The Founder who AUTOMATED Content Creation using AI with Varun Mayya | Bad Decisions Podcast #57

we covered the entire Apple event 15 minutes after it went live 15 minutes yeah you can check it's on Instagram 15 30 minutes within 15 30 minutes videoos live what this is Veron he's a builder founder and content creator that's using AI to create content at scale vun has developed the secret sauce to handle more than 1,000 videos every month generating millions of views across multiple platforms by integrating AI into his workflows 15 minutes from idea to distribution we got to break this down so I'll tell you how it works right so we get can

you explain exactly what you're doing on social media and exactly how you're using these tools I simply wasn't the most consistent content creator so I decided let me replace myself just me speaking and my face and my hand movement with AI a lot of people have access to the tools that you have access to what are the steps you took to fine tune let's talk about haen first we fine tuned so many haen models the point where we discarded this one secret that we've figured out go to chat GPT and ask it for the what

do you see the future of editing be with AI coming in I think footage is going to be solved at some point on the editing part your medium of instruction will change it'll become English you still need to tell the computer what to do if someone comes to you as a content creator and looks for advice I don't know if I would actually give the advice for somebody to be a content creator to make money off but I feel like what you guys are doing and what a lot of other content creators will do which

is you and your team have been successfully using artificial intelligence and Tech technology to help you create content at scale how have ai tools changed the way you and your team produce and distribute content Varon welcome to the bad decisions podcast is this a bad decision well we shall find out by the end of the episode and you have to tell us by the very end if it was a bad decision or not so I'm going to rate this on our decision scale but thank you so much for having me uh you know this has

been a long time coming I should have met you in Dubai the last time I was there yes uh we couldn't make it it was like I was I needed a more no the truth is Von ditched us okay we we told him to meet us and he like we were waiting we waiting we're waiting for hours and Von ditched us and so we we forced him to come on the podcast so that's that's the truth to that story but joke I'm going to be there next time I'm going to be there for sure do

you have any plans actually on coming to Dubai anytime soon no but uh you know we'll figure it out something comes up for the other like there might be a client there that might I might end up coming like I need an excuse to be there or or by the end of this podcast we become best friends and you come and visit us or we come up with a business idea that you have to come to Dubai to discuss it that makes sense yeah I'm sure one of those three things is going to happen that's

the chances are high well Von first of all we appreciate your time thank you so much for coming here with us and making this bad decision to join the podcast we have been wanting to speak with you for a very long time we're big uh you know big proponents of content creation technology and the advanc ments in technology and we covered that a lot on our Channel but you seem to do exactly the same thing at scale and with such incredible quality so first of all we just want to say congratulations because we see your

face on Instagram every single day you and your team are doing such incredible job at creating content and updating the world on the latest in technology and artificial intelligence video games for God's sake and even when whatever happened with Lebanon recently which was really sad you guys covered it but also the perspective you guys had on all the news is the craziest part about it so first of all congratulations on the crazy content that you guys are creating but second of all something that I'd like to talk about and fud and I have been discussing

is how you and your team have been successfully using artificial intelligence and Technology to help you create content at scale at amazing qualities so I guess the first topic that we want to discuss today is the impact of AI on content creation Varon how have ai tools changed the way you and your team produce and distribute content so I'm actually a very inconsistent content creator as a person because I feel like life just you know it's life like a lot of people you know this's this one question that people used to ask me right which

is if it's short form content if it's like one minute a day that's 7 minutes a week why can't you donate 7 minutes a week and do it consistently forever but no no one manages almost nobody puts out a video every single day right it's it's effort because it's context with sometimes you're traveling and you just don't have the time to get to the studio and shoot it's almost like you have a tether to the studio and you can't go too far away from it if you want to shoot content every day plus you got

to come up with new topics new ideas you got to do the research yourself you got to write yourself it is very painful so I think a couple of years ago I realized I realized from other content creators actually that the secret to winning on YouTube and Instagram are consistency sounds odd you be like wait it shouldn't be quality of content actually not really it's consistency because you can't tell which video is going to go viral like today we have some signals but you can't tell and you gain subscribers based on videos that do really

well right so unless you try 30 shots you don't like per month you don't know which are going to enter the hoop right and which ones are actually going to add 20,000 subscribers to you this month so it's that it's a game of that and the Lesser number of shots on goal the lower the likelihood that you're you know you have these videos that get we don't call them viral we call them super reach which is views more than the size of the you know the the follow count that we have so we said we

need to be consistent and I I know this is a stupid way to say this but I think AI really made us consistent because the minute you have an avatar and we use hen for the Avatar we we find tuned so many hen models to the point where we discarded so many of them and then we finally kept the good ones and I remember before haen we tried this tool called um wave to lip it's an open source model kind of we stitch lips on you to sync it to any audio you want it wasn't

great but when we saw it we were like yo in one year I want to be using this to replace myself I put a tweet about it February 2023 I put out a tweet about this 1.5 years ago and we even tried a video on my Instagram with wave to lip people could tell we were like well we'll just wait but when this happens when this opportunity is here we have to take advantage of it and then when hen came out it's like actually before hen Synthesia came out but it didn't really allow us make

our own avatars we tried other things but it looked kind of fake but hen was great especially with fine tuning we fine tuned so many models it was literally Brute Force till we got the right one right and today we know a lot of things right for example if you're moving your you you can't move your head more than like 45 degrees on either side lot of things right you can't blink too much you can't blink too little uh you have to speak in a very excited tone you got to like speak in an even

more excited tone than normal because AI sort of brings you you know down but the hard part was still audio because if you see some of the old videos we did automated the audio was still bad and we were using our own model at some point like the best model we found was RVC which is retrieval Bo cloning where we were able to take somebody else's voice like somebody in my team and sort of replicate my voice that was kind of good but it still required effort from somebody to somebody somebody else was tethered into

me yeah right and I had to be sort of the same person otherwise the tone is slightly different but then 11 Labs came out with a pretty good model and even now people struggle with 11 Labs because they haven't figured out this one secret that we've figured out I'm sorry I'm click baiting everybody but the one secret it's a very simple thing that we learned with Audio models which is it wasn't getting all our words right there was this one video where I said the word but the AI model had to say the word devote

right which is like this Indian thing where you know you're a devotee of something else and it just did it really badly it said tvot or something like that so we realize that it's all about coverage right it's all about can you cover most of the used words in the English language so we go to chat GPT it's very simple it's a secret go to chat GPT and it's very simple it's not really a secret I don't but I don't see anyone talking about it so I'll say it anyway you go to chat GPD and

you ask it to Output the list of all the commonly used words in the English language or all the commonly used words on YouTube it'll send you a list just read them out and put them back into 11 Labs that way you have coverage over 99% of what you'll say anyway and for certain specific words we sometimes do a top up on we know that okay these are 10 words you outside of the range that you're going to be talking about in this week so do a quick you know read out of those words for

the team and that's why the model is getting better over time it's genius wow and for anybody who doesn't know I'll just do a quick brief explanation about 11 Labs so 11 Labs is an AI tool that can generate text to audio it can do voice cloning basically is a library that you can create Voice through it we tried it we recreated Mr Beast Voice using using 11 Labs we tried Gandalf we even tried our voices one year ago when it wasn't that great but recently I think it improved a lot haen is another AI

tool which creates instant avatars basically you can create your lifelike Avatar which can speak on behalf of you yes and I think for context Varon because I know you you're so excited you went right into how you guys are using it can you explain exactly what you're doing on social media and and exactly how you're using these tools for people that have never never ever heard of these tools at all sure so what we do is like I said I simply wasn't the most consistent content creator so I decided let me repl myself the presenter

part just me speaking and my face and my hand movements and stuff with AI which is what happened and then we have an editing team so the editing team actually Ed edits it we also have a scripting and research team that sort of does the scripting does the research where I give some of my inputs as well and then it comes together as a nice little one minute video and we can do it fast we can do it in like 15 minutes after some news goes live we covered the entire Apple event like 15 minutes

after it went live wait video 15 minutes yeah you can check it's on Instagram 15 30 minutes within 15 30 minutes likeo wait that is faster than any sort of media speed I've ever seen in my life so your scripting so let's start with the idea right the idea of course you guys know Apple keynote is happening there will be something to talk about at there is some preparation yes so the scripting theme are they using AI tools to generate the script yeah so I'll tell you how it works right so we get let's say

