Neale 00:00
You wanted him. We got him. You requested this guest the most. Welcome James! James welcome to the podcast. So AT-AT Walker that is fully mobilized, a full-size transformer, a PC that can cook pasta dishes. Are you just a massive kid living the dream?
James 00:31
Yeah, I think so. So I spent a long time in the corporate world working in IT and then I spent a long time trying not to do that. Okay. And now I’m there. Yeah. SO yeah, the ideal job.
Neale 00:42
What was What was the driver? What made you want to do that? Have you always been sort of crifty crafty? Have you always been mechanical? I know you mentioned IT obviously so you’ve got a technical side. What was the backstory?
James 00:54
How much time have you got? To tell you the whole story.
Neale 00:56
An hour, let’s go for
James 00:58
I mean, yeah, so I’ve always been making things since I was a child, which was a long time ago. So there’s pictures of me with a robot made of egg boxes, bits of Meccano wood, and the mouth was chattering, those rind up chattering teeth, that sort of thing. And then, so I did electronic engineering at degree level at University of Birmingham, but that was in the 90s, and they didn’t even teach us microcontrollers. So it’s a long time before Arduino and Raspberry Pis and all that stuff came along. In 2004, I decided to get back into that stuff, having worked in IT for a bit. And I basically wanted to build a humanoid walking robot.
Neale 01:33
As most people.
James 01:34
Yeah, so, and I tried to find some website that would show you how to do this easily. And of course there wasn’t one. So I thought, I’ll just make that website. That’s when XRobots.co.uk got registered about 2004. But that was long before, well, YouTube wasn’t really there. Well, it wasn’t there at all, actually. And you couldn’t get cheap stuff from China on eBay and Aliexpress and all these things. So it was all like wood from B&Q and bits of metal tube and windscreen wiper motors and things like that.
Neale 02:02
And you still had the IT gig on the side to fund all this then.
James 02:05
Yeah, sure. So it’s all just, I wasn’t making any money from it. I had AdSense ads on my blog, but they didn’t make much money. And I thought at the time, how can I have an output to make money from this thing? Would someone pay me to just make these robots? Anyway, I didn’t actually achieve making a walking robot. I did about something like nine different ones for a number of years. And then also had my main IT job was working for Aion Corporation, the biggest insurance company in the world. And I did that from 2004 to about 15. And in that time, so 3D printing came along. The RepRap project came out of Bath University 2003. So I’ve been reading that blog early on about making the first parent and child’s machine. So Raspberry Pi’s and Arduino’s and all that stuff came along, 3D printing. And then obviously YouTube came along. So I started doing projects, putting them on YouTube.
Neale 02:57
The perfect storm of technology sort of coming together.
James 02:59
And then I left that job because I got recruited by a toy company to go and do prototyping based on what they saw in my YouTube channel. That was Blades Toys in Portsmouth who are 28% owned by Peter Jones from Dragon’s Den. So good media angle. And then I eventually dropped some days a week till I was two days a week and the rest was YouTube and now I’ve been full time for six years.
Neale 03:18
Fantastic. You said you always made something since when you’re a kid so that the puppets and that kind of thing We spoke to Mend It Mark and his initial inspiration was they took the back off a television They saw the city inside and he was fascinated by it. Our engineers who are huge fans of yours. That’s why we’ve brought you on the show. They they’ve all got their own stories: for Jason it was taking apart his toys, for Tom it was a VCR that he took apart. Was there a moment that you remember where it’s like that’s when the fascination started?
James 03:49
Not really but I just remember there not being any information about how to do stuff there was a local library I lived in well I was a village with three schools and there’s a relatively small village and there obviously is a village library but they never really got any new books about anything there was a book about building a robot arm to interface to a Commodore 64 or something it was like make your own breadboard by getting a piece of wood and sawing it and get all these components and then cut out balsa wood but it was I got the book out loads of times and never managed to find the parts even to buy or how do you do it you know so where’d you get the motors they say you know there was no internet basically
Neale 04:24
Sounds like a curious mind, you’ve always had a vast how-to-think-to-work, essentially. Let’s talk about some of the early builds then. When you first started off putting things on YouTube, was it just projects that you found interest in? Was it, I suppose it was too early to find a hole in the market and that kind of stuff?
