Brainrot is the future!

Hey, it's all about brain rot videos and how brain rot can actually be used to create a very powerful marketing engine. And today we have an expert with us, Ray. I, I don't want to say expert, but you are an expert at everything. So I thought for this exciting topic, I need Ray, because if you know computers, you know brain rot.

You certainly run into it before, right? This is like the classic video where, you know, somebody is talking about something and usually like they, they have some sort of background video that's— can be like video game playing or somebody doing some sort of repetitive activity. Any ideas?

Stitching or some random stuff. Yep.

And like disconnecting your— the way you look from the way that you hear, which I find to be just really interesting as an engagement technique and also as an educational technique, because if I can by disconnecting the one, maybe increase receptivity in the other. And the— and like I've seen brain rot education as being a really cool thing. And you've been experimenting with that quite a bit just for—

I saw recently I did it yesterday because I saw and I saw I was on my For You feed on YouTube Shorts and there was a channel called AWS Peter. I was looking up how to do AWS for facial recognition and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. I have a facial recognition pipeline. I was just looking up because they migrated some stuff, some APIs are new. So I was looking into how to set up new facial recognition pipelines with AWS. There are just some videos and I found there is something called AWS Peter, which is Peter Griffin from Family Guy explaining you how to set up stuff in AWS. And I thought that was hilarious.

That's Funny. Is it— it's all in shorts, or they— it's all in shorts.

It's like AWS in 2 minutes.

Okay.

And they have like diagrams, and like, it's, it's really funny. And I was like, my God, we need like a No-Code Peter. And I did a few videos, and I posted one video. I— the guy who runs AWS Peter, of course, has a Vibe-coded application. We want to shout him out, or guy or girl. I don't want to assume something here. But he of course has a Vibe-coded application. It's brainrot.mov. It looks like it was made in like with whatever API, whatever AI tool using Claude. It has like this, whenever you see purple gradients, you know it's Vibe-coded. But he built that and it's really cool. Like I built an app with the free credits, I built one video in it, immediately 1,000 views in like 10 minutes. And I was like, this is great. I posted another one and it got like 3,700 views in like less than a day. And it like, it got the first 3,000 like within 1 hour. I don't know. And it was educational. Technically it was an advertisement for DeskJet, but it was educational advertisement. So looking at that, is this a trend that's coming back? Because I don't necessarily know of technology being interesting. Of course, there's technology. Apple did a new iPhone and people watch that for leisure. But I don't think people watch the stuff we talk about for leisure. They're like, I'm done with work fighting with my APIs and having to deal with all those headaches of troubles and workflows breaking. Let's sit on the sofa and let's watch some more stuff about the stuff that's making me headaches. I don't necessarily think that was a thing before.

The question is like, how can we bring education to entertainment? How can we be able to bring some of the good stuff? Then also with the new modalities we have here. This is something I've been doing a lot actually with my children. I'm a father of two boys, they're 11 years old, twins., and, you know, trying to figure out like how to be giving them screen time that will be both enjoyable and fun for them, right, while simultaneously moving them forward with the kinds of, you know, skills and thinking patterns that I would, you know, wish for them. So, you know, we don't necessarily— I'm not giving them access like to just sort of, you know, raw YouTube, um, or giving them access to, you know, other sort of, you know, a brain ruddy type stuff, if you will, but like looking for things that they want their screen time But if they're gonna have the screen time, I want to also engage their brain, right? Like I want them to have delicious food that is also nourishing. Yes.

Right?

Not just go eat your vegetables the way I think you're supposed to eat your vegetables, but how do we help you want to eat your vegetables? Because vegetables make you healthier, but like how do you make that into something that's gonna be a great experience? And a good cook can do that. But the good cook knows about the materials they're using, knows about their ingredients. And the ingredients we have when we're like doing the video, you know, portrait video on your phone are not the same having a tablet, or not the same as what you do with TV, right? Or it is also not the same as what you'd have on like a desktop. Like we're doing this right now, I think we're both on our laptops right now. And that difference in medium then drives what we need to do, I think, with the message. And that's why I think what you're doing here with Brainwrap stuff is so interesting, because this is where like if you're going to have like these easily flippable, you know, highly engaging, certainly very addictive, you know, little short videos. How can we, you know, give people that which they want, which is the, um, you know, their brains operating at that level, while simultaneously elevating them? And that's like, that's an opportunity. And I'm sure there are lots of people who are just going to go for the candy no matter what, but if we can be giving something that's both, you know, delicious but also nourishing, I think that's— there, there, there's real juice there.

And then Yeah, but I think there's a point to be made if we look at the economy right now that is happening on those social media platforms. If you look at the applications who are making the most money on the App Store right now, they are either brain rot or using brain rot for advertisement. My favorite example of all are those short drama apps. It costs $20,000 to $30,000 to produce, somewhere $100,000 if they're high quality, but on average it's like $30,000 to produce a 1-hour-long movie. Those drama movies, and they— an average movie pulls in about $300,000 in subscription revenue. Okay. And they have high profit margins, and it's really badly made, but it works because the way they build— I don't know if you know those applications, if you see them also on your— probably they're just targeting Gen Z. Um, but every time I go on TikTok, I'm like getting all those random drama Sirius on my phone and I ended up subscribing to one of those services because they filmed the movie in the house I used to live in. I was like, okay, I got to subscribe to that now. I was like, I know that sink, I know the kitchen, I know the bedroom.

That's kind of wild.

