147: The Future of Undecided

147: The Future of Undecided

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[Music] hey everybody Welcome to still to be determined the channel where we talk about Matt's most recent episodes from undecided with Matt Farrell but today it's a special day man something different we're doing something different you know what we're doing what are we doing Sean we're not talking about your video what that's right we're talking about the channel as a whole this is kind of a year-end wrap up in talking about where the channel is and some of the things that are going to be coming in the future and to that end let me just quickly let you know who you're listening to you're listening to Sean Farrell that's me I'm a writer I write sci-fi I write some stuff for kids and I'm curious about technology and of course you all know Matt Farrell of undecided with Matt Farrell and his videos that focus on technology and its impact in our lives Matt how you doing I'm good how about you I'm doing well it's getting a little chilly outside it's already December we're almost done with a year so I figured what a great time to take a step back and just kind of talk about your Channel here on still to be determined we're not changing a thing if the magic isn't isn't broken why would you screw with it why would you support Perfection listen to the sound of my voice people you know what I will say although I will say I do plan to inject more of the full interviews that I do from time to time and to still be determined but it won't change the structure of the show that much at all yeah we've talked about that in the past and the most recent time we did it we asked viewers what did you think we like had our little brief chat and then we were like and here's the full video and it was like a 35 minute long interview between you and the interviewee and response was overwhelmingly positive I think people really want to get into a deeper dive into the conversations that drive your main Channel and I think that's a great use of this space for that it also makes it incredibly easy for me [Laughter] and if you know anything about Sean Farrell he's like water he is the easiest yeah you know that Sean Farrell likes to uh to just slide slide downhill if I didn't have to be sitting up right now I wouldn't be I'd be lying on the floor but it would make for a weird video but on your main Channel there will be a few new things on the way and just topic wise I'm curious what are some of the new things that you're going to be talking about in 2023 I can't believe I just said that sentence but in 2023 what are some of the things you're going to be discussing well one of the things I'm planning on doing is I'm planning on talking about more of like home technologies that we can get today to put in your home and use today I haven't done I've done that from time to time over the past year or two but I want to try to make it more of a regular thing I don't want to over promise but like a once a month kind of thing I want to try to have something that's more accessible to today almost like a review kind of a video about that product maybe some of my first-hand experience or talking to somebody who has first exam first-hand experience with it I want to try to do that more often another thing is uh just there's topics I'm talking about more it's like I just did a video on fusion and I'm kind of going down this Fusion Rabbit Hole so I have more plans ahead to talk to more places and more people about what they're doing for Fusion trying to get it out there do more site visits is the other thing I want to do but like immediately there's more battery Tech more solar Tech I'll be talking about like there's a video coming up probably within a week or two of this uh about wood batteries that's right wood batteries that's right um it's really it's really interesting worth talking about but yeah it's it's I most the topics I'm kind of focusing on I'm listening to the viewers in the comments and seeing what they're talking about and that's kind of helping me to inform what we're gonna potentially talk about so there's wood batteries there's more hydrogen videos coming up there's more videos about Fusion more videos about nuclear technologies as well mixed in with that I just talked about Home Tech things that are more immediately available to us to add to our homes I had a email with you a couple of days ago Believe It or Not listeners Matt and I actually correspond outside of these videos that's right we do or podcasts depending on how you're consuming this right now and I shared a little news story with Matt and with a couple of dot dot dots question mark for the podcast maybe about a technology that's basically taking vegetable cell structures and using them as a medium to regrow human nerve cells and it was the development of a researcher who is in early stages of looking at using vegetation like asparagus and basically removing the the living cells from the vegetation and allowing that to become a structure that then the neurons can regrow through really trippy kind of like you gotta squint and turn your head and say like does this make any sense but it's legitimate research it is from a reliable news source it was a remarkable piece of writing I was very interested in it shared it with Matt and I was basically like would you ever talk about this kind of thing and Matt's response was I was surprised sure well the reason for that is my channel has morphed over the years and for the past few years I've really zeroed in on renewable energy and sustainable Technologies that's the real heart and focus of undecided but the intention of my channel was I'm just inspired by the amazing science and engineering and research that's happening that's going to basically push Humanity in different ways and how it's going to impact our lives in the coming years and so that goes beyond renewable energy and sustainable technology and I want to start to experiment with that to see if viewers are interested in it so Sean bring up basically this biotech I have a huge interest in biotech um basically printing organs yeah like there's crazy stuff that's happening nanotechnology that can help people who have had heart attacks and just really amazing stuff and I want to start to experiment with looking at that as well as like Ai and machine learning I have a huge interest in that and I don't understand if you may have not noticed this but 2020 2022 to me has been the year of AI really becoming mainstream