Hey friends, welcome to a special "Best of 2024" re-release of an insightful conversation with Matt Wolfe. This episode is one you won't want to miss again—Matt and I chat about how his strategies and extensive experiences in digital marketing and content creation and how it's built him a media empire. We delve into diverse subjects like the intricacies of music licensing, maintaining consistent content production, dealing with internet trolls, and exploring the exciting potential of AI tools. Matt walks us through his journey, emphasizing the critical role of video thumbnails, the art of managing teams, optimizing old content, and his shift from direct response to brand marketing.. So, let's dive back in!
Creating content consistently while handling sponsorship obligations poses a significant challenge. Matt uses systems and teams to help manage this workload. He notes the struggle of meeting old sponsorship agreements as his audience grows, often facing backlash and negativity from viewers who dislike too many ads. Balancing quality content and sponsor requirements remains a critical focus.
Matt shares that when it comes to managing content, it’s crucial to have strong systems in place. Assigning team members specific roles helps in maintaining a smooth workflow. He notes the importance of continuously optimizing old videos. For example, he adjusted a video’s thumbnail and title, which led to a massive boost in views. Click-through rates (CTR) are important, and Matt emphasizes testing different thumbnails and titles for better results.
Handling trolls and negative comments is part of being a content creator. Matt talks about developing a thicker skin and understanding that not every viewer will appreciate the content. He explains that he now focuses more on engagement through Discord and X, where more constructive feedback happens. However, he still has team members review YouTube comments for useful feedback.
Matt’s transition from direct response marketing to brand marketing in emails reflects the changing landscape of digital marketing. He prioritizes providing valuable content directly within emails to achieve high open rates. He targets about 35-40% open rates, with the most important news at the top followed by sponsor content. This strategy helps ensure higher engagement and a more loyal audience.
Discussing the value of data, Matt mentions that his website, Future Tools, receives almost a million visitors monthly through effective SEO. This has led to acquisition offers because of the valuable database of tools and related data. AI tools also play a significant role in his workflow. Matt uses tools like Claude, which can code and create video games, and looks forward to the release of Sora for one-minute videos.
Community building remains a core part of Matt's strategy. Engaging with his audience on social media and in person helps build a more loyal community. Active participation and approachability are key. While he focuses less on YouTube comments due to negativity, other platforms like Discord and X help maintain valuable feedback and engagement.
Matt Wolfe suggests an alternative approach to music licensing, similar to Grimes' method, where artists grant broad permissions for using their music but maintain some control to ensure it’s not linked to harmful content. This makes licensing easier and could transform how music is used in various media.
AI is evolving fast, and Matt is most excited about AI integrations in wearable tech, such as AI glasses that assist in social interactions. He also highlights the potential of agentic AI tools that can perform tasks on behalf of users. Connecting AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude shows potential, with companies like Mind Studio already working on building these systems.
This episode with Matt Wolfe is packed with practical advice and forward-thinking ideas. We discussed everything from alternative music licensing and consistent content creation to AI tools and community building. Matt’s insights into managing and optimizing content, dealing with negativity, and leveraging AI for future trends provide valuable takeaways. Tune in to learn more and apply these strategies to your own content journey.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Hustle & Flowchart Podcast!
If the information in these conversations and interviews have helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes (or wherever you listen), subscribe to the show, and leave me an honest review.
Your reviews and feedback will not only help me continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help me reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you!
you can actually 100 do really well with SEO with AI generated content.
Speaker:Google does not give a crap and not only does it not give a crap,
Speaker:it has no way of knowing whether or not your content was generated
Speaker:with AI or handwritten by a human.
Speaker:No way of knowing.
Speaker:I know there's AI detectors out there.
Speaker:They suck.
Speaker:They don't work.
Speaker:They're not as accurate as everybody believes they are.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I want to pull out one of the most popular episodes this year and rerun it
Speaker:for y'all because it was super impactful.
Speaker:Not only to you guys, but to me, it's one that I.
Speaker:Thought a lot about, and it's close to my heart because it's also one
Speaker:of my best friends, Matt Wolfee.
Speaker:Now he used to be the cohost of this podcast, Hustle and Flowchart.
Speaker:And for a lot of years, and now he is deep into the AI news world.
Speaker:He's kind of like the ne AI news guy, you know, he's the go-to guy, almost
Speaker:700,000 subscribers there and YouTube.
Speaker:Millions of people going to his website, future tools.
Speaker:I O and in this episode, what we did is we broke down how he's done all this
Speaker:stuff, how he's built out the YouTube channel, his website, how AI and AI
Speaker:content can help you generate, but also automate so much in your business.
Speaker:And he literally breaks down all the tactics, you know, how the guy works,
Speaker:and if you don't follow him on YouTube, you know, definitely go do that.
Speaker:But you're going to enjoy this episode before you get in there.
Speaker:I want to shout out the Delphi, Digital Mind clone that you've seen, maybe.
Speaker:Or you've heard me talk about, but I want you to test it.
Speaker:That's the big thing.
Speaker:So hit pause right now.
Speaker:Go over to your browser and type in hustle and flowchart.com/clone C L O N E.
Speaker:That gets you to a page it's totally free.
Speaker:You can interact text, voice, or video with my AI twin,
Speaker:and it has this digital mind.
Speaker:The second mind that's trained on every episode and YouTube
Speaker:video and content I've put out.
Speaker:you can interact with it and actually customize it to your situation, your
Speaker:business scenario, whatever you're trying to learn or engage or think about really.
Speaker:This thing will understand you.
Speaker:Like I'm a human, you're a human and, and it's, it's crazy.
Speaker:You just got to try it out for yourself.
Speaker:So hustle and flowchart.com/clone will get you there.
Speaker:Enjoy this episode with my good buddy Matt Wolfe
Speaker:Mr.
Speaker:Lobo, Mr.
Speaker:Matt Wolfe.
Speaker:How are you,
Speaker:Mr.
Speaker:Fierro, uh, or, or as I call you, Jose Fierro.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:it feels like home.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Back at it.
Speaker:to have you.
Speaker:And of course we are probably gonna, I don't know how long this episode will go.
Speaker:We do have a hard stop, which is probably good for
Speaker:everybody here.
Speaker:probably
Speaker:cause we've already been chatting for like 40 minutes without recording.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:uh, I if, if, if, uh, if we could, we'd probably do like Joe
Speaker:Rogan style four hour episodes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Well, that's what, so we're doing.
Speaker:Oh, we didn't, we never did that.
Speaker:I think our longest was
Speaker:like two and some change back in this show.
Speaker:I feel like we might've done like one or two, three hour episodes, but we broke
Speaker:it up into like two parts if we did.
Speaker:Everybody thinks us for that . Yeah.
Speaker:But so you're back for those, the, the minority or maybe majority, who knows,
Speaker:um, that, that know or don't know you?
Speaker:This is Matt Wolfe.
Speaker:He was my co-host for many a years starting off the
Speaker:Hustle and Flowchart podcast.
Speaker:And, um, you?
Speaker:know, we've been
Speaker:partners on various things over the last, I don't know,
Speaker:15 years or whatever it's been.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:I stopped counting.
Speaker:I'm like this show, I was looking at the sign over here.
Speaker:You can't see it.
Speaker:I was like 2017.
Speaker:Cause I've been saying like seven years, eight years.
Speaker:I'm like, no, it's nine years just for this podcast.
Speaker:yeah,
Speaker:damn.
Speaker:That's crazy.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, I know both of us sort of quit our day jobs, So, to speak in 2009.
Speaker:So we've both been full time.
Speaker:Uh, let's just say entrepreneurs for the last 15 years.
Speaker:There it is.
Speaker:So yeah, it's, I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker:So brother from another mother, we've always shared a lot of thoughts,
Speaker:different types of brains collaborate.
Speaker:And that's, what's always been fun to jam.
Speaker:And that's
Speaker:what like.
Speaker:It doesn't feel like we skip a beat, even though we're doing different stuff.
Speaker:Um, you're, you've, you know obviously done some awesome things on YouTube.
Speaker:A lot of people follow you for the AI stuff as they should.
Speaker:And if you're not look up Matt Wolfe, W O L F E on pod on YouTube.
Speaker:Um, future tools.
Speaker:I mean, it's referenced all the time, you know, for AI kind of database, finding
Speaker:what you need, cool tools out there.
Speaker:Um, I just feel like you've like, you've found the thing that
Speaker:you've wanted to do for so long.
Speaker:Yeah, no, I think, I think that's true.
Speaker:Like I've always been a sort of tech nerd, right?
Speaker:Like, uh, probably as long as you've known me, I've always been like a early
Speaker:adopter, get all the gadgets, play with all the toys, uh, test all the software.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Like that, that was, I feel like in the early days of creating content,
Speaker:people always came to me for like, what WordPress plugin should I use for this?
Speaker:What tools should I use for this?
Speaker:What's the best like funnel builders?
Speaker:People kind of always looked at me as the guy that just played with all the toys
Speaker:and like knew which toys did what, right.
Speaker:But at the same time, I was always really into content, right?
Speaker:We had the hustle and flow chart podcast.
Speaker:I had a YouTube, my first YouTube video I ever published was back in 2009.
Speaker:Um, you know, we were doing blog content together, so I've always loved content
Speaker:and I've always loved tech and gadgets.
Speaker:And I feel like when AI started to bubble up, you and I kind of talked
Speaker:about AI, like really early, right?
Speaker:Back in 2021 or so we were talking about.
Speaker:Uh, things like Jasper, which, uh, even before that, when it was conversion AI
Speaker:and then Jarvis and then Jasper, right.
Speaker:So we were talking about AI, I feel like way early before anybody else was.
Speaker:Um, and then, uh, I really started to get into AI because of like all
Speaker:the sort of visual stuff, stable diffusion, mid journey, like all of the
Speaker:cool, like AI art stuff, and when all the AI stuff started to bubble
Speaker:up in the mainstream, I kind of found that thing that was like, all right,
Speaker:I get to make content about the
Speaker:stuff that I'm really enjoying now.
Speaker:And I found that sort of like Venn diagram overlap of like, this is,
Speaker:this is my jam now, and I think it.
Speaker:I don't know people for whatever reason, I still don't understand it to this
Speaker:day, but for whatever reason, people gravitated to it and enjoy the content.
Speaker:What do you think it is?
Speaker:Like, have you figured out why you
Speaker:Uh, no, I asked that question constantly.
Speaker:Like I have no idea why people enjoy my content.
Speaker:Like I actually, when I'm making my videos, I, in my
Speaker:head, I'm usually thinking like, why would anybody watch this?
Speaker:I don't, I like, I, I don't actually think my content is good.
Speaker:So I'm always surprised that people watch it
Speaker:and leave good comments.
Speaker:Um, but I don't know, is that if that's just like a, I'm too close
Speaker:to my content, so I don't really
Speaker:see.
Speaker:Um, you.
Speaker:know, a lot of times I feel like I'm talking about stuff that to
Speaker:me is just like, well, I like, everybody already knows this.
Speaker:Like,
Speaker:why am I even making a video about it?
Speaker:Everybody already knows it.
Speaker:And then I put the video out and everybody's like, oh my God, mind blown.
Speaker:I didn't even know that existed.
Speaker:And so I think a lot of it is, um, I, I,
Speaker:I can speak based on the feedback I've gotten from other people who watch my
Speaker:going to ask you.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Like, uh, based on the feedback, people seem to like the sort of excitement,
Speaker:the like, uh, sort of little kid on Christmas opening a new present energy.
Speaker:Like, Oh, look at this new thing.
Speaker:This is awesome.
Speaker:Like, how do I, how are people
Speaker:not talking about this?