four bullet points right we have we have an actual analyst going through the you know sort of video the the actual key keynote and saying here are the four bullet points here are the things that we think are important from the keynote then I add my insights to this so I add two more bullet points right sometimes I send a voice note sometimes I actually text I'm like hey the implication of this is a the implication of this is B we take that entire thing and we ask AI to expand those bullet points right into

cohesive script right teacher may I ask a question in the middle in the middle of your instruction have you trained chat GPT or any AI to also understand your way of talking about points okay so it's it's your own sort of opinions in the middle of those key points yes but what we have done and what we're working on we've tried a couple of videos of this in Claude I wrote a book a long time ago so we just fed that at context to Claude and we said talk like this person it's not great though

that's not great it's not prime time yet but I assume with one more leap in models it is possible we think with 01 when it allows us to feed in context this should be solved um so I think I mean our entire job now is to give those two insights this thing has already learned from my writing which in the future we'll sort of put out but for now it's chat GPT or CLA and then we have a script that comes out then we push the script to 11 Labs which has been trained on you

know my model I mean my my data and then it goes into hen sort of produces it then the editors do the job manually the overlay of videos overlay the editing subtitles something it's all AI assisted like all our Boll for example we do um flux Laura Plus cing flux flux I know what flux is that's the image generation model that Gro is also using at this point which creates these really photo realistic images but you mentioned another thing I have not heard of yeah so flux luras are when you can train flux on your

images so now I can prompt flux and say generate Von as a cowboy and it'll actually make me look like a cowboy and then we put that in cling which is another image to video generator we also have we sometimes use Runway so image to video that gives you b-roll with me in the b-roll so if I talk about Mars I can put me on Mars like smelling the flowers so that's Boll okay so that's Boll and then we have subscription to uh epidemic music and a bunch of like sound services so we're able to

use sound background music all of it we have like actually a bun we don't innovate too much on the background music it's like sometimes we use the valerant background music for example right so we like anything that we feel is usable in relatable we just use it we put it all together and yeah it's 15 minutes like we have seven editors on the team at this point right like on my team so that's for short form and yeah we put out a video every day and over the last like when Ricardo made that video uh

not Ricardo sorry when RP and Roberto made that video uh I think we were doing 25 million views a month now we're doing like close to 60 mil what wow that video that video is not made a long time ago that's just ago yeah a few weeks ago my Instagram just updated and showed me like 50 mil and YouTube were doing about 10 mil we also do long long form videos and with long form we recently tried we've always done it like with me in front of a camera and doing stuff because we feel like

people will tell but we made a video on vuong yes and we were debating we were debating like is he [ __ ] or it's not it's not you and let me tell you something as people who use Unreal Engine on a daily basis and create 3D avatars and know exactly what is real and what is not we had a hard time figuring that [ __ ] out but it's not you right it wasn't it wasn't yeah but the hand gesture in that video was very complex so at one point I saw you were doing

this got us the reason you remember it the reason you remember it because that frame repeated twice that was our bad no and we paid a lot of attention we did I mean we watched the video and then after seconds we were looking for we were looking for it I don't think anybody would realize that honestly I don't think anybody would realize that so yeah I mean that's we we did a long F Wukong it did the best on our Channel it did like 300K views so you know AI have brought me a lot of

humility I'm like I'm not really the useful person it's the content that actually drives traction I'm just like the medium um but it's it's incredible like being consistent has been awesome uh and it truly being consistent is a secret to being on YouTube or or Instagram whether you're doing it with AI whether you're doing it personally by the way AI avatars don't work for everybody else right like it works for me because I'm in the AI space and it's okay if I use an AI Avatar because people like okay get it but if let's say

you're Finance Creator and you start using AI kind of comes across is a little bit awkward until the model gets so good but the minute people know they get upset with me you're I'm breaking news right so it's like hey I want to know what happened to the iPhone event this is the fastest source to get that information from I'm doing what the media technically does right but doing it much much faster on video I don't think anyone's too many people are reading texts anymore so I found that opportunity in video and I think it's

doing well I will I will say one thing first of all we got to break this down this is a very important conversation here and I think a lot of people watching and listening are hearing about this for the first time I hope they are at least because it's very exciting first of all I want to say congrats on you and your team because you guys are doing a phenomenal job once again this is something I've never seen or heard of before and it's extremely smart and we can talk about all the ethical problems and

all that and I I'd love to discuss that but what really matters to me is the value that you're giving people so in that vuong video I don't care if it was you if it was 10 other people 20 other people I'm getting the same value out of that video and you're talking about something that I'm interested in so as long as I can get that value as fast as POS possible in the best way possible as your audience I think the job is done and for theong video it had your take and your perspective

in it I think that made it so valuable it wasn't I couldn't get the same news from other outlets because you were talking about how why India doesn't have AAA games so it was it was your perspective yeah so it's still like I just wanted to shorten time from thought to output and I think with AI avatars now I'm just able to do thought which actually frees my time up because I can read now books like I'm reading this book about how Singapore was built right it's called from third world to first by you know

the guy that built Singapore over decades and decades and I get to read that and I get to compress it in a good video for people by the way here's an opinion I think more people watch AI generated content in the future than real content here's why okay even now they prefer AI generated content they don't they don't know why but let me articulate it now that we actually have the evidence when you do AI generated content you always start from the script okay when you do real content it's you in front of a camera

talking mumbling you know going off track sometimes you know doing a lot of things that are not related to the video and some people tend to like that but most people 90% of people just want you to be on point and run through everything so when you write the script you can be tight with the script you can just be like here are the five things that work here the five things that don't whatever you can just be very very tight with the script and because you're working at the script level there's no um there's

no butt nothing and then when you put that into haen or any AI Avatar generator you don't have the burden of now you know having footage to cut out like sometimes my editors used to cut out excess things that I used to say so you that Wukong video if I done in real life would have been a 20-minute video because I would have ranted I would have gone on tangents directions like I'm doing right now but with AI and because I have to write it or because my team and me had to write it and

we have a really cool kid that's helping me right now it gets compressed so so humans prefer compressed information with great graphics great narrative great storytelling because people just don't have time they don't have the attention span for a 20-minute video so AI forces you to be tight because you're starting from a script and therefore more people watch AI generated content because you're getting the point faster the same reason short short form content works even for information just rate of insights per second is higher way higher I mean 15 minutes it's still baffling to me

I I cannot I cannot believe that because I started making content if you remember in the beginning of YouTube when aliia was making Call of Duty videos and all that and that was when when you wanted to make one YouTube video it would take you two weeks right and now you're saying 15 minutes from idea to to basically distribution it is we we have another secret we have another secret that I like that you were holding on to that but now you decided to share it let's hear it yeah my wife runs the largest editing

School in India now oh so she has she trains about 200 editors a year and therefore we editors yeah 2,000 editors a year you should hire from them if you're interested yes so so I get access to a lot of really high quality editors who already been pre-trained on good formats already know what to do so we we don't mind having a slightly larger editing team and we don't mind paying them reasonably well and sort of building our own sort of backup and so on and so forth uh so I feel like that's a really

big Advantage because people struggle finding editors and editors leave very often this jurn and stuff like that you got to run it like a company you got to run it like a tide ship it's very like a lot of people want to be remote editors and a lot of people are okay with hiring remote editor still there's churn three months later for those that don't know churn means people leaving but when you have an office that doesn't happen as as often because you can actually give them a career path you can actually give them guidance

so on and so forth so it's that um that's our second secret which is we have editors so we're able to do this much faster at scale uh you know I plan to hire another four five editors but here's the thing about long form right I o want to do like in-depth CG videos like we did one on the slipstream I don't know if you saw that right which was I did with Intel and uh it we had two cars we had an Aston Martin and some other car in I think the Ferrari in the

video right that was CGI the entire scene was CGI it was just me in the scene with these two cars and there we wanted to go push the boundary right we're like yo if we're automating content here we should be doing really crazy videos on something like for example one of the things I want to work on is India five years in the future and we actually want to do CG right we want to go shoot some places in India and we're like What if there was a massive Tower here right and it's not hard

tracking is easy the iPhone does it with lar um so it's not hard for us to use I don't know if you've seen tools like similon or if you've seen tools like Wonder Dynamics it's easy to put robots in so we're like let's try like unlimited creativity so in a way short form content is allowing me to focus my energies on doing really good long form content right so I don't want to do too much AI generated long firm content even if I can get more views brand deals whatever I think it still has to

