Using A.I. to Grow Your Business - with Matt Wolfe

Hello and welcome to the Ray Edwards Show. In just a moment, we'll jump into a conversation that Ray had with Matt Wolf. Now, recently, Matt's YouTube channel, his website, his newsletter subscribers, all of these have grown exponentially just in a few short months. So Ray's going to find out why that happened. They'll chat about some cool AI tools, the future of content creation, how AI plays into that, and the importance of producing content that you're actually passionate about, not just doing what you think YouTube wants you to do. It's a great conversation. So let's jump in as Ray talks with Matt Wolfe. The Ray Edwards Show.

Matt Wolf, I'm so excited that you're actually here with me having this conversation. You have been somebody I've been watching, I feel like forever, but it's only been a few months, really. It all started back right after ChatGPT became public and I saw one of your first big videos. I'd like to start like this. It seemed as though you came out of nowhere and suddenly you were everywhere. Now, I know that's not really the case, but what's the story? How long have you been at this YouTube thing and how did you become the guy when it comes to AI?

So, yeah, thanks for having me. First of all, I'm really excited to be on the show. Love chatting about this kind of stuff. So super excited to deep dive on this stuff with you. But yeah, to answer the question, I started my YouTube channel back in 2009. So this has been 14 years in the. But back when I first started my YouTube channel, I was really into WordPress and teaching people how to build websites and different WordPress plugins. I think the very first video that I ever put on my YouTube channel, I actually left it there. I've unlisted most of my videos from over the years just because they're not so relevant to AI anymore. But my very first video was how to put affiliate links into WordPress blogs. And it was a quick tutorial on how to do that. And that video was from, I think July of 2009. So that was the first video I ever put up. Yeah. So over the last 14 years, I was making content around digital marketing, blogging, content marketing. I had videos about running Facebook ads and Google Ads and SEO. And I've kind of gone down all of the various digital marketing rabbit holes over the years, and it just, it was just always kind of, this is what interested me. I've always sort of been a techie, nerdy kind of person, and I just gravitated towards marketing and pay per click and SEO and all of that kind of stuff. So I made a lot of videos around that over the years. And then around I'm fast forwarding and jumping over a lot of stuff. We'll probably get into some more of the details as we get into the conversation. But Fast forward to 2022. I really, really started to get into the AI stuff I discovered midjourney. I started making art with Mid Journey. I came across some tutorials on how to train my own face into AI art and started to generate images of myself in AI and various fantasy situations in space and just all sorts of fun images. And when I started to come across that stuff, that was the new rabbit hole that I wanted to start making videos about. So I started making quick tutorials about how I was doing this stuff with AI, and that started to get some attention. I think the first video that I did where I talked about training your own face into AI, that video was the first one where I actually started to get some, like, real traction, right? It was at the end of 2022, maybe about October of 2022. That video, I think got 20,000 views or something like that within a couple months of it going live. And I kind of started to think, okay, people like this AI stuff a lot better than my marketing content. My content about, you know, advertising and SEO and stuff like that. At the time, there wasn't a lot of YouTubers talking about this stuff either. There was maybe two or three other channels that I noticed talking about AI stuff. But because that video took off, I went, I'm gonna keep making more videos about this because people seem to keep coming back and watching these videos. And then I had a video right after ChatGPT came out, maybe two weeks after ChatGPT came out. It was called something to the effect of this is better than ChatGPT. That video. I remember I published it at like 10pm at night on like a Tuesday or something like that. Went to bed, didn't think anything of it. Thought I was going to wake up to a couple thousand views like any other video. I woke up the next morning and it had almost 100,000 views just in the time that I had been sleeping. And I went, oh, wow, this is. This is really, really crazy. I went and shared some of that success on Facebook and on Twitter, and I went, wow, look at this video's really blowing up. And I think that sort of fueled the fire a little bit, and it kind of got more and more viral. And eventually that video went on to do something like 1.2 million views and to this day is still the most popular video on my channel. And you know, long story, even longer. I just kept on going with the AI stuff. I just kept on finding cool new AI tools, finding cool AI news stories and making videos about it. And I know I jumped over a lot of stuff, but yeah, it's been a 14 year journey.