I thought that was wild too. Yeah. Because it turns out some of my neighbors who used to do e-commerce, they kind of like moved into now doing those drama series because there are no tariffs on them, and they just had to, you know, invest in other ventures. Yeah, they were doing e-commerce before, but I thought that was hilarious, and I just subscribed and I was like, this is interesting. They just create those, those movies, but like, you know, like in a movie there is always a peak at some point where it gets really interesting Mm-hmm. Right. And a good movie has like 1 or 2 of those peak moments. They, their goal is to have in 1 hour as many of those peak moments as possible. And then it's like every movie, it's like a 2-minute segment that you can scroll to, to the next one. And it costs money to unlock the next segment, the next scroll. So you're paying with coins. Oh my goodness, I spent like $200 on that. Um, I was really curious. I wanted to see the movie they filmed in my house. And, and I, the moment I was done, I think I just, I, I was done spending another coin, so I just like purchased like, I don't know, it was like $100 a month subscription to watch. People pay for that. They're making like $300 million or so on the App Store with those ads. With those applications. And what they do is they know people have short attention spans, and when you have lots of peaks in those advertisements in the content that you're watching, people could keep watching. And when you then stop at every episode, because every episode has a peak, you want to go to the next one. And I thought, that's very interesting. How can we do this for our videos? Because compared to what they're doing, the stuff that we're doing seems pretty boring.

Yeah, there's an aspect of, you know, what's making people eat their vegetables. And there's, you know, uh, I think bringing it to shorts definitely makes it a little more candy-ish, right? So a little more delicious. Uh, and I certainly find that like I get a lot of, um, you know, a lot more views on the shorts. Like, which could, you know, I've got shorts are coming out every day now. I've got shorts both from the chairlift as well as like clips from, from our, our thing here. Um, and then You know, but, but even so, that's like what I— on, on a per-video basis is like, you know, 1/10 of what you're showing here on this. Um, uh, and it sort of shows just how much juice there can be and like just sort of taking, taking the tastiness up another level.

I thought about— I mean, I'm experimenting with the Peter thing. I'm experimenting now with a few other things as well. I, I'm trying to copy the success of those short drama apps, and because their advertisements are like the teasers of the movie, so they don't have to create advertisement, they just take a part of the movie, put it in there, run an ad. I was like, this is interesting. I'm trying to kind of like create some dramatic scenes to start a movie as a hook, like with VO3. So I'm trying to clone myself so it kind of like looks like me and VO3 in a scene, like, I don't know, the apocalypse is coming, we need to act now. And then this is the VO 3 video and then it does a cut and it says, yes, this can happen when you don't protect your APIs correctly. It's a concept. You got to draw it. You need it. I need to show it to you. I got to experiment more because right now I have like 5 fingers. I know I have like 7 fingers and like 3 eyes and it just doesn't look that good, me as an AI character yet. But I'm experimenting with it and I'm trying to automate it. Then I'm trying to get that as a hook because people, you know, we need to make it more interesting. And, uh, I think AI is a great way how we can get more engagement, uh, into our content, especially when we're doing Shorts.

Yeah, well, I think also, I mean, you, you and I have done a lot of work around like, you know, low-code, no-code tools.

Cameron said, I'm here for the brain rot.

Yeah, I hear that. Uh, and like, it's just, it's about the medium, right? Like something that I often tell people like in state change, do it wrong. It's okay to do it wrong because that means we're doing it and we're making progress in a way that you weren't before. And I think there's a lot of, it's very easy to get into a judgment circle or judgment, you know, sort of vicious cycle, right? And like, oh, I'm not going to ship it because I'm not sure I'm doing it quite the right way. And I don't want to be showing the world I'm making mistakes, but like, you know, then you can, but by doing things in sort of weird new ways, we get to unlock potentially really useful ways we can improve the world. You've taught a few thousand people who are potentially not people who would have otherwise known about Nordcraft and React.

Peter Griffin and Stewie were also making a video yesterday on my YouTube channel about Nordcraft versus React.

Yeah. I don't know what the legal implications are for it.

Because it's definitely a good point. Uh, I think it's fair use if you put it together. If not, you know, I'll be definitely filming any, um, people trying to serve me a lawsuit here and make content out of it.

Yeah, but, but even so, like, I've been doing—

I think we're just too small to get a lawsuit.

That, that's also, I think, reasonable point. Um, and but the— for me, it's like, okay, what is it about Subway Surfer or the, uh, what's the other thing in there? It's usually like Subway Surfer and, uh, Minecraft, right? Yeah. What is that makes them attractive and the procedural generation is really part of that. I've been doing some work around 3JS with my hackathon partner to create those backgrounds or create the ability to go between backgrounds.

That would be great. You can make a video editor just for Brainrot. Think CapCut but only for Brainrot. The appropriate templates where you can upload a link to a long YouTube video like we're doing here, and it automatically creates Brainrot clips, like Brainrot on demand or Brainrot AI, something like that.

Right. And the other aspect we're bringing to it, and this is the— we solved one part of it relatively well, and since the background video we're having trouble with because the Subway Surfer legal problems, right? And like, sure, you can throw up Subway Surfer, but like the, um, but the— what we want to do is have it be procedurally generated so it can be owned. And not have the copyrighted music.

I don't necessarily think that there is a trademark implication when you use the Subway Surfer because there are people monetizing, there are streamers on YouTube who are just filming themselves play Subway Surfer and they're commenting that and they're monetized.

Well, yeah, but then what you're really doing is that's them recording themselves, right? As opposed to these other videos which are pretty clearly using the addictive quality of Subway Surfer, right, to hypnotize hypnotize at least the visuals of the individual to get them to listen to the other. But actually, they've made some pretty compelling videos this way. Like I said, I'm trying to get the 3G and using Three.js to procedurally generate 3D scenes, which has gotten much better using GitMCP.

How would you create this as a video? Because Three.js is like something you run client-side, right?

Yes, but you can run it on the Node side and run one frame at a time and extract the frames into the video that then goes into FFmpeg.

Now we're talking about something that will kill my Xano instance.

