AI and the future of the creator economy with Matt Wolfe

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Artificial intelligence isn't anything new, but it's been gaining more popularity with chat G T P tools that generate images and even AI generated music. It seems like everyone is talking about AI. So how can creators make the most of AI in their workflow, and will AI replace creativity altogether?

Matt: And I think the best creators are gonna leverage AI as a tool, not as the main source of content creation. Right? 

Akta: I spoke to Matt Wolfe, a YouTuber and newsletter creator about AI and what it means for the creator economy.

Matt: I started to get into AI about 2021. Uh, that's when I first came across G P T three, which was a tool where you can, you know, have it type articles for you or finish your sentences, or you can ask it questions and it would respond to you. And back when I was making content about it in 2021, nobody really seemed to be that interested in it.

Um, it wasn't until 2022 when. Dolly, the image generation platform started to get more popular, more YouTubers and creators started to talk about AI art generation, and then Mid Journey came along and Mid Journey just made mind blowing images that everybody were really blown away by. That started to get AI a little bit more traction, but then the biggest moment when AI just exploded was when chat G P T got released to the public and people were able to see what AI was like in this sort of conversational platform where you can.

Talk like you're chatting with a real human and it would respond back like you're chatting with a real human and would actually, for the most part, give pretty accurate and coherent answers. And when chat G P T came along, I can't remember if it was December, January, somewhere around there, that's when people really started to take notice and, and AI exploded.

That was also. Correlated with when my YouTube channel and my website exploded, as well as when it started to kind of be in the public consciousness. That's when it really started to explode from a creator standpoint as well. 

Akta: No, I'm so glad that it's reflected on your own channels and that you've seen growth because of this trending topic.

Mm-hmm. Um, but something that I also see whenever AI comes up is that argument of will AI replace creativity? Will it replace creators? What are your thoughts around. 

Matt: Stop. So my thoughts around it is, I think it just augments creativity. It augments creators. It gives them superpowers, right? I've been a creator for 13, 14 years now.

I've been making YouTube content, I've been making podcasts. I've just been in the content marketing world for 14 years. Throughout that entire time, I've never been. You know, an artist in the sense that I can make really good images, uh, that I could make really polished videos that have cool special effects and look really creative.

And when all of these tools came along, I all of a sudden was able to make really amazing YouTube thumbnails that grabbed attention, that stood out. I was all of a sudden able to work stuff into my YouTube videos that just blew people's minds and got people to pay attention to the content I started creating.

So as somebody who's been a creator for the last 14 years, And sort of struggled for 12 of 'em the last two years since AI came along and sort of added these superpowers to my arsenal. It's only augmented and helped grow me as a content creator. I think a lot of people out there are scared of it, but I think those that embrace it and learn how to augment what they're doing with it and actually use it to add additional tools to their arsenal will actually go a lot farther with it.

Akta: I love that. I love how you've reframed it to call it a superpower versus something that we are almost playing against. So I think that's really interesting. I'm really curious about how you use it for YouTube, cuz you've already mentioned that you use it for thumbnails and for like actual video content as well.

So how, how does that work and how can YouTubers make the most of 

Matt: ai? So the way that I use it in YouTube is I'm showing off a lot of it, right? So the way I like to use it is I like to. Try to think of creative challenges that I can do for myself that I can demonstrate how I did it on YouTube. So I might, one of the, one of the examples that I did was I wanted to try to make a video game.

I'm not a developer. I don't know how to code. I knew a little bit of H T M L. I can fix a few things on a website here and there, but that was the extent of my coding knowledge. And I decided I wanna try to make a video game. So I went and I used Chat, G P T, I used Mid Journey, I used Leonardo, I used a handful of these AI tools that are available out there.

And using these tools that exist, I was able to pull together a video game that was actually playable. I was actually able to share it online. Others could go and play it. It's out there. And that's sort of how I use 'em in my video is I make content challenging myself to figure out these cool, creative ways to use it.

You know, I also do that with video. I made a short film that was, it was like a two minute film entirely generated by ai. Every scene throughout the entire film. Was all generated with ai. Some of it was video clips, some of it was still images that I went and animated the images. All of the voiceover was generated by ai.

