Virtual influencers and VTubers are the future with Jordi van den Bussche aka Kwebbelkop

The Business of Creators is a podcast for content creators and everyone interested in the creator economy. On this show Ian Shepherd speaks with the pioneers shaping the industry and digs deeper to get the scoop on new ways to create, distribute and monetize content.

Ian is co-founder of Electrify Video Partners,  a company investing $m in established creators to accelerate their growth. Check out electrify.video.

In this latest episode Ian speaks with Jordi van den Bussche aka Kwebbelkop. Jordi is one of the most forward thinking creators in the industry and has a team of 75 supporting him on his various ventures. We discuss 

• His ten year career as a creator on YouTube
• The challenges with mental health as a creator
• His entrepreneurial ventures
• Why he thinks virtual influencers are the future
• His experience creating VTuber Bloo 

And much, much more! This is one of my favourite episodes.  

Please go check it out and subscribe to the show for more interviews from industry leaders shaping the Creator Economy. 

Transcript

Jordi Van Den Bussche  0:00  
I see a future where every influencer, almost every influencer, is a virtual influencer. I've been saying this for years, and now it's it's slowly starting to happen, so I'm super happy to see that. Telling you this is the future, this is where we're going to go. Welcome

Ian Shepherd  0:13  
to the business of Creators Podcast. If you're a content creator, or you want to know more about the Creator economy, then this podcast is for you. In this episode, I'm speaking with Geordie vandenbusch about his life as a creator, his struggles with mental health, and how he's overcome these and his ventures as an entrepreneur. We also discuss his investment in virtual influencers, why he sees these V tubers as the future, and the positive opportunities and ethical challenges associated with them. Geordie is a super smart, forward thinking creator, and this is one of my favorite shows to date. Before we get into it, I want to tell you about electrify video partners, a business I co founded that invests millions of dollars into YouTube channels. We've recently raised $50 million and so if you want a business partner to grow your YouTube channel, or you're wondering how much your channel could be worth check us out at electrified dot video and get in contact, right? Let's get on with the show. So today I'm joined by Geordi, aka quebecop. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Jordi Van Den Bussche  1:13  
Thank you for having me.

Ian Shepherd  1:14  
Excellent. I've got so many questions to ask you about your career as a creator and your more recent entrepreneurial activities, but for everybody listening, can you just explain who you are and how you started as a creator? Sure.

Jordi Van Den Bussche  1:26  
Yeah, so about 10 years ago, I started making YouTube videos just for fun as a hobby, and that grew into a full fledged career business and a lot of other businesses around it cool

Ian Shepherd  1:43  
and I mean, you've been on, as you say, for a decade now on YouTube. Can you sort of explain how you think the platform has changed in that time, and how you've adapted as a creator to stay relevant?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  1:54  
Yeah, the platform has very much become much more professional, matured a lot. When I got started, it was everyone had a one man army, and that was it. And now you see creators who have a business, who have multiple people running it. I think that's been a very, the biggest, the biggest change. And then, how have I tried stay, staying relevant. It's a brand building and channel building, right? So really diversifying your revenue streams and your content, and then that's how you can stay in the game for for this long great. And

Ian Shepherd  2:36  
just so everybody listening knows the type of content you've been creating, can you just give a bit of an explanation to that?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  2:43  
Yeah, I started off doing a lot of gaming content, and then later on, did I transition more into personality based content, where the content revolves around what I do and what I do with my friends, and more story based around my life. Right now we're doing vlogs, and sometimes they do some crazy things in vlogs, and that's what people really like cool.

Ian Shepherd  3:07  
And what do you think are some of the most challenging aspects of growing and maintaining your YouTube channel? And what have you done to sort of overcome these over the years?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  3:17  
I would say the most challenging part is the key man problem. It's that you're building a business that revolves all around you, and if you want to take a week off, if you want to take a holiday, or maybe you're kind of done with it, that immediately impacts your business, which impacts your cash flow, which impacts everyone who works for you. So that's been by far the biggest challenge. How we've tried solving it, or how we believe we've solved it, is by introducing virtual influencers. So having a virtual Creator as the host, or better than a real person. Yeah,

Ian Shepherd  3:54  
I'm really excited to talk to you about that in a little bit, but before we jump into that, I know that you've spoken about sort of mental health issues and the pressures of being a YouTuber, and I just wondered if you could share a little bit about how you've thought about maintaining a healthy mindset as a creator.