That's so good. Thank you for sharing that story. And to me it illustrates we could never judge too soon whether we're like on the right path. I think what I hear from you, and I'm not sure you said this explicitly, but I feel like implicit in your story was you were doing stuff you loved. When you were doing, working on the WordPress stuff and, and marketing and doing all that, you were enjoying yourself. And then you kept doing that and you hit this one topic that kind of ignited and seems like it was on fire, so to speak. So you decided to throw a few more logs on that fire.

Yep, pretty much exactly how it went.

Down that I, I love your enthusiasm and you, you've gone from being someone I was not aware of before to now. You're like an everyday thing for me. I got to go check out, see what, what you've posted on YouTube, what you've put on future tools IO. In case you haven't been there yet, folks, go to Future Tools IO. That is, that's your newsletter site, right?

Right, yeah, that's, that's the site where I curate all the cool tools that I came across. That was actually part of the beginning of the story as well. You know, I was, I was making YouTube videos. I had a couple of videos out there about some of the AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Mid Journey and a few of those things. I'd already released videos about those. But as I was coming across more and more AI tools, I wanted to have a sort of resource to organize them and help keep my head on what tools I've come across already and which ones I've played with. And I was kind of keeping that all in a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. The spreadsheet was getting longer and longer and longer as I came across more and more tools. So I decided to go experiment with this, this tool called webflow, which is a no code web page builder. And it has all of this cool like filtering and sorting and stuff like that that you can do with it. And I started to like that a lot better than WordPress. So I went and built the website essentially for myself to just kind of organize all the various tools that I came across. And when people asked me, hey, what was that tool that you mentioned that made, you know, AI generated music? I could quickly jump over to that tool real quick, type in AI music and pull up the tool and be like, oh yeah, that one was called Sound Draw or whatever the tool was. So it was really designed as a resource just to sort of help myself resurface tools that I'd already come across. But yeah, that's that. That came about actually a couple weeks before the YouTube channel exploded. They both kind of had the, the sort of hockey stick trajectory at the same time.

Well, I appreciate you making the site because I was watching the videos and I was referencing links and things that you shared. I did the whole put my own face inside AI and there were people on my team who are much more technical than I am, who are like, how did you know how to do this? And I finally had to fess up. Well, it's Matt Wolf that knows how to do it. I just followed his instructions on YouTube. But it's an awesome service you're providing. I've seen, I don't know if you want to comment on this or not, but I've seen a lot of very similar looking sites pop up after yours became so successful.

Yeah, I mean there has been and you know, I don't really mind. I still think a lot of people sort of still, you know, reference. Mine is sort of one of the first ones when I made it. I didn't really know of any others. There was another one called Futurepedia that literally started the exact same month. So I can't really say that, you know, we, we fed off each other because if you look at the dates that those sites started, they were like within a week of each other. But pretty much all the ones that I've come across other than those came out after mine. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't really bother me. Cause again, I built that as a resource for myself and if it's helping other people, then awesome. But it wasn't really the intention. It wasn't meant to be my business model, honestly.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious now, thinking about that. How do you think about your business going forward? How do you think about future tools and, and Matt Wolf and your, your AI video? Because I think you are. I've looked at a lot of these sites and a lot of creators. There's other great people doing great stuff. I'm not denigrating anyone, but to me you are the authority in this area. And part of the reason why is because you didn't come in pretending to be an expert. You're like, I'm an enthusiastic user of this technology. I'm fascinated by it. I'm sharing what excites me and that's what drew me to you. And I think it's what draws so many people to you. So how do you see that going forward?

Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying that. And that's really been kind of the approach I've tried to take. I feel like as soon as I start trying to portray myself as an expert in this stuff, as soon as I start kind of giving off the impression that I know everything, I think that'll probably be the downfall of my content. I think I'm trying to stay in that constant learner, constantly curious mindset. You know, I don't know how the AI algorithms work. If you were to ask me how the math and the code underneath some of these tools work, I can't explain it to you. I just know how to do some prompts that make cool images. I know how to use some of the front end stuff that's available to generate this cool stuff. And over time I'm sure I'll get a better and better understanding of how the code and math and stuff underneath it works. But I just love always taking that perspective of I never know enough. I'm going to keep on learning and keep on finding out more stuff. But as far as the business goes, there's three main aspects now with a fourth kind of coming into play here. So I've got the Future Tools website, which the tools on the site, if they have an affiliate program, I'll use an affiliate link. I would say 75% of the tools on the site don't have affiliate links, but if there's affiliate link available, I'm going to use it. I disclose on every page if it's an affiliate link or not. So I generate revenue from that. I've got a featured listing on the website now where various tools can actually pay to essentially boost their tool to the top of the listing for a one week period. So I allow people to do that now. So that sort of essentially covers the costs of running that site. It's not, it's not anything crazy. My main revenue model right now comes through sponsorships. I've got. The other two areas of my business are my weekly newsletter, which recently just passed, I think 135,000 subscribers. So I've got that newsletter and then I've got sponsors that sponsor the newsletter, and then I've got the YouTube channel, and I have sponsors that sponsor the YouTube channel. So it's really largely sponsorship revenue that runs the business. Now, the additional thing that is getting added into the mix as me and a co host were talking about starting a podcast, and I'm actually recording our first episode later today on the day that we're recording this, but we're starting a podcast, and we're going to be interviewing various founders and CEOs and engineers trying to help people better understand how. How this stuff works underneath, try to help people, you know, quell the fears that might be coming up around AI and, you know, talk about the legitimate fears and just sort of have those conversations. But as part of that podcast, we're also starting a fund where we're also looking for tools to invest in. And, you know, investors can invest in our fund, but as part of the podcast, we're going out and finding tools to invest in as well. So that's. That's a piece of it. So over time, the larger business model is going to be this fund that we're running. I'm going to continue doing the sponsorships and then, you know, continually trying to find new ways to add features and make future tools more and more valuable resource to people.

Well, it's a valuable resource to me, for sure. I feel like people give me a lot of credit for being up to date on AI and I'm like, well, here's my secret wolf. Other than the podcast you're doing with this new collaborator, are you doing all this other stuff by yourself? Is it just you?

No, I actually have. Well, I have quite a few team members now. So the Future Tools website, I have two people that help me run that. I've got a webflow developer now who, when I have new ideas for features, he jumps in and implements those features. And then I have somebody that actually is adding the latest tools to the site. So all the tools that I put on the site are all still tools that I came across. So every tool that goes on that site, 100% of them are tools that I've actually looked at the website. I go, okay, this doesn't look shady. It doesn't look scammy. They're, you know, they're not trying to ask for credit card details without telling you what the product is. I still curate every single tool that goes on the site, but the way I do it is I add them to a Google sheet as I come across them, and then I have a team member who actually Runs the automations on the back end to put them into the website. And a lot of what goes on that website is actually using AI the way it works. I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but the way it works is I'll take the URL of the tool, I'll put it inside of Google Sheets. Then there's a little automation that runs in the background that goes and looks at that website and summarizes what the tool does by looking at the website. It's actually using the GPT 3.5 API and it's looking at the website and summarizing it for me. So the summaries on the website are actually generated with AI right now. And then I have a. I have Vishal who is my. The guy that basically runs the site for me now. He goes and double checks AI because every once in a while AI has a tendency to make stuff up, right? If, if I put a tool there and there's no text on the web page, maybe it's just a embedded YouTube video or something like that. Well, AI will just make up what it thinks that tool does. So I still need some human eyes to Double check the AI generated description of the tool. So I have those two team members running the website for me. On the YouTube side, I have an editor who edits about one video a week for me. I still like to do a lot of the editing myself. That's sort of really enjoyable for me. I like getting creative with the editing.