All of the background music was generated by ai. The only thing I did was I pulled it all into Da Vinci Resolve and sort of assembled the pieces, but everything else was generated by ai. So that's personally how I'm using it in my videos is, I'm challenging myself to figure out creative ways to use the AI and then documenting the process.

Now other people that want to use ai, there's tools out there that speed up editing. I use a tool when I edit my videos that automatically uses AI to cut out silence and to find the US and ums and things like that. And it cuts all those out for me. Um, I'm using tools that overlay really cool effects.

There's a really cool tool out there called Kyber. Which can take video content and sort of turn it into something that looks more like an animation. I'll use that from time to time to change up the scenes to make it more visual, to kind of have those pattern interrupts in my videos to keep the video flowing and look interesting.

So this is probably a topic I could talk on for hours. Like, you know, thi this is where my creativity starts to flow, is all of these various AI tools. How do we do interesting things that nobody has seen with them yet? And that's really how I'm leveraging it in my videos. 

Akta: And what about thumbnails? How do you use AI to help you create thumbnails?

Matt: Yeah, so my thumbnails are all mostly ai. I'd say 90% generated with ai, so, oh wow. The way I make my thumbnails is I generate an image inside of Mid Journey. I'll just think of any sort of creative image that goes along with the theme or the title or you know, what my video's about, you know, and then I will take this image that Mid Journey generates, cuz it generates these really sort of high contrast, vibrant colors, like really amazing images.

I'll take that image and I'll move it into a tool called Stable Diffusion. And inside of Stable Diffusion, I actually have my own face trained into the ai. So I can actually take this image that I created in Mid Journey, replace the face that was generated on this image with my own face. And then the last step is I'll pull it into Canva.

That's the final 10% where it's not ai and that's where I'll add my text and any sort of additional images to it. But right now I, it's, it's sort of this combination of multiple tools where I tie 'em all together and then get these really cool. Thumbnails that are bright, colorful images, but then a cartoon version of me built into the thumbnail that looks really cool and stands out and gets really high click through rates on YouTube.

So Amazing. 

Akta: Yeah. That's so interesting. I love that. And then you also have a newsletter as well where you, you know, share tools and things like that. Do you use any AI to. Help you write it or anything like that? 

Matt: So the newsletter's all about ai. I don't use AI to write it, but I use AI to double check it for me.

So what I'll do is I'll actually write the entire email myself and then when I'm done, I'll copy the email, paste it in the chat, g p t, and then say, can you double check this for grammar, uh, spelling and readability for me? Right. You could use something like Grammarly. But Grammarly doesn't typically reword stuff.

It'll just kind of re, it'll, it'll, it'll tell you where they're spelling and grammar mistakes. Yeah. Chat. G p T will actually take the content and say, you wrote it this way. Here's a better way. That word to word it to make more sense to the audience and it will actually restructure some of the paragraphs for you.

Sometimes it'll write stuff that's not really my voice and I'll just, you know, I'll throw that out. I'll go, I don't like the way you worded that. That's a word I would never personally use in my own vocabulary. But for the most part, it does a pretty good job of double checking my newsletters. So the bottom of my newsletter, every single newsletter, it says ps.

This email was 95% written by a human cause. The final 5% is chat, G P T. Just double checking for me. That's 

Akta: brilliant. I love that. And I'm glad that you kind of mentioned that. Sometimes it doesn't always sound like you because I feel like that's an issue I've had whenever I've tried to use ai. Mm-hmm.

Do you feel like blog posts or like social media posts written. By AI do well enough to kind of capture the attention of people and engage with people's audiences or like how would you recommend creators do use AI for kind of written posts? So it still sounds like them and it's still human, it's still encourages their audience to 

Matt: engage.

Yeah, so. I think AI is great at writing rough drafts, right? I think one of the hardest things about being a content creator, like a blogger that does a lot of written articles or that sort of writing is staring at a blank screen, right? Okay, I need to write this article. I need to get it out. What do I start with?