Jordi Van Den Bussche  4:12  
Yeah, so, so in these 10 years, it wasn't, it wasn't easy right to to get a lot of fan subscribers and things like that. It really came with its challenges. So things that happened were neglecting relationships and neglecting your own mental health and physical health just to put out another video or to get even more views. And the challenge there has always been in and keeping that healthy balance. It took me years to finally get a healthy balance. So what have I done right now? I say from nine to five I work, and in the weekends I don't work, I take holidays and just accept the fact. That it can't always go perfect. That was a, that's an important one too. It's a, it's a, it's a very complicated thing at diversifying your revenue streams, so that the pressure of everyone's jobs isn't just on your shoulders, but it's more spread out. Things like that that really helped.

Ian Shepherd  5:23  
Great. I really want to talk about how you've leveraged this success on YouTube to explore other ventures and opportunities, and, as you say, sort of diversify the revenue streams. I guess, before we sort of talk more about the ventures and we just talk about diversifying the channel. Can you explain, over the last few years what you've done to diversify, I guess, beyond just the AdSense revenue,

Jordi Van Den Bussche  5:47  
yeah, so at first it was only AdSense revenue. Then we started investing more into PR, started getting more deals out of that. We started finding lovely partners we could partner up with. So that really helped take the pressure off the just the YouTube views, then other things we've done, like I've experimented with merchandise, but not really my thing. So what else? We started some other channels that don't involve me at all in the day to day. So I can, run them, or we can run them without needing any of my input. Build and release the video game. We're building another game right now, so we're doing that all in house, and that's another lovely thing. Obviously, what I personally did was, throughout the years, I saved a lot of money, my YouTube money, and decided to buy a bunch of real estate. So I have a real estate business on the side, which is obviously also generating money invested into a few startups with the business. So a lovely campaign that I did was with Backbone. And backbone is this video game controller, so you have their controller, and then you can, like, slot your phone in and you can play with a controller on your phone. They reached out and they said, Hey, we're looking for angel investors, or, like, seed round investors. Do you want to participate? And in this conversation, together with a bunch of other YouTubers, we said, well, let us promote the game, or let us promote the product and really be a part of the company, rather than it just being a deal where we promote it. So that's a that's a very fun one, one of my, like, the coolest things I've ever done, because I can officially say that I own a controller company. I own a small percentage of it, right? But still, I'm still an owner. So that's a really cool one, like I mentioned. Oh, another one we started doing was really investing more into business to business. So we're helping companies run their social media, and we're helping them with social media campaigns and strategies, mainly to focus on brand awareness. So we run their social pages in a way where, over time, we really see that fan base build up, and occasionally we get our little viral video in there. I think that's really, in short, everything publicly that we're working on, there's a

Ian Shepherd  8:27  
lot going on. How many people? I mean, can you explain, sort of, how many people you have working with you, broadly, just in terms of the different parts of your business?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  8:34  
Yeah, I would say on a weekly basis, we touch about 75 employees. You know, you on top of that, you got your lawyers, you got your accountants, this and that, I would say, then it gets closer to 100 but I always say about 75 people. We have about 25 people working on the video game, from designers to producers, to you name it, and then the rest of the business is from the back office to running other channels, to running the qualcop channel production. There sales, business to business production. You have the agents, managers.

