Rejection, Algorithm Addiction & Creating Without Fear

I'm sure you've heard about the concept of having this internal thermostat, where you have your own comfort level with everything, like your income level — this is how much you expect to earn per year, and then if you go above it, something happens in your life that brings you back to the average, or if you go below it, you take certain actions to bring it back up to the normal. I think many creators fall into this narrative where I start to have to validate why this is important, or it cannot be easy, I need to struggle with it. And I agree. I think there's something in this story we tell ourselves about an artist's struggle as a creative — it's more worthwhile if you had to struggle to attain it.

And so people create the circumstances for that. It's almost like it creates this origin story. Those are the stories we tell, right? I'm thinking of the Bob Dylan movie that Timothée Chalamet just did. The story is about Bob Dylan coming to New York and being dead broke. And I think a lot of that is true, but it's romanticized this idea of starting from nothing and rising to the very top.

So people, I think, want to live that story. They try to play out a story of struggle in their own path more so than it probably is necessary. For myself, there are a lot of things I see that I could do that probably would move the needle forward — things like content creation that has certain hooks — that I'll tell myself, "Oh, they feel cheap," and I'll moralize them. And so I moralize them and then I set them aside and I don't do them. And in a sense that makes it harder on me, and it reinforces this story that I did it my way and it was more of a struggle than it probably needed to be as a result.

So it validates, I think, the exact theory you're talking about. I think we have this idea of how we want to do it. It makes sense to me that if people made a certain amount of dollars, and then in your career you're making less, you think this is uncomfortable, I've got to get back to where I was, like I'm supposed to be up there now. But I wasn't aware that people, when they got above — I guess you're suggesting — self-sabotage and kind of bring themselves back down to where they feel comfortable. Maybe imposter syndrome sets in, maybe people think they're going to be found out.

They don't like the added pressure. That's okay. So something's surfacing for me. I find that I like to show people what I'm capable of in bursts. I'll edit this YouTube video and spend so much time perfecting it, making it perfect, but it's not a sustainable output for me. I can't maintain that.

And yet I know that, and I put it out there, and then people react and respond, "wow, this is really impressive, this is really good." I had that happen with a couple YouTube videos, and then I kind of retreat a little bit because I know I can't sustain that. I know I'm not going to be able to maintain that.

So I go through these bursts of producing on a level that I'm not capable of consistently. And maybe that's okay, but it is kind of funny. I think it can set expectations that I'm not able to live up to, and then maybe I retreat from being seen as somebody who's capable of that output, because I don't think people assume when they see a level of work from someone that it's not sustainable. I think they automatically assume that it is.

I think a lot of creators also try to balance between what you can call hero videos and the other, lower-effort stuff. I really think in 2026, as our new tools and platforms make it easier than ever to produce a piece of content and publish it, it just becomes more important — as you said, it's difficult to stay consistent, and keep producing week after week or month after month — but it's those hero videos that actually make the difference for the channel. I fully see from my own analytics that the growth chart over the years is mostly flat, but it's trickling up, and then there are two or three little bumps, and you live for those, because those are the little moments inside the year, and it was always a video that I actually put more effort into. That's why I could call it a good year even if 80% of the videos fell flat. I was just calling myself being productive by generating videos that at the end of the year I decided to hide from my channel because they didn't do anything. I like having a public body of work that I can point to. For years I wasn't publishing content, and I kind of felt invisible in a sense, and maybe that's my own psychological thing I have to look at, but I was never somebody who wanted to post everything I was doing daily on social media.

But I want to be able to look back at my life and say, okay, I made these things, I built these things. Some people build buildings, physical structures, and some people create art, and I look at the content I'm creating as hopefully content I'm proud of, that I can look back on and maybe it stands the test of time to some degree. That would be ideal for me. So it's nice to put in the extra effort on these ones, these videos, and those are the ones that really shine, the ones you remember, the ones you're most proud of. For sure.

You know, YouTube — that's something I met you through, you being a YouTube coach. Are you still as keen on YouTube now as you were a couple years ago? I think we met probably a year and a half ago or so. Where's your feeling about YouTube now? Actually, let me start here.

What got you into YouTube? And then let's talk about what you think about YouTube now. That's a good question.

I started in the year of COVID, 2020, because I was back from Asia after traveling for six months, and I was like, "No, I'm screwed, I'm running out of money." And you thought YouTube was a great way to start making some extra income? YouTube wasn't the first idea. The first idea was, okay, I've been doing freelancing for a few years now, and I just want to take it to the next level — that's why I quit my old job as a content writer as well.

I got so tired of writing average articles about online games and so on. So I was like, okay, I need to go back with my parents for this global health crisis going on, and I'm going to start my own business, make it full-time, and just figure it out. And from that thought process, I realized, okay, if I want to have any probability of actually making it work — that I might find clients and actually make money with this — I need to get on social media. Before that I was quite reluctant, every photo or video I took was basically for my own gallery. I didn't like the idea too much of being in front of the camera and talking, and even the idea of being on a podcast was like, nah, I'd prefer not to. But then you start thinking that you want to build something for yourself, and you want to make sure it works at some point — if you're doing something by yourself in the middle of a forest, good for you, but if you actually want to engage with people and let them know you're doing something, then you kind of have to go through this process of accepting that maybe I can make content, that maybe it makes sense to make videos about it. So that's how I slowly talked myself into making videos, and that's how I got started — my first videos were about, okay, I'm starting this marketing agency, and this is what I've been doing for some time, and on my channel I'm going to...

So at first it was this fully business-oriented idea, that I'm just going to be posting content about copywriting and content writing, but soon after it kind of branched out to everything — okay, I don't care, I can make a video about VFX or video editing or whatever and just see how it goes. Yeah, that's what I struggle with. Choosing a niche, right? There's so much debate about that.

I think for the most part, the common belief is that having a niche is better for building an audience. It's predictable, people know what they're getting from you. Yet there are exceptions — there are people who don't do that. And I think those are the people who have massive success, right?

There's Sahil Bloom, he's one of them. He posted a lot of stuff in the early days, from what I know about him, where he was just sharing his life. And Joe Rogan, being somebody who had his podcast, it was just curiosity and conversations with friends — he had the MMA stuff too, but it wasn't only topics about technology or only conversations about diet and exercise. I don't personally want to be reduced down to one particular niche. I get bored.

And I think that's what I resist throughout this process since I've started creating. I find myself saying I'm going to pick a niche, and then I just drift. And then I realize I've drifted, and I think, should I go back or should I just keep going? And lately I've just been deciding to keep going and figure out whatever comes of it.

So it's not surprising to me that you had that same experience. You've done travel videos which are excellent — you've had a really good response, really good viewership on those videos, and I watched them from start to finish, they were so engaging. And that's something you have in your bag that you could pull out at any time, but you don't stick to that necessarily because you have other interests. Exactly. I don't want to, as you say, pigeonhole myself as a travel channel.

So I have two thoughts about what you just said. I was watching this Rick Beato, the producer guy — I don't know if you're familiar with his YouTube channel, but he's this old dog, expert in music and music production, has a lot of good ideas. And he was talking about how musical styles are dying in the traditional sense. Like now, if you're an artist — whoever, be it Taylor Swift or anyone below that level, in smaller niches — they don't follow one particular niche so closely anymore. Rock musicians tend to make rock music, but they can do a lot of crossover with country, electronic, rap, whatever. And it's the same with creators in general. Why do you need to wear one hat and only play blues for 50 years, that's the only thing you're going to do?

