AI's Role in Creativity and Business

This is actually something that people are scared of. This is something that a lot of people are worried is going to take their jobs. And so it was after I was already kind of doing AI stuff for a little while that I started to realize like, okay, this is, I need to take it a little bit more seriously. And I think I need to approach it with a little more empathy to the people that are worried about it. AI is being used for scripting, for shooting and producing movies. AI is being used for everything. Hollywood production is being transformed by artificial intelligence. Welcome back to episode 11 of the Curious Refuge podcast. We are extremely excited about today's guest, Matt Wolfe. Matt is my personal AI hero. He is at the forefront of integrating AI into creative and business workflows. He has one of the largest, if not the largest AI following online, and he has almost 600... thousand YouTube subscribers, which is wild, Matt. Congratulations on that. Matt is also the host of the Next Wave podcast with Nathan Lanz, where they cover how to integrate AI into businesses. And Matt is also the founder of futuretools.io, a website that highlights over 2700 of the latest and greatest AI tools. And he lets users vote their favorite and they use their tool all the time. to check out cool AI tools. So Matt, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. I always love to nerd out about AI with fellow AI nerds, I guess. Hopefully you're okay being called that. Yes, I think that is safe to say at this point. And it's fun to finally hang out with you because we basically hang out with you every lunch day. You and Tim Simmons were like, okay, we've watched. Tim's videos, I watch Matt's, so it's nice to hang in person. Yeah, yeah. And we've got a Discord now, too, where we all chat a little bit as well. That's so true. Exactly. Where we talk about click-through rates and data and all the really exciting stuff. YouTube metrics and invalid traffic bugs and whatnot. Yeah. It's amazing. YouTubers are some of the most data-minded people on the planet. It's incredible the amount of plot. that goes into something so benign like a thumbnail or a title oh yeah yeah i mean it's it's crazy we're all trying to like optimize to get that you know extra hundred views out of every single video you know yeah it's like every release it's like oh this is this is seven of ten we need to update the thumbnail like we've got to change this title to really work this video yeah yeah i mean when it comes to youtube if i'm being honest i wish they would just get rid of the like one of ten 10 of 10 like i don't want to see it it just drives too much like anxiety for me right like you see a 9 out of 10 you're like no what do i need to do i don't know if you feel this way but whenever we put out a video and even if it's not you know let's just say it's like 5 of 10 just like completely average for us my first thought isn't like good job we did it guys we made like something that is performingly average for our channel people are enjoying it it's always like people hate us now uh whether we have no spot in the industry anymore what are we doing like i don't know if it's that way with you oh yeah yeah i mean i have like a mini version of that pretty much every time i publish a video and then when i look at the comments right we were joking before we hit record about the comments i'm like yeah don't don't show people the comments i mean the reality is probably 95 of the comments on like all of our channels are pretty good comments but my brain focuses on the five percent and i start thinking everybody hates this video yeah you Yes, totally. Totally. It's the perils of being a YouTuber. And just the waves of scarcity that come like, yeah, every time. It's just like, this is the last one. That one video was the last one. We're not going to be able to do it again. Yeah. Yeah. That was the end of our run. It's been fun. Exactly. Yeah. So hopefully this is a lesson to anyone listening to this. You know, you never get past that feeling of scarcity or inadequacy or imposter syndrome. It's always been. there. Oh, yeah. No, I've seen interviews with, you know, Marques Brownlee and Mr. Beast and some of these people, and they still talk about that stuff. So, yeah, like even at the top, top, top of the tier on YouTube, everybody's still thinking that way. I would love to transition because I definitely want to hear about your background and all that good stuff. But, you know, really, if we could press into that, that kind of imposter syndrome, what am I doing here? What's happening? You know, that really, you know, anytime you're innovating in any industry, that's going to pop up. But with AI specifically, it's a very different beast because not only is it uncharted territory, but at least for us, and I'd be curious about your perspective, Matt, people, especially if you're in the business of context and helping people to understand what is happening with tools and technology, a lot of times people want you to also project into the future. And they'll be like, where are things going? And how is the world going to change? What job should I get? All these really high level questions. And I don't know. know about you, how have you dealt with those questions and that kind of propulsion to that figurehead status? And do you feel imposter syndrome in that regard too? I do. Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard not to when it's like the people building a lot of these AI systems and products, you can ask them a lot of the questions and they'll tell you, I don't know where this is headed. Some of them don't even know how the technology they're building works. Right. A lot of this stuff is like these magic black boxes where even the engineers on them couldn't accurately explain to you what's going on underneath the hood. Right. So it's like everybody in the AI space is kind of trying to figure out what's going on right now. Right. Um, but yeah, I definitely get the imposter syndrome. I try to make predictions, but I always say like, I'm going to tell you right now, my predictions are usually wrong. I'll say something like, I think this is going to happen within the next two years. And then three months later, that thing happens. Right. And I'm like, okay, my timelines are just way off. So I like making predictions. I think a lot of times the predictions that I make, you know, they'll be accurate, but the timelines will be way off. Right. So it's like, everything just happened so much faster than I. than I think it's going to happen. But yeah, I mean, I kind of enjoy the, you know, the theorizing and the sort of speculation of where it's all going to go. I find a lot of enjoyment in those discussions. But, you know, I always, you know, put it out there with a grain of salt and say, I also have no idea what I'm talking about and probably am wrong on most of this. Don't quote me in a year, but. It's so funny to me from having those conversations with developers. as well to realize that truly in these back rooms, no one knows what is happening. Because I definitely think there's this assumption that, you know, oh, OpenAI or any other company has this big master plan, and everything is being perfectly choreographed down to the, you know, product release and, and, you know, everything is in their control. And yet so much of this, this new world, and I think why it's so exciting is the fact that Everyone is reactive, you know, and especially like with some of these tools, a lot of times, rather than going through crazy beta testing, they're just putting it out into the community to seeing what people do with it. It's a complete change in the way that we deal with technology. Yeah, no, absolutely. I feel like like even with chat GPT, when chat GPT came out in, I think, November of 22. Right. That was essentially like a giant public beta test. Right. They put it out into the world thinking not that. many people were going to jump on board or know about it. We all know how that went. It became, you know, the fastest growing launch like ever in history of any sort of tech product. But they actually put that out there saying, look, we don't know how this is going to work. We don't know how people are going to use it yet, what use cases they're going to use it for. We don't know what's going to happen when we put this out into the world. And they just put it out there, found out, okay, everybody wants this. And as they started to figure out the use cases that people started to use it for, they started kind of. of dialing it in towards those use cases. So, you know, even the biggest of the companies out there that are developing and putting this stuff out into the world are still just kind of figuring it out as they go along. And I'm so curious for you, because I think you do better than anyone else on the planet at contextualizing the news and the technology and kind of, you know, what does this mean? You know, Lama 3 came out, like, you know, was it a surprise? No, it wasn't a surprise. We knew about it like all along. And it really was like you have a finger on the pulse of everything that's happening. But I guess my bigger question is, how in the world are you able to keep up with everything that's happening? Because it feels like there's 100 new news announcements every single day. Yeah, well, I mean, I did make it my full-time job, right? So, like, it is literally all I do now is just kind of research and keep my finger on the pulse. But, you know, like, the actual tactical, practical ways that I'm keeping my finger on the pulse is I'm subscribed to, like, every AI. blog that's out there, right? Like I've got a RSS feed reader called feedly that I use. And on there, I'm subscribed to like tech crunch, but it sort of filters just the AI stuff from tech crunch and the verge and just the AI stuff from the verge. I pay for all of the, you know, the newsletters that you have to pay for, you know, the Bloomberg's and the information's and all of those kinds of sites so that I can kind of keep my finger on the pulse of what they're talking about. I'm on X, your Twitter all the time. I created a curated list of people talking about AI. I'm scrolling that list throughout the day to see if anything pops up. I'm jumping on phone calls a lot of times with a lot of founders and CEOs. That's one of the things that led me to wanting to launch a podcast is I'm having conversations with all of these CEOs and engineers and people building this stuff. And I'm like, these are fascinating conversations. They should be shared with the world, right? So that's really kind of how I'm doing it. It's mostly just an RSS feed reader. And I am scrolling the news in my feed reader every day. I am scrolling my X list every single day. I'm on all of the AI newsletters. You know, Rowan Chung, the Rundown is a really great newsletter. The Neuron from Pete Huang is a really good newsletter. There's a handful of AI newsletters that I'm subscribed to. You know, I use those to make sure I'm not missing anything, right? I'm kind of scrolling the news and then I'll check their newsletter and go, did they find anything that I didn't come up with? But yeah, I mean, it's honestly, it's just, it's my full-time thing now. I pretty much spend, I'd say about four hours a day, just reading news, reading Twitter, reading the newsletters, just going down the rabbit hole. That's seven days a week, every day. I'm just kind of making sure I'm looped in every day. How do you manage the overwhelm? Because I imagine that is a lot. Seven days a week, four hours a day, seeing what's new and trying to contextualize that for your community. I know we are doing that as well, and it is a lot. And so how do you manage that? Yeah, so it's funny because the Future Tools website that I have was literally built. To help me manage that stuff, right? It's got a list of tools that are organized and filtered, and you can like filter down to just the video tools, just the music tools. I literally built that not thinking anybody else would ever look at that website. I built it because I was kind of coming across cool tools, putting them in a spreadsheet going, okay, this is a cool tool. I can make a YouTube video about in the future. And I was just keeping a spreadsheet of it, but it got to the point where the spreadsheet was so big. I couldn't find anything anymore. You know, I, I didn't know what I was looking at anymore. So I literally built Future Tools as a tool for me to sort of sort and organize all of the tools that I came across. And so that's one way that I kind of keep my finger on it. And then I created the news page on Future Tools. Whenever I come across any news that I'm like, this is really interesting. I want to talk about this on my Friday news video. I save it to the news section of the Future Tools website. So that website, for the most part, is like fully still run by me. I put every tool on there. I put every piece of news on there myself because I built it to keep my finger on the pulse. Like, that's why it's there. As soon as I hand it off to somebody else, my finger is no longer on the pulse of everything. And when did you start learning about AI tools and start building this spreadsheet for the first time? So I started in July of 2001 was around the time I can like specifically say I started putting out content. I was probably. interested in it and looking into it a little bit before that but july 2001 was the first time i ever put out any content around ai um it was back when um jasper which was previously jarvis which was previously conversion.ai it was back it was around that time when that was getting really popular and that was using gpt3 under the hood to help you use ai to write content and my previous life I've always been a content marketer. I've been doing full-time content marketing since 2009. So I've been, what I'm doing now, I've been doing for 15 years now. But prior to 2001, I was more focused on like how to blog, how to set up WordPress blogs, all the WordPress plugins. So in the same way, I keep my finger on the pulse of AI right now. I was keeping my finger on the pulse of all the latest plugins for WordPress and the latest themes and updates for WordPress. It's kind of always been like the sort of realm that I played in. And so I started playing around with, Jasper as a way to sort of speed up a blog content creation, use Jasper to write the rough draft. Once you have the rough draft, go in, tweak it, add your own voice to it and, you know, dial it in the way you want it. And so that was kind of the beginning of when I started going down the rabbit hole. And then in