Transcription
You guys ask a lot of good questions, but also a lot of really weird questions. I did a video like this last month where I answered all of your burning weird questions about my YouTube channel, how much I make, all that sort of stuff. And well, you guys seem to like it, so I figured let's do another one.
So, by far the most common question I got asked was, "What video model are you using for your intro? Really cool. How are you guys doing these weird intros?" Yo, show us how to create those intros. Intros. Intros. Intros. Intro. Everybody wants to know about these intros. And well, in my last AMA style video, I literally broke down exactly how I make my intros. So, if you haven't watched this video right here, currently called the truth about my channel and how much I make, well, I do break it down in that one. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to title that video and likely no idea how I'm titling this video because I cover so much ground in videos like this. So, I did get a lot of feedback on this video like, "Hey, I loved that video, but I didn't care how much you made." So, it took me forever to actually click on it and watch on it.
Here's the thing. I'm going to try to make one of these videos once a month where all the questions that came in that I haven't answered on my videos, I answer on this video. If you see these weird random titles, it's probably me doing this. Saying that, a lot of these were specifically about the wolf intro that I did recently. It looked like this, where there's a wolf sitting in the chair. Here's the AI, and then it merges into me. I'll quickly walk through exactly how I did that one because I did do it slightly different than some of my other intros. I actually started in chat GPT and I gave it a screenshot of just my office with an empty chair sitting in it and I said make a wolf sitting in the chair and it initially gave me this image which isn't the correct aspect ratio. So I gave it the same image again of an empty chair and I said make a wolf sitting in the chair. Make sure to keep the same 16-9 aspect ratio. And then it made this image of a wolf sitting in a chair. I then jumped over to runway ML and you can see how many different attempts I took here. 13 different attempts of the wolf in the chair. Most of them weren't that great. Like this one up in my quarter. You can see it looks like a wolf peeling over me. This one, a little bald man pops out. I think this is the one I ended up using. And you can see I gave it a first frame and that was the image that I generated of the wolf. And then I gave it a second frame which was the first frame of my video actually starting. So this is right when I start speaking in my video. I just took a screenshot just of that frame. First frame wolf, last frame, me sitting here talking. And then I gave it the prompt, the wolf morphs into the man in one smooth motion. The wolf head slowly looks more and more like a human head. And the wolf body slowly looks more and more like a human body until the man from the end of the frame is sitting in the chair. The man then stares silently into the camera. And I had to put this last line because if you don't put that a lot of times it makes me just like start talking into the camera. >> Moses thing >> like that where I just spoke gibberish. So yeah, you got to be really specific with the prompt and tell it don't add any extra sound to it. But then I just took the little video clip that this generated for me and put it at the very front of my video. Put like a little smooth transition over it so it kind of hides any sort of cuts. And that's how I make my intros. I do go in more depth in my last video that I just pointed out earlier. So, check that out if you want more detail about how I actually make these.
Bob here asked, "Who, or more precisely, what comes up with your intros?" Well, I come up with all of my intros, or my kids help me come up with my intros, believe it or not. The wolf one was what people actually suggested in the comments. I kept on seeing people say, "Make an intro of you morphing from a wolf." But most of my other ones where there's like a claw machine or me bursting through the back wall or things like that, a lot of those were actually my kids ideas.
A lot of people also wanted to know about my team. Do you have a team creating, researching, editing? In the end of the video, you mentioned me and my team, but the entire video felt like a one-man team. How big is your team? Do you do all your own editing or do you hire someone to help? How many people are on your team? But you said before you had somebody to edit your videos. You and your team, you say? I thought you did this alone.
So to answer that question, yes, I do have a team. And yes, I do edit my own videos. I have hired editors in the past. For a while, I hired a whole team of editors who were trying to make my videos more polished. I had this goal in mind of like I wanted to be like Cleo Abram or Marquez Brownley or Veritasium or one of these channels that has really high polished videos. So, I hired a team to help me do that. And the more I went in the direction of high polish, the more people were telling me in the comments, "Hey, we just liked it when you made the simpler videos." So, I actually ended up just saying, "Okay, well, the simpler videos are just me editing live, where I'm literally just pressing buttons right next to me as I'm talking and moving the things around as I'm talking so that I'm literally editing this in real time." That's how I made my videos before I hired editors. And well, that seemed to be the style of video people enjoyed from me. So, I just went back to doing that. I let my various editors go and now I edit myself. I do a pass in Da Vinci Resolve where I, you know, cut out mistakes and stuff like that. But yeah, I do most of my own editing. Now, there's one caveat. I do have a couple people that help me on shorts. So, when you see a lot of the clips that are on short form videos, I do have an editor helping me with those. In fact, there's two editors making shorts. And then when I do put sponsorships and ads inside of my videos, I have an editor that helps me make those ads. But the majority of my video is just me editing in real time, clicking buttons on my little stream deck here and then cleaning it up in Da Vinci Resolve later. Again, I do go into my editing process in last month's AMA style video, which I will link in the description below if you want to watch all those tips.