be like very in-depth content even if the view count is lower right so different games I'm playing a totally different game on shots and reels I'm playing a totally different game on long form content and yeah I think the B burden of not having views allows me to creatively sort of expand myself so we use a lot of blender for the CG stuff we use a lot of Unreal Engine um although we've actually moved back to blender and I have some reasons for why right um I think that's what we're doing and it's fun and

most people don't know that we actually run eight channels eight channels eight channels Yeah we actually have a lot more channels than just mine uh different faces different names there's no reason to link up all the channels together like they're all different brands they're all under one Banner so the original Channel sort of helped them grow and they help each other grow now it's very easy for us to start a new channel as well we produce over a thousand videos a month because not just do we do those eight channels we also do several Chan

for for customers we have companies that work with us uh some of the largest unicorns in India some of the you know big billion dollar businesses uh outside of India uh so yeah we we we've built this as a solid business and all the advantages now really play out having that video editing school that my wife has automating AI content here or the presenter here I think has really given us advantages that we're sort of putting to play now and yeah my opinion is the best use case of AIS content and you can't change my

mind on it because I haven't seen examples outside of this where it's been so valuable for anybody um yeah and it's worth makes money right so uh the minute you start working with Google and Intel and all the other cool clients whether you're doing work for them or you're doing a brand deal with them or you're doing channels for them or you're even doing plain vanilla AI Services right and I'll talk a little bit about that as well but um yeah it makes money it does well that's amazing I think I want to talk about

the fine-tuning part because a lot of people have access to the tools that you have access to but you are the one who managed to scale it to this size eight different channels we didn't even know about the eight channels thousand videos that you mentioned it's crazy what are the steps you took to fine tune let's talk about haen first and then 11 Labs later on is that something that you're working on constantly so look find tuning is very simple right like at least from what we did it's a very you know ml Engineers are

going to hate me for this but I feel like it's more of an art than anything like the way I F tune like I'll give you an example of how we fine tune my flux laa right we just try a bunch of things until we get outputs that are close to what we want and then we learn from it like the first time I learned this when was when with stable diffusion there was this equivalent to the lowas that you have now called dream Booth where you could make your own character like look like you

and there were a lot of settings so we used a tool that time called automatic one11 there's this you know settings panel on automatic 111 to train the model right everything from how many epochs you're running this on to you know uh what kind of precision you you want to run this on so I basically learned it by opening a new tab Googling everything seeing other people's results there's like a ton of YouTube videos on best settings threadit every day there was like a best settings for dream boo sort of thread right so I I

learned what each setting does each parameter does hyper parameter does uh one by one and then then it becomes like an art you train it like for example with the flux Laura that we made which we actively use for thumbnails the stream thumbnail is made with the flux Laura right so I wear a mic and all the photos that we fed it I I own a mic in it so it always generates a mic I'm like wait no I'm asking you to generate vun but yeah there still a mic in yeah that's input Mike is

part of vun now yeah so uh so we learned that well you you need to keep the subject whatever you want to replicate you know in every kind of image but you need to change everything else like in the in dream boo if you have me in every image wearing this shirt it will always generate the gray shirt MH right so we we like what is the subject we want preserve this this okay fine all of this we change in every photo right or we use different photos from different times right so it's that but

you don't want the face changing too much so if you take photos from a 10- year period And I look very young in the early photos and very old in the later photos uh it doesn't look like me it looks like some hybrid between an younger and older me so we learned these things that's why I said it's an art and people hate me when I say that but it's kind of like that and you just try a lot um and yeah we trained on consumer GPS we train on my 4090 sometimes we train it

on you know online um and it's getting easier like my only advice to people who are fine tuning and you just care about the outputs and you you don't really care about learning too much about it I think it's mostly about trial and error and over time this is going to be one click because yeah look it's not rocket science for 11 I'm sure they've figured it out that you can just give them a synthetic script to read covering most words they're going to do it it's not rocket science right same with you know fine-tuning

luras flux luras right you can do it online now and somebody will make it one click so I'm like you don't need to learn this this is going to be one click and they're going to tell you EX exactly what to do and you follow steps MH right hun removed fine tuned Avatar recently I don't know if they brought it back but they have now this new thing called instant Avatar we still tend to use the fine T avvatar um but they' they've removed the guess work out of it all right and they just give

you a bunch of ground rules that you use but I think you get good at this it's sort of like making a website right like or or making anything it's like taste anyone can make a video with Premier Pro doesn't take you too long to learn it but someone making a good video and a bad video about taste yeah and going to the right places and choosing between A and B this is the style I want this is the style I want it's it boils down to Pure taste and I think we just knew exactly

what we wanted we wanted me sitting from a camera talking in exactly my voice we had to just replicate this and just so you know this is not a new problem for us to create avatars many years before metah human we actually made an avatar of me in Unreal Engine a live speaking Avatar in Unreal Engine I'll tell you what we did so we modeled it we manually modeled it we use we used Daz 3D actually at that time right we we changed the face structure to sort of match and then we put some clothes

on and then we exported from Daz to sort of Unreal Engine because we wanted real time and then we just lit it well in Unreal Engine there is the live cam uh I don't know what it's called now the live cam the the AR kit to uh you know yeah where the blend shapes are sort of transferred over and then I was just speaking and then what we did with the body is you know neck and Below we sort of made it run a mixo animation of just you know talking yeah right on Loop and

I did a live stream like that it was still my voice so I was like I was always looking for a way to sort of replace myself uh this you can find this video from my YouTube from like four five years ago right this is before metahuman launched so we did that and after metahuman there were ways to do photos scans of your face like the photogrammetry equivalent of your face into this thing there's still some tools to do that where it gets a point cloud and sort of puts it in uh we did that

we didn't like the outputs and then you know sometime later we saw wave to lip we like we can't fool people with a 3D avatar it's hard fool is the wrong word but we can't like sort of pretend like it's me so it's better do this because people don't like uncanny valley and Below AB if I put 3D avatar on you know um on your feed you'll just be like some cartoon [ __ ] yeah and you move on yeah right so it had to be real to to gain real benefits for me and I

think we've crossed the uncaring value yes and listen I I do want to add to what you just said first of all a couple of things that you covered one every technology in the early days there's so many things you have to learn that will eventually disappear and become much easier to use so I agree with you I think especially with AI there's a lot of when you go to conf UI there's so many nodes and so many settings that will eventually become a lot more user friendly so yes you can wait until it's easier

but then if you're trying to be competitive and stay on the the front lines then you have to learn these stuff now which is why we're talking about this with you today but going back to your next point you've been waiting for this Avatar thing for a very long time I can see so that's why you're so early into it because you've been trying to do it for such a long [ __ ] time and it finally happened and you managed to do it through a completely different method I mean d 3D modeling texturing UV

unwrapping animating is nothing compared to what you can do with haen and create content in 15 minutes but more so I I I do want to touch on the fact that a lot of businesses have also been looking for this approach so many people have contacted us to make their metahumans and then run the animation but that almost never really works unless they're willing to invest a huge amount of budget because animating the metahumans every single time will take a lot of time and it will require the same person usually to come and talk but

now with haen and 11 labs this new approach is completely different and has completely changed the game so one one thing that was interesting to me about your approaches you mentioned about the script generation the ideas and the hent Avatar The Voice all of those seem to be a lot more automated now whereas the editing part seems to be the most manual and you mentioned that yourself your wife having that school of editors and you guys being in contact with some of the top editors what do you see the future of editing be with AI

coming in the AI assisted workflows I mean right now Premier Pro yeah Premier Pro and D Vinci resol is there and SE are amazing softwares right I'm an editor myself I I love editing videos but at the same time if there are new workflows that will make editing much easier do we need to use all those buttons again I'm just comparing metahumans versus haen right a completely new approach to making avatars and it's more life like that a metahuman can be because it is actually you will we see something like that with editing itself that

manual approach so my thoughts on this are a little bit nuanced right um I feel like there are two parts to a video if you want to edit a video or make a movie or make anything right one is the footage the base footage and I feel haen solves the base footage because if you see the base footage as is you see it's not perfect right there's issues sometimes I'm saying things but my hands I'm not sometimes I'm pausing but my hands are still moving it looks weird but we edit it cleverly to remove those