If you want to do that, that's great. But no one is requiring that anymore. And oftentimes it's refreshing that if you create a profile for yourself online that's interesting to follow and watch, you can just try different things and see what resonates with people, and as long as you keep doing interesting things, the problem solves itself, you see it from the data, what's going to happen. The second point I wanted to make is related to a concept I heard recently, I think from the Veritasium channel — this scientist, engineer type of guy — and he was comparing the average bell curve to the power law distribution. I don't know if you're familiar with the idea.

No. So basically, if we take YouTube as an example, by now there are 100 million so-called active channels producing some sort of content, and 90% of them are super tiny channels — under 1,000 subscribers, most likely under 100. And if you're thinking about the content they're creating, and compare it to the average distribution curve, where everything is in the middle and you have the fringes coming down on either side — it made me realize that if you try to make the average of the average and do everything the same as everyone else, you're directly smack in the middle of the bell curve.

And that means you have the most competition and the hardest time actually breaking through, because you're doing exactly the same thing as literally millions of others. And the parallel idea is, instead of doing the normal, the expected, you bet your own strategy, whatever you want to do online, on these big swings that are risky, that are really unique, and you put more effort into them and bring a new angle, a new format. And even if nine out of ten of the swings completely miss, if the tenth one actually hits, it can blow you out of the park instantly. And I think that's the beauty of YouTube and social media in general, and something new creators should really think about — if you try to follow the average bell curve, it's going to be a really steep uphill battle.

But if you try to adopt this power law thinking — I make big swings, nine of them might completely miss, not one to tell your grandchildren about, but just one thing needs to work. Because the beautiful thing about social media is that if you post some stuff no one cares about, no one's going to see it anyway, so you're completely safe. Even if it's risky, your fear for your reputation, whatever — no one's going to see it. And if it failed completely, so what?

I delete it. No one even knew it existed. But if one of those hits actually makes it big, you solve the problem. Once you get over the hump of getting 5,000 subscribers, or 10,000, or a million views, you're already on the other side of the fence. And I think the best way forward is figuring out what the power law application can be for yourself.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this subject lately. And here's my theory related to this. I think a lot of people show up after something has already proven successful. If you look back at the music industry, the film industry, there are these innovators, these early adopters who become legendary for setting the foundation for a new industry, a new art form. They're doing it without self-awareness of what it could become. They're not doing it for the outcome necessarily.

They're not getting the type of admiration and feedback, the financial reward that comes later. Once those people start to prove it's viable, as we're seeing now with creators, a lot of other people start to show up. And I think a lot of those people are just copying what came before them. They're not doing anything risky, as you say, because they're going off an old model they saw worked. And if everybody's doing it, everybody's copying that model, it becomes commonplace. It becomes boring.

And I think once an industry or an art form matures, the only thing left to do if you want to stand out is try to reclaim that lack of self-awareness that those early adopters had. You try to find a corner within the space that isn't proven yet, you're doing something that isn't part of the model anymore, and you don't know if it's going to work out, and you're just doing it because you enjoy doing it. And I think those are the people who find breakthrough. They find this little subsection of the mature industry, and they're now following that same pattern while everybody else is in the middle of the bell curve.

And a lot of those people in the middle of the bell curve, they quit because they're not getting the result. They see that it worked for somebody before them, they do it, it doesn't work right away, and they were just in it for the outcome to begin with. So they leave. And I think it's the ones who stick around — I don't think you find that little corner I'm talking about unless you stick it out.

Because I think in the beginning we all kind of mimic, we copy as we're finding our voice, as we're finding ourselves. So I think it's something that can only be achieved with time. I think that's how you get good at anything, and that's how you differentiate yourself from a pack — through experimentation, repetition, and finding what fits right. But to sum it up, I think you need to try not to worry about the outcome, and not worry about the template or the model you've seen work for other people, because that's uninspired. I think we have to find what inspires you about the work.

And then that's where the results come later. It might take more time, but if you're doing it and enjoying it, I think the credibility comes once people start to see, oh, this guy's doing something interesting and it's different from what everyone else is doing. So I think a lot of people try to give that advice, they try to say, "Oh, just be different, be the purple cow," as Seth Godin likes to say.

Right. But you don't just walk out the door and become a purple cow. I think you have to find the purple cow within yourself. And I think that comes with letting go of outcome and expectation, and just following your joy, following your bliss. And that's one of those cliches that gets overused.

People say do what you love, that's all over the internet. But I think it's something you have to find you'd be doing even if people weren't watching. And if content creation is your thing, whether you're an artist, whatever it is you enjoy doing, do it your way and just see what happens. Because that's the only way I think you're going to find it. Exactly.

The early people weren't doing it anyone else's way. That's how they found it. They didn't have any model to go off of.

And it's so easy to think that every other person says now, "I wish I'd started YouTube 10 years ago" — because they want to go back in time and do what they're doing now, 10 years ago, because it would have worked 10 years ago. And they're still doing it thinking, well, why isn't it working for me? Well, yeah, when it wasn't yet proven — he did it when it was unproven.

It's so easy — because the situation is always changing, and the playing field is constantly evolving. I'm sure five years from now people will look back and think, "oh, shoot." Yes, they will. But see how fast it's progressing, see how quickly things are evolving, and you need to have this X-ray vision a little bit for the future — this is the opportunity, this is what I need to learn now, not what was proven 10 years ago, and just trying to copy that and keep beating the dead horse, that's not going to work anymore. Or be ready to grind for years. Those are pretty much the options.

And I'll add to that. I don't believe in fighting the current and going upstream. I think a lot of people know that AI content, AI-generated content, is going to be a valuable skill. But if you don't enjoy doing it, I don't think that's the way to go. Leave that to the people who enjoy doing it.

There are guys on X posting really cool user-generated content through AI, and it's awesome to see, they love it. I don't care to do it. Maybe it's a valuable skill, but right now it's just not of interest to me. Maybe it'll come to me later.

I'm okay with seeing people profit from pursuing that path, but there are thousands of skills that are valuable and will continue to be more valuable, and we don't choose to do them just because we're not called to them. So I think when people are trying to find the thing that's going to be profitable, it's driven by fear. It's not driven by joy for doing the thing, it's only outcome-dependent. They're only doing it because they want to get either fame or money from it. I think most of the time it comes down to money. People want to find ways to generate income online, and they see people doing it here, doing it there, and you see them run from one thing to the next trying to figure out, well, this one didn't work.

Let me try that one. Oh, everybody's moving over there, let me run over and try that one. And I'm not even making fun of them, I get it. It's just that it doesn't work.

I think most people, when they go into that field, whatever it is, fall in the middle of the bell curve — they make a little bit of money, they think, oh, okay, that was all right, and then they probably try to figure out something else to do pretty soon after that. So I'm becoming of the opinion that if you want your work to be enjoyable, you find ways to do things that don't drain your energy. Do things that energize you. Some people don't care, some people are like, I do my job and it's just a paycheck. I think you and I are different, I think we're trying to figure out ways to live in the modern world and be self-sustaining, and also self-governing our lives in a way that maybe wasn't possible 75 years ago. And I think that's one of the biggest — like you were mentioning, what we really want as creators, and why it's such a big thing — because at the end of the day it's about self-determination, self-expression, self-actualization.