Now, as far as how big my team is, I don't really have anybody that works directly for me. I have a handful of contractors and agencies that I work with. I do work with two editors. One of them purely does shorts for me and they're actually more of an agency. So, they work with a bunch of other creators as well. And then I have another editor who primarily works for me, but they also are part of an agency. They're just like my sort of dedicated editor at that agency. They do the short forms and also the ads for me. So, two editors, one's only doing shorts, one's doing shorts and ads. I have a person on my team named John who helps me with all of the packaging. So, he helps with titles and thumbnails. He also works with other creators. I'm not his only client. And then I have a production assistant named Roya who helps with a lot of things. She helps manage my social media. She helps manage the ads editor. She helps manage the shorts editor. She's involved with the packaging and the titles and thumbnail ideas as well and sort of just helps manage all of the various people and also make sure that all of our sort of social media strategies are on track. I have one person that helps me run the future tools website. His name's Vishall and he's pretty much the one reviewing the new tools that go on the site to make sure that AI didn't mess up any of the processes so the descriptions look good and all that sort of thing. And then I work with an agency that handles all of my sponsorships. It's actually a company called Smooth Media. And when a sponsor reaches out to sponsor my YouTube channel, my future tools website or my newsletter, well, they get passed over to Smooth and they do all the sort of negotiation on the pricing for the sponsorships and things like that. I also have a newsletter writer who works on the newsletter with me. Her name is Katherine. If you're subscribed to the Future Tools newsletter, you'll see that it is now signed by Katherine and Matt Wolf. And we work together to put out the best possible newsletter we can every week. So, I guess you know, seven or eightish people, but none of them are in-house. Nobody's like a salaried employee for me. They're all different agencies and contractors that I work with that all have like other clients as well. I am still a oneperson business that outsources a handful of things still.
So along a similar line, what kind of overhead do you need to support that? I assume you have cost of simply paying for the gear, software subscriptions, and model subscription costs. Yeah, so the question of overhead, it's probably bigger than most people realize. I would say across all of those agencies that I'm paying and the various contractors I'm working with, it's probably in the realm of about $20,000 a month that I'm paying for all of that stuff to happen for me. I don't want to get into specific team members pay ranges, but as a whole, all of those people and agencies, it yeah, it's roughly around 20K per month. As far as subscriptions, I pay for the highest tier plan for Claude, the highest tier plan for Chat GPT, the highest tier plan for Gemini. I would say if I was to look at all of my tools, and I haven't done this recently, but if I was to look at all of it and sum it all up, it's probably around another $2,000 in subscriptions a month that I'm paying for so that I can constantly test new things as they roll out as well. So, if I'm giving a rough estimate of my overhead, it's probably in that range of 23 to $25,000 per month to run everything I'm doing. Now again, that's the Future Tools website, that's the Future Tools newsletter, that's the YouTube channel, that's running my social media accounts, that's all of my short form videos. There's a lot happening, probably more than most people realize. And again, I'm paying for tons and tons of subscriptions so I can stay on top of everything.
How many hours a week do you put on your projects or do you work on your channel? To be honest, I'm pretty much 9 to5. This is my full-time job. This is what I do. I get to my computer probably roughly 9:00 a.m. every morning and then around 5:00 p.m. maybe some days it stretches till 6:00 p.m. I'm reading the AI news. I'm having conversations with people. I'm testing out tools. I'm recording. I'm outlining. And I pretty much spend a good 8 hours a day. And then after that, I'll go and, you know, hang out with the family and eat dinner and do that kind of stuff. We might watch a TV show or two. And then on some nights when I'm like really excited and there's a lot going on that I want to be working with after my kids go to bed and sometimes after my wife goes to bed at, you know, 10:00 10:30, I usually come back to my computer and work for another, I don't know, couple hours. I have been known to burn the midnight oil and work from, you know, 10:00 p.m. till 1:00 a.m. before going to bed and then getting up at 9:00 the next day and starting all over again. But I don't have to work those hours. That's just because I get really excited about some of this stuff and want to like get it and play with it and test new stuff. like a new chat GPT model came out or a new image model came out and I'm like oh I got to get in and play with this right now. So a lot of times I'll do that in the middle of the night after everybody goes to bed and then you know start over 9 to5 don't typically work on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays are usually family time and I'm able to do that because I've built a lot of automations and I have a really good team that I just talked about that helps support everything else I'm doing.
This was another popular question. A lot of people wanted to know how much I make from revenue outside of AdSense. And this is the more complicated number to talk about. So, if I jump into YouTube, I'll show you again. I'm still kind of in the same range that I was in in my video last month. But obviously, I just got done talking about how I have about $25,000 a month in overhead. And obviously, this $7,600 a month isn't going to cover $25,000 a month in overhead. But that's because, well, sponsors do make up a majority of my income. The reason it's a little more complicated to talk about, it is somewhat of a sliding scale. It's kind of negotiated a little bit because I have multiple things that companies can sponsor. You know, I've got the YouTube channel, I've got the newsletter, I've got shorts, I've got future tools. I will go out and speak at events. All of these kinds of things can be packaged into sort of different bundles. So, a sponsor may come to us and we might sell them on. Okay. Well, why don't you sponsor two YouTube videos, four newsletters, and one Instagram reel, right? And we're selling these different bundles all the time. So, there isn't really like a fixed rate, and it does fluctuate up and down every month. What I will say, and I really don't like talking about this cuz it feels like I'm bragging, but I don't want to feel like I'm bragging. It is generating over $100,000 a month in sponsorships. So, I will let you know that it is enough to cover all of those expenses that I mentioned, but it is more nuanced and difficult to get into like exact sponsorship rates and things like that. We also do some long-term deals. We've had sponsorships that we've sold that were 12 months of sponsorships and we pre-sold the whole 12 months. So, they would get like one ad per month for 12 months. Those deals are often in the six figures to sell like a whole bundle of those. And then the company that I work with, Smooth Media, who goes and sells those sponsorships, they get a commission on all the sponsorships they sell. So, you've got to remove that from the number of what we sold. And then I've got all that overhead that I mentioned. And then obviously there's taxes. So, I mean, it sounds like a really big number. And it is good. I mean, I'm very, very grateful for the amount of money I make. I am by no means struggling, but it's just very sort of complicated and complex to get in and explain exact numbers there. Again, I feel weird talking about this and might even edit this part out. We'll see.