Curiosity. What, I'm just out of curiosity, what editing tool do you use to edit your videos?

So I use DaVinci Resolve. So I record with a tool called Vmix. And Vmix, it's similar to like OBS for recording, but it records multi track, so it'll record my screen and my camera on separate tracks. That way when I go to edit, I can sort of put my camera in different positions and beautiful and stuff like that. So I record with VMix, I edit with DaVinci Resolve. And then I have an editor who edits my Friday news breakdown VM videos for me. So if you look at my YouTube channel, you'll notice sort of two distinct editing styles. Mine's a little bit more toned down, not a whole lot of like cuts and changes and transitions, just sort of very basic. And then I have the Friday News videos where you'll probably notice sound effects and memes and crazy transitions and stuff flying on the screen. That's my editor on those Friday videos taking the news that I record. And then. And then editing it together. And then I also have what I've been calling my creative director. He's somebody that I just recently started working with, who actually helps me with ideas for videos, ideas for titles, ideas for thumbnails. He's actually helping me with, like, scripting some videos as well. He's just sort of somebody that I brought on board to bounce ideas back and forth with me. So I never have that writer's block kind of thing. So that's. That's somebody that I just recently brought on that's really helping me out. And then I have a whole agency team that aren't, you know, necessarily employed by me that run all the sponsorship side of things. So they're going out and any sort of inbound sponsorship requests are actually going directly to them. They're doing any sort of back and forth on negotiating prices on the sponsorships, and they handle all that stuff for me. So it's growing into a bigger and bigger operation. But for the first six months, from the time that one viral video blew up to, you know, six months later, I was doing everything myself. It's only been within the last call it eight weeks that I've actually started bringing in people to help me with it all.

Well, it's probably good that you did, because now you can get some sleep every once in a while.

Exactly.

Thank you for that peek behind the curtain. I appreciate that very much. The nerd in me feels like I've been given water for my thirsty soul. So I appreciate the shares. If we could shift for a moment. The audience for this show and for our podcast and for our list tend to be creatives, writers. We have a lot of copywriters and marketers, of course, but also lots of people with YouTube channels about various different topics. What do you think? What should our approach be as creators to AI? How should we think about. A lot of people are worried this is gonna, like, people are just gonna create a bunch of faceless YouTube channels or even, I think, more scary video that looks like it's a real person, but it's not. Should we be worried? What should we do?

I think, you know, I think that stuff is going to happen. I mean, we're already seeing a lot of the faceless YouTube channels. You know, I don't know how many times I open up a video now, and I can tell it's an AI generated voice throughout the entire thing. And I'm sure they got the script from ChatGPT and then they got a, you know, a voiceover from 11 Labs or one of these AI audio tools and you know, maybe they just put together slides or something like that. So I have been seeing that more and more. I've also started seeing there's a new tool called hey Gen, which is really, really good at sort of deep fake kind of videos where it looks like a real person on screen talking. The voices are fairly realistic and harder to tell. You can still kind of tell that it's, it's. Something's a little off, but it's getting better and better. So I do think that's going to happen. And you know, it is sort of one of my concerns that we are just going to have loads and loads of low quality, low effort content, flood the market. But I also think as that happens, it adds more value to the people that are real. Right? Like the people like you and me who were putting our face on camera. You can actually hear us talk. You know, maybe from time to time we'll actually bump into each other at live events in person. I think more value over time is going to be put on that. You know, there are a lot of AI channels that have popped up since my channels come out, but my channel still seems to do a lot better with the view counts than a lot of these other channels because a lot of these other channels are taking some of the shortcuts. They don't want to put themselves on camera. They, they want to have these AI voiceovers do all the work. And I don't think that that really resonates with audiences as much as a real person. I believe that people for the most part get on YouTube to, you know, connect with creators that, you know, there's a lot of channels that I watch and most of the channels that I watch frequently, I watch them because I connect with that creator. You know, there's the Casey Neistat's of the world, the Marques Brownlee, you know, Pat Flynn, who I think you and I mentioned through email, who's a mutual friend of ours. Those types of people are real people. Those are the channels that I gravitate to. And I don't really see that changing anytime soon. I think it's only going to become more and more important as AI gets more and more mainstream and more and more people start to use AI. So I think, you know, being real is just becoming more and more valuable as AI grows in popularity.