What's that first sentence? What's, you know, where do I go from here? And I think tools like chat, G p t and g p t four are great at building the bones for you. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll have chat, g p t, write an outline for me. So I'll say, I wanna write an article about Xtop. Can you write an outline?

And why that's really useful is chat, G P T and those sort of tools are gonna help make sure you don't really miss anything, right? They're gonna, they're gonna give you this outline that's pretty exhaustive. And if you're just kind of going off and writing on your own, you might miss some things that would be important to mention throughout this article where chat g p t is gonna be, you know, fairly exhaustive for you.

If you want, you can go to the next step and then say, okay, now that you've written the outline, write the article for me. And the way I would do that is I would take each bullet from the outline and one at a time, have it write the section per bullet, but then I would just use that as a rough draft. I would pretty much always go back and rewrite it in my own voice, change the sentences, remove words that I can't ever picture myself saying in real life, saying all of that.

You can't actually get chat g p t to write like you. There are ways where you can train it on your own content that you've written in the past. You can train it on your own writing. And then tell it to right in my style and it will get a lot closer. But that's a much more in depth process, which I don't think we really have time to get into on this.

But you can do what's called embedding and embed your own sort of, uh, content and back catalog of content in there and train it to right like you if you wanted to. But I'm still a fan of that human touch. I like to write, I like to have my voice in there and. To me, when I'm putting content out into the world, I don't like knowing that.

AI wrote the whole thing for me. I like knowing that this is my thoughts and opinions on, on paper, on, on the screen. Yeah, 

Akta: I agree with you a hundred percent. And do you use it, uh, at all for repurposing? So I mean, like if you've got a YouTube video and you wanna, I don't know, turn it into social media posts, are there ways to use AI to help with things like that?

Matt: So there are tools out there that do that specifically, um, that there's tools like Tweet Hunter and type fully these. These like Twitter publishing tools that will actually use AI to help you write posts. I personally don't use any of those. Anything I tweet or put on social media is still written by me, which people are often surprised.

I mean, one of the most, uh, common comments I get whenever I tweet something was, was that written by ai. But, uh, um, I still actually write almost everything that I put out myself. One of my favorite repurposing strategies is when a YouTube video does really, really well. I go and take the same concept from the YouTube video.

And I turn it into a Twitter thread. So I might talk about 10 different tools in a YouTube video, and if that video does well, I'll talk about those same 10 tools in a thread. I'm sure there's ais out there that will, you know, summarize the, in fact, I know there's YouTube, there's, uh, tools out there that will summarize the YouTube video for you and give you back a written transcript and then you can go and.

Paste that transcript into chat g p t and say, turn this into a Twitter thread for me. You can do that process. I haven't done that myself a whole lot yet. I'm still, I don't know, I'm, I'm still somebody that likes to write to, I like to get my thought out on paper. I'm somebody who journals a lot personally out away from my computer, so I'm still somebody that feels like I have a lot to say in just the written form.

So I don't really feel the necessity to use AI to. To supplement that for me, but I think it can be really helpful for people that don't have ideas or don't know what to write about or need that little push to get that content out there. 

Akta: Yeah. It seems like you've actually got a really good balance of your own creativity and using technology to help you.

Do you think that's important for creators who want to succeed? 

Matt: I, I mean, I don't know if it's important for people that want to succeed. I think there's a lot of people out there that will probably be successful using purely ai. In fact, I know there's a lot of YouTube channels out there already that.

The script is purely generated by ai. They use a voice to, or a text to speech tool to generate all the speech, and then they use B-roll and take the B-roll and put it all over the speech. And wow. Pretty much the entire channel is generated by AI and they're doing well. I think people can be successful with that, but I also think.

There's sort of a window of opportunity for that. I think that window of opportunity is gonna close because the easier it gets for more and more people to do that kind of thing, the more prolific that kind of content's gonna be and the less value that kind of content's gonna hold. So I do think in time it's gonna be important to be a real human voice.

I think as. The lines are blurred between what's real and what's not. It's gonna be more and more important to be a real human. I mean, we're already seeing stuff where people are putting images on social media and nobody can even tell if it's real or not, right? There was the image circulating of the Pope and the big puffy coat, and everybody thought it was real for a few days until.