I also seem to get this one a lot. People asking me if I'm AI or if I'm using like an AI avatar to make my videos. And no, I'm not AI. Have I played around with AI avatars and sort of tested them in some of my videos? Yes. But it's always been very very clear that that was what was going on. And I've never like tried to deceive and pretend an AI avatar was actually me. If you want to know exactly how I use AI in my business, I did go pretty deep in that in last month's sort of AMA. So, I don't really want to kind of cover all the exact same ground. Again, I do use AI heavily in my business. In fact, I'm using AI to do what you're seeing on the screen right now. But again, I covered that in my last video.
This was a question I saw a handful of people ask about my most recent video where I had a little bit where Sam and Mera were talking back and forth as I was having them read a text message. Now, first off, let me explain why I chose to do this. The reason is I didn't want to have to read their names over and over again. I didn't want to have to be like, "Sam Alman, can you indicate direction?" Blah, blah, blah. Mera, directionally very bad. Sam, okay, Sam, can you wrap this up? Instead of reading their names every time, I just put their faces on the screen so the dialogue just felt more natural and you knew who was saying what. But here's what it looked like. Sam, this is very bad. Can I come in? They don't want you to. What do you want to make it better? I'm still willing to just walk away if that helps. So, you get the idea. I basically put an image of them saying the things in the text message so that I could indicate who was speaking instead of reading their names off back and forth. And ideally, it would make the video just sort of move along better. For this, I also used runway. So, if I come over to my Runway account here, you can see in my recents, I've got the mirror one and the Sam Alman one. And it was simple. I actually just recorded the video with me speaking out their lines and then I clipped out the audio of me speaking that. Sam asked, "Can you indicate directionally good or bad?" Satia and others are anxious. Mera said, "Directionally very bad." And you can see I just put the entire audio clip of me talking about it along with their image into this character audio to voice model. And I had both of them say both lines. And then when I was editing it in Da Vinci, I just went and cut it so they were only saying the lines they were supposed to say. But I used the same audio file for both characters. I just uploaded the audio file, uploaded an image of Sam, which I'm pretty sure is an AI generated image that I found online. And I did that for both characters.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love the color purple? I really like the color purple. This is purple. A lot of times I'm wearing a purple hat. My background's purple. I have a lot of purple. There's actually a reason for that. I read something at one point that purple is supposedly a very calming color. And I'm a sort of high energy, excitable person. So, I like to put a lot of purple around me to invoke calm, but also I figure in a world of AI where people are sort of freaking out All the time and constantly feeling stressed because of AI, well, using purple as a calming color throughout my videos could be a very, very slight maybe subconscious counterbalance maybe. So, even though that was a sort of joke question, there is a real answer to it.
How do you balance your use of AI across different tasks both at work and privately while ensuring your brain doesn't rot? In other words, how do you persuade yourself to spend a bit more time solving a task yourself even though AI could do it faster? So, this is in response to a video that I made called AI is frying your brain. You can see it right here where I talked about if you let AI do too much of the work for you, your sort of thinking muscle atrophies a little bit and it gets harder to think through things. And I have a very simple answer for this. I journal a lot. Like every day I journal. And usually when I'm journaling, I just write out my problems I'm trying to solve right now. I write out cool things I've seen other creators do, other people in the AI space do. And as I'm writing and just sort of letting my brain flow with all of this stuff, a lot of times solutions also come out on the paper. I'll be saying, "Hey, I'm having this issue. I don't know what to make a video about. I've seen other people make a video about this, but I don't want to make the same video, but maybe I can make a video about this." And the next thing I know, my brain is unloading solutions. For me, that journaling habit has been the biggest thing for me. And then what I like to do is still use AI, but I'll take my journal entries of me laying out my problems and then trying to solve my problems in the journal. Throw those into something like chat GPT and say, "Here's a problem I'm trying to solve. Here's some of the solutions I came up with. What's your take?" You know, something like that. and then let chat GPT maybe fill in some gaps or some blind spots or make some additional suggestions, things like that. But for the most part, I'm spending a lot of time like in thought in journaling in planning mode myself. And then once I've come up with the ideas, the thoughts, fleshed them out myself, I almost use AI as like a second opinion instead of the originator of the idea. I actually think AI a lot of times is a very bad originator of ideas, but it's good at giving you second opinions and finding holes in your ideas and maybe suggesting other things that can improve upon your idea.