Ian Shepherd  9:16  
Yeah, got it. And, I mean, I love that example in the product, the backbone. And I know that there's a number of other high profile creators involved in the project. You must get pitched lots of ideas where a business wants you to take a share for the promotion of it. And can you share a little bit about how you would look at an opportunity and and how you assess those,

Jordi Van Den Bussche  9:44  
yeah, I always, I always start with no, and then I'll see, maybe it turns into a yes. A lot of ideas are pitched, and as a startup founder myself, I know the process of having a good idea, and it. Coming to fruition, and it becoming successful. So a lot, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot of ideas are being pitched. And, hey, I want to have you in as a co founder, you know, like, I don't have to do anything but provide advice. Those ideas are there. And sometimes it's like, we, we split the cost, 5050, there's, there's a lot of things we look for. So for example, with the backbone, what I really liked was that I wasn't the only one, right? I only got a small share into the comp in the company, rather than a massive one, which also meant that my things expected from me were a lot less, if, if I, if I want to get 50% in a startup business, that means, like, that's going to be my baby for the next few years, and I don't really have time to do those things anymore. I also would say, now, just give me a small share, and I'll help where I can help, but I really want to maintain focus. So with all these businesses, the hardest part is the work life balance, but also focus. And those are the things as a CEO you have to do. You have to focus on the resource management. If you go and do too many projects at the same time, it's not gonna work. You're gonna you're gonna do everything poorly, rather than do one thing really well. So with these ideas that are being pitched, I asked myself, yes, okay, first of all, how big is that like? How big would the returns be? And second of all, would this fit within my portfolio so that we can maintain focus? For example, if someone would say, Hey, I have this great video game idea, and we have the video game here, Jordi, and we just want you to push it and release it, I would say that works. That sure, that's a that's a cool idea, and it it would fit in my portfolio, but our focus would then have to shift towards that game, rather than the game that we're working on right now. So unfortunately, I can't do it, and then that would mean I'd have to upskill the business to be able to do it, which is then going to require my focus, which would also require resources. So, so those, those are the decisions that I try to make. And right now, right now, we don't have any new startups. We are personally very involved in. Sometimes we get these offers. For example, we had a drink company, like as, like an alcoholic beverage. You know that like a like a beer in a can, but then with some flavors, that's the best way to describe it. But rather than us doing it, we we pass these deals onto other influencers, since we have our own internal agency too. Since, I mean, I was like, I hate it. I had agencies, I had managers. Just let me just do it myself, I guess. Yeah,

Ian Shepherd  12:49  
nice, very smart. Well, I really want to talk to you about the business of being a creator, and the first thing I want to touch on is jvdb Studios. Can you tell us why you set that up, and some of the things that you do there?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  13:05  
Yeah, so jvdb Studios is the umbrella company that all that contains all my companies. Rather than saying I'm a video game company of this over that, I want to slowly move towards just saying, like I'm the owner of jvdb Studios. And what do we do we do with JVD studios? We do a lot of things, but mainly what we focus on is being an innovative company in the social media space, in the entertaining entertainment space, if you want to take it a little bit broader, so social media is 90% of our business. 5% is video games, and 5% is investing in startups, but the majority is we produce content. That's what we have a lot of knowledge on. We know how to run the production of these social media channels. We know strategy, and within that, we try to offer services to, for example, companies. But we also like to start our own channels. And sometimes we sign influencers to provide them with extra cash flow, and then we take a little percentage on top of that, just to, you know, just to be as efficient as possible, right? When you get 10 emails in, I want to be able to do something with all 10 emails, for example, rather than having to put nine in the trash and only run with one. Got it.

