shelley Walsh: Yeah, it’s certainly an exciting, fast-moving industry. One of the reasons why I love it so much is because it’s constantly evolving and it never stays still, and it’s just a fantastic intellectual challenge all the time of something new almost every day.
How much emphasis do you actually put into actively building the community?
Did the community just come naturally or did you really focus on how you could build that?
Barry Schwartz: So I think it does come naturally with the search roundtable concept. It’s all about getting comments and highlighting stuff from the community. That’s how it was originally. And I love the community so much.
I’ve been part of it. I love the people of the community. I love the fights in the early days of the community. I love trying to be the peacemaker sometimes if possible. There was a lot of early fights. I think we have a lot less of that.
It’s different because people used to leave forums, moderators used to leave because they were upset.
It was pretty interesting. People used to leave conferences and so forth. I guess it still happens. Maybe I don’t see it anymore, but yeah, I think it went hand in hand with the community but I do make a significant effort to promote people within the community.
Like I always cite people, I try to tag them on their social media profiles, on Twitter, Facebook and so forth. I really try to promote what people are saying and their personalities as much as possible. Because again, without the community we wouldn’t have any of this. So I think it’s really important to not take stuff as our own without citing where it’s coming from.
If not to cite something that’s not publicly announced as well, like you have to be very careful not to listen to somebody’s conversation and write about it without their approval. So the easiest way to do that is say, this person said this over here, this person said this. This person said this on Twitter.
This person said this on LinkedIn. I think that helps a lot. Always to credit the person who said it because if you credit that person who said it, they’re gonna go ahead and look for more things that are new and exciting and share more and more. And the more you cultivate the community to share, I think the more they get involved and help the community grow, it just builds upon itself, which is great to see.
Shelley Walsh: Would you call yourself a researcher or a documentor?
Barry Schwartz: I dunno if I’m much of a researcher, I did a lot of research on things. So I will test things to make sure what people are saying are true. Sometimes you can’t test things and you have to ask other people to help you test those things. But also sometimes I’ll be like, I’m documenting what this person’s saying.
There’s a lot of things you could easily see if you have experience with stuff and test it before you report about it. And I’ve gotten it wrong over the years. Good thing is the community calls me out if I get it wrong and I can update it. It’s a blog post. You can easily modify it, share again that you’ve got it wrong.
I honestly love getting things wrong. I don’t get things wrong all the time. Maybe once every month or maybe less. But if I do get it wrong, I will update that post immediately, quote how I got it wrong, say I got it wrong, and share that I got it wrong. I think getting it wrong makes you just makes you smarter just as much as getting it right.
Shelley Walsh: What’s your most memorable fail getting it wrong?
Barry Schwartz: Oh, good question. I guess the biggest one was when Microsoft launched their live search engine I think it was like in 2000, I don’t know, four, 2005, something like that. I’m like, that’s it. Google’s dead. There’s no way Google’s gonna be able to compete. Microsoft back then had the operating system and they had the browser.
I thought that, hey, this is gonna be a big deal.
And even if their search quality isn’t as good as Google, I think people are gonna switch. I was wrong. Google people still went to google.com eventually Google built their own browser. They have Chrome, they have Android now. There was no mobile phone back then.
And I thought Microsoft would be massive in search back then. And you look at their stats, they never really did. And even to today with Bing Chat, it’s really making a little bit of a dent, but not much.
I was big on Microsoft dominating search. I think I wrote a blog post Bing or Microsoft would be dominating search in a few years and I was completely wrong
Shelley Walsh: In 2018 you got the Search Personality year award and your personal brand is probably one of the most recognizable in the industry.
Did you ever actually actively consider your personal brand? I know a lot of people now talk about personal brand and developing personal brand. Did you ever actually think about that or was it just secondary to everything you were contributing?
Barry Schwartz: Not really. I still don’t use my name as my handle.
Back in the old days we used nicknames as handles. So I used my company name Rusty Brick, which is like a nickname as my handle. It’s still on Twitter, it’s Rusty Brick. A lot of the formus, it’s Rusty Brick. I don’t really think about Barry Schwartz as the name but it just goes hand in hand I guess with covering so much where people just recognize you.
I don’t really think about building a personal brand, I never went about it like a personal brand.