Well, that's not something you can do in a Xano instance. You need something that's got more horsepower than that. Google Cloud Run it is. GCR, yeah. GCR is great for this job. In fact, I do actually quite a lot of video processing for the state change office hours and all those things. All that processing stuff I do through GCR provides lots of horsepower for it and super, super cheap. Um, the, um, but, but we, but because, you know, have that all going already, like, hey, just use that, use FFmpeg, and then be able to start put these things together. It's a bit of tech. I don't mean to confuse it like being super, super low code, but it's not that much code, and the AI does help out with it. And then the other half is like, okay, so what are we going to teach? And instead of writing the script myself, I'm taking things like, um, computer science papers from Archive right, and saying, okay, here's a computer science paper from Archive, a PDF, and let's break it down. Let's figure out 5 big ideas in it. And then for each of those ideas, let's make a 1-minute— actually, make it more like a 2-minute BrainRot, um, or 2-minute, um, you know, subject to a couple of rules, engaging, um, a description, right, of the big idea. And then play that back. One of the keys to it is play it back at 1.5 speed. And then gets into about a minute. And then combine that with the background, have the text going across, and you've got yourself a Brain Rock combination. Now it's not Stewie and Peter, right? Because we're trying to use a voice— because one of my concerns is sort of making sure I don't hit like the copyright issues, because I want it to be able to be successful without having that challenge. But that combination is allowing us to take, you know, really complicated ideas like, you know, papers are being, you know, academic papers and preprints, characters With AI. But I actually also really loved your approach to doing the conversation because right now we're just doing it as a monologue, and the idea of like having it be a back and forth, I love that idea and getting it to write that script.

You want us to show the video I made yesterday at the risk of getting demonetized because we're using copyrighted characters?

I think it's fine. Yeah, let's show the video, but also I would love it if you could show your approach to writing the script.

Sure. I mean, I just had Chewy T to write the script, but—

Well, also there's a lesson in there. So yeah, let's start by showing the video. Hey, Stewie, you're going to laugh at this. I just paid—

Try that again.

Hey, Stewie, you're going to laugh at this. I just paid $500,000 for a mobile app. Some guy told me he built it in Capacitor.

Oh, good Lord, Peter. Capacitor is just a framework that lets you build mobile apps using web tech. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then wrap them so they run on iOS and Android.

Wait, so that's like not fancy?

No, Peter, it's not fancy. It's meant to be cost-effective. You can absolutely build solid apps with it, but not for half a million dollars.

Oh my God, so I got ripped off?

Quite. If you wanted something faster and cheaper, you could've even used a low-code platform like Testspire Native. Those exist specifically to make building apps cheaper, not to drain your bank account.

So I could have paid like a couple grand?

Precisely. These frameworks are designed to save you money, Peter, not give some bloke a new yacht.

Oh, crap.

You can see it's hidden advertisement. But it did work well. It got like 4,000 views.

That's— yeah, I actually— I like it as an ad, although the fact that it creates its own sort of challenges. But would you mind sharing the approach you took to writing the script because that script as a dialogue, I thought had some nice touch to it and I think other people might value seeing how that works.

Sure. Let me share with you this amazing web application that I'm using. Oh my God, I may not be able to do that because I'm using Dia and I have not given Dia permission to use my computer. Let me do a screenshot and I'll be talking very visually. Let me just—

Again, I'm using— What's the ChatGPT app for too, sir? Because you're in India, so that you can't do more with the outright. Yeah.

Let's go back here. Let's add a media element. Media will be coming. You'll see that, that's how the interface looks of Brain Rot MOB. Let's see if I can customize that here. Look at that, I can even make it— that's nice. It's already built to be a mountain lock in that interface. I mean, he obviously vibe-coded that, you can see that on the interface. I think it's great application, great job, congratulations, because I'm paying for it now. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, I probably could have built this myself in a day, but you know, why spend a day if I can pay $50 to not spend a day, you know?

And now we're getting to the— yeah, the, the build-by dynamics. That's cool. Okay, so, so this— so do you have to sort of paste these things in one at a time, or you sort of paste in like a full script, or how'd that work?

You got to add one by one because it's web coded. The person who built that didn't think of having the whole thing AI generated. I got to work within some limitation constraints here. But I just go to ChatGPT and say, hey, here's the topic, make it look like an authentic conversation between Stewie and Peter. If you may ask yourself why I choose Stewie and Peter, it's just because it's the only option that the application So, you know, if I'm getting a lawsuit for trademark violations, I'll be forwarding that to brainrot.mov. But please don't sue me. Um, but, uh, you know, I'm just pasting those in there, and then I'll just click play, and they're probably running that in GCR. As well. And then I get the video like this.

Hey, Stewie, you're going to laugh at this.

And that's BrainRot, professional BrainRot for educational purposes only.

And I love the use of it for education. That's sort of, you know, that's something you and I both do, right? All the time.

To be fair, I saw the original on X. You know, my X feed is wild, so that I saw, like a conversation of Stewie and Peter where they talked about printers and how the government is spying on people using printers and that there is a hidden agenda behind it. But the person who made that video was way better than I did because he actually made their lips move and he made it look like it's a real scene. So like, I mean, there's probably more being of a copyright violation than what I'm doing, but Yeah, uh, and, and bigger, but I, I think even just the level you have—

in fact, I really like the simplicity of it because, uh, yeah, I kind of wonder if it worked even well like not showing Stewie and Peter, right? Just having the voices and having the memory connection without having the, you know, Fox, uh, Corporation come after you. I mean, I think they'll probably come after me for the voices as well, but Yeah, I think figuring, figuring out how to do this well, I think there, there's a lot in there because the, you know, that, that 60-second time frame associated with like YouTube Short or TikTok or whatever, there's just a wonderful opportunity to, you know, to teach and, and, and, and, and to come out not so much dumber, which is very possible after spending a little bit of time on Shorts, uh, but maybe, maybe hopefully a little bit smarter. Yes.