October of 2022 was when I came across mid journey and stable diffusion. I think I came across mid journey first played with that. Well, this is really cool, but it's not super customizable. How do I go even deeper with it? Learned about stable diffusion, learned about dream booth. That was where I learned how to like actually train my face into the stable diffusion model. I started making YouTube thumbnails that were like these crazy over the top cartoony thumbnails, but with my face in them. And, um, you know, I think those thumbnails were a little bit of a catalyst for the growth of the YouTube channel. And then I just kind of went all in from there. So, uh, July of 2021 was when I started to go down the rabbit hole. October is when I went like. all right i'm going all in on this that's amazing well it's wild to me that you were covering ai in 2001 i mean ai has been around since the 50s technically but like that is a really early time so it's 2021 so i mean really three years now oh yeah i think it's the 2001 i might have if i did i misspoke it's 2021 Well, some of the people we talk with, they truly are like, yes, we were like, you know, developing AI systems in the 80s. And it's like, OK, man, like, that's cool. In 2001, I was a senior in high school. So if I did say that I was misspoken, I was more into smoking weed and listening to music. So that's a different era. You are 10 years old and I love that. And okay, so, so many things to unpack there. I think there's like a lot of different paths that we could go down. The first one that I really want to draw attention to is the fact that you were in content marketing before you started contextualizing all this stuff, because that's my background as well was in doing yes, storytelling and filmmaking, but also content marketing. And I wonder if there's some sort of secret here, because content marketers typically have to be really efficient and proficient in so many different creative disciplines, because you got to do a blog post and a PDF and a free course and, you know, a video. And there's so many things that you have your hands on. But with AI, it's like your creative potential gets elevated. So I wonder, like, if you could talk to like, how do you feel like your skills in developing, you know, your, let's say, just like SEO skills or blog writing skills translated to this AI revolution? And are you able to draw from that in your creativity today? Yeah, well, I think you know, doing a lot of content marketing over the years. I've done a lot of blog writing. I've, I had a podcast from 2010 all the way to 2022 is when I stepped away from that podcast. Um, my cohost of that podcast actually still runs it is called the hustle and flow chart podcast. Um, but I stepped away from that podcast. I was doing YouTube videos. My first video I ever published on YouTube was also in 2009. Um, so I've been doing that for a long time. And I would say as far as like the content creation around AI now. I really sort of developed that skill set, right? Like you develop a skill set of feeling comfortable on camera. You develop a skill set of learning how to edit the videos better and learn how to like do the little tricks to, you know, keep retention higher. And so I learned a lot of those strategies over the years. I think, you know, the reason I got into AI was because it was helping me be a better content marketer, right? I was able to use tools like Jasper to more easily write. good blog posts, right? I was using tools like chat GPT to help me brainstorm ideas for Google ads or whatever, right. Or, or help me up, come up with ideas for new blog posts. I can say, Hey, these 10 blog posts worked really well on my website. What blog posts should I write next? Given the context that this, this is what worked, right? So it helped me become a better content marketer. So I started teaching AI in the context of content marketing, and then just started going further and further down the rabbit hole until Eventually, people saw me as the AI guy. And then I stopped being so AI as it relates to content marketing. That's so interesting. And I feel like so many companies now have a person on their team that is that person, that is the one that's venturing into AI. And they're probably one of the most exciting people at the company because you figure out all these creative ways that you're like, oh my gosh, the processes that we had. If we integrate AI into them, we can. do them faster or better or with more iteration. And it feels like there's a lot of opportunity here for people who think like yourself. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. I taught my dad about chat GPT and he runs a window covering company and he I showed him chat GPT and now he doesn't write his own emails anymore. He lets chat GPT write up for him. But I think there's so many companies out there that are still just kind of oblivious to the fact that life could be way easier if you. look into this stuff. Well, and I think that's really interesting to talk about, you know, because while it feels like in our bubble, everyone's using AI and they're all in and they're just like spending four to five hours a day reading the news and like they're so excited. That is absolutely not the case for most people in society. And I don't know if you've gone to events and seen this, but you start chatting with people that are part of traditional industries, and it's like only small fractions of people are actually integrating this. into their day-to-day life. So I'm curious from your perspective, why is that? Do you feel like that's going to change sometime soon? And how do we help to educate people about these tools? Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. I think a lot of, especially brick and mortar businesses, I think they kind of just tend to fall into their habits of like, this is the way we've always done it. So this is the way we're going to keep on doing it. I was surprised. I actually did a presentation at Social Media Marketing World and... I think there was like 2000 people there. And I gave a presentation where I was just showing off AI tools. Like every slide was just like a different AI tool. Right. And I was hearing like audible gasps from the audience. Every time I like showed off a new tool because, um, yeah, I showed off Sora like two days after Sora video was shown off. And I showed that on stage and everybody was like, Oh my, like the, the crowd was like going nuts for it. I showed off. Hey, Jen, where I, you know, translated myself into Japanese and Spanish. And, and, German and I showed all these variations on stage. I showed off Suno where I made a song for social media marketing world. I made like a social media marketing world theme song and played that on stage. And people were just blown away. And it's funny because from my perspective, I'm like, the people I talk to, like, this is all old news to us. But yeah, it's so interesting. I don't know exactly why a lot of companies aren't embracing it. I do know that from a lot of the conversations I've had, there is still a lot of fear. I think a lot of people are afraid if I start using AI in my company, am I going to lose control? Is it? you know, privacy concerns are a big thing. You know, you see the companies that are the biggest names in the AI world, right? Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, who is essentially owned by Microsoft, right? They're all worried that where's my data going? If I start sharing company information, are other people going to get access to this company information that I'm sharing? Right? So I think there's a lot of like fear around it. A lot of people are worried about the privacy concerns. A lot of people are worried about it being something that could potentially replace them in the future. Personally, I think that should be what we strive for. Like, let it replace us. Let it do the work that we don't want to do so we can all focus on the work that we want to be doing. And let's like build a society where everybody's doing what they actually enjoy doing. But yeah, I think it's fear and ignorance, right? A lot of people just don't even know it exists. They're not paying attention. They're, you know, my dad's not sitting around watching YouTube videos. My dad's... I don't even know if my dad's ever seen one of my YouTube videos and I've been doing YouTube for 15 years. And I don't think he's ever even seen one of my videos, right? Like a lot of these business owners that are in this like, you know, traditional world, they don't know about Curious Refuge. They don't know about the Matt Wolf Show or, you know, Matt VidPro or any of these other people making AI videos. That's just not the world they operate in. So I think it's just those two things. There's fear and there's ignorance. I think it's mostly those two. When... Caleb, I think at one point he was like on his grandfather's computer and went to a video, a YouTube video of Curious Refuge. Or maybe you subscribe to our channel. And so now every time his pawpaw goes on the computer, he sees a new video from Caleb. And he's just like, Caleb, you're everywhere. What's funny, as content marketers, that's like one thing I think we learned to do a long time ago is make it look like we're everywhere to the people that discover us the one time. If you've done like... Facebook ads and you learn about retargeting and stuff like that, you can make it look like you are everywhere to like the one person that saw your website. And I, and you know, I think, um, that's really kind of fun to do. Um, talking a bit about fear. Um, so another thing we've been talking about just the last few days, I think it was on like Tim Ferriss's podcast, but basically there was this quote about how the opposite of fear is not, um, or the opposite of anxiety even is not calm, but it's. creativity and curiosity. And so I think that's really interesting. And I think for in my own experience, that has been so true when it comes to AI. Curiosity and creativity have really helped ease any hesitations I had in the beginning. My experience has been supporting traditional artists and VFX and animation. And so for me, it was a little bit like, oh man, this is a big deal. This is changing the way people I work with are doing their work. And so So I felt that I went through two months probably of like my paradigm shifting into this new kind of AI world. And I would say I definitely felt fear. But in hopping in myself and exploring, it really helped me to that lifted. And I got to see, oh, like truly a tool that I have to work with as a creative person. And so I'm curious about you and your experience. Was there ever a time that you did feel that hesitation yourself? Or do you feel like you came embracing it pretty early on? I'd love to hear. I do feel like I've probably, you know, embraced it pretty early on, but I've almost always played with AI as like a fun toy more than anything, right? Like my early videos about AI were me making silly videos where I, you know, injected my face onto images or, you know, used AI to make myself dance in like a silly video. Like I was using it a lot for like fun, entertaining stuff. So when I first started going down the AI rabbit hole, it was not even. on my radar that this could be a controversial area. Like that did not even cross my mind. I was just like, this is fun for me. This is fun to make AI songs. This is really fun to go and generate any image that I can imagine and maybe even inject my face into that image. I, that was like the perspective I went into this stuff with, but as I made more and more videos and as the videos got more and more popular and I was reading the comments and you know, people on, on Twitter. ex started responding to some of this stuff. And then I started to realize, oh, this is actually something that people are scared of. This is something that a lot of people are worried is going to take their jobs. And. So it was after I was already kind of doing AI stuff for a little while that I started to realize like, okay, this is, I need to take it a little bit more seriously. And I think I need to approach it with a little more empathy to the people that are worried about it. And so, you know, over time, my approach to the content has become much more of this empathetic approach of, I'm not going to talk about this stuff as like, get on board with AI or, you know, get left behind. I really, really don't like that narrative. I think. Um, that narrative only creates more resistance from the people that are afraid of it. I think, um, I think the narrative needs to be, you know, shifted a little bit more. I think the narrative needs to be that, um, you know, a, it's a tool, right? Whatever you're doing, if you do it well right now, this just gives you new superpowers to do it even better. I think that needs to be kind of the narrative. And also I do think it's true that this stuff is coming. This tech is coming, whether you like it or not. So I do sort of agree that. You kind of need to get on board or get left behind. But I don't think that that's the proper narrative to bring people on board. I don't think that's the proper onboarding narrative to get people excited about AI. So I don't know. I just think it's like we got to navigate it in a way that's both showing how fun and how powerful it can be, but also being very empathetic to the people that are worried about it. Yeah, it's it's so interesting. And Caleb, maybe we can talk a bit about like. we've been creating this game and we just hosted an e-sports event in Vegas where we had people who maybe have experience in AI, who have never seen any AI tools come into this, you know, e-sports arena and watch people use Leonardo and see the real-time generation happen before them and really get exposure to these tools and see that there's these artists that are kind of pushing the creative in a direction and seeing that live generation. And it was so fun to watch people just like gasp and react and just get so excited throughout this experience because it is really fun and incredibly entertaining. But I think it was having it displayed in that kind of game collaborative way definitely helped it to like break a barrier, you know? Yeah, no, that's very cool. I heard about the game. You guys talked about it in the Discord. that sounds like a really fun idea i think aren't you guys even talking about possibly making that like a like something you do like on live streams or on youtube or something like that yeah we're we're in conversations with like maybe setting up an esports league for creative ai tournaments and like making it into something like really big uh so we should uh we we should chat i would love to set up something i don't know in la or san diego like you know host like a meetup for all the ai nerds to like get together it'd be really fun yeah yeah that'd be really cool that'd be really cool so fun Yeah, it was a problem. People are already like, when's the next one? So we can't wait to do it again. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you know, kind of going back to the original conversation, I just think it's so interesting that I kind of started making YouTube videos just as like a silly, like, hey, this is like a silly tech that's just fun to play with. And now I find myself like, I was on, I've been on two different panels now at two different events. where we were talking about ethics and AI. And I'm like, how did I land here? You're like, I'm just trying to turn myself into cartoon characters. Exactly. Hold on, I should not be creating policy. Yeah. You're like, okay, so earlier on this call, I don't know what this tiny screen is behind you, but it's playing memes every now and then. And there was the Homer Simpson disappearing into the crowd. And I was like, that's Matt. Yeah. That's how I feel when I go to events, honestly. I really do. I think it's funny. Quick question about that. Have you ever been out in society and someone was like, oh my god, are you Matt Wolf? If you're just walking around San Diego. Yeah. It's actually happening more and more often. But the craziest story is we have some new neighbors that moved in across the street. Literally, they've been there, I don't know, maybe four or five weeks now. Um, and, uh, when the neighbors came over to introduce themselves, they, I answered the door and the Nate, the new neighbor was like, oh my God, you're Matt Wolf. I watch your YouTube channel and he lives directly across the street from my house. And I'm like, that's cool. But this is also kind of awkward. I don't know what to say to that. It's so funny. Uh, so yeah, that happened. Um, I would say the majority of the times though, it's when I'm at events, right? Like if I was, when I was at NVIDIA's GTC event, I was at South by Southwest. uh speaking on some ai panels there when i was at those events i would bump into people to be like hey i watch your youtube channel but i mean it's like that's like the tech nerds all converging in one spot so it's i guess it's kind of to be expected it doesn't happen very often just like in normal day-to-day life yeah once you hit a million i i really think that's gonna be you're gonna have to have a security guard going with you everywhere it used to happen for caleb with after effects um because he was on a few different channels uh creating after effects tutorials but i think it's happened once with your with youtube in yeah yeah yeah i i feel like being nerd famous is you Better than being regular because it's like, I don't know, you just get to like geek out with somebody. It's not like someone's like... You can still go to Trader Joe's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. As long as you just need to double check that the person didn't purchase the house because it was across the street from you. That would be... Yeah, yeah, I know. That's a good point. So I guess just shifting gears a little bit, you really, it feels like you're really on the forefront now for contextualizing AI for businesses. You know, I know that you have some... and partnerships with HubSpot. And you've really been pressing into not just marketing, but just business in general and productivity. I'm curious with the current technology that we have right now, are there any specific areas when you're talking to a business or when you're thinking about creating AI processes that you think that AI is really good at currently, whether it's large language models or image generation or advertising? And are there things that AI is not so good at that maybe we need to wait on? Yeah. You know, it's funny. So when it comes to like AI in the business use cases, that's actually probably more HubSpot's influence than anything. Right. Like so when I started working with HubSpot, they they approached us about being Nathan about doing a podcast together. And we're like, yeah, we'd love to. We want to get like the engineers from some of these companies building the AIs. We want to talk to a lot of them. And they're like. cool, let's do it. And then when we started recording some episodes, they started saying, hey, you know HubSpot has a small business audience. We need to make sure that these episodes cater to them a little bit. So a lot of the over, they saw me as like, okay, Matt's been doing content marketing for 15 years. HubSpot primarily built their entire business off of content marketing. And now they're trying to push into AI. So they're like, okay, Matt, Nathan, they're those guys that have that overlap. Let's see if we can get them to talk about that stuff. So that's, that's really like a lot of their influence. But, you know, to answer the question, one of the areas I still think that AI is not amazing at, and this is, this could be controversial. I don't know is I actually still think AI sucks at like writing good content. I actually don't think it's very good at writing good content. I think it's decent at writing like a good rough draft or a good outline that you can go and iterate off of and go and, you know, put your own voice into it. But But it uses words that like no human types that way. Like I can read an article and go, okay, I know that was written by like chat GPT or Claude because no human is going to use those adjectives that they used in this. So I actually don't really think it's that great at writing, which, you know, a large language model, you would think that would be the thing it does best right now. Right now, I think the area where AI is excelling and I think probably most helpful to people is probably in the art side, right? If you need to make. Facebook ads, if you need to make Google display ads or banner ads or YouTube thumbnails or things like that, leveraging AI to help with those workflows can save you hours and hours and hours of screwing around in Photoshop to get the right composition, right? So I think the area that it's probably helping the people the most is probably in the graphic design, like art area. And one of the areas where I wish people would stop using it is like stop letting ChatGPT write your blog posts for you because everybody can tell at this point. Yes. And your outbound emails, I get so many emails in my inbox that are so clearly written by chat GPT. It drives me crazy. Exactly. Exactly. I'm really excited about like the video stuff like Sora and stuff like that. Like that to me, when that comes out, that's going to be really, really fun. Also scary, right? Like, you know, especially here in the US coming into election season, like, how are they gonna, you know, make sure it's used it like that's the whole conversation that I think is the toughest for me is like, where should the guardrails lie because like part of me wants it to be like completely uncensored let me do whatever i want but then the other part of me goes i totally understand why you don't want to be able to do that so like that's where that's where i kind of struggle the most is like where the guardrails should land absolutely it definitely feels like some countries aren't they're trying to completely get rid of guardrails like japan saying that you're not even legally allowed to sue if somebody uh wants to bring a lawsuit up about their work being used to train AI models because they're trying to get rid of guardrails. And so it's so interesting because it feels like a day in AI is like a month previously. And any small head start that any country or company has really begins to exponentially compound very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think if you're looking at it on like the macro scale, I think we almost need like the, like we need globally everybody to kind of get on the same page. Right. Because like if one country is allowed to do certain things and has the capability to use these models, however they want, but other countries are excluded from that, you know, it gives advantages where others have disadvantages. And, um, you know, it's, I don't really want to go down like the, the. sort of more dystopian rabbit hole but um you know you don't want to have like uh sort of some countries overpowered in this technology where other countries are less powered in this technology i think there needs to almost be like sort of a global like handshake of like this is how we're going to treat this stuff which is that ever going to happen i don't know i don't really in the current climate i don't know if i really see that anytime real soon yeah we'll we'll see i hopefully humans uh come together and we cooperate, but we don't have a good track record at this point. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it takes like a global threat to bring the globe together, right? Like in the same way, like when some major tragedy happened to the US, it brings the US together. You need something that's happening on a global scale to bring the globe together. And AI could be that, right? Avoiding Skynet could be that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm really curious. I love that you brought up Sora. What are your initial... thoughts about the model outside of like this is just amazing and then what are some immediate practical uh implications or ways in which you think this might be integrated beyond just cool fever dream music videos yeah so i mean sora my initial thoughts on it were like this is just insanely impressive right like they were able to make really really realistic stuff i think the more they sort of dropped additional demos of what it was capable of i actually became less and less impressed over time Because it kind of showed that the initial stuff that they showed us was probably a little more cherry picked, right? It was probably the things that are like, these are the best generations we've done. Let's show those off as the examples of what it's capable of. But, you know, as Sam Altman started to do more of the user generated prompting where he would go to Twitter and say, hey, what do you want me to generate? And he would generate that stuff. We were starting to see a little bit more of the flaws and things like that. So I think what we're going to find is that. People are probably going to have a hard time getting like that realism right out of the box. It probably requires some special prompting. I'm also really worried about the cost. I think it's really, really expensive to generate a video with Sora. I saw like a math breakdown earlier today where somebody said that they estimate it costs about 12 cents per frame. Right. So if you're doing a video that's, let's say, 60, 60 frames per second, and it's like a one minute video. You do the math on that. Those costs add up really, really quick. You're talking like a couple hundred bucks to do a one minute video. So I think obviously the processing needs to get better. Compute needs to come down. There's a lot of bottlenecks that are going to keep that from being something that's like really, really mainstream use. But as far as like use cases, I think the use cases really are going to probably be like more of the sort of film industry use cases to fill like little gaps, right? Like. When you watch like a big hour and a half long movie, right? Like every frame of that movie is usually only like three or four seconds long, right? Like five seconds is like a long time to keep on like one shot in a movie. So when you're generating something with Sora and you need to fill a three, five second gap, I think Sora is going to do a really good job of, all right, here's some really quick B roll that we can throw on screen for three seconds before moving on to this next scene that we actually shot. So I think we're going to see it used like that early on. I don't know if you guys saw the recent Adobe Premiere demo where they showed like they can extend a clip where they have a clip of somebody standing there, but maybe the clip doesn't go to the very end of the song and they want it to time with the song. They can actually extend the clip and have the person sort of looking to the camera for an extra like two seconds. So I think I think that's where we'll see it being used. Like, I don't I don't really think there's a lot of really amazing AI generated videos out there where I go, OK, I want to go and see something like that in the theater. Right. Like. I don't, and I don't see that coming for quite a while still, but I do think it can be used as like that gap filler to kind of fix little scenes in a movie. And then people like me are just going to figure out how to have fun with it. Like, what can I, what's the most outlandish thing I can generate? You know, like the wolves on Mars with, you know, aliens wandering around chasing it or whatever. Right. Like I'm going to figure out how to do just like weird fun stuff with it. And so I think you're going to see those two sides. You're going to see the people that actually need to sort of fill gaps in their video. And then you're going to see the people that are like. I just like having fun with this stuff, which is really where I tend to lean a little more. But I think we're going to see those kinds of two, those two things really with it. And how has. working with AI tools influenced your creativity? Because it sounds like you're like thinking, you know, let's create, you know, wolves on Mars. Like, I don't know, is that like, how do you come at ideas? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I just love to kind of think of stuff that I feel like would be hard to make and then go and figure out what tools I can use to make it, right? Like I almost approach it as like, I don't know what tools I can use to accomplish this thing I want to accomplish, but here's an idea. Let me see if I can go figure out some tools that'll... do that thing right so that's kind of been my approach lately um you know in the beginning i would just i mean still to this day i do this where i'll go on like x and i'll find like funny memes that people made and i'll go how did they make that i need to figure this out so for me i'm just i'm very very curious right like everything i do comes from that place of curiosity like i find a meme and i go all right how did they make that meme i'm going to deep dive into it when i first came across jasper um several years ago i went all right I know the people that built Jasper. They're marketers. They're not coders. They're not machine learning engineers. They're digital marketer people. How did they build a tool that's like on the forefront of AI right now? So I actually started digging in beneath the hood. I learned about GPT-3. I learned about OpenAI's playground and how you can mess around with GPT-3 on the OpenAI playground. And I sort of reverse engineered how Jasper was built. And so that's kind of always the approach that I've taken and I probably will continue to take is I see something cool. And then I want to reverse engineer it. Yeah, I totally agree. There's like nothing worse than like you lay your head on the pillow at night and you think of a video you watched and you're like, how did they do that? And your brain's going through all the technology and you're like, okay, if you plug this into that, you're like, no, that still doesn't make sense. Like it's very frustrating. It's like, it reminds me of being a kid. My, my younger brother was so curious about how things were made. And so he would just take apart the cord of a lamp and like put it back together. using like, you know, electrical tape. And like, it was great. I mean, he just was so curious, but it's similar, like with these tools. I love that. Yeah, no, that was me for sure. Except I would take stuff apart. And then my parents would get pissed because I didn't know how to put it back together. Right. So we would just have like things disassembled all over the house. My parents got mad because I disassembled the VCR and then nobody figured out how to put it back together. So they had to buy a new VCR. And, you know, that, that was, that was definitely, that was definitely me. I hope that's not a metaphor for AI people tinkering with stuff, but not being able to put it back together. I mean, there's probably some of that. So I would love to know, just very practically, you're talking about AI and creativity and how it's helpful for thumbnails and things like that. In your day-to-day workflow, how do you use AI to help your productivity? Whether it's like putting together YouTube or curation, like what are some of the practical ways in which you are personally utilizing AI? Yeah, so I'm using AI all over the place, right? So when I mentioned Feedly to help me with, you know, find blog posts and articles about AI, Feedly also has an AI built into it. So it's almost like a better version of Google Alerts. You could go in there and you can say, hey, I want you to surface any articles that are about artificial intelligence, about... machine learning, stable diffusion, generative art, right? You can give it these keywords and it will try to surface brand new articles that came out that day that mentioned these keywords. But then the AI portion comes in because you train it over time. You can say, I want more articles like this, less articles like this, more like this. And so it sort of builds this feed for you of news articles that are only relevant to what you talk about. So I use that every single day with our thumbnails on YouTube. all AI, right? We either start with a mid journey image or a Dolly image, and then we pull it into stable diffusion. We use automatic 1111. Um, I have a fine tune model with my face in it. So like I'll go and do face swaps with my own face on them. Um, I use chat GPT all the time to help with like ideas for titles and thumbnails. Usually they're not very great, but they'll give me like a nice little starting point to jump off. Right. Um, with YouTube, I think the hardest thing for me is coming up with titles. Like that is. Probably the most difficult thing about YouTube for me is coming up with a title that I don't feel is like over the top clickbaity that's going to get people mad, but also good enough that it draws enough interest that they are going to want to click on it. Right. And like finding that balance is probably the hardest part about YouTube, in my opinion. So I'll use chat GPT to kind of help me with that element a lot. I use chat GPT and Claude all the time as just like a consultant as well. I'll say, look, here's a problem I'm struggling with in the business. What should I do? I've got this team member that. you know, I'm, I'm struggling with, they're, they're, they're telling me that they can't do this because of X, Y, and Z. How should I approach it? You know, and they'll give me advice on how to go back to that team member and, and, and talk to them. Um, you know in my videos one of the things i started doing is i started adding my own like suno generated songs into the background of videos where i'll do like a little montage and something will be going on and it'll be like a suno song playing over the montage or i started making suno songs as like the outro of my video so i'll finish the video and then like a song that i made in suno that says subscribe to matt wolf over and over again starts playing while i have like a weird ai image of myself dancing on screen right so Like I'm using AI like all day. Future Tools is powered by AI as well. So when I do find a tool that I like that I think should be on Future Tools, I actually built an integration or a workflow on make.com, which if you're not familiar with that, it's similar like Zapier if you've ever used Zapier. But basically I built this integration where I can plug in a URL of a tool that I found. And what it'll do is it'll go to that website. It uses a tool called Scraping Bee. to scrape all of the content off the page of the site. And then it takes all that content, puts it into chat GPT, and then says, summarize this down into one paragraph that explains what this tool does. And then once it explains what that tool does, send that description over to Webflow, which is where my site's hosted. So when I find a cool tool that I want to share on there, I plug it into make, and it summarizes the tool and puts the description into Webflow for me. So AI is running behind the scenes on future tools as well. Amazing. Amazing. It's amazing how you really can use these tools in such creative ways. I mean, this is such a simple idea. But last night I was like, just kind of curious about on my explore feed, what my like, what's the theme of the images I like in mid journey? Right? Like, so I just had like, I took screenshots of like four times to get the, you know, enough there. And then I put it into chat was just like, Hey, can you summarize kind of the, the describe in a few words the aesthetic of these images and how they kind of go together and it said that my taste is whimsical surreal anthropomorphic vibrant playful imaginative quirky and dreamlike and so and most of my images i like are like animals wearing a raincoat you know like right like dream and so it makes sense but it's so now when you prompt stuff do you use all those extra like uh descriptors yeah it's like now when i'm prompting maybe i can use that to kind of create some consistency with like my style and taste right it's so funny but it's like you you really can't every day find a new way to use these tools which is amazing i don't know why in the back of my mind while you were describing that i was just thinking of those old books anamorphs you remember they like had a person that would like convert to a person it just like felt like the aesthetic of that book in a nutshell yeah yeah for sure um so let's uh Let's go ahead and kind of wind things down. I really don't want to take up too much of your time, but I appreciate the conversation. We love to end these podcasts with some rapid fire questions. Just, you know, whatever's on the top of your mind. You don't have to think about it too quickly. So Shelby's going to give you some rapid fire questions and, you know, less than one sentence, just whatever comes to your mind. Cool. Let's do it. So this first section is going to be what's your favorite? And of course, we're going to go with AI. So. What is your favorite language model? Opus, Cloud3 Opus. Okay. What is your favorite image generator? Stable diffusion. Video generator. Right now, probably Pika Labs. I don't know. Do you want longer sentences or do you just like want the one word response? Okay, cool. This is great. If you want to go into more detail, you're more than welcome to. What is your favorite YouTuber tool? I use both TubeBuddy a lot and vidIQ a lot. I like TubeBuddy because it helps me with a lot of the split testing stuff. And I like vidIQ because it shows me how well a video is doing relative to my other videos. It always shows like it's doing 1.2x compared to my average and stuff like that. So I use both of those. I'd say those are pretty equal. And if you didn't have Feedly and you weren't subscribed to... it helping you like subscribe to all these newsletters and pull all this news what is the one newsletter you would maybe missing or want to make sure you're subscribed to as an individual newsletter i think the person who's doing it the best right now is rowan chung he's got a newsletter called the rundown um i think he's probably the most on top of it i think him and i almost joke from time to time about who's more on top of the news so i'd say rowan's rundown newsletter i love it And is there a YouTuber that inspires you right now? Corridor Crew. I love Corridor Crew channel. Yeah. They're so good. They're so great. Yeah. What do you do for fun when you're not seven days a week? It's the same day of the week. What do you do for fun? Um, well, if I'm home, I play video games. I'm a gamer. We camp a lot. We have a trailer. So we take our trailer out to the desert or to like the local mountains, like, you know, Big Bear, wherever, and go camping with our trailer. So we camp a lot. I go fly my drones when we camp. And then when I'm around at home, I'm either playing with my kids or playing video games or both at the same time. I love that. What video game are you into right now? I'm really into like more indie style games that. The two games I've been playing the most lately are a game called Vampire Hunters and a game called Stardew Valley. Okay. I love that. Caleb's into soccer, I guess. Whether it's Rocket League or FIFA. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when I am playing, like, a bigger game, like, we have Switch, so I like, like, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I love those games a lot. So good. This is the, I have a Korok seed that lives on my keychain. It's made of. That's funny. my wife has a little sticker on her car of a corax seed and under it it says ha ha ha you found me i love that so much that's so great i'm gonna go find the xerox seat real quick it's so cute it's funny too because we were at this like um fair in downtown burbank and uh went up to this vendor and i was like it's crocheted and i was like is that a corax seed and she was like you're the only person who has guessed that that's awesome you it's so cool it's so cute yeah a lot of people if they don't know breath of the wild they're like um what is that so we have to uh clarify you know because i played breath of the wild for four months before i was given the um divine beast mission and so caleb was like what have you been doing and i was like i have so many apples in my cart like my basket is full like you don't even know like that's what i do i collect apple yeah you For me, I like I try to like speed run it to like win the game as fast as possible. But my wife's like that completionist where she does like every single side mission before even going to the bosses. We're the exact same. Caleb is like you. It's great. So fun. Amazing. I have Caleb. I don't know if you had any rapid fire questions or other questions. I don't have any rapid fire questions. But if people want to learn more about you or follow you online, where can they go? Yeah, just check out the YouTube channel. Just search up Matt Wolf. You'll find me. I've got the Future Tools website as well, where I curate all the cool AI tools and news. Those are probably the two best places. And anything else I'm doing will be linked from one of those two places. So you'll probably find them as well. But yeah, that's probably the best place to go. That's awesome. And we'll put a link in this video so that you guys can go directly to Matt's channel. And quick confession. So every time we do these podcasts, I always... like to you know use language models to help us craft the the questions and i was curious about llama 3 because you know zuck was like oh it integrates with the live data it's super updated and so i'm like okay we're gonna have matt wolf on the podcast like do you have any cool questions and it thought that you were like in hollywood and it thought that you were like some sort of like big time producer out here and i'm like no not that matt wolf the ai one he's like oh the bat wolf that works at meta yes like here's the questions for matt you I'm just like, what is happening? Well, the funny thing is Matt Wolf's a fairly common name, but some of the Matt Wolf's I don't want to be associated with. So there's a Matt Wolf that's a golfer. If you Google my Matt Wolf, you'll find me and the golfer. But there's also an adult film star named Matt Wolf, which I have a Google alert set up on Matt Wolf, and the adult film star comes up almost as much as I do. So, yeah, that's fun. Oh, no. But. Yeah, I'm not going to ask any further questions about that. I don't even know what they look like. I've never once clicked. I'm being honest. I refuse. Caleb Ward is also like a bodybuilder, I think. So that's in your search. Honestly, that's preferable, though. I don't think anyone's going to confuse that Caleb Ward with me. Oh, man. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the podcast. We really appreciate it. We will, of course, link to your channel. Thank you so much for everything you're doing, not only for the creative community, but like society at large. I think it's so important to have people that are helping people to contextualize and for people that share the same sentiment that you have related to not wanting to push into fear, but pushing the curiosity. It's very noble. And I love that you. take that approach. So thank you so much, man. Yeah, I appreciate it. This has been a super fun podcast, probably one of my funnest podcasts I've been on. So I really appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. I've watched a lot of your videos and podcasts as well. So, you know, we're all in the same tribe. And I love it. I love that we're all raising ships together. So appreciate you having me on. I've had a really good time today. Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you so much for your time. And I wish you a lot of fun playing video games with your kids and some downtime. You deserve it. I appreciate it.

