Nikki, thanks for being here. How's it going? Everything's going well. As I told you, I kind of took my YouTube thing and put it on a back burner for a little bit. But it's still on the brain.
As much as I'm thinking, oh, I've got to focus on this thing for now, I'm still thinking of YouTube. So I'm still watching all the videos, teaching all the tips and tricks, and I don't think I'll be able to put that down. You've been doing YouTube for years, right? I mean, when I met you in May of 2024, you were already deep in YouTube.
You'd had a channel for a couple years at that point. Multiple. Yeah, I've tried different types of content. I've tried.
I saw you doing the education stuff with language. Was there another format you were doing as well? I had a personal channel where I was doing things like mindset, self-development, productivity. I couldn't quite put my finger on what I wanted to do on that channel. And long before all of this, I had an art channel where it was just speed paints and me yapping over it with absolutely no point. But I just wanted to be on YouTube.
So I was like, here's an excuse, let me try that. Yeah, I go back and forth with having a format versus just sharing what I'm interested in. Whenever I try to figure out the perfect format, I end up in this paralysis-analysis. And that's part of why I just jumped right back into this podcasting thing, because I was trying to deliberate so much and I needed to just do it and experiment. What do you think nowadays?
Is it better to be more focused, or is it better to be more diverse in sharing varied interests? I've seen both sides of this argument and I don't even know what the right answer is. But my heart leans more into what you're doing, where you just do it, because I think it depends on the type of person. You and I are the type that will overthink a lot and plan, plan, plan before actually putting pedal to the metal. So I think we benefit from the just-do-it kind of mentality. But there are people who kind of just spray things at the wall without thinking at all, and maybe they benefit from planning and strategizing direction.
So I think it really depends on the type of person, but personally for me lately, I feel like I need to lean more into just doing it. I'm actually doing that with my work, my ESL teaching, English as a second language, where I've been trying to find ways to add more value for students. I got a great idea from a class I was taking for myself. I took a Chinese class with this teacher, and he told me that in China — because I have mostly Chinese students — they're very interested in test prep, and I was like, I never thought of that. So I took that away from the meeting and decided I'm just going to do this. I bought the books.
I already made my plan and I started procrastinating a little bit, but then I went with my best friend and said, let's make a deal with each other, let's push ourselves to do this. And I'm back on it again. I think I can actually say definitively that in a week I'll have class options up on my teaching profile. So I'm trying that just-do-it mentality right now, not necessarily in the YouTube space, but I think it's a good practice in life for the type of person that overthinkers are.
That's great. And you have an accountability partner? Yes, essentially.
Which is I think one of the reasons people still hire coaches — that accountability. I think that's the key thing that still can't be accounted for with AI, that can't be replaced. It's funny you should bring that up, because when I was on our Twitter high with Denko, one of the ideas I contemplated was accountability coaching, especially for productivity — that was what I was doing at the time — and I think it's still a viable idea, just like you're saying. It's one of those possible moats that's difficult for AI to overcome, just because it can pretend to be human, but it never will be.
It'll run out of context window. Oh, who are you again? Paying absorbent amounts of money, losing your sanity. There's so many risks with AI versus just having a real person that you can trust, that you can rely on, that will actually care about you, deeply. And that feeling, that real knowing that they actually care about you, I feel like that's something that will still be around for a long time. And if people don't get too sick of coaching and that kind of thing, I think it'll still be beneficial for a lot of people.
I've actually had the AI tell me, "oh, we feel this way," and it'll use a collective "we" as it relates to what I'm thinking or feeling. And I'm like, what are you talking about? You're not a 40-year-old man. You have no idea of mortality. This is completely just a language learning model, but it's bizarre.
It does a lot of times sound like you're talking to a person, or it gives good insight. So it can be seductive, right? For sure. But yeah, I think you're right, people are starting to want to connect with people and know what's real. I think that's the big fear right now, how do we know what's real?