I’m not really like the type of person that looks to be on the stage or something like that. In fact, for many years I refused to moderate any sessions on panels. I just said I’d rather just cover it and share with the community, not, speak on stage. But then, as Danny Sullivan started to like wind down and move outta that space, somebody had to step up for that conference.
I do love being the first person to share something, I love being the first to break a news item and stuff like that. But I don’t know if I think I’d do it for the personal brand purpose, but it’s nice to be able to see so many people follow you and sharing what you share.
At the same time, that comes with some hate as well. It goes hand in hand. But, I never thought about it like, I need to build Barry Schwartz as a brand or something like that. I didn’t really think about it that way.
Shelley Walsh: Do you think today people are getting more focused on their personal brand?
Do you think it is becoming more important?
Barry Schwartz: I think for a while people have been. I think a lot of people think it’s important, and I don’t think it’s not important. I think for a lot of people to grow in their careers, they have to have a brand and where people could say, this person’s well known in this industry for this and that.
I think it helps them get job opportunities, helps get clients and so forth. Again, I don’t sell SEO services, so it’s not like I’m trying to get business from my personal brand. It’s a whole different way of thinking about it. Whereas a lot of people in the SEO community do that and they should go ahead and build up their personal brand or their company brand so that they could get business and that earns trust and respect and it builds up their ability to charge what SEOs should be charging for their services because they are known as an expert in.
I just try to share as much as possible. Obviously the more people like to share my stuff, the more people that read it, but it’s not like I’m making a dollar more because somebody’s viewing my article five times more. It doesn’t work like that. I don’t know. There’s no monetary reason for me to do that, if that makes sense.
Shelley Walsh: But obviously building a personal brand to the level that you’ve managed to achieve, has to be quite a reward as a thought leader. There’s a lot of value in that. If you were to suddenly start an SEO company, you would probably have a lot of people wanting to work with you. As a thought leader, you’re very much sought after your opinion, and that has a huge value. But also, personal achievement.
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, it’s always nice getting an award. Getting that award with PubCon that was really nice, is really meaningful.
I got a couple other awards over the years as well. It’s nice when people like to call you out as being helpful and stuff like that, especially when you get people from the SEO community doing it as well as people from the search engines. Also, when John Mueller says nice things about you or whatever when Google and you get, you speak to somebody at Google that you’ve never met that has been running Google search for the past 20 years and they know who you are.
It’s shocking, but it’s flattering at the same time. Yeah, I’m not gonna say it’s not nice, but it’s not why I necessarily do what I do. I do it because it’s the passion of the community.
It’s the way it changes and how fast it changes. But of course, getting, those call outs here and there saying it’s great. Saying what you do is very helpful. People have told me over the years that I’ve helped them with their careers directly or indirectly, I’ve helped them build their businesses directly or indirectly.
That is super rewarding. And it’s an honor to be in a position where, you know, where I can make a difference in this small industry, if that makes sense.
Shelley Walsh: Yeah, definitely. It’s a reward, isn’t it? You put a lot of hard work in, for example, this series I’ve been doing, the SEO pioneers, it’s an incredible amount of work.
It’s not the same as what you’ve done over 20 years. But it’s a huge amount of work that goes into it and time and it, it’s hard trying to fit that in with really demanding full-time work. And then when John Muller mentioned it on Google Search Central, and that was just such a huge, amazing feeling because you just put in so much without expecting anything back.
Barry Schwartz: It does keep your energy going, but it does. It’s nice to have a passion about something. Do it for a while and then people say, wow, that’s really good stuff. Not that you’re doing it for any other purpose than because you love doing it for yourself and you think it’s something that you like doing and it’s like a hobby, like you said, it’s something you really love, but then if it helps other people, it’s like a double win.
Shelley Walsh: So just going back, you mentioned something before about how you love to break breaking stories.
You love to be at the cutting edge and getting the breaking stories on things. So how are you managing to, how do you manage to keep at the edge of the news? What are you following? What’s your secret? How are you sourcing?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, I follow everything.
Almost everything. All the public forums. I follow a lot of stuff on social, mostly on Twitter, but a lot of stuff on social as well across Twitter. LinkedIn, Facebook is tricky because a lot of stuff is private.
People also send me tips all the time, both on social media and via email. I have tons of RSS feeds and I have tons of bookmarks. I follow a lot of stuff. I even have some track automatic technology I built myself to track a lot of stuff to see when things change and so forth.
