Mastering YouTube Content Creation and Leveraging AI Tools with Matt Wolfe

Here's the thing. Clickbait works so well and I hate clickbait, but it works like if I make a video that's just me going like this, it's just like a straight face, nobody clicks on it. If I make a video of me going, it looks like I'm yelling or pulling my hair out or going ah. Or looking scared or like doing some crazy like emotional looking pose. The videos get clicks and it's like, all right, I guess I gotta do some of this like chocolate covered broccoli strategy here where I make the thumbnail something that's going to get the clicks and then when I get them into the video, I bring them back down to earth a little bit.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy.

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I am doing great. Thanks for having me on Hustle and Flowchart, my favorite podcast.

You better keep saying that. Why do you love it so much, Matt?

Because I came up with the name. No, you did.

In the shower, I believe, too, right?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's awesome because it talks about all the latest happenings in marketing and tech and AI.

At least this show we are. Geez, you haven't been listening. Maybe.

We'll see.

We completely pivoted to underwater back basket weaving and. And all sorts of all the leaders in that space, but.

Oh, I've been paying attention. I saw, I saw, I saw. Bacon Wrapped Brad was on.

That's right. We didn't call it that, but you're right. Or the Bacon Wrapped Hustle. Is that what we used to call with him Mr. Castino?

So bacon Wrapped Hustle, Something like that. Yeah, yeah. Hustle and Bacon.

Hustle and Bacon Hustle is not a bad name either. I like that new podcast. Here we go.

All right.

Yeah. So this episode, for anyone that's new here, this man is a brother from another mother, and I won't name her, but.

Getting weird already. I love it. It's been too long. This is my. My boy. Matt Wolf was the co host for many years here on the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. And now he's gone off to live with the robots and wear a lot of Hawaiian shirts in his YouTube video. Thumbnails in my Thumbnails. It's true. I've seen this. Yeah, you don't have. I don't think you own a single one in real life.

Yeah, I do. It's the pineapple one. And we bought it because we went to, like, a Hawaiian themed event when we went to a conference one year. You bought a, like a pineapple or a flamingo shirt or something as well.

Yeah, they're like the. I don't know. Mine was like, the worst way I've ever seen. It's long gone.

But there is a reason I wear Hawaiian shirts in those thumbnails, and it's just because I try to make my thumbnails as colorful as possible. And Hawaiian shirts tend to be. They pop.

They tend to work yes. In all reality we have black shirts.

I know I'm always wearing black or gray.

Nothing's changed here with me either. So, yeah, this is our form of the random show. If you've ever watched any of these with Tim Ferriss and Mr. Kevin Rose, those guys were, I don't know if they're ever business partners, like they're investors together and stuff.

Yeah, I think they've invested in stuff together. But yeah, Kevin Rose originally created Digg and then he went and worked for Google and now he's like an NFT guy and talks a lot about crypto and NFTs. Tim Ferriss. I don't really feel like anybody listening doesn't know who Tim Ferriss is.

An introduction there.

But yeah, those two every like what, three, three months or something, get together, make a podcast. I think they both go into it with like some notes of a few things they want to touch on when they go onto it. But they call it the random show because the show just goes in a million different directions. And we've talked about like, all right, when you and I do this once every other month or so, like, that's what it is.

Right? Basically. So this is us without the notes, but there's always a lot of things that we're doing not together so much, but I know, I mean, Matt, you're publishing something almost daily, I don't know how many times on YouTube now. Maybe it', two, three times a week, something like that.

Yeah, so I was publishing every single day when I first started the YouTube channel and then I backed it off to like four a week and then it dropped to three a week and then the month of August, it's actually averaging two a week. I've only actually dropped six videos total in August, but I'm starting to ramp it back up again. The only reason I dropped less videos was because I was at a bunch of different conferences this month. But yeah, I am, I am sort of bringing it back up to where I'm going to be publishing. Three to four a week again.

Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've been busy. If you, if you've not checked out Matt yet, go look up his name on YouTube. Pretty easy to find. So look for the robot looking dude. And no, I genuinely, your videos are the best in the space and that's been told to me by many other people in the AI space who've been in it for many years too. So you're doing something right there.

Well, thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'M still my own worst critic, right? So every time I publish a video, I'm just like, this video sucked, but here it goes anyway. People are like, that was the best video I ever made. I'm like, okay, you say so.

No. So yeah, yeah. Let's be honest. The creator, yes, it's tough. It's tough to hit publish, but you just got to do it anyway and say f it. Let's go. For sure, for sure. What's like, so this episode, what we're doing these like every few months or so. A couple months. And I don't know we chat about. Exactly last time. But I know it was AI related. It probably always will be to a pretty good extent. Maybe we can venture in some other topics. But yeah, I want to hear what the latest is like, you know, for the entrepreneurs listening. Of course I want to, I want to serve you first. And with Matt here, you know, like, he's so deep in the AI tech, you feel like you spread.

I don't.

How would, how would you say, like, how do you like to cover AI? Like, are there specific categories you really like to hone in on and. Because I want to kind of condense maybe like the latest and greatest things that we should be knowing about for entrepreneurs.

So I think what the most, most people who watch my YouTube channel, I think know me for is like the AI news videos that I put out every Friday. Those are the videos that tend to get the most views. It's like whenever I put out a Friday news video, it's like a guaranteed hundred thousand plus view video. And then the other videos I'll put out and be like, why did this video suck? It only got 30,000 views or whatever. Which, you know, sounds stupid because a year ago we would have killed to have a video that did 30,000 views. But yeah, so most of my videos these days are about AI news because that's what people seem to want. But I love making like tutorials. I love challenging myself. I love going, all right, I want to figure out how to make a game. Can I make a video game using AI? And I'll, I'll start playing around with a whole bunch of tools and figure out how to make a game with AI. Or I'll have Chat GPT write me a story and I'll be like, all right, I want to make this story into a, like, short film. That's like a two minute long short film. And I want to use AI to make this entire short film. Can I do it? And I'll just record the process. And so I like to challenge myself. I like to make tutorials and I like to do news videos. And those are really like the big three. I am talking to a script writer right now about doing some more like, narrative style videos where he writes a script for me, I narrate the whole video, and then I go and either generate B roll with AI or I find relevant B roll. So we're going to experiment with a couple videos like that coming up soon. Yeah, I mean, just anything AI related. I'm experimenting. Right. I feel like. I feel like YouTube is just a constant experimentation of. All right, let's make a video like this. Do people resonate? Nope. Okay, go back to what I was doing. Let's make a video like this. Did that one work? Ooh, people seem to like this one a little bit. Let's try another one. It worked the first time, but not the second time. All right, go back to what I was doing. Right. So it feels like this constant, like, all right, I'm going to dip my toe in this water over here. All right, that didn't work. Let's go make more videos. That worked. All right. Let's dip our toes again. All right, that didn't work. Let's go make more of what worked. So it's just a constant experiment, really.