You decide what you want to do, follow your own thing, and try to find it, whatever rock is hiding — just go for it, explore, try different things. I took AI video as an example because I've been getting into it myself and I find it fun, but as you said, there are a thousand different skills that are relevant and really valuable to learn and utilize and play with. And that's the beauty of it — even if I know the travel content for my channel would do well, at the moment I just don't feel like doing it at all, and when I publish an AI music video instead of a travel video, I see my subscriber count going down. But it's so easy to become addicted to the statistics — did this video get as many views as the ones before, what's happening to my subscriber count? But you kind of need to take a bigger perspective, out of the numbers right in front of you, and see it like, okay, if I teach myself these skills, it might take 10 tries, and over time I get better, and then what I'm producing is going to be on a different level, and that will open new doors again — I might get a new audience, new collaborators, more clients, more leads. You just need to be able to see it in longer lines.

Like you said, most people just jump from one thing to another, where can I turn a buck, try a little bit of different things, dabbling. But if you keep doing that, you don't get too far with anything. With your fan base, with your subscribers, you're evolving — it only makes sense that your subscribers would expand and contract as they evolve with you, right? You're shifting your focus, the type of content you're creating, in a new direction.

And some people subscribed before you were doing that. So naturally, they're going to fall off. That doesn't mean you're not entering a new pool, an even bigger pool of potential audience, in this new space you're entering. So it's funny to me that we do this to ourselves, that we try to limit ourselves based on the feedback and success we're getting, rather than allow ourselves to just grow in the direction we're inclined to grow. Why create a YouTube channel you don't want to create content for? Why build a travel channel you don't want to show up to every day?

It's like the idea of creating a job for yourself that you don't even want. Doesn't make much sense. Of course, we do it all the time, we do it to ourselves. Yes, people do that because they're getting paid, or getting views, or getting likes, and then they find it hard to give that up, because — you said earlier about wanting to validate this as a job, as a creator.

Yeah. And I think the measuring stick we all use in the modern world is financial. That's evidence that it's real, evidence that it's a real job. And when you don't have the money like that, you feel like this isn't real.

This is fake, I'm not doing — and there's insecurity tied up in that. And so I think it's all tied together with what we're talking about, following that feedback. When we get the money, people don't want to give that up, that's what they expect. It's like there's that fear of loss of status tied up in it. Yeah, those are all —

At this stage, obviously my YouTube income, ad revenue-wise, is like 20 bucks per month. So it's not something to celebrate. But at the same time I realized I shouldn't be complaining. I was talking with AI some time ago about AI music and how that's showing a new opportunity, and it was funny because the AI didn't know the context, and it was like, yeah, once your channel gets huge and has more than 1,000 subscribers — and I'm like, I already have 1,000 subscribers, but it's been a long time since I thought my channel is huge. And it's so easy to become blind to your own success, however you measure it. If there's anyone watching this in the future and they're like, I want to start a YouTube channel — everyone starts from zero.

And it's so easy, once you achieve one milestone, to become desensitized to it — okay, now I have the 500, now I have the 1,000, and so on. But it's a hard-fought 500, a hard-fought 1,000, it didn't happen by itself, and for me it took years. What percentage of YouTubers are monetized? That's a misconception — we've talked about this before. Isn't it — you tell me. I think it was something like four or five percent, don't quote me on that. But what I can say for sure is over 90% of channels have less than 1,000 subscribers.

So if you are monetized, you're already in the top 10 easily. And that kind of gives you the perspective, because it's so easy to go after, ah, there's a podcast with 200,000 subscribers, there are big channels with millions of subscribers — but those are the supernovas in the galaxy, and there's a lot of space for us also around them, and the creator economy is huge, we only need a small sliver of the pie and be fine, right? At least that's my goal doing this. I do have the positive mindset that over time I'm going to scale this up, as it's been doing over the years, by getting clients, doing coaching, building my own programs, ad revenue, affiliations — there are multiple revenue streams you can build with your personal brand, but it takes time.

That's the reality of it. It's the American marketing that has sold us this quick-solution mindset, like 90 days and you're monetized and earning 10,000 a month from YouTube. I totally understand the allure, why we want to watch those videos, why we want to believe in them. But at the end of the day, how many people who watch those videos are actually following the advice, or reaching the same result? Yeah, that's what the creator economy gets criticized for — that there's a lot of people selling get-rich-quick, and it's not really able to be verified a lot of times that these people have those income numbers.

So you get people you don't really even know where they came from, and they claim to be a coach, they claim to be wildly successful. You don't even know if they bought their followers or how it all happened. But somewhere along the way they figured it out, and now they're going to teach you how to do it. And I think people have gotten skeptical of that over time, because they've been burned by coaches and stuff.

Okay, here's one thing I want to hear your opinion about. I was watching this Think Media podcast about a recent report from YouTube, with quotes from the CEO of YouTube. And it said that creators are replacing stars and studios. What do you think about that? I think they're finding that a lot of these creators have a bigger reach — I guess when you say stars, you mean actors and traditional celebrities.

Yeah. There are some of these people on Twitch, video game streamers and stuff, who just have massive pull, and they're making tens of millions of dollars a year, just outrageous, from sponsorships, because their audience is so loyal. I'm trying to remember their names, I don't even remember, I should know.

But yeah, I think it's documented, these people are getting bigger contracts and sponsorship deals that used to go to traditional actors and celebrities. Because my nephew watches basketball on YouTube, this league of influencers that play basketball — pretty good, I guess, street-baller kind of types, but not on the NBA level. And he prefers that because it's kind of gamified.

There's drama, it's like a soap opera. It almost reminds me of WWE, the way there's a lot of theatrics on camera, they go on feuds and fighting between players. Then they go on social media and talk trash. There's off-court stuff going on, they're still in character off camera, and people buy into it. It's this whole new entertainment experience that's more than just basketball, centered around basketball. But that's a generation that may not care about the traditional NBA.

And I think it's the same thing, a generation that doesn't care about traditional entertainment, movies and TV. My nephews, they don't watch Netflix, they don't watch HBO, Hulu, all that stuff. I'm surprised — "no, I just watch YouTube."

Yeah, exactly. I think it's the immediacy — by now, when you click on a video, most creators, especially the established ones, get right into the meat, you're instantly hooked, whatever it is, basketball, internet celebrities, whatever. It's a different pacing than a Netflix series or HBO.

The question I wanted to ask you about the celebrities, or the stars and studios — if you look at the movies they're producing now, of course there's always the handful that really stand out, probably nominated for Academy Awards, but the vast majority is the smaller-budget Nicolas Cage movies that no one goes to watch. Why do people even bother to make those? The scripts are crap, the acting is bad, the direction is bad, the editing is bad, and you're just creating this wave of very mediocre movies. And I don't think that's sustainable — I think we're at the end of that B-movie cycle, because AI and these new tools and social media are leveling the playing field, new talents, new people with directorial vision or acting chops — it's free for them, it's an open sandbox, and now you can learn the basic tools and create anything. You don't need a $25 million budget to bring your vision to life. So I think we're really entering an interesting time right now, 2026, with these new tools. I think it's just the beginning.

With the barrier to entry being lowered, there's always more volume, more supply. And figuring out, as a consumer, how to find the good thing becomes a challenge. Netflix has tons of stuff on there, most of it I don't really care for, most of it kind of looks like slop to me. So I think there's still that high volume.

If anything, it's probably increasing the volume of content being created. I think of those as the new B-movies, things you're kind of talking about. There are a lot of shows on there where you wonder, why did they make this, who is this for? But interestingly, I just heard the other day that the most popular show, or probably movie, of all time on Netflix is now this K-pop Demon Hunters.

Yeah, I watched it, the whole thing. My wife watched it, we all liked it.