James 04:40
So this movie came out in 2008 called Iron Man. Yes, yeah, yeah. So that’s when I basically, that’s where I got most of my subscribers, which was from building an Iron Man suit. So that was a four year project.
Neale 04:50
Wow.
James 04:50
That I did from about 2010 to about 2014.
Neale 04:54
Where do you even start?
James 04:55
50 videos. Where do you start?
Neale 04:57
Yeah, well where did you start?
James 04:58
So I started, so there’s this thing called Pepakura, which is basically if you get a book with a flat paper stuff and you fold it all up and make a thing. So people have made templates that you can do that with. So they’ll either rip game models and then refine them, made Pepakura templates with the software called Pepakura Designer that unfolds 3D models so they’re flat. So then what you’re supposed to do is print them out on card stock, reassemble it and glue it, fiberglass all over it, spend a very long time sanding it down. And then that’s how people made it before 3D printing pretty much, or any downloadable 3D prints. I made one out of foam, which is much easier because it’s got a thickness so you don’t need to do like the little indents. You can also use foam. Yeah, yeah, they can stick it back on it. So I did a foam suit and then I wanted a rigid suit. So I propped it all up with cardboard inside and made silicon moulds from the foam and then made a fiberglass and polyurethane suit. And at the end of that, I got my first 3D printer which is about 2012 or 13 and made little catches to fit it on, but that was about it.
Neale 06:00
I’m going to guess the foam version was softer than the on the skin.
James 06:03
Yeah So ends up with this whole rigid Iron Man suit. So I’ve done 40 videos over four years by that time.
Neale 06:09
You talked about, you know, you want to do electronic engineering, it was a college university.
James 06:15
Yeah, university, electronic and electrical engineering.
Neale 06:18
So we’ve had this conversation quite a bit, I mean it sounds like that didn’t really, you had an interest in it then but didn’t go on to do it. Obviously they didn’t teach FPGA, Raspberry Pi’s weren’t around, do you think there’s more for kids now to get into engineering? Is it as easy as stepping stone or is it more hurdles?
James 06:35
Sure, I mean, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, there were no, there were electronics kits. So when I was a kid, I had one of those ones with the spring terminals.
Neale 06:42
Make your own radio.
James 06:43
Radio shank, well it’s a handy one. But then it’s sort of like, why are all these things up and here’s this thing that works? And they have the explanations, all analog electronics about the voltage rises over this capacitor and then this thing happens. But I didn’t really find it good for learning. No. There weren’t, if there’d been one for digital electronics with logic chips, that would be much easier. But then when I left university, it was 1997. So the internet only went public in about 94. So my first job was an IT company in Tamworth in Staffordshire. IT services company, but they didn’t have a website or external email or internet access in the building.
Neale 07:17
As most people didn’t, no.
James 07:18
No one thought that was unusual.
Neale 07:19
No, not for an IT.
James 07:20
So the kind of computer side interested me far more at the time than doing electronic circuits.
Neale 07:27
Okay. We’ve got a few guys in the office who’ve thought about setting up their own channel. They do electronics all the time. If you’re going to give someone some advice on where to start off, what would you know, you’ve got a successful YouTube channel for a while. What would your advice be? I’m sure there will be people watching this who have got the same idea, you know, who want to know what to start off with. What would you say?
James 07:51
Make content. So I know a number of people who do say this to me and some of them who have YouTube channels and then they haven’t put a video out for ages because they’re too busy. So yeah, like the content, do content and learn to edit and learn to film and light things, make quality content about something. And if it doesn’t have a lot of views, it doesn’t matter, but you need to do something and then learn from it as you go. So I did weekly videos for eight years from 2000 and about 14. About something, even if it was a can of paint I bought, I thought was a really good finish. Just something.