Ian Shepherd  14:30  
That makes absolute sense. Well, there's one particular topic that I do want to talk to you about, and that's virtual influencers and V tubers. So before we talk about your particular project, can you just share some of your thoughts about how you think the future the Creator economy will involve these kind of virtual influencers?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  14:48  
Yeah, I see a future where every influencer, almost every influencer, is a virtual influencer. I've been saying this for years, and now it's it's slowly starting to happen, so I'm super happy to. See that I don't look like a lunatic anymore. But yeah, so creating content that is slowly becoming more and more accessible to everyone, right? So YouTube is very much focused on making, you know, so that everyone can become a YouTuber. That's lovely. It's only gonna go crazier and crazier and crazier. So right now, if you want to create an insane production, you need a camera crew. You need experts who know what good video ideas are. You need good script writers. You need prop designers. You need set designers. You need professional editors. You need a movie director, you name it, whatever you need, all those things, graphics designer for your thumbnails and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is obviously pretty intense if you want to be able to compete with the top YouTubers. What we're going to start seeing is that this AI revolution that we're experiencing right now is going to make it much cheaper for people to participate and do all these things, much faster for people to do all these things, and much more accessible for people to do all these things. And one of them, the main thing, and this is what everyone sees, is that the host, the host, is also a liability. The host is also holding people back from scaling, and everyone's clinging on to it, because everyone's ego is often the one that takes control of the ship. So that's where virtual influencers come into play. What does it matter that when you're listening to this podcast, when you're watching this podcast, you name it, that it's actually me and you sitting here. It doesn't that we don't have to sit here, if we can imagine someone's watching this, and it's not you sitting there and it's not me sitting there, but it is an identical replica of you sitting there and me sitting there, which is already happening, because it's it's not face to face. There's a monitor there. Your screen is being recorded. My screen is being recorded. So it is. You're not even watching the real me, right? Yeah, you see, do you understand what I'm saying, right? So if you can perfectly mimic the conversational style, the emotion, the sound and the video, you can perfectly fake at this recording, and you can make say crazy things. That's the example people tend to jump towards. But that's more of the negative thing. I like to focus on the positive. What you can also do is you can say, well, we can do we can now film 100 episodes a day, because we're not filming them, we're generating them, right? So that is a virtual influencer that is not even though it looks like you, it sounds like you and it acts likes you, it is not you. So then what is it? It's a virtual representation of you, which means that it's a virtual influencer rather than a real influencer. And that's the future that I'm betting on. That's the future that I've been investing into for the past few years, and we've seen massive success. And this, I'm telling you, this is the future. This is where we're going to go. There's going to be a massive demand on sale for authentic, real people. But the better this virtual influencer economy becomes, the more people want to start seeing that than the real stuff. Or they might create, it might create, like it like a like a different demand, right? You still have radio, even though there's TV, but then you also have Spotify, and there's this other platform you can listen and you can listen to music on YouTube and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's that, that's that's how I see the Creator economy changing.

Ian Shepherd  18:51  
Well, I know you've been, as you say, investing in this and working on this for quite some time now. So can you tell us about Blue and the inspiration behind it when you started it, and some of the backstory. Yeah,

Jordi Van Den Bussche  19:04  
so blue is the best clone I could make of myself as an influencer, because I ran into the issue where I did key men problem, like, if I would stop uploading YouTube videos, my business would stop. And like, I don't care if my business stops, but there's two things I do care about. First of all, my legacy, I think, is pretty important. I don't want to let the fans down. And you know, all the knowledge that I've accumulated over the years, I wanted to live on and continue. That's one thing. Another thing is my employees. I don't want to let my employees down. I don't want to have to fire them. I don't want like I want to make sure that I can make them rich and wealthy and successful and happy. So that pressure was on my shoulders where, hey, Jordy, if you're sick, and I was sick at the time. The business is done. So I sat down, I brainstormed a little, and we eventually came to the conclusion to change the host, so not have me there, but someone else. We tried that with a few different hosts. I think it was four, three different versions, three different people. We tried, and every time we learned it didn't work, we tried again. We learned from it didn't work. Eventually we stumbled up on this guy, and named Hassan. I started a YouTube channel with him called Tiger. He was version three of the virtual influencer, but at the time, it was still a real person. So the virtual the essence of the virtual influencer was more in the protocol behind running that channel, rather than the visual look of it. We learned a lot from that, too, and then we decided to go virtual. So we said, Okay, well now let's make the looks virtual, because the process on the back end works really well, but the looks, that's what we're running into. And we tried that didn't work out with version four, and eventually version five is blue. And blue has a has a step by step process on the back end, and then also has, has an actor, but it is a virtual person, person, right? The beauty of blue is that every element of the process is modular, so you can replace anyone and everything there, and it will live on and breathe on forever. So, you know, let's say we have 10 people running blue. These 10 people, even the main person, the main actor, the key men, you we have replaced and put someone else into place. And views wise, and everything wise, we didn't see noticeable change, like nothing at all. I even think it was even good for the channel, and it needed it so, so that's blue. And since then, we've been internally developing virtual influencers, which I've not made public for various reasons, but who are better, who are more scalable, who are faster, who get more views, who scale faster, who grow faster, etc, etc, etc, to eventually get to the point where we have a fully autonomous AI agent running a virtual influencer channel. Well,