So, yeah, the news thing obviously is working. So you're going deeper on that or at least continuing on that. Yeah. Like, how do you. I guess, how do you test? Like, when you're dipping your toes, what are the metrics that you're looking at? At YouTube, obviously, views are probably one of the biggest. But, like, what are. What are some of. Some of these things that tell you if it's a good test or not? And, like, should I actually go deeper on this thing?

Yeah, I like to see videos that actually generate new subscribers as well.

Right.

So, like, views are important, but I get less hung up on the views than I used to. Right. Like, I want to see a video that gets a decent watch time. Right. I might get a video that only has 30, 40,000 views on it, but the watch time, they watched 75% of it. And I got, you know, I got 100 new subscribers from that one video within the first two hours of it going live. All right, that was a successful video. I sort of got more people to gravitate and press the subscribe button on my channel. I definitely care about views less than I used to because I do know that certain videos just aren't going to resonate with everybody. Right. Like, Yesterday, I made a video all about Mid Journey and a new feature that they just rolled out called inpainting. And the video, typically when I put out a video, it'll get 60,000 views within the first 24 hours. That one got about 30,000 views within the first 24 Hours. But I knew that was going to happen because it was about Mid Journey. And midjourney is a paid tool. If you want to use midjourney, it's either 10 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month to actually use it effectively. They got rid of their free trial. So it's not one of those AI tools where you can just go out and use it for free and generate a million images and, you know, there's no cost to it. So whenever I make a video about a tool that's not free, I just get less views on it because only people interested in midjourney are going to watch that video. So videos like that, I worry less about views in the short term.

But.

But because it's about inpainting and this new feature, that Midjourney rolled out six months from now, people are still going to be looking up, how do I do inpainting in Mid Journey? And that video is still going to show up. So what I've noticed is there's really two types of videos on my channel. I've got the news videos, which I'll put out every Friday. Those videos will get a giant pop, right. The day that I put them out, they'll get 60, 70,000 views. Over the first week that they come out, they'll typically pass 100,000 views. And then after a week, they just kind of die off and they stop getting views. Right. Because now there's timely. Yeah. Now that it's a new week, there's a whole bunch of new news. Now people are watching the latest news video that gets the big pop and then dies out. Right? But then I also have the challenge videos and the tutorial videos, which I'll put out. Those videos might get 20, 30,000 views in the first 24 hours. My head usually gets all funky and I go, why do this video suck? Why does everybody hate me? My channel's dying. It's all over. It's the end of the world. And then I'll look at that same video three months from now. And three months from now, that video has 100,000, 150,000 views. So I have like the big spikes that get the news out there, and everybody watches them. And then I have this sort of slow burns where over time, when more and more people start searching for that topic, those videos start to get more and more trickles of views. So I've sort of learned to just stop caring about the view numbers really because I know some of them, it just takes a lot longer to get those views. Some of them, the topic is just so niche that they may never get the views. And then some of them I know will get a lot of views in the beginning and then just sort of die out. So views are less important. I want to see subscribers, I want to see retention, I want to see click through rate. Those are the kinds of numbers I'm looking at these days.

Do you ever look at like click throughs to. And I don't know if this is part of the goal, but click through just to like your website or somehow tracking that? Like do you do that?

Not really. So like my business model has obviously changed a lot over the years where my, my income is earned based on views now, right. I get, I get AdSense revenue. So YouTube pays me just based on the amount of views the video gets because of the amount of ads that are shown. And then I'd say about 50% of my videos these days are sponsored as well. Right. So like if I do, if I. And the sponsors, I negotiate with a price up front. So it's not even view dependent. You know, I always want to do as good as possible for my sponsors. I want to make sure that when I make a video for a sponsor, it's one that's going to get a lot of views over time and really support them. But you know, it's really based on that. So I do have the Future Tools website. I do want people to click back to the website, but that's not my main goal. My main goal is to, you know, get the views, get the subscribers, keep them on YouTube because that's where my like the majority of my money is made with Future Tools. Most of the, most of the traffic from Future Tools still to this day comes from Google search and not from people finding it out, finding out about it from the YouTube channel.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure you have a hell of a lot of people linking back as referrals to future tools for whatever assortment of the thousands of tools that are on there.

And with Google, like I think you even mentioned it last time we did a podcast where certain tools on there, the Future Tools website will rank above the tool itself. Right? So like, well, we have a lot.

Of history in that with the, with the affiliate game back in the Day, you know?

Yeah. So a lot of times, like, people will do a search for the tool and they'll be like, the actual website and then future tools or future tools and then the actual website. So future tools is starting to rank for a lot of that stuff. So I would actually say the website drives more people to YouTube than YouTube drives to the website.

Interesting. I like it. Yeah. I haven't thought about it that way, but that makes sense because it's like, okay, someone finds the tool for whatever reason, however they got there, but most likely from a search or a link over, and they want to go deeper now. They want to know how to use these tools or maybe hook it up into like a. A system or a bigger thing. Like, how does this thing play with the greater world of AI these days, which is what you're reporting on. I like the idea going back to the YouTube channel, your strategy with videos, because I. I imagine a lot of people can probably think this way, starting a new YouTube channel or. Or diving deeper into the one they already have, is create something timely. Those are things I can kind of newsjack a little bit, ride the trends and. And whatever's happening in the world. And you could do some crazy crap to get that attention, however you got to do it. And then you have the evergreen approach, which is more like the tool name, the brand name, the big thing that someone is going to like a resource that someone will refer to later on, years down the line, or even months. Yeah.

Or like a tutorial. Right. Like how to train your face into AI images. Right. That kind of stuff. People are going to be searching for months and months from now. Right. Because they see thumbnails like mine, they see, you know, PowerPoint slides floating around or webinars or whatever, and people have, like, AI cartoon images of themselves with their face in it. People are constantly going to be searching for that months and months and months from now. Right. Like, I published a video about how to train your face into the AI. That was one of the first videos I ever put on my channel. When my channel started to actually get some traction in the early days, that video, for the first, like, three months that it was live, only had a thousand views on it or something. If you look at that same video Today, it's got 350,000 views on it. So it's like people are still searching for that and still watching that video. So the tutorials and the tools, you know, as long as it's something that people might be searching for in the future, they still, they still get Some traction.

Yeah.