They're making a second one, I know that for sure. Makes sense, they'll probably do a big theatrical release, people are saying that would make sense.

That's what they did with Stranger Things, for the last two parts, or just the final part — maybe it was just the final finale, and they did a limited theater release, because it was like a two-hour episode. I think they were getting increasingly longer.

An hour and a half, and then the last one, an hour 45, and I think that last one was over two hours. So it goes both ways — you've got these studios putting bigger and bigger budgets into their shows, but they're also creating a lot of content that might not have gotten made in the past. Some of the Adam Sandler movies he's done on Netflix, I haven't watched them all, I can't say they're all bad, but some of them just seem a little half-baked in terms of the concept. It seems like he got carte blanche, a green light to just make whatever he wanted, and that's what you get, sort of this content that's just okay, middle-of-the-bell-curve type thing.

And so I think there's always going to be bad movies, is what I'm saying. But we're also talking about distribution — if it's on Netflix, you're going to see it on the grid, it's one of those thumbnails.

But now, if you make a bad movie, or a filler Adam Sandler movie, that's pretty much what it gets. And I think just how the algorithms work, it serves the viewers, that the slop — not just AI slop, but slop in general — is going to fall to the bottom. And even if the bottom gets bigger, most of us will not spend a second watching any of that.

There are also niches too, right? Like within anime, for instance. I don't know if you're an anime fan. To some degree — well, okay, so K-pop Demon Hunters was kind of anime.

I was going to say I'm not an anime fan, but I really liked that, so maybe there's some anime I do like. But there are people who are diehard anime fans, it's a whole subculture, there's a whole rule book for anime, the characters, what certain things mean in anime. You learn this whole new subtext language of it. But you go on Netflix and see all that stuff mixed in together in one big bin. And for a lot of it you think, oh, that's not for me.

They say their algorithm — and one of the big things that made Netflix popular was that their recommendation engine was really good. I don't find it to be that impressive anymore, personally, and I don't know if that's just because there's so much extra content on there, or if it's gotten worse, but I don't see how it could have gotten worse. Maybe it has gotten worse, or maybe my experience is worse. But I don't know why they don't have good stuff anymore.

That's a good point. There's that study about when we have too many choices, we end up choosing nothing. I've heard it likened to some end-of-the-grocery-store-aisle experiment, where they had housewives taste different types of jam — if there were three types they could taste, people would buy one, but if they gave them 12 to choose from, people would get overwhelmed and wouldn't buy anything.

And I think that's kind of what happens now with content. It's overwhelming. There's a joke now that couples will sit there and watch trailers for an hour and a half, and then it's too late to watch a movie, and they just go to bed. I've done that.

Just trying to find something to watch. You don't want to commit to anything, you're like, none of this looks worth committing to. We've seen that with dating too.

People say that now with online dating — this person seems okay, but I don't know if I should commit, so people stay single longer, not engaging enough. This fast-paced social media sets an expectation that we need to be entertained, and if you set that expectation for the poor other person on the other side, is that realistic? It's fearful of loss, right, I don't want to make the wrong choice, I don't want to commit to something and realize later I could have been happier if I'd chosen the other thing. And I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier with niches, people creating things that are safe. I think it's predictability.

People assume that if they can get something they know is reliable, they're going to choose that. It's like the idea of pulling off the freeway and going to McDonald's on a road trip — people would rather go to McDonald's than the local burger spot next door, because they don't know what the quality is there, they don't know if it's going to be any good. So most people will choose predictable over risk. And I think that's the conventional knowledge, why a lot of people are still educating other people, as creators, to create content that follows a template, follows a formula. It's the safe route, but good luck getting any outliers following that strategy.

You can't have that massive success doing that. And maybe for some people they don't care, maybe some people just want some success and they'd rather try the safe route, they don't have to be too inventive with it. Maybe they weren't in it for that in the first place, they were just in it, like I said, for the outcome. But you didn't answer my earlier question.

Okay, you got me — which is where you see this all going with YouTube, for me personally, or YouTube in general, as a coach, where do you see it going? Because people are fearful it's becoming pay-to-play, or that it will be — I noticed as a user I couldn't speed up a video the other day without upgrading to premium. So they're already clawing back features. They've been trying to get me to upgrade to premium forever, and it's like, YouTube with live TV or something, it's outrageous, like $80 a month or more if you want sports.

I'm not doing that. I'm not interested enough to do that. They haven't created enough incentive for me to do that. So what they do, with all these software companies in particular, is start to claw back features. The speed playback is one I use all the time. Most videos I watch at least at 1.25 if not 1.5.

Absolutely, it should be the default. So as a consumer, things are starting to get clawed back. And it's funny, because there are posts and stuff which don't call it pay-to-play, but essentially is — I wonder, going back to mature markets, is YouTube at the point now where it's so mature it's going to be hard to break into without a war chest, where you can pay to boost yourself in the beginning and potentially buy followers, because TikTok basically sells you followers.

You can go on there and boost posts, and they almost guarantee a certain number of views or new followers. They're definitely adopting this, at least pushing it more to creators. So they're definitely going that direction, wanting creators to pay, and of course get premium users, but at the same time they're making a killing with ad revenue. I don't know how expensive it is to advertise on YouTube now, but I'm sure it's rivaling Facebook by now — in the recent presentation the CEO said that in the last four years they paid out $100 billion to creators. So that gives you the scale of how much money they're making with ads.

That would make you think, okay, they should be doing fine, they don't need to be clawing back functions. But regarding your question in general, many people think, okay, now it's established, it's a huge platform, there are so many channels, if I start now it's a little late — but I don't agree with that at all, because I don't know the latest number, but how many active monthly users do they have, two billion by now, it's crazy, and how many short views per day, hundreds of billions. It's insane, how many watch minutes and hours the platform is getting. And if you compare the number of users to the number of creators, it comes down to like five or four percent. So there's a huge discrepancy still existing in the platform. If you want to start now, you're still early.

It's so silly to think the train has already passed, there's no point starting now, like, I don't have a million subscribers today, so better not even start. But the thing is, if you can just double the size of your channel every year and commit to it for 10 years — of course 10 years for a modern person sounds crazy, a decade, what are you talking about — but for the ones who can actually commit to 10 years, YouTube or social media in general can completely transform your life.

Yeah, most careers, before you're comfortable making a nice salary, a lot of times can take around 10 years before you hit that senior or mid-management level within your career. So we don't a lot of times treat it like a career, but I think you need to look at it that way. Where it's painful is, in most careers you at least get a nominal salary for the first few years, whereas with this, most people make zero dollars for the first few years doing it.

It's a sacrifice, it can be brutal. If there are so many people coming to YouTube and views are going up and everything, why is it still challenging to build a following? Personally, I've found it more challenging than I thought it would be. I've made some videos I think are very good that don't do well.

If I'm being honest with myself, I probably haven't made enough videos. But I think it's probably more challenging than people realize when they start out, at least it was for me. Why do you think that is, for you, and I think it would apply to many other people — you're writing good emails for your email list.

I read them, not all of them, but I give them a glance, I come through them and most of the time I like the content, but in the back of — well, thank you, appreciate it — in the back of my head I'm like, Andrew is kind of keeping this under a rock. There are good things there, good insights, good information about the industry, interesting points.

But by only showing that to your email list, which is still relatively small, you're limiting the reach. There's no function in email that says, okay, your regular readers like this, so let me show it to more email users. That's not how email works. So for you, you're absolutely on the right track that you should be making more content to reach more people, because that's the top of the funnel. If you don't touch on that point first, it doesn't matter what happens at the end of the funnel, you need to be out there putting the message out, engaging with people, making your face familiar. Yeah.