Speaker:Like that kind of energy, um, combined
Speaker:with
Speaker:totally keeping my finger on the pulse, probably to a level that
Speaker:most people aren't willing to do.
Speaker:Well, that's what.
Speaker:I think that's a good feedback that they're giving.
Speaker:And I think it's honest to like, you're not boring.
Speaker:Like if it was just you talking head, no editing, you know, maybe screen capture
Speaker:tutorial, like you would still do.
Speaker:pretty well, I think, you know, because you've, you've always been great at that.
Speaker:Uh, but then with the quick cuts, with the B roll, with all of these other,
Speaker:like little silly thing, you know, things that'll pop up or sound effects.
Speaker:Like.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Okay, now you just took it up that extra, I don't even call it like extra 20%.
Speaker:I feel like it's way more for YouTube, Like.
Speaker:engagement wise.
Speaker:you know, you and I, we both been in the digital marketing world
Speaker:for 15 plus years at this point.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So it's like, we learned all the little like marketing tricks to grab attention.
Speaker:Like.
Speaker:When I, when I'm thinking of titles for my YouTube videos, it's exactly the same
Speaker:as thinking of subject lines for emails.
Speaker:Like what is the thing that's going to get somebody to click this email and open it?
Speaker:Well, what is the thing that's going to get somebody to click
Speaker:this YouTube video to watch it?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So like all the sort of copywriting and intrigue and persuasion and all that
Speaker:kind of stuff that we learned is all.
Speaker:The same for digital marketing that we did for 15 years that I'm doing in YouTube.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, when it comes to creating video content, um, it's all the
Speaker:same strategies we've learned over the last 15 years of like making
Speaker:sure there's pattern interrupts.
Speaker:How do you hold the tension?
Speaker:How do you, um, you know, how do I make sure that I'm teasing out what's
Speaker:going to come later in the video?
Speaker:How do I open loops?
Speaker:It's like, All of the same stuff that we use when writing copy for a
Speaker:sales letter can be sort of applied over to YouTube videos, pattern
Speaker:interrupts, hold the tension, uh, open loops, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker:And so I'm constantly thinking about that stuff when I'm making YouTube videos,
Speaker:I'm thinking of it as like, okay, I've got this, uh, sort of pool of information
Speaker:that I want to share in this video.
Speaker:How do I make it a entertaining
Speaker:And B, uh, make people want to keep watching it.
Speaker:How do I make it so that, um, you know, three minutes in, they're not already
Speaker:like glossing over and, and bored of
Speaker:it.
Speaker:Like that's where the pattern interrupts come into play.
Speaker:That's where the open loops come into play.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So I'm, I'm just applying all the marketing skills that we've learned
Speaker:and all the content creation skills that we've
Speaker:learned and just mashing them all together around the topic of AI.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you've done that well.
Speaker:And I know the last episode we recorded here, I don't know, six months,
Speaker:maybe plus it's been a little bit, but, uh, we, we talked about that,
Speaker:like how it was like the three parts of making a great YouTube video.
Speaker:it's basically title, thumbnail hook, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Anything changed on that regard?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:much exactly the same.
Speaker:I mean, title thumbnail hook.
Speaker:Uh, in fact, I even think that focusing on retention is less important than it used
Speaker:to be.
Speaker:I
Speaker:Retention in the video.
Speaker:in the video.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I think it's less important than it used to be because I think.
Speaker:Um, people have gotten overwhelmed and sort of, they're just over what we
Speaker:call retention editing and retention.
Speaker:Editing is essentially like quick cuts, fast motion move.
Speaker:Like Mr.
Speaker:Beast has been like, people have used the term, the
Speaker:beastification of YouTube, right?
Speaker:The beastification of YouTube is like editing for retention, where
Speaker:it's all quick cuts, fast yelling at the camera, lots of B roll,
Speaker:lots of texts on the screen, uh, you know, explosions, like just.
Speaker:So much happening at once where your brain is just like, uh, overloaded.
Speaker:Like, oh my
Speaker:gosh, there's all, yeah, there's a lot going on.
Speaker:I can't look away.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, and I think people are kind of over that now.
Speaker:And there's been this shift back to like what YouTube was like 10 years ago, where
Speaker:it was more, um, like personal, right.
Speaker:The Casey Neistats, the, um, uh, David Dobrik's,
Speaker:the, like the vlogger style where people are just sort of sharing
Speaker:insights into their daily life.
Speaker:You look at people like, um, moist critical or penguin Z zero, right?
Speaker:His videos are just like a dude talking to the camera and commenting
Speaker:on like, whatever the latest news is.
Speaker:And he's one of the most popular YouTubers in the world right now.
Speaker:And he's literally just like face to camera commenting on stuff.
Speaker:No retention editing whatsoever.
Speaker:And he's one of the most popular YouTubers.
Speaker:There's another YouTuber named Sam Sulek right now, who's in the fitness space.
Speaker:And his videos are often an hour long and it's him just talking to the camera
Speaker:and like taking his camera to the gym and showing his workouts and stuff.
Speaker:And so some of the most popular YouTubers right now have started moving away
Speaker:from that retention editing and sort of building a bond with the audience.
Speaker:Like when you're not trying to.
Speaker:When you're trying to do retention editing, you don't really build a bond.
Speaker:You're just going and making these videos that are fast and keep moving
Speaker:and try to like overstimulate the brain.
Speaker:So people want to keep watching, but people don't necessarily
Speaker:fill a bond with the creator.
Speaker:When you sort of get rid of that retention editing and you just, um, focus
Speaker:on being a real person, focus on being that dude that other people want to
Speaker:go and sit down and have a beer with,
Speaker:right, that sort of
Speaker:content is what's rising to the
Speaker:top at the moment.
Speaker:So I've been kind of
Speaker:leaning into that.
Speaker:Um, and I feel like that's sort of my natural way of
Speaker:creating content is just like, I'm going to like, you know, me, right?
Speaker:The way I talk when
Speaker:I'm being recorded is exactly the same way I talk when I'm not being recorded.
Speaker:Yeah, you, you are really good at that and you have been for a long time.
Speaker:Like you just have that excitement.
Speaker:It legitimately is that kind of giddiness and that comes through.
Speaker:And, um, like for me, I've had to work on it over the years where I'm
Speaker:like a lot more subdued, but then it's like, no, hold on, you know,
Speaker:and, but now it's, it's feels natural.
Speaker:Um, well, how have you changed?
Speaker:Like to be, I guess your videos or like to have more of that bond,
Speaker:like what shifts are you making?
Speaker:Uh, so a lot less
Speaker:cuts, right?
Speaker:so I think a lot of people, when I first started making AI videos,
Speaker:I think a lot of people thought I was trying to do retention editing,
Speaker:but that was never really like
Speaker:my focus, I wasn't trying to edit to like
Speaker:keep like viewers attention.
Speaker:Um, my edits were because I just cut a lot of stuff out.
Speaker:Um, so if you watch one of my YouTube videos, it might be anywhere.
Speaker:I mean, I think I try to average the videos around 20 minutes.
Speaker:Sometimes there'll be a little longer.
Speaker:Sometimes there'll be a little shorter, but the, if you saw the raw
Speaker:video before I did any editing, it's probably an hour and a half long, right?
Speaker:I'll flip on the camera and I'll talk for an hour and a half and then I'll go in
Speaker:and I'll do like, all right, that's fluff.
Speaker:That's just me rambling.
Speaker:That's me.
Speaker:I already said that early in the video.
Speaker:I can cut that.
Speaker:Cause that's just redundant.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And so I'm cutting all that stuff out.
Speaker:And when I cut it all out, it starts to look like it's choppier
Speaker:and sort of edited for retention.
Speaker:But that's really me just like trying to cut out the fluff.
Speaker:Well, I think what's changed is I've gotten better at just not putting
Speaker:the fluff in, in the first place.
Speaker:So I don't have to cut it as often.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I think.
Speaker:I think it's just been a, a more of a, like a practice thing
Speaker:where I
Speaker:don't necessarily need to cut as much because
Speaker:my brain is getting better at getting to the point, not
Speaker:duplicating itself, not repeating myself
Speaker:and just saying what needs to be said and moving on.
Speaker:And so it starts to feel like I'm doing less and less of the retention editing.
Speaker:But it's just, I'm getting better at speaking on camera.
Speaker:There you go.
Speaker:Yeah, it's definitely practice.
Speaker:I came across here with, uh, with podcast stuff.
Speaker:I know this has been practiced for both of us over the years doing this show.
Speaker:And, and I know it's made me improve as a speaker and, and
Speaker:just, I think confidence, right?
Speaker:Like you just catch these ums or uhs or filler words that naturally you might
Speaker:say, and I definitely still catch them.
Speaker:But the power of editing, you still, you know, editing, AI editing,
Speaker:especially is, is quite easy and great.
Speaker:These days.
Speaker:Um, just kind of thinking, okay, so, and I love the, I think of lifestyle.
Speaker:It's like, it's bringing the human connection.
Speaker:Like, you mentioned bond and community because that's the case of like, for
Speaker:course, creators, for instance, actually had a Marissa Murgatroyd back on here
Speaker:recently.
Speaker:And, you know, it was five years before that.
Speaker:And, and even Sean Cannell, he was saying, he's like the big thing with courses
Speaker:and anything you're selling digital product, like you need to have community
Speaker:and, and it goes for media as well.
Speaker:Like, how do you, So you have your email list, but it's like, I tell,
Speaker:talk about the community side and, and I, kind of have some ideas, but
Speaker:I want to hear how you're doing it.
Speaker:So I, I put a big focus early on when I started the YouTube
Speaker:channel on discord as well, but
Speaker:I think so discord and X are probably where I focus on
Speaker:community the most.
Speaker:Um, if I'm being totally honest, I don't pay as much
Speaker:attention to the
Speaker:YouTube comments as I used to.
Speaker:Um, when it comes to YouTube comments, what I've sort of learned is that.
Speaker:Very similar to people who leave reviews on restaurants.
Speaker:They'll typically only leave a review if they have a bad experience, not
Speaker:when they have a good experience.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So like a lot of times you'll see reviews and, um, you got to take them with a
Speaker:grain of salt because most people that didn't like their experience are the ones
Speaker:that are most likely to leave a review, the people that liked their experience,
Speaker:they're just, they just go on with their life and, you know, don't feel the need
Speaker:to go, you know, Talk about it, right?
Speaker:YouTube comments are very, very similar.
Speaker:People tend to only leave comments if they disagree with something you said.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So most of the time I'll post a YouTube video and the comments are 90 percent
Speaker:the people that had something to disagree with something I said in the video.
Speaker:But that's like.
Speaker:3 percent of the people that actually view the video that
Speaker:actually leave the comments, right?
Speaker:The other 97 percent enjoyed the video and went on with their life.
Speaker:So for that reason, I actually don't really pay a whole lot of
Speaker:attention to the YouTube comments anymore saying that I do have a team
Speaker:member that actually reviews them.
Speaker:And if somebody is like leaving good, valuable feedback, that is like,
Speaker:could help me improve the videos.
Speaker:They're pointing me to it.
Speaker:If people are saying good things about the video.
Speaker:Um, like they're, they're helping me with that as well.
Speaker:There's also AI tools out there now that can do like sentiment
Speaker:analysis on your YouTube comments.
Speaker:Um, but most of the community building that I do is on X and inside of discord.
Speaker:And the way I do it is I just try to make myself as approachable as possible.
Speaker:Like if people.
Speaker:At me on Twitter or X, I pretty much replied to everybody.
Speaker:I'm reading the comments.
Speaker:I'm replying, uh, same with discord.
Speaker:If somebody is asking me a question in discord, I get in there.
Speaker:I'll answer the questions.