Neale 08:27
Reviewing this and that versus something.
James 08:29
Learn, like do something, make content. Because if you don’t, like this is the same as any career, you have to invest a lot in it to get something back. If you start your degree and say, where’s my 50,000 pound a year job after the first year, I’ll give this up, then you’ll have given up and you won’t get there. It’s the same thing, like don’t give up because then you’ll have given up.
Neale 08:49
And you only learn by making mistakes. No one’s ever successful on the first go that you try.
James 08:54
And now when I started, it was all like my camera I had was a mini DV camcorder with a 4×3, you know, with a little DV tape and then a PCMCIA FireWire card in my laptop and you had to play the content back to stream it off and then editing it in Microsoft Windows Editor or whatever. Now, you know, everyone’s got a phone and there’s free, like DaVinci Resolve standard versions, free with loads of good stuff in, like anyone can edit. You can get lights on Amazon so that you can compare.
Neale 09:23
camera quality, the idea is all very good.
James 09:25
So it’s much easier to produce something that’s much better quality. Looking back on the old videos, even if I look at Colin Furze’s channel on the old videos I thought were really good at the time, it’s like what’s this grainy content you know? Even the ones he did hydroforming that we thought were quite recent, you look back on it and it’s like oh that’s awful. Now it’s easy to make quality content.
Neale 09:44
So all I wanted to ask was content. Yes. Great people learn and make mistakes. What’s been your longest costly biggest mistake today?
James 09:53
I don’t think so people ask me about how them how I’ve learned from mistakes, but I don’t really have many massive failures. Okay, I think maybe my they always pay back anyway from the YouTube content. So I guess open dog one that was all ball screws and it was really rigid not back drivable and it was too heavy to lift That went on for a quite a long time and it did kind of walk But it wasn’t anything like the next one But then I learned a lot from that doing inverse kinematics and the interpolations make all the joints just the engineering side I’m saying that I now have that experience. So actually doing a walking machine I can ride on at the moment, which is again ball screws and it’s not back drivable But it’s statically stable. So I think that was the biggest thing I put money into that didn’t work in the end But also did pay back from the ad revenue and the ads that are in it and the 11 episodes whatever I did
Neale 10:41
I think it was Med It Mark who said he was sort of, it was the repair video that went wrong that actually sort of lifted him up. So he was running around trying to, he needed to put some content out, just like he was like, oh, I need something out, something out. And he was like, oh, I’ll try and fix this thing. Rumbled through. And the end of the conclusion was, well, I can’t fix that. Bit disappointed. Stuck up online. Came over the next day. All of a sudden his subscriber just exploded. Do you know now what resonates with people and does that come into factors when you make videos or are you still?
James 11:11
I don’t know. So things I’ve, so the ball bike had 9 million views, I had a million views in a day, I think. It was the biggest uptake of views I’ve ever had. And almost didn’t do that project because I thought two balls as wheels, do they just look like wheels because they’re round? Well, people click on that. The balls were 300 pounds each. Right. And the motors were like 350 pounds each and there’s five of them. So that’s a lot of money to sink in. The chute as well, because it has to be, it’s omni wheels running on the balls. So it has to be in a clean, flat environment somewhere. So I had a big sports hall to even do a turn in it with a camera op. That shoot cost a thousand pounds with hiring the whole of this huge place as well and going to Northampton to do it. And it did really well, but I just didn’t have any idea at all. So I don’t know.
Neale 11:54
Yeah, I still don’t know. Do you think it’s a case then of trusting your gut and being sort of authentically you? That’s why.
James 12:03
Yeah, so my strategy now, because some of those did really well, then I did another omni bike that did not so well. So I’ve done four omni bikes that all did three to nine million views, fifth 150k, don’t know why. They’re all distinctly different. I’m going to do a one ball vehicle, we don’t know if that’ll do well. So my plan now is to break down the projects into smaller chunks, purely so I can put ads in them all, and then at least cover the costs, because I don’t know.