I'm a firm believer in video. When I first started out creating, YouTube was top of my list in terms of which platforms I wanted to be creating for. So I'm a big believer in video and connecting with an audience, building a rapport in that respect. For me, what's been challenging over the last five months or so is I started to shift away from just content around creators and being a creator business, more into social commentary, philosophy, interesting perspectives I want to share. Creating that in a visual medium, sharing deeper ideas, more complex ideas, and translating that into a visual medium has been a tough nut for me to crack — that's one of the reasons I've paused and I'm getting back into video content.

One of the reasons I wanted to have these conversations is so I could share some of these ideas and get them out there, flesh them out in real time, in a way that was at least somewhat visual. It's not maybe as stimulating as a well-edited YouTube video, a five-minute video with B-roll and graphics. But yeah, to answer your question, I think that's one of the things that's been challenging — how do you take deeper concepts, deeper ideas you want to share, and translate that into YouTube content? You've heard of Dan Koe? He just sits there and talks to the camera.

Exactly. And he seems to be doing fine. He does seem to be doing fine, I'm a big fan of Dan. It's hard to verify what is real and what's not, or at least what's currently real — I think there are plenty of people who got big followings five years ago that may be stale.

When I see a creator really start to change their business, migrating off of one platform, as many creators on X, like Dan, have done, and moved to Substack — Dan has now created a subscription tier for his newsletter. The fact that he's doing that, and that he's also creating software, to me implies that maybe some of the revenue streams he had in the past are drying up. He even created a video recently about information products being dead. And I haven't heard him push or promote any of his writer boot camps or that kind of stuff anymore, which is how I met him, in his writer's boot camp. And I thought, wow, this is a great business model, having these information products, these cohorts.

He preached that, but he's not preaching that anymore. I'm seeing a lot of creators really pivot their revenue streams, and to me that implies the old ones are drying up. So if he's creating YouTube videos, I'm not necessarily convinced that's translating into dollars for him the way it was before. I guess we were talking more about views, and with YouTube there's some transparency there in terms of how many views they're getting.

So yeah, Dan, he sits there and talks about his ideas, he shares in that way, that's fair, I'll give you that one, maybe I'll take a look and see. He's interesting in that he puts clips up on Instagram, often of his YouTube videos, and they get big reach.

I don't see why they necessarily get big reach — even as a fan of his, I don't find them particularly interesting, and I also don't see that aligning with the Instagram audience's tastes. So you start to wonder, this doesn't really add up. Is this real? It is funny.

I've started watching more shorts, I don't know, it just happened a little more than before. Maybe it's how YouTube's home screen is built now, pushing you more shorts, and instead of watching a 15-minute video, you can open a few shorts that look interesting and spend the next minute, and you've seen them. But what I realized is much of that content is actually just clips of longer videos, and rarely is there anything super insightful — oh, thank god I watched this short, now I know this — it's just a line from a podcast episode, the guys are talking, family is really important, I have kids, wow. But the thing is, people watch shorts, period. And if you just produce them, clip them, publish them — I've been trying, as an experiment, to post clips of my new AI videos, and instantly when you publish it you get 500 views. Just like that, hundreds of views coming from somewhere.

And it's the same for Dan Koe, I imagine, he probably has someone to do that, but he clips his long videos and publishes them, and it seems to be serving him well as short format, and that's arguably the best way to actually attract new audiences now. The best way for free marketing, basically. That's kind of become the strategy a lot of creators are taking — create longer content, make shorts from that content, chop it up, and let those serve as advertisements for the longer-form content.

I don't find that I get subscribers from short form. I think the hope is, going back to that funnel idea, that shorts are the top of the YouTube funnel, and the step below that is your long form, and then hopefully a subscription after that. So that's how I look at them, as advertisements for the long form. And that's what I intend to do with conversations like this.

I'll chop up interesting moments within the conversation and put those up as shorts. Very good. A word about the sales funnel is also that I think more creators should be thinking about what happens after the subscription, because that's not the end of the funnel — that's, okay, now you have a warm lead, what are you going to do next?

Is your channel page optimized, so when they click in they see your bio, there's a link, what are you offering, how are you helping people, is there a link to book a call, is there a cohort, what comes after? I think it's important to build the mentality that views and subscribers are nice and essential for this social media game to work, but by themselves they don't pay your rent or bills. If you're running a business, you should treat them as leads. So that's the hard transition for a lot of people, as creators, turning it from a hobby into a business, thinking about it that way.

It's hard, I think, to package your product and get the right messaging so it's clear, having that clear communication as to what it is you offer. I look back at some of the stuff I put up earlier and I thought it was crystal clear, why isn't anyone buying this? And then I look at it six months later and think, well, obviously that's not clear at all — things just look different to you after some time has passed, you step outside of it and have more objectivity. But at the same time, I think many people overcomplicate what a sales funnel is, or how to monetize. My easiest example: the current iteration of my homepage is super simple, if you're a creator, click this button, it goes to Calendly, and you can book a call with me, we talk for an hour, I help you around YouTube, being a creator, a solopreneur. Is that a free call? That's a paid call. Is there anything you offer for free, as a lead magnet? Do you do that?

If you're a business and interested in collaboration or paying for my services, there's a different link for those inquiries. But if you want one-to-one coaching — that's the thing, I don't need to specify too much on the landing page, because I already know the person on that page saw one of my videos, clicked my link, and wants personal feedback, whatever the question is going to be, and I just need to make it available, that's the first step. If we trace back what we talked about — make content, make it super easy for people to contact you, monetize it, put a price tag on it, and you have an online social media business. It doesn't need to be a cohort, it doesn't need to be a fancy SaaS product or whatever. It's easy to think, okay, we have these AI tools, I need to build this amazing tool that everyone in my audience wants to download and pay every month for — just put a booking link, people pay for your personal experience and whatever advantage you have, lean into your talents, and that's it. Problem solved. I prefer to simplify things.

I personally was trying to create, with my business, one that's not dependent on hours and me being in the chair always. So creating those information products was always appealing to me, because coming out of software engineering, I was always selling my expertise, selling my time.

I always had this idea that I would build a software product and have that limitless growth selling something digital. So with information products, that appealed to me — being a creator and just trying to monetize through YouTube views didn't seem like a realistic goal for me. But the idea of attracting an audience, not even necessarily a huge one, and being able to create products and services for those people that I could sell, that appealed to me. I think it's more crowded than I initially realized. It can be hard to get people to buy your information products, but I think people are more inclined now, if they like you, to pay for coaching or pay for your time. I think that's a lower barrier to entry for people who are creators coming in — you don't need as much trust to get people to book a call with you as you do to get them to buy your digital product. Depending on price. I agree.

And I think, with your course, what I especially liked about it was having weekly calls, because that's such a big value add-on, because with AI available now, the better prompt you write, the better answer you get.

So in that sense, I think a lot of people have this DIY mindset now — I don't need to buy that course, I'll just type the title into ChatGPT and see what it gives me, and even if it gives me 80% of the same material, I'm already halfway there. But that's why it becomes so valuable to offer these hybrid models, where you're not only talking or reading text or talking to an AI, but actually talking with the person who created the course and has done this thing before you. So it's a completely different level of value in the information you're getting, because it's tailored to you personally, there's the interaction, there's so much more going on. I think accountability coaching as well is another area AI doesn't replace. Good one. Sure, you could create some type of calendar using AI, but who's going to hold you to it?

