Short-Form Video, AI, and the Future of Content with Roberto Blake - EP13

🔥 Quick Intro

Is short-form video ruining attention spans - or is it just exposing bad content?

In this episode, Roberto Blake shares his perspective on the rise of short-form video, why creators misunderstand it, and how AI will reshape content creation in the years ahead.

👉 Episode in a Nutshell

Roberto Blake explains why short-form video is still early and why many creators are approaching it the wrong way.

He discusses how YouTube Shorts has matured, why creators should treat shorts as their own format rather than just a funnel to long-form content, and how AI is changing the landscape of content creation.

The key takeaway is that short-form itself is not the problem. The real issue is the quality of the content creators choose to publish.

⏰ Timestamps

00:00 - Is short-form video good or bad?
01:26 - Why shorts are a huge opportunity
03:01 - Why Roberto changed his mind about shorts
06:06 - Why YouTube Shorts is more stable now
08:19 - Are we still early with short-form?
16:44 - Roberto’s take on AI content
35:19 - Is short-form causing brain rot?
40:49 - How to make better short-form content

💡 What you will learn

- Why shorts should be treated as their own content format
- Why creators may still be early with short-form video
- How AI will change the content landscape
- The difference between junk content and meaningful short-form videos
- How ethical creators can still win in the AI era

🔗 Resources

Roberto Blake on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@RobertoBlake

Try Vubli free here | https://vubli.ai

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Don't worry about making slop if your consumer is not a pig. So human beings make slop all the time. People make tasteless trash that is disingenuous or dishonest at best. So the short form content itself isn't the problem. You can make short form that isn't brain rot. You can make short form that is delicious and nutritious if you really want to. You can make short form that, if consumed, makes someone's life better. So now everything will come down to Roberto Blake.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

I'd love to know your take on this. Short form video. Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Uh are you a consumer or a creator? That changes the answer dramatically either way.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

With uh let's start with creator and then talk about consumers as well.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Okay. Well, if you're a content creator, short form is probably one of the easiest ways to be omnipresent. You can be everywhere. Um, I work with a company called Opus Clip. It's really good at repurposing and scheduling uh short form across multiple platforms. So you could be on YouTube with shorts, Instagram Reels, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn all at the same time, TikTok, multiple TikTok accounts all at the same time, multiple Facebook pages if you so desire. So, from that perspective, it's an opportunity for a creator to monetize multiple platforms. If you're a business creator, you get to promote your business and your brand and have all these inflows from multiple places. You could mass produce short form content off of live streams or public speaking engagements or interviews like this one, like a podcast. And it would actually be easy to turn around a flow of five or 10 of those a day without much effort or lift or outsourcing it to your editor. And so, from that standpoint, it's this absurd opportunity to put out 50 to 100 pieces of content a day, all of them either monetizing you directly through platform revenue or promoting and marketing your businesses and services or brand awareness, more inventory and proof of concept for sponsorship. So, from a creator standpoint, yeah, short form is great. It's amazing. Even with the lower RPMs, it just has scale and it has speed. And if you do it right, it's not a dilution on quality or value. And then as for it being brain rot or junk food, that's just a matter of, well, what's the substance of what you're doing? If it's educational, then it's an abundance of fruits and veggies. If you're doing brain rot, then yeah, it's an abundance of sugar. So that just comes down to garbage in, garbage out, and that would all begin and end with the creator anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

All right. So I just want to unpack that, uh, Roberto, uh, because I want to go back in time a little bit with you because I think way back, if I remember right, you weren't as keen on short form video right at the beginning, but then you changed your mind and you've you've evolved your thinking quite a bit on the topic. Take me back to the beginning of when you started seeing short form, what you thought and you know how that's changed over the years.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