So I just really try to stay on top of everything. I check in the early mornings and I check later, like late afternoons to see what’s changing and then. I have dashboards and stuff that I could be alerted of when something big changes and so forth. So it’s just being able to know where to look, how often to look and if something needs to be looked at more often.
You can set up tools to track them a little bit faster for you. But again, it’s really about my opinion. The reason that things have helped me be on top of things more often is becuase I cite a lot of people in the community and give credit where credit is due.
So as long as you treat the sources as the sources and you respect them and they respect you, I think it just helps.
Shelley Walsh: How many hours reading are you doing a day?
Barry Schwartz: Probably, I dunno, two hours.
So two hours, probably less than two hours. I don’t know. I read very fast, incredibly fast. I also talk very fast. I write very fast. I’m crazy about being super efficient, like insane. Like it bothers my wife. How crazy. I’m about being efficient. Like even stupid things like keeping my phone in this pocket as opposed to my pocket over here.
Because it’ll save me half of a second to actually get your phone in your face, those types of things. Like I look for ways to cut any step out of the process or even a partial step out of the process to be a little bit more efficient so that I can spend more time doing what I need to do and less time doing the other things.
Which is what my company does. Rusty Brick builds software to make companies more efficient. And that’s my other passion is just about how we make things more efficient. I get more productivity out of what a person does or a company does. It’s just, that’s how my brain works and it helps me do what I need to do in terms of the SEO side as well.
Shelley Walsh: Your website Search Engine Roundtable, it’s not being updated. Like the design hasn’t been changed in how long?
Barry Schwartz: I actually redesigned it a few years ago. My development team’s so busy with client work that it’s hard for me to pull them off the client work to work on my side Hobby project. And it’s such an old platform. It’s gonna take a while to update the design and some of the features on it. So I have this new design, which is now dated, which I wanted to implement, although I have a nice mobile app. The SER app is a really great way to consume the content as well. But yeah, it’s something that I need to sorely work on and I probably can’t even just implement that new design anymore.
I have to go ahead and redesign the redesign that I have never implemented. Just cause, you know how they say, but the shoemaker always has my tears in the shoes and stuff like that.
Shelley Walsh: I almost feel like its got such a nostalgic feel about it now, and there’s something about it that makes it feel really honest and I almost feel like if you were to like drastically and radically update the design now, we’d be like, Ooh, what’s happened to search engine round table?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah. But at the same time, there’s so much code bloat on it, like authors, some old stuff like Authorships, some Google Plus profiles you probably see there.
It’s like legacy stuff that needs to be done. I’d probably just clean up the code base and launch it and add some basic SEO stuff that I’ve been meaning to add for a while. The pagination is all messed up and broken.
This is such legacy code. It’s such old stuff. There’s so much old content and this gets a tremendous amount of traffic that it’s like a scary project to work on. But eventually I’m gonna have to do it. I know it for sure. What platform is it on? It’s a custom cms. It originally was on Moveable Type.
I was gonna move to WordPress and you know what I’m gonna build my own thing. I like to be able to control and build it the way I work. Again, it’s well being fully optimized to work. When I type it’s HTML a lot of the stuff is not like I have a WYSIWYG editor. I don’t want a WSIWYG editor.
I know html. I can go ahead and make things bold and use bullet points and embed images and so forth. Using image tags. So it’s, most of the CMS is very basic. But yeah, if I were to rebuild it, it would basically be similar to how it is now. Just the code output would be a lot cleaner and the design would be a lot more modern.
But it’s a custom CMS.
Shelley Walsh: I actually prefer writing HTML myself as well. It’s like whenever I’m in WordPress, I always switch to the code view and never use the WYSIWYG. I just find it much cleaner and much easier to use.
So just going back a little bit again, I just wanted to talk a bit more about the SEO community.
You’ve been an integral part of it for 20 years – how do you think it’s evolved over 20 years?
Barry Schwartz: I think it’s matured a lot.
I think it’s no longer a bunch of hackers or geeks in their bedroom. Geeks in the bedroom, just like hacking things together. I think it’s just a lot more mature. I’m sure there are a lot of people that are hacking stuff in their bedrooms, but it’s different. You now have like SEOs who are VPs of SEOs at companies.
Who would’ve thought. It’s way more corporate professional things. Also, like the things that moved a lot off the forums. You have the social media now that’s pretty popular.