But if you have a coach, somebody you have a meeting with on Wednesday, and you've got an assignment, you said you were going to do it, you've given a commitment — there you go, there's accountability now. I think that's something there's still going to be a market for, for sure, with AI content. I find myself, if I scroll to somebody's post on LinkedIn or get a newsletter and see the obvious AI cliches or formatting, I'll start to lose trust a little bit. I start to think, am I really going to get this person's insight, or am I just getting a variation of ChatGPT filtered through them?

It is truly a concern. Even now I'm watching some YouTube videos with that same kind of filter, and I'm like, does that person have too many products in their face or something? Because when it starts to be too polished, you're not sure anymore if they're using an AI avatar with their own voice.

I have seen some demos of AI avatars you can't tell apart. So it's possible they're doing that, I find it eerie. I forget what that factor is called, when something looks human but isn't quite human.

The uncanny — what is it, there's some term for it. Whenever I tried some of those tools — this is going back probably a year now, maybe they've gotten better — I'd put my own photo in, put me in a scene doing this, and it was somebody who kind of looked like me but wasn't quite me. They smiled, but had teeth that didn't match my teeth.

It was weird, like seeing a pod person of myself, it was disturbing. I don't think I'd like seeing a video of myself that I didn't actually live. I think it would be eerie.

It is, it is definitely an interesting time. As of now, doing these experiments with music videos, I'm using my likeness and seeing how far I can take it. And it's so funny, every third picture the AI screws it up, forgets how my hair is or changes my face, and it's like, come on, you were doing it fine for two attempts and now you screw it up again. The tools are still prototype level in many senses, but at the same time all those demos —

I was going to say, all those demos, they must have spent a lot of time smoothing out all those issues, because when you work with these tools a lot, you see how frequently they make mistakes. Absolutely. The AI music videos I've been doing — I'm not lying, for some of them I spent 40 hours getting the lip sync right, creating the scene I want, not just close enough and move on, because there's always these little things. Have you posted these yet? I haven't seen them. They're on my channel, yes.

There are currently four music videos, early experiments. And it's fun, and I don't know if you've seen any ads yet for Luma Labs, that seems to be the top-notch thing, but they're getting much better with motion capture, lip syncing, likeness, keeping it consistent. So the progress we're going to see in the next 12 months — I honestly think by the end of the year there's going to be a really popular viral video, or it could be an AI song with a great music video that just blows up, or something similar, because these tools are developing so fast, and with a creative mind and patience you can really create impressive stuff.

And I saw a viral thing that went around with Stranger Things characters getting swapped onto a guy sitting in a chair doing different things, waving, smiling, cycling through all the different characters. It was eerie, because the way they moved their faces too was how the actor moves their face — it wasn't just a completely still face, it was making these facial expressions the same way Millie Bobby Brown moves her face when she has a confused look. I was like, that is eerie, that's bizarre.

I don't think we're too far off from image and likeness being licensed for a lot of these actors, having extras do the motion and their likeness be used to superimpose onto it. I don't know what the quality of that work will be, but I think we're going to start seeing it in the near future. Absolutely. And now they're rolling out this new tool in YouTube — you already had content ID and stuff to make sure your content, if it's repurposed, is linked back to you as the rights holder. Now they're rolling in this likeness tool detector, so if someone uses your face, you're going to know about it, it'll show in your YouTube studio, hey, this random channel put you in a scene saying something. I can only imagine what kind of things go around that, but obviously YouTube is waking up to the issue, and of course it's important that no one is using your face or likeness without permission. Celebrities are having a big problem with that — there are people who made fake Joe Rogan channels, or I was listening to some Alan Watts channels, old recordings, and it turned out they were just AI generated, brand new. It's hard to tell the difference.

And you could have celebrities doing audio advertisements on podcasts, and it doesn't say it's them, but the voice is so distinct you think it's that person. I think that's unfair, you shouldn't be allowed to put somebody's name on something as an endorsement if they haven't had any part in endorsing it.

I think we're going to have to figure that out. I wonder, faces seem to be more easily identifiable, the tools have gotten pretty good at that biometric — I wonder about the voice, if there's enough variation in people's voices that you can do that as easily.

Interesting question. I believe so, the vocal qualities, you can algorithmically create this identifier, however that works. But it's obviously problems the engineers have to solve, and it's coming on fast. There was some tool I tried, a free trial, where they had Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and somebody else, who would read whatever text you put in.

It was basically a plugin, you could put it on your browser, and any web page you could have Snoop Dogg read the web page to you, or something you wrote. It had a personality to it, made it a little more fun, but it was pricey, so I didn't end up doing it, it was kind of a gimmick, I wasn't going to pay $200 a year for that.

I think the bigger question here is around IP, and at least my own approach to the upcoming years is to build as much IP now as possible, because as AI is leveling the playing field, and at the moment it's a bit of a free-for-all situation, the more you can amass things you can call your own, that you're the originator of, the better you're going to be down the line. With Suno, for example, this AI music generator, it removes a big bottleneck — I've been going through my hard drive finding old demos I never finished, and I can take that basic recording, whatever idea I have, give the prompt, how I envision it coming together, and I have a polished track. I write the lyrics to it, and that's just one of the pretty amazing breakthroughs that have happened recently with version five — it actually sounds like you really need to pay attention to realize some of the tracks are done with AI.

I'm going to check them out right after this call, I'm curious. I've heard a couple online I wasn't able to tell were AI. There was one that went viral, "you can f— right off," it sounded like a 1950s old-school recording, real quaint and campy, and then it drops an f-bomb in the middle of the song, and you're like, whoa, wait, there's no way this was recorded back then, it never would have passed FCC regulations. It's surprising, I wasn't able to tell it was AI. It's getting really good, and if that's version five, what will version six sound like?

This has all been happening little by little, things being replaced by tools that close the gap between our mind and what we envision and being able to produce it, removing the middlemen you needed. Used to be, you wanted to record an album, you had to go to a studio and pay a producer, pay for studio time. Then it moved to the laptop.

People were able to do it at home, it became a lower barrier to entry, people publishing their own music online. Used to be, if you were a guitarist, you'd buy physical pedals to get sound effects on your guitar, now you have Neural DSP, that does exactly the same thing. You could play something on your guitar and translate it into a piano, or a xylophone, or any instrument.

It'll translate the notes onto whatever instrument you want. And suddenly you've got a full band, you don't need to hire all these people. I think we're closing that gap between what's in our head and creating that, bringing it into reality. And for perfectionists, as we said earlier, you and I tend to be, or at least I said I tend to be, that may be a nice thing, where we can hone something and refine it to the point where the creation is very close to what we had in our mind. I think then the limitation really just becomes your proficiency with those tools.

With these home studios, I think there was still a pretty high barrier to entry — I bought a keyboard years ago, tried making some digital music, but it was a whole new learning curve, and of course I wasn't committed enough to stick with it. But with AI tools, it's now an even shallower learning curve, and you're probably going to find a lot more content out there. It's interesting also, if you think about IP and where the line is, where something is just AI-generated versus you can call it your own work, especially in music — if I recorded this chord progression, thought about this song structure, wrote these lyrics, I know the song is mine from start to finish, then the AI part is just the final arrangement and mastering, and I have good conscience saying I created this song. If AI can play a solo I couldn't play, I can still call it my song, because it originated with me, there are certain elements that would be difficult — a composer writes notes, doesn't need to play them, and it's still a song. Right.