parts it's still it still requires effort right um I think footage is going to be solved at some point right now we we can do it for a few seconds like the flux Lowa plus runways of the world are not bad and I feel that's just going to get better so the footage part is probably going to be solved consistency is still a problem like if you take two different Runway outputs from the same image that I've sent or like from two sequences of that you know scene it doesn't look like it flows very easily

and maybe that's a short-term problem maybe that's a long-term problem I don't know uh but I feel like it feels reasonable to say that footage generation is going to be solved at some point or the other I know this because we're trying to work on a project called Soo where I I always wanted to do one take on philosophy right I love like long form I really want to do Tech philosophy even though I feel like it won't get too many views I feel like if I'm already pulling views on short form might as well

experiment on long form right yeah yeah um so for that we really needed something like this to come out so we waited we've waited almost a year I've already written the story it's a year ago I have the Google Doc with me and I've told my team the minute you know we have accurate text to video at least for one one and a half seconds because we really inspired on that particular video by this Channel called Melody sheep I don't know if you've seen Melody sheep he does this crazy like you know it's all about

planets and it gives you a this feeling of awe when you watch his videos MH right so we wanted to replicate some of that and still have me in it and still grounded to be human uh the video was about is based on Max tegmark's book it's by one of it's on it's called our mathematical universe and then I want I want to flow in from that book to another book on Philosophy by Douglas hofstader it's called I am a Str Loop uh it's it's a very trippy video supposed to be a very trippy video

we knew we couldn't do it without solid text to vid and solid you know like WID to WID sorry and then solid you know image to WID U so I think footage will be solved and we need it for this project so we'll keep trying on the editing part I think it's unlikely at least in the short term because your medium of instruction will change it'll become English look for any of these tasks like coding and and even editing to some it'll become like English you still need to tell the computer what to do mhm

you you you'll tell it so I can go and I can look at a video and I can be like well at 30 seconds chop this off okay at 45 seconds add like a nice Banner that flows in from the top to bottom at 60 seconds do this at 70 seconds do this but there are other parts right like subtitling which is going to be automatic right it's already automatic um there's certain things like Boll which is going to be 100% automatic it's Again part of footage but I feel like maybe editing will change to

just tell the thing exactly what you want like describing it to the extreme te and I feel like then you have to go frame by frame and make sure it got the right thing you still have to watch the video and be like well everything was good but at 2 53 I I didn't uh I didn't like the the you know the the transition I want a different transition so you just tell it and you edit like that I feel like someone reasonably experienced with Premier Pro can easily switch over to that form of editing

but we'll find it more convenient to go back to Premier Pro because you can again then now say if you want to move something from one place to another you can just draw a spline right like from place a to place B so I feel like you'll just find it faster like to go edit by yourself and even if it changes it's going to change to a I speak English and now it edits which for people like me I can do it right I can speak and edit but then I feel like for people like

creators who are really busy it still makes sense to have an editor and be like you speak and you have that creative taste you tell it what you want so it might reduce the number of editors in the world but you're still like hiring for you're still hiring for somebody who knows what you like you're still hiring for somebody who doesn't make you look like an idiot in front of camera or Cuts things completely out of context you need somebody who knows the narrative and wants to set that narrative so when we hire editors we're

hiring almost like people who can be editors but also could potentially manage editors right if it gets automated tomorrow we want them to be able to play one level up uh but it's going to take a while right it's going to take several years for it to be English um the other approach uh is through something like a lamb right the thing that rabbit came out with where they said it's a large action model I don't know where rabbit is right now but the idea if it worked would be interesting which is teach a computer

to use the keyboard and the mouse and then teach a computer to use Premier Pro so it has access to everything that's in Premier Pro right so you say hey I want you to remove this part of the footage it will go it will use the blade tool cut those two parts remove it you can train a model like that right uh I just feel like when that happens you will still need somebody telling it exactly what to do and I don't have have the time for that like I know from my time perspective and

I know from your time perspective as well you don't have like hours especially thousand videos right producing thousand videos just do not have the time to sit on Thousand videos and tell them what to do so I will still have a team for it so maybe less editors but uh definitely you still need editors who have that taste creativity understand the tool because if it gets it wrong you need to be like no no you use the blade tool wrong or no no no you you need to use this um you know plug-in for the

lens flare yes whatever right like I'm saying you need to have enough context to know what to do it's the same thing with engineering right codee might die you might speak in the English language to the computer but you still need somebody to know what they're doing right if you're building an app and more than that you also need somebody who understands as the product clear you know why something would work for end consumers or not and I think that piece is very very important so no answer answer there's no is editing going to be

automated or not I feel like some parts will be automated yes some parts won't but yeah we'll still hire people and I I do want to add to what you said because you said it beautifully when I meant by automating I don't mean like click a button and then the editing is done and you don't need any editors anymore it's more about the editors who are editing they have a much easier time editing what they are working on so I'll give you an example me and farat suck at drawing we're working on a fortnite map

at the moment and usually you have to go to a concept artist and then try to convey your idea to them and that timeline will take a l a lot of time and not a lot of companies have concept designers right unless you're using them on a weekly basis so for me and F right now going to chat gbt which is even better than mid Journey now because I get to talk to a model tell them what I want my map to look like and it will spit out images in in 10 seconds and I

can get new ideas that I didn't even have by just talking to the model so all these things on chbt I imagine can be integrated into premere Pro or the Vinci resolve when you're editing when you're adding in footages to get ideas that you didn't even have before so it makes editing better more creative easier in the long run plus I do want to talk about the lamb thing cuz I had no idea about lamb you mentioned something like that the other day was like why can't an AI just learn from our tutorials how to

use Unreal Engine 5 and then we tell it what to do and create the scenes we wanted to create go through our tutorials 20 episode I'm sure you're going to learn everything then you can make everything for us after that yeah so I think uh it's it's possible like I feel like agents the entire goal with agents is this how do you teach it to use a computer by the way they did this a long time ago right with you know in the early days without a thought process if you just gave a computer a

keyboard and a mouse going back to machine learning right and you just give you said let's use reinforcement learning the computer never gets there even with millions and millions of iterations it just will never learn how to use Premier Pro but the minute you give it a Chain of Thought the minute you allow it to think reason the steps through and then build that out it's a little bit better so you needed something like o1 Todo agents right gpt1 Todo agents and I feel like now that we have that but sometimes you know the reasoning

and Chain of Thought is what happens behind the scenes the reasoning is what you gets you expanded you can sort of see it uh I feel like it still gets it wrong very often so it still H it's even the reasoning of the thing um pretty exciting to see how that plays out but we are ready you know if something like that comes out happy to use it if something that doesn't come out happy to play the old way you just need to like what what I tend to do is I try to try all

the new models I tend to read the new papers that come out I tend to try the most experimental models you get a idea of what the future is going to be like and then we're like if this gets better we should start using this in our workflow and we want to be the earliest to use any new tool in our workflow where like we will do this live in production like similon live in production we we used it in one of our videos right one second so we want to be those people that sort

of bring you the uh earliest previews of all this new tech especially in audio video text and honestly AI really just solves audio video text right like and and now using computers and stuff so yeah I feel like show and tell is amazing and it's awesome to be a Creator where you get to show and tell and then also you know speak about it 100% and now you have a team and you have access to all these tools if someone comes to you as a content creator and looks for advice what is the first tool

you ask them to use well I don't think it starts with tools I think creating content is this question of do you want to do it seriously because it's actually pretty risky to be a content creator seriously L like doing eight channels is even riskier right it's the craziest risk ever but it's kind of scary you don't know when it going to die right you don't know when you're going to have a bad month or whatever there's any number of issues that that could happen right so I feel like as a person um I don't

know if I would actually give the advice for somebody to be a content creator to make money off of it but I feel like what you guys are doing and what a lot of other content creators will do right which is you create content to bring you a few more leads to be slightly more discovered and if you get big during that period if you get like if you go crazy massive during that period Then great but don't start with that expectation so I never started with that expectation my wife didn't start with that expectation

just like we'll create content more people will know us and then maybe you know we'll get some more B2B deals or something like that but uh you make money when it gets to scale yes but you have plan for that um and honestly it was just me being lazy saying I don't want to shoot content every day so how can I automate it uh so so you need to really just focus on having a business or having something to sell and then doing content is a way to generate leads otherwise it burns you out cuz