Neale 12:29
Community is important, we were having a chat about this when we went to grab a coffee before, tell me what’s involved in that, so you’ve done collaborations with Colin Furze and you’ve done the Christmas gift last year, how important is that community and how do you make those connections?
James 12:47
It’s interesting, the biggest people I’ve collaborated with are Colin several times, we did some e-promos for eBay a while ago for building the Hulkbuster and when he built the Tie Fighter and I built BB-9E.
Neale 12:56
I saw the Tie Fighter and the Tie Fighter, yeah.
James 12:58
That was officially licensed by Disney to eBay, everything had to be bought from eBay.
Neale 13:03
I hear Disney are quite protective over their IP.
James 13:06
Yeah, we had, so the shoot was like 40 people on site with Disney licensing and CEO of eBay UK and a catering truck and a medic with an ambulance.
Neale 13:13
Did you get a light saber out of it?
James 13:14
No.
James 13:17
Then we did the other one for Hulkbuster where I did all the cosmetic design and the control. And also did the Amazon Alexa fart flame thrower he did and the bed shaker. And then when I did my Rhino Tank, I went up and used his place to go and do it. Done quite a lot, and I did Mark Rober’s bowling ball as well. So the autostripe bowling ball you can throw and then he had an IME on his back and you can lean into the steers. So that was nice, so he contacted me for that. I had 50 million views in his channel. He came to my house and said, go and subscribe to James’ channel. 80,000 people came over from Mark’s channel. But, so the way to get views on YouTube is good click through and good retention. Having those 80,000 subscribers expecting Mark Rober, probably didn’t click on my videos because I was doing like ROS robots and things at the time, fairly in-depth technical stuff. So it may have had a detrimental impact, I don’t know.
Neale 14:13
Right, do you read the comments?
James 14:15
I’d still do another collaboration with him. Yes. Because it was good. But you know, yeah. So I don’t know whether people just don’t, you know, drives click through down. So it’s very difficult.
Neale 14:25
Yeah, so you want that longevity of the video, basically, to get through. But yeah, I mean, was there any negativity in terms of comments or anything? Oh, no, it’s just like…
James 14:31
I don’t know if that actually benefits me in the long term.
Neale 14:35
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose if you, you want to find your audience and grow your audience and if, I mean, we, we don’t have this podcast to sort of have a huge audience, more of a value thing to give back to the customers, but the people that we interviewed, so we interviewed you, we’re interviewing you right now. Obviously you’re here. Um, we interviewed a few YouTubers, um, in the electronic space. We also talked to the business leaders. I’m very, I’m very wary of trying to spread ourselves too thin, I suppose, because someone who’s watching this now, because you’re here, would not be interested, for example, in Roy Newey or Brad Sugars, who’s our business coach who we interviewed recently. And we’re trying to add value and just talk to interesting people, but it’s not really thematically, but I suppose if you’re doing it as a career, you have to think about audience and sponsorship and, and revenue, that kind of stuff, right? That’s got to be a balance.
James 15:31
I think that yeah, the money has to come from somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, so I’ve done two sponsor videos recently Which were dedicated videos views haven’t been very good, right? It’s two in a row and then I had one of my own videos and before that was another one which was for Lego Yeah, but a lot of dedicated sponsor videos or with ad in the thumbnail because I have to put ad on it Yeah, yeah, so views haven’t been great. The money’s been really good. So that’s had to outweigh it.
Neale 15:55
Yeah well no you do have to get paid at the end of the day it’s your job and it’s a passion you want to carry on doing it do you think that maybe if people see it’s an ad I’m not saying they sell it out I don’t think that the slightest but maybe an audience will go oh I’m going to have an ad push down my throat maybe I don’t know
James 16:11
Yeah, I mean, the whole video is an ad, ultimately, for that brand.
Neale 16:15
They could see it that way.