Yeah, I agree. And I think also those of us who are okay with letting our personality come through in our content and I, I'm a big believer in just being your weird, quirky self. And so I, I do believe in data driven business. So I like to look at what's happening with my analytics and what kinds of videos are working and what kinds are not. But ultimately I'm making the videos I make for me first.

Right.

And then for my audience. And I think that's the proper order.

Right. I agree.

I feel like from your content you're really enthusiastic and fascinated by this stuff and that's what draws me to watching your videos.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it has been a little bit of a sort of back and forth mental game with me, if I'm being totally honest. Right. I have on YouTube tried to make videos that I think will do well for the algorithm or videos that I think, oh, this is one that I don't really feel like making, but I think the audience will like it. And almost every single time I try to do it for the audience or do it for the algorithm, those videos almost always underperform the videos where I'm just, here's something cool I found today and I want to show it to you. You know, so I've, I've had to, it has been a little bit of a mind trip to sort of get my head going with. Just keep doing the stuff that excites you and talking about the stuff you're having fun with because that's what people are coming for. And whenever I start to stray and try to like feed the numbers, I never seem to get the results that I want to get with it.

Yeah, I've had the same experience. So I keep telling myself I'm done playing that game. I'm just going to make the videos that seem interesting, like a cool idea to me. But every once in a while I get suckered in by, well, I just look at the research, I can figure out the keywords and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

Things work out for me the right way.

Yeah. It's always just going to be a constant course correction. Right. Like I'm sure I've always get a little off course and then course correct. And that's just kind of how I always see it.

Yeah, same. I think that the people who are creating these large scale spammy operations where they, they have like a dozen or three dozen YouTube channels or I saw one guy who's published a hundred books in the last 30 days and I'm like, well, okay, AI helps us get speed to create things. Yes. But if you're just going to do that kind of stuff, I feel like you're, you're, I'VE I think I've coined a term, speedy ocrity.

I like it.

How to be mediocre at scale really fast. And I don't think that's going to work for people long term. I feel like what you said is true. The more value we can provide, the more real we can be, the more like you. Approaching this as an enthusiastic observer of the space is compelling. And it's because you're a human being that we like. I think that's, that's the key. And it doesn't mean you have to be like George Clooney. Just be yourself. There are people who like you just for you, right?

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to think so, but yeah, no, I totally agree. And you know, when it comes to things like Kindle books, I think, you know, the general public isn't stupid. Right. I think the people that are doing that aren't giving enough credit to normal people. And I think over time that's not going to be a sustainable model. In fact, Amazon just made new rules about how you have to disclose whether or not any content you put on Kindle was generated by AI. So that in the listing it's going to tell you it was AI generated now. And if you sort of try to bypass that or get around that, you know you're going to get the slap from Amazon. So I think over time, trying to find these shortcuts is never the answer. Right. You know, when it comes to like SEO, people constantly tried to find shortcuts and then we had, you know, penguin and you know, various animal slaps where now all of a sudden the people that spent all this time and all this money on trying to do these quick hacks for SEO, it didn't work for them anymore. Well, I feel the same way about YouTube content that's low effort and Kindle content that's low effort. It might work right now, but it's a very short strike. Very short sighted strategy.