Ian Shepherd  22:34  
that's crazy. And I, you know, I love hearing about the development process that you went through there. Can you explain some of the tools and technologies that kind of go into making these virtual influencers?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  22:44  
Yeah, it's the crazy thing is that these technologies, they change so fast that you're always looking for new stuff, you're always talking to new people, and you're always innovating. So the things that I would talk about a month ago, they've completely changed. Now. We have a lot of tools we develop internally. We have a bunch of programmers here, including myself, the programming systems. I love it, and we're just hammering away right? We have a we have an insane amount of data, after 10 years of of YouTube, in the form various, various different forms. So yeah, we focus on machine learning applications, and then also just writing a bunch of code and seeing if it works or if it doesn't work, seeing what's available out there. I can't share too much on the details there, but it's a lot of internal headache most of the time. And the crazy thing is, you know, you're like, working on something, it just breaks, breaks, breaks, breaks, breaks. And then you start, like, slowly start, start, like, chiseling away the little, the little rough edges, and eventually it, like, works. And I'd say that's always the best feeling ever we're now on we're now on version eight of the virtual influencer. So who is version five? We're now on version eight.

Ian Shepherd  24:07  
Well, I'm excited to see some of the future iterations of that as well. Oh, you question. You will, you will. I've got a question around, like, some of the ethical considerations that perhaps you need to navigate with creating and managing a virtual influencer. Can you just share some thoughts around that?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  24:25  
Yeah, well, I would love to know from you what type like where do you want to take this? What kind of ethics Do you want to discuss? Because I could talk about ethics for years, but which specifically,

Ian Shepherd  24:38  
I guess, what are the first things that people have challenged you on in terms of creating these fake or virtual? Yeah,

Jordi Van Den Bussche  24:47  
I would say the biggest one, the biggest feedback point, is that people say, Oh, but it's fake. You will never be able to convey real personality and have people create a connection. And and I agree it's it's hard, but it's possible. It's just, it's really, it's really hard. So the example I love to give is I love Spider Man with Spider Man's not real, and spider man always as a different actor. But I still love Spider Man, and I feel like I have a connection with Spider Man when I'm in the movie. I'm in the movies. So that's kind of the a big challenge currently we're currently facing. But I also feel like we have seen some lovely, lovely results there. We haven't seen die hard fan bases emerged just yet, but I think that's just a matter of time, and I think that's an emergent property within all these, all these applications that we're building, and all of a sudden it just clicks and makes sense. And

Ian Shepherd  25:54  
are there any other sort of any unique experiences or opportunities that have come from managing a virtual influencer that you can share that perhaps maybe you hadn't thought of before you sort of set out on this journey

Jordi Van Den Bussche  26:08  
building out the IP. So at first it was very much, I just want to make a successful influencer. And then we realized, for example, the blue IP, we can really leverage that and build it out into and franchise it in a way right, to really focus more on PR there. That's this is something that I've experimented with myself. I realized, Hey, okay, this whole PR stuff is working lovely. People are talking about it, and brands and companies want to work with us. Why don't we start doing this too for our virtual influencers? And that's when the IP becomes worth a lot of money and value and power and you name it. The issue I have right now with myself, though, is that I can never sell myself. I can never sell the cumulative IP that just it's like, it's not going to be successful. I wouldn't want to sell it, but with a blue however, we can literally say, oh, cool blue has matured Disney. Sure, here you go. Not that I want to sell to Disney, but more that I want to be able to tackle challenges that have not been tackled before in the Creator economy. And this, this was one of them which we tackled cool.