Speaker:I'm not reading the entire sort of feed that's going in discord.
Speaker:We've got 15, 000 members in there now.
Speaker:So like the feed is just too hard for me to keep up with, but I do
Speaker:have team members that are like, Hey, this person just asked a question.
Speaker:You should jump in and answer it real quick.
Speaker:And I will.
Speaker:And so I think the community element of it is really just me saying
Speaker:like, Hey, look, I'm a real dude.
Speaker:I'm here.
Speaker:Come ask me questions.
Speaker:Come talk to me.
Speaker:Like let's interact.
Speaker:Um, I go to a lot of events, right?
Speaker:I was at augmented world expo the week before recording this right now.
Speaker:Um, the week before that I was at a Cisco event in Vegas.
Speaker:The week before that I was in Seattle for a Microsoft event.
Speaker:Before that I was in, uh, San Francisco at Google IO.
Speaker:Um, I
Speaker:Tonight you're going to
Speaker:I was at NVIDIA GTC.
Speaker:I was at like, I've like, we're, we're recording this in June right now.
Speaker:And I've already been to about 10 events this year.
Speaker:So I'm actually out there shaking hands, kissing babies is our
Speaker:old friend, fun uncle would say.
Speaker:Um, um,
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:That's
Speaker:I'm like, I'm meeting people in person and going and having dinner with the men, um,
Speaker:You know, doing what I can to hang out.
Speaker:Like I'm, I try to be as approachable as a possible.
Speaker:And I think most people are often shocked that like,
Speaker:Oh, when I hang out with him in person, he's like the exact energy, the exact
Speaker:person that I see in those videos.
Speaker:And that's, that's kind of what I'm
Speaker:going for.
Speaker:And I don't, I wouldn't say it's methodical.
Speaker:I think it's just who I am.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that's why this whole model is for you.
Speaker:And that's, and like, that's why I tell people as well, you know, if
Speaker:they're like, Hey, how's Matt doing?
Speaker:I'm like, he's literally doing what he wanted to do for a long time.
Speaker:you know, like it's perfect.
Speaker:And,
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It is interesting in that way.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, I feel like at.
Speaker:Um, evergreen
Speaker:profits.
Speaker:We were constantly talking about the idea of like building a media brand,
Speaker:going in harder on YouTube and creating more video content and, um, all of that
Speaker:kind of stuff.
Speaker:and
Speaker:I just kind of leaned into that and it's, it's been working out pretty well.
Speaker:Well, and you also carved out a very, you know, a niche space, obviously
Speaker:it's kind of broad, but like in the time, like there was a gap, right?
Speaker:Like on YouTube and you filled that and Like this is like kind of
Speaker:what we were talking about before recording is the fact that like if
Speaker:you could spot something like that and
Speaker:you can move quick being like a, as a single person going after
Speaker:it, or maybe you have a small
Speaker:team,
Speaker:maybe not a bit, like you could see maybe some of the trends that
Speaker:bigger companies are doing, but you're like, Oh, wait, hold on.
Speaker:No, one's really attacking it in this way or this, this vertical
Speaker:or on YouTube, you know, and like twice a week, whatever it might be.
Speaker:Like, I feel like that's where you, like, you found the gap and
Speaker:then you just fricking hit it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, I don't, I don't know if
Speaker:it was like that methodical at the time, right?
Speaker:Like I was just kind of like, Hey, this stuff's really, really cool.
Speaker:I like making videos about it.
Speaker:Um, there was maybe like
Speaker:one or two other people on YouTube that were talking about
Speaker:AI, but it wasn't the main focus
Speaker:of their channel.
Speaker:It was just kind of like from time to time they'd post a video about AI and
Speaker:I kind of decided I love this stuff.
Speaker:Let's just kind of make the channel all about
Speaker:this, you know, um, um, And I don't know, I might've been one
Speaker:of the first, if not the first
Speaker:channel to really say, all right, I'm going to put my channel fully focused
Speaker:on AI.
Speaker:Um, but it wasn't like a methodical thing.
Speaker:It was
Speaker:just like, that
Speaker:was what really interested me.
Speaker:And I started making videos about it.
Speaker:The video started doing well and I went, okay, well, these videos are doing well.
Speaker:Let's keep making videos about it.
Speaker:cool because stepping stones, I mean, I don't know who said it, but
Speaker:it's like, you can connect the dots, you know, going in reverse and it.
Speaker:makes a lot of sense, you know, it's never a straight line or whatever.
Speaker:It's that whole zigzag thing.
Speaker:And I mean, we haven't mentioned, but you have, you know, you have
Speaker:a podcast as well, the next wave.
Speaker:And that's with a HubSpot, which is.
Speaker:Which is rad.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that gets a lot of attention.
Speaker:You have the YouTube channel.
Speaker:We already mentioned the community.
Speaker:You have, uh, what, um, future tools.
Speaker:Is, is the website.
Speaker:You also have an email newsletter and it's like you start,
Speaker:well, I was mentioning to you and I don't know, I don't think we chatted
Speaker:about it before this, but I see it as like three key components is like,
Speaker:you have the media side, which is your YouTube channel mainly, and then you
Speaker:have your website, which is the hub.
Speaker:You can have the, um.
Speaker:Sponsorships, other monetization.
Speaker:You can obviously on YouTube as well.
Speaker:And then, um, and then the email newsletter is all tied
Speaker:together again, sponsorships, but they're all very scalable.
Speaker:Um, couple of those are sellable, maybe the media side
Speaker:too, but like the other ones, but like that whole trifecta, I feel like
Speaker:is a model that a lot of people and something that we talked about a long
Speaker:time mentioned evergreen profits, like our whole company, it's kind
Speaker:of the same idea, but, you know, You said it wasn't really super
Speaker:methodical, but you did it in like, you did it anyway.
Speaker:It's probably in there somewhere, you know?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, I, a lot of times I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for, um, you
Speaker:know, how, how it all came to be right.
Speaker:Like I say, it's not super methodical, but also I did 13 years of marketing,
Speaker:content marketing, uh, copywriting, all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker:So it's like.
Speaker:And my brain, the pieces all kind of fit together and made sense of
Speaker:like what I should do, but it wasn't like, okay, I sat down with a pen
Speaker:and paper and said, all right, I'm going to make this three pronged
Speaker:approach of YouTube website newsletter.
Speaker:It was just like the marketing brain in me who's been doing this for so long
Speaker:knew that, okay, we've got the media outlet, which can drive attention.
Speaker:We've got the newsletter, which can drive retention, right?
Speaker:Keep bringing people back to whatever I'm doing over and over again.
Speaker:And then we've got the website, which can, um, sort of capitalize on SEO
Speaker:and other traffic methods to bring people in as well, but also the
Speaker:website is what grows the newsletter, the most, most people think, oh, the
Speaker:newsletter probably grows from YouTube.
Speaker:I get almost no subscribers to my newsletter, even though it's my main
Speaker:call to action in my YouTube videos.
Speaker:Most of my newsletter growth comes from the future tools website.
Speaker:Um, the future tools website gets close to a million visitors a month,
Speaker:straight up from Google, uh, SEO.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So it's like, I have a way of capitalizing on the SEO with, with
Speaker:the website, it grows the newsletter, which helps with retention.
Speaker:So I can bring people back to YouTube videos and back to the website.
Speaker:And it's just this like symbiotic process that to me just all kind of made sense.
Speaker:Like if you have a website.
Speaker:You should have a newsletter.
Speaker:We've like, we've preached that for over a decade.
Speaker:Now, if you have a website, bro, damn newsletter that helps
Speaker:you bring people back to the
Speaker:website, right?
Speaker:Uh, content marketing is in my opinion, the best form of marketing
Speaker:because it's free.
Speaker:You put the content out there.
Speaker:It could live on forever and continue to drive traffic forever.
Speaker:We've preached that
Speaker:forever, right?
Speaker:So it's like all of the stuff I'm doing is literally the stuff that
Speaker:you and I preached on the hustle and flow chart for, you know, however long
Speaker:we did the hustle and flow chart show
Speaker:Nine years now.
Speaker:I'm all with you about seven and a half or So
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So it's all, it's all just doing like practicing what
Speaker:we've been preaching, right?
Speaker:Um, you build media, create content, grow a list,
Speaker:and that's really it.
Speaker:Well, so talk about, um, and this is great.
Speaker:I love the fact that SEO, cause I was unaware.
Speaker:I kind of had a feeling, you know, in terms of traffic SEO, because of
Speaker:the sheer amount of tools that you're referencing daily, like new, new
Speaker:ones all the time, and you obviously have a system for this, this is
Speaker:where you always had your brilliance.
Speaker:Um, so I guess walk through, cause I question a lot of people have,
Speaker:and I've heard it a lot asked me, cause still the main driver
Speaker:actually of growth of this show is.
Speaker:On the website, it's through
Speaker:SEO as well.
Speaker:Um, same thing, but obviously you, you're capitalizing like other
Speaker:brands, which is always brilliant.
Speaker:Again, what this podcast has done to leveraging other people's names,
Speaker:break down the whole SEO thing.
Speaker:And like, so obviously it works still.
Speaker:Cause that's the biggest question people are like, is it even worth it?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, it is for now.
Speaker:I don't know of
Speaker:long term it's going to be worth it, but right now in this current
Speaker:moment in time, it's still worth it.
Speaker:so yeah, like the SEO.
Speaker:So there's been a lot
Speaker:of talk about how like
Speaker:AI is, you can't create content with AI
Speaker:and get it SEO'd Right.
Speaker:A lot of people have claimed that it's.
Speaker:bS you can actually 100 do really well with SEO with AI generated content.
Speaker:Google does not give a crap and not only does it not give a crap,
Speaker:it has no way of knowing whether or not your content was generated
Speaker:with AI or handwritten by a human.
Speaker:No way of knowing.
Speaker:I know there's AI detectors out there.
Speaker:They suck.
Speaker:They don't work.
Speaker:They're not as accurate as everybody believes they are.
Speaker:there's been stories out there of college professors failing
Speaker:everybody in their entire class.
Speaker:Because he thought they wrote it with AI because one of these AI
Speaker:detectors claimed all the fricking articles were
Speaker:written by AI.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:so like the, those
Speaker:detectors just, they don't work.
Speaker:Um, if you wrote something with AI and you, change like two words in
Speaker:the article, all of a sudden the
Speaker:detectors can no longer tell that it was AI
Speaker:written.
Speaker:AI 100 percent can still work for SEO
Speaker:what are you using specific tool?
Speaker:Um, obviously you have a whole automated thing, but to do your writing,
Speaker:like, do you prefer any one tool?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I built a workflow.
Speaker:Um, are you familiar with make.
Speaker:com?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I built
Speaker:it for anybody who's not, it's very
Speaker:similar to Zapier.
Speaker:If you're if you're familiar with Zapier make.
Speaker:com as a competitor,
Speaker:they kind of do the same types of stuff.
Speaker:So I built a workflow
Speaker:and make.
Speaker:com where whenever I come across a new tool, I take the URL of that
Speaker:tool, I put it into a Google sheet, into like a cell in a Google sheet.
Speaker:And then make.
Speaker:com takes that URL, uses a tool called scraping B.
Speaker:It uses the API from scraping B to scrape the sales page.
Speaker:It basically just looks at the URL and goes, all right, we're going to take
Speaker:all of the content that's on this page.
Speaker:It takes all of that content and then it pulls it into, um, uh, GPT four.
Speaker:And then there's a prompt that it automatically submits that
Speaker:says, uh, summarize what this tool does down into one paragraph.
Speaker:And then it summarizes it down into one paragraph, and then it takes that output,
Speaker:that one paragraph, sends it to another GPT 4, and, and asks it to summarize that
Speaker:one paragraph down into one sentence.