I mean, the majority of my shorts are like yours.

Okay, that was a— I mean, the worst of my videos are like yours, Ray. No, but I, I hear what you're saying. Like, to, you know, to talk to the camera, you know, about your idea has a certain eat your vegetables aspect to it. And like, but getting creative about this stuff, I think, is there— that, that there's some real cool stuff in there.

My TikTok is so completely different, and that is— I don't know, I have no influence over that algorithm. Um, yeah, it's the majority, um, the majority of my TikTok are advertisements for those drama apps, and I, I'm, I'm so brainwashed by them I'm actually considering making my own. I'm already talking about licensing those movies. Yeah, well, I need some help. Remember when I was like, Ray, I need help with HLSG? It'll be a great Despia case study. We just need to get some good deals on the negotiations for those licenses.

Yeah, the, um, you know, the sort of, you know, this widens the universe, right? Like, how, how can we be, uh, one, educating, but two, also spreading the word, right, in a way today, in a way that we couldn't before?

I've been talking to sales Yeah, I'm thinking about building an application that's like my feed. Yeah, so where you can put in topics that are interesting for you. And it's actually why I built this and kind of like started goofing around with it, because first of all, we're going to launch a native video player inside of Despia for mobile applications. So I need stuff to show it off, because the biggest limitation of Despia definitely was video playback. That really sucked. But because, you know, I'm working on building a drama and all that kind of stuff. We needed good video support for myself because last time I mentioned already, all major decisions for Despi are because of what I need, not necessarily because of what customers need, even though of course we listen to them. But, uh, you know, it's because what I need, because I'm my biggest user, uh, and I need good video playback. So we already have that feature built in where it actually has very great video playback, almost like native. This is why I was like, I need to build a TikTok component that I can use for my application anyway. Why don't make a video and make something that people can download from the App Store to test it out and convince how great Despia actually works in those use cases. The app is something that I want to be where you put in some interests that interest you and it starts building a feed where you get videos. It's like TikTok but only for you. And it's AI-generated. I stole that idea from Elon Musk because he said he's wanted to bring Vine back and he's making all AI-generated with Grok. And I was like, that's a great idea, let me do that too.

Right. And then, and then to what end? Like, what, what, what, what are you sort of looking at being able to, to teach?

I just need something that looks good on the App Store, that is a great case study for Despia to show that you can build good video playback in it. Fair enough. It probably involves something else because I think it's a pretty cool idea having personalized videos. Let's say you want to learn about something, why don't have an application where you put the topic you want to learn about and you learn through BrainRot?

And then have it create the brain rot for you.

Yeah, it would like— AI would like generate a few videos every day for that topic so you can just scroll through it and learn as you're scrolling. So it's like personalized content. I think this is really where the market is going because if you think about it, um, you, you're using Suno, you love Suno. And this is AI for one, like the content that you're generating in Suno, your country songs about no-code, not necessarily my taste, even though I love the messaging, but it's not really my taste. So you're developing that, you're building, you're creating that content for yourself because it's something that you enjoy. I was like, we should do that for videos. You should have a personalized video feed with AI content only for you that is just like your taste.

I think there's really something to that. Like, the, um, the— I mean, AI can create both content as well as code, as opposed to low-code, which is creating code. And, uh, that idea of the market of one, I think, is really, really important, uh, to get a lot of value out of. Because the reason why we talk about AI slop is because it's designed for engagement and to appeal to a broad base of people. But if it's just targeting you That's, you know, higher. It can be AI-generated and high quality through doing what the AI can do that no human could afford to do, which is make content that's just specifically for you. Because if it's a human being making it, I have to make it for enough people that they will actually be able to pay me my time.

Yeah, and Cameron said there is a huge wave of using Brainword for educational purposes. I'm a consumer.

Yep, me too.

There you go. So I mean, I think it's— the messaging is definitely changing because when we used to talk about educational things, they used to be serious. But now with everything getting less and less serious, you know, I think this is the way to go, how to educate. So I don't know if my videos will still be relevant in a few years where everybody is just learning from BrainRot on TikTok, but we'll see. We'll be riding the wave.

We, we will be. And I think it's also a really good point that like it— for your videos to be successful, you don't need them to be continuing to add value in 20 years, right? Your, your, your, your payback period is much, much shorter, both because the form factor, but also because we get to use AI for, for, for doing this. Even more, it's like, wait, but the video that was made for Cameron, the guy who just did the comment, and the video that was made specifically for him won't be useful for you in 5 years, but might be still useful for him because of that level of customization.

Yeah. I found when I'm trying to learn about a complex topic, I'm just going on ChatGPT voice mode and talk to it. It's just way easier than reading something, just having that conversation. And something I say, you know, explain this to me in a conversation of this person talking to me. And I'm like, why don't— like, this in video with some visuals would be great, right? And then maybe turn— we can turn database indexing into a 30-minute short drama TV vertical show that you can scroll through and pay per episode.

I sure do think what that 30-minute TV show looks like, but, but yeah, no, I could totally see that happening.

It's essentially like a 30-minute movie in 30 segments.

It's, yep, interesting. And of course, you design your age on TikTok, change it like to 25 or something, and you'll see all the ads I just need to become a Zer. Okay, I'm a couple adrift from Z. Uh, that's, that's cool. Uh, there's, there's just a lot of potential in here. And the, um, and I think it, it is like the low-code stuff and like the AI code stuff because there are a bunch of people who will say, but wait, that's not the way that it's done. But the way that's done is about context. I think the question is, how can you make things happen that couldn't have happened before?

I think we should ask ChatGPT in voice mode right now about the legality of the Peter stuff I'm doing.

Sure, if you want to go for that.