still you get to like 200 300K you don't make any money being a contract Creator especially in India where it's kind of saturated as well right uh at least 100K to make any money right as a as a content creator like doing a branded post um so I feel like people just give up it's too easy to give up you're at 50k you're not making money you're like fine let me just give up right so you need something to keep you going and the minute you realize it brings you leads to your business uh it

is better and one thing I realized is it can bring you a lot of leads like the difference between you having like 20,000 subscribers and getting maybe two leads a month versus 700,000 subscribers and getting 50 times that is actually a very real thing you can get hundreds of leads a month saying can we do something cool together sometimes they don't have clear ideas sometimes they have very clear ideas so the number of opportunities grows and that's how we built a company to be honest with just got more people reaching out to us saying can

you do this can you do that I like cool we'll do it um yeah so I I feel like the first advice I would give is you know don't expect anything from it to a new Creator and second thing is from a tool perspective I'd be like get an editor MH like people say people think I'm saying this because I'm biased or whatever but it's not really that I feel like there's still content creators today who edit their own videos and I'm like do you know what a Monumental disservice that is to you and even

the team you get tomorrow because what they need you to do is focus on making that channel big or go out and crack B2B Partnerships or whatever and hand off the editing role to somebody you're also creating a job in the process uh it saves your time and your time becomes very very important at scale because you have so many inbound opportunities you have to evaluate them you to be like should I do the one with you know Nvidia or should I do the one with something else like that becomes important right so uh it's

better to hand off to an edit team so you have the time and freedom to think about scale otherwise if you're editing you can't really think about scale and how the channel grows there's a difference between working in the channel and on the channel I don't know if that makes sense it's better to work on the channel and think strategy and be like how does this scale six months from now how does it scale a year from now what do we need to automate it and you need somebody with free time and free energy to

read learn talk to other people because there are lots of people one thing I learned in the last two years is there are lots of people with Secrets there lots of people who know stuff where if you just sat down with them You' learn more in a conversation and you'd pick up you know you you'd find secret to actually doing well but they will never say it publicly because either they'd get canceled for saying it or they're just like what's the incentive for me to say this publicly right and nobody knows them for example there's

a guy who sells blankets right who makes millions of dollars a year and he's just like here my 10 Secrets easy why aren't you all doing this you have so much distribution why aren't you selling blankets that's not really a thing but interesting insights I could apply this this to something else um so yeah it's it's it's mostly that I guess no I agree with you I think what's really interesting for me and fared is based on your response we used to watch this guy I I'm sure a lot of people probably know him Casey

neistat he was one of the best one of the biggest YouTubers now he is a very unique case of someone who loves the editing process so much so that he never wanted to hire anybody to do it because he wanted that part to be done by himself he was a Storyteller and his goal was storytelling on a daily basis so if you're a creator or an aspiring Creator watching and listening and that's your goal then I guess that's where you can just keep doing the editing and everything yourself but I guess what Von was referring

to and what we're trying to talk about is more about people who are trying to scale the business grow the business they have other interests uh and those interests are being hindered or prevented because they have to spend a lot of time on what can be done by other people or now be automated in the process so again just going back to your workflow it's it's crazy how you are looking at this your perspective is incredible I I do want to talk about the ethical point of view as well because in in one of your

own videos you were talking about the time 100 people when it comes to the most influential in terms of artificial intelligence and there was a Bollywood actor there I forgot his name but he has been against the use of AI for using his liking or his voice now there's people like that a lot of people like that who are against AI against you know he's not against AI he's against using the misuse of AI let's put it that way and then there's people like us who are you know using AI we're gladly feeding in our

information our liking our faces to AI I want to know your thoughts on this in this whole thing I'm sure your audience has their own point of view they commenting on your videos all the time you probably talk to a lot of people who have different opinions where do you stand here because clearly just like us you're gladly testing out and experimenting these Technologies giv permission and consent to all agree to all of these is we do the same thing like so excited for haen yes you can use anything you want my voice my face

my audio so so I have a line I have a line the line is if you deep fake somebody else or if you clone somebody else's audio that can sometimes be a problem and maybe a few years ago we've done that some of that right like just to experiment because the models weren't that good back then it wasn't believable and a lot of Indians are shy so my team would always take a celebrity and you know try cloning their voice or whatever because they're just like I don't want to use my own voice um but

I think the line is you can't clone somebody else's Voice or somebody's else's face without their permission it's as simple as that uh but that's my line I feel like the legal line is not going to be that across the world even though there's right now people have different opinions and thoughts because it falls in the same line as caricatures in a newspaper I can make a caricature of celebrity and it's okay because they're public figure right so I feel like are sort of the same but we let the legal system you know uh sort

of comment on that where my line and the other side the line is it's okay to deep fake yourself or clone your own voice model it's fine yeah like and some people like there was this guy and I got really pissed there's this guy who was like in the comments like you should tell the world that this video is AI generated otherwise it's causing people harm I was like yo number one this video is not fully AI generated 7 Seconds of this video has a presentation with me in it that's the only part that's AI

generated everything else has real tangible human effort the editing is manual human effort right I'm only there for 7 Seconds don't give me that much importance and plus it's my own voice it's my own face what do you want me to do come there and stand and do the exact same thing it's the exact same thing and plus if you think if most people think there's no effort done in that I spent 30 years of my life building a real world brand I spent 31 actually I'm 31 so I spent 31 years of my life

building a real world brand I spent 31 years of my life honing the voice that I have today which is an attribute of me I spent 31 years old 31 years creating videos right so my hand movements the way I talk the animated nature of who I am it's all captured in the bottle but I made it what it is in 30 years a lot of people without that personality and you'll find them at 40 and they don't have that personality so I'm not taking too much credit for the personality I built my environment shape

me into that but that's still work that took a lot of time that we captured in a very quick form through these models so it's a snapshot of me that wouldn't have worked if it wasn't me right and the other people who do AI generated content the outputs are like you know it feels like a robotic zombie right so I'm like credit me for the amount of time energy and work I've put in actually making this you know getting this to this point um and then yeah I'm just automating myself like I don't think there's

any harm if I'm anyone going to be sitting in front of the screen reading the same script if there's a model doing it who cares right that's my opinion on it uh but yeah my Hardline is we don't deep fake anybody else anymore we don't do any audio of anybody else anymore without their consent because on we have a subsidiary of AOS the company I run AOS called AOS Labs where we also do AI services for companies we work with Amazon Prime we work with Netflix where sometimes we do we we make trailers where we

put you know you inside a trailer with an actor but we don't do that without the actor's permission and of course there's Amazon Prime and Netflix involved so they have to get permission it's it's a big deal for them so we do stuff like that and I think with consent everything is fine so that's my line it's a very Nuance line but you know today people are like either proi anti I'm like so stupid I'm like everything is nuanced yeah it's it's not white or black at all correct it's like saying oh are you pro-

nuclear or anti-nuclear I'm like yeah if you use nuclear as a bomb and drop it on people's head it's bad but if you use nuclear for power it's not yeah yeah so so everything's nuanced and I feel like social media has stripped the Nuance out of people one minute videos have made people either do this or this yeah all the time for everything they're just used to a like or dislike um and I think it's also done something to people's inhibitions right like people just comment whatever whatever comes to their head right and they don't

think it's through and then and then they don't realize people take decisions on those comments especially politicians and stuff they actually take decisions on those comments so they're ruining Society by just commenting the first thing that comes into their head without realizing what the second order effect of something is right like Banning nuclear it just sounds like a bad word because of Chernobyl or whatever and then you made that decision and then you're going backward in time it's not as bad as it was yeah and and those were accidents you can't you can't any you

get what I'm saying and another important aspect is the amount of time and effort you put into fine-tuning these models creating the Avatar multiple times trying different Tools 11 Labs the other AI tools so you spend a lot of time researching the outcome is that 7 seconds but the effort is all the time that you put to fine-tune these models find the new tools it's we have done a lot of R&D in everything that we do and doing R&D a lot of times lead to a dead end there is nothing at the end you try

for 3 days you get nothing out of it you have to try two or three different software to get the result that you want so it's not just looking at that 7 second is looking at all the time that you have spent on on the entire process yeah I guess it is that um I just feel like sometimes those comments don't mean well in the sense when people say oh this this uh you're creating a generated content you're harming Society I'm like no no bro well eventually you're going to get harming nature global warming you're