James 16:17
Well, they have to be told it is, because that’s the law. Well, you have to sort of open and say, this is an ad for Lego. And they have to know it’s an ad before they engage your content. So you have to, yeah, straight away. So there’s going to have an impact. So people want to skip ads. Of course they do. I mean, so, yeah, that building Iron Man out of Lego was quite an epic build. Still didn’t do as well as I thought it would. No, I wouldn’t. Even for sponsoring. Because Lego is a massive piece of pop culture. They make 100 million bricks a day, I think. A billion every 10 days. Multi-generational pop culture. Everyone knows Lego.
Neale 16:50
I love Lego. Where are they based again? Where’s the headquarters? Denmark. I didn’t know this so Denmark is the biggest producers of tyres in the world because of Lego.
James 16:59
Ties?
Neale 17:00
Tires, sorry. Tires, Lego tires. That’s what they do, yeah. So you’re doing great sponsored content the minute you’ve got the freedom to look at whatever projects you want. What ideal, what do you want to do going forward, what sort of builds are on the horizon and where do you want to take the channel?
James 17:19
It’s difficult, ones that do well on YouTube, so yeah, the one ball bike is what I’m working on just started the design for that, so like the two ball bike but one, so instead of just balancing sideways it balances in all directions.
Neale 17:33
How’s your core strength? Are going to be
James 17:35
Well it should be okay because I’ll be sort of over a ball, leaning yeah I don’t know I’m going to definitely have controls that help it lean and so on and I think turning I can drive straight and lean so it kind of banks hopefully. By my fan’s the blow around because it’s really difficult to turn on the spot even if you can turn the ball there’s almost an infinitely small contact area with the ground so normally what happens is the ball will just spin and you’ll be really difficult so there’s some challenges there I’m hoping that’ll do well I don’t know yeah the walking machine I’m building now which video goes out in a few days hopefully which is a big quadruped I can ride on so that’s an ongoing series which I took out to fall next in Germany some of the videos from out there. The handstand sheet device that’s on the cards which I’ve been talking about for ages which is basically high powered fans on my ankles that blow me up right. And then some other sort of hedging my bets with shorter one one video for the build but shorter things so elastic band powered roller skates or skateboard so another channel called Joel Creates tried to do an elastic band powered car right in the US that failed miserably the rest of his content’s really good that was terrible.
Neale 18:48
What was the sticker board? Or what did the call…
James 18:50
Yes, it’s really heavy metal sort of beach buggy thing he borrowed and then he had a sort of cage that was the drive and he tried to wrap the elastic band around that way but obviously wasn’t very long so he did push him about a couple of meters and it stopped. If you think about an elastic band power plane the elastic band’s long and it’s stretched.
Neale 19:11
Of course it is you’ve got a lot more coil.
James 19:13
Yeah, so the plan is basically to have a very long stick with a very long elastic band, some sort of 90 degree bevel gear on the bottom and then probably make some sort of stick that’s like an outboard for a skateboard and all make a really very light frame carbon fiber little buggy. So the mass makes a massive difference.
Neale 19:32
I can see the joy when you’re talking about, you’ve got a smile on your face, you’re animated. It really excites you, these projects, doesn’t it?
James 19:37
Yeah, I think so. And hopefully the elastic band powered, you know, car, whatever skateboard is something people will click on. Yeah, hopefully with a big red arrow pointing at the stick or just as long as I can envisage what the title is that I would click on. Yeah, what the thumbnail looks like, because some things are very hard to convey in one picture. Yeah. And one bit of text.
Neale 19:57
We’ve just got to the point where we started to A-B test a couple of images and it’s really interesting what resonates with people and because sometimes I’ll put something, and think they’re gonna click on that yeah and then it’s the the other one that pops up.
James 20:08
Well so the A-B testing doesn’t measure click-through, it measures retention, how much of that video someone watches. So they may be, it may be massively less click-through but the people watching it are more invested because it’s a technical subject but that isn’t, but it’s actually click-through you need first to get reached, so it’s very difficult.