AI is being used for scripting, for shooting and producing movies. AI is being used for everything. Hollywood production is being transformed by artificial intelligence. Welcome back to episode 11 of the Curious Refuge podcast. We are extremely excited about today's guest, Matt Wolfe.

Matt is my personal AI hero. He is at the forefront of integrating AI into creative and business workflows. He has one of the largest, if not the largest AI following online, and he has almost 600... thousand YouTube subscribers, which is wild, Matt. Congratulations on that.

Matt is also the host of the Next Wave podcast with Nathan Lanz, where they cover how to integrate AI into businesses. And Matt is also the founder of futuretools.io, a website that highlights over 2700 of the latest and greatest AI tools. And he lets users vote their favorite and they use their tool all the time. to check out cool AI tools. So Matt, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I always love to nerd out about AI with fellow AI nerds, I guess. Hopefully you're okay being called that. Yes, I think that is safe to say at this point.

And it's fun to finally hang out with you because we basically hang out with you every lunch day. You and Tim Simmons were like, okay, we've watched. Tim's videos, I watch Matt's, so it's nice to hang in person. Yeah, yeah. And we've got a Discord now, too, where we all chat a little bit as well.

That's so true. Exactly. Where we talk about click-through rates and data and all the really exciting stuff. YouTube metrics and invalid traffic bugs and whatnot. Yeah.

It's amazing. YouTubers are some of the most data-minded people on the planet. It's incredible the amount of plot.

that goes into something so benign like a thumbnail or a title oh yeah yeah i mean it's it's crazy we're all trying to like optimize to get that you know extra hundred views out of every single video you know yeah it's like every release it's like oh this is this is seven of ten we need to update the thumbnail like we've got to change this title to really work this video yeah yeah i mean when it comes to youtube if i'm being honest i wish they would just get rid of the like one of ten 10 of 10 like i don't want to see it it just drives too much like anxiety for me right like you see a 9 out of 10 you're like no what do i need to do i don't know if you feel this way but whenever we put out a video and even if it's not you know let's just say it's like 5 of 10 just like completely average for us my first thought isn't like good job we did it guys we made like something that is performingly average for our channel people are enjoying it it's always like people hate us now uh whether we have no spot in the industry anymore what are we doing like i don't know if it's that way with you oh yeah yeah i mean i have like a mini version of that pretty much every time i publish a video and then when i look at the comments right we were joking before we hit record about the comments i'm like yeah don't don't show people the comments i mean the reality is probably 95 of the comments on like all of our channels are pretty good comments but my brain focuses on the five percent and i start thinking everybody hates this video yeah you Yes, totally. Totally. It's the perils of being a YouTuber.

And just the waves of scarcity that come like, yeah, every time. It's just like, this is the last one. That one video was the last one.

We're not going to be able to do it again. Yeah. Yeah.

That was the end of our run. It's been fun. Exactly.

Yeah. So hopefully this is a lesson to anyone listening to this. You know, you never get past that feeling of scarcity or inadequacy or imposter syndrome.

It's always been. there. Oh, yeah.

No, I've seen interviews with, you know, Marques Brownlee and Mr. Beast and some of these people, and they still talk about that stuff. So, yeah, like even at the top, top, top of the tier on YouTube, everybody's still thinking that way. I would love to transition because I definitely want to hear about your background and all that good stuff.

But, you know, really, if we could press into that, that kind of imposter syndrome, what am I doing here? What's happening? You know, that really, you know, anytime you're innovating in any industry, that's going to pop up.

But with AI specifically, it's a very different beast because not only is it uncharted territory, but at least for us, and I'd be curious about your perspective, Matt, people, especially if you're in the business of context and helping people to understand what is happening with tools and technology, a lot of times people want you to also project into the future. And they'll be like, where are things going? And how is the world going to change?

What job should I get? All these really high level questions. And I don't know.

know about you, how have you dealt with those questions and that kind of propulsion to that figurehead status? And do you feel imposter syndrome in that regard too? I do. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's hard not to when it's like the people building a lot of these AI systems and products, you can ask them a lot of the questions and they'll tell you, I don't know where this is headed. Some of them don't even know how the technology they're building works. Right. A lot of this stuff is like these magic black boxes where even the engineers on them couldn't accurately explain to you what's going on underneath the hood.

Right. So it's like everybody in the AI space is kind of trying to figure out what's going on right now. Right. Um, but yeah, I definitely get the imposter syndrome. I try to make predictions, but I always say like, I'm going to tell you right now, my predictions are usually wrong.

I'll say something like, I think this is going to happen within the next two years. And then three months later, that thing happens. Right.

And I'm like, okay, my timelines are just way off. So I like making predictions. I think a lot of times the predictions that I make, you know, they'll be accurate, but the timelines will be way off. Right. So it's like, everything just happened so much faster than I.

than I think it's going to happen. But yeah, I mean, I kind of enjoy the, you know, the theorizing and the sort of speculation of where it's all going to go. I find a lot of enjoyment in those discussions.

But, you know, I always, you know, put it out there with a grain of salt and say, I also have no idea what I'm talking about and probably am wrong on most of this. Don't quote me in a year, but. It's so funny to me from having those conversations with developers. as well to realize that truly in these back rooms, no one knows what is happening.

Because I definitely think there's this assumption that, you know, oh, OpenAI or any other company has this big master plan, and everything is being perfectly choreographed down to the, you know, product release and, and, you know, everything is in their control. And yet so much of this, this new world, and I think why it's so exciting is the fact that Everyone is reactive, you know, and especially like with some of these tools, a lot of times, rather than going through crazy beta testing, they're just putting it out into the community to seeing what people do with it. It's a complete change in the way that we deal with technology.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I feel like like even with chat GPT, when chat GPT came out in, I think, November of 22. Right. That was essentially like a giant public beta test.

Right. They put it out into the world thinking not that. many people were going to jump on board or know about it.

We all know how that went. It became, you know, the fastest growing launch like ever in history of any sort of tech product. But they actually put that out there saying, look, we don't know how this is going to work.

We don't know how people are going to use it yet, what use cases they're going to use it for. We don't know what's going to happen when we put this out into the world. And they just put it out there, found out, okay, everybody wants this. And as they started to figure out the use cases that people started to use it for, they started kind of. of dialing it in towards those use cases.

So, you know, even the biggest of the companies out there that are developing and putting this stuff out into the world are still just kind of figuring it out as they go along. And I'm so curious for you, because I think you do better than anyone else on the planet at contextualizing the news and the technology and kind of, you know, what does this mean? You know, Lama 3 came out, like, you know, was it a surprise? No, it wasn't a surprise.

We knew about it like all along. And it really was like you have a finger on the pulse of everything that's happening. But I guess my bigger question is, how in the world are you able to keep up with everything that's happening? Because it feels like there's 100 new news announcements every single day. Yeah, well, I mean, I did make it my full-time job, right?

So, like, it is literally all I do now is just kind of research and keep my finger on the pulse. But, you know, like, the actual tactical, practical ways that I'm keeping my finger on the pulse is I'm subscribed to, like, every AI. blog that's out there, right? Like I've got a RSS feed reader called feedly that I use.

And on there, I'm subscribed to like tech crunch, but it sort of filters just the AI stuff from tech crunch and the verge and just the AI stuff from the verge. I pay for all of the, you know, the newsletters that you have to pay for, you know, the Bloomberg's and the information's and all of those kinds of sites so that I can kind of keep my finger on the pulse of what they're talking about. I'm on X, your Twitter all the time. I created a curated list of people talking about AI.

I'm scrolling that list throughout the day to see if anything pops up. I'm jumping on phone calls a lot of times with a lot of founders and CEOs. That's one of the things that led me to wanting to launch a podcast is I'm having conversations with all of these CEOs and engineers and people building this stuff.

And I'm like, these are fascinating conversations. They should be shared with the world, right? So that's really kind of how I'm doing it.

It's mostly just an RSS feed reader. And I am scrolling the news in my feed reader every day. I am scrolling my X list every single day.

I'm on all of the AI newsletters. You know, Rowan Chung, the Rundown is a really great newsletter. The Neuron from Pete Huang is a really good newsletter. There's a handful of AI newsletters that I'm subscribed to. You know, I use those to make sure I'm not missing anything, right?

I'm kind of scrolling the news and then I'll check their newsletter and go, did they find anything that I didn't come up with? But yeah, I mean, it's honestly, it's just, it's my full-time thing now. I pretty much spend, I'd say about four hours a day, just reading news, reading Twitter, reading the newsletters, just going down the rabbit hole. That's seven days a week, every day.

I'm just kind of making sure I'm looped in every day. How do you manage the overwhelm? Because I imagine that is a lot. Seven days a week, four hours a day, seeing what's new and trying to contextualize that for your community.

I know we are doing that as well, and it is a lot. And so how do you manage that? Yeah, so it's funny because the Future Tools website that I have was literally built. To help me manage that stuff, right?

It's got a list of tools that are organized and filtered, and you can like filter down to just the video tools, just the music tools. I literally built that not thinking anybody else would ever look at that website. I built it because I was kind of coming across cool tools, putting them in a spreadsheet going, okay, this is a cool tool. I can make a YouTube video about in the future.

And I was just keeping a spreadsheet of it, but it got to the point where the spreadsheet was so big. I couldn't find anything anymore. You know, I, I didn't know what I was looking at anymore.

So I literally built Future Tools as a tool for me to sort of sort and organize all of the tools that I came across. And so that's one way that I kind of keep my finger on it. And then I created the news page on Future Tools.

Whenever I come across any news that I'm like, this is really interesting. I want to talk about this on my Friday news video. I save it to the news section of the Future Tools website.

So that website, for the most part, is like fully still run by me. I put every tool on there. I put every piece of news on there myself because I built it to keep my finger on the pulse. Like, that's why it's there. As soon as I hand it off to somebody else, my finger is no longer on the pulse of everything.

And when did you start learning about AI tools and start building this spreadsheet for the first time? So I started in July of 2001 was around the time I can like specifically say I started putting out content. I was probably. interested in it and looking into it a little bit before that but july 2001 was the first time i ever put out any content around ai um it was back when um jasper which was previously jarvis which was previously conversion.ai it was back it was around that time when that was getting really popular and that was using gpt3 under the hood to help you use ai to write content and my previous life I've always been a content marketer. I've been doing full-time content marketing since 2009. So I've been, what I'm doing now, I've been doing for 15 years now.

But prior to 2001, I was more focused on like how to blog, how to set up WordPress blogs, all the WordPress plugins. So in the same way, I keep my finger on the pulse of AI right now. I was keeping my finger on the pulse of all the latest plugins for WordPress and the latest themes and updates for WordPress.

It's kind of always been like the sort of realm that I played in. And so I started playing around with, Jasper as a way to sort of speed up a blog content creation, use Jasper to write the rough draft. Once you have the rough draft, go in, tweak it, add your own voice to it and, you know, dial it in the way you want it.

And so that was kind of the beginning of when I started going down the rabbit hole. And then in October of 2022 was when I came across mid journey and stable diffusion. I think I came across mid journey first played with that.