But yeah, like it's funny because my research most of the time is focused around AI, right. I'm reading all the AI news articles, I'm reading all the, about all the tools. I have a submission form where people can submit their tools to me. I look at the tools, I play with the tools. I'm seeing new tools on Twitter, I'm seeing new tools in the newsletters that I'm subscribed to. So I spend a lot of time messing with the tools and the news. But when I get on YouTube, really the only content I watch on YouTube is how to be better at YouTube. Like that's seriously like where my head goes in my downtime is how do I get better at YouTube? So I probably spend almost as much time learning about how to be better at YouTube than as I do, you know, keeping my head on or my finger on the pulse of the AI world.

That makes sense. And that's where I was naturally feeling where this conversation would go anyway, at least as it's been developing. And I think that's it's, it's something that people have asked. I know they've asked you. I'm sure a lot is like. And we talked about in the previous episodes like hell in a bad dude, this so fast. Well, we already talked about it. It was like a timing thing. You showed up in a lot of places of Twitter. I know or X helped you a lot as well. But like you just kept showing up as well. And it's the consistency and I'm curious on the YouTube side of things. So like if you were to look back, I know, like six months ago, you know, when we were doing stuff at hard for maybe let's call it a year ago, you know, like a year ago today we were, I mean, shoot. We were actually at it for a while. This is August now. If we put us in 2022, we were busting our ass like doing these live streams. We were, you know, keyword research, coming up with interesting looking videos in the web three gaming space primarily. What are like the top three things? If three is too many, maybe just start with one and we'll just go down the line. But like, what's something you wish you knew back then that you now know?

Yeah. So I mean right now when it comes to YouTube, there's really three things that you need to focus on to have a video that does well. Right. And it's pretty well documented now. You can, if you look up any YouTube channel about how to grow on YouTube, these three things are the three things that are going to come up. Title, thumbnail, hook.

Right, I heard that before, Matt. What the hell?

It's true though, you know, like the, the cliche advice is usually cliche for a reason. Right? But the title, the thumbnail and the hook are really what it's all about. And when you look at like something like Hard Fork, I think we didn't really put focus on any one of those really. Right. Like maybe a little bit the hook. Because we would make a video where we would do sort of a cold open and do something like silly to try to grab attention in the first like few minutes of the video. I think we were fairly decent at doing that. But you know, our titles and thumbnails would just be like maybe a bunch of images of, you know, product names and the title might be like.

HFG Live lfg, you know, with a whole bunch of like company names listed after it.

Right.

Like there's no real reason to watch that unless you're specifically looking for HFG Live. Right? Like nobody's gonna look for that. Like so if we were to, if we were to do titles back then like that, and we know this about email, but we don't tend to do it with our, we didn't tend to do it with our titles, right? Like we know it with email. If, if we write an email that's sort of ambiguous, you write a subject line in your email that's like, oh my God, this is going to change the world. Right? And that's your subject line. People are like, what's going to change the world? I need to know what he's talking. What the heck? Well, I need to know more, right? And then you open the email and then you start reading the email and the email's like, there's one simple trick that I've learned and I've practiced this over the last five years and every single time I've done it, it's gotten more and more and more effective. And the most recent time I did it, it just blew my mind because I 10x the results I got the last time. And click this link to find out what I'm talking about. People are like, I need to click that frickin link. Right? And that's what it's all about with YouTube as well. You need to write a title that makes people go, what the hell is he talking about? I need to watch this video to find out more about what he's talking about. When they click on that video, the hook is that email of like, here's one thing that I did that's just worked over and over again. And you need to try this. It's so amazing. Check it out. Let's dig in, right? If your first 15 to 30 seconds is people going, I need to know more. What? Keep. Keep going. Tell me more. All right, shove or get into it, then you've got them, right? You've hooked them, right? And we didn't do that with Hard for Gaming. We didn't try to hook them in the title. We didn't try to hook them in that first 30 seconds. And the thumbnail, the point of the thumbnail is really just to, like, draw their eye to it, right? You want to draw their eye to that thumbnail, and then they're going to look right below the thumbnail and read the title. And so that's really the goal of the title, the thumbnail and the hook. The thumbnail draws their eyes to it. The title hooks them in. So they want to click on it and go, I need to know more. And then the hook in the video sort of primes the pump and gets them going. All right, I need to know more. Keep talking, keep talking. And. And. And that's the goal. And there's a really, really, really good Colin and Samir episode that just came out, like, last week. I highly, highly recommend it, where they interview Ali Abdal. And Ali Abdaal actually said that every piece of content he makes is a list. He's like, it may not. Like, I may not title every video, like, seven productivity habits to, like, cut your day in half. I might give it a sort of catchy title that draws you in. But every video I make is just a list. So he says that every video needs a title, a thumbnail, and a list. And that sort of really simplified the process for me of YouTube videos, because even a tutorial video is a list. Step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. Here's the list of steps to do this tutorial. Every news video I do is a list. Here's the 15 things that you need to know about this week. So it's just a list of news items. Every single challenge I do is a list. Here's the things I'm going to achieve. Here's the steps I'm taking to do them. So if you just think of every piece of content as a list or maybe even multiple lists, like, here's the list of what I'm trying to accomplish. Here's the list of steps I'm going to take. Here's the list of results I got. That's three lists in one video. But every video, if you break it down into this is just a listicle video, it sort of simplifies that process in your mind.

It does. And I would imagine, even if you don't know what the hook is, if you have that list and you start listing out things, you could probably pretty quickly come up with, like, what is that hook? Like, what's the. What's the big idea? Like, why is this important? I'm sure you can get some help from our friends in AI land, you know, ChatGPT, Claude or whoever. But, yeah, I like that whole reframe of listing things out, because we can all do that. We can brain dump what is the thing that we want to educate or teach on or what we just find exciting and then just like, literally probably just capture your excitement, you know, about that list. And I don't know, would you record that? Like, and I don't know when you come up with the hook, because it's always been said in, like, copywriting, that's the most difficult thing. What's the big idea? What's the thing? Like, do you write that before? Do you write it after? What's your process there?

It depends. Right? It's like, so the news videos. Not really. Right. The news videos is just kind of like, here's all the news this week. And then I have, like, a sort of rotating set of titles that seem to work with my news videos. Usually it's something to the effect of, here's the AI news you missed this week. Or I bet you didn't hear about this AI News.

Or I'll read some for you. Actually, guys, most insane week. Things will never be the same. Uh, shoot. Actually, I'm like, see, this is interesting. That was actually on your most popular videos. Like, your third most popular. I rated. I sorted them wrong. I have all your. Like, most. The news ones aren't up there. Uh, but, yeah, that's. That's one of them I just had.

Yeah. And see, that's actually proving my point too, because the majority of the ones that are up there are tutorial videos, if you look at them. And the tutorial videos are always slow burns. Right? Like, one of the ones is, like, how to make a logo with Mid Journey. Like, I'm not looking at them right now. I just know that one's up there somewhere. Yeah, yeah. And the how to make a Logo with Mid Journey. That video bombed when I first released it. I put that video out and it was like, all right, it got 40,000 views in the first two days. Why does this video suck? And then that was that slow burn where people started searching, make a logo with midjourney. And over time, it got more and more and more views because people kept on searching for it.