A lot of times I can't tell if a photo is a real ad campaign with an actual model or not anymore. And I'm seeing these demos now where they're doing character swaps. There was one — did you see that Stranger Things one, where there was a guy sitting there and he kind of toggled between all the different characters and made all these facial expressions, and it looked just like Millie Bobby Brown, the girl from the show? Even the way she moved her face, the way she moves her eyebrows — it was bizarre. For like two seconds I think from being able to have these actors just lend their likeness and not even necessarily have to perform.
I don't know how they feel about it, I'm sure it'll be a mix, but we're in this age now where people are questioning what's real, and I'm actually starting to see design go away from the AI perfection of it all and go more back to this Zen style, cut-and-paste, 1970s-style media, where it's a lot more sloppy. Because that's the thing we don't get anymore, the sloppiness of everything. Everybody is crafting and perfecting everything and fine-tuning it through AI and editing themselves, and it just loses something. It loses the humanity. And that's actually what people look for, because it's those moments where you're talking to someone in real time and you see how they respond, or the cadence with which they talk — that's not perfect, and you kind of really get a sense of their essence, of who they are. So I think we're right on the forefront of this explosion.
I think we all know it, but we're in this trust-based economy now. I feel that. I was trying to remember a meme while you were talking, one I saw recently in the comments of a video.
It was like, in 2024 the disclaimer was — I can't remember what the old one was — but now in 2026 the disclaimer is "this was not made with AI." So it's like this is now the stamp of genuine, "not made with AI." And people are looking for that. There's a channel, I don't know if you've seen it, that's gotten really popular for lo-fi.
And their claim to fame is lo-fi made by real people. They're singing live with their little dog, just making music and posting it on their channel, and I keep seeing them pop up more and more, and I feel like they're getting more popular because that's the vibe right now. Totally. I was thinking of starting to put "written by humans" on things that I write.
But it's funny, my degree is software engineering, my master's degree, and the school seems to be changing up how they're doing the degree, trying to respond to the whole AI surge, and this semester is just topsy-turvy. It's crazy, the things they want us to do and complete in the amount of time — everyone's confused. But one of the main themes is the encouragement of the use of AI, because they know people are trying to use AI to write their papers anyway.
So they say just disclose what you use AI for and in what capacity. That's all you can use AI for. We're on the third week now, and they want us to complete a portion of the assignments completely with AI — with Figma to do the initial design, and the instructions literally say the design shouldn't take you very long at all, you're going to spend the time on implementation, just have the design be created by the AI. And it highlights to me that everyone's kind of rushing to make everyone stay relevant with the AI influx, and everyone's looking at it from a different perspective.
Schools, at least this school, are starting to feel like maybe we need to prepare software engineers for going into the workforce with AI skills. And then there are people in the creative arts who are resisting it with all their strength, who are like, I want to do all of this myself, I want to prove that I don't use AI and show that I'm competent. And I'm very interested — I'm not scared like a lot of people are scared about how things are going. Even for me, being in this field, I should be worried, like, am I going to have a job? But I'm not.
I really am not. Part of it is my faith in God and Jesus, but the other part is that humans are — I say it in a slightly derogatory term, but I mean it with all the love — we're like cockroaches. You can't stomp us out completely. We really can't be killed completely. No matter what the conspiracies are about trying to cull the population or whatever, you can't undo the human race, because humans are too hearty, and they always survive.
So we're going to figure something out. People who want to work will work, and people who don't want to work won't. It's just about keeping your head on your shoulders and thinking about things like we're talking about, little niches like accountability coaching. It might seem like, well, maybe I can't do that, but you don't know until you try. And there are other little things hidden out there — if you keep your eyes open and don't get blinded by anxiety, you'll find something. You'll find something in the things you like, too. I really believe that.
I really believe we'll make it through this AI apocalypse, and some of us will embrace it. I personally don't hate AI. I don't use it for everything, but I use it, and some of us will resist, and we'll see where we end up. But I have faith in being able to express your creativity and do meaningful things still, even with whatever AI wants to offer.