Along similar lines, this was in reply to another video. Do you journal hand type voice? The answer is yes. I journal in all forms. I would say majority of the time I still type by journal. I don't know why. My brain just flows better when I'm typing. I learned how to type very very young. I'm very very fast at it. very proficient with it and for whatever reason ideas just flow out best for me when I'm typing. But I have also mentioned I do handwrite a lot. I've got this notebook here and as you can see I write down a lot of notes and thoughts and then I go back and I highlight my notes and thoughts. So I do handwrite journals quite a bit, but I would say my real deep dive journal entries where I'm really trying to think through things, I typically type and then I do voice sometimes, but that's usually if I'm driving. I do have a spa that I like to go relax in sometimes and I will voice out notes in my spa sometimes. Or if I go for a walk and I have an idea I want to unload, I'll voice out then. But I would say most frequently is typing, second most frequently is handwriting, third is voice. But I do use all methods.
I've had a few people ask this question as well. Why are you still using benchmarks even though you made a video debunking benchmarks and saying why benchmarks are pointless, which is true. I made this video here called You're being misled about what AI can actually do. And it's all about how benchmarks are kind of pointless. And my honest answer to this question is I don't have a better way to compare them. A lot of people want to know if they're improving in coding and math and some of those kinds of things. And the best we've got right now is benchmarks. And a lot of people want to see those improvements. But I also always kind of disclose that most of these model upgrades are incremental for most people. like 90% of the world is not going to notice a difference between GPT 5.4 and GPT 5.5. Maybe it'll be a little less wordy or maybe it'll be a little less snarky or like a slight vibe change, but most people aren't going to notice. So, how do I show off that? Okay, this actually did get better. Well, right now the best I've got is showing off benchmarks. Again, I don't really put a lot of weight personally on benchmarks, but I put them in my videos cuz some people care and want to see them. That's really my honest answer.
If anyone wants to start a channel in the field of AI, is the field too saturated and what do we talk about and what to talk about is very confusing? Can you suggest anything? So, if somebody wanted to start a YouTube channel in the field of AI, what I would probably suggest now is sort of niche down. Don't just start a channel in the field of AI. Start a channel in the field of AI related to something else you're interested in, right? Like maybe you're really into gaming. Maybe you do a channel about how AI impacts gaming and all of your videos are focused on that overlap of those two things. Or maybe you're really, really into specifically automation and automating business processes. Make a channel about AI and automating business processes. Maybe you're a lawyer and you want to talk about AI. Make a whole channel about how AI is impacting law. I think AI is too big of a niche to be like what a main channel is about now. Now, I think you probably still can break through if you want to do that. I just think it'll be a lot harder now than it was when I started like five and a half years ago talking about AI. I think now the key would be like AI plus another interest. Sort of mash those together and make your channel about that.
I got a lot of this question. What is that LED screen that's on the table behind you? So, I think they're talking about let's see this thing right here that's currently got like my Oh, there goes Homer backing into the hedges there. If you're talking about that right there, that is called a tidbit. That was actually a birthday or Christmas present somebody gave me four or five years ago. So, this is that thing, right? It's just a little box that has LEDs and you can change what you want. There's a little iPhone app or Android app that you install and you use the app to decide what shows up on the little screen. See, here's what the app looks like. So, that's what that's called. It's called Tidbit. And you could learn more at tidbit.com. tbt. Oh, there goes the pop-tart cat right now.
If you had to choose only one LLM, which one are you rolling with and why? Same for image and video models, you can't say Leonardo, no cheating. Okay, so when it comes to this question, I have zero zero loyalty. Like I will use chat GPT when I feel like it is the best model of the moment. I will go and use the Claude models if I feel like they're the best models of the moment. As of this recording, GPT 5.5 is my favorite model to use. I really, really enjoy that model. It's good at coding. It's good at answering my questions. It's good when I give it like journal entries and see how the it responds to the journal entries. It's the model I'm using inside of codeex when I'm building out my wiki. Another whole video I made a tutorial on. GPT 5.5 is my go-to. But if you would have asked me last month, it was probably Claude Opus 4.7. If you asked me like 3 months ago, it was probably Gemini 3.1 Pro. I just use whatever I feel is the best model in the moment. And at sometimes different models are good for different things. At one point, I really liked the conversation abilities of chat GPT, but the coding abilities of Claude, so I would jump between them based on what I was using it for. Right now, I kind of find GPT 5.5 to be good at almost everything, so I'm primarily using that. Will my opinion change next week or next month or 3 months from now? Absolutely. It will probably keep changing as new models come out. Again, zero loyalty. Same for image and video models. I'm jumping around a lot. If you would have asked me a month ago, it was Nano Banana Pro. that model was the best of the best for me. You ask me today, I really, really like the GPT image model, especially if I want text in it. So, the main go-to model for me for images right now is the GPT images 2 model. That's probably what I'm going to go and use if I want to prompt an edit of an image or if I want to just directly prompt an image right now. Honestly, I'd probably go give Nano Banana the same prompt and see which one does it better.