ChatGPT, I'm making brain rot content on YouTube for educational purposes. I'm featuring the voices of Peter Griffin and Stewie Griffin with their images to make videos about educating people on how APIs work and how web development works. It's an original piece that is edited and it features the background of Subway Surfers, like a game recording. Will I get in legal troubles for that? I'm in the state of California.

So basically mixing a bunch of different elements together, like the voices of Peter and Stewie Griffin, a little Subway Surfers footage in the background, and then you do an educational concept on top of that. It's kind of a fun mashup. Now, in terms of legal stuff, generally when you're using recognizable characters and voices like Peter and Stewie, you have to be a little bit careful because those are copyrighted characters and they're owned by the creators of Family Guy. And similarly, Subway Surfers is a game, so that footage is also technically someone else's content. In a lot of cases, people rely on fair use, especially if it's transformative, like you're adding a lot of educational commentary and you're making something new out of it. But fair use is always a bit of a gray area, and it can depend on the specifics. So short version, it's possible you could get a claim, like a copyright claim on YouTube, or maybe a Content ID match. It's not necessarily that you're going to get into legal trouble, but you might want to just be prepared that you could have some kind of copyright issue. Maybe have a backup plan or just kind of be aware of that as you go. But A lot of people do this kind of thing and just navigate it as it comes.

And that— my lawyer just spoke.

That was, that was a really lucid, uh, good explanation. I don't know if the conclusion is right, but it is— that was, that was, that was remarkable, uh, and a great demonstration of voice mode in, um, in ChatGPT.

Imagine I could watch now a BrainRot video. With Peter and Stewie that is customized in my mobile application explaining me why this is what I'm doing is illegal or why it is technically on a gray area.

I think that that constitutes asking for trouble, but yeah, sure, that actually sounds like a lot of fun.

I mean, I'm seeing them all over the place. I, I think they're going after the people making videos with Stewie and Griffin about why the government is using printers to, to monitor you or whatever, um, you know, that use that to provide those kinds of things. I think they're going after them first and then, then it's us. But then, you know, we already stopped, we're already on the next character.

Yep.

If not, we gotta use Mickey Mouse. It's fair use now.

I love it. Um, you know, I, I, the, the, you know, when I look at like the, you know, the Brainrot MOV, uh, which is the website for the, uh, thing you're showing, um, you know, I gotta say the biggest downside is he isn't really the copyright thing, although it was the first thing I thought about. It's just how much work it was to create all those, you know, line by lines, as opposed to just not doing it.

He's not capitalizing it. This market has potential. Yeah. And, and if he can like just like dump in a YouTube video link and I'll make like 50 Brainrot videos and you— I just use your credits, right? Mhm. I'll be in a mansion, in a Brainrot mansion.

Yeah, certainly being able to slice it into the YouTube video, into— slice it into like the scene videos or the, the scene videos Um, but also I think they're, they're the, the just sort of take a bunch of content and then pour it in there. I gotta say, like, this whole thing has got me much more jazzed for this, uh, project I have been working on, sort of laid down, because, okay, the videos can take a little bit to go. By the way, how long does it take for it to process video and actually deliver it to you?

On BrainRot MOV, it takes like 10 to 15 minutes. It's quite a while.

Yeah, well, video processing is slow, so that part doesn't totally surprise me. I want to know if I want to benchmark what, what I think.

It may be faster if you use this like an API API, but he'll be paying like an— you know, like they're like AI video, they're like video editing APIs, right? Like, yeah, better make it fast. Like, what was it? Convert— I forgot the name, but I was paying like $300 for one like a while ago when I was building a SaaS. But I don't think anybody— what everybody wants to pay $300 a month for like so-and-so many hours of video processing if you can do it for free. On your own server.

Yeah, I was able to get it to go about 1:1 speed when I was just jamming audio with the background video. The thing that really drives up the cost is the captions because it has to recalculate each frame.

I mean, for captions, you can use something on Replicate where it just does the captions and it's pretty cheap. Replicate has a model.

The captioning, you can throw up the captioning, but if you want the captioning to be part of the video, part of the frames of the video, I mean, one way or the other, there's somebody who's got to be doing the hard work of reprocessing each frame. It's not about the difficulty of it, it's actually relatively straightforward from a code point of view. But the computational intensity of it, I think drives up the time for it. What are you going to show us, man? We are a little in the corner.

The video is still loading. It says 42%. Now it's at 67%. I made another video where it's me talking, not Peter Griffin, because I got a little bit concerned about your concerns about copyright. But you'll love that video because I'm just having like, I don't know, Minecraft below me. So like, you'll love it. Look at that. Plugins are an absolute piece of shit. And here is why. If you build your whole application on top of a plugin for authentication, for anything, especially core plugins, your whole foundation of your application is now built on something that is an absolute abstraction of all the things that you need. Let me give you an example. If you're using, for example, the Supabase package inside of Nordcraft, the only settings that it lets you edit is your anon key and the project URL. Now what happens if you want to change how the cookie is set? And there are some use cases where you want to change the content protection policy. You can't do that. As you can see right here, there is you know, the strict that is preset, but I can't edit it because the plugin doesn't link it dynamically to the settings that the plugin exposes. Meaning you have lots of configurations that you can tap into because the plugin author thinks a certain way about how you should build an application, meaning you're limiting yourself in what you can do by using those plugins. Now, sometimes actually the code that they abstract it is minimal. For example, with Supabase authentication, it's as simple as running an API call, just this call, you could copy and paste it. And then you can set it up yourself. Of course, it'll take 10 minutes with the help of ChatGPT to understand how to set it up if you're doing it the first time. But I think those 10 minutes are very worth it. Because that is an investment towards the future of your application. The moment you use a plugin, you know, you have to rebuild the whole core again, at least the moment your requirements change. So why not start the right— it's at the right— I better get cut off. No, like bringing in those elements that move because people, you know, think my content is boring, which it is. It's, it's educational. Education is always a little bit boring if you're not a geek, so we're trying to make it less geeky.