Neale 20:28
That makes sense, doesn’t it? Because if you put, I don’t know, you’ve got a video to talk about how to fix a printed circuit board, and you go, this circuit board explodes, people probably click through, because I want to see the exploding circuit board, but it’s misleading, they’ll click off and realize it, so it’s the retention that’s going to… There is that as well, yeah.
James 20:47
You can’t make it too clickbaity and that’s why they don’t tell you what the click-through is mm-hmm They tell you the retention of it. Yes, you’re getting quality
Neale 20:55
over the attraction act, definitely. So when you started off, you said you were doing this, you started a job, you did this part-time, so it was very much your baby, you did the editing, you did the filming, you did the scripting, voiceover, I know it’s voiceover now. Is that different now that you’re more established? Do you hand stuff over? Is that difficult to let go? What’s the process?
James 21:18
I still do all of it. So I have an agent who lines up the ad spots and deals with the contracts with brands, which is a company called Ziggurat XYZ, who have a lot of other YouTubers on their books. And apart from that, I do everything. Unless there’s someone in the video that I collaborate with. So, yeah, the world of Warcraft promo I did. My friend Billy came down to help do the fabric work and everything, and obviously she was in the video. Otherwise it’s all me, there’s no one else there.
Neale 21:42
Did you have a conversation with your agent? Obviously you have morals, we all have personal morals and values and stuff. Did you sit down and say, look, these are the projects that I’d want to work on, or do they just literally throw stuff over to you? How does that relate to your work?
James 21:55
They mainly line up the ad spot where the content created as a 60 seconds. I’ve got an ongoing deal with PCBWay or you get, you know, obviously, Hello Fresh and those world of walker words. The RAID: Shadow Legends that comes up a lot. Nord VPN come up a lot with creators. Surfshark. Yeah. There’s a lot of those. So they find those and that they have that little segment and that’s it. So as long as it’s something I can’t see, we do check their moral businesses. But those will go around, you know, exactly. But then the big dedicated ones like Arduino, obviously we they come with a thing and say, can you do a vehicle that uses this technology product we’re launching? And then that’s we’re pretty much stuck with what they want to do. But yeah, yeah.
Neale 22:39
Have you got a dream brand that you’d like, or organisation that you’d love to work with that’s not come knocking yet? I know you were.
James 22:46
I just said Lego, but I’ve already done Lego, I’ve already done, basically, the Disney ones through eBay. Paramount, that’s Transformers. So there’s a lot of big brands in there already. It’s great. So, yeah, can’t really complain.
Neale 22:56
You’ve worked with a lot of different collaborators, Colin Furze we mentioned, he’s got a huge underground bunker, bit of a mad one. Out of all these collaborators, and YouTubers, have you ever come across a channel seen a video and thought, damn, I’d wish I’d thought of that idea.
James 23:13
Um I can’t specifically think of one okay so Colin’s very special though because he can do almost anything he used to do weekly videos every Thursday and some of them if I’d done that build they wouldn’t have done a million views but Colin’s very special for some reason his personality I think might be the answer.
Neale 23:27
You’ve got a great personality!
James 23:29
And he’s just I mean he did a video about before YouTube he just made videos anyway for fun with crazy things where he just had this he was um had a like a non-profit company to do a skate park and he got loads of kids involved in skating and then they did an event where it was something like they made everyone drink loads of milk until they were sick and just like he just tried to parachute on a bike and then he got like sucked up into a field and he just like these things just because he’s praising
Neale 23:54
I think it is his enthusiasm. He’s cheesy as anything, but he’s so enthusiastic and so passionate and so eager and keen. It’s just infectious, I think, isn’t it, as well?
James 24:08
And just having the crazy ideas.
Neale 24:09
Yeah well it comes from that brain.
James 24:11
Yeah and just doing it as well so I was with him at Maker Central when he’s saying like I’m going to dig this bunker. We’d done the bunker in the back garden then he’s like I’m going to dig the tunnel you know and Tom Lamb was there you know Tom Lamb the farmer he’s like right you know what’s the density of the rocks you know how much do we how much when we dig it out is it going to be and how are we going to get rid of it and you know that we’re starting to plan it just like is he really going to do this tunnel under his house just tunnel under the house really?