Every until it came out that it was AI and there was, uh, this thing where people thought there was a bombing at the Pentagon, and then it came out that it was generated by ai. And so people are having a hard time differentiating between reality and AI right now. And I think as that becomes more and more commonplace, being a real human, being, a real voice, being somebody that people can trust and look to, will become increasingly important.

Mm. But 

Akta: I find that really interesting because like you said, the lines are blurring and people can't even tell what is real. So how can you make sure, as a creator that you are being authentic enough that you sound real? Like what can you do to distinguish yourself from AI and technology? I. 

Matt: Well, I think, you know, this is, it is an interesting question because I think it's going to be even tougher and tougher even with, you know, video on camera.

But right now I think you can still distinguish whether or not it's a real person on camera talking to the camera. Uh, that I think is still fairly obvious, but I think even those bl lines are gonna get blurred over time where you're gonna think there's somebody talking to a camera and it's a real person, but somebody just typed it in and it was an AI doing it.

But, you know, uh, getting out there, being a real person, I'm going to an event, I'm leaving tomorrow to go fly out to an event up in the, the Bay Area. And, you know, going and hanging out and making real life connections with people. I think that's important. I think putting your face on camera and not hiding behind, uh, an alias and, uh, You know, a, a profile picture of a monkey or something.

I think doing that kind of stuff is important. Sharing real opinions. Right. I think it's easy for AI to go and share, you know, factual information, but you know, if you have opinions that are sort of counter to what everybody else is sharing, those are less likely to be AI as well. So it's gonna get weird.

Right. It's definitely gonna be interesting to see how it plays out, because I think. My answer to that same question will probably be different a year from now than it is right 

Akta: now. Definitely. And you run future tools where you share some of the best AI tools in different categories. How do you define what makes a good AI tool?

Like how do you choose what goes on 

Matt: there? Yeah, so when I first started building the website, I pretty much accepted any tool that people wanted to share with me because, When I started the website, there wasn't a lot of AI tools. It was like I started the website with 80 tools on it that I'd come across over the span of nine months or something like that.

And then I put a submission form on the site, and in the beginning I would get one or two submissions for tools per day. Now, today I get a hundred, 120 submissions of tools every single day that we're sifting through. So I actually have like team members now that help me sift through the tools. But in the beginning it, there wasn't a lot of tools.

So pretty much anything that I came across was amazing and made it on the site. Now it's, it's like if I've seen that same tool a hundred times already, it's not gonna make the site right. There's, there's a thousand different tools that will do SEO articles for you now, right? It's, I put the first. 10 on there that came out.

But now if you're building another tool that does the exact same thing I've seen a hundred times already, it's probably not gonna make the site. There's. There's tools out there that, you know, you can generate AI images with, but most of 'em are just using the API from another tool and they're just, you know, putting a user interface on front of an existing tool like Stable Diffusion, and you're just seeing clones of those kinds of tools over and over and over again.

So, while I was adding, you know, 10 to 20 tools a day for a long, long time, now I'm only adding maybe four or five tools a day because I'm just looking for something. That's different, right? I want something that's got a unique use case that I haven't seen yet. Like if somebody's using an AI image generation tool to do something unique that I haven't seen yet, it'll make the site, you know, for a while I was seeing people make tools where you can take a picture of yourself and then see what you'd look like with different hairstyles.

It was using tools that already exist, but it was something new. It was a new use case for those same tools, or there was tools for a while that were coming out where somebody would take a picture of themself and they could try on different outfits using ai. And I knew the technology behind it has been around for a while now, but this use case was new.

So that's kind of what I'm looking for. I'm looking for new use cases to old technology or you know, old technology, three month old technology. Uh, I'm using, looking for new use cases to existing technology, and I'm looking for, You know, just stuff that I haven't seen done at all yet. You know, uh, the, a lot more is coming out in the text to video area and the animation area and the visual effects area.

That's the kind of stuff that's really exciting me these days, because that's the area that I'm seeing the most progress and the most kind of cool stuff come out of right now. 

Akta: And what are the most used tools that you personally use? In terms of ai? 