It's true. I talked to friends of mine who were in software — I don't think I realized your degree was a master's in software engineering. Somehow I missed that. I knew you were in school, but I didn't realize it was for that.
They've been telling me how much the industry has changed since I left, how people are expected to work with AI now, and the productivity they're expected to output is like 5 to 10x per week. I see the acceleration of how everybody's afraid they're trying to keep up with all the new apps, the new software that comes out. Anytime I read a list of what AI tools so-and-so is using, or the best productivity apps, a lot of them I've never heard of, and it becomes overwhelming, it becomes daunting, and you wonder what's the limit, when do we decide, okay, enough's enough. Not that we'd say "okay," but I think we're starting to see people deciding, you know what, I can't keep up, it's gotten too crazy, and I'm not even going to try to keep up anymore.
I'm just going to do me now. And I think that's kind of the mindset of what we were talking about at the beginning — I'm not going to get the perfect idea, so I'm just going to experiment and do what I'm going to do. I think people are starting to do that online a little bit with their content creation, the stuff they're putting out there. They're like, I don't know what's next because my career is in jeopardy, but I'm just going to start posting content and see what happens. So I think we're starting to see more people come into the space, more people just letting it rip in a sense.
I don't know, that's a lot of stuff there all in one bite. But it's all connected, right? It's all swirling around in this soup of the internet, and now AI, which has really accelerated things. I just look at it now and think, wow, I don't even know how somebody could be expected to keep up with this.
And like you said, I'm not surprised. It's really interesting that your school is kind of flying by the seat of their pants trying to figure out how to reconcile this before the end of the semester, even changing the curriculum mid-semester. It's kind of crazy.
I understand their frustration, and I guess their desire to make their students usable out there. It may be a crazy way to go about it, but I understand, and I am grateful, because as a programmer I kind of resist using AI too much. I do use it in terms of if there's something I'm learning that I don't know and I need it to explain — it gives me a code snippet, I don't know all that's going on, explain to me what's going on.
That's how I learn using the AI. But I essentially prefer to just write things myself. Now with this course, they're having us let AI do a lot more than I'd be comfortable letting AI do. And I guess they're trying to say that's what it is out there, that your company wants productivity over your learning, or your competence. But there's an argument I agree with, that came to mind when you were talking about something else — I should have written it down — I think it goes for other industries, where in software engineering, if you don't have people, if you just have people using AI, or even just senior people using AI and making all the things, you're not going to have the pipeline anymore of people becoming seniors.
There will be no one left to become a senior, and you're kind of killing the position, the entry level, which is done so easily with AI, because those people need to gain skills in order to become the people who can be competent. And I think this is the same in other fields that might try to use AI to take over the position. You're not going to have the person learning the skills that require them to be the senior in that position to run things. They're not going to have the background. They're not going to have the foundation. You're going to have incompetence.
And then you're going to have situations like entire code bases that can't be debugged because the people who wrote them just used AI and don't understand it. I think there's a new job position — have you seen it? Vibe coding cleanup specialist. Have you seen that? I have not seen that.
Crazy. I was like, oh my gosh, a new job position already, there we go. But I guess that's just evidence of them saying the new economy created by AI, or displacement of other jobs, creates new jobs. So that's an example, I guess. But I just think a lot of the times we get a little shortsighted by the money and we forget about our humanity.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, new jobs will be created. I think it's becoming a situation where, from the people I've talked to, you have got to do more systems design stuff, and you use AI to do the junior-level coding and you have to oversee all of it. But you're right, how do you get the new people entering the workforce to be able to level up to that point? Honestly, I think AI has kind of created this gap where new people come into the workforce and they need those entry-level jobs. Now if AI is taking those entry-level jobs, and the people who were already in software are having to level up to become more systems architects, how do the people entering the workforce gain the experience to cross that chasm? Exactly what you're saying — the low-level jobs, the menial tasks people used to cut their teeth on, have been taken away.