I wasn't entirely against it. A big part of it was I didn't see the value and the effort based on the monetization if you weren't an established creator uh for it. And then even if you were, it felt like, well, with brand deal leverage, if you're an established creator, you don't need it, right? Whisk risk it. And you, if you're an established creator, you already have the reach. You don't need the viral capacity of it. And if you're a beginner, it's good for a low barrier to entry, but it's not nearly as financially rewarding unless, of course, you go viral like the uh TikTokers, or unless you build off of it the way the kids from Vine did. So it wasn't a matter of being against it outside of the fact that I didn't feel it was practical for the majority of people. The platforms changed how they handled short form, the market changed how it handled short form. That's why my thinking evolved because I wasn't going to be beholden to an opinion I had when the circumstances no longer applied. Short form revenue on YouTube went from being one cent to six cents RPMs to now being on average uh 10 cents to 50 cents, with some outliers getting 70 cents on the dollar. I believe that under Neil Mohan, he'll bring in so many advertisers uh to YouTube Shorts that within two to three years, it'll probably be um upwards of a dollar, not as the baseline, but as the ceiling, which on short form is excellent considering that it also gets 10 times to 100 times the views. But keep in mind, I'm always bullish on, sorry, bearish, I'm always bearish on initial platform changes because even with YouTube, the life cycle of them stabilizing a product rollout usually takes a minimum of three to five years. When YouTube uh discontinued Google Hangouts on Air as a live stream product, the initial live streaming on YouTube with YouTube Live had unintended consequences that negatively impacted channels to the point where people had to start entirely new channels for live streams. The same thing happened with shorts, but it was a three to five year life cycle for YouTube to stabilize the live stream product. And when they did, everyone was happy with it. And now no one questions whether you can live stream on the same YouTube channel as your original channel, and they haven't for years. So I'm exactly where I was with the cycle of YouTube Shorts in particular, like I was with YouTube live streams because of the reality of YouTube's product development cycle and rollouts.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Okay, so so from your point of view, where do you think we are in that cycle right now? Uh like are we kind of in the midst of it? Are we at the peak of it? Uh, where are we going with this? Like, is it is it is it a good time now still to get into shorts and particular uh short form video, but in particular shorts? Uh, you mentioned the the increase in RPMs, you know, so getting paid more for that, which is a good incentive. But um, you know, I mean that's a 10x difference.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

That's a 10x difference in just three years.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so is that the only reason why people should be doing shorts though? Or are they?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

No, it's more stable. Well, it's more stable than it was with YouTube because they made multiple iterations and changes to the algorithm. I was vindicated on my early skepticism because YouTube made three just before the one they did recently. They did three massive different changes in the way they handle short form, and also they did a massive change early on where you used to be able to link in the description, then they took it away. It is now stable and it's where it's at now, and now it's not, oh, 60 seconds or less, it's three minutes or less. So now we're in the most stable version of YouTube shorts to ever exist. This is the prime time. And like I said, when YouTube goes through its development cycles, the early cycle for shorts, they admit that it was rushed because of a TikTok ban in India, and India is one of YouTube's largest market. 70% of YouTube viewers are non-English speaking. India is one of the largest markets in the world, they have over um a billion users in market share in India alone. YouTube had to move on that when uh the nation of India uh banned TikTok there. They had to move with YouTube Shorts, get a product rolled out there for creators, and so it was a little rushed, and they admit that openly. So that was a change because of the ability uh for short form to end up being um spam or automated, they had to take away link in description and move to a different uh model for that where you can't link out from YouTube Shorts. They had to do that for a lot of different reasons, uh, but especially malware, spam, and so on and so forth, and just user protection. So that was a major change. So going all in early on shorts, you could have been in a good position, but you also could have been negatively impacted by a lot of the changes they had to do back then. So that in my mind vindicates my earliest stance. Now we're at stability. Now we're at no more radical, drastic changes that can be negative. And so now, with only uh the future looking bright, in my opinion, the asymmetrical upside, there's an advantage. The other thing is we've had maturity in the support systems of other tools and apps for editing short form content, vertical streaming in the shorts feed, better analytics on the YouTube side, better best practices and strategy around this being locked in. So now that it's stable, we're in what I like to think of as the early middle. So we're still early, but we're um at the end of the tail cycle of early mid. And once we get to even higher RPMs, then we're at the last cycle of being early, and then we're gonna have even more mass scale adoption of shorts because again, this is a life cycle that was proven with YouTube live streaming a few years ago.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

I want to just uh there's a couple of things I want to double-click on, but just this immediate one in terms of where we are in the cycle. Are you talking here in terms of adoption of viewership of an or adoption of the creators specifically for shorts?