Yeah, for sure, 100%. So just make good stuff that helps people. And I'm excited because I'm a copywriter and I write not only for clients, but I'm writing some fiction as well. I'm using AI to help me in those endeavors. I look at it as a tool. I'm not worried it's going to replace me. I feel like it enhances me.

Right. I feel the same way. Yep.

So that's, that's where I would urge people to focus on.

Yeah, I think, I think AI is a great co pilot. Right. If, if you're trying to, you know, I, I do a weekly newsletter right now. I use a help me. The way I typically do it is I write down all of my thoughts that I want to share in the, in the newsletter for that week and then I actually take my write up of everything I've got for the newsletter. And lately I've been using Claude a little bit more than ChatGPT just because you can actually paste longer content into it.

Love Claude for that reason.

Yeah. And so I've been posting it into Claude and then saying, can you double check this for me for readability, grammar and spelling? And it will actually go and find any of the little grammar quirks and also say maybe if you reworded this sentence it might read a little bit better. So it's all the thoughts from my head. It's all still, here's what I think about what's going on this week, but it's just cleaned up a little bit by AI.

Right, right, exactly. So let's, let's do, let's do that. Let's run through what are the tools that you use like every week that are crucial to you running your business.

Sure, yeah. So I might forget some, but off the top of my head, Feedly Leo is one that I really, really love. So Feedly is like an old school RSS feed reader where you can go and find different blogs, plug in the RSS feed to into Feedly and whenever a new post comes up, it'll show it to you inside of Feedly. But they recently added an AI element which is kind of, it's almost like a twist on Google Alerts sort of thing, but using AI. So I can go in there now and I can tell it. I want you to find articles and news for me about this specific topic. For me, I have it looking for AI, generative art, machine learning, neural networks. I have a handful of keywords that whenever it finds an article, it brings it to my attention and it just searches the whole web for it. So it'll surface blog posts and websites that I would never normally read and it'll bring them to the surface. And if it starts bringing up stuff that you don't find relevant, you kind of train it over time. You say, I like this article, I want to see more of this. I don't like this article, I want to see less of this. And so over time, this feed reader, like Google Alerts goes out and just searches the web for these topics. But then you sort of train it so it narrows in on exactly the type of content that you're looking for. So when people ask me, how do I stay so in the loop with like the AI news and the latest AI tools? That's the secret. I'm using Feedly. It's going out there and bringing all the latest stuff to me, and I'm just checking in on it every single day. So that's Feedly Leo. I use Midjourney constantly. You know, my, my YouTube channel, I get a lot of people saying they like my YouTube thumbnails. I usually use Mid Journey to make the thumbnails. And then I'll take the image that I made in Mid journey and I will pull it into stable diffusion, and in stable diffusion, I'll train my own face into it. And you know, when I was on the Social Media examiner podcast, we actually walked through that process on that, that podcast episode of how I start with a Mid Journey image, train my face into the image, and that becomes the YouTube thumbnails. So I use those two tools quite a bit. I use it a little bit less these days, but I do use it from time to time. I actually made a video where I made a complete video game using Chat GPT where it wrote all the code for me. And I went back and forth with Chat GPT so it wrote the code for me. I may, I've used it to write like video scripts for me. Not like my YouTube scripts, but to make like a short film kind of script. I've had it help me with that kind of stuff. I've used it to create like a prompt generator. So I can say here's five or six prompts that I really, really like that I generated in Mid Journey. Make more prompts like this and, you know, getting the context of the prompts. That worked well. It gives me even more prompts. So I've used it for that. I use anthropics Claude a lot now for a lot of summarizing long articles, you know, pulling a PDF in and, and then saying, you know, give me the main bullet points of this PDF. Or maybe there's a new AI research paper that came out and I'll try to skim the paper and it's just over my head. I have no idea the terms they're using. It just confusing me. So I pull that paper into Claude and say, explain this like I'm five and it gives me the, you know, the high level overview of how that research works. So I'll use, I'll use Claude for that. Those are really the main ones that come to mind that I'M I'm using every single day. But I'm, I'm sure there's some that are slipping my mind because I'm, I'm using a lot of them.