Matt: Yeah, that's a good question. I use, I use quite a bit actually.

So I use Mid Journey pretty much every day to generate images. Um, I use Mid Journey to generate sort of B-roll background images for some of my videos. I use Mid Journey for my thumbnails for YouTube videos. Um, I use chat g p T quite a bit. I use chat g p t almost as like a personal consultant. I'll say, Hey, I'm struggling with an idea for a YouTube video today.

What should I make? Here's some of the videos that have worked well in the past and have it give me ideas for new videos. So I'm using chat g p t constantly. Um, I use G P T four using Open AI's playground, which is kind of connected. This is kind of getting into the weeds, but it's connected to the Open AI api and.

I can basically plug in a big chunk of text and then ask questions about the text. So I might find a news article, read the news article, and it's over my head. I don't, they're using technical terms that I don't know. I'll copy and paste that news article into G p T four and say, explain this article like I'm a five year old, and then it get a, you know, a simplified version of what it's trying to say.

So I'll use that a lot. I use a tool called Feedly, which is an r s s, uh, feed that tells that, you know, I, I have all of my favorite AI blogs plugged into it, and it's a feat of all those blogs. But it's also got an AI built into it now where it will sort of scour the web for me and find any articles related to AI from, you know, thousands and thousands of websites and bring those to the surface for me as well, using ai.

So I use that to stay in the loop with Alva AI news. I use, uh, stable diffusion quite a bit, which is the tool that I use to sort of superimpose my face onto other images. I use a tool, Kyle Kyber quite a bit, which is a tool for video where you can take an existing video and then, you know, let's say it's a real life video that I shot, but I want to turn into something that looks like an anime cartoon or something like that.

I use that quite a bit just for, for fun. I'll just make little videos and share 'em on Twitter because those types of videos get a lot of reach on Twitter and people seem to really like 'em and share 'em around. So I use that a lot. Um, You know, the, the, the ones that I use on a daily basis that I can say pretty much every single day, mid journey, stable diffusion and chat G p T would be the three biggest ones that I use the most.

I love that you've 

Akta: given me so many ideas just by listening to you. Cause I don't really know how to use ai. So what advice would you have for creators who want to use AI network workflow but they don't really know where to start or what they should use AI to help them with? Like what, what do you recommend?

Matt: So this is gonna sound really, really meta, but I would use chat, G p T, and I would go into chat, G p T, and I would say, here's what I do, right? Here's, here's my business, here's what I need help with. Here's something that would be, you know, I, I, I do a podcast. I want to grow my podcast. I wanna get more listeners.

I want to get better guests on my podcast. What do you recommend? And then have chat G p t actually give you recommendations. And then you can also go to chat G p t and say, what are some tools to make my life easier as a podcaster? What are some tools to make my life easier to get guests and to make sure the guests show up on time?

And you know, I, I, I was a podcaster for. 10 years, so I know all the struggles of, of doing podcasting, but you know, you could go to chat g p t and chat. G P T is the AI that will help you find the best AI to use. I know it's a very meta response, but chat G P T I think should be everybody's starting point, honestly.

Akta: I love that answer. Are there any other prompts you recommend creators use for chat? G p Cuz you already mentioned, you know, the YouTube ideas one, which, I mean, that blew my mind. I didn't even think of that. But like, what other prompts can we use for chat G d P to get the most 

Matt: out of it? Yeah, so one of my favorite prompts, I, I don't know the exact wording, but the wording doesn't matter as much as the sort of idea behind it, but I like to go into chat, g p t and say something like, for, for YouTube videos, what is the most mind blowing out of the box idea that you can give me for a YouTube video?

I like to tell Jet g p t to give me an out-of-the-box idea on X topic. And usually it's pretty mind blowing, the types of response it'll give you. Just asking it to think outside of the box. It won't give you the typical, you know, make sure you share your videos on social media. Make sure that you're telling people to like and subscribe in the video.

It'll give you some very, very creative things that you probably have never thought about before. So telling Chat G P T to think outside of the box is actually a nice little hack that I think works really, really well to get some creative ideas that aren't the sort of common wisdom that you'd expect.