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Both.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Okay, both. All right, so you're thinking, so what does that mean? Are we in the early majority to be towards the beginning of the early majority still of the if we if we could draw an S-curve?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

We're getting closer to we're getting closer now to the tail end of the beginning and about to enter the beginning of the middle chapter. So we're about being early to the middle chapter of ubiquity and normalization.

unknown 9:32

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

So moving to if you if you're uh sort of a reader of something like Jeffrey Moore's uh crossing the chasm kind of book or any any marker penetration book, we're sort of you've got the early adopters right at the beginning, then you've got the uh you know innovators, then early adopters, that small tail at the beginning, and then you've got the early majority, which is almost 50% of the market, then the late majority, which is like all the other 50%, and then the lagards right at the end. So you're saying we're sort of starting to enter now the the second half of the the the big majority, so the the the late majority as as uh Jeffrey Moore would uh would label it. That second half of the the big part of the markets that that's where you think we think.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

We're at the beginning of that for shorts. We're at the we're at the end of that um mass majority adoption for long form.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Right, right. That makes sense. Okay. So this is this is actually interesting, just as a as a little bit of an aside, um, because we've known each other uh informally, you know, for more than ever a decade. Yeah, yeah. Um, and you know, back in the day when I was sort of at my peak with YouTube, it was running about 2010, um, that's probably when you saw me the first time. Funny thing, funny story is back then, this is how stupid I was now looking back. I can only say this looking back, but back then I thought we were we were already sort of in the a late majority sort of area for uh for YouTube and YouTube adoption, especially YouTube, uh, you know, business uh YouTube educators, people teaching people about how to use YouTube for growing their channels, etc. I thought we were sort of, you know, we were kind of past it, you know. And how wrong I was, I was completely wrong. It was just we were really right at the beginning back then, and and I totally missed that. Do you think it's possible that we could be wrong about uh the adoption of short form video as well, and that we might still be even towards the beginning of the adoption? Is that possible?

SPEAKER_01 11:29

That would be more likely than us being closer to the end, if anything. That would be the most likely thing. I'm offsetting that possibility by the sheer um exponential scale that it's had in a very compressed amount of time, and also the fact that we're now in a higher acceleration cycle than the long tail of the last 21 years of YouTube. Um, because YouTube moved incredibly slow, and now everything is incredibly fast, even if you look at AI. So I think we're just now in uh such a compressed world of acceleration that that's why I believe I can make the claim that I'm making. But if I'm wrong, it just means there's more upside than we ever could have imagined, and that we're still early, and that just means the future is much brighter for people than they can think, and that they're they're not late and they don't need to worry about it. Because if I'm wrong, your upside is you're still early, and so the only way to lose now is to quit.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Yeah. I saw a really interesting graph uh about AI adoption uh in the last week or so, and you might have seen it floating around as well. This graph with uh a dot for each um, I don't know, million people on on the planet. And yeah, you're still like less than one percent if you're using it. Yeah, correct. Yeah, we're right at the beginning, really still of the adoption of AI, and then you like even more towards the beginning if you're like getting into things like vibe coding, etc. And exactly, yeah. You know, what one thing I've I've realized being being at the front end of a uh a trend is that it's so easy to to think that everyone in your bubble is is the it represents the world. You know, it's very easy to sort of get lost in it. Like it happens to me all the time, even with this AI stuff. I only see people talk about AI all the time because I'm in the AI space, we've got an AI company. Um, so so for me, it's like, oh, AI, surely everybody's talking about AI. Surely everyone has the same understanding.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