And now people take SEOs very seriously this days. So I think it’s a lot better in terms of being more respected and more professional. But I miss the old days of things being a little bit scrappy and a little bit more happy and stuff like that.
In the old days plus it was a smaller community, so it was much more everybody knew each other, especially in the forums, whereas now it’s like, there’s so many people. Did I really meet you? It’s hard to know. So it’s definitely a different it’s not as like small of a community, but it’s, I think for overall it’s all for the best, I think, to see the industry mature so, so much over the past 20 years or so.
Shelley Walsh: how do you feel now about social media, where it’s at today, with kind of the outrage that we seem to experience.
It seems that you could literally tweet anything and someone, somewhere, it’s gonna be outraged by what you’re saying.
And there just now seems to be so much negativity and hatred and do you not see this?
Barry Schwartz: I think we always had that. I think we had this in the forums too. You would say something in the forums, people would be like, you’re an idiot. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
There’d be lots of fights. So I don’t know if it’s changed much. I’m not sure how much it’s changed per se versus how much more accessible it is and how many more people are in the industry. I think overall it’s actually a lot better than it used to be in terms of the hate and stuff like that.
I do think overall it’s been getting a little bit better. Again, because social media is also pinned to somebody’s name as opposed to just being some type of abstract avatar that people used to use, like some weird name. And now that people like on Facebook, use your real name on Twitter.
Most people, not everybody, a lot of people use their real name. But I think it helps a little bit by people using their real names. Although a lot of people don’t, but most people, a lot of people do these days.
Shelley Walsh: So you say you get a lot of tips. You must have had a lot of interest in stories pushed through you, pushed to you over the years.
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, a lot. It’s hard to, I’m getting, I wrote close to over 40,000 articles.
Yeah. So it’s been a lot. Yeah.
Shelley Walsh: So you must get to hear a lot of things that you can’t ever publish.
Barry Schwartz: I’ve heard a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I haven’t covered a lot of stories over the years that would be great to cover. But again, if I can’t link to something that was publicly said by somebody, I will not cover it.
So that’s my rule.
And I hope never to cross that line in the future. And one way of doing that is to say, if somebody doesn’t, if it’s not publicly available, that I could link to it in a tweet or a forum thread or a blog post that I will not cover it.
Shelley Walsh: Are there any stories that anybody ever sent you that now looking back, you think, I really wish I had shared that.
And you didn’t at the time? For some reason
Barry Schwartz: I don’t know. No, I think it would be cool to have shared certain things. I wouldn’t mention what they were. Because I can’t really talk about them, but I have no regrets of not sharing something that was sent to me in confidence that could have potentially hurt either the SEO community, an individual, or even the quality of Google search results.
And no regrets not sharing that type of stuff. Sometimes I’ll be sent stuff like a weird bug with Google that could be manipulated. I would ask the person who sent it to me, do you mind if I send this directly to Google? If they say yes, I will forward it to somebody at Google that I know and never cover it.
That probably happens at least once a month. I will ask the person who sent it to me permission to send it to them. And if they say yes, I will forward it over to one or two different people at Google that I know could deal with it whenever they wanna deal with it. If somebody then goes ahead and tweets about that issue, I probably won’t cover it.
But if it’s not out there, I’m not gonna be the one who’s gonna go ahead and be like, You’re the guy who went ahead and made this a bigger deal, and it should have been. I don’t wanna, yeah, I don’t wanna cause issues, if that makes sense. I wanna report about what’s there. I don’t wanna be the person that people are reporting about.
That makes sense.
Shelley Walsh: That makes sense. It’s a huge amount of integrity. You’re in a very powerful position, you’re in a position of authority and it is a massive amount of integrity that you follow of what you will and won’t publish.
And again it’s obviously why you’ve got to the position where you are so well respected from both sides, from SEO and search engines because you take that position. And I thoroughly, I a hundred percent agree with it. I would never out anybody for anything unnecessarily ever.
Barry Schwartz: I don’t think they do it on purpose. They just thought, oh, this is great to share. They don’t really think about how it might impact something. I hope I’ve never done that. Hope, I never will do that in the future. But again, if something’s publicly out there, I will cover it once it’s out there.
But I’ve received those things and I continued to see, receive things like that over the years. Yeah.
Shelley Walsh: How long have you had a direct relationship with Google? Did they get in touch with you or did you manage to build that relationship yourself?