Ian Shepherd  27:24  
And can you talk about any other sort of V tubers or virtual influencers that you're developing, maybe outside of gaming, or is this still sort of in the works?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  27:33  
We have some stuff, but I can't disclose the names, because we're afraid that people will reverse engineer okay? Because, because, in my opinion, the the breakthroughs that we've had over the past few years have been phenomenal, and I've just been keeping my mouth shut, but the niches that we dabble into, everything from lifestyle to, yeah, lifestyle. We do some kids entertainment. We do some not adult entertainment. That's that's a different we focus on the older demographic, I should say, but still, all on social media pages and channels, and some of some of them, they've been viewed millions of times, and no one knows that. It's me, which is hilarious. But one day, someone's going to correct the code, someone's going to find out and string it all together and be like, yo. What this is, this is insane. But, yeah, scaling, scaling, scaling. That's, that's my focus. Cool.

Ian Shepherd  28:45  
Well, I mean, I think, as you say, the one of the challenges of running a business like yours is, how do you scale yourself? And a virtual influencer is a way to do that. Can you give any advice for if there's creators of any size listening to this, thinking about creating their own virtual influencer. How would they start?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  29:03  
Where do you start going? Google it, YouTube, it, ask it. Us, chat, GPT, go and go and just start moving. It's now or never. I think the the opportunity right now is insane. You know, a lot of jobs are going to be replaced, but one thing people love is creating and sharing creative works. I think there will always be a demand for it. I'm not 100% sure if AI could fully replace the content creation scene, but it can definitely empower people. So definitely look into that. And the virtual influencers are a big part of that cool.

Ian Shepherd  29:46  
Well, since you mentioned the word chatgpt, I'll ask you the question. I mean, how do you see these emerging technologies, particularly sort of AI supporting creators or I. Creating an abundance of content and making it harder for creators, I guess, both in terms of the near term, but then also the long term. Yeah,

Jordi Van Den Bussche  30:08  
it levels out the playing field a lot more. As someone who's dyslexic and who's born in the Netherlands and raised speaking Dutch, and eventually had to pick up English like 97% of all Dutch people. It's it levels out the playing field. So for example, with writing, if I would want to use these applications, I'm, all of a sudden, a way better writer than I was before. I make a lot less errors and things like that. The same thing goes for drawing. If I want to draw something, make like a YouTube thumbnail. Rather than me having to know how to draw or know how to Photoshop, I could use these tools. And that's why I love it so much. That's why I'm all for it. It makes things much more accessible, like I mentioned earlier, and that's what I want to see. I want to see more creators. And want to see more creatives and give everyone the opportunity to to experiment with it. And

Ian Shepherd  31:07  
do you think that there's this danger that there'll be an abundance of content, so much that's just created by these AI tools that is relatively low value and relatively generic, but just flooding the platforms and cannibalizing more traditional creators and their content? Yeah, I

Jordi Van Den Bussche  31:29  
mean, let's go, at the end of the day, survival of the fittest, right? So you didn't hear any like this same the same discussion that we're having right now people were having a few years back, and they said, No, YouTube should just be one Creator and one Creator only working on a channel, not a whole company making this content. It shouldn't be editors and thumbnail artists. No, it should just be the creator. There's already enough content. There is no way you're going to become successful. Those were the discussions that were going on 10, five to 10 years ago. And the same thing goes with this AI stuff. It's like, no, like, I don't care what I'm watching on YouTube, as long as it's fun. I don't care if it's made by AI or partially made by AI. Would you care? I mean, if it's good content, then no, if it's good, right? Whatever cares. Who cares? Right? Who cares? So as long as we're being entertained, and as long as I feel something, and which pretty much boils down to being entertained, I'm good if, if I eat a hamburger, I don't care if the hamburgers may buy a robot. I care if the hamburger tastes good and if it's healthy, right? If you know if it can be both that's perfect and if it's made by a robot, sure, it's cheaper labor. It's probably produced faster, probably less germs, so it's safer, yeah, if I, if I was a brand, and I could either pick, let's work with an influencer, or let's work with an AI, I'd much rather go with the AI, because I know this AI is not going to fuck up. This influencer, however, might say something stupid when he goes on a podcast or in a night out, or all of a sudden this guy's a racist. You never know this AI is not going to rock up and just be like, Oh, turns out I hate this and that then, blah, blah, blah, and this is what I stand for. So I would much rather go for the AI. However, there are a lot of interesting discussions that need to be held right now. For example, what if we someone creates a rogue AI? But I don't think that is something that I have to be concerned about, because I definitely won't be that person or any other creators. I think that's much more for you know, the people who are 100 steps above us, company wise, government wise, things like that. But it's always good to mention that like this can be this can have serious consequences. So let's say, let's say I'm going to become a politician and I launch 1000 AI generated channels that all make videos about me and how good I am, right? And educational videos on the topics that I'm trying to push. I might be giving away too much info right now, but that would, that would definitely, I can definitely manipulate people on social media, and we've seen it before with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. So so those are, those are some serious things. But I don't think the there. I don't think there won't be much spam. Also, don't forget, like, right now creating AI generated content, like, it still costs money and time, and it'll cost money and time for quite some time. And then, let's say it becomes really cheap, then it's going to be okay. Well, now it's really cheap, and you can do it really fast. Now it's all about quality, good. Up with the quality, and to create quality simply costs time, right? Unless that also gets tackled, which I think will be a while.