Speaker:So now, all I do is I plug in this URL into a Google
Speaker:Sheet, and it writes me, it scrapes the site, writes a
Speaker:summary, writes a single sentence.
Speaker:And then the final step on make.
Speaker:com is then it then adds it to my website automatically for me.
Speaker:So it takes that description.
Speaker:It takes that short description.
Speaker:That's what you see on the main homepage is the short description.
Speaker:And it, and it builds out that page for every single tool.
Speaker:And so.
Speaker:dope.
Speaker:I love
Speaker:that's the workflow.
Speaker:You just throw it into, uh, whenever I find a cool tool, throw it into
Speaker:Google sheets and it's on the website.
Speaker:wow.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And so that's, that's sort of how that works.
Speaker:And you know, all of these things rank.
Speaker:And a lot of times if you search for a specific tool, the number one
Speaker:listing is like the tool itself.
Speaker:The number two listing is the future tools listing for that tool.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So I know it really works.
Speaker:And the, what Google really wants to see is if somebody clicks on
Speaker:a link, And they go to the site.
Speaker:How, uh, how quickly do they come back to Google after they click on the site?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like that's pretty much 90 percent of SEO these days.
Speaker:Um, you know, people who sell SEO services don't want to admit that
Speaker:that's what it is because otherwise everybody can just do it themselves,
Speaker:but that's what SEO is these days.
Speaker:If I find a resource on Google and I click on it.
Speaker:And then I land on a page.
Speaker:If I click right back to Google within five seconds of landing
Speaker:on the page, Google thinks, okay, we showed them a result that
Speaker:wasn't relevant to their search.
Speaker:Let's push it down the ranks a little bit.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And this is this very oversimplified.
Speaker:There's more nuances to it, but for the most part, that's a
Speaker:very simplified version of SEO.
Speaker:If I click on a link and then they bounce back to Google real quick, Google sort
Speaker:of de ranks that site a little bit.
Speaker:That wasn't the right result.
Speaker:That's all Google cares about.
Speaker:It doesn't matter if it was AI written.
Speaker:It doesn't matter if it wasn't AI written.
Speaker:However, if you spend a lot of time doing like AI written blog posts and
Speaker:these days people are getting better and better at going, this feels like it
Speaker:was written by chat GPT and they bounce off very quickly, those sites de rank.
Speaker:So if you're using AI to write a blog post and people land on it
Speaker:and they start to get this impression, this feels like it was written by
Speaker:AI, they're going to bounce that
Speaker:site's
Speaker:going to D like lose rank And you know, Google's going to
Speaker:rank the higher value content.
Speaker:It's on there, which is why a lot of people say like,
Speaker:Hey, I content doesn't really
Speaker:work for SEO.
Speaker:It's just because sometimes AI is writing really crappy content
Speaker:that people bounce away from.
Speaker:And I would, I would urge to say that maybe people.
Speaker:Either a, they don't know, or they're being lazy and they're
Speaker:not humanizing the content.
Speaker:They're not writing
Speaker:it, training it in your, your writing style, or at least prompting it
Speaker:in a way to model someone else.
Speaker:That doesn't sound like, you know, maybe it's using delve five
Speaker:times inside of a, an article.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:and it's like, when the hell have you used delve in your life?
Speaker:yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker:there's certain words AI loves that everyone's kind of picking and seeing now.
Speaker:exactly.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:okay.
Speaker:This is great, man.
Speaker:And that whole workflow, I mean,
Speaker:someone could just take that right there
Speaker:and like create a whole workflow of yourself, like whatever
Speaker:application to your website.
Speaker:Um, I know.
Speaker:make.com.
Speaker:It's super simple.
Speaker:It's all
Speaker:like no
Speaker:Drag and
Speaker:stuff.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Um, is that what your website's made on?
Speaker:Is Well Is Make or, um,
Speaker:know It's built on Webflow right now, but saying that I'm actually
Speaker:working with a developer right now, and we're
Speaker:actually going to
Speaker:migrate the whole thing over to WordPress.
Speaker:so it's actually going to be on WordPress
Speaker:again.
Speaker:Sweet.
Speaker:Basically because Webflow has like bandwidth limits and my site gets
Speaker:so much traffic that I'm constantly hitting those bandwidth limits.
Speaker:problem.
Speaker:Yeah, it's a good problem to have.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:Beautiful, man.
Speaker:And that's the thing is I feel you've, you've had a workflow kind of like this
Speaker:for a while, um, on your side, I believe.
Speaker:And I mean, honestly, it's like any databasing in general.
Speaker:Um, it's just clever.
Speaker:I mean, I'm already getting a
Speaker:bunch of ideas.
Speaker:We don't need to go down the rabbit hole now, but, um, beautiful.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Thanks for clearing up the SEO thing
Speaker:on the website side of stuff.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:Funny thing is I'll just add this too, is like.
Speaker:I built a website like that back when
Speaker:we were still doing hustle and flow chart, but I was having it show pages
Speaker:like lead page tools, like lead pages And
Speaker:click funnels.
Speaker:And it had like a filtering
Speaker:thing
Speaker:where It you know, are you looking for a landing page builder?
Speaker:Are you looking for a checkout cart builder?
Speaker:And we'd try to push them to thrive card.
Speaker:And I built like the same sort of filtering tool.
Speaker:I don't remember what we called it at the time.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:shoot.
Speaker:I it's coming back to me.
Speaker:It was some affiliate kind
Speaker:an affiliate marketing play where like you've filtered down to
Speaker:the exact tool that you needed.
Speaker:And when it found the tool that you needed, you clicked on it and it was our
Speaker:affiliate
Speaker:link.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And so when I built future tools, I literally just took that
Speaker:same concept.
Speaker:I'm like, man, I can build that same thing that we were building
Speaker:there, but let's just focus on AI
Speaker:tools, same exact concept.
Speaker:I just sort of
Speaker:applied it to a new sort of niche.
Speaker:I love it.
Speaker:it
Speaker:just, I love the fact that because we proved it on the podcast side as well.
Speaker:And this is through a little bit more manual work because you have to
Speaker:record the content of course, but you know, like leveraging people's brands
Speaker:and names in YouTube, like that's such a powerful thing because we
Speaker:would specifically title episodes and obviously in the content itself, you
Speaker:could do some more SEO engineering.
Speaker:The fact that you don't even have that much content inside that
Speaker:website, but obviously it's very, like you said, time on site.
Speaker:So they're going to start clicking around to other tools and going deeper.
Speaker:And like that's the point, I
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that's, and I think that's what happens too.
Speaker:I think people look at it.
Speaker:They, they find the tool on Google, they click
Speaker:into it.
Speaker:And then when you
Speaker:look at any tool
Speaker:on future tools and bottom of the tool page, it says other similar tools.
Speaker:and people go, Oh, like,
Speaker:like I
Speaker:was looking for a tool that does this.
Speaker:Well, here's two other tools that do the same thing.
Speaker:Maybe one of these
Speaker:is a better fit.
Speaker:And so they start
Speaker:diving deeper into the website and they don't back bounce
Speaker:back to Google very quickly.
Speaker:So the site
Speaker:stays ranked well.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Okay, cool.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So I want to move away from the website stuff now.
Speaker:This is great.
Speaker:No, this is beautiful.
Speaker:Like we can keep going down, but, um, I'm going to stop there
Speaker:on the, let's see YouTube side.
Speaker:I think we, we nailed some good stuff there already.
Speaker:Um, There's obviously changes now, you know, like you can put multiple
Speaker:thumbnails and split test those.
Speaker:So there's ways to kind of optimize the whole
Speaker:got that
Speaker:feature really early.
Speaker:I've had that for about a
Speaker:year
Speaker:now and they just rolled it out to all of
Speaker:YouTube within the last like two weeks or something like that.
Speaker:Um, but yeah, I've been doing the split testing for a long time now.
Speaker:And yeah, it's been awesome.
Speaker:You learn a lot
Speaker:and what you find out by doing a lot of YouTube split testing is that almost
Speaker:never is the thumbnail you think going to win the one that actually wins.
Speaker:Uh huh.
Speaker:Uh huh.
Speaker:Um, are there any, like, I don't know, best practices, if that's not the right
Speaker:word, but like, have, have there been some commonalities that are the winners?
Speaker:Uh, or is it literally a crap shoes you
Speaker:uh, it feels like a crap shoot at this point.
Speaker:I would say as far as best practices go, um, one thing that
Speaker:we learned pretty quickly is that
Speaker:when you first start doing a thumbnail
Speaker:test, test three dramatically different thumbnails, right?
Speaker:Cause in the beginning, what we were doing is we were doing like three of
Speaker:the same thumbnail, but we'd try like.
Speaker:Uh, different words, right?
Speaker:Like I might do one that says AI news.
Speaker:One that says crazy AI news.
Speaker:One that says huge AI news, but other than just the text, the thumbnail
Speaker:was identical in all three, right?
Speaker:We'd go and look in and it would be like 33%, 33%, 33%, right?
Speaker:They'd all be like the same click through slash watch time.
Speaker:It's not based on click through.
Speaker:It's based on watch time, but, uh, watch time is factored into click
Speaker:through rate because they wouldn't have ever watched if they didn't
Speaker:click through in the first place.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So, um, but we would find that they would all be like equally matched.
Speaker:But then if we would put in three dramatically different thumbnails,
Speaker:like one is like my real face, one is an AI generated face.
Speaker:Um, one is just like a colorful picture and it doesn't have me in the thumbnail
Speaker:at all, but they'd be wildly different.
Speaker:We'd find you'd get like, one would be 25%, one would be 45%, one would
Speaker:be like 12 percent or whatever.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:I obviously didn't do
Speaker:the math in my head right there, but, um, you know, that
Speaker:one would be like a dramatic
Speaker:winner.
Speaker:And then once you find that dramatic winner, you go and
Speaker:take the thumbnail that won and do another split test.
Speaker:But this time.
Speaker:Try testing like different text and now now you're going for marginal improvements
Speaker:But you're not really gonna see the like
Speaker:marginal improvements by three like really close thumbnails So
Speaker:starting wide with the variations.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, absolutely
Speaker:So one thing, and I think you, if you have a YouTube video on this, just, uh, say
Speaker:I have a YouTube video on this and I can find it, but like you've gotten, I think
Speaker:you're the best, or at least one of the
Speaker:best people who can, you know, get your face in AI form, but like do some wacky
Speaker:stuff, modeling, different characters, whatever it is, can you break down your
Speaker:process if it's simple enough to do that?
Speaker:Or at least point us in the direction.
Speaker:Yeah, so I do have a couple YouTube videos about this
Speaker:But the the
Speaker:sort of quick overview of it is you have to use a tool So are you
Speaker:familiar with stable diffusion?
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:The AI
Speaker:a ton, but
Speaker:Yeah, the, the AI art
Speaker:generation tool.
Speaker:Um, so the way I do it is I have stable diffusion installed
Speaker:locally on my computer.
Speaker:Now, if you're using like a Mac, it doesn't work very well
Speaker:because it, like they want to see an NVIDIA GPU for some reason.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, but I have it installed locally.
Speaker:And what I essentially
Speaker:did was I find tuned a stable diffusion model and trained
Speaker:my own face into that model.
Speaker:And then once my own face was into that model, I can now prompt any Use
Speaker:a little keyword that tells it that I want my face in this image and it
Speaker:will put my face into that image.
Speaker:Um, so, you know, it's probably too, um, like I did an interview on social
Speaker:media examiner with Michael Stelzner.
Speaker:And that entire interview was like a step by step breakdown of how I do
Speaker:this.
Speaker:And that was the entire interview, right?