going to get all of that in the comments oh you're using gpus but the thing is the reason why I also say it's grad because a lot of those people commenting anything negative about AI they don't even know they're using it already I mean technically anybody buying the new iPhone series will be using AI it's like integrated into it and eventually sorry every filter you ever use yeah I mean not every filter but many filters yeah many of them right and there there's a lot of AI in our life already it's just people pick one

out and then they call a a bad just for that one so I I completely agree with you I do believe it's nuanced and I think this is going to be an ongoing discussion as AI develops really rapidly and there's going to be companies that do it ethically and companies that won't because at the end of the day it is a capitalist Market or everybody's just trying to make profit at the end of the day because there are sh shareholders involved and that's when it gets really nuanced but the point is that I think as

you mentioned as long as you're not using other people's work or other people's faces and voices to try to trick people then that is fine and I I do know people who are doing that today so on social media you do see a lot of deep fakes of of of people um I I want to talk about a video that you did and you talked about a developer doesn't care about storytelling and design and an artist doesn't care how their ideas are executed first of all are you a developer or an artist and second how

does one solve this problem so I'm a little bit of both I feel like the minute you do any sort of Game Dev you guys have done a lot of unreal Eng [ __ ] where do you put yourself when you use blueprints so for example if you use blueprints right you're doing object oriented programming I studied objectoriented programming in college right I studied computer science for four years uh I built up my first business was a recruitment platform where we built it on Ruby on Rails so I actually transitioned from being I don't like

using the word transition I still do a lot of engineering right like I still have an engineer's brain uh I feel like these are all arbitrary things that we have created for ourselves to study things that okay this is engineering this is content if you come to our studio we have these giant LED screens where it's just the backgrounds are beautiful right because it's an LED screen it's not green screen so it it actually emits light so you have the light wrap effect on you so you look good like you look like you're actually part

of the scene that's technology it's hardware and the images we put on that Hardware are generated by ideogram or mid Journey or flux right so but the end output is a video like when Disney does uh Disney has imagineering right where they do where they do these little robots they're eventually doing it to be in the next Star Wars movie or whatever right or in their amusement parks but are they a tech company are they a Content company are they an art art company I don't like any of these distinctions and and that's why if

you ask me of all the things I've ever done in life what's my most favorite it's Game Dev I Love Game Dev I built this demo many years ago called Mumbai make KSA it's about this incident that happened in Mumbai I want to make a very very short game something that you can finish in minutes right and and tells you a story and you can play the game it's it's on it just search for mum makea you can play it very recently a year ago we made this game called overpowered the card game we just

want to make a card game for fun um not very commercially successful because we never really intended them to be like you know money-making whatever just like we give back to the community get our hands a little bit because how can you talk about game dab without shipping things right um so so that's why we made them but I enjoy that getting the assets ready uh you know doing the mo cap if necessary combining the two and then writing code to make sure that's you know there's some events that are triggering things that happen in

the game I love it it's the most fun thing ever right so but I never go there thinking oh I'm either an artist or an engineer I'm just like this is what I do and uh even today like people don't know what to call me they're like well you also run a company with people are you a Founder are you like a manager are you like an artist I'm like actually I don't know I don't care right call me whatever you want because here's the thing right it's it's derogatory on both sides artists say oh

bro you're an engineer you're like disrupting art this is not true art you know you go sit there in front of the camera and speak you're you're spoiling this freedom of expression all sort of things and you on the other side like you don't know anything about engineering blah blah blah look at the researchers doing stuff I'm like you know the the synthetic thing that we came out with that came from technically a process very much like research right so but forget about the research part right like you're not a real engineer blah blah blah

I'm like I've built an insane amount of stuff right uh but anyway both sides like you become like this paraya where you're like no side likes you or no side relates to you um because they feel like the engineering side is better and you have a little bit of Arts you're an outsider it becomes a tribal thing you know an engineer in India or actually across the world be like I'm part of this tribe called software engineer we the mighty tribe we we've always made the most money the artists are like oh I'm part of

this tribe you know this is how I'm supposed to be this is how I'm supposed to dress here's my flag I'm like you know I don't know what Drive part of like I just want to create cool stuff right and I feel like it should never be a limit of whether you're an engineer or artist to create cool stuff but also what we have realized is because there's so little competition when you stop thinking about tribes and you're doing this thing where you're combining two really weird sides and we will always use the engineering side

to get an advantage we will always use the art side to make things cooler than the engineering side would have done it by themselves I feel like there there's very little competition and when there's very little competition you know money flows towards you and then you become a capital allocator so it's weird but I've started calling myself internally somebody who allocates time and capital the most boring side right um but I do want to create even more awesome work like I feel like you know some people will go on their entire lives knowing me only

as an artist some people go on especially people who met me three four years ago would go on knowing me only as an engineer and some people who probably work with us know me as a manager whatever it's okay and and if you look at you have a wait sorry please continue and if you look at Elon Musk right there a lot of people who like oh this guy just hires people and makes them work or another guy will be like oh you know he's the guy that designs everything and goes to space so nuanced

yeah right it would have been like a thousand decisions and you know whatever people have their own people make their own decisions people will make their own assumptions over time and I think that's okay one thing that is clear you work really hard I mean it it's pretty much obvious from the stuff that we see on social media but also speaking with you we also figured out after inviting you to the podcast that you have a crazy time per day that you working like the timeline of your day starts at 2: p.m. till 5 a.m.

right it's a crazy night hourl like schedule why did you decide to take on something so intensely different than what usually people would be taking I usually earlier morning sleep earlier but then you're going through this crazy hours every single day um I don't know like I just feel like I got stuck at this weird sleep cycle and it never ends I do like the quiet of the night I do like you know I don't like the mornings I feel they're noisy there's too many people moving around cars this traffic the night is just better

short answer I just like the night less distractions less distractions less people you know asking for things it's just in the night uh I don't know I love the night and when he goes to us no jet lag yes zero jet lag he's with the US live every single day and you you do read a lot of books as well is there any books that you would recommend for people who are interested in starting startups or generally content creation or anything inspiring to you that you've read in the past one or two years Okay so

we've added a lot of employees over the last one year right because we're also doing content father others we're also doing AI Services business has done well uh in the last year or so uh and it's almost started becoming like company culture management so I'm reading this book called Inside Apple it's about how Apple's culture was built I'm reading this book called from from third world to first it was about how Singapore was built I told you guys about this before the part um I'm reading these books I'm reading it takes ultimately boils down to

how you work with other human beings and the rules and the you know things you set right for example yeah I'm a big fan of gerar mematic desires right which is everything that we've ever desired in life it's because somebody else desired it right except for Basics like your food Water Shelter everything else like you want a Lambo you want a Lambo because other people find it cool right so it's stuff like that so really understanding how human psychology works requires time effort requires you unraveling what you think about humans already in your brain and

be like actually we're social creatures driven by simple rewards and just accepting that requires you to destroy your ego and requires you to have the humility just a monkey running around like I'm just a monkey running around uh sort of playing monkey games with other monkeys right which is awesome if you're okay with it which is not awesome for people who think they're the center of the world so uh books really gave me that because when you read from somebody who's like 40 or 50 and done a lot of stuff they come to the same

conclus especially people who accomplished a lot of things in their life they come to the same conclusion that ultimately we're just like this animal here with very little control over things and it's about how we work well with other animals and setting rules and also setting rewards like a punishment reward system for ourselves yeah it's it's it's mostly that and the minute you say that on Twitter or Instagram you get cancelled because people like no life's about get Super Rich by 25 and you know travel all the world and I'm like yeah that that's one

life and yes that's still part of a head like if you traveled every day like I now travel like three times a week not not for fun but even inity I hate travel like too much of this I just want to be home yeah I just want to be home right so everything changes depending on what you have if you have too much of something you want something else right the billionaire who's you know ex extremely wealthy but probably you know is is um doesn't have health will really want Health right so you always want

what you don't have and social media is actually this this bottle that captures things that like it's basically that right it's a bottle like a transparent bottle that captures what everyone wants to have but doesn't right and it's that like even in my content it's kind of that right when I make a video about the future India five years in the future and I show technology something I want but I don't have it's the same thing that some 20-year-old saying oh you here's a million dollars here's my lamborg same thing it's something that they want