Do you actually get comments that your educational— that your content is boring?

No, but, you know, when I look at my content, I'm like, this is very, very educational. It's not something people watch in their free time unless their free time consists out of building a startup on their site. You know, my videos are— the content is like, you're trying to build the SaaS on the site, you watch it in your leisure time when you're building the SaaS on your site. I'm not doing videos like how to build an online agency and make millions of dollars because I think you can't do those videos. It's garbage, it's bullshit. So, you know, like, it's not like, you know, this flashy, highly edited content. My videos are very unedited because it's about the core, it's about their information, it's not about the editing, right? Like, my videos are not in the style of Alex Hormozi because the, the way I teach is by sharing my screen, not by putting stuff on the whiteboard, right?

That's a fair point. So, um, you know, we, we were talking about like your, the, the method for building those things. We showed the, the, the brainrot.mov. What were you using for, for this video?

For this video, I just edited in CapCut.

Okay, so we just use CapCut editing, and then like you just sort of what, sliced it up so that you could— and does CapCut have sort of a built-in feature makes it easy to use the, um, you know, the bump thing, or how hard was that?

Manually edited. And the whole shaky you had going on yourself, that was also like with the camera tracking? Yeah, it was like lots of movements. Every— everybody is now— has now the attention span of a goldfish, so gotta get things moving. If I'm not moving for a second, they're going to scroll away. Maybe I overdid it with the last video because when I look at it, I'm getting a little bit dizzy.

It, it, it was a lot of motion, um, but I certainly think your point, like, that is what a lot— some of the other videos I've seen sort of in that vein look like. And then where do you get the bottom part from?

The bottom part? Yeah. Inspect elements on brainrock.mov preview.

Oh, you just, you just scrape video. Okay, cool.

I mean, I guess I'm just assuming that if they have it on their website and I'm having a paid subscription, and I'm free to use that content. If someone doesn't agree with that, please send any documents to my PO address.

Oh, I, I, I, I have the feeling that like the use of that content and the, the Pierre and Stewie and the Minecraft and the, uh, and the Subway Surfer, uh, that, that, you know, it's probably not perfect for you, but I bet it's— bring on MOV is in a lot more trouble than you are, right?

Because I'm just telling them I'm just using this tool.

But that's cool. Uh, so, so you were sharing a little about the, the Brainrot MOB one. You made a couple of them. How long does it take you to make one of those videos?

Took me like 5 to 10 minutes. Like, the processing was the thing that took the longest, but I just—

well, it—

well, the first one was processing, I was making the second one.

Uh, fair enough. But in terms of process, the process we're talking about, those 5-10 minutes, that was you talking to ChatGPT to come up with a script the opening, setting up the project, putting in the text, and then pressing the button, presumably, is sort of that— that's what it looks like.

Yeah.

Okay. And then, and then what did your CapCut experience look like? Because I'm sure there are people who have thought about, hey, this CapCut thing, they've seen ads for that.

It was like— it was, it was, it was easier than Final Cut Pro. I have like Final Cut Pro, I paid like $300 or so for, never used it because it was just way too complex for me. CapCut is perfect. I can do it on my computer, I can do it on my phone. I got access to lots of copyright songs. My content may be used for AI training. I'm completely fine with that, so I'm all good.

Cool. And how long did it take you to make it?

In— that was like 25 minutes to edit the video and all that.

Okay, that's not— that's not terrible. And like, so, so you cut the role. Did you, did you, did you do that monologue specifically for this video, or this thing you ripped it from?

No, I just did the monologue specifically for the video because I looked at the Nordkraft, Nordbase package and I was like a little bit— I was like, this is like, why are people using that? Like you're going to have an integration for your authentication system. And it doesn't let you configure some of the core authentication mechanisms. Like it's like, you gotta do it this way. And the plugin doesn't let you have any flexibility in how you do it. I was like, why would anybody built their authentication on top of that. But quite a lot of people actually did and they were coming to me with problems because they were like, I need to adjust the way the cookie is set and then you couldn't. So they already had their whole authentication stuff built on top of this plugin but then it didn't work because they wanted to do specific things with it. So they essentially have to rip it out now and, you know, put the API call in there or clone the plugin and then adjust it to their need, which usually I found those plugins don't help people. They just, they just help people feel like they're getting started fast, but you're not getting started fast when you use a plugin for any no-code tool besides Bubble, because you have to.

Okay. So, so that's what you've been building so far, right? And like, these are like new experiments. You start bursting onto the scene with this stuff and I think there's definitely a trend that we've both been tapping into a bit with this brain rot or shorts, whatever, for education.

I want to see your brain rot on stage change. We're going to have a little Ray cartoon figure talking with his mouth and with an animation.

I'm going to be talking with my mouth. How else would I talk? But yes.

You could do it like Peter and just have your mouth like this and nobody knows that you're talking because it's just this. Still image.

That's an option. Sure, we'll go with that. But yeah, you're right. Like I would love to, like I say, I have been working in this field, but like, man, that's some cool stuff. And now I want to go play more with it because I think there's just an opportunity to teach more, frankly, I mean, far more advanced topics. Like the success of just, I mean, I like the Stewie and Peter stuff. I think that's very cool. I like the notion of making it into a dialogue. I want to get into that. Um, but the, the, the, but the even like the first round of what, you know, Akshay and I were doing is just saying there's, there is something here. Yeah. And I'm, I'm really, uh, really excited about that.

I mean, I saw some Brainrot videos. They were like, you, I, I, there was like a Brainrot video about, uh, like promoting some vibe coding tool and like it was like, like politicians, they essentially, it was like our current president, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden talking about vibe coding. And I was like, they'll probably be in more trouble than I am with Stewie.