Well, this is really cool, but it's not super customizable. How do I go even deeper with it? Learned about stable diffusion, learned about dream booth. That was where I learned how to like actually train my face into the stable diffusion model. I started making YouTube thumbnails that were like these crazy over the top cartoony thumbnails, but with my face in them.

And, um, you know, I think those thumbnails were a little bit of a catalyst for the growth of the YouTube channel. And then I just kind of went all in from there. So, uh, July of 2021 was when I started to go down the rabbit hole.

October is when I went like. all right i'm going all in on this that's amazing well it's wild to me that you were covering ai in 2001 i mean ai has been around since the 50s technically but like that is a really early time so it's 2021 so i mean really three years now oh yeah i think it's the 2001 i might have if i did i misspoke it's 2021 Well, some of the people we talk with, they truly are like, yes, we were like, you know, developing AI systems in the 80s. And it's like, OK, man, like, that's cool. In 2001, I was a senior in high school. So if I did say that I was misspoken, I was more into smoking weed and listening to music.

So that's a different era. You are 10 years old and I love that. And okay, so, so many things to unpack there.

I think there's like a lot of different paths that we could go down. The first one that I really want to draw attention to is the fact that you were in content marketing before you started contextualizing all this stuff, because that's my background as well was in doing yes, storytelling and filmmaking, but also content marketing. And I wonder if there's some sort of secret here, because content marketers typically have to be really efficient and proficient in so many different creative disciplines, because you got to do a blog post and a PDF and a free course and, you know, a video.

And there's so many things that you have your hands on. But with AI, it's like your creative potential gets elevated. So I wonder, like, if you could talk to like, how do you feel like your skills in developing, you know, your, let's say, just like SEO skills or blog writing skills translated to this AI revolution?

And are you able to draw from that in your creativity today? Yeah, well, I think you know, doing a lot of content marketing over the years. I've done a lot of blog writing. I've, I had a podcast from 2010 all the way to 2022 is when I stepped away from that podcast.

Um, my cohost of that podcast actually still runs it is called the hustle and flow chart podcast. Um, but I stepped away from that podcast. I was doing YouTube videos.

My first video I ever published on YouTube was also in 2009. Um, so I've been doing that for a long time. And I would say as far as like the content creation around AI now. I really sort of developed that skill set, right?

Like you develop a skill set of feeling comfortable on camera. You develop a skill set of learning how to edit the videos better and learn how to like do the little tricks to, you know, keep retention higher. And so I learned a lot of those strategies over the years.

I think, you know, the reason I got into AI was because it was helping me be a better content marketer, right? I was able to use tools like Jasper to more easily write. good blog posts, right?

I was using tools like chat GPT to help me brainstorm ideas for Google ads or whatever, right. Or, or help me up, come up with ideas for new blog posts. I can say, Hey, these 10 blog posts worked really well on my website.

What blog posts should I write next? Given the context that this, this is what worked, right? So it helped me become a better content marketer. So I started teaching AI in the context of content marketing, and then just started going further and further down the rabbit hole until Eventually, people saw me as the AI guy.

And then I stopped being so AI as it relates to content marketing. That's so interesting. And I feel like so many companies now have a person on their team that is that person, that is the one that's venturing into AI. And they're probably one of the most exciting people at the company because you figure out all these creative ways that you're like, oh my gosh, the processes that we had.

If we integrate AI into them, we can. do them faster or better or with more iteration. And it feels like there's a lot of opportunity here for people who think like yourself.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's funny. I taught my dad about chat GPT and he runs a window covering company and he I showed him chat GPT and now he doesn't write his own emails anymore.

He lets chat GPT write up for him. But I think there's so many companies out there that are still just kind of oblivious to the fact that life could be way easier if you. look into this stuff. Well, and I think that's really interesting to talk about, you know, because while it feels like in our bubble, everyone's using AI and they're all in and they're just like spending four to five hours a day reading the news and like they're so excited. That is absolutely not the case for most people in society.

And I don't know if you've gone to events and seen this, but you start chatting with people that are part of traditional industries, and it's like only small fractions of people are actually integrating this. into their day-to-day life. So I'm curious from your perspective, why is that?

Do you feel like that's going to change sometime soon? And how do we help to educate people about these tools? Yeah. I mean, it's a good question.

I think a lot of, especially brick and mortar businesses, I think they kind of just tend to fall into their habits of like, this is the way we've always done it. So this is the way we're going to keep on doing it. I was surprised.

I actually did a presentation at Social Media Marketing World and... I think there was like 2000 people there. And I gave a presentation where I was just showing off AI tools.

Like every slide was just like a different AI tool. Right. And I was hearing like audible gasps from the audience.

Every time I like showed off a new tool because, um, yeah, I showed off Sora like two days after Sora video was shown off. And I showed that on stage and everybody was like, Oh my, like the, the crowd was like going nuts for it. I showed off.

Hey, Jen, where I, you know, translated myself into Japanese and Spanish. And, and, German and I showed all these variations on stage. I showed off Suno where I made a song for social media marketing world.

I made like a social media marketing world theme song and played that on stage. And people were just blown away. And it's funny because from my perspective, I'm like, the people I talk to, like, this is all old news to us. But yeah, it's so interesting. I don't know exactly why a lot of companies aren't embracing it.

I do know that from a lot of the conversations I've had, there is still a lot of fear. I think a lot of people are afraid if I start using AI in my company, am I going to lose control? Is it?

you know, privacy concerns are a big thing. You know, you see the companies that are the biggest names in the AI world, right? Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, who is essentially owned by Microsoft, right?

They're all worried that where's my data going? If I start sharing company information, are other people going to get access to this company information that I'm sharing? Right? So I think there's a lot of like fear around it. A lot of people are worried about the privacy concerns.

A lot of people are worried about it being something that could potentially replace them in the future. Personally, I think that should be what we strive for. Like, let it replace us.

Let it do the work that we don't want to do so we can all focus on the work that we want to be doing. And let's like build a society where everybody's doing what they actually enjoy doing. But yeah, I think it's fear and ignorance, right?

A lot of people just don't even know it exists. They're not paying attention. They're, you know, my dad's not sitting around watching YouTube videos.

My dad's... I don't even know if my dad's ever seen one of my YouTube videos and I've been doing YouTube for 15 years. And I don't think he's ever even seen one of my videos, right?

Like a lot of these business owners that are in this like, you know, traditional world, they don't know about Curious Refuge. They don't know about the Matt Wolf Show or, you know, Matt VidPro or any of these other people making AI videos. That's just not the world they operate in.

So I think it's just those two things. There's fear and there's ignorance. I think it's mostly those two.

When... Caleb, I think at one point he was like on his grandfather's computer and went to a video, a YouTube video of Curious Refuge. Or maybe you subscribe to our channel.

And so now every time his pawpaw goes on the computer, he sees a new video from Caleb. And he's just like, Caleb, you're everywhere. What's funny, as content marketers, that's like one thing I think we learned to do a long time ago is make it look like we're everywhere to the people that discover us the one time. If you've done like... Facebook ads and you learn about retargeting and stuff like that, you can make it look like you are everywhere to like the one person that saw your website.

And I, and you know, I think, um, that's really kind of fun to do. Um, talking a bit about fear. Um, so another thing we've been talking about just the last few days, I think it was on like Tim Ferriss's podcast, but basically there was this quote about how the opposite of fear is not, um, or the opposite of anxiety even is not calm, but it's.

creativity and curiosity. And so I think that's really interesting. And I think for in my own experience, that has been so true when it comes to AI. Curiosity and creativity have really helped ease any hesitations I had in the beginning.

My experience has been supporting traditional artists and VFX and animation. And so for me, it was a little bit like, oh man, this is a big deal. This is changing the way people I work with are doing their work. And so So I felt that I went through two months probably of like my paradigm shifting into this new kind of AI world. And I would say I definitely felt fear.

But in hopping in myself and exploring, it really helped me to that lifted. And I got to see, oh, like truly a tool that I have to work with as a creative person. And so I'm curious about you and your experience. Was there ever a time that you did feel that hesitation yourself?

Or do you feel like you came embracing it pretty early on? I'd love to hear. I do feel like I've probably, you know, embraced it pretty early on, but I've almost always played with AI as like a fun toy more than anything, right?

Like my early videos about AI were me making silly videos where I, you know, injected my face onto images or, you know, used AI to make myself dance in like a silly video. Like I was using it a lot for like fun, entertaining stuff. So when I first started going down the AI rabbit hole, it was not even. on my radar that this could be a controversial area.

Like that did not even cross my mind. I was just like, this is fun for me. This is fun to make AI songs.

This is really fun to go and generate any image that I can imagine and maybe even inject my face into that image. I, that was like the perspective I went into this stuff with, but as I made more and more videos and as the videos got more and more popular and I was reading the comments and you know, people on, on Twitter. ex started responding to some of this stuff.

And then I started to realize, oh, this is actually something that people are scared of. This is something that a lot of people are worried is going to take their jobs. And.

So it was after I was already kind of doing AI stuff for a little while that I started to realize like, okay, this is, I need to take it a little bit more seriously. And I think I need to approach it with a little more empathy to the people that are worried about it. And so, you know, over time, my approach to the content has become much more of this empathetic approach of, I'm not going to talk about this stuff as like, get on board with AI or, you know, get left behind.

I really, really don't like that narrative. I think. Um, that narrative only creates more resistance from the people that are afraid of it.

I think, um, I think the narrative needs to be, you know, shifted a little bit more. I think the narrative needs to be that, um, you know, a, it's a tool, right? Whatever you're doing, if you do it well right now, this just gives you new superpowers to do it even better.

I think that needs to be kind of the narrative. And also I do think it's true that this stuff is coming. This tech is coming, whether you like it or not. So I do sort of agree that. You kind of need to get on board or get left behind.

But I don't think that that's the proper narrative to bring people on board. I don't think that's the proper onboarding narrative to get people excited about AI. So I don't know. I just think it's like we got to navigate it in a way that's both showing how fun and how powerful it can be, but also being very empathetic to the people that are worried about it.

Yeah, it's it's so interesting. And Caleb, maybe we can talk a bit about like. we've been creating this game and we just hosted an e-sports event in Vegas where we had people who maybe have experience in AI, who have never seen any AI tools come into this, you know, e-sports arena and watch people use Leonardo and see the real-time generation happen before them and really get exposure to these tools and see that there's these artists that are kind of pushing the creative in a direction and seeing that live generation. And it was so fun to watch people just like gasp and react and just get so excited throughout this experience because it is really fun and incredibly entertaining. But I think it was having it displayed in that kind of game collaborative way definitely helped it to like break a barrier, you know?

Yeah, no, that's very cool. I heard about the game. You guys talked about it in the Discord.

that sounds like a really fun idea i think aren't you guys even talking about possibly making that like a like something you do like on live streams or on youtube or something like that yeah we're we're in conversations with like maybe setting up an esports league for creative ai tournaments and like making it into something like really big uh so we should uh we we should chat i would love to set up something i don't know in la or san diego like you know host like a meetup for all the ai nerds to like get together it'd be really fun yeah yeah that'd be really cool that'd be really cool so fun Yeah, it was a problem. People are already like, when's the next one? So we can't wait to do it again. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, you know, kind of going back to the original conversation, I just think it's so interesting that I kind of started making YouTube videos just as like a silly, like, hey, this is like a silly tech that's just fun to play with. And now I find myself like, I was on, I've been on two different panels now at two different events. where we were talking about ethics and AI.