but they don't have so they're showing they're projecting that Future I'm Just Doing it slightly differently with what I want my surroundings to be like they're doing it with what they want their status and their lifestyle to be like it's it's just it's still the same thing so social media is not reality it's like an extended version of people's expectations so but when you read a lot you realize this is not new this has happened forever this happened 50 years ago in the era of you know postc Colonial uh you know how the world recovered

when suddenly there used to be this leader this should be this authoritarian figure leader is a wrong word authoritarian figure and that figure left and then you have to now figure things out yourself and then you realize all these expectations that you had with them now you have to reset those expectations new set of people and reform it it's the same like when with the era of kings and queens right so like the reason the only reason you would want to have the structure of you only become a king if you have Noble blood is

the minute you remove the criteria of you need to have Noble blood to be a king then all the subjects decide they they want to be king and they fight and itate creates insane amount of chaos and they all try to be king so you have to make it familiar and even in families like even if it's a noble blood thing Brothers like two two young young brothers or sorry two sons or siblings of a king will always fight for the throne imagine that fighting among millions of people so you want to limit you want

to limit the fighting to a specific criteria and the best criteria is like Royal Blood so you're reducing the amount of damage created so it's stuff like that and when you read all of that you're like this still happens today because we have not our human brains have not evolved from 200,000 years ago so every story captures from the past captures a little bit about of of how I would interact with with other people and you know some of the ground rules have been the same like when you fight with somebody I'm sure you know

you guys have fought with each other and never what are you talking about what are you talking it's going to happen right it's going to happen right after this podcast so when you guys I don't I don't know what he's talking about so when you guys fight half the time it's it's not even about topic that you're fighting about it's like that underlying emotion that you'd have right so for example you you might be arguing about how something is implemented but you would have been angry with farad because he said something about you in front

of somebody else that you didn't like how he referred to you whatever it could it could be session for you're right I'm sorry yeah so so people don't like hearing that actually now that the company is scaled 90% of my job is no longer hacking it's enabling new hackers in the team and the company yeah and by preventing all these stupid things from bubbling up so people can focus on work so now that you are running a company and we talked about how AI impacted your content creation Journey but now that you're Running Company managing

multiple PE uh people has AI helped you in that way as well yeah I don't think we'd be able to the unit economics of my company would not make sense without AI without when we do a thousand videos it would not we would not be profitable if we didn't have ai like everything from Boll to background music to it's not just AI but it's also other tools that have now existed I don't think it would be possible um the presenter we pres we replace presenters in a lot of channels that we do for other people

so I think it just not be possible without AI even AI services like we wouldn't be able to sell AI services without AI like geni sort of really kicking into high gear so we're really thankful to everyone that makes like folks like llama that make open models we're really thankful to this ecosystem existing with like a lot of people saying terrible things about stable diffusion I wouldn't be here without stable diffusion without all that early experimentation without just having it on com UI and having that my screen open in front of me just trying a

bunch of random stuff I w't be here all the researchers who've contributed so uh no chance this would happen PR AI era wow what do you think about AI encoding for software Engineers how do you think it would shift the way they work so right now if you look at the software engineers in the company they're using CLA cla's generating code uh they still have quite a bit of input I think all software Engineers are going to move one level up when the agents work the agents are not great yet we built a stool called

aut code Pro to try out agents before they before anyone knew what they were long time ago before the Deans of the world but I think with reasoning with Chain of Thought behind the scenes I think the agents are getting slightly better uh and at some point the agents are going to do the work but you still need somebody on top sort of telling it what to do because a CEO does not like I don't believe in the idea of one person unicorn because you can really scale and when you scale when you have so

many things coming in you need people to absorb some of that make those executive decisions because you don't have the time yourself and you want some freedom to think about the next steps so uh I think agents will solve some of code but you will move to a higher level role of describing exactly what you want and using English to sort of create software but I also feel like software is getting commoditized for a slightly different reason we learned this with the last business which is when you're building software and there are lots of other

people building similar software the features don't matter anymore like if you can build something and somebody else can build something in a week like then what's your boat right and then we realize the hard way it's about distribution getting in front of the user which is why which kind of dictated by we're doing what we're doing now um but yeah we started there's diminishing value in adding new things and there were also a lot of apis and sdks that were appearing on the market that sort of added new features to us so we took to

give you an example we we we soled realtime audio calls over eight months in my last business we took eight months to solve that and then there's another business that came out that sort of just gave you an one SDK to sort of solve it and then a few months later there were like five of them and they were all competing for price and we like why did we build this we spent so much money we spent so much engineering time we should have just been able to predict that this would be out and this

time we didn't make that mistake we could have spent the time energy and money sort of figuring out how to solve you know um lip stitching and a lot of other people have done that but we like let's just wait for somebody else to do it let's capture the value there's a difference between value creation and value capture and we had created a lot of value in our last business we weren't managing to capture all the we weren't able to capture the value so this time we were like we just want to play the value

capture mode for as long as we can and then once we have enough money then we'll start creating brand new types of value through R&D right which is what we're doing now um so yeah it's it's it's that so I think software you'll go one level up but I feel like software in general is not as useful as it was in the past because anyone can create it so it's commoditized so I'm not really confident about software jobs in the future in a way uh or I I feel like they're going to be less number

of jobs and in India we've seen some of those effects I don't think it's AI related though I just think it's like the zero interest phenomenon era is gone where people are trying random new stuff with like unclear benefits and they want to go back and that's why you know in a crisis weirdly businesses spend more on marketing than product development why would you say that because think about it right like let's say you're a company let's say you're car dealership okay or let's say forget car dealership let's say you're a new you're a company

that sells something and you have two choices you have a product that works okay that can make you more Revenue if you advertise it better or you build a new product where you're not sure if it works there's unclear Roi you don't know if tomorrow the products actually going to work make you money what would you do in a crisis you have a million dollars to spend would you take a risk and build a new product stop advertising the first one or would you just say I already have a product that works it's not the

most efficient it's probably not the best product but if I spend a million dollars in advertising I can make that 2 mil what would you do you choose the first one so we have seen especially during periods of competition um especially during periods of lots of you know like funding crunches people focus on their co-products and spend more on advertising and getting it to the market that's the disciplined way to do things actually so I think we're doing better as a Content company now because it falls cleanly under the department that people will spend on

when there's a crisis and we seen especially with content when you're creating content for a company it's like it's organic so you know that the spends are 30 high in the early days but if it if the channel works you spend a lower in the later days you want organic distribution so people go after organic distribution just right place right time I guess we also got a little bit lucky because we just followed this AI curve to the point where Mark zberg once said this he like don't don't follow the local Minima a local Maxima

like just because you got one idea you don't go double down we built this tool called Alpha CTR to solve thumbnails we could have double down on it we could have said hey we're going to be the best AI thumbnail to but we like no no no good idea but let's keep checking let's keep seeing the surface of the worldall for where the highest value here is uh Alpha c and a bunch of other apps we built they're doing we've got more than a million users on them but we like this is going to die

at some point right or this is not where the end value is the guy who uses this to make content is going to make the most value so we should be the person you know taking advantage of making most value yeah wow so you're right now you're looking at the products and services that are out there that are providing Val that are solving a problem and you use those to provide value but then eventually as you're experimenting you would like to solve problems yourself I imagine it's replacement more than anything it's replacement right for example

face swapping in the early days we used to use other tools now we're s of building our own model for face swapping I just like we're not doing much except just capturing like there was a company in India I'm not going to tell you their name but they started with printing then they realized there's a business in Inc then they realized there's a business in publishing then they realize there's a business if you're publishing and there's a business in uh you know uh schools if you're publishing anyway uh so stuff like that it's just value

chain after value chain picking up new stuff um and it comes from experimentation because until you experiment you don't know if it works or not right so we run a lot of experiments we fail on like eight or 10 things we do you're only hearing of the successes lots of things we've tried that have not worked um and we just scrap it quietly and we're like this is this is part of the game how do you handle failure at what point you say that oh this doesn't work let's go to the next thing it's actually

very quick the cool part about having distribution is I can tell you right after putting out post within 30 minutes from the website activity or whatever we're selling activity or how the comments are I can tell you whether this is something viable or not it sounds odd is that that's how you're testing your ideas then yeah we just put out a video we see what audiences think like for example I know let me talk about content first we know people don't like content about Robotics and people will not buy robots unless it's solved like a