Well, yeah, the different, different tools that President Trump might bring to bear.

Right.

But I also want to ask, like, you know, you've been experimenting with a couple of these things. What are you excited about? I mean, and we're heading towards like the sort of the last segment, I think, of our, of our time together today. What's, what's next? Like, what, like, this stuff has gotten you excited. You were, you were playing with the CapCut thing, you're playing with the Brainrot, with the Brainrot MOV thing. Is it making more of these? Is it— you're thinking there's another turn of the wheel? What, what, what's in store for the, for the YouTube channel, or at least for your experiments with it in the coming week, whether you ship it or not?

I think it'll be probably what's happening to your channel. I think there'll be more shorts. I mean, you haven't been posting that many long-form videos in the past few weeks, months, 2 years.

Yeah.

So I've been trying to have like one real video a day. Now I'm trying to step a little bit away from having one full video a day. I'm trying to do one short a day, at least more shorts, and then focus on the quality of the video because I don't want to just give you a mountain of videos. When I do a video, I want to make sure it provides actual value and it's very high quality. That is important because I've been running out of video ideas and my list says like set up authentication in 15 minutes in Nordcraft. Now I'm just like, you see, I'm desperate of video ideas. I'm just trying to repurpose stuff I did in 1 hour and just talk a little bit faster to it in 15 minutes. I need new ideas and this is by focusing on new topics. I don't want to do anymore how to make gradients on a button. Like, okay, cool, gradients and how to make them dynamically loaded from your database.

Cool.

But who needs dynamically loaded gradients on your button from your database, right? So now I want to make like how to make an AI brain rot generator inside of Nordkraft and Xano, how to make this. I want to, you know, give those examples and make like 1-hour videos or 2-hour videos, 3-hour videos where I'm walking people step by step on how to set those things up and I'm having people, you know, just shadow me and they can follow along with the video to build great stuff.

I think that makes so much sense. You know, like there, there, there's some rule of thumb with the YouTube algo that's like, you know, a video of roughly like 10 to 12 minutes, kind of like the sweet spot for it. Um, but I don't know about you, I find myself watching, you know, the, the, and, and of course I'm watching too many videos. But I'm either watching a video that's like an hour in length plus, or I'm watching shorts. And like that, I think that, that split that you're—

yeah, I'm not really watching any like 5-minute, 10-minute videos. It's like 1 to 2 hours, or it's like you scroll, right? It's like there's no middle ground. So what's the point of making a video? Like, there's so many people making videos. Norcraft is making videos about how to do this in Norcraft. Why do I need to show people how to do in Nodecraft, there is going to be theoretical knowledge that the moment they know, they forget because it's not important to them. But if someone wants to build a membership application out there, they don't necessarily need to know on how to do concatenation. It'll be part of it. And this is what I think is important. If you make videos about, you know, how to put two strings together and that's your part of the video, your audience, the audience that you're getting is someone who wants to put two strings together in Nodecraft. That already knows how to solve the problem. But if you make videos how to build a mobile application in Nordcraft, how to make a Vibe Code application generator in Nordcraft, how to build this, this, this in Nordcraft, you're targeting specific audiences and they're going to be more likely to convert because they know how great my help is and join office hours. Yeah, I think they already know, I know how to set it up, and now they're stuck at it.

Right, right. Well, and that kind of brings me back around to like another thing about the, um, about the Brain Rot videos, which is when the Brain Rot video does not involve you, how does it help with your marketing?

That's a good point. I thought about having the Peter Stewie dialogue and just putting me in the corner doing like— I saw that on TikTok. People do.

Sure.

You know, maybe I can have the hook be Peter and Stewie having a discussion, then I go into the video and like duet it and like—

yeah, yeah. And I appreciate like the, the system is what it is, but I start thinking about like, could you be having a conversation with Stewie?

Oh, that's a good idea. I gotta cartoonify myself with some AI.

And then, and, and some like that. And I think the Peter and Stewie stuff certainly what was attracting my ear. But the— I find that the, the key to brain rot is this disconnect between the eye and the ear. You're learning through the ear and you're kind of being entertained through the eye. And that's the reason why your whole shaky cam thing was the way it was, trying to create more entertaining looking at you. But they're sort of also discouraging me from looking at you and having a look at the brain rot thing in the bottom instead, right? And then the background thing as well. It's like, would this work without the Stewie and Peter thing? And I think the answer I don't know for sure, but I think the answer is yes. I think that's a lot.

I'll be experimenting with it. I'll be doing it right after this video. I'll be filming some Brain Rot videos with me behind a roller coaster, you know, or some random stuff that moves, or someone stitching in the background, or someone baking cake, or whatever.

Yep, your voice. Also, when you're doing the, the CapCut, are you doing any intro outro stuff? No. Okay, you start going straight, it's the scene, and then the scene cuts that at the end, 6 seconds.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, but I think it's a very interesting topic, brain rot content, social media content in general. Um, it's definitely changing. I think a few years ago, if you wanna— I think everything about professional business and professional companies have become less professional over the past few years. And that's the way to do it. Like if you look at the biggest social media teams from Apple, from the biggest companies, Fortune 500 companies, like if you look at their social media, it looks like I could have run that. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, it's on a very personal level. It doesn't look corporate. It doesn't look like, hey, we got really, you know, we got millions of billions of dollars and we got only the best. It looks like, hey, we're paying someone $5,000 a month to maintain this whole social media thing here. Yeah, and I think they wanted to look like that on purpose, and they're probably paying millions of dollars to make it look like they're paying 5.