So it's a weird time. I think we're just seeing the beginning. And the funny thing is, when I was in the field, people used to think truck drivers would be the first ones replaced —
— they're still trucking away. And software engineers have replaced themselves. It's wild. I'm with you, I think ultimately we're going to come out the other end of this better. I think a lot of the tasks computers are good at doing are tasks that people don't really want to do, and in the same breath, I guess there's also what you mentioned with the creatives, people feeling like, well, AI can make songs now, AI can make photos and art.
I can't tell the difference now for some of these AI songs. I heard one on X the other day and it sounded like something from the 1950s, like it was recorded back then. It was like "you can f right off" or whatever, if you might have heard it, going viral, sung in this old-fashioned style. It was kind of funny, wouldn't have expected it with that voice.
Yeah, pretty good. So we'll have to see. It's one of those situations where you don't know what to do, you just keep doing, right? Keep creating.
And it's like all of our institutions are being disrupted. I was watching, there's been a lot of sports on TV lately, football and even basketball starting up. I was in a bar and it was on TV, and it was kind of funny to me, I was thinking it's weird, we still have all these student athletes and people still going to these institutions still trusting that if they do what's asked of them by the institution, they'll be rewarded at the other end, because I think we know now more than ever that's not guaranteed. Like when I was in school, high school and everything, it still had that factory-style school, you go, the bell rings, you go to class, you sit down, lecture-style education, and I think we've got so much information now that proves that's not the most effective way to learn, but I still have nephews who are going to school doing that, they hate it, I don't blame them.
I kind of think to myself, we're still educating children that way, how is that, it just seems dated, it seems so antiquated. And when I see these kids on TV doing the college sports thing, that whole system is being disrupted by name, image, and likeness contracts, by people going different routes into the professional realm. It's gotten so competitive because it's not just domestic, it's international, and people are being found on YouTube in Africa — there's really no guarantee the way there used to be. So it just seems like all of our institutions are on trial right now.
And I find it surprising when people are still going the traditional route, because there really doesn't seem to be that guarantee anymore. But I just think we really don't know what else to do. It's like keep posting. There's a flood of AI stuff out there and everybody sort of sounds and looks the same, but I don't know what else to do. I'm just going to keep posting my own thing, and hopefully I'm that signal in the noise.
And I'm realizing as I'm saying this, you're in a traditional education system right now. And we've talked about this before — I told you two years ago, I don't know if I would bother learning coding. And you're like, I don't care, I want to learn coding, I've always wanted to learn coding.
I'm doing it because I want to do it. And to me, that made total sense, that was justifiable. It's the same for me. I wanted to learn coding. I found it interesting, and it used a part of my brain that was exciting to me.
So I never pushed back on that, I was like, I get why she wants to do it. But you are sort of seeing the bricks crumble in the building while you're getting your degree, on the way out. Walking out with the ceiling falling in.
You remind me of something I heard someone talking about, basically why things seem to be degrading right in front of our eyes — it's because the rate of change of eras is speeding up, and we're just in a super exponential period of time where everything is changing faster than we can react. And you start to wonder, what should I tool up on, even if you were to change directions, like you're saying, people don't know what to go to, so we just kind of stick with what we know.
We think about our parents who insist on us going to university or getting PhDs. My family is Caribbean, and they're very traditional in that sense — you go to school, you go all the way to the end, to that PhD, you get everything. In their minds, thinking of anything else doesn't make sense, but that's because that's the world they grew up in, that worked for them, or that they grew up seeing work for other people. So now our generation and millennials, who are the adults and parents right now, are thinking, well, I had to go through school and it kind of worked for me.