You casually mention that you're using codecs often lately. I've also heard you recommend co-work in the past. For someone that can only afford one $20 a month plan, would you recommend Codeex more than co-work? Right now, I would say Codeex is the way to go over co-work. There's a few reasons for that. One, I actually think the GPT model is slightly better than the Claude model right now, but two is just the rate limits. Claude rate limits you so much faster than the GPT models. So, for your $20 a month plan, I feel like you just get so much more mileage right now. like you can keep on prompting and prompting and prompting and get a lot more prompts before you start running into rate limits than you will if you're using Enthropic right now. As with the last question I just answered, my loyalties change based on new information.
When open source models that can be run locally can match Frontier models or at least be very competent at doing real tasks, what do you think happens to these giant models that require huge data centers? I don't think they go anywhere. I think large enterprise companies are still going to want to use the most state-of-the-art best models they can get and they're going to need those big data centers in order to use them. I think some industries are going to switch to ondevice on premises sort of large language models but they're going to be the industries that really really really need the security and the privacy. I think for most companies most industries they're still going to use the state-of-the-art closed models that do require the data centers. The other thing is these AI models still need to be trained, right? Like you're not training these models on the local devices. They're still being trained in these big large data centers. The data centers will still be needed to train the bigger models. Even the big open- source models are still trained on monster GPU clusters. They're not trained on like a DGX Spark like local machine.
Is your head really that big compared to your shoulder width, or is that another AI effect? No, my head is just giant. I have a giant head. Thank you very much for pointing that out.
What was the coolest or oh wow moment you had with a fan or someone who admires your work? I think for me the coolest moments are when the people that I really respect and look up to and have followed for a long time have sort of acknowledged my work. I think there was a very surreal moment for me when Tim Ferrris featured one of my YouTube videos in his Five Bullet Friday about like one of the things you should be paying attention to right now and he pointed to one of my YouTube videos because I read Tim Ferrris's book back in 2007 and it sort of totally changed my trajectory on life and made me want to build my own thing. And when Tim Ferrris was writing emails talking about my YouTube channel, that was a big moment for me. I've bumped into some other really bigname YouTubers at conferences that I've watched their channels for years and when I met them I was sort of starstruck but they're like hey I watch your channel and that those kinds of moments are always really really cool for me and then just anytime I go to an event and somebody wants to like take a selfie or something that's always cool to me like I don't know it's it's it's cool to meet people that watch the channel and put faces to the view numbers that I see that's always really really cool.
Do you use AI for fun? If so, what do you do? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most fun stuff are the image generators. I love just like trying to break it and see what I can do with the image generators. The thing that I probably play with the most and just use it for fun, but then don't really ever share it or make videos about or things like that are some of the music generators. Like, I have a lot of fun just playing with. going to SNO and taking like a text message thread or something like that, throwing it into SNO and having it convert it to a song or grabbing one of my guitars behind me, playing like a quick acoustic rift and throwing it into seeing what kind of backing drums and bass it puts over it. I really really like playing with the music tools, but I also have some reservations about the music tools. Like it's one of those areas where I do feel for all the artists that it's been trained on. So, I have like ethical mixed emotions about the music tools, but I also think it's some of the most fun you can have playing with AI. Yeah, that's my honest answer there.
Okay, a four-parter here. Cover elephant in the room. Matt Wolf transformation. We already talked about that. Your team and family, how do they allow you to be an AI so much? I've kind of already talked about that. I have a team, so they're all helping me. I kind of keep my work confined to like 9 to5. Maybe some days stretching it to 6:00. And then I also work late at night once everybody goes to bed when I'm really excited. I wouldn't say I do that every night, but maybe like one night a week I'll stay up till like 1:00 1:30 just sort of pounding away at something. How do you deal with AI haters, AI slop guys? Eh, I ignore them. Everybody's allowed to have their opinion. In fact, I actually read and watch a lot of videos from people that are very anti- AI cuz I want to hear both sides of the coin. I want to understand their points of view and a lot of times I agree with their points of view. But if somebody's just being a jerk in comments, I'm pretty good at just ignoring that and tuning it out now. And for the most part, I just kind of read it and go, "Nah, whatever. You're not my audience." And then just move on, right? Like I'm making videos for a specific person, people that are interested in this stuff that want to learn about it. You don't have to love it, but if you just want to be looped in and you want to know what's happening, that's who I'm making it for. If you're somebody that's just gonna like completely tune it out, put your head in the sand and uh attack anybody who does talk about it, well, you're not who I'm making this for. So, whatever. I don't really care about your jerky comment very much. Demonetization of YouTube AI channels. Your thoughts? Well, here's the thing. YouTube isn't necessarily demonetizing channels for being AI channels. They're demonetizing for being like super super loweffort like no value added channels. YouTube is actively pushing AI. Like they baked VO into YouTube shorts so you could generate videos directly into VO. So they're not like anti- AI. But I also really really hate the fact that not just YouTube, but most of these big tech companies like Meta, Facebook, Instagram, like a lot of these other platforms are using AI to make the decision. And I think that's not right. Like if you're going to demonetize a channel or close a channel, AI should not be making that decision. AI should not be having their finger on the demonetization button. I think it needs to go through a human review. And I really, really think it sucks that platforms like YouTube are willing to let an AI make the decision about who gets demonetized and who doesn't. That really sucks in my opinion.
I'd like to know what your TV view percentage is, given that YouTube CEO states that more than 50% of YouTube viewing is now on TV. Let's take a look. I mean, here's my spread. It's uh almost a third, a third, a third, but 33% mobile phone, 31% computer, 29.2% TV.