Paying, paying, yeah, paying a whole lot so that it looks like stumbling even when it's dancing. The— that's the— I think there's— yeah, that, that's a good point. Um, but also I think there's a lot of— they are trying to avoid being wrong. And I see that a lot in corporate media, and I actually see a lot in startups too, a big fear of being wrong, and they don't want to put out something that like would, you know, potentially get criticism. But the kind of work you're doing, even though we have had lots of, hey, here's how we might be able to outbear a little bit, like you're, you're out there and you are educating and bringing value to the market in a way that, you know, that other people aren't. And we just need to be figuring out how we can use these channels to, you know, I do receive criticism.

People are saying, you know, what you're doing in the video is not safe. This doesn't meet cybersecurity best practices. My response to that is, if you're really concerned about cybersecurity, you can join StateChange or NoCodeProCode, or better, both. YouTube is not— I loved how, uh, when we're talking with Mitch at StateChange marketing office hours, you know, back in that time, I was telling people everything on YouTube YouTube, and I said to Mitch, you know, I love doing YouTube videos, I love educating people, and I want to do this, and I'm just giving them everything on YouTube. And then Mitch said, you're not running a nonprofit, you got to make money, so make it, make the video a very interesting hook, and then you get them to sign up for your office hours where you give them the last bite. And that really stuck with me. I think that was like a year or a year and a half, one and a half years ago or so. And sure, still to this day, I, I can see him saying that. And that was like a paradigm shift for me when he said, you're not running a charity, you're not running a nonprofit, so be smart and run this like a businessman, right?

It needs to serve the job, it needs to do the job of marketing, it needs to help, and there needs to be a flow of income in order for you to be able to afford to continue to do this. Yeah, um, that said though, like, the idea, like, hey, you do it through providing service to people, I think there's a lot of— there's just a lot of merit to that.

Yeah, yeah. That was the moment where, you know, uh, uh, some people were like, ah, it's just advertisement, don't post that in the Norcraft channel. I was like, you know, if I'm not posting that advertisement, there won't be any more Norcraft videos.

Yeah, Gary Vaynerchuk's model for this is jab, jab, jab, right hook. Hook, and where each jab is like free stuff you put into the market, and the right hook is when you are, um, you know, giving them— when you basically make the ask. Hey, by the way, I do this for a living. And like, I think mixing that up and that ratio of 3 to 1 feels about right to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I'm learning from the best. Not Mitch. You and Mitch, like both. I don't want to offend.

I was about to say Mitch is— let's make clear who the marketing expert is in that particular conversation. Mish Van Dusen, by the way, is a wonderful marketing expert and people should be reaching out to him for that. This has been absolutely delightful, man. We should— I think maybe we should even do this every week.

About BrainRot?

Well, we could do BrainRot every week.

I mean, we're already doing our office hours every week, but— Oh, yeah.

Yep. And the, and yeah, let's, we will, and I really love that like this time around we were focusing on issues of marketing. Like so often our discussions are a little more technical, but this is like using technology to actually help people's business move forward. I think we might have made a real impact.

I think if we keep talking about technical stuff in those open office hours, I don't think it's going to provide people that much value because people, most of the people, they're already knowing what they're building. Us talking about why you shouldn't use Supabase for that specific use case is not going to convince someone who's already using Supabase for that specific use case. And someone who's using Xano is already convinced and someone who's using WeWeb is already convinced. Same for whatever tool they're currently doing. I think the most value that we can actually provide is tell people how, you know, they can get out there and get room, get some reach. Because I was thinking about it, like, we got a comment last time about the job market and how to market yourself. And I think those are the things that we should be talking more, because I don't talk about it on my YouTube channel, and you don't talk about that necessarily on your YouTube channel. And I think there's some value that we can provide to people that is something that they don't necessarily know that we know.

That is, I think, a pretty good point. Um, let's, let's be doing that for next time too.

Oh yeah, and I think the idea of doing this weekly content marketing reach, laugh, the thoughts and concepts.

All right, we got a vote.

There you go. So we're doing it. So what's our talking topic next week?

What is our topic, uh, next week? Is it gonna be more, um, you know, maybe more discussion of the, the question from last week was about employment, so this could be a little more about the idea of the personal brand.

Yeah, I need some help with my personal brand from you.

Uh, and I probably need some help with the personal brand too. In fact, I'm pretty sure we all do. And we'll—

maybe we should get— can we get Mitch inside of here?

That's a really good idea. Let's see what we can do.

I think that will be— because like, he's going to rip us both apart live, and I think that would be very entertaining.

Yeah, that sounds, uh, that— yeah, that sounds great. I'll reach out to Mitch and see if we can make that happen for next week.

And maybe if we can get Mitch on here, people can send their websites and maybe their CVs or their YouTube channels, and he can share his screen and we can review them together and give some of our insights.

Ah, get some roasting going.

Yes, website roast, SaaS roast.

Yeah, that could be, uh, that, that sounds like there could be a lot. Yeah, sounds like there could be a lot in there.

Yeah, I think we have some great people on StateChange and on NoCodeProCode. I'll, I'll reach out in my community, and I would love if you could also reach out in your community if we can get some interesting guests, because this is really what makes the podcast interesting. It's always just us talking And, you know, I think it's very interesting to have some different insights, like with Daniel, where you said, you know, it's not meaningful to learn Xano, and he got a little bit, you know, protective. I was like, I don't know if I should post that. I don't want Ray and Daniel to do to me what we all assume Family Guy is going to do to me, you know.

I thought, I thought that was fantastic conversation. In fact, I thought that exchange was actually sort of, uh, particularly useful for, uh, for getting some core issues there. Um, but, uh, but yeah, we'll be doing more of that. I'll, I'll reach out and we'll do, uh, we'll get more into this marketing game and using technology to advance your marketing when we meet up again next week.

Fantastic. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate that. And yeah, let's see who will be next time inside of here.

Excellent.

Thank