And I'm like, how did I land here? You're like, I'm just trying to turn myself into cartoon characters. Exactly.

Hold on, I should not be creating policy. Yeah. You're like, okay, so earlier on this call, I don't know what this tiny screen is behind you, but it's playing memes every now and then. And there was the Homer Simpson disappearing into the crowd.

And I was like, that's Matt. Yeah. That's how I feel when I go to events, honestly. I really do. I think it's funny.

Quick question about that. Have you ever been out in society and someone was like, oh my god, are you Matt Wolf? If you're just walking around San Diego.

Yeah. It's actually happening more and more often. But the craziest story is we have some new neighbors that moved in across the street.

Literally, they've been there, I don't know, maybe four or five weeks now. Um, and, uh, when the neighbors came over to introduce themselves, they, I answered the door and the Nate, the new neighbor was like, oh my God, you're Matt Wolf. I watch your YouTube channel and he lives directly across the street from my house. And I'm like, that's cool.

But this is also kind of awkward. I don't know what to say to that. It's so funny. Uh, so yeah, that happened.

Um, I would say the majority of the times though, it's when I'm at events, right? Like if I was, when I was at NVIDIA's GTC event, I was at South by Southwest. uh speaking on some ai panels there when i was at those events i would bump into people to be like hey i watch your youtube channel but i mean it's like that's like the tech nerds all converging in one spot so it's i guess it's kind of to be expected it doesn't happen very often just like in normal day-to-day life yeah once you hit a million i i really think that's gonna be you're gonna have to have a security guard going with you everywhere it used to happen for caleb with after effects um because he was on a few different channels uh creating after effects tutorials but i think it's happened once with your with youtube in yeah yeah yeah i i feel like being nerd famous is you Better than being regular because it's like, I don't know, you just get to like geek out with somebody.

It's not like someone's like... You can still go to Trader Joe's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. As long as you just need to double check that the person didn't purchase the house because it was across the street from you.

That would be... Yeah, yeah, I know. That's a good point. So I guess just shifting gears a little bit, you really, it feels like you're really on the forefront now for contextualizing AI for businesses.

You know, I know that you have some... and partnerships with HubSpot. And you've really been pressing into not just marketing, but just business in general and productivity.

I'm curious with the current technology that we have right now, are there any specific areas when you're talking to a business or when you're thinking about creating AI processes that you think that AI is really good at currently, whether it's large language models or image generation or advertising? And are there things that AI is not so good at that maybe we need to wait on? Yeah.

You know, it's funny. So when it comes to like AI in the business use cases, that's actually probably more HubSpot's influence than anything. Right. Like so when I started working with HubSpot, they they approached us about being Nathan about doing a podcast together.

And we're like, yeah, we'd love to. We want to get like the engineers from some of these companies building the AIs. We want to talk to a lot of them.

And they're like. cool, let's do it. And then when we started recording some episodes, they started saying, hey, you know HubSpot has a small business audience. We need to make sure that these episodes cater to them a little bit.

So a lot of the over, they saw me as like, okay, Matt's been doing content marketing for 15 years. HubSpot primarily built their entire business off of content marketing. And now they're trying to push into AI.

So they're like, okay, Matt, Nathan, they're those guys that have that overlap. Let's see if we can get them to talk about that stuff. So that's, that's really like a lot of their influence. But, you know, to answer the question, one of the areas I still think that AI is not amazing at, and this is, this could be controversial.

I don't know is I actually still think AI sucks at like writing good content. I actually don't think it's very good at writing good content. I think it's decent at writing like a good rough draft or a good outline that you can go and iterate off of and go and, you know, put your own voice into it. But But it uses words that like no human types that way.

Like I can read an article and go, okay, I know that was written by like chat GPT or Claude because no human is going to use those adjectives that they used in this. So I actually don't really think it's that great at writing, which, you know, a large language model, you would think that would be the thing it does best right now. Right now, I think the area where AI is excelling and I think probably most helpful to people is probably in the art side, right?

If you need to make. Facebook ads, if you need to make Google display ads or banner ads or YouTube thumbnails or things like that, leveraging AI to help with those workflows can save you hours and hours and hours of screwing around in Photoshop to get the right composition, right? So I think the area that it's probably helping the people the most is probably in the graphic design, like art area.

And one of the areas where I wish people would stop using it is like stop letting ChatGPT write your blog posts for you because everybody can tell at this point. Yes. And your outbound emails, I get so many emails in my inbox that are so clearly written by chat GPT.

It drives me crazy. Exactly. Exactly.

I'm really excited about like the video stuff like Sora and stuff like that. Like that to me, when that comes out, that's going to be really, really fun. Also scary, right? Like, you know, especially here in the US coming into election season, like, how are they gonna, you know, make sure it's used it like that's the whole conversation that I think is the toughest for me is like, where should the guardrails lie because like part of me wants it to be like completely uncensored let me do whatever i want but then the other part of me goes i totally understand why you don't want to be able to do that so like that's where that's where i kind of struggle the most is like where the guardrails should land absolutely it definitely feels like some countries aren't they're trying to completely get rid of guardrails like japan saying that you're not even legally allowed to sue if somebody uh wants to bring a lawsuit up about their work being used to train AI models because they're trying to get rid of guardrails. And so it's so interesting because it feels like a day in AI is like a month previously.

And any small head start that any country or company has really begins to exponentially compound very quickly. Yeah. Yeah.

And I, and I think if you're looking at it on like the macro scale, I think we almost need like the, like we need globally everybody to kind of get on the same page. Right. Because like if one country is allowed to do certain things and has the capability to use these models, however they want, but other countries are excluded from that, you know, it gives advantages where others have disadvantages. And, um, you know, it's, I don't really want to go down like the, the. sort of more dystopian rabbit hole but um you know you don't want to have like uh sort of some countries overpowered in this technology where other countries are less powered in this technology i think there needs to almost be like sort of a global like handshake of like this is how we're going to treat this stuff which is that ever going to happen i don't know i don't really in the current climate i don't know if i really see that anytime real soon yeah we'll we'll see i hopefully humans uh come together and we cooperate, but we don't have a good track record at this point.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it takes like a global threat to bring the globe together, right? Like in the same way, like when some major tragedy happened to the US, it brings the US together. You need something that's happening on a global scale to bring the globe together.

And AI could be that, right? Avoiding Skynet could be that. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I'm really curious. I love that you brought up Sora. What are your initial... thoughts about the model outside of like this is just amazing and then what are some immediate practical uh implications or ways in which you think this might be integrated beyond just cool fever dream music videos yeah so i mean sora my initial thoughts on it were like this is just insanely impressive right like they were able to make really really realistic stuff i think the more they sort of dropped additional demos of what it was capable of i actually became less and less impressed over time Because it kind of showed that the initial stuff that they showed us was probably a little more cherry picked, right?

It was probably the things that are like, these are the best generations we've done. Let's show those off as the examples of what it's capable of. But, you know, as Sam Altman started to do more of the user generated prompting where he would go to Twitter and say, hey, what do you want me to generate?

And he would generate that stuff. We were starting to see a little bit more of the flaws and things like that. So I think what we're going to find is that. People are probably going to have a hard time getting like that realism right out of the box. It probably requires some special prompting.

I'm also really worried about the cost. I think it's really, really expensive to generate a video with Sora. I saw like a math breakdown earlier today where somebody said that they estimate it costs about 12 cents per frame. Right.

So if you're doing a video that's, let's say, 60, 60 frames per second, and it's like a one minute video. You do the math on that. Those costs add up really, really quick. You're talking like a couple hundred bucks to do a one minute video.

So I think obviously the processing needs to get better. Compute needs to come down. There's a lot of bottlenecks that are going to keep that from being something that's like really, really mainstream use.

But as far as like use cases, I think the use cases really are going to probably be like more of the sort of film industry use cases to fill like little gaps, right? Like. When you watch like a big hour and a half long movie, right?

Like every frame of that movie is usually only like three or four seconds long, right? Like five seconds is like a long time to keep on like one shot in a movie. So when you're generating something with Sora and you need to fill a three, five second gap, I think Sora is going to do a really good job of, all right, here's some really quick B roll that we can throw on screen for three seconds before moving on to this next scene that we actually shot. So I think we're going to see it used like that early on. I don't know if you guys saw the recent Adobe Premiere demo where they showed like they can extend a clip where they have a clip of somebody standing there, but maybe the clip doesn't go to the very end of the song and they want it to time with the song.

They can actually extend the clip and have the person sort of looking to the camera for an extra like two seconds. So I think I think that's where we'll see it being used. Like, I don't I don't really think there's a lot of really amazing AI generated videos out there where I go, OK, I want to go and see something like that in the theater. Right.

Like. I don't, and I don't see that coming for quite a while still, but I do think it can be used as like that gap filler to kind of fix little scenes in a movie. And then people like me are just going to figure out how to have fun with it. Like, what can I, what's the most outlandish thing I can generate? You know, like the wolves on Mars with, you know, aliens wandering around chasing it or whatever.

Right. Like I'm going to figure out how to do just like weird fun stuff with it. And so I think you're going to see those two sides.

You're going to see the people that actually need to sort of fill gaps in their video. And then you're going to see the people that are like. I just like having fun with this stuff, which is really where I tend to lean a little more.

But I think we're going to see those kinds of two, those two things really with it. And how has. working with AI tools influenced your creativity? Because it sounds like you're like thinking, you know, let's create, you know, wolves on Mars. Like, I don't know, is that like, how do you come at ideas?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I just love to kind of think of stuff that I feel like would be hard to make and then go and figure out what tools I can use to make it, right? Like I almost approach it as like, I don't know what tools I can use to accomplish this thing I want to accomplish, but here's an idea. Let me see if I can go figure out some tools that'll...

do that thing right so that's kind of been my approach lately um you know in the beginning i would just i mean still to this day i do this where i'll go on like x and i'll find like funny memes that people made and i'll go how did they make that i need to figure this out so for me i'm just i'm very very curious right like everything i do comes from that place of curiosity like i find a meme and i go all right how did they make that meme i'm going to deep dive into it when i first came across jasper um several years ago i went all right I know the people that built Jasper. They're marketers. They're not coders. They're not machine learning engineers.

They're digital marketer people. How did they build a tool that's like on the forefront of AI right now? So I actually started digging in beneath the hood.

I learned about GPT-3. I learned about OpenAI's playground and how you can mess around with GPT-3 on the OpenAI playground. And I sort of reverse engineered how Jasper was built. And so that's kind of always the approach that I've taken and I probably will continue to take is I see something cool.