And, dude, that video is now just to tell everyone else. Cause I'm looking at it. It's at 835,000 views currently. That was published six months ago, like you said.

So, yeah, that's a slow burner video. Cause it's a tutorial video. The tutorials are just. I like making the tutorial videos, but I always get bummed out when I first release them because they don't always perform right away, but those ones are, like, they're. Once they become part of the catalog, over time, they keep on getting views and they keep on working. Right. But, like, the news videos, like, I do have a playlist on there about, like, the. That's just, like, AI News. And most of the time, it's like, here's the news you missed this week. Here's the AI updates that you probably missed. I like to say, here's what you missed. Right? It's always got something around, like, this stuff you probably missed to let them know that, like, yeah, you probably heard some AI news, but you didn't hear all of it.

Yeah.

And so, like, my. My hook for the AI news is sort of preset. I probably should experiment with some different hooks to see if I can get one to work better, but those tend to be pretty reliable when it comes to tutorials and challenges. I always try to come up with a hook before I even make the video. You know, like, the. I. I made this game with AI with no experience. Right. Like, that's kind of the hook that I came up with. And then I went, all right, let's see if I can game without experience. I actually have my little, like, remarkable tablet here with, like, lists of hooks for videos that I want to make. But so many of the list, I don't know how to make them yet. I'm like, all right, here's a hook for a video. I got to figure out how to make this video, and then eventually I'll make it. But I have, like, all sorts of ideas for videos I'd like to make. I just learn. I have to learn how to do them before I can even make them interesting.

That's a. That's fascinating. Actually, it reminds me of Mr. Beast a little bit, because he's. He always lists these different topics of videos out like he's like a Google Doc of thousands of ideas of videos and it's kind of similar sounding and it's like he's not making all those videos, but. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. What do you got there?

I was going to see if I can pull some up here so I can. I can give you an idea of some of the videos that I have in mind of creating.

We can crowdsource how to make some of this. Maybe I get some feedback from people.

Yeah. I made a game in Unreal Engine using AI tools. I made a better short film. I need some of these are just like ideas. They're not like the actual title. I made an AI song go viral.

That's cool.

Let's see. I want to make a video about a Nerf with a big location. Like, if you're not familiar with a Nerf, it's like a 3D scene that was generated by a whole bunch of images. I want to go to like a location. Like I want to go to like Petco park and fly my drone around Petco park and turn the shots that I get from the drone into a 3D nerf. Right. So those are some of the ideas I have in here. You know, these are the best mobile AI apps testing different AI money making ideas.

Yeah.

So I don't know, some of them are just too lame to read.

It's working. It's. It's.

Yeah, yeah. One of the videos is WTF is Siggraph. That's a video I need to make because I filmed a whole bunch of footage over at Siggraph and haven't done anything with it yet.

Well, see, that's a brand name that you can leverage. Like, that's one of those that, you know, thousands of people are at and have been before and will in the future. So it's kind of like, okay, let's establish that video.

Yeah, that's like one of those videos. If I make it next year when Siggraph is getting close again and people are like, I keep hearing Siggraph. What the fuck is Siggraph? You know, they'll go and search that and they'll find a video called wtf. Siggraph.

Just call it straight out. You're like, what up? I'm here. I'll tell you. Yeah, that's cool. Big announcement here. The Hustle and Flowchart podcast is now the newest podcast on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They're the audio destination for business professionals. It's exactly why I joined the network, to expand what we've been doing here. Making business the fuel for your life, not the stressor or the burnout. We want to build fun and make business a big part of who we are and our expression out to others. So you're going to expect a lot more. More curated guests that sync up with this mission. Also more topics and, and episodes from me. And I want you to keep listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Go check out other shows on the HubSpot Podcast Network at HubSpot.com podcast network. All right, so the hooks, I get it now. All right, so you're developing most of those ahead of time. Sounds like all of them really. You know, even, even the news side of things.

Thumbnail. I want to talk about thumbnail. And I know you have videos on this stuff, so like, we can, we can point to those and all that, but what's your thought pattern with the thumbnails? Obviously, bright colors. You already mentioned that.

Yeah. So again, the point of the thumbnail is to grab attention. It really depends on what the topic is about. The AI news videos, I've sort of gotten to this like, theme of trying to make myself look like some sort of like AI newscaster holding a microphone with some sort of colorful background behind me. Those videos have kind of become consistent. There's this thing where it's like once people know you and they know you for a certain type of video, they're kind of looking for that thumbnail to sort of recognize you, right? So the AI news videos, I try to keep a semi consistent look to the thumbnails so that people go, oh yeah, I like watching this video every week. When it comes to some of the other videos, I mean, mostly my goal is make it bright, make it colorful, make it pop, use AI to do it because it's sort of meta, right? Like I used AI to generate my thumbnails and it's a channel all about AI. And you know, I will try a ton of different thumbnails, like what YouTube shows you like the real time click through rate when you upload a video. So I can upload a video, put a thumbnail on the video and go, okay, this is this click through rates, only getting like a 5% click through rate. Let's swap it out and see if I can get better click through rate. So I will, within the first 24 hours of publishing a video, often put three different thumbnails and keep on swapping them out. Luckily, YouTube is actually rolling out their own internal thumbnail split testing tool. But it's not rolled out to everybody yet. And I don't have it yet, but they are, they are actually rolling that out. So you can just plug in three thumbnails and it will split, test them and then, you know, prioritize the one that's working the best. So I'm really, really looking forward to that. But really, thumbnails are like, that's probably one of the things I spend the most time on still is trying to think of a thumbnail to go along with most of my videos. And it's still like, it's still probably the toughest part for me is, all right, what's going to grab attention and make people click and make them go, I need to know more about this, right. Some, some things you can do is put an image there and like sort of circle a piece of the image so people go, all right, why is he circling that piece of image? You know, you want to have that intrigue with your thumbnails as well. Like, why did he use that image? If I'm making videos about like Mid Journey or Leonardo or one of these cool AI art tools, I'll often use some of the like best art that I generated from those tools that is also colorful and like really pops.

Yeah.

I mean, thumbnails is one of those things where I have a process to make the thumbnails, but what actually goes into the thumbnails, it's still like I sort of agonize over that like every time still. Like titles and thumbnails are still really, really, really hard like every single time. I like put so much thought into them and I will change them like three or four times after the video's live to see if I can increase the click through rate or find something that's going to get people even more interested in. It's one of those things that I still don't feel like I have totally figured out how to nail yet.

Right.