Speaker:So that was like an hour long, like, here's how to do that process.
Speaker:Um, and then I also have a couple
Speaker:of
Speaker:YouTube videos where I break down the process as well.
Speaker:But essentially I'm fine tuning a stable diffusion model with
Speaker:my face trained into it.
Speaker:Once
Speaker:you have it trained, you can literally type any prompt you want
Speaker:and put your face into that image.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, I just found six days ago, at least kind of this recording,
Speaker:uh, repurposing video content into
Speaker:multiple mediums without, uh, it's probably something else, but that
Speaker:was a stable diffusion or sorry.
Speaker:Social media examiner.
Speaker:yeah, yeah, that was actually a more recent podcast.
Speaker:The one I did with, uh, Mike about, um, training your images.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:Probably came out last year sometime, I think.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Actually, I think I found it here.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:How to generate headshots
Speaker:with AI.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Right on.
Speaker:yeah, We'll link that up here.
Speaker:um, beautiful.
Speaker:I figured that would be the answer anyway.
Speaker:I just wanted to ask it cause it was top of mind.
Speaker:interesting enough though, from our split testing.
Speaker:Now, if you look at my YouTube channel, you'll notice that I'm actually using
Speaker:my real face instead of an AI generated face a lot more often because the split
Speaker:testing.
Speaker:So when it comes to like what images
Speaker:work for thumbnails, it's been a moving target this whole time,
Speaker:right?
Speaker:And we find that out through split testing thumbnails.
Speaker:Is that a year ago, me putting my AI generated face in the thumbnails
Speaker:is what really, really worked.
Speaker:But then we saw that
Speaker:trend happen on YouTube and more and more people started doing AI
Speaker:generated versions of their face.
Speaker:Now, what works on my channel is actually real images of my face tend
Speaker:to get better, um, optimized better
Speaker:with the thumbnail tests than when we use AI generated images.
Speaker:So we're constantly testing back and forth.
Speaker:And right
Speaker:now we're in this phase where my real face works better than my AI face.
Speaker:So I have a guy named John on my team who
Speaker:makes all my thumbnails now.
Speaker:And so he's also the one he's like, I guess you could call him like my head
Speaker:of, uh, YouTube optimization, right?
Speaker:He's
Speaker:constantly, going back to old videos and running new split
Speaker:tests on old videos and things like that So we're constantly, constantly optimizing
Speaker:videos That even came out like a year
Speaker:ago.
Speaker:Um, so
Speaker:yeah, like even the image you just pulled up is probably a
Speaker:split test that's currently going.
Speaker:Probably.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And then, I mean, that's a big nugget.
Speaker:You kind of just like, just said not passing, but like going back in
Speaker:time and looking at your history, Sean Campbell said the same thing.
Speaker:He was like, it could be videos four or five years ago that are now starting to
Speaker:pop off or maybe consistently growing.
Speaker:Like, why not go optimize those go peek at, I mean, now with
Speaker:all these tools that we have,
Speaker:Yeah, yeah,
Speaker:have then
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:we have one video.
Speaker:I don't, uh, I don't remember exactly which video it is, but there was one
Speaker:video that was sort of like flatlined.
Speaker:It wasn't getting any traffic anymore.
Speaker:We went back in, changed the thumbnail, changed the title, and
Speaker:you can literally go into our stats, see the date that we changed it.
Speaker:And it's just like a hockey stick.
Speaker:It just went and just shot up.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It was a video that had like 10, 000 views over like six months or something.
Speaker:And now today it's got, you know, 300, 000 views after
Speaker:changing the title and thumbnail.
Speaker:You just never know.
Speaker:A lot of times, uh, Algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, nobody really knows
Speaker:how it works, but if it seems like if you go and make some of those changes,
Speaker:YouTube might
Speaker:kind of test the waters with that video.
Speaker:Again, they
Speaker:might start putting it out to more people and
Speaker:going, all right, there's been some changes to this video,
Speaker:Let's let's see what we
Speaker:can do.
Speaker:I
Speaker:mean, YouTube wants the retention on site.
Speaker:YouTube wants people to go back and watch more
Speaker:videos.
Speaker:So it kind of feels like if you go back and change
Speaker:some things, tweak titles and thumbnails, YouTube, I think kind of goes, all right,
Speaker:let's see if this does a little bit better this time
Speaker:around.
Speaker:And it's going to give you more love.
Speaker:Uh, I want to go back to cause I could have been hearing you wrong,
Speaker:but the retention on a video, like does the engagement rate per
Speaker:video, do you think that gives you the most love with the algorithm?
Speaker:Or is it more like maybe they go to multiple videos within your
Speaker:channel, stay on site in general.
Speaker:Do
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, I do think
Speaker:it's, I think, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker:factors at play and obviously YouTube's never published how the algorithm
Speaker:works exactly.
Speaker:So everybody's just kind of guessing and like, uh, finding
Speaker:correlations between their
Speaker:tests and things like that.
Speaker:Um, I do think retention on the video matters.
Speaker:I think the point I was making earlier isn't necessarily that
Speaker:you shouldn't focus on retention.
Speaker:It's more that you shouldn't be doing the like retention editing style, where
Speaker:it's this, these quick cuts and like fast motion and like try to, overstimulate
Speaker:the brain to keep people working.
Speaker:That style of video isn't as effective as it used to be.
Speaker:I still think you need to keep people around.
Speaker:We still focus on things like, the hook in the beginning and opening loops.
Speaker:So people stick around to the end and pattern interrupts to, you
Speaker:know, grab people's attention.
Speaker:Who's when the attention starts to go away.
Speaker:It's just not that like what you would have seen Mr.
Speaker:Beast do a year ago, where it's just like today I'm going to do this.
Speaker:And then an
Speaker:explosion happens and there's a cut every two seconds.
Speaker:And it's just move, move, move, move, move.
Speaker:That style seems to be less effective, but that doesn't mean
Speaker:you shouldn't focus on retention.
Speaker:It just
Speaker:means that that style of editing of just like quick cuts and
Speaker:like overstimulation isn't as
Speaker:effective as it used to
Speaker:That makes sense.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I figured I just wanted to make sure it was super clear there.
Speaker:Uh, for any, any of those wondering, cool.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Um, really fast on that other third part of the trifecta.
Speaker:I know there's more, but like on the email side, I'm curious of some quick.
Speaker:and, uh, and then I have like a few other questions and I know we have a hard stop.
Speaker:I want to make sure that I can give you some time as well.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:need any time.
Speaker:I can literally jump on like one minute before the
Speaker:Oh, all right.
Speaker:You don't need to pee or anything.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:You got it.
Speaker:You do you,
Speaker:Hey, they work for me.
Speaker:Damn it.
Speaker:Ah, I like it.
Speaker:This is good.
Speaker:That's the mindset, baby.
Speaker:Um, email newsletter.
Speaker:What are some like, you know, some things that might not be so
Speaker:obvious, obviously grow the list and all that stuff, but like anything
Speaker:that
Speaker:you've learned now doing this for what, almost two years, a year and a half or
Speaker:so, um, like best practices, maybe new
Speaker:ahas since, since going this route.
Speaker:So the way I do newsletters now is like dramatically different from the way we
Speaker:did newsletters back when, um, you know, we had the, the newsletter for hustle
Speaker:and flowchart and evergreen profits.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Because now I'm focused on.
Speaker:Like more of the traditional definition of a
Speaker:newsletter, right?
Speaker:Where it's filled with the news from AI, right?
Speaker:Like our old newsletters, we might focus on like one topic.
Speaker:And, um, you know, the, the, when it comes to marketing, the sort of common
Speaker:wisdom, the common rule of thumb is like one call to action, right?
Speaker:Like one offer, one call to action, try to drive them to one place.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And I do think that that's necessary from like a, A sales standpoint.
Speaker:If you're trying to sell something in an email, one, like one call
Speaker:to action, don't confuse people of what you want them to do.
Speaker:The style of newsletter I do now, every single email has 20 links in it, right?
Speaker:So it's like a completely different style of email.
Speaker:And it's just been a completely different way of thinking.
Speaker:It's, it's more about like, how do I provide as much value as
Speaker:possible inside of this email?
Speaker:Versus how do I get as many clicks from this email as possible?
Speaker:I'm less focused on the click through rate of the
Speaker:email.
Speaker:I want the open
Speaker:rate.
Speaker:That's what I care about.
Speaker:I want people to read the email as opposed to click away from the email
Speaker:to one of the links that I'm sharing.
Speaker:And so that has been like a shift in focus that I've, I've had to adapt to.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I've, I've tried to optimize for click through rate, but found that when
Speaker:you're sending out a newsletter, certain pieces of news are going to resonate
Speaker:with some people, but not other people.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:What kind of open rate are you are like, what's your target?
Speaker:Let's just say that.
Speaker:uh, I would say I'm targeting a 50 percent open rate, um, on the emails.
Speaker:I would say more realistically, I get between 35 and 40 percent open rate.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:so the, the open rates are a
Speaker:lot higher than what we used to get on like marketing emails.
Speaker:Click through rates are a lot lower than what we used to get on emails because.
Speaker:There's a lot of options and a lot of people will just read the newsletter and
Speaker:go, that was enough of an overview for me.
Speaker:I don't need to click into any of these links and
Speaker:that.
Speaker:way a lot of times.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I'm okay with that because the monetization is completely different.
Speaker:The way we used to monetize our old newsletters is one link, one call to
Speaker:action, send them to a site with an offer.
Speaker:If they click the offer, we either make the sale or we make the commission
Speaker:on the affiliate offer, right?
Speaker:The new way of doing it is get as many eyeballs reading the
Speaker:email as possible.
Speaker:And put sponsors in
Speaker:the email.
Speaker:I don't care if they click away from the email.
Speaker:I want them to see the sponsor, right?
Speaker:So the monetization strategy has been a completely different strategy.
Speaker:Now, all I really care about is how do I get people opening
Speaker:and reading the email, because
Speaker:that's what gets the sponsor in front of them.
Speaker:So that's been a big sort of
Speaker:shift.
Speaker:And it is really interesting because when you do
Speaker:these like, uh, newsletter styles, you do find that
Speaker:the higher up the email you go, the higher the click through rate on the link.
Speaker:And then it sort of trickles down.
Speaker:And by the bottom, like the last links in the bottom of the email,
Speaker:nobody even clicks on at all.
Speaker:So obviously it's a sponsorship opportunity or whatever you want to
Speaker:highlight, you know where to put it.
Speaker:Yeah, well, I mean, my, my goal is to make sure value first sponsors get what
Speaker:they want out of the email second, right?
Speaker:The value to the user is number one for me.
Speaker:Same goes with YouTube.
Speaker:Same goes with future tools.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:They're all monetized through sponsorships and stuff, but like making sure the
Speaker:user experience and like them getting the content they want out of it.
Speaker:That needs to be number one priority always.
Speaker:So I always put like the number one, most important news thing
Speaker:of the week kind of top, and then
Speaker:the sponsor might fall after that.
Speaker:And then the rest of the content falls after that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, and so that's kind of been the approach at this point.
Speaker:I've hired
Speaker:a team who mostly runs
Speaker:the newsletter for me.
Speaker:Um, but it was definitely like a total mindset shift of how
Speaker:email marketing works from.
Speaker:The way we did it as like direct response marketers to now the way I'm
Speaker:doing it as
Speaker:more of a brand marketer.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I like it.
Speaker:And that's honestly, I feel like that's just the approach overall.
Speaker:Obviously.
Speaker:But there's two camps, like you'd be on the more of the media side or be on more
Speaker:of the product creator slash owner side.
Speaker:So there's still a place for media, but of course, you know, you're
Speaker:going to probably direct mainly to your own thing if that's the case.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:just deciding, but Obviously.