And then I want to reverse engineer it. Yeah, I totally agree. There's like nothing worse than like you lay your head on the pillow at night and you think of a video you watched and you're like, how did they do that? And your brain's going through all the technology and you're like, okay, if you plug this into that, you're like, no, that still doesn't make sense. Like it's very frustrating.

It's like, it reminds me of being a kid. My, my younger brother was so curious about how things were made. And so he would just take apart the cord of a lamp and like put it back together.

using like, you know, electrical tape. And like, it was great. I mean, he just was so curious, but it's similar, like with these tools. I love that.

Yeah, no, that was me for sure. Except I would take stuff apart. And then my parents would get pissed because I didn't know how to put it back together.

Right. So we would just have like things disassembled all over the house. My parents got mad because I disassembled the VCR and then nobody figured out how to put it back together.

So they had to buy a new VCR. And, you know, that, that was, that was definitely, that was definitely me. I hope that's not a metaphor for AI people tinkering with stuff, but not being able to put it back together.

I mean, there's probably some of that. So I would love to know, just very practically, you're talking about AI and creativity and how it's helpful for thumbnails and things like that. In your day-to-day workflow, how do you use AI to help your productivity? Whether it's like putting together YouTube or curation, like what are some of the practical ways in which you are personally utilizing AI?

Yeah, so I'm using AI all over the place, right? So when I mentioned Feedly to help me with, you know, find blog posts and articles about AI, Feedly also has an AI built into it. So it's almost like a better version of Google Alerts. You could go in there and you can say, hey, I want you to surface any articles that are about artificial intelligence, about...

machine learning, stable diffusion, generative art, right? You can give it these keywords and it will try to surface brand new articles that came out that day that mentioned these keywords. But then the AI portion comes in because you train it over time. You can say, I want more articles like this, less articles like this, more like this.

And so it sort of builds this feed for you of news articles that are only relevant to what you talk about. So I use that every single day with our thumbnails on YouTube. all AI, right? We either start with a mid journey image or a Dolly image, and then we pull it into stable diffusion. We use automatic 1111. Um, I have a fine tune model with my face in it.

So like I'll go and do face swaps with my own face on them. Um, I use chat GPT all the time to help with like ideas for titles and thumbnails. Usually they're not very great, but they'll give me like a nice little starting point to jump off. Right. Um, with YouTube, I think the hardest thing for me is coming up with titles.

Like that is. Probably the most difficult thing about YouTube for me is coming up with a title that I don't feel is like over the top clickbaity that's going to get people mad, but also good enough that it draws enough interest that they are going to want to click on it. Right. And like finding that balance is probably the hardest part about YouTube, in my opinion. So I'll use chat GPT to kind of help me with that element a lot.

I use chat GPT and Claude all the time as just like a consultant as well. I'll say, look, here's a problem I'm struggling with in the business. What should I do? I've got this team member that. you know, I'm, I'm struggling with, they're, they're, they're telling me that they can't do this because of X, Y, and Z.

How should I approach it? You know, and they'll give me advice on how to go back to that team member and, and, and talk to them. Um, you know in my videos one of the things i started doing is i started adding my own like suno generated songs into the background of videos where i'll do like a little montage and something will be going on and it'll be like a suno song playing over the montage or i started making suno songs as like the outro of my video so i'll finish the video and then like a song that i made in suno that says subscribe to matt wolf over and over again starts playing while i have like a weird ai image of myself dancing on screen right so Like I'm using AI like all day.

Future Tools is powered by AI as well. So when I do find a tool that I like that I think should be on Future Tools, I actually built an integration or a workflow on make.com, which if you're not familiar with that, it's similar like Zapier if you've ever used Zapier. But basically I built this integration where I can plug in a URL of a tool that I found.

And what it'll do is it'll go to that website. It uses a tool called Scraping Bee. to scrape all of the content off the page of the site.

And then it takes all that content, puts it into chat GPT, and then says, summarize this down into one paragraph that explains what this tool does. And then once it explains what that tool does, send that description over to Webflow, which is where my site's hosted. So when I find a cool tool that I want to share on there, I plug it into make, and it summarizes the tool and puts the description into Webflow for me. So AI is running behind the scenes on future tools as well. Amazing.

Amazing. It's amazing how you really can use these tools in such creative ways. I mean, this is such a simple idea.

But last night I was like, just kind of curious about on my explore feed, what my like, what's the theme of the images I like in mid journey? Right? Like, so I just had like, I took screenshots of like four times to get the, you know, enough there. And then I put it into chat was just like, Hey, can you summarize kind of the, the describe in a few words the aesthetic of these images and how they kind of go together and it said that my taste is whimsical surreal anthropomorphic vibrant playful imaginative quirky and dreamlike and so and most of my images i like are like animals wearing a raincoat you know like right like dream and so it makes sense but it's so now when you prompt stuff do you use all those extra like uh descriptors yeah it's like now when i'm prompting maybe i can use that to kind of create some consistency with like my style and taste right it's so funny but it's like you you really can't every day find a new way to use these tools which is amazing i don't know why in the back of my mind while you were describing that i was just thinking of those old books anamorphs you remember they like had a person that would like convert to a person it just like felt like the aesthetic of that book in a nutshell yeah yeah for sure um so let's uh Let's go ahead and kind of wind things down. I really don't want to take up too much of your time, but I appreciate the conversation.

We love to end these podcasts with some rapid fire questions. Just, you know, whatever's on the top of your mind. You don't have to think about it too quickly. So Shelby's going to give you some rapid fire questions and, you know, less than one sentence, just whatever comes to your mind. Cool.

Let's do it. So this first section is going to be what's your favorite? And of course, we're going to go with AI. So. What is your favorite language model?

Opus, Cloud3 Opus. Okay. What is your favorite image generator? Stable diffusion. Video generator.

Right now, probably Pika Labs. I don't know. Do you want longer sentences or do you just like want the one word response?

Okay, cool. This is great. If you want to go into more detail, you're more than welcome to. What is your favorite YouTuber tool? I use both TubeBuddy a lot and vidIQ a lot.

I like TubeBuddy because it helps me with a lot of the split testing stuff. And I like vidIQ because it shows me how well a video is doing relative to my other videos. It always shows like it's doing 1.2x compared to my average and stuff like that.

So I use both of those. I'd say those are pretty equal. And if you didn't have Feedly and you weren't subscribed to... it helping you like subscribe to all these newsletters and pull all this news what is the one newsletter you would maybe missing or want to make sure you're subscribed to as an individual newsletter i think the person who's doing it the best right now is rowan chung he's got a newsletter called the rundown um i think he's probably the most on top of it i think him and i almost joke from time to time about who's more on top of the news so i'd say rowan's rundown newsletter i love it And is there a YouTuber that inspires you right now?

Corridor Crew. I love Corridor Crew channel. Yeah.

They're so good. They're so great. Yeah.

What do you do for fun when you're not seven days a week? It's the same day of the week. What do you do for fun?

Um, well, if I'm home, I play video games. I'm a gamer. We camp a lot.

We have a trailer. So we take our trailer out to the desert or to like the local mountains, like, you know, Big Bear, wherever, and go camping with our trailer. So we camp a lot.

I go fly my drones when we camp. And then when I'm around at home, I'm either playing with my kids or playing video games or both at the same time. I love that.

What video game are you into right now? I'm really into like more indie style games that. The two games I've been playing the most lately are a game called Vampire Hunters and a game called Stardew Valley.

Okay. I love that. Caleb's into soccer, I guess. Whether it's Rocket League or FIFA. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, when I am playing, like, a bigger game, like, we have Switch, so I like, like, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I love those games a lot. So good.

This is the, I have a Korok seed that lives on my keychain. It's made of. That's funny.

my wife has a little sticker on her car of a corax seed and under it it says ha ha ha you found me i love that so much that's so great i'm gonna go find the xerox seat real quick it's so cute it's funny too because we were at this like um fair in downtown burbank and uh went up to this vendor and i was like it's crocheted and i was like is that a corax seed and she was like you're the only person who has guessed that that's awesome you it's so cool it's so cute yeah a lot of people if they don't know breath of the wild they're like um what is that so we have to uh clarify you know because i played breath of the wild for four months before i was given the um divine beast mission and so caleb was like what have you been doing and i was like i have so many apples in my cart like my basket is full like you don't even know like that's what i do i collect apple yeah you For me, I like I try to like speed run it to like win the game as fast as possible. But my wife's like that completionist where she does like every single side mission before even going to the bosses. We're the exact same.

Caleb is like you. It's great. So fun.

Amazing. I have Caleb. I don't know if you had any rapid fire questions or other questions. I don't have any rapid fire questions. But if people want to learn more about you or follow you online, where can they go?

Yeah, just check out the YouTube channel. Just search up Matt Wolf. You'll find me. I've got the Future Tools website as well, where I curate all the cool AI tools and news. Those are probably the two best places.

And anything else I'm doing will be linked from one of those two places. So you'll probably find them as well. But yeah, that's probably the best place to go.

That's awesome. And we'll put a link in this video so that you guys can go directly to Matt's channel. And quick confession. So every time we do these podcasts, I always... like to you know use language models to help us craft the the questions and i was curious about llama 3 because you know zuck was like oh it integrates with the live data it's super updated and so i'm like okay we're gonna have matt wolf on the podcast like do you have any cool questions and it thought that you were like in hollywood and it thought that you were like some sort of like big time producer out here and i'm like no not that matt wolf the ai one he's like oh the bat wolf that works at meta yes like here's the questions for matt you I'm just like, what is happening?

Well, the funny thing is Matt Wolf's a fairly common name, but some of the Matt Wolf's I don't want to be associated with. So there's a Matt Wolf that's a golfer. If you Google my Matt Wolf, you'll find me and the golfer.

But there's also an adult film star named Matt Wolf, which I have a Google alert set up on Matt Wolf, and the adult film star comes up almost as much as I do. So, yeah, that's fun. Oh, no.

But. Yeah, I'm not going to ask any further questions about that. I don't even know what they look like. I've never once clicked.

I'm being honest. I refuse. Caleb Ward is also like a bodybuilder, I think. So that's in your search. Honestly, that's preferable, though.

I don't think anyone's going to confuse that Caleb Ward with me. Oh, man. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the podcast.

We really appreciate it. We will, of course, link to your channel. Thank you so much for everything you're doing, not only for the creative community, but like society at large.

I think it's so important to have people that are helping people to contextualize and for people that share the same sentiment that you have related to not wanting to push into fear, but pushing the curiosity. It's very noble. And I love that you.

take that approach. So thank you so much, man. Yeah, I appreciate it.

This has been a super fun podcast, probably one of my funnest podcasts I've been on. So I really appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing.

I've watched a lot of your videos and podcasts as well. So, you know, we're all in the same tribe. And I love it.

I love that we're all raising ships together. So appreciate you having me on. I've had a really good time today.

Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you so much for your time. And I wish you a lot of fun playing video games with your kids and some downtime.

You deserve it. I appreciate it.

Transcript for:AI's Role in Creativity and Business

Transcript for:
AI's Role in Creativity and Business