It's kind of. I'll just keep on testing stuff until something works better than the last thing I've tested. And you know, it's all about intrigue and getting people going. I need to know more about this. And one of the struggles that happens there is, you know, if you're so immersed in a certain world, like I'm super immersed in AI, we're both super immersed in marketing. We start to just have assumptions that everybody who might possibly find our videos know what this word means, know what this term means, know what I'm talking about when I say this. And so sometimes I will do stuff like for example in the marketing world, like, how to improve your ctr, right? You kind of need to be in the marketing world and sort of immersed in that to know what the hell we're talking about when we say how to improve your ctr, right? The same thing is with AI, right? Like, if I make a video that's like, I made this Nerf, and it's amazing. Well, anybody in the AI world goes, okay, I know what he's talking about. Nerfs are awesome. Anybody that's, like, just slightly outside the AI world goes, like, what? He's playing with Nerf guns. Get some Nerf guns. Nobody knows what I'm talking about. And so a lot of times I will fall into that trap of using terminology that I think is just common knowledge. And then I realize, oh, wait, if I want to reach a bigger audience with this, I need to say something that I need to use words that everybody understands. So it is sort of a battle still for me. You know, titles and thumbnails are still a struggle, but it's. It's a struggle that I kind of have fun with. And it's also a constantly moving target.

Right.

You know, the YouTube algorithm is constantly changing, and what people. What. And people's interests are constantly changing. And so it's just a. You know, I. I don't know if that's something I'll ever say. I know how to make a YouTube title and thumbnail that's going to work 100 of the time. Because if I did, I'd be freaking Mr.

Beast. Yeah, right. Well, and we know him. Like, he's. Well, we don't know him. You might, but I don't. But I know he agonizes over thumbnails, like. Or at least he studies those things for, what, thousands of hours or whatever he's put into at this point. I mean, he's been doing the game for a while, but I know, like, him and his crew will. Will just pick apart thumbnails and. Because he knows how important those are, and if that's the first visual that you're seeing of that video, then that's your first impression. Obviously, there's a headline, but really, it's the thumbnail, like you said, that catches the attention. It's the scroll stopper. It's like.

And Mr. Beast makes his thumbnails before even recording the video.

That's right.

He'll figure out what the thumbnail is. Is this YouTube video going to grab attention just based on the thumbnail? If so, he goes and makes the video, you know? Yeah.

There you go. Interesting. So, I mean, there's. And I could see some. As you were talking, I was kind of scrolling through your most popular videos. I'm like, all right, so what are the commonalities here? Definitely big ass, colorful explosion background or something popping. There's. It's usually you, like, you said newscaster or you're pulling your hair out. There's a lot of that. Like, there's. Holy crap, Matt, are you okay over there? Like, for a while, the first few months, I was like, hate it, hate it.

So here's the thing.

What do you hate?

What do you mean, here's the thing? Clickbait works so well. And I hate clickbait, but it works like, if I make a video that's just me going like this with just like a straight face, nobody clicks on it. If I make a video of me going, it looks like I'm yelling or pulling my hair out or going or looking scared or doing some crazy emotional looking pose. The videos get clicks and it's like, all right, I guess I gotta do some of this chocolate covered broccoli strategy here where I make the thumbnail something that's gonna get the clicks and then when I get them into the video, I bring them back down to earth a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. Because I'm like, I know you're not like that in real life or in person and. But like, I look at probably a good 50. Not 50%, but I mean, there's one theater where double fisting popcorn, that might be my favorite actually.

But yeah, everything.

Like, there's some that I'm like, dude, is Matt having a mental breakdown over there? Like, I need to make sure he's okay.

Well, I make fun of my own thumbnails. You know, Ben Settle always used to have this phrase about making the skeletons dance, right? It's like, it's that idea of like pointing out the stuff yourself that other people might be thinking, right? Like, you know, there's that famous scene in 8 Mile from Eminem where he gets up on stage and he does his rap, and in his own rap, he makes fun of himself the whole time, which takes away the power of the other rapper. So the other rapper has nothing to come back with, right? I do that in my own videos. I'll say like, sorry for the clickbait thumbnail. I know it's ridiculous. I'm sorry, but I had to get you to watch that. You know, like, I will call it out here if you're. If you're following me on Twitter. X X Twitter. I guess it's X Twitter, right? Because that makes sense. It used to be Twitter.

So now I like that X Twitter.

I don't know if you're following me there. Like, I make fun of my own thumbnails all of the time. Like, I'm just like, hey, here's my latest clickbait for you. Like, I just, I call it out because, like, it's obvious what I'm trying to do. I'm not gonna like, like hide the fact that I'm trying to use clickbait thumbnails, right? Clickbait works. And usually as long as the video is entertaining and enjoyable and informative and what they came for from the video, nobody cares.

Well, that's the thing, right? That goes to what you have a thumbnail again back to the headline and then you have the hook. So it's like, okay, that hook better, better deliver like on, on whatever the thumbnail slash headline title are saying, right? Like, and you better deliver that fast, I would imagine. Right there.

Yeah, that. And that's usually the goal, right? Like, as soon as the video plays, if it's like a visual thing, like I'm showing off a new Mid Journey technique, I'm going to show the result. Boom. Right away. Like, as soon as the video, like, I don't even do intros anymore. I don't go, hey, my name is Matt Wolfe. Thanks for watching my channel. Here's what I'm going to talk about. I don't do any of that. The second my videos start, I go.

Today we're going to. We're going to make a, I don't know, a good example. Today we're going to make a short film using AI. And as I'm saying that you're seeing the short film that I make, you know, using AI. Like, I'll have that video on the screen so you can see the end result right when the video starts. And then we'll get into it. When I do my AI news videos, I literally start the video. Here's the AI news for the week. Boom. First news. Like within two seconds of the video, I'm already talking about the first news of the week, right? So my goal is just like, don't beat around the bush. I don't need to introduce myself. I'll introduce myself at the end. If you like the video, I'll tell you more about myself at the end.

See, that's so interesting. And I'm thinking back to all those videos we were doing at Hard Fork. And honestly, for years prior to that it was always like, we gotta tell who we are. You know, we.

Yeah, yeah.

To establish credibility, authority, blah, blah, blah, you know, and it's like really at the end of the day, especially YouTube, it's like short attention spans. They want information. Now you have a million choices. You are not the only one. Yeah, yeah.