Speaker:there's a whole businesses built off of newsletters now at this point and
Speaker:they're sellable, they're scalable.
Speaker:And that's why I really wanted to, yeah, go for it.
Speaker:yeah, That was the other piece
Speaker:with like future tools.
Speaker:So Matt Wolfe, the YouTube channel, not really sellable, right?
Speaker:It's too much focused on me.
Speaker:I mean, somebody could potentially buy the YouTube channel, but I would still
Speaker:have to be like an employee of it.
Speaker:Like making the content on the YouTube channel,
Speaker:probably a direction I would never actually go.
Speaker:Future tools, the website and the newsletter is something that if
Speaker:that could be my retirement, right?
Speaker:Like that's the thing that down the line, a company might come in and buy.
Speaker:And like what I found about future tools is.
Speaker:You know, I've had acquisition offers.
Speaker:I've had a few of them now.
Speaker:Um, none of them have been serious enough that I've like really entertained them.
Speaker:But what I found is that like companies don't necessarily care about the
Speaker:actual website and like the amount of traffic it's getting, uh, what people
Speaker:seem to want to buy is the fact that I've built this database of all of
Speaker:these tools and like every single tool that goes on to the website.
Speaker:When somebody submits their tool, I collect their name.
Speaker:I collect their email.
Speaker:I collect the URL of the tool.
Speaker:If they have like an affiliate program, I collect the link
Speaker:to your affiliate program.
Speaker:All of this data for all of these companies that are building an ai.
Speaker:All of that is in my database, right?
Speaker:And like I'm not, I'm not like a data broker.
Speaker:I'm not gonna go sell it.
Speaker:I don't wanna be the next Cambridge Analytica
Speaker:like I like.
Speaker:it's not really a route I'm thinking of going, but
Speaker:the Future Tools, website and newsletter is something that is
Speaker:like sellable in the future.
Speaker:If somebody wanted to buy
Speaker:that company as a
Speaker:whole, I would never just go and sell the
Speaker:database.
Speaker:People can do cold outreach to those emails that like,
Speaker:that's just against my own,
Speaker:like ethical code.
Speaker:But, um, the business as a whole is something that I can sell down the line.
Speaker:I think it's brilliant.
Speaker:And it's the data play.
Speaker:And again, like this could be applied to so many other verticals and industries.
Speaker:If people, if you're listening to this, obviously you've already
Speaker:outlined how to, how you automate a lot of this on your website.
Speaker:And the fact that you are collecting that information, I can just think.
Speaker:A bunch of other industries and some that I'm already in as
Speaker:well that like, yeah, that data is valuable or like, that's where the money
Speaker:is or like, who else is doing that?
Speaker:Well, maybe no one, or are they guarding that content?
Speaker:Are there other ways?
Speaker:Like, can you publicly, so again, it's like spotting the gaps
Speaker:and then finding, you know, and filling the gap in your own way.
Speaker:Cool stuff.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So moving on, looking at time here and looking at my notes.
Speaker:I love how like, We did zero prep for this podcast.
Speaker:And it's like, I have a whole list of notes now at this point.
Speaker:but that's just a, that's just our vibe, right?
Speaker:We, whenever you and I get on a call, it's like, there's no way you and I are getting
Speaker:off that call within 30 minutes, right?
Speaker:It's just not possible.
Speaker:that's why I'm like, I got to cancel the team call that Jacob.
Speaker:Now, you know why I actually, I told the team.
Speaker:So, all right.
Speaker:There's a
Speaker:few things.
Speaker:Well, shoot, where do I go?
Speaker:Where do I go now?
Speaker:I want to, I want to go here first.
Speaker:So what excites you for AI
Speaker:maybe with what's coming?
Speaker:What's here.
Speaker:What's exciting.
Speaker:and keep it kind of don't go like, I know you can go super deep, but
Speaker:like, let's have some followups.
Speaker:Yeah, the thing, so I'll tell you what I'm playing with the most when it comes to ai.
Speaker:I love playing
Speaker:with the AI music generators, SUNO and UDO.
Speaker:Being two of 'em, like
Speaker:wait, sorry, I cut you off soon.
Speaker:It was one I've used that.
Speaker:What's the other one?
Speaker:Uh, U-D-O-U-D-I-O.
Speaker:haven't used that.
Speaker:Yeah, same concept as soon.
Speaker:Oh, um, I feel like so between the two soon.
Speaker:Oh, I feel like makes more enjoyable music, right?
Speaker:Like it's more music that I'd kind of bob my head to and I
Speaker:actually kind of enjoy what it creates, but you can kind
Speaker:of still tell it's a I right.
Speaker:You listen to it and the way they sort of blend words together and They still
Speaker:haven't figured out how to say AI.
Speaker:A lot of times it'll just go, right?
Speaker:Like,
Speaker:That's
Speaker:uh, so soon I'll like, you'll listen to the songs and be like, okay, I could tell
Speaker:us AI, but it's actually pretty good.
Speaker:I kind of like this song, right?
Speaker:UDO is a lot better at fooling you into thinking it's a real song.
Speaker:Like I will listen to that music and be like, this sounds like a real band.
Speaker:I couldn't tell if you played this for me that it was AI.
Speaker:However, I feel like the music's slightly less enjoyable.
Speaker:Like I'm not finding myself like, Oh man, this song fricking rocks.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like I don't, I don't feel that way as much with what you do generates.
Speaker:They're both good.
Speaker:They're just good for separate reasons.
Speaker:The other stuff that I'm really excited about is AI video generation, right?
Speaker:I'm sure you've seen like a luma stream machine where, um, you can, uh,
Speaker:enter a text prompt and it'll generate a video off of it.
Speaker:Uh, it doesn't really work very good for text to video, but it works really well.
Speaker:If you generate an image with mid journey or stable diffusion or dolly
Speaker:three, pull that image in and use that as like the starting frame of the video.
Speaker:Amazing at that.
Speaker:That's a good, that's a good tip right there.
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:And then runway also, uh, sort of teased their, uh, yeah.
Speaker:Runway ML sort of teased their gen three model, which is another sort of like
Speaker:Sora level text of video AI generator, which looks really, really good.
Speaker:So when I'm just like sitting
Speaker:around having fun playing with AI, I'm playing with the music generators and
Speaker:I'm playing with the video generators.
Speaker:And a lot of times I'm doing it like.
Speaker:In tandem, I'm generating a song and then going to like a pseudo.
Speaker:Or generating a song in Suno and then going to like Luma and generating
Speaker:like a whole bunch of video clips to go along with the song and then
Speaker:making a music video using the song and the clips that I generated with,
Speaker:like, to me, that is so much fun.
Speaker:Like I, I love that stuff.
Speaker:Um, like that to me is really, really cool.
Speaker:Um, Claude keeps getting better and better and better.
Speaker:I love using Claude.
Speaker:I know, um,
Speaker:a, what, um, what
Speaker:Sonnet 3.
Speaker:5.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And it's, and it's outperforming GPT 4.
Speaker:0.
Speaker:It's out.
Speaker:Yeah, it's like an all the benchmark test.
Speaker:It's outperforming.
Speaker:It can do a single prompt, uh, video game, right?
Speaker:I've saw, I saw somebody prompt it to like, make me like a basic
Speaker:game, like make me a snake game.
Speaker:It coded the whole thing and it worked right out of the box.
Speaker:I did a video where I was like, Make me a playable tic tac toe game where
Speaker:I'm playing against the computer.
Speaker:Made it with one prompt.
Speaker:The game was workable, playable right out of the box.
Speaker:Now, no other AI is really doing that right now.
Speaker:So, um, Claude is really, really kicking ass
Speaker:for like writing code for you right now.
Speaker:Um, that one's been really, really
Speaker:cool.
Speaker:I, I still use chat GPT on my phone a lot.
Speaker:Like I, I, I, for whatever reason, I
Speaker:like the
Speaker:chat GPT app, uh, quite a bit.
Speaker:So I use chat GPT on my phone, but when I'm on my desktop, I use
Speaker:Claude.
Speaker:Um, but yeah, those are the things that I'm playing with
Speaker:that, that sort of excite me right now in this, this current moment.
Speaker:Is there anything coming up on the horizon that, cause this is like the
Speaker:video thing I felt like was on the horizon for a while, um, because of, I'm
Speaker:blanking on the name, the open AI Sora.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I was going to say Sora.
Speaker:Anything coming that's exciting.
Speaker:Well, we're still waiting on Sora, right?
Speaker:Um, Luma only generates five
Speaker:second videos.
Speaker:Uh, that runway gen three can generate up to 10 second videos.
Speaker:Supposedly, Sora can
Speaker:generate one minute videos.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So like that additional length from Sora, once we get
Speaker:that, that'll be really, really exciting.
Speaker:Um, you know, the stuff that I think I'm the most excited about.
Speaker:That's like in the pipeline is more of the like agentic stuff where you're
Speaker:building like these agents that will actually go and do tasks on your behalf.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So like, um, I work with a company called mind studio.
Speaker:They help you build like these little AI agents as well.
Speaker:Um, and.
Speaker:That type of stuff is, is really exciting.
Speaker:Like, um, you know, go and do this research for me, come back with the
Speaker:research once I've, um, you know, based on your research, go find the
Speaker:product on Amazon, price shop it for me, find the cheapest place I can buy
Speaker:the product based on your research, and then, um, you know, send me
Speaker:a confirmation and I'll give you a yes or a no.
Speaker:If I say yes, then buy
Speaker:it on my behalf.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Like some of this agentic stuff is sort of popping
Speaker:up and we're going to start to see that more and more and
Speaker:more in the coming months of like these.
Speaker:These language models that can use tools and go and actually take actions on
Speaker:your behalf.
Speaker:I think that's what we're going to
Speaker:start to see bubble up more and more and more over the next several months.
Speaker:And that's where like, you know, I'm, I'm doing a lot of stuff with a lot of
Speaker:clients, enterprise level, um, you know, with Mike Koenigs and Brad Costanzo and,
Speaker:and, and, you know, just across the board, I'm seeing a lot more people starting
Speaker:to think that way with the agents.
Speaker:I think people now are understanding at least the basic fundamentals
Speaker:of chat, GPT, Claude, they might
Speaker:not know really how to make the most of it, but at least they're
Speaker:already starting to think, Oh, what if I string these things together.
Speaker:And that's exactly what you're describing in mind, mind studio.
Speaker:Uh, kind of connect me with the founder, by the way,
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker:my neighbor, our neighbor.
Speaker:He lives out in a mule.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Hey, don't call him out like that.
Speaker:Oh, sorry.
Speaker:Did I just
Speaker:tiny flat.
Speaker:Yeah, my bad.
Speaker:Uh, it's only horses and a bunch of lifted trucks out there.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:No, I'm just, uh, we're in East County.
Speaker:Y'all
Speaker:so, uh, but no, the mind
Speaker:studio seems like the best one I've found.
Speaker:Cause I've
Speaker:looked around for solutions and,
Speaker:um, yeah, For
Speaker:exactly what
Speaker:you said.
Speaker:Like it's, it's a sweet business, like use case if
Speaker:you're looking for a lot of these agents and it just looks fun.
Speaker:I personally haven't used it yet.
Speaker:I need to though.
Speaker:I'll share one more thing that I think is that we're going to see a lot more
Speaker:of as well that I think is exciting is more of like the wearable tech,
Speaker:you know, there was the things like the rabbit are one and the humane pen
Speaker:and you know, they just got fricking destroyed and all the reviews online.
Speaker:And I don't think that's it.
Speaker:Like, I never thought that was
Speaker:it, right?