It should work for you too. So even with everything going on, it's hard to tell what's good in the future. And there are very few people who can grasp that the change is too fast for you to go the traditional route. I'm even considering now, after all these years doing this degree — I slowed down, I would have finished in two years, but I slowed down because I wanted to save up for a particular goal for my family, and so I'm finishing this year. And I'm now thinking maybe I'll just get my certificate in — I can never say that word —
Phlebotomy? Oh gosh, the one who takes your blood. Phlebotomy, I think. Yeah. And just get a certificate in that and do that job for a while, and then maybe get something more physical, that's less likely to be replaced by a robot.
Robots are going to take a lot more time to get to that. We need a lot more time for robots, I think. Who knows? But I don't want a robot taking my blood. At least people will reject it long enough. So I think we're safe doing a job like that.
So I'm thinking I'll probably do the software engineering on the side and do something more physical as a safer job, at least for the time being. Who knows what's in the future? And there are going to be more and more people who wake up to that and realize the MBA might not be the answer, the software engineering degree, whatever university degree you come up with. Maybe — a lot of people are turning to running their own small business, and there are some people who really aren't cut out for it in the beginning, it's going to take a long time for them to build up to the mettle that it takes to run a small business, but they're thinking, what choice do I have? But I really think we'll figure it out. It's just going to take some time that AI is not giving us.
It's racing ahead of us, and it just feels like we're running a losing race. The technology is moving fast, but we're the ones pushing it, right? This arms race between these AI companies — as much as we're sensing fear from the consumer end of this, that arms race between these companies is fear-based too.
It's true. They're all worried about becoming irrelevant, because I've seen in my own behavior, and I've seen in the community online, people just move with the cheese. One release of ChatGPT is better than Claude, and everybody moves over there, and then Claude's better and they move back, and now the images from Nano Banana are blowing people's minds and everybody's jumping over to that, within a week you could probably lose a third of your users, because they'll just cancel their membership and try this one for a month, try that one for a month. From the services I use, it's almost like with streaming services — a lot of times I'll just run through all the shows and then cancel that one and sign up for the other one, run through them, and then the other seasons are back, I jump to the other one. That's smart. I'm finding it's the same with a lot of the AI tools — I'm doing a bunch of video editing this month, so CapCut, and then if I'm doing image generation the next month. I don't always remember to do it, but if I'm on a down tick for a certain service, I'll suspend it for a month or cancel it, and it'll expire in like two weeks, it says. And then if I need it, I'll renew it.
But if I end up not needing it in a month from now, I'll just — or if I do need it in a month, I saved a two-week subscription because I wasn't even using it then anyway. But yeah, I think a lot of these companies are in this race right now, and people are desperately trying to keep up. I think the software engineering degree you have reminds me of law degrees, like lawyers in the 80s — everybody was getting a law degree, and even into the 90s, it just started to become really saturated. But people were still getting law degrees, and they were going into political science and things like that afterwards. It was always seen as a good degree to have.
If you have a law degree, you're employable, people will be impressed by that. And I'm assuming that's probably what's going to be the case with the software engineering degree. Like, okay, this person's intelligent, she's got a master's degree in software engineering, she's no dummy.
She's going to be able to adapt and understand systems — if you're going to hire somebody and they need to know a bit about AI and understanding how to integrate that into a system, maybe she's not the engineer doing it necessarily, but there's a role for somebody who has that degree versus doesn't have that degree. So I think it's probably going to be useful in that context. Another analogy I have for all of this — I don't know all the history of it, but I can imagine when the calculator came around, I remember the arguments about using calculators in school going on. I don't think I even touched a graphing calculator till university.
My school was a little private school, and they didn't let us use graphing calculators, it was just a regular calculator. So I remember when they were afraid, the same fear, you're going to lose your skills, people aren't going to be able to write — just the same fears as people writing things with AI and not being able to write anymore. But there are still mathematicians. There are still people who have to get a math degree and go teach you how to do math.