Like if you go and watch YouTube videos and I spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos, a lot of time, like, and most of the time I'm like analyzing them. And, and if I click away from a video, I'm usually like, why did I click away from that? If I sit and make it through the end of a video, I'm sitting there going, alright, what made me watch? To the end of the video? And I'll tell you, usually the videos I click away from are the ones where there's just too much filler or there's too much introduction or, you know, how often do you go to find a tutorial like, all right, I need to figure out how to like edit this piece of my image in Photoshop. And you watch the tutorial and you're four minutes into the video and he hasn't even started on the tutorial yet. And you're just like, all right, I'm going to go back and click on the next video, see if they get to it quicker, you know, and so I'm, I'm constantly sort of paying attention to that. And that's like rule number one is hook them right from the beginning. Just get right into the thing you said you were going to give them.

Yep, makes sense. So headline or title? We didn't really cover that so much. I know you agonize over it, but I feel like over the top three things, that's the one that we kind of skated around. So like, what's, what's your process there? And is that. Maybe you already said this, but is that something you start with or do you end with or like, where does that show up in your process?

Yeah, that's one where it is dependent. Right. Like then the news videos, I usually just record the news video and then try to think of one afterwards. Any other video, I'm usually trying to think of the title before I get into it. You know, like, like some of the ones that I read, like, I made a game in Unreal Engine using AI, right? I. I haven't made a game in Unreal Engine using AI yet, but I already got the title ready for it. When I do, I try to come up with the title. I try to think of that thing that's going to get people to click on it and I want it to be intriguing. I want it to be a little bit open ended. I want it to be those subject lines in our old emails of you've got to see this. That's a horrible title. But you want it to have that feeling of I need to know what he's talking about with that title. So I'm usually trying to leave the titles a little bit open ended to get you to click to get the rest of what I'm talking about. Like my latest one was like this Mid Journey feature is insane or something like that, right? I'm not telling you what the Mid Journey feature is. I want you to click to find out what the Mid Journey feature is. I'm about to talk about, you know, I'm talking about in painting in that video. If I just put like Mid Journey just added in painting. If you already heard that news, you're not clicking on the video, you know, so although I'm probably showing you some ways to use in painting that you haven't thought of yet. You're probably not going to click that video just because if you think it's just going to be an announcement about inpainting, you're all right. I've already heard that I don't need this video now. And so it's always going to have a little bit of intrigue and it's got to. And I always want to make sure it delivers on the promise that I give in the video. Right? I don't want to over promise. I never make a video that is like this thing is absolutely insane. It's going to blow your mind. And then you get into it and it's like, look, Photoshop added a new color. You know, like it's.

You know, it's got to be something that I legitimately think is a mind blowing feature for me to say this is mind blowing. So you know, I want it to deliver on, on any sort of hype that I put in the title. But I do try to make the, the title slightly hypey and then what I'll use is, you know, I used to use Chat GPT and I'll plug in my title and I would say here, generate some alternate titles for this and 9 out of 10 times I end up going with the title that I wrote and none of the ones ChatGPT wrote. But now Vidiq, I use Vidiq a lot. They have that just built in so you can be right inside of YouTube uploading a video. The Vidiq, like, little bot is right there inside of YouTube where you're uploading the video and there's a button that says, like, generate more titles. It'll look at the title that you've got already and it'll generate like five more ideas for titles. Still, most of the time I end up going with the title that I came up with and not the one that GPT came up with. But every once in a while I'm like, oh, that's actually a good spin. And I'll use one that ChatGPT came up with. But I would still say nine out of ten times, it's still, it's still one of my original ideas that I end up going with.

Right on. Yeah, no, it's good to know, man. I mean, that's where it's good to have some feedback and some different perspectives.

But yeah, well, Vidiq and ChatGPT, like, they'll tend to go like overly clickbaiting, right? Like, they'll go like, finally reveal the amazing unknown, unseen feature of midjourney. That must be be mind blow. I don't know, I'm just kind of going off the rails there. But, like, they will just try to just go like the most click. They try to throw as many clickbaity words in there as possible where you read it and you go, this is just garbage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, man, that's, that's the thing. Don't rely on the tools, rely on us first. But have a structure of things. Leverage the tools. And it's cool to hear Vidiq as one tool you use. What are some other, like, obviously mid journey for thumbnails, it sounds like that's where a lot of it's made. Are there other tools that you just like, can't not live by when it comes to YouTube and creating this content? I know people are always going to want this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I use, I use my mind. That's where I save like all the interesting stuff that I come across, right. Because I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm on YouTube a lot. I'm reading a lot of articles when I come across stuff that I'm like, I need to resurface this in a video in the future. I save it to a tool called MyMind, which is just like a little browser extension that works on both my phone and my browser and it just literally saves that link. So I know I'll resurface it later. I use that a lot. And then it uses AI to automatically tag those things so you can easily organize them later. So I use that a lot. I use Feedly leo, which Feedly is an RSS feed reader, but LEO is an AI add on to Feedly that basically, like, browses the web for you. So for example, I can go into Feedly LEO and say I want to surface articles about artificial intelligence every day. It will sort of search the entire Internet for articles about artificial intelligence. It'll find articles on medium, it'll find it on blogs, it'll find it on news websites. It'll find anything it can that somebody's talking about artificial intelligence for the day. Kind of like a Google alert or something. Right. And then every day you get in there and you can kind of train it so I can flip through all these articles and I can go, I want less like this, less like this, less like this, more like this, less like this, less like this. And over time, it actually gets trained and knows, all right, he's just looking for latest announcements about AI or, you know, announcements about new tools that got released. And so now my Feedly LEO feed is like really dialed in to only show me the kind of news that I'm interested in making videos about. So that uses the AI and your own sort of training to dial in that feed for you. So I use that quite a bit. I do use vidiq on my YouTube channel mostly to brainstorm some ideas for titles. I'll also use it for coming up with a whole bunch of keyword ideas for the video as well. But everybody says keywords. Yeah, tags on YouTube. But everybody says tags on YouTube serve, like, no purpose anymore. Like, they get zero weight, from what I understand. But I do it anyway because it's still kind of a habit that takes, you know, five seconds. With Vidiq, what else do I use? I use Mid Journey. What's that?

How about, like, the description? I guess that's like the one piece that we haven't talked about. Like, is that. How do you come up with that? And I know it's getting off the. The tools thing, but I feel like that's like a gap there that we haven't talked about.