Speaker:Like, why have a separate app, a separate little handheld device when my phone
Speaker:does all the same crap already, right?
Speaker:Like it doesn't make much sense to
Speaker:Apple intelligence.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:but what I think is, is more useful is things like, um, like I've got the
Speaker:meta Ray Ban, uh, AI glasses, right.
Speaker:I, um, there's been some demos of like AirPods, right.
Speaker:And the AirPods, they look like the Apple AirPods, but they have little
Speaker:cameras on the tip that are like three 60 cameras that can see all around you.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And like, based on what you're seeing can sort of feed information into your ears.
Speaker:Um, and so what I think is, is going to happen is we're going to see more and
Speaker:more of these wearables with AI built in.
Speaker:And right now the AI that's built into the glasses isn't very useful, right?
Speaker:You got to talk to your sunglasses and say, Hey, Meadow, what am I looking at?
Speaker:And it'll be like, it looks like you're on the beach.
Speaker:And it's like, cool.
Speaker:What's that good for?
Speaker:Unless I'm like, unless I'm like hard of seeing or blind or whatever.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And I, and I need the glasses to sort of give me a description of what I'm seeing.
Speaker:It's not really that useful to me.
Speaker:But what I think is going to happen is they're going to start putting
Speaker:like little heads up displays in it.
Speaker:Or,
Speaker:um, you know, I was actually, it's funny that we talked about mind studio.
Speaker:I was talking to Dimitri, the CEO of this.
Speaker:Of, of mind studio.
Speaker:And
Speaker:one of the things that we were, we were really sort of nerding out about is the
Speaker:killer app would be sunglasses that when you meet somebody remembers that person,
Speaker:and then the next time you bump into them, the sunglasses whisper in your
Speaker:ear, by the way, this is Joe, you know,
Speaker:Here's a couple of nice facts about him.
Speaker:This is Joe.
Speaker:He's got two daughters.
Speaker:He's
Speaker:married.
Speaker:He's got, you know, like, and it gives you some like information.
Speaker:He lives at, he lives at 1, 2, 3, 4, B S drive, you know,
Speaker:PS drive.
Speaker:whatever, whatever information remembers about this person you
Speaker:walk up and it's either like giving you a heads up display on
Speaker:your glasses.
Speaker:Like.
Speaker:This is Joe, or it's like, you know, telling you something
Speaker:in your ear about Joe.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, um,
Speaker:that's cool.
Speaker:I can see
Speaker:would be like a killer use case.
Speaker:Like be
Speaker:my, like how many people are say they they're horrible at
Speaker:remembering names, put on a pair of
Speaker:glasses and now you remember everybody's names.
Speaker:Like, I think that's
Speaker:coming soon.
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:And follow up.
Speaker:Like you could probably initiate follow up like that instantaneous, like with
Speaker:all of these next steps that you might be doing when you're meeting someone, like.
Speaker:It's yeah, I think it's, it's just like how AI already is here on the screens.
Speaker:Why not bring it into the world around us and make it visual, make
Speaker:it here, make it all, all the above.
Speaker:So I a hundred percent cool.
Speaker:It's going to start somewhere with those meta Ray bans.
Speaker:I mean, it's like, it's going to start basic.
Speaker:It's like Google class or whatever the glasses,
Speaker:yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They were ahead of their time
Speaker:really.
Speaker:Like now they probably would have, I mean, they, they ugly as hell, but now
Speaker:they would probably be a little slightly more accepted than they were back then.
Speaker:for sure.
Speaker:For sure.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:What scares you?
Speaker:Makes
Speaker:that scared of.
Speaker:Most AI stuff at this point, right?
Speaker:The stuff.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So the stuff that really scares me around
Speaker:AI is more like bad actors using AI to do bad actor II things, right?
Speaker:Like, uh, using AI, like we talked about Claude and how Claude is really
Speaker:good at coding with a single prompt.
Speaker:Now, both Claude is really good at coding with a single prompt.
Speaker:Now.
Speaker:How easy it for, is it for anybody to become a hacker, right?
Speaker:Like if I can go and have one of these AI and, you know, Claude and open
Speaker:AI, they're putting guardrails on it.
Speaker:So people can't do that, but there's also open source models that are
Speaker:quickly becoming just as good as the closed models.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And if you're using an open source model, You can yank whatever
Speaker:guardrails you want off of these models
Speaker:and do whatever you want with them, right?
Speaker:So what happens when these open source models get good enough at coding that
Speaker:they're as good as claude and I can say Write me a script that's a trodden horse
Speaker:that I can install on joe's computer and steal all of his data, right?
Speaker:Like, um or
Speaker:You're probably capable.
Speaker:Don't do it.
Speaker:Or like, um, you know the As the video and image generation gets
Speaker:better and better and better.
Speaker:How is, um, like visual evidence ever going to be used in court anymore?
Speaker:How are we going to show a video of, you know, somebody getting attacked and
Speaker:prove that that was, that really happened versus generated with AI.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, the AI voice cloning is getting really good.
Speaker:We've seen scams already where people have used other people's
Speaker:voices, called the person's parents, scanned them out of money, trying to
Speaker:be somebody else because they were able to clone their voice with AI.
Speaker:So the stuff that like bad actors can use AI for.
Speaker:To me is the most scary thing about AI.
Speaker:I don't buy into the scenarios of like them rising up and, uh, destroying the
Speaker:world, at least not with large language models, not with the AI that we're using
Speaker:today, they're not even capable of that.
Speaker:There's.
Speaker:There's almost like,
Speaker:uh, there's really no path to that with our current like tech that's out there
Speaker:It's pretty dumb text still in the
Speaker:in that sense.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Um, the, the sort of scam potential, the deep fake potential, the, uh,
Speaker:the hacker potential, but yeah, um, you know, there's already been
Speaker:reports of Russia and China and
Speaker:stuff like that.
Speaker:Meddling
Speaker:in elections using AI
Speaker:and.
Speaker:You know, who knows
Speaker:if it's propaganda or reality, hard to disseminate that stuff
Speaker:now, hard to determine the truth
Speaker:versus not
Speaker:truth and AI is not making it
Speaker:any easier.
Speaker:It's getting more complicated more.
Speaker:I keep thinking of, and this isn't the scary part, but like,
Speaker:we're in a time of, um, almost like a new Renaissance in a way.
Speaker:And, you know, it's like, there's different arts, there's different
Speaker:media, there's different things that we all get to explore and kind of.
Speaker:reinvent ourselves, reinvent society, you know, and there's obviously a
Speaker:lot of scary stuff that can come from that, but it's like, it's new, I guess.
Speaker:So it's like this whole new reality, I feel like is shaping
Speaker:up rapidly in front of us.
Speaker:And, it's, it's adapting to that.
Speaker:it's like, a different way of thinking that a lot of us, all of.
Speaker:us
Speaker:Well, yeah.
Speaker:And I think, I think one of the big struggles we're going to run into is
Speaker:like governments are going to try to regulate this, but they're trying to.
Speaker:Regulate based on like the way things used to be with new technologies.
Speaker:And that just isn't going to work, right?
Speaker:Like I don't think copyright law is going to exist in the same form that
Speaker:exists right now, 10 years from now.
Speaker:I just, I don't think it's going to be possible.
Speaker:Um, you know, like, uh, there's all this, these sort of issues about, like,
Speaker:where the training data came from on like the large language models, the
Speaker:video models, the image models, like it's trained on other artists work.
Speaker:It's trained on the writings of other people.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:the books out there, basically
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And that really sort of muddies the waters a lot.
Speaker:But if you look at humans in general, they operate in the same way.
Speaker:If I become an artist, I learned from all the artists that came before me.
Speaker:I'm taking influence from, you know, the artists that I tried
Speaker:to model when I was learning art.
Speaker:How is that much different?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Um, you know, I, I actually have this belief that all of the people that
Speaker:are fighting against, um, AI over copyright reasons are actually pushing
Speaker:AI to become more and more mainstream.
Speaker:I think the people that are fighting it are actually having a reverse
Speaker:effect from what they're going for.
Speaker:And so you look at a tool like Suno that can generate AI music, right.
Speaker:Well, in the old days, you would have to go and license somebody's
Speaker:song, put it over your YouTube video.
Speaker:And if the song didn't happen to be licensed, they would slap you down.
Speaker:The video would either get removed off YouTube or all of the monetization,
Speaker:all the monetization on that video would go to the creator of that song.
Speaker:I could have a 30 minute video and a five second clip of a song.
Speaker:And if that the copyright holder saw that my, that five seconds
Speaker:was in my video, they can take a hundred percent of the revenue from
Speaker:that video, even though it was only five seconds of a 30 minute video.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So what does that make me do?
Speaker:Well, I'm not going to go license other people's songs, tools like sooner or out
Speaker:now I can just make a song, not have to worry about licensing it and put that
Speaker:in my video without worrying about any
Speaker:repercussions, right?
Speaker:So by you going and slapping down YouTubers for using their song in their
Speaker:videos, well, I'm Now people are going to
Speaker:alternate sources to do that.
Speaker:Remember when we used to do like blog posts and, um, you know, we might find
Speaker:an image on Google or something, throw it into our video, and then you get
Speaker:an email from the associated press saying, Hey, you owe us 800 because
Speaker:you use that image on our blog post.
Speaker:I do.
Speaker:I remember that.
Speaker:what do you think that's doing to people now?
Speaker:Okay, fine.
Speaker:I am never going to use an associated press image ever again.
Speaker:I'm going to go generate an image with mid
Speaker:journey instead, right?
Speaker:These companies that are enforcing copyright law are pushing people
Speaker:to the AI alternatives, which is not helping their cause.
Speaker:I just think copyright needs to be rethought completely.
Speaker:If the creators of this, uh, this IP.
Speaker:Want to continue to like actually be relevant in the creator
Speaker:economy.
Speaker:And think about the people who are pushing back and all that.
Speaker:It's like, well, you gotta, you gotta know technology's not stopping.
Speaker:It's going to keep moving quicker and quicker.
Speaker:It always has.
Speaker:And, uh, maybe, maybe the better stance is to be that person that helps shape.
Speaker:What regulation new regulation works like, but understanding that technology
Speaker:is going to keep moving forward.
Speaker:Someone's got to take the realm.
Speaker:and like, if you're specialized in yeah.
Speaker:Music licensing, It's like, great, you know, own that and then be the person to
Speaker:help make that a thing that's, you know it's helpful for everybody as a whole.
Speaker:Um, It's probably going to look different
Speaker:I mean, Grimes had the right idea, right?
Speaker:You know, Elon's one of Elon's baby mamas, right?
Speaker:Like she had the right idea of going on on X and saying, Hey, you can use any of
Speaker:my music you want, you can use my voice,
Speaker:make new songs with
Speaker:my voice, do
Speaker:whatever you want with it.
Speaker:Just give me a percentage of whatever you generate from it.
Speaker:If I was an artist,
Speaker:I'd be saying
Speaker:screw copyright.
Speaker:I'm going that direction.
Speaker:Here's here's the files to use my voice.
Speaker:Go make
Speaker:songs with
Speaker:me in it and give me a cut.
Speaker:Look, I just created an army of me's now.
Speaker:Like that's a better model.
Speaker:I'm sorry.
Speaker:Kind of brainy, but yeah, I'm getting all the marketing love now and the
Speaker:first mover to do that, or at least handful, like are going to win.
Speaker:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker:they're going to be known.
Speaker:Um, all right.
Speaker:So on a, uh, on that note, and I'm looking at the clock still pop up, pop,
Speaker:um, how are you staying with this path?
Speaker:Like I'm thinking more mindset y now.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:and cause you're, you're, going hard.
Speaker:How many, I mean, at least what two episodes, two videos per week,
Speaker:right.