Neale 24:38
His wife must be very, very understanding.
James 24:42
Oh, yeah.
Neale 24:43
So I said before, our engineers are big fans of your channel. You were highly requested when we were asking, who should we go out and interview? So they have a question for you. And it was, Ignys, we’re electronic engineers. And you know, we pride ourselves in coming up with creative solutions to bring people’s ideas to life. So if you’ve got an idea for an electronic device, then we can do it from start to finish. That’s not an ad. That’s just what we do. If you had a very large, maybe infinite budget, and you had an idea for an electronic device, and you wanted to work with us, what would you aim for? Anything’s possible.
James 25:21
It’s difficult. I’d like to build bipedal robots again. So I’m going to try and do some simpler ones. Okay. But I guess something like that. Yeah, the whole training with AI, I don’t understand at all. Right.
Neale 25:32
Do you use those yet? Do you use it much?
James 25:34
I have done some projects with AI. Triggered Wolverine Claws. It recognized facial recognition. So I trained it on my face like this on my face like this. Wolverine’s face. I had spring loaded Wolverine Claws and a little camera on a stick. So when you went, ah, Wolverine’s face, they injected. Yeah. So that was AI because I trained them basically on the Jetson. Okay. All their off the shelf stuff.
Neale 25:59
You could do that with an enemy, surely, so if you had an enemy, that’s something that you’d do. But when they came towards you, their facial expressions changed, your claws just pop out.
James 26:09
Yeah. That’s another way of doing it. Yeah, sure. But then that was a long time before large language models. So that was quite specific AI. So yeah, I don’t know. Obviously AI generated art and things a bit controversial.
Neale 26:24
It is controversial. Have you seen a lot of it? I mean, you’re a YouTuber, you obviously watch other people’s channels and whatnot. Have you noticed a rise in other people’s?
James 26:35
I think a lot of thumbnails are sometimes in some channels and a lot of the channels that tell stories about interesting anecdotes and maybe you have a bit of animation of the character or whatever that’s probably AI generated. I think AI should be doing the mundane tasks so that we can do the art. Why are we doing it the other way round? I was going to do a sort of AI driven making robots clean toilets or something you know.
Neale 26:56
Yeah, I’ve got a subscription. I won’t say who the company is, but it’s quite a small organization. I think that the grade, they’ve got a really good product and I’m a big fan of them. However, I think because of budget and whatnot, a lot of the promotional content they put out was AI generated, everything from visuals to photography to even music. And you can tell, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s a bit off-putting, you know, because you sort of, if someone comes across it, I’m not saying they aren’t genuine, they are genuine people, I actually met them a couple times, but with the reliance so heavily on that, it sort of takes away a bit of authenticity, doesn’t it? Sort of a little bit of a…
James 27:35
Yeah, I mean, it’s cheaper than paying an artist. Yeah, well, absolutely.
Neale 27:39
And that’s why people do it. I totally get it, but if you lean on it too heavily.
James 27:44
So I think you could use it for inspiration, so the Knorr passed the PC, they really wanted lots of pipes in it that looked like the computer and everything was linked together, and you can just buy pipes and pipe joins and things, but I wanted it to look like it was cooking food, so I did actually have ChatGPT make a visual, and it was a bit like it drew this sort of like a comic picture of some sort of food making crazy chemistry thing, that was the prompt, but there were specific aspects in there, that looked like what I wanted, and I was like, right, can you describe, can you tell me what these components are? And it’s like one is a reactor vessel and one is a sight glass. So then I was like, Oh, that’s the sort of look I want. Just from one thing that like hundreds of pipes in this image it made, but there’s this one thing I was like, that’s what I want. So I went on Amazon, like sight chemistry sight glass, and you can just buy this thing, which ended up in there. So it wasn’t like AI made it or designed it even, it inspired me, it just gave me the knowledge to get that specific component that’s now in there, that is like the main feature with the pipes.