In regards to ad revenue, are views per video not more important than total amount of subscribers? And does video length play any role in this? Yes, the amount of views you get per video is way more important than subscribers. In fact, the subscriber number doesn't really matter. It's almost just like a personal goal post, a personal milestone because you know that if somebody watches one of your videos and clicks subscribe, that's somebody saying, "I like this video enough that I want to make sure I see more from this person again." Right? So, it's just kind of like this nice milestone. But YouTube doesn't even really work that way anymore. Like even though you're clicking subscribe and saying, "I want to see more of these," YouTube is just going to put more videos in front of you based on what you've watched in the past, whether you're subscribed or not. Getting the views is way more important than getting the subscribers, but the subscriber number is just like a cool milestone that everybody's shooting for. Does video length play any role in this? When it comes to revenue, yeah, I mean, if a video is longer, there's more opportunity for ad slots in the video. So, longer videos actually have potential to make more money if people watch them all the way through because there's going to be more ads throughout that video that YouTube injects into them.
What do you tell a high school freshman about preparing for life after high school? College? No college? And this question is something that's actually kind of close to me. My daughter is 13. She'll be in high school in about a year and a half. So, it is something that comes up and I do think about a lot. I really don't know what the job market is going to look like in the future. The best advice I think I can give is to be really good at learning. Like enjoy learning and enjoy sort of going down rabbit holes and trying to understand things. Understand how things work. Understand how tools work. Understand how businesses work. understand how various things work and just kind of go down rabbit holes and love learning. I remember hearing Tim Ferrris once say that among all of the most successful people he's ever had on his podcast, there was one trait that separated the really successful people from the less successful people. And that was the trait that they all just love to learn. They're just always so fascinated and wanting to learn more and more and more and can never stop learning. that fascination and that obsession with learning and knowing more. There's a huge correlation between that and being successful. I also think it's important to go out and test things and build real things. School is great for that book knowledge and learning what happened in the past and how things have worked, but companies these days, they're looking for people with realworld skills that have actually built stuff. And if you go and use AI and actually build stuff like build websites, use AI to code things up. Learn to actually code yourself so you can understand what the AI wrote, you know, write a newsletter, write a substack, actually create things using your own skills and maybe AI if you're inclined to test AI to sort of be a accelerant to these interests. That's what gets you further in the real world. people seeing that you've actually done things and put things out into the world and actually have something to show for all of this learning you've done. I also think it's important to develop social skills. I think that's an area where younger generations might actually struggle and those people that build social skills that are in that sort of Gen Z, Gen Alpha, those are the people that are going to get further ahead as well because more and more people are isolating themselves. you've got more and more kids hanging out at home just playing video games all the time or finding companionship through a screen instead of through real life interactions. And so people that are constantly learning, constantly actually building and putting things out into the world and people that are actually out there networking and getting to know other human beings and building connections and relationships are the people that are going to continue to succeed. Those are going to be the people that opportunities are put in front of, right? The more people you know, the more opportunities those people might be able to present to you. The more skills you build and the more knowledge you build, the more ready you're going to be when those opportunities pop up. AI can be an accelerant to all that. It can help you learn faster. It can help you build faster. It can even give you tips and advice on how to be a better communicator and connector. But you still have to be the person that goes and does those things. You still have to be the learner, the builder, the communicator. I think those are the skills that are really necessary. Now, whether that means you should go to college or not, I think that's really going to be dependent on like what career path you want to go down, but people that are obsessed with learning are probably going to want to go to college. People that are obsessed with communicating and networking, getting to know other people. College is a great place to do those things. Do you need college to do those things? Not necessarily. So, I don't know. Those are just kind of my broad thoughts. I don't necessarily have the answer and it's a conversation we're going to be having this household more and more over the coming year. But again, I think those are the skills that are important.
How do we get featured on your Framio picture frame that shows your images in the background? So, you're talking about this thing right here. I could sort of swipe through it and show pictures of, you know, photos of people I've met in person. This is literally just anytime I get a photo with a group of people or with somebody at one of these events that I go to, I just toss it on that little frame app. So, if we ever bump into each other at an event and get a selfie together and then you either text it to me or DM it to me or you post it on Instagram or Twitter or put it in some way where I can actually see it and access it, I'll throw it on that frame. That's literally every photo that's on here is just from the various events and parties and conferences and things like that. When I get photos with people, I come home, throw them on the frame, and they end up in the background of my videos.
What do you use to switch between you being on the screen slash off the screen and in the corner? Is that just your OBS setup? I do this kind of stuff where I can like move my head around and switch between me and my screen and even take myself off the screen like this. I can do that stuff using a combination of OBS and a stream deck. So, let me see if I can actually hold this up on camera. This is my stream deck here. And you can see I've got these buttons over here. Sorry, I'm having trouble getting the angle. This one switches it to me on on screen or my screen share. The one next to it switches the side of the screen I'm on. So, I can switch that back and forth. And then this one switches it back to me on screen here. So, I just set up these buttons on this stream deck here. And there's an OBS plugin. So, you install OBS on your computer. You install the Stream Deck OBS plugin that makes the two talk to each other. And then I can do stuff like this.