lot of issues they wouldn't buy like simple robots because we've tried that few times content we've tried some experiments they don't care there's no engagement on it it's not an interest area for people it's not hot yet uh games as well right like like games we know there's no market right you talk about AAA game in India a lot of people get upset this that the minute you put a price tag on it people leave right we have a free demo that people can play Nobody plays it right so interesting uh so so stuff like

that um and with businesses if you have a landing page you make you know a video put it on all your channels and we have a lot of channels we'll know very quickly if it works or not um yeah it's it's mostly that it's like distribution is really valuable once you have distribution you can test things you can hire people because you just put up a hiring post people join you you're able to get new leads and new business I mean I don't know why for so many years of my life I thought content creators

were idiots when I was much younger and I thought I was talking on screen or whatever I just didn't realize how valuable it is um you have a great ecosystem of try and error using all of your channels you basically can have an idea and then just try it immediately that's that's priceless yeah I mean think about the math like some some of you you've probably done this in the past buy a domain make a landing page yeah put it up put a stripe thing on it if it's a service you actually build the product

if necessity build an MVP of the product we can do it all super quick and the better AI gets we can do it even faster like I want to go make an MVP in like like I want agents to get to the point where I can make an MVP in no time make a video about it even if the product fails it's okay because we have whatever we'll have like at least half a million people see it and at least you know 20 30,000 people try it we'll know immediately it works just don't price for

the first this thing because you set the wrong expectations if you price something and you're killing it then it's not cool um but yeah as long as you set expectations the audience that this is a trial they're okay with it but the audience is completely okay if you tell them this is just a trial and I'm just figuring things out you know clearly a lot of people get their source of news from you where do you get your source of news uh Twitter Reddit reddit's become like horrible now so we don't get any unbiased news

from redit it's all biased but Twitter sometimes we look at research papers archive um a bunch of different places that you know we we we get on news from um sometimes it's other people's YouTube channels sometimes there'll be a YouTube channel where they do a deep dive on like I was reading I was watching this deep dive on EAC right which is effective acceleration and there were lots of things for and against it and I was like should I make a video about this my own video but topic like my thoughts on this because people

want to hear my thoughts on that topic sometimes it could be that sometimes it could be um you know lot of Twitter noise around something so in a way we bucket content to different places like sometimes it's tw Twitter import export in a way yeah right sometimes it's paper import export I mean I'm I'm I'm simplifying the what what we do it's a lot of effort love to do inside but uh yeah we need to look for interesting so so sometimes my own opinion sometimes just like yo I have thoughts I'll make a video about

this so it's mostly that um sometimes it's reactions to stuff that have happened on Instagram we have a very diverse like I can't tell you next week what content we'll be doing because a lot of it is time sensitive how far ahead you plan for the content because we able to make videos in 15 30 minutes not very far oh all right so not very far I we have an interesting idea today it can be done today incredible that is that is a new way of looking at things I I I've worked in companies where

you have two weeks worth of content in advance but I guess for you everything is so time sensitive and the fact that you guys can do it so quickly now do you apply that same method to the companies you're working with because I understand for other companies there's that delay of you guys reviewing things with them and and also them understanding the technology and how fast you guys work how does how does that relationship work with the companies so with external companies they love us like in the sense that they often just give us the

steering wheel after a couple of months they're like this is working just keep you do you right and there's only a problem if we put up something that they don't like but they've never done that not even once right so I think it's good my dream is to take that services company and make it a pure play Product Company at some point in life right and I think it's possible right every year with AI with every new Advance it's possible and even if you don't manage to make it a full like Product Company even if

you have a little bit of services that's okay like Salesforce does have a lot lot of services yeah right even in the product uh even though they're a product company so we just want to make sure that we're able to do it very lean very efficiently and that should be good enough I love that Varon thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure speaking with you honestly learned a lot about what you do and how you and your team have managed to create content at scale but with quality which is something that

is unheard of especially about the times that you're talking about the speed and we're looking forward to see what you guys create very interesting in the way you approach not just leading the team but also looking at how you want to manage different problems in the world using the technologies that you learn about so we're very excited to see what you would create we cannot wait to see everything absolutely in fact I know I mean I actually want to hear a little bit about you guys right I'm sure you're doing you're doing a lot lot

of stuff on 3D what's the business behind the scenes I'm sure there's a business behind the scenes oh yeah 100% bad decisions is twofold one is the content machine that we create tutorial Series this is the podcast that we are doing and we do a lot of tech updates and then we have bad decision Solutions then we deliver immersive experiences we created recently a fortnite map for can we say the client name I think we can say the client name for Dubai Police we are creating immersive experiences 3D immersive experience for clients here in UAE

we are now in Dubai and in Canada as well wonderful so one of the cool ideas I had if you're open to it is we should do we should do video together like we should do a proper CGI video together cuz I know you guys are great at Unreal Engine we have a good team as well we can collab and do like three or four crazy videos let's do it I think that's a fantastic idea I honestly believe that we can do something really sick together because what you guys are creating is awesome we work

a lot behind the scenes like you said when it comes to Unreal Engine but also blender because you did use the word blender earlier on I do have to mention our team is blender Unreal Engine we do explore other software as well we do touch Hood a little bit but Houdini is pretty damn complex uh but when it comes to the business side of things I mean me and far were discussing this the beauty about Unreal Engine is that it can be used for so many different worlds right you can talk about real estate it's

useful you're talking about Game Dev it's useful fashion because it's real time events because it's real time so many different Industries are using Unreal Engine and I can see that for the foreseeable future again I don't know how AI will change things in 10 years time but at least for the next few years I know unreal is going to be the king when it comes to a lot of different Industries and so that's been our main focus we do work with a lot of clients most of them use our Unreal Engine Services but at the

same time the reason why we were discussing content with you is because understanding social media is not easy I mean everybody can make videos but like you said there's taste to it but there's also skills of understanding the trends and what people will watch and listen to so a lot of the times in in the clients we worked with we do offer social media services as well because naturally they will see the content that we create and they're asking us hey why don't you guys create content for us we're like we never we never thought

of ourselves as a social media agency but I guess we can do it better than most people that you can work with actually the funny story is the first time that it happened the we were delivering our normal services and the client ask us why don't you guys do social media your social media is bigger than our social media agency you guys should do it their social media agency had 2,000 followers and we had like over 100 100K so they said why don't you guys become a social media agency we said we never that was

not our goal but we can do it I mean if you guys want us to do it do together let's give it a try and we did and our video perform much better than their own social media agency so we do offer that service as well it is really fun I mean understanding the psychology behind social media is essentially understanding the psychology of people the the overall psyche of society at a certain point in time that's why I read so much that's why I read so much yeah exactly exactly that's why I I understood what

you said about reading books because if you understand the psychology of people you will understand what works on social media why are people watching Tik Tok at a certain point in time it also extends to business ex also extends to business what people buy it's also related yes yes I it's it's quite important understanding the psychology of humans because we're [ __ ] dealing with them every [ __ ] day we should do a video on that yes if you want we can do a really cool CGI video on this you let me know how

we should do it happy to you know try an experiment if it works books that's awesome we make a CS I I think we have to come up with a bunch of different ideas and then see which ones are the most interesting to all of us and then see how we would produce those ideas to be something unique something different that one of our teams couldn't do on their own we'll have to work together to collaborate to create that and I think that video will be [ __ ] awesome lovely I'm excited to hear your

ideas like my inbox is open and you have access I freaking love that man dude thank you so much I I would I would sit down with Farah and our team and we would definitely go over some ideas with you and I guess for everybody watching and listening right now they probably should be aware that some cool video or videos are going to drop between our channels awesome I love it man Von so I gotta ask you was this a bad decision cuz I mean you did mention it in the beginning I gotta ask you

I mean not really uh I think you know it it was a good decision but you know I was joking about the intro yeah you need you you need something that kept retention up for the intro so I said bad decisions amazing um but yeah this is awesome this was fun we got to go just the right level of technical for the audience watching and yeah you guys are great host thank you so much man that means that means a lot and when you're in Dubai next time we're definitely meeting up done I love it

Baron thank you so much and for everybody watching and listening as well you guys are amazing we will see you guys on the next episode until then ciao