But I surely everyone knows who Mr. Beast is, surely everyone knows who PewDiePie is, surely everyone knows who Jordan Hallett is. Oh, surely everyone knows who Marquez Brownley is. No, normal people have no idea. Normal people cannot name like 10 or 20 YouTubers. Young people under 20 probably can name 10 to 20 YouTubers if they try, but it depends on whether you're getting a regular consumer versus someone YouTube obsessed. Most of them cannot name them or active YouTubers. It's very difficult for people.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah, for sure. Okay, there's this another thing that you mentioned, and it's it's more just to satisfy um satisfy my own curiosity, and that's um the the description areas for for shorts on YouTube. Like they've removed the links, the ability to have links in there.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Um Yeah, you can't have links like you could with long form, or you can link out to your website, your email list, to all those things. That does not exist for short form.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Okay, but why? Well, what why do they uh I noticed some security concerns, but how's that in any different now from long form? Like they've got it still for long forms.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

The sheer volume and speed at which short form can be uh put out and a speed at which short form could be automated. For it takes time and effort to put out a long form, even a live stream, but for a fraction of that, you could literally put out 20 pieces of short form in a day. So imagine 20 pieces of misinformation plus malware per day, and in an automated system, it could be that per hour. The cap on how many shorts you can upload to YouTube shorts on a day on a single channel is about roughly 60 something. So now imagine that you have a system where you can do that and you have multiple YouTube channels. The number of YouTube channels that a single email account can manage is 100. So 100 times 60 per day. That's the threat. Different different ballgame. You cannot do that with long form, you just can't.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Okay, all right. So it's a way for them to manage that uh risk profile. Okay, thank you. That that actually makes a lot of sense. So I uh appreciate that they don't have links in there for that reason. But it's it's unfortunate because it'd be so cool if you could have a link there going back to your website for legitimate business purposes or legitimate other purposes as well. So it's a pity that we have abusers of the technology uh so often. Okay, cool. Thank you for answering that one. Um the other thing that you've briefly touched on, which is uh a really nice segue for us to talk about this stuff, is the this whole AI thing that I wanted to ask you about as well. Um I I I've heard you talk on previous interviews about AI and AI slop and uh you know the importance of still being you and the authentic you. And yeah, I I remember you have having a really good session with um sorry, I've just forgotten his name again. Let me just see uh the um the host from YouTube Creators Hub. Um Dusty Porter. Yeah, Dusty Porter. Uh you you mentioned some really interesting things, but that was like uh almost a year ago uh that you talked about that. And I thought it was like it could have been an interview from yesterday. I thought, you know, you're very interested in the It was President Yeah, yeah. So so I want to revisit that now almost a year later. And it was in April uh last year, so I don't know when it was recorded, but it was you know it would have been before that, and now it's uh you know, almost March uh in 2026. So um what are your thoughts on AI at the moment, specifically as it relates to short form video? And and and they can there's different ways, many different facets here, but there's you know, for example, there's there's the angle of using AI to completely take over from the creator, you know. So you have a um an AI um clone of yourself, or not even an AI clone, just a AI personality or influencer. That's completely AI, you know, that's like one extreme, but then there's also more complementary kind of things that you can use AI for. What are your thoughts on the whole AI thing, specifically as it relates to shorts and short form video right now?

SPEAKER_01 17:36

I think creators are very short-sighted on this and they need to be less emotional about it. I understand why people, especially people with an artistic identity, are very frustrated about this and they scream about AI slop all the time, but they also have to look at the consumer side, and that can be very harsh because the consumer really doesn't care about any such animal as artistic integrity, not in the majority. It'll be a vocal minority in Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, and X that think about that and care about that or say that they do. These same people will buy items that um val uh invalidate intellectual property law, trademark, and copyright all the time. These people will emulate and steal uh video games, they will pirate music and movies and television shows and then claim to care about artists. So I don't think you can really take people at their word. You have to take them at their actions. So I don't really believe that the consumer who claims that they value art and creativity genuinely does in the overwhelming majority. That may be a very cynical view, but I think the numbers bear it