Your studio looks pretty impressive. Did you hook all that stuff up yourself or did you get it professionally installed? No, I did it all myself. I tend to like tear down all of my equipment and rearrange my office like once every 6 months or so. I'm actually probably due to do that pretty soon. So, if you start noticing new camera angles and
new stuff show up in my background or whatever, I feel like I'm about due for that. I've just always been a technical guy. Like, I just know how to use computers. I've been using them since I was like 8 years old or something like that. And uh have always had like a strong grasp of how to make all the technical stuff work together. I guess that and a lot of YouTube tutorials. I watch a lot of YouTube tutorials on how to set stuff up as well.
Was there ever a winner announced for the DGX Spark? Yes, there was. Uh they were emailed directly and we already sent it out to them and we got an email back confirming that they received it. So, there was a winner, but we do have more giveaways like that coming up. In fact, every year Nvidia gives me something to give away. In the past, we gave away 4080s, 5090s, DGX Sparks. So, every year around uh the Nvidia event, I do another giveaway. And I also have some other cool things that me and my team are working on around the 1 million subscriber mark that we'll probably do some fun giveaways as well once we hit that milestone.
I heard rumors that when you hit 1 million subscribers, you're going to sell out to private equity. True. Funny you should ask that cuz I have an announcement to make. This channel has been No, it hasn't. I'm just kidding. I didn't sell the channel and I don't plan on selling the channel. I think what you're referring to is probably this video that a buddy of mine Gen made. It went super viral about how private equity turns your favorite channels into slop. I did watch that video. No, I have no plans to sell my channel to private equity. But the funny thing is, I've gotten two offers already for companies wanting to buy the channel. One of them was a private equity. One was a bigger sort of well-known software company that tried to buy my entire brand. Both times I turned him down and said, "No, no intention on selling my Matt Wolf YouTube channel. I don't plan on doing that."
I've wondered about this for quite some time. Do you have OpenClaw helping you manage the comment section for your videos? I do not. Open Cly I mostly just have doing some simple stuff like it alerts me of new news from Enthropic and OpenAI and stuff like that. I have it do some simple things like helping me reply to emails and stuff. But if I'm being honest, I haven't been using OpenClaw as much as I used to. I'm using Codeex a lot more. If you watch my video about Obsidian Plus Codeex building a second brain, I'm using that system a lot more than I'm using OpenClaw these days. But no, I still read a lot of the comments myself for the first few hours after a video goes live and then I have a tool that helps me find questions that pop up so I can make these videos. And uh no, it's still a very manual process.
I can't find your AI is awesome list. Why would that be? I don't know. It still exists. If you go to Twitter, I don't know if this is the exact URL that you would use to get to it, but I will link it up in the description. So, if you want to get to this list, this is where I save all the people that I think are good follows in the world of AI on Twitter. So, if you want to keep up with AI, you can follow this list. It's got almost 2,000 people following this list. So, it's definitely still there and still getting more followers all the time. Again, I'll link it up for you.
At what point did you get into dabbling with coding? How long did you dabble and when did you start to feel confident in coding with the various tools? I mean, that's an interesting question cuz I started coding when I was 11. I think I actually started coding in Qbasic and built little DOSs apps and DOSs games. So, I've kind of been involved in coding for like a big chunk of my life, like 30 plus years. But I sort of fell out of coding for a little while and then when AI came around, started to get back into it. I made videos probably 3 years ago where I started to get into AI coding to help me code up games and little apps and things like that. So, I've probably been messing around with coding using AI for the last three or so years. But, I mean, I guess technically I've kind of been a coder most of my life. I'm just not the best coder in the world and know some really, really outdated coding languages.
Everyone says you can create an app with AI, but they don't tell you how to get the app to work once you get AI to write the code. Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated. So, I think the easiest way right now is probably Versel. And to use Versell, I would ask AI. So, I would sort of build the app, demo it inside of whatever platform you built it in. Like if you built it in codeex or cloud code or you know inside of chat GPT directly usually you can demo the app straight inside of the platform and once you've tested it and it works say hey I want to deploy this to versel walk me through it and have it walk you through deploying it to versel. That's probably the simplest way to get something online really really quickly that you can test and send links to other people and play around with. I'm sure there'll be other comments with other suggestions, but that's what I tend to do is I push it over to Verscell so that I have it living online where I can test it from like an actual online cloud environment. But again, have AI walk you through it. Just tell AI what I told you. Help me set this up on Verscell.
Do you have an event list you attend? Would love to meet you sometime. Also interested in what you think is worth attending throughout the year. I don't specifically have a list. I just kind of get invited to events and decide in the moment if I feel like going or not. I tend to go to Google IO every year. I tend to go to Microsoft Build every year. I mostly go because most of my friends go to those events and I'm looking forward to seeing them at those events even more so than sitting through a keynote. I could kind of care less about being there live for the keynote. I just love meeting other creators that are there and also meeting builders like the people that are actually working in Google developing the stuff and talking to them. Like that's why I'm at the event. If I can just skip the keynote completely, I probably would. But usually if they invite me to the event, they tell me I need to be at the keynote. Also, I went to Human X this year. That was a pretty fun event. I like to go to Augmented World Expo where they show off AR and VR stuff. It's really fun to demo that kind of stuff. I'm going to be at Open Sauce this year, which is like a sort of opensource engineering group. I don't even know how to describe it. It's like a bunch of builders that just sort of build stuff in their garage kind of people. But to be honest, there's a few events that I go to every year and then most of the events are like I try to get to new events that I've never been to. I want to experience different events and try different events every year. So, other than the handful of like main stays for me, which are Google IO, Microsoft Build, Augmented World Expo, and CES, maybe like those are the four that I know I'm kind of going to every year. Other than that, I'm kind of testing different events constantly.