There are still people who actually need that deep, technical, fundamental understanding of math in high positions, and maybe that's what's going to happen with software engineering, like you're pointing at, I think there's going to be a chasm. Maybe there's not going to be that entry level anymore because it's not needed, but there's still a need for software engineering, just in a more technical aspect. Much like a mathematician — you don't need a mathematician with a PhD to teach math class in fourth or fifth grade, you need that for university or NASA or something more technical, more advanced. And that makes it more valuable. The only difference is this is happening so fast that there are just too many software engineers available for the few jobs.
So maybe you can't satisfy the need yet with all the people who want the job. But I think it's going to even out, where there's still going to be a place for software engineers, but there's going to be more of a balance about who actually attempts to go into that field, because of where the need is and how technical you have to get, how good you have to get at your craft to actually be usable. So instead of making lazy engineers, or people who just vibe-code surviving in these places, I think it's going to make more technically advanced people, people who strive harder to be so good that they're actually needed in these higher positions. I think it's going to make more experts, is my guess.
I think you're right. If you look at other industries, the type of mathematics and the type of things we're doing today at NASA and SpaceX, these types of companies — I'm confident the math they're doing was math that was incomprehensible 60 years ago, they're able to have these equations and predictions for how to calculate all of the different variables with these space launches. I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff, but once it's supercharged with the technology, suddenly now you can do a lot more. I think there's still the mental load though, of having to keep all of these different tools straight, and you become a manager of all these different tools. It's like you can do more, but you're also managing a lot more. It's that idea of we create technology to ease the workload, but does the workload ever ease, or does that productivity just become the new baseline?
And now I think the cognitive load of life today is overwhelming for most people. We now are trying to manage a job, probably a side hustle because you need a little extra income because it's so expensive. What used to be a single-income home is now a four-income home. You've got your two cars, your house, your mortgage.
These things have been around for a while, but social media, trying to make sure your online presence is still there, you're trying to learn new skills all the time. The list goes on. I think we all have our own experience of how much stuff we're trying to take on. Now everybody's trying to be fit at the same time, trying to eat healthy.
Trying to learn a new hobby. We've got all of these things we're doing, and we can do them because of the internet and because of technology nowadays, but that's still exhausting us mentally, still draining our mental resources. And I think in a way that, again, 60 or 70 years ago wasn't as draining for people, they weren't doing as much, but that was okay, they didn't care because the baseline was lower.
So we keep raising the baseline on ourselves, and everybody's having to keep 10 balls, 20 balls in the air just to be considered a successful person. And otherwise you feel like you don't have social relevance or status if you can't prove that you're doing well at work, or doing well in your family life, that you're healthy, you're going on all the right vacations, that kind of stuff — at least around here in California, in Orange County it's very much that way. You made me think of this whole overload you're talking about. I feel like that's going to be resisted as well.
I feel like it's started already, a lot of people trying to minimalize. I don't know if you've seen that trend going on on YouTube a lot. There's this guy — I didn't watch the video, but he talked about, I think he was sitting on a chair with nothing in the room, and he was talking about how he eliminated as much as possible from his life. I didn't actually watch it, but I saw the premise of it. And I feel like this is being pushed because of this overload of productivity.
And even AI adds to that in the workplace, just like you're saying, because AI is doing some more things for you, you should be able to do more things. That's the same thing happening with this semester, because they're giving us AI to do things. But it actually brings me around to a thought that came to me at the top of this year, and actually my sister had the exact same thought, which was kind of interesting — we both felt the same pull of doing less. Every year I usually sit down and write a bunch of goals I want to set out for the year, and I organize them with action steps and habits I need to put in place, organized by the time of year I'm going to start them.
Everything went wonderfully as usual last year. This year I sat down — I was doing this thing, who was it, Chris Williamson, I don't know if you know that podcaster — and my best friend gave me this reflections list to fill out.
And I went through it and just had this feeling of, I want to not do any of this. I just felt like I want to do less this year. I literally have three things I wrote down to do. I've already dropped two of them.