Exactly. And on the other end of the spectrum, you just say, create me a house song, EDM, 128 BPM, and it generates you a song, generates the lyrics. Are you going to call it your own song, your own IP? And the thing I've been getting into now — if we talk about YouTube, or social media in general, there's also the licensing part, the ad revenue part, where you get compensated for views, but also if you add music that's your own, you get to collect licensing fees. And then the AI conversation becomes interesting, the IP conversation — where do you draw the line? If I wrote half the lyrics and AI did the rest, generated the song, is it still my song?

And who can say where the line is, like, my effort was 51% and AI was 49, I don't know where to put it. But I have this internal compass — I wrote the lyrics, I made the composition, that's my song. If I just write lyrics and play around with Suno, I wasn't the composer, I was only the lyricist. With my artistic background, coming from a sound engineering school, for me it's very clear, and I wouldn't cross the line of telling someone something is mine that really isn't. But I can imagine there's an influx of people who don't care about that. Everybody's got their different moral compass, not everybody's playing by the same rules. So I think you just have to understand that, which I think you do, and find where it's comfortable for you. You've got your system now for how you make songs, and you're comfortable saying it's your music. There are certain lines you don't cross, not because they're immoral, but because you wouldn't be proud to say it's your song once you cross that line. So that's just your artistry, your style, and you'll probably find other people out there doing 100% AI, and they're transparent about it.

"I'm 100% an AI artist, I make my EDM music this way," and that works for them. There's going to be a spectrum, because I think there's not going to be one answer for the question you asked, when is it AI, when is it not, because how do you draw that line? What did you start with — did you start with lyrics?

Did you have any notes you played on the guitar? Or did you ask AI to generate some and then pick from that? Maybe you added another note, decided on another chord — the process can start in so many different ways. Did it start with your idea, or did AI give you some ideas? I think the publishing may be even harder.

With traditional music publishing, a lot of times people got credit just for being in the room — if a song was written and a producer was in the room, sometimes they got publishing credit even though they didn't really contribute much at all. I know there have been famous songwriters who took a lot of issue with people getting publishing on their songs who didn't feel they'd earned it. With the AI stuff, how are we going to figure that out? I have no idea. I'm thinking of these tools —

Have you seen the ones that analyze writing and determine how much of it was AI generated? You can Google it. I've seen the tools, but I haven't used them myself. You can copy and paste text in, and it'll analyze it and tell you, 80% of this we're 100% certain is AI generated, the other 20% we're only 50% sure, and the last 5% we're pretty certain is human written.

How do you measure that, how reliable is it? I don't know. I think it tries to explain common phrasing and things like that it finds with AI. I'm sure it's AI analyzing AI — we've studied a million different pieces of generated content and found these patterns, and I see these patterns in this content.

So it's likely generated by AI. But life imitates art in a way — I find myself using em dashes in my own writing now, because I better understand how to use them. Me too. Like, me too.

I was an English major in college and we were never really taught to write with em dashes, I just didn't incorporate that into my writing. And now I put it in my own writing, and sometimes I take it out, or use some alternative, because I don't want people to think it was — I'm happy I'm not the only one. So it's like I started doing it this way too.

So are we going to start writing more like AI ourselves? I like to think I've become a better writer over the last year or two, but I've definitely learned from things I put in AI, maybe just stream of consciousness, and it organized it for me, and I kind of learned from that.

Okay, this is a better structure for communicating an idea, this sort of presentation of what it is I'm going to talk about, here's the problem, here's the solution we're going to talk about. I've done that for some of my emails, and now I keep that in mind when I write.

So in a way I was kind of coached a little bit by AI. So maybe I'm writing more like AI now. Will people think content was AI-generated even if it wasn't? Will I continue to self-edit to try not to be like AI?

I don't know. At the end of the day it's a tool, and if it helps improve our own craft, it's for our benefit, it's our leverage. The way they said it in a YouTube podcast I was listening to earlier, AI is separating winners from losers — really harsh way to say it, but if you're not using it, you're definitely at a disadvantage. Why not? What's the benefit of not using AI? As you said, it can be your writing coach, it can help you produce better music.

It can help you write better novels, direct better movies, write better scripts. Of course it's still very dominant sometimes, as we all know — examples, I've been, Gemini has this function, has had it for some time, where you can tell it information about yourself, so it remembers, okay, Maru is about this and that, and it's useful, and then when I'm asking what's the population of South Korea, it's like, here's this, and because you're making videos on YouTube, blah blah blah — I'm like, I don't need you to reference that now in your reply, that's not connected to my question at all. It's still so silly, that if you told it something once, it's going to remind you of it every time. It's still evolving. It's easy to think the chat is so smart now and can help us so much, but it's only been around for three years or so, there's still a lot of room to improve, and as it improves we also improve, and as long as you're able to put your mind into the perspective that it just helps you make better work, whatever your creative expression or professional calling, go for it, 100%. I think we're going to start to look back on this content being created at this time and it's going to look dated. Like when synth sounds came into music in the 80s, and everybody was using them, and now you hear them, or the saxophone in 80s rock music, it starts to get dated — or maybe the synth even sounds better, you hear it and think, oh, okay. I think the models we have now for AI, as people become more fluent, they're going to look back and be like, oh, that's so ChatGPT-4. They're just going to be able to recognize the patterns, the whole setup of the turnaround that AI writing does all the time.

"It's like, most people think this, but here's the real truth" — I didn't know it back then, at the time, but it was just really bad AI writing. I thought it was really good, but I didn't realize it was AI. So keep that in mind — the more you lean on these tools, and the more ubiquitous and successful they become, the more overdone it'll be, the more obvious it'll be to people, and dated it'll become.

Yes. I think it's easy to fall into the trap, especially when you give it more creative control over the final output than it should have. There's a bunch of lazy creators who, literally in the last lines of the article or social media post, there's the "would you like me to talk about" — the last phrase the AI is asking, do you want to go there next — and some people are so lazy they don't even read what they're posting.

So of course it's got the prompt for a new question. When your bar is so low, obviously people should be called out for that. But it's funny, because that's like getting caught with your pants down, your fly's down, you posted that and everybody can see you used AI. But the funny thing is, we're all using it.

I think a lot of people are afraid to admit how much they're using it, or it's one of those things everybody's doing but nobody really wants to admit how much. It's like a little secret. You know how many emails I get where the fonts are mismatched now, because people are copying and pasting out of ChatGPT and don't realize it takes the formatting with it. It's actually true — this is a little bit of an admission, but part of my job has been web design, and you need to be careful, if you just copy and paste out of GPT, there are these little snippets and attributes included inside the text, if you look at the HTML you see comments, data, whatever. You need to be careful when you're using these tools, because it has instructions for you baked in.

And if people read it, they'd know it was in the notes. It's a funny culture, we're in this liminal water where everyone knows everyone is using AI, and we don't know how to feel about it, we're still figuring out the rules around it. At the end of the day, I think now is a great opportunity to create more content, use it creatively, use it to increase your output for quality content, use it to your best ability — but just don't get lazy. That's what people are calling out more than anything, right?

It's like, you couldn't have just put a little more effort in. You want me to follow you on social media, but you couldn't even trim out that last line, that's how little effort you're putting into what you're giving. Then it really becomes the dividing line, it's insulting, it's literally the lowest you can do — it would be better not to post anything, because you lose your credibility instantly.

I think that's what we're kind of entering right now, that trust economy, people trying to find out what's real and what's not. And that's why I think there's going to be a lot more movement toward real, human-created content, those authentic moments. There was always a backlash, right, there was backlash on social media about people overediting themselves, so a lot of user-generated content started to shift more into filming on their phones, in their cars, on their couch, where it wasn't perfectly lit, and people wanted that intimate moment with the person they were watching.