Well, you got a, you got an exhaustive list at FutureTools IO. People can check in. But I love the fact that you're using the technology as well as reporting on it. I use it as well. And I think as there are so many things that right now it's unique that AI is doing we've never seen before. But I've also noticed it's becoming more and more of a feature inside other apps like Canva is a great example. They've integrated AI and I know lots of companies have notion and different, different tools are available with AI functionality. But.

Right.

It's gonna, I think it's gonna become more and more a feature.

Yeah, I agree.

That's where the big change I think is gonna come as people, more and more people are using it. Like the thumbnail thing. I did, I did the, follow the tutorial that you published on your channel and made pictures of me for thumbnails. I also found a quick hack using, I'm embarrassed to say, I have this app, facetune. They have a. Where you can buy a bundle of AI avatars of your face now. And if you, if you have an Apple, you have a Mac, you're in that, that ecosystem. Ecosystem. You can separate your actual photograph out from the background. I can pop out on top of an AI background. So it's kind of a workaround.

Yeah, yeah.

Somebody who's less. I did it the hard way, so I figured I earned myself the privilege of doing it the easy way.

Yeah, I think you're going to see a lot more of that too. I think, you know, the, the hard way. Basically there's apps that are just trying to make it not the hard way. Right. I think a lot of these AI tools, the very, very early ones, like the Stable Diffusions and the Dream Boost where you can train your own face, these are the ones that really only the real, you know, techie nerd type people are going to attempt. But the people that are developing that stuff, their goal isn't to make something that's hard for people to use. Right. That's, that's essentially the plumbing underneath. They want to make that faucet that anybody just turns the handle and it comes out. Right. But people like me, I like to get in at the plumbing stage, learn how it's working, and then eventually somebody is going to come and make that faucet and make it easy for everybod.

Yeah, well, thanks for your help because I've been able to dig in and do some of that and impress the heck out of my team. Of course now they're going to know my secret is you. But it's been fun while it lasted. So what do you think about the future? There's a lot of concern in different camps about AI and what it means and replacing people's jobs and other scenarios. What's your thoughts on all that?