because there have been so many tools that have just like flooded the market especially for creators like myself of like Jasper AI notion which is a service I use for managing my project management has integrated Ai and machine learning directly into the tools where it's like you can basically tell the AI I want to make a video about hydrogen Tech what could what could be a good opening hook for the video and it will actually write you an opening hook now granted it's more missed than hit yeah but some of this Tech is like crazy like it's creepy it's like an uncanny valley right now where you can say to it I wanna look I'm trying to write JavaScript for my website and I want to do X Y and Z when this happens and it will get write the JavaScript for you right it's like machines are coming for everybody's jobs including the computer programmers who are writing the machines right it's like there's gonna be a day where those programmers aren't needed because the machines can program themselves and so it's like we're we're rapidly heading to this and I find it fascinating and it's going to impact the future of everything so it's like I want to talk about that stuff too but it's it's a matter of I'm not going to like do a cold turkey turn the channel and like a 90 degree Direction and go someplace different yeah but I do want to start experimenting with this maybe putting on a video every once in a while that's a little outside of what I normally talk about to see how people like it yeah listeners and viewers you should weigh in about how whether that's in your interest area because I think that those would be some very interesting conversations especially when you talk about AI which brings with it not only the fascination of what the AI can do but also serious concerns about privacy concerns about you mentioned it's the AIS are coming for your jobs people aren't necessarily happy about that and it's not just the people who might be like working in a shop where they're putting together cars and the cars are being put together by robots it's not just those jobs it's literally my job as a writer I mean I I raise my job too there's the beginning there are the beginnings of as Matt just said you take an AI you say I want to tell a story about such and such and such and then the computer writes the story or there was a big blow up this last year around AI driven art where the there were a number of different apps that dropped around the same time where you could go in and say I want something that's an impressionist style but it's of a painting of a cityscape in the rain populated by robots and then these apps give for various versions of this there was a lot of uh debate in art communities about one is this actually art two is it okay when the AI is learning the styles by going through the internet and lifting the styles of artists from Pages like deviantART where artists post their own work so the AI is in fact the argument goes a little bit like this the AI is kind of plagiarizing in order to take the style of artists so it's a real weird gray area and we really haven't I'm like have we ever had this happen before where something pushes forward and then makes this kind of debate around idea ownership style ownership it's a very new there's two very great there's two things I want to add to that I just watched a video this morning from a YouTuber who's a smart home YouTube channel and he used one of these open AI tools where you can just tell it what you want in able to do it he said describe what the home assistant smart home platform is as if in an m m rap and it gave him I'm not joking the description of Home assistant was spot on like it described exactly what a smart home was how what home assistant was and how it works and it was a rhyming rap and it was just it was disturbing Sean that it was like it it was like if nobody told you you might think a human wrote it like it's getting really creepy yeah and it's not exactly the same thing but still in that machine learning territory there's a tool that I use called descript where you can take any audio file or video file you jump it into into descript and it will transcribe what was said but it's also an editor so like if you have a podcast and you put it in there and you're like oh I want to cut this sentence out just like a word processor it looks like a word doc you highlight that sentence delete it it's now outside of it it's cut so now it just plays seamlessly because the machine learning goes oh I have to put a cut here before this word and after that word and it figures out what to do right it can automatically remove ums and us and stuff like that you can it also does video editing now but here's the creepy part John it now can learn your voice yeah and you can type new sentences deep fake and it sounds like you yeah and they have rules around it where you can only do it if it's your voice and you have to prove it's you so like I did it as a test and I said do it for me and I had to read this specific sentence saying I give descript authorization I am approving this to happen and it used as an approval and then I uploaded a file from our podcast of just me talking and to say it's it's not perfect because some of the sentences I put in there it sounded the intonation wasn't completely right right but I would say like 70 of it it sounded like it was me actually speaking it was disturbing it's like you could take this and then have the AI write scripts and then the AI I could find b-roll and then suddenly you don't need Matt Farrell to actually make a video for undecided the computer is just making videos on its own right it's like it gets really weird really fast oh interesting interesting topics and these are things that I really do look forward to talking about with you as as you put these videos together and any other things that our listeners or viewers might be picking up on shoot them into the comments shoot them through the contact information in the podcast description let us know what you've heard about because that kind of stuff is uh it's fascinating to me and I and the debate is also important because it reaches the point where policies and regulations are not in place about any of this stuff but this stuff is going to be seen more and more in our lives as Matt just described you have the ability to create an audio that is indecipherable from an actual recording of an individual talking how long before somebody stands up in a court of law and says that's not my voice somebody made that using a computer