And honestly right now, because of how school started off, I am in the mindset of doing one thing. I just want to do one thing. I just want to focus, because there's so much that wants to be done. Like you're saying, I want to lose weight, I want to eat healthy.
I want to get married. I want to have a good job — even that I had to drop, I was looking for a job but I was like, nope, I cannot handle a job on top of this semester, so I stopped that. So it's like that feeling of overwhelm is real, and I feel like a lot of people are going to push away from it, just like the thing with people trying to grayscale their phone, turn off notifications, escape the matrix, whatever — it's going to be that pendulum that humanity loves to swing to the other side, and I feel like a lot of people are going to feel it and react probably in a similar way, wanting to do less, wanting to be able to breathe and be present and mindful and enjoy where they are. But you made me think of that need to focus, because even as a person who loves to do many things, I'm feeling that strain, and actually feeling that rebellion in wanting to let go.
I think we're going to see that in 2026, a lot of people simplifying their lives, because it's gotten a little too noisy in a lot of our brains. I don't know how people watch the news, keep up on social media. I have to be on there with content creation, but it's taxing. I can get sucked in, especially with political news and stuff, I just don't have the bandwidth for it.
It's just too exhausting. I won't have any energy left at the end of the day if I'm absorbing all of this content and information. So I have to tune out. I have to just focus on my life and the things that are present, in the immediate vicinity, not worrying about things happening halfway around the world that I have no control over whatsoever.
I know you've got to go in a minute. I wanted to talk to you about content creation and being in that space, because I think a lot of people are going to be washing out of certain careers. Oh yeah. Where do you see the industry going in the next year? What's changed in the time that you and I have known each other? Maybe we'll have to have another call about that, because I think a lot's changed.
Even Dan co-posted something the other day saying information products are dead. Oh yeah, I saw that. Maybe he was just trying to — maybe it was clickbait, maybe he's trying to eliminate some competition, or maybe he really believes it, I don't know. But I've definitely found it more challenging personally. Coming into it, I think I saw what Dan was doing and what some of these other creators were doing, and I've seen them change their behavior in real time.
It's kind of similar to what we were saying with your degree. I sometimes feel like I walked into a building that was on an unsteady foundation. Things just started to shift around me real fast. And that's probably because of AI as well, right, allowing more people to enter into content creation.
It's lowered the barrier to entry. But that whole promise, or expectation is a better way of putting it, of what the outcome might be if you follow this path, has rapidly changed, and we're seeing that even at the top of the pyramid here. I definitely see that. In terms of my perspective, I don't know for sure, but I do think it's going to lean into more realness. I hate to say the word authenticity, but someone who is genuine, or it's not too polished, like we talked about.
There are rough edges, but also you're not in a wife beater sitting in your backyard, because unless you're rich, nobody cares about that, right? There's still a need to present yourself in a way that people care about you. But there are going to be people who latch on to channels they care about more. Even the YouTube algorithm is interesting, that will play a part in this. The way it's been acting for me, I'm wondering how good it is for content creators right now, especially those who want to start new. There's some good aspects, in terms of promoting smaller channels, but there's the aspect of how quickly you become irrelevant if someone just doesn't click on your video three times in a row.
So there are the balances and the difficulties, but I still think it's worth it if you want some semblance of independence, but at the same time to make impact, because I still think content creation is a great way to make impact. One thing Dan Co talked about, in that video or a couple videos after, I thought was a good point. He said opinions, having an opinion, has always been the way to stand out. And I think that's something I want to have too. I feel like I've always struggled with being confident with an opinion, but there are so many people whose whole thing is having a very strong opinion that maybe a lot of people agree with and a lot of people don't.
But it doesn't matter, because it gets you attention. So I think there are just going to be different techniques, different tricks that'll emerge, and even with the saturation, there'll always be a way to sneak through the noise. I still think it's a good route to consider. But yeah, we can talk about that again another time. All right.
Well, and we're out of time, but I appreciate you being here, this was a great talk.