Akta: Yeah, no, I'm actually surprised cause I kind of just thought it would regurgitate like common ideas. It would just fine on the internet or something. So that's really interesting. I'm definitely gonna try that. Um, we've already touched on this a little bit, but how do you see the creator economy changing with ai?

Do you think AI is here to stay or. Or what do you think? Oh, 

Matt: I definitely think AI's here to stay. I think we're gonna see more and more creators embrace it and use it to make their lives easier. I, I think we are going to see a lot of just sort of, for lack of a better term, junk content being put online where people just sort of slap together content that chat G P T wrote for them and they used AI to generate the videos.

I think as the barrier to entry is lowered and more and more people have access to these tools and these tools become easier to use, you are gonna see. See a lot of very low quality, low effort content, and I think that's sort of one of my fears about the creator economy. But I also think you'll see the cream rise to the top.

I think the, the, you know, the people that are real that, that people identify with and connect with, that maybe still put their face on camera. Uh, I, I think those types of people will rise to the top, and I think the best creators are gonna leverage AI as a tool, not as the main source of content creation, right?

I think they'll, they'll use it to make their videos look cooler. They'll use it to edit their videos faster, or to make them more polished or to, you know, create content that they never thought they'd be able to create. And I think the, the ones that try to always push things to the next level are gonna be the ones that stay on top.

You know, the, the best example of a creator, in my opinion on the planet is Mr. Beast. Right? And Mr. Beast has this philosophy of every single video I put out needs to be better than my last video. And I think the people that sort of adopt that kind of philosophy will do well. And I think AI will help people continue to up-level and make better and better videos with each new video.

Mm-hmm. Definitely. 

Akta: And I wanna ask you one more question about, mm-hmm. I mean, so you've been able to grow as a creator by, Jumping on this trend. Well, you were already following that trend, but you took, you made the most of the trend of ai for sure. Do you have any, do you have any advice for creators on how they can make the most of trends without also dipping with them so that they're actually there for the long 

Matt: haul?

Yeah, I mean, any advice I'd give would be sort of like, in retrospect, it's not like I went into, into YouTube going, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, jump on AI and this thing's, and I'm gonna write it up, you know, but the, the advice that I would give is if you see something work double down. Right?

So what I, I was creating YouTube videos since 2009. I actually created that channel in oh nine. And most of my content up until, you know, a year and a half ago was around WordPress and WordPress plugins, and I had a podcast, so I'd talk about different tools to grow your podcast, and none of that stuff really ever got any traction.

It was just kind of stuff that I enjoyed talking about, so I was making content and putting it online. When I made a video about stable diffusion, it started to do a little bit better. An AI art generator tool that you can train your face into. That video was one of my first videos that started to do well.

So I went, oh, okay. People like this AI content. So I made a video about Mid Journey. That video did even better than my stable diffusion video, and so I, and so I just kind of went, all right, this AI thing. The numbers are showing that people like it. When I talk about ai, maybe I should do another one of these.

So I made a video about chat, G P T to show off another AI tool. That was my first video to hit a million views on YouTube. So I went, okay, people really like chat, G P T. And so what I did when I started to see this trend of like these videos about AI we're getting a little bit better views each time I'd make one about AI was I just doubled down.

I had about a 28 to. 32, I don't remember the exact numbers, but somewhere around a month period where I released a new video every single day about AI because the numbers weren't slowing down, right? Every time I put a video out, it would get, you know, six figures in views. It would get a hundred thousand views when I would put out a video about ai and I went, okay, if people are gonna keep watching 'em, I'm gonna keep on making videos until I run out of ideas.

And so I just doubled down and kept making videos on that content every single day. And in a one month period, my channel drew by 90,000 subscribers because I just doubled down on that, on that trend of people are liking this content. I need to stay top of mind. I need to keep their attention. Once I passed a hundred thousand, uh, subscribers on YouTube, I decided, okay, I'm gonna back off and I'm gonna only release five videos a week.