Neale 28:52
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s sort of doing a lot of the heavy lifting. When we transcribe this episode, we’ll transcribe the other episode and we’ll use AI to do that because, you know, it’s just a little quicker. It’s actually ruining Mark’s life at the minute. So his wife went to a cricket club, AGM, and spent the entire evening writing up notes because she doesn’t trust AI. And it’s like, well, just, just Claire, just use AI to write up your notes. It’s, yeah, I think it’s great when it’s a tool, but if you start to use it as the main form, it definitely takes something away, I think. When we say about using it as a tool, we interviewed Henrique Olifiers, who runs Bossa Gaming Studios. My question to him was, could AI write a Last of Us, I know you’re not a huge gamer, but like a big complex game with a story? And he’s like, it can’t do it now, but, you know, in 10, 15 years time, it may do.
James 29:40
It could come up with a plot and it could do character design or at least inspiration for the character design.
Neale 29:44
Well, he was saying, yeah, he was saying that before they would have to get the programmers would probably get an artist and go like, we just need some visuals for this, but they could kind of do that themselves now. So they’ve got an idea for it.
James 29:55
Or they can do the inspiration and then give it to the artist to refine it and say well we want this kind of thing but agree and can you put pointy ears on this character?
Neale 30:04
and also do give it your own sort of artistic flair. I just hope that the point he made was right now it can’t, but in 15, 20 years it possibly could do, but would we be interested in that sort of thing in 15 or 20 years? Because while that’ll evolve, surely our taste will evolve too.
James 30:22
But then, yeah, but then look at short form content and kids looking through TikTok and haven’t got any concentration span. Will there be and not having been born after the Internet came along and after YouTube came along and not knowing any difference? Yes. Will the younger generation just end up living with not knowing any different?
Neale 30:41
Yeah well they weren’t to, they were in a digital world, Mark and I have this conversation all the time, we and your very similar age, we remember an analogue time but we were young enough to adapt to technology and use it and I think it’s a very privileged position but you’re absolutely right, I’ve got nephews who would happily just sit in a tablet and scroll through 30 second clips all afternoon. As a content creator who makes long-form content, is that something you have to consider?
James 31:13
I’ve never had much luck with short form on TikTok, but they hardly do any views. YouTube shorts always abysmal. Um, sometimes Instagram reels do okay, but you don’t get any money for them. So like the ball, when, if I cut down a video normally, so normally subscribers have really seen it cause I do a cut down. So for me, I’ve got to reach people that have never seen that video. So I’ll do a cut down on Instagram reels. Ball bike. I think I had two videos I put out and they had like two and 5 million views on Instagram and the rest are like tens of thousands. And then my friend, Matt Denson, who’s another YouTuber came up. We had a night out with some beers and then we came back to my house and he’s messing around in the kitchen on the ball bike. We’re trying to find out there’s a static electricity issue that calls it after the beers. Yeah. So he’s just sitting on it going, Oh, what is that? You know, riding it around. He’s just like I’ll film this. I’ll put it on my shorts. Whatever. It’s filmed on his phone. We’re just talking. It has 60 million views. People commenting, why haven’t you done a proper testing video? It’s like, why are you watching this? So it’s again
Neale 32:08
You don’t know what resonates.
James 32:08
But sometimes I think the casual videos can do well. Another one. I was on the stage at Maker Central with a screw bike, someone filming in the audience of all the heads in the way. That’s done really well as well.
Neale 32:20
It must be frustrating but also joyous at the same time people still view it at the end of the day but even if you’ve worked on something that’s taken you weeks or even years to and then something so small gets 60 million views yes yeah
James 32:34
It wasn’t even planned or the edited videos did like ten times worse.
Neale 32:39
James, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast.
James 32:41
No worries, thanks.
Neale 32:42
Thanks a lot.
James 32:42
Cheers.