Ian Shepherd  35:12  
I mean, there's so much going on there. I think I really like your analogy of the robot and the hamburger. I think in the first instance, that's that's a great takeaway. So before we wrap up, I just wondered. Jordy, thank you for your time. Can you share some predictions for the year ahead, just in terms of some of the things that you think we may see in the next year or so?

Jordi Van Den Bussche  35:29  
All right, let's see. In a year from now, I want you to send me a message and see if I Okay, right? I'll put in my calendar. Please do so. So here's what I expect in the next year. I expect hyper realistic, AI generated videos, I would say by the end of this year, even hyper realistic in a way that it is not a portrait talking or whatever. No, it's like you say, I want to have five Lamborghinis driving next to each other, jumping through fiery hoops, and it generates this hyper realistic that you will not be able to distinguish it from the actual real thing. That's going to change a lot. I'm expecting the same thing for potentially for VR, that might be two years away where you can generate a fully hyper realistic VR experience with the diffusion model. That's going to change a lot of stuff. I'm expecting environments and game design to become much more productive and in general, producing software and producing anything on the computer or that the computer could produce, I'm expecting a massive cost reduction. So let's say you you want to create your own app. Now, this can be done in a fraction of the time, in a for a fraction of the costs, and you could do yourself, right? You don't, you don't need to hire a company for that. So I think us as humans, Software wise, we're going to be hyper productive. It's going to be accessible to everyone, because the price is going to be super cheap. And just to throw in a little curveball, I'm expecting augmented reality to be the norm. Oh,

Ian Shepherd  37:27  
so it's gonna almost make a comeback.

Jordi Van Den Bussche  37:31  
It will 100% once Apple releases, either it's gonna go one of two ways. It's either gonna be a massive flop, which I doubt, because it's apple, don't arrest made Apple ever, or it's going to be massive success. And just like with the air pods and all the wearables that they've released in the past, I'm expecting this one to be home run, for everyone to just change overnight and say, or when, it comes out to really change overnight and say, this is this is the future. Start building applications for it. And that's obviously where we're going to see this whole movement go. So Entertainment's probably going to go there too. Software development's going to go there. Productivity, lifestyle applications, it's all going to be in the Augmented Reality scene, including an AI assistant. That's actually good. Okay, those are my predictions. I think that's all going to happen in the next year. Well,

Ian Shepherd  38:32  
I've noted all those down, so I'll be getting in contact and seeing scoring you on those predictions. But Jody, thank you so much for joining us today, telling us about the virtual influencers and some of your thoughts on the future. It's been great listening.

Jordi Van Den Bussche  38:46  
Thank you for having

Ian Shepherd  38:48  
me. So that was the latest episode in the business of Creators Podcast. We've got some amazing guests coming up, so please hit subscribe to join the conversation, and don't hesitate to send me a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn with your feedback about the show you.