So then I just started doing Monday through Friday, a video every single day. And then when I passed about 300 subscribers, I went, okay, I feel like I have the luxury to back off even more. And now I'm doing three videos a week. So I doubled down in the beginning when the trend was hot, but now I'm almost finding this sort of point of diminishing returns with YouTube where if I post a video every day, the, the sort of views start to get a little bit more divided and, and fractured.

So, Now I'm finding if I post once every few days, I get more views per video as opposed to, you know, more videos but less views per video, if that makes sense. So as I grew, I was able to sort of back off on the frequency, but still continue to get the same kinds of numbers, but really the best advice I could give.

All that being said is, When you see that something is working, keep doing what's working, yeah. Mm-hmm. 

Akta: I feel like even three times a week is a lot. So you're doing a lot of creating. How do you deal? Do you have any, I mean, do you have any fears about if the trend starts to reduce and how that might reflect on your channel and how you cope with that?

Matt: I think about it every day. Um, yeah, so I mean, that's one of the reasons I also have future tools, right, is I didn't want all my eggs in that YouTube basket. I don't own YouTube. I'm playing in somebody else's playground, so to speak. Um, YouTube what day can say, you know what, we don't like ai. We're disallowing all AI content.

I mean, I highly doubt it cuz Google is sort of an AI first company, but it could happen, right? Uh, we've seen that happen in other industries, crypto, things like that. Platforms have said, Nope, you're out. We don't like you, we're not gonna give your content reach. So you never know. So that's why I built future tools as well, is I wanted this side business where I'm talking about these tools over here.

And if the YouTube channel ended today, I have another business that's still gonna make sure that I am getting income and that I have, you know, I, I'm still able to, to continue. I also have the newsletter, right? If YouTube ever shut down tomorrow, I still have over a hundred thousand subscribers on a newsletter that I can reach out to and say, Hey.

YouTube kicked me off. Come hang out with me on Twitch now instead, or wherever I decide to go. So, you know, I think it's important to make sure that you don't have all your eggs in a single basket. So for me, it's YouTube, it's newsletter, it's Twitter, and it's uh, my Future Tools website. I've got all of those various platforms.

I don't really see AI. Dying off, but I also sort of branded myself as the future tools guy and not necessarily the AI guy. So I can also pivot, right? I do. I do want to talk about virtual reality and augmented reality and robotics, and there's also all sorts of like nerdy, cool tech topics that I think I could sort of talk about that might be the next thing after ai, you know, so it's something I do think about a lot that you know, what happens if this goes away, but.

I also feel like I know where to go next. Yeah. I sort of know where the next path leads. 

Akta: No, it sounds like you've kind of future-proofed yourself there as much as you can, so I think that's great. Um, we're gonna jump to a quick fire round now. So I'm gonna ask you five questions I ask every creator that comes on air, starting with what's your favorite thing about being a creator?

Matt: Oh, I just, I love being creative. I, for a long time I was, I worked in an industry, I was in a manufacturing industry where I just looked at computers and ran spreadsheets all day and worked on numbers. And now I, I play with video cameras and I basically play with my equivalent of toys all day. So for me, I just think it's a blast to be a creator and to.

Express myself creatively because I came from a, i, I had a degree in finance and I looked at spreadsheets all day. So to go from that to being somebody that gets to play with video cameras and turn, you know, videos into cartoons and that sort of stuff, that's, uh, that to me is just living the dream. I, I, I feel like I found the path that I was meant to be on.

Definitely 

Akta: sounds more fun than spreadsheets, that's for sure. Um, what is something that gives you the most inspiration for what you create? 

Matt: Um, probably I get a lot of inspiration from Twitter. I'm on Twitter a lot. That's my sort of hangout of choice. I scroll Twitter a lot. See what other people are doing.

Uh, go, that's cool. I wonder how I can do something but improve upon that or do it in a different direction than what they did that in. Um, I have two young kids as well. They give me a lot of inspiration. They're very creative. They, they love Minecraft and Legos and building stuff, so, You know, just play with my kids.

They give me ideas for videos all the time. So, um, yeah, Twitter and kids. 

Akta: I love that. Um, what's one tool that helps you as a creator? Doesn't have be ai, but can be aif you want it to be? 