Yeah, I mean, I. So I tend to lean a little bit more. Tech optimist, right. I like to be optimistic about stuff. I think it's, you know, just beneficial for my own mental health to lean more towards optimism than pessimism. But I do think there are some things to be genuinely concerned about Now. Am I really concerned about the sort of Terminator Skynet robots rising up and, you know, taking over the world? Not so much. That's not something that I really have a lot of fears around. I think more where my personal fears lie around AI is that this stuff is getting so good at replicating our voices, making images that are practically indistinguishable from actual photographs. It's getting better and better at making video where people are actually fooled by like deep fake people talking on camera. So the sort of potential for the fake news, the deep fake videos, the images that people can't tell are whether they're real or AI generated. You know, there's already been scams going around where somebody would call up somebody else's parents and then use one of these AI voice tools trained on somebody's voice and trick the parents into sending money because they think they're sending it to their, you know, their child, as opposed to some hacker that managed to train on this person's voice. And you know, as somebody who puts a lot of content out into the world, you know, people like us who our voices are all over the place, our faces are all over the place. Yeah, it's actually even slightly more concerning for people like. Like us. So that's where my concerns lie a little bit is, is that sort of how do we tell the difference between what's real and what's not? You know, what whether or not people really said something, whether video evidence is legit evidence anymore or photographic evidence is legit evidence anymore. That's more where my fear lies is, is the potential chaos that all of that could create. Especially as these tools it easier and easier to use. And you know, more people make them More accessible with easier user interfaces. That kind of stuff gets easier and easier, but it also gets easier to do at scale as well. Right. It gets easier and easier for bots to be created that call up 50 different numbers and pretend to be somebody's voice and try to get money. And if just one out of the 50 is fooled, then somebody gets scammed and the scammer gets money. So that's more where my fears lie. In it is that chaos that can happen. But overall, I tend to be optimistic. I think when it comes to jobs and AI taking jobs, I have less concerns about that. I sort of believe in the human race. I believe that we're resourceful people and we'll find new ways to bring value to the world. And right now, I do think there's a lot of jobs that it can take, but I also think that there still needs to be human oversight on a lot of it. Right. I think it's going to become really, really good at diagnosing ailments. There was a news story that came out in the past week of this boy who had chronic pain for three years straight, and he saw 17 different doctors and they couldn't diagnose it. Couldn't diagnose it. This lady went and put the symptoms of her son into, I think, chatgpt and, or one of the chatbots that are out. I think it was ChatGPT and ChatGPT actually diagnosed it. They took this diagnosis to another doctor and that doctor confirmed the diagnosis and they managed to actually get this, the child fixed. Right. So I think there's a lot of really, really good things that are going to come out of AI like that. But I still think we're going to want that human oversight. I don't think people are just going to go, okay, the computer told me, this is what I have. So now I'm going to go start taking this drug to fix it. I think people are still going to want that confirmation from a human doctor. Right. When it comes to legal stuff, there's a whole field of paralegals who their whole job is to sift through documents and find precedent for the cases that they're working on that could be handled in moments. With AI, that job, it's not quite necessary anymore, but I still think we're going to need lawyers to argue on behalf of things in court. Right. So I think AI is going to help humans assist with a lot of stuff, and it's going to be overall a net positive. But there is some potential chaos that could happen. But I think humans are going to be resourceful. I think humans are going to find new ways to add value. I think humans are going to find ways to leverage AI to make them more efficient at their jobs and better at their jobs. And then the jobs like let's say coal miners or a lot of the blue collar labor that's just can get taken over by robotics. I would argue that we're better off for it in the future if a lot of the hard manual labor is taken over by robots. Right. The car manufacturing industry is already 90% handled by robots. I think we're going to see a lot of that with a lot of manufacturing and a lot of hard labor. And I think humans are better off for it overall.

Agreed. 100% agreed. So I think the best thing we can do is stay informed and stay aware of what's happening in these different fields that AI is, which is all fields. You're going to see it everywhere if you're not already seeing it everywhere. So I recommend you do that by going to FutureTools IO and subscribing and going to Matt Wolf's YouTube channel. We're going to link to all these things here in the show Notes. Wherever you're watching this video, we'll have the links underneath it. So you can go do that. And then on Twitter you're Mr. E. Flo.

Yep. Mr. Eflow. It's just so my first two initials of my name are Matt R. And then my last name is Wolf. E. Flo is just wolf backwards. So Mr. E. Flo.

Clever. So, Matt, thank you again. I know you've become suddenly a very busy guy and I love what you're doing and I want you to continue and I want people to support you. So we're going to send them to sign up, subscribe to your channel, watch your videos and look for your new podcast. Let us know about that. We'll promote that to our folks because that sounds fascinating. I can't wait to listen.

Very cool. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. This was. This was fun. I mean, this went by super quick. I love, I love having conversations like this and some of the favorite busyness that I get to do is have conversations like this. So happy to do it.

I love this too. Is there any other place people can get in touch with you or you'd like them to know about your online presence?

Or really just futuretools IO is the main place. If you're looking for my YouTube channel, I link to it from there. If you're looking for my Twitter X account. I link from it, link from there. So it all kind of stems from future tools these days, so better to just give the one link and you can find all the rest from there.

Love it. All right, well hopefully we'll get you back someday in the near future because I have a feeling things are going to keep changing for a while.

Absolutely no doubt in my mind.

I love that. Thanks again.

Yeah, thank you. For show notes, links, a complete transcript, and the video version of this episode, visit rayedwards.com635.