Yeah. So the description is also less important. You want to make sure it's got a few of the keywords in there that people might search for, because I think it has a little bit of weighting on the. The search engines. But one thing you'll notice on, like, really big channels, like, if you look at Mr. Beast, you look at, like, Ryan Trahan, you look at some of these, like really, really massive channels, they don't even put anything in the description most of the time. So I don't think the description holds a ton of weight. So usually my description is like one or two sentences and then I have like a, a default template that has like all my URLs already baked into it. So like by default my template already says like, you know, here's my Twitter, here's my website, here's my, you know, subscribe to this YouTube channel or whatever. It's got like all of the things already there. So the only things that I really add to my description are like one or two sentences about what the video is about. If I have a sponsor for that video, I always try to make sure the link to the sponsor is, you know, above the fold. So, you know, like YouTube will truncate your description, it'll put like the little dot, dot. I always try to make sure the link to the sponsor is visible on the YouTube video because sponsors like that. And then timestamps are important, right? Timestamps. I find I try to make timestamps for every video. Timestamps are sort of a double edged sword, right? Because people can sort of skim your timestamps and see everything you're going to talk about and then go, oh yeah, I've already heard about all this and click away. But more likely what happens because of timestamps is you'll start talking about something. People go, oh, I'm not interested in this. They'll skim the timestamps, see something they didn't know about, jump to that portion of the video. And timestamps actually tend to help retention more than hurt retention.

I would think so, yeah.

Yeah, because people will, will skip around, they might see like a news article, oh, I already heard about that. But then skip to like a news article three news pieces away because they haven't heard about that one. So I always put timestamps in. Timestamps I think have been really, really helpful. And at the end of the day, my YouTube channel, I want it to be of service to people. I want it to be very, very helpful. And it's just more helpful to people if I tell them what I'm talking about and let them skip around to the points that they're interested in. So I think that if you just do only one thing in your description and nothing else, put timestamps.

Timestamps. Yeah, makes sense. All right, so thanks for closing that loop because that was like the one thing I forgot to ask about. But back to tools like the ones that you already named are great, and I have not been using them. So thanks for sharing those. What other. What other resources are just like, the things that you. You really need when it comes to creating YouTube content.

Yeah, so we already mentioned Mid Journey. Leonardo is another AI tool that I like a lot. I use it a lot. It uses Stable Diffusion under the hood, but they have their own sort of pipelines to improve the image quality. You can actually train your own images and stuff into it and make more images that look like you and make more images that look. Look like a certain style. So it's a really, really powerful one. A lot more powerful than Midjourney. But Midjourney has kind of like a style to it that, you know, people like, an aesthetic style that people just really like. So I like to use Mid Journey, I like to use Leonardo. I also use a locally installed version of Stable Diffusion, which, you know, because it's locally installed, I can add all sorts of plugins and upgrades to it and just do all sorts of insane stuff. But that's sort of getting into more like. Advanced level. Yeah, advanced level stuff. I use Chat GPT quite a bit lately. I've actually been using Claude more than ChatGPT.

Same thing.

Because Claude has this large context window where you can paste in large chunks of text up to like 75,000 words and get it to, like, summarize it for you. So I don't know if I should be saying this, but when I do my news videos, what I'll do is I'll have like, all right, here's the 10 news articles I'm going to talk about. I will copy and paste that entire article, pull it over to Claude, not even read the whole article, and be like, summarize this into bullet points. And then what I'm actually saying in the news, I'm just reading the bullets off of Claude so that I don't have to give you the whole thing.

Thank you for sharing that. Because I literally use Claude for anything summarization now. Like, if it's transcription from a podcast, a call, a coaching call, any news. Yeah. Distilling a book in some cases, like, let's be honest, it's a way to shortcut things. You could prompt it on exactly what you want it to summarize for you and then, like, rearrange it in a way. Yeah, it's like, it's short. That's why AI is so effing amazing. It's like, I love it for the summarization and Automating a lot of things that honestly are just going to save us all time. And it produces better quality and it's, it's a win win for everybody.

Yeah. So you got, you have, you have Chat GPT, you have Claude and you have Perplexity. Right? Those are the three like sort of chat models that I tend to use the most. Right. Perplexity is great for research, right? Because you can search like ChatGPT for a small window of time, actually had Internet access where you can actually search something and it would actually search the web and pull in new details from the web. And then they decided, hey, we're going to remove that, we'll bring it back eventually. But it's been months and months now since it's been gone. And the reason they got rid of it was because it was finding ways to get around paywalls, right? So if you found a paywalled piece of content, you could say summarize this, it would summarize it even was behind a paywall. And so it was sort of screwing with other sites terms and conditions and they didn't want to get into legal hot water. That's why they, they took it away. Perplexity, on the other hand, it will still search the Internet for you. So if you're trying to do research on a topic or you know, one, one thing that's really cool, although Amazon is rolling this in now. But you can go to like an Amazon website, find a product that you're interested in buying, go open up the Perplexity plugin in Chrome and say summarize the reviews for me and it'll just give you like an overall feel of the reviews and what most people are saying, you know, so it'll do stuff like that world actually browse the web. So if you want web browsing, Perplexity is where it's at. If you want to summarize long content, Claude is where it's at. And then Chat GPT, if you want to do more complex stuff like their code interpreter is freaking amazing where you can add like you could take three images, put them all into code interpreter and say make a video that sort of merges these three videos together or these three images together and it will actually like make a little merging video for you.

Wait, see that's something I have not played around with because I just interpreted the name code interpreter by the fact that I need to be a coder and use it.

Okay, so code interpreter writes code for you. So what you do is you tell it what you want it to do, and it will go and write the code to do the thing you want it to do. So what it'll do in that instance, if I upload three images and say, make an animated gif that merges between these three images. It will go and write a script that animates images between the three images and then run that script on the three images that you uploaded.

Okay.

So that's what Code Interpreter will do. It also is great for, like, correlations. Right. I can upload this PDF over here and this PDF over here, put them both in there, turn on Code Interpreter and say, find any similarities between these two books. It will skim both the PDF files and say, between these two books, here are things that both of those books talked about. Right. So you can do stuff like that with ChatGPT's code interpreter. It's really, really powerful.

Wow.

So there's use cases for all three.

Yeah, yeah. Do you have a video on Code Interpreter? I'm sure you do.

I don't yet, actually. Code Interpreter is one that I've been like, sort of collecting all the different use cases that I've seen people do that are really smart. And I was going to make a video that's like, here's 20 ways to use Code Interpreter. I would love collecting them. Yeah, cool.

Make that. Because that's literally has been one of those things where I'm like, okay, I hear how power it is. I just don't know how to relate it to what I'm doing. I'm not going to create code and all this stuff, but maybe I am. We all are, I guess, at the end of the day. But yeah, the correlations, comparisons, again, it's like summarization, but with a lot more specificity to what we're trying to get out of this. So cool.

Yeah. I mean, one use case, totally outside of what we've been talking about is for, like, health data. Right. So let's say, for instance, you get migraines a lot or something. Well, you can just keep a daily log of like, this day I ate this thing, didn't get a migraine. This day I ate this thing, did get a migraine. This day this thing did get a migraine. You keep like a daily health log. You can throw it into Code Interpreter and it will find correlations of what types of foods, what things inside of those foods tend to give you headaches. Because it has that additional context. Right. Like if you say, like, you know, I ate a California burrito and I got a headache, well, ChatGPT knows the ingredients of a California burrito as well. So it might realize that from that log of all the stuff that you plugged in, that a certain ingredient that was in a handful of foods is what tends to give you a headache because it knows the ingredients in the food as well as your sort of habits that you've been charting. So you can find sort of correlations on health data and stuff like that, which I think is a really interesting use case as well.