I noticed that you changed your logo. Did you do this because the old logo looked too much like the OpenAI logo? Yeah, kind of. To me, it just looked like a lot of different logos. Like, it looked like a logo that you'd see on a lot of different websites. It just sort of blended in and was boring. My new logo is very clearly an F and a T. I mean, I did get comments like in my videos like, "Where did you get that OpenAI hat?" And I'm like, "It's not an OpenAI hat. It's a future tools hat." I wanted a refresh, a rebrand, and I wanted it to be a little more modern looking. And also, I didn't want it to look like OpenAI or just a lot of other logos I've seen.
Do you actually use any of the Vision glasses types of things? I test a lot of them. The only ones that I still use frequently are my Ray-B band Metas mostly just to use them for headphones and to take quick pictures without having to pull out my phone. I do have a lot of VR headsets. I will play games on them from time to time, but uh lately I've been too busy. But yeah, they do get use every once in a while, just not as frequently as I'd like.
In your setup tour, I remember you collecting handheld and VR headsets. So, I was curious if you're a gamer. Yes, I'm a gamer. That's kind of what I do in a lot of my free time as I play video games. If you look at my background and you know gaming, then you can probably tell some of my favorite games. That sword over here from a game. This little character here from a game. I got like a little Pokemon thing here. actually don't play that much Pokemon, but we do collect the cards as a family, and my wife is a big Pokemon player. But yes, I'm definitely a gamer.
Love the updates. Can we have one on the sword? Sure. One sec. Let me grab it real quick. All right. So, this sword is the Master Sword from Zelda. If you know gaming, you probably already recognized it, but what I love about this thing is it's a legit like real sword. Like this. I don't know if you can tell, but it's it's actual metal. It's made out of steel. This is a real legit sword that could, you know, slice somebody. It's crazy. And it's got all the Zelda markings on it and stuff. Like, it's legit and I love it. We bought it at a Renaissance fair. Yes, I'm a nerd.
And last question. Considering you love gaming, what is your favorite gaming system? And favorite game of all time and current. Favorite gaming system of all time for me, like most nostalgic is Super Nintendo. Like I just remember playing so much Super Mario World growing up. I I was I loved that game. favorite current system is PC gaming. Like, hands down. I actually use my Steam Deck and play a ton of games on Steam Deck, which if you're not familiar with Steam Deck, it's basically a handheld PC. So, you play PC games, but on a handheld thing. Favorite game of all time has to be Ocarena of Time, a Zelda game. I basically binge played that game until I beat it. I remember getting it one year for Christmas, booting it up, and then like not sleeping for like two days cuz I just wanted to keep on playing it until I beat it. So, like growing up, that's probably the game that I became the most obsessed with the fastest and was obsessed with every Zelda game that's ever come out since then. Current favorite game, that's tough. I rotate through a lot of games. Right now, I'm playing a lot of Slay the Spire 2. I also really love Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I kind of find myself going back to those a lot on the Switch. But right now, the games I'm playing the most are Slay the Spire 2 and well, in fact, screw it. Here's my Steam. You can actually see what I've played recently. Slay the Spire 2, Battro, Vampire Survivor, Ball Pit, Celeste, Dead Cells. I have a lot of games. I've been a gamer for a long time. This is years and years and years worth of games. But recently, yeah, it's mostly Slay the Spire 2, Bolro, and Vampire Survivor games where I can just sort of like jump in, play like one round real quick that might last me 30 minutes, and then jump out. I've also really enjoyed Hades 2 recently. I've spent a lot of time playing Valheim. I put some mileage on Dave the Diver. Elden Ring is one of my favorites, but it doesn't work on my Mac. I have a PC on this desk over here that I play that on. So, yeah, I'm a nerd in like every sense of the word. I love tech and AI. I love games, and I go to Renaissance fairs with the family sometime.
But on that note, that was the last question I got. There was a few that I missed, but this video was already getting insanely long. I know I already covered way, way, way more than even the last video, but I'm going to keep on collecting questions, and we'll do this again next month. I think this is going to be a once a month thing where I just pull up all the questions and try to fill in holes and gaps and answer questions that people ask because it's a blast to make. Like these videos are really, really fun for me and I know people get a lot of value. They probably don't get the most views in the world, but I just like making them. So, there'll be more of these.
If this is the first video you've seen on this channel, this isn't what my videos normally are like. I normally make AI news breakdowns where I break down everything that's happened in the world of AI. I drink from the fire hose all week with all the news, all the new tools, everything that's coming out. And then I make one video every Friday that tries to filter the signal through the noise and hype and just tell you here's what I think you'll want to know that happened in the AI world. Those videos come out every single Friday. If that's something that interests you, maybe consider liking and subscribing to this channel cuz that's like my normal breadand butter video.
All right, again, that's what I got for you. Thanks so much for tuning in. Hopefully I'll see you in the next one. the bike.