I think it's just going to become more of that with AI entering the space. People wanting to know, this is really written by this person — I know on Substack there's already a lot of that going on, "human written," so people know they're getting the words directly from a person. There's probably just going to be more of that with video on YouTube too, people wanting less polished content.

I agree with that, that the time of the super — even if it's not the editing itself, there's a lot of things happening on the screen, but also the style of writing the scripts, the hooks, the openers — I'm so tired of the hooks, it can actually get tiring, and people just want authenticity. Of course I am fully an advocate that you should know what you're going to say in your video, it's not just press record and see what happens, excluding obviously podcast episodes for example, but instead of having this highly polished, AI-written script — this is the hook for 15 seconds, and then you go to your first open loop — I think we're seeing people want this free-flowing thing, you have your talking points and you just get into the first point instantly. I've been seeing this happening on social media, instead of that hyper-polished thing. And I think for AI, the best format in my opinion is still going to be video, because it's so much easier to see when things are authentic. With written content, you can fake it to look more authentic, we don't know anymore, it's impossible to tell. But with this visual communication style, when you're expressing your ideas and thoughts, people appreciate it more because they know it's originating mostly from another person. That's one area you still can't fake.

And that was one of the motivations behind doing live, for myself, last year. I liked the idea of doing live video, because it captured those unpolished moments, and people could trust they were getting to experience the real me on those lives. I may go back to doing those again. I did enjoy them. And also, when you were done, it was kind of done, you didn't have as much of the labor burden of editing it.

But it can be slow, there can be dead time on there, or maybe lulls within the conversation, that's a drawback. And I don't think people mind — with talk radio, people know that's going to happen, they tune in every day.

They know it's volume content, not necessarily deep or curated. So if you're doing a live, weekly or daily, you might be able to get away with that, but don't expect people to go back and watch those later unless you've got high-profile guests. But most high-profile guests don't deviate from their script.

Mark Manson, who I'm a fan of, was doing his podcast for a while and he canceled it, he got tired of doing it. He said he didn't really like doing the interview-style podcast, and one of the things that was tough was that everybody was cycling through different podcasts saying the same things, and it was very difficult to get them to break from their script — they were told to go on there and talk about their book, what they did last year, what they're doing, and he could try to get them off, but they'd go right back, and it just felt like, what's the point of people watching this guest on my podcast versus another.

It's just more of the same. So that's the cool thing about live, but I'd wonder if you'd get a lot of those people to do a live podcast, because if they're saying something they don't like on a recording, they can just say, "you can't use that, you've got to cut that, I can't say that."

But if you do it live, it's out there. So there's a lot more risk with live. That was kind of the fun of it, let's just go out there and see what happens, there's no protection. Also, as a general note, I think we're coming out of this cloud of PC culture, a little past that era where you need to be super careful about everything you say online or you get easily canceled and your life is over, and it's a witch hunt for the next decade. I think I'm seeing the first signs of that switch happening on social media, that people are again saying whatever their opinion is — some through comedy, some more seriously — but the overly careful, "I cannot say anything that might offend anyone," I think we're getting a little past it, and it increases the breathing room, we don't need to be super-fragile snowflakes that break instantly when someone says something that triggers us.

So I see it personally as good progress for social media. I agree, that's a good point, I haven't thought about it that way but I have noticed it and just didn't put my finger on it. I think we all lost some things in that time. I think there were some people who got canceled who didn't deserve it, and once people calmed down they realized, and some of them got their platform back, others didn't, or had to find a new one. But I don't think a lot of us felt like we were better for it in the end.

And I feel like we threw some of the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. I think it's a good thing, I think we also tried that straitjacket on ourselves and didn't like how it felt, it felt very restrictive, people didn't feel like they could be themselves. It's uncomfortable. So you're right, we're transitioning out of that phase now, and I think it's a good thing.

I never know if, when I use some of these expressions — my wife makes fun of me because I use a lot of these old-fashioned ones. No, I get them, I like it, it adds to the language.

I try to edit myself out a little bit. I almost didn't say it just then — "the baby out with the bath." No, it's a good one, it's a good one.

But maybe I won't filter myself with those anymore, I'll start using them more often. And as you said, we need to lean into our own intricacies and quirkiness, whatever we are, we represent our — older millennials, that's what we are. Us trying to pretend to be Gen Z, younger or older, doesn't make sense — we have our own cultural background, our influences, a lot of shared cultural experiences, and that's how we can relate to each other and also find the uniqueness. I find it funny that Andrew uses these kinds of terms, that's what I like to hear, it's that kind of unique toolset that gives you the right ingredients to make you more interesting as a personal creator, a personal brand.

Yeah, I completely agree, you've got to lean into who you are, and let people see the real you, and that's the way you get real fans. It's like I've heard with job interviews or dating, why present anyone other than yourself, because if you don't get the job or the partner, you don't really know if they would have actually liked you.

There's that fear of rejection, people don't want to put themselves out there, their true self, because if they get rejected, then they really got rejected, rather than the false persona they put out — you don't even know if that person could have really liked you. And when you're trying to build an audience online, if you're trying to do an impersonation of somebody else, copy someone else out there, you don't really know how long that's going to work.

Exactly. And I know we get so easily caught up with rejection, but I think it's a little bit of an immature way to see it. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it's more about incompatibility, not about rejection. That's how I try to reframe it for myself.

I like that. If you say no to me, it doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong about me, it means we weren't a good match for this, and it serves us both that I came to the situation authentic, being myself, and if it didn't resonate with you, that's the good outcome — let's change the script, otherwise one of us would be begging it, and that would create tension and problems down the line. I think that's a great reframing.

I'm going to use that. That's definitely something helpful, because you can slip back, backslide, even when you've been creating for a while, or just in life in general — you can find yourself hiding, putting out who you think people want you to be rather than yourself. So keep that in mind with the audience. Like you were saying, when you changed to AI videos, you kind of lost some of your audience.

And keep in mind that incompatibility thing. And of course, there are also ways to mitigate these kinds of modern problems in social media — I've heard this term, they call it bridge content. If I want to start making AI videos out of nowhere and my old content was more travel content, I can figure out a creative way of marrying the two together, create a travel video where I incorporate elements of AI, for example, bring it a little bit inside the script. But most — well, I can only speak for myself —

I'll be a little lazy with that, but it's like merging music genres. And how I like to see YouTube in general going forward, going back to my earlier point — we easily overcomplicate things. How I want to see it going forward, seeing what kind of expectations I set for myself in the past years, okay, it's 2025, this is my goal for the year, let's go for it — whatever your goals are, let's go back to the basics, post content, fall forward. Does it do well?

Does it not do well? Doesn't matter. Keep posting content. It's step by step, step by step. Sometimes one of your videos does better, others don't do so great. But I don't remember who said it, that's the mastery basically, that you keep showing up, and you detach yourself from the outcome, and that's how you make it, that's how you turn it into a marathon and not a sprint, that you do finally get over the finish line, but that's how you need to see the whole process.

I think it's a great place to end. I think this has been, as always, an enlightening conversation. I always love talking to you. So that's why I wanted to have you on here.

It's been a pleasure, Andrew.

All right. Very good. I'll talk to you, I'll have you back on again soon, because I'm sure there'll be more to talk about, like you said, the way everything is moving so fast.

Yeah. Very good. All right. Thank you.