Matt: Yeah. Uh, so I love a tool called Time Bolt. Um, it's a random tool that I use for editing where once I record a long piece of content, I plug it into Time bolt and it goes and it finds all the silence and it cuts out all the silence for me.

Nice. So it makes editing, you know, way, way, way faster. That's probably the tool that I find myself recommending the most to people because it saves probably two hours on the editing process for me of just, yeah, cutting out stuff. Yeah, 

Akta: I use a similar tool actually, that's my most useful as well, so I can definitely agree with that.

Um, what's something that helps you with your work life balance? 

Matt: Uh, working from home, honestly. Um, so I, I'm in my home office. My wife works from home as well, so we're together all day. So, you know, I find a sort of flow throughout the day that's kind of a work, uh, or a mix of both work and family. You know, during my lunchtime, I usually leave my office.

My wife and I will eat lunch together, either in our backyard or. You know, watching a TV show or movie together, um, I'll come back in, in for a couple hours. My kids will get home from school. When they get home from school, I break away and we'll go have dinner and maybe watch a movie together, or, you know, lately we've been playing Zelda on the switch together.

Um, so I. Just working from home and just being around the family all the time, it's, it's less of a, all right, I need to put eight hours in and then I need to cut it off. It's just kind of more of a flowing thing. A few hours here, a few hours with the family, a few hours in here, a few hours with the family kind of flowing back and forth, and that seems to be, yeah.

A pretty good balance for, for us, um, you know, open door all day, unless I'm recording. So my kids are floating in and outta my office all day long and Aw. Yeah, it's, um, it's, it's, it's a good balance. 

Akta: I love that. I love how it's a lot less structured than other people's routines I hear, like from creators.

That sounds really nice. Um, and what's one piece of advice that you would give to other creators? 

Matt: I mean, just, just go. I feel like, I feel like it's probably the most cliche advice, but I know so many people that come to me and they wanna start a YouTube channel, or they wanna start a podcast, or they wanna start a blog, and I say, well, why haven't you yet?

And they're like, oh, I, I need to get it just right, or I need to find my perfect niche, or I need to find, uh, the exact thing I want to talk about, or I need to differentiate myself from other people. And I feel like they're focusing on the wrong things. I feel like the first thing you need to do is just go.

You need to just create that first blog post. It doesn't have to be right. You need to create that first YouTube video record, that first podcast episode. Nobody's first piece of content is any good. Anybody who's a content creator will attest to the fact that the first time they ever put a piece of content out there, it was probably not their favorite piece of work, but so many people just get hung up on.

It's just not creating that first piece of content. And I feel like that's one of the areas I differentiated myself on YouTube is if I have an idea for a video, I'll just record it after I've recorded it. I might go, all right, I can't publish that. That's not very good, but I'll, I'll go and record it and I'll make that piece of content and then decide if I wanna publish it.

Um, most of the time I'm pretty shameless. I'll just be like, ah, that's good enough. Let's put it out. I like it. Um, but I think so many people just get hung up on the that first step. I think if you want to be a creator and. If you wanna have any sort of success, you need to get out of your own head and just start creating.

Akta: Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. That's really good advice. Thank you so much, Matt. This has been such an interesting conversation, especially for me. I don't really know much about ai, but I feel like. I've learned so much and you've given such great tour recommendations as well. So I'm gonna go off and research into those as well and start incorporating them into my workflow.

So thank you. I really 

Matt: appreciate it. Yeah, no, this has been great. This is, uh, one of my favorite interviews I've done so far because Oh, thanks. So many people wanna talk about, you know, uh, the, the business side and I love nerding out about the AI and the creator side. So this was one of the few times I gotta nerd out on about a.

A topic other than what I normally talk about, so this has been a blast. I've had a lot of fun. 

Akta: No, I'm glad. Yeah. I feel like it's a useful topic for creators and I feel like you've definitely made it a little bit less scary and daunting, so thank 

Matt: you. Awesome. Thank you. 

Akta: You can find Matt on YouTube, his newsletter, Future Tools, and on Twitter, and if sponsorships are a part of your creator business, check out passionfroot for an easier way to manage them.

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