Speaker:I try for three.
Speaker:Um, I'm really busy weeks.
Speaker:I ended up getting two.
Speaker:Um, but I would say the average week I'm putting out three videos.
Speaker:So you're obviously like you had the website pretty damn dialed in.
Speaker:There's obviously still a filtering process.
Speaker:We don't need to go through all that, but you automated a lot of the
Speaker:website side.
Speaker:You have someone else writing your newsletter for the
Speaker:most part, or completely.
Speaker:Videos though, and staying up with the news.
Speaker:And then now I'm thinking of the sponsorship obligations
Speaker:you have across the board,
Speaker:um, partnerships.
Speaker:Obviously you're having the YouTube or sorry, a podcast side of things.
Speaker:So you're creating content there as well.
Speaker:Um, how do you sleep?
Speaker:Do
Speaker:I mean, systems and teams, right?
Speaker:Systems and teams.
Speaker:um, when it comes to YouTube, right?
Speaker:I've got,
Speaker:uh, I've got John who helps me with all the YouTube optimization, the thumbnails.
Speaker:I've got, uh, Mark, who's my editor.
Speaker:I still edit a lot of the videos myself because I just enjoy editing.
Speaker:Um, Uh, but I still send, you know, I'd say half the videos,
Speaker:Mark edits, half the videos I edit.
Speaker:So I've got an editor who's helping me there.
Speaker:I've got a team who helps sell the sponsorships for me.
Speaker:Um, I basically got like an assistant who makes sure that like, all right, don't
Speaker:forget this Wednesday, you've got to put this sponsorship into the video and
Speaker:like helps keep me on top of that stuff.
Speaker:Um, so it's really just a lot of team, a lot of systems.
Speaker:And that's how I'm able to like crank out as much as I crank out.
Speaker:Like I've probably got not directly working for me.
Speaker:Most of them are contractors, but I'm probably working with a good,
Speaker:like 15 people on a daily basis now.
Speaker:Um, and I've even gotten to the point now where like, I've got
Speaker:people managing the other people.
Speaker:So like, so I've, I've had to figure out how to build these
Speaker:systems to keep everything going.
Speaker:Um, but like getting into the sponsorship stuff, that's probably
Speaker:been the toughest part of like this sort of transition into YouTube for me.
Speaker:Is because so when I started doing a lot of sponsorships, I think last time
Speaker:we talked, I talked about how I signed like a lot of long term deals with some
Speaker:partners and I've got like one, two year deals with a lot of these partners.
Speaker:Well, back when I signed those deals, my channel was smaller.
Speaker:I was getting less views per video.
Speaker:Well, as the channel has grown, a lot of the audience has become less and
Speaker:less receptive to sponsors, right?
Speaker:So like, um, some of the deals that I made included like dedicated videos,
Speaker:for instance, where, um, I would make one video and the whole video would be
Speaker:about this one company, it wouldn't be like, here's all the news, by the way,
Speaker:this video is sponsored by X and then move on with the news, people don't
Speaker:seem to mind that, but if I make a video and the whole video is about one
Speaker:single company, People hate it, right?
Speaker:Like the comments are all like, Oh, you're ruining your reputation.
Speaker:Oh, you're shilling for this company.
Speaker:Oh, and I'm like, damn it, man.
Speaker:Like I signed this contract with them like nine months ago when people
Speaker:didn't really seem to be paying as much attention to my channel as they are now.
Speaker:And now it's like, all right, I've got to fulfill on what I promised
Speaker:in the contract, but the channel has gotten to this level where people
Speaker:seem to have a problem with that.
Speaker:And it's like this.
Speaker:Constant balance.
Speaker:And now I'm going back to a lot of the sponsors that I have like
Speaker:dedicated videos with, and trying to renegotiate old contracts and say,
Speaker:Hey, instead of a dedicated, can we do three integrations instead?
Speaker:And they're like, we'd really prefer it.
Speaker:And so a lot of that is like the, the, the struggle for me.
Speaker:And I'm not going to name any particular sponsors.
Speaker:I actually do really enjoy working with all the sponsors I work with.
Speaker:It's just this, like, it really sort of weighs on me that I want to make
Speaker:content that comes across as unbiased.
Speaker:That's just sharing the news that shows my excitement.
Speaker:And then when I got to work these ads
Speaker:into them and sort of like shill for somebody else for whether it
Speaker:be like a minute or like an entire video, I just feel so inauthentic
Speaker:doing
Speaker:that, but It's like part of,
Speaker:what makes the money doing this.
Speaker:So it's
Speaker:like, I don't know, like trying to find that balance has probably
Speaker:been the biggest struggle I've
Speaker:had so
Speaker:far.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And, and I feel like you're always, you are always authentic as far as I can
Speaker:tell, you know, on the video side, I mean, I don't know all the nuances of
Speaker:the tools and whatnot, but it's, it's tough and it's not the sponsor's fault.
Speaker:It's not, it's no one's fault.
Speaker:It's just kind of, I guess what it is, right.
Speaker:It's, it's yeah, that's really what it comes down to.
Speaker:Um, and obviously it's like I dunno, it's, a, it's a tough game and
Speaker:there's no perfect solution there.
Speaker:But like you said, it's like, You're juggling that multi year sometimes.
Speaker:Like it's It's a good and
Speaker:bad thing, I guess.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:As a creator.
Speaker:it's, it's interesting.
Speaker:I feel like the, the multi year contracts was like a really, really, really good
Speaker:idea when my channel was smaller, but the bigger the channel gets, you know,
Speaker:the more you're like, okay, well you, you, you got in on this deal back when
Speaker:you were, I was getting way less views.
Speaker:And, but I mean, that's part of why you sign the long term deals, right?
Speaker:Is you get in with the sponsor wants to get in with you.
Speaker:Seeing a rising star or whatever and like, Hey, cool.
Speaker:I'm going
Speaker:to, if I capitalize on this now, then I get them when they're a lot bigger too.
Speaker:So like, I under,
Speaker:I understand that part of it.
Speaker:I just, I don't think I anticipated the trolls and the backlash and
Speaker:the negative negativity that would come from those, that kind of
Speaker:content later on down the road.
Speaker:Like I didn't sort of anticipate that happening.
Speaker:Does that ever get to you?
Speaker:Like the trolls or, uh, you know, comments like that.
Speaker:Cause you know, Rogan, Joe Rogan would say like, don't read your Twitter comments,
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I don't really get much like trolling on Twitter or in like the,
Speaker:in the, in the communities where I engage, it's mostly positivity.
Speaker:Most of the negativity is in the YouTube comments, which I try to avoid,
Speaker:but I still catch them from every once in a while.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like I still have to go into my YouTube account and I still.
Speaker:See comments in there, right?
Speaker:If you go to your dashboard, YouTube doesn't even let you hide it.
Speaker:The comments are right there in your dashboard.
Speaker:Like the most, the three most recent comments, right?
Speaker:So every once in a while I pop into my dashboard and I see something
Speaker:just like horribly negative.
Speaker:And yeah, it affects you.
Speaker:I don't like, I listened to a Casey Neistat interview recently.
Speaker:And Casey's like, dude, I've been doing this for 20 years
Speaker:now.
Speaker:And it still affects me when I see like trolls and negativity.
Speaker:Like, I
Speaker:don't know if you ever get over that, but you do learn to have like a
Speaker:thicker skin around it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:like I, it, it.
Speaker:it.
Speaker:affects me for a half hour and then
Speaker:it rolls off and I forget about it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like the amount of time it takes me to like, forget about it is a
Speaker:lot quicker than it used to be, I guess is the best way of putting
Speaker:it.
Speaker:the gap.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:that's good, man.
Speaker:That's great.
Speaker:Well, I mean, we can, we can go further on the, I think, Yeah,
Speaker:On the mindset side, like, is there anything else that you think like you
Speaker:could, I'm just thinking if you started all over, like the tell yourself, like
Speaker:how to prepare for what you're in the middle of now, I don't have a perfect
Speaker:question, but some, whatever lands there.
Speaker:Well, so one of the things that
Speaker:I've realized is most of the stress and most of the pressure is from.
Speaker:that I've, uh, got from YouTube is all
Speaker:put on by me, right?
Speaker:like I put the pressure on myself to try to produce three videos a week.
Speaker:And I try to put out three videos a week and the weeks that I only put
Speaker:out too, I sort of beat myself up for it, but I don't have a boss somewhere
Speaker:sitting there going, why didn't you get that third video out this week?
Speaker:That was just my own like constraint that I built for myself.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Like, so a lot of the like pressure and stress is like,
Speaker:Is is self inflicted, right?
Speaker:Um, I agreed to all of these sponsorships.
Speaker:I agreed to all of this stuff.
Speaker:I think, you know, if I was to give myself advice, I would say.
Speaker:Um, you know, don't worry too much about the, like
Speaker:the, the frequency of the content, right?
Speaker:Like worry about putting out really good content in the beginning.
Speaker:I think, um,
Speaker:you know, I don't know though, that's hard because that's sort of the
Speaker:advice I would give myself today.
Speaker:Not the advice I would have given myself when I first started the
Speaker:YouTube
Speaker:you needed frequency to get the
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The frequency is sort of what kickstarted the channel.
Speaker:But then I, I almost feel like I got to this point where I felt like I
Speaker:needed to keep that same momentum, even once the channel was already big, but
Speaker:the bigger the channel got, the more I can get away with producing less
Speaker:content, but going higher quality.
Speaker:It's almost like the bigger the channel gets, the more you
Speaker:need to focus on quality versus quantity.
Speaker:It's like an inverse relationship kind of thing.
Speaker:You know, I don't know if I would do a lot of long term sponsors.
Speaker:I don't think I would ever do dedicated videos.
Speaker:I think, um, I have already said no more dedicated videos.
Speaker:We don't sell them anymore.
Speaker:They're not an option.
Speaker:I still have a few that have already been sold that I need to fulfill
Speaker:on, but I don't sell them anymore.
Speaker:And I think I would have given myself that advice.
Speaker:Don't do dedicated videos.
Speaker:They're harmful to the channel integrations.
Speaker:Cool.
Speaker:Dedicated.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Got it.
Speaker:Makes sense.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:but yeah, I would say that's like.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:It's, it's hard to say because I, I, it's hard to put myself
Speaker:back in the mindset that I was.
Speaker:You know, two, two years ago when I was first kicking this all off
Speaker:and started going down this path.
Speaker:Um, but I, I do think the free, the high frequency, maybe not as high of quality
Speaker:is what helped me in the beginning.
Speaker:Then as I got bigger, I sort of shifted more into quality versus quantity.
Speaker:And, uh, yeah, when it comes to sponsorships, uh, pick and
Speaker:choose the sponsors, right, and don't do any dedicated,
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Know what you're getting into and thinking.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's almost like not always solving just the now thing, but
Speaker:thinking ahead just enough.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:All right, amigo, uh, we are two till the time you get to bounce.
Speaker:So I took you to as far as
Speaker:we
Speaker:can take you.
Speaker:Um, thank you so much.
Speaker:Uh, shout outs, obviously future tools.
Speaker:io.
Speaker:Find Matt
Speaker:Wolfe on, uh, everywhere else, basically, but YouTube, what Mr.
Speaker:Eflow on X, Twitter,
Speaker:X and Instagram.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:I
Speaker:Instagram.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Join his
Speaker:really do a lot of Instagram.
Speaker:I'm trying to do it a little bit more, but yeah,
Speaker:All right, man.
Speaker:Appreciate you so much.
Speaker:Love you, bro.
Speaker:man.
Speaker:Likewise.
Speaker:Appreciate you.
Speaker:I love you.
Speaker:And thanks for having me again.