if it hasn't already happened I'm sure it will happen soon the last thing we wanted to talk about today is some changes Matt you've already talked about some changes in the vision of your channel and you've talked about the scope but I wonder about the background of the channel itself the putting it together I remember way back when when a young lad named Matt Farrell said to me yeah I'm thinking about starting a YouTube channel and that young lad was doing everything from yes researching writing production editing releasing everything was being done by Matt Farrell and Matt Farrell was a tired young lad he was working 80 to 100 hours 80 to 100 hours a week and we've already discussed yeah we've discussed in a previous episode how Sean likes to just be like water rolling down a hill or maybe that was earlier in this episode I don't even remember anymore anyways together anyway the idea of working 80 200 hours a week uh sounds absolutely terrible so it is you have grown since then and you are planning on growing some more and why don't you talk a little bit about what your team looks like and how that all works I I gotta start off by saying I feel blessed because my channel has had success and it's grown and that was my goal was to get it to grow because I can earn money from Google AdSense I earn money from the direct sponsorships you see in my videos and then I have fantastic support from the patreon members so it's like between all of that it's allowed me to kind of scale up a team to make this sustainable for myself from a don't get burned out point of view so I have people on my team that have been ramping up over the past couple years but this past year has had a lot of growth where I have an assistant producer his name's Lewis fantastic he helps me so much with just like Logistics around the channel helping to kind of vet topic ideas about what we're gonna do and then he takes care of like making sure that they're released properly and everything like that I have a couple video editors one that does all the video editing now for for all of the undecided videos named Sunny Peter is my video and audio editor that does all these podcasts that you're watching right now and then beyond that it's like for a couple years I've had people that help me with the research and some of the writing and I've been one of the biggest changes I made just recently is I recently just hired kind of a lead writer somebody that's going to help because even though it's like I always have my hands on every script I put my own ideas my own thoughts into each script but that takes a lot of time and so now with this lead writer his name is Vincent he's helping to not only help write the scripts but to basically proofread copy it copy edit final scripts to make sure everything's buttoned up and tight and proper and precise and I've got a I don't know how the official title for this but I have a science Advisory Board and this is something that is important because I am not a physicist I am not an engineer it's very clear that I'm not and if you look at my about page but it's one of those I have a fascination with technology I have lifelong Fascination engineering and things like that so it's like I've kind of self-taught in a lot of this but having science advisors who are experts in physics who are experts in mechanical engineering that I can ask questions to I've been doing that informally for the past couple of years because I've been building up contacts in different Industries where I can ping out a question about physics question to a physicist that I've I've made connections with I've been doing that for a while but this is more formal and this is a new process that I've been putting into place where I have this science Advisory Board which are people that are funded because of all this the ad revenue and the patreon sponsorships that allow me to do this so I'm I have this team that's mechanical engineers material scientists chemists physicists that are all on board so that from the very beginning seat of a topic idea we can all be talking about like what are the gotchas here what are the things we should be looking at what are the what are the things I'm not aware of that we should dig into and so I can ask questions and they can advise as to like what areas we should focus on and not focus on and making sure that we're explaining things in a precise way because Precision in this what I'm doing is very important and so I want to try to make that better and better and better over time so that's the biggest change that's happened just recently is that more formalized science Advisory Board that's all really very cool the growth of the channel has been impressive and as somebody who's incredibly lazy no I'm not lazy um he's not lazy but his family a man wrote a novel on a train on his phone yeah which I don't understand well you do we have to okay but as somebody who's watched all this stuff develop and the structure grow over time it's it's very impressive to see and I think it shows in the videos and I think that the listeners what do you hope to see in 2023 Mets just described how the structure of his team he's trying to bring the best product to all of you he's trying to spur on conversations around things that are on The Cutting Edge and I'm curious listeners what do you see as being a good Focus for 2023 let us know because what you suggest might just end up in a video and then be part of the conversation you really do help drive all of that and we appreciate your taking the time to weigh in don't forget if you'd like to support the show please review us on Apple Spotify Google wherever it was you found this podcast go back there give us a thumbs up or multiple Stars or even just one star any kind of review but however you feel about it don't forget you can subscribe on YouTube or on any of the platforms I mentioned before and do tell your friends sharing us with your friends and family is a great way to support us and if you'd like to more directly support us click the join button on YouTube or go to stilltbd.fm and click on the become a supporter button both of those ways allow you to throw Quarters at our heads and please don't aim for the eyes trust me all of these steps really help support us and we take we appreciate each and every one of you for tuning in for listening for leaving comments and for supporting us in whatever way you're able to and we'll talk to you next time foreign [Music]

2022-12-20 22:09

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