Barry Schwartz: I dunno. I don’t know how long, I guess since I, I don’t know, 2004, 2005.
I was one of the few people covering the space and probably met people at conferences. I remember people like Yahoo, invited me to their stuff, having me interview like Tim Meyer back in the yellow days. Matt Cutts, going on walks with Matt Cutts.
I like to sit in the background and then cover what people are publicly saying about it. I’m not the person that kind of tries to get that interview with that CEO or goes to them and take a picture with them.
You don’t see any pictures of me with Eric Schmidtz and the CEO of Yahoo in the early days and stuff like that. Because I wasn’t the type of person that would walk over to somebody, be like, let’s take a picture or could I sit with you.
Of course I cover the stuff, but I always like to bring the communities’ thought process into that as well as possible.
Shelley Walsh: Are you driven with a passion for really being at the cutting edge of the technology, do you think?
Barry Schwartz: Yeah, I think so. I love getting like upgrades to their software programs.
I love it. Like always the first upgrade stuff. I like experimental stuff. I love beta stuff. I think that helps a lot. Yeah, for sure.
Shelley Walsh: Looking back, I’m pretty sure I know what you’re gonna say to this, but looking back, do you think you would change anything if you could do anything differently?
Barry Schwartz: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I would change anything. Trying to think if there’s anything I did. Yeah, this is like maybe one blog post. I probably would’ve, I did, although it went it met all my guidelines about writing stuff. But outside of that one, it’s the one blog post I have in my robots.txt file, if you wanna look it up it’s the one blog post. But basically it hurt a young teenager. And that wasn’t my intent at all. I didn’t think anybody read it, not for the SEO community, but it ended up hurting a teenager. I guess I can tell the story. You may have heard it before.
Basically there was somebody who posted it on social media that a girlfriend was getting back at her boyfriend. I guess they were in high school. And the girlfriend basically spammed Google images. This is probably like 10, 15 years ago.
And I thought, this is great. You have some high schooler using SEO tactics to get back at their boyfriends. So I did a story about how this girlfriend used SEO to get back at their boyfriend. SEOs would love it. And all of a sudden I saw a ton of traffic to it and I saw oh my God, TMZ, CNN, all these major publications and gossip magazines also were covering it.
I’m like, why do they care about this stuff? And the family called me from the boyfriend saying, could you remove it? I’m like, absolutely. I thought it was like an SEO thing. Nobody would actually see outside our community. So that I probably wouldn’t have covered in hindsight if I knew it would’ve got that big.
And that was super rare for anything to get that big. But overall outside of that, I don’t think I have any regrets. I don’t think, should I? No.
Shelley Walsh: No. It’s all, that’s a life well lived, it’s a life well lived. Yeah. We all make mistakes. Like you were talking earlier about making mistakes, and I think mistakes are really important because if you’re not making mistakes, it means you’re not trying stuff and you’re not trying new stuff.
I look back at some early work I did, and I still literally now I all the time, I’m like, oh my God, that was so embarrassing if that was to come out. But then I think, no. Do you know what, I was experimenting. I was trying, I was, I was working hard to keep trying new things and putting myself out there.
Don’t be embarrassed about it. Don’t be ashamed. I did it. It was awful. And you know what I did? I learned, I picked myself up and I moved on and just kept going. You got to make mistakes.
Barry Schwartz: I said earlier, being wrong I think is even more valuable, You learn from those mistakes and you get better from it. For sure.
Shelley Walsh: I think more importantly, you learn humility as well. And I think that’s really important to learn.
Barry we’ve been talking, I could keep talking, but we have been talking for quite a long time, so I’m gonna have to wrap up, but I just wanted to ask you one last thing and do you ever sleep?
Because honestly, it doesn’t seem to matter what time of day I ping you or somebody pings you, you will respond immediately. It seems like you live online 24/7. And how do you keep up that pace.
Barry Schwartz: It’s a routine. It’s being very efficient.
I do sleep, I need sleep. So I do sleep. Although I work very hard when I’m awake, I work very hard. I’m very efficient. I’m very efficient about how I get things done. I’m very productive. And having a routine helps with that as well.
It looks like I don’t sleep, but I definitely do sleep yeah.
Shelley Walsh: Well, Barry, I have to thank you for your time and I’ve been really looking forward to talking to you and thank you so much for coming on and my pleasure. Thanks so much for sharing your past. I appreciate it.
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