That's an incredible use case. And that can help a ton of people. It's just understanding how to do it. And obviously track shit too. People. Yeah, yeah, like whatever.

Yeah. The hardest part about that whole process is just keeping up with the tracking. Exactly.

You need your own data. Well, it's interesting because I have like a daily log of a group of guys, Trevor Turnbull, you know him and, and. And a few others, and we track micro actions every single day. And it's like a list of 10 to 12 things. So it's like in my mind, I'm like, okay, I can take all that data in the last six months, all of us, and throw it in there. It's like, what are the correlations, where you slacken and why and what are trends? And it's like any data that we have, obviously us as business owners, we're tracking a lot of data. Probably pull it from like Google Analytics.

You know, you can 100% from Google Analytics and tell me and ask ChatGPT what this data means. You know, pull up, pull in as a CSV file and say, like, here's my traffic numbers. You know, based on what you're seeing, what do you recommend? Right. I find Chat GPT to be a great sort of consultant as well. You know, you get in there and ask it for advice and it will give you advice based on all of its training data from, you know, other people that have shared their advice over the years in blog posts and articles and videos and stuff.

Yeah, man. All right, all right.

Anything else on that note or. And then we'll wrap it up. And I have a couple. Couple thoughts.

No, I mean, I think. I think we kind of covered it all. I mean, I'm using a ton of different AI tools. A lot of them I'm just sort of popping in and I'll use it like once or twice and then not really use it again for a couple of weeks. I'd say most AI tools are kind of like that. I think it's like that for a lot of people. But I think the ones that I'm using legitimately on a daily basis. We. We kind of covered right mid journey. Claude chatgpt Perplexity.

Feedly Leo My mind, those are really the like daily. All right. How did I live without these before I had them kind of tools.

Makes sense because it's like, it's like your brain captures a lot of information. It captures what we find important. Then it also. And then all these other things. Perplexity Claude chatgpt They're helping us distill summarize and it allows us to kind of create action or actually express what we want to make of this data in our own voice, of course. So cool, man. That is a hell of a masterclass. I'm happy to capture that. So that's probably what this will end up being. Wrap up question or questions are how the hell do you keep up with everything? Like what's your. Just keep it kind of snappy. But like, are there things that. Because I honestly don't know because we haven't been chatting as much. But like how do you keep yourself, I guess grounded and like not feeling like you're freaking out because of the news and obviously you have all these resources. So we talked about that. But like yeah, yeah, maybe the non tech stuff like speak to that so you're not burning out on all this. I think a lot of people would.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually wrote a tweet just yesterday. I don't know if you saw it, but it was an X post. I'll never get used to calling tweets Twitter. Yeah, I don't know if I'll ever get used to not calling them tweets, but basically I've been saying yes to way too much stuff. Right. I think my biggest problem in business is that I want to say yes to everything. That was, I think, you know, when you and I worked together, that was something that we both had in common is like when. When opportunities came up, we had a hard time saying no. And I've gotten to a point now where I literally have no choice. I've got to say no to like everything. I went to like two conferences. I've been on a whole bunch of podcasts lately. I've been and meeting with companies that want feedback on tools and I just kind of like if I have a gap in my calendar, I'll say yes because it might be an opportunity. And that's led me to the point where I mentioned at the front of this call that I've only made six videos this month where in past months I was making 20 plus videos. Well, the reason I've only made six videos this month is because I'm saying yes to way too much and going back to, like, you know, James Schramko. Effective hourly rate. My effective hourly rate when I jump on phone calls plummets. Right? So, you know, speaking to the personal stuff, I just personally need to stay focused on creating content and research. And for me, research looks like checking in on Feedly Leo every day, reading the handful of AI newsletters that I'm subscribed to, and then I like to create Twitter lists. So I have lists of people that share really cool stuff in the AI space, and I just follow lists. I don't even read my home feed on Twitter anymore. I just look at my AI list and see what everybody's talking about in the AI space. I do those three things every single morning. Whether I'm traveling, whether I'm at home, check the newsletters, check my feedly, check my AI lists. And by doing that every day for an hour to two hours a day, I feel like, all right, I am immersed. I know what's going on. I've got the lay of the land. I'm good. So I feel like as long as I'm doing those three things and making content on a fairly consistent basis, I'm in a good place. But when I start to load up my weeks with calls, when I start to agree to go to events and speak on one panel, that turns into three panels and all of that kind of stuff, now all of a sudden I start to go, all right, my effective hourly rate is dropping like a rock, and I need to get back to just doing the stuff that I know is important to me. And that's kind of been my process now, is figuring out how to shave off more of the yeses. And, you know, saying no to more stuff means saying yes to creating content.

It's saying yes to you. Yeah. And the boring work, it's like Alex Hermosi talks about. It's like the boring work. It's like, do the thing that's honestly the boring thing that's working and just go deeper. Go deeper.

Exactly.

Yeah. And thank you for saying yes to this. I caught you before you got really busy.

But, yeah, there's always still exceptions in the. In this world. I'm never gonna say, like, there's no room for exceptions ever.

Of course. Course. Of course. Well, dude, this is. Yeah, this is fascinating. It was cool to go deep dive on the YouTube side because we haven't been able to do that. It's always been kind of AI focused primarily. Obviously this is too. So I'll give a little shout out again for you. Is obviously go check out Matt on YouTube. Pretty apparent why and where how to find him. So everything will be linked in the show notes as always. Check him out on X as well. That's just what shoot is it Matt Wolf or I Forget.

It's still Mr. Eflo, Mr. Eflow, Mr.

Eflo, Mr. E. So, yeah. Anything else, Matt, before we wrap this one up?

No. We've covered everything that I think we wanted to cover, seeing as how we had no plan of what we planned to cover.

We had a big outline for this episode.

Yeah. I think the plan going in was fulfilled. No. Thanks for having me on again. Still love all the Hustle and Flowchart listeners and. And excited to continue to be a part of the show, at least in a smaller form these days. So, you know, doing it and. Yeah, yeah, I'm digging it and I'm digging the. The kinds of guests you're having on and can't wait to see where you take it next.

There's places it's. It's moving. I have some things in the works I've not shared yet, so. But thank you very much, dude. And I know people are. Have missed you, but they're following along and they know where to get you. So we'll keep doing these little random shows every now and then. So thank you, brother man. And we'll do it soon.

Sounds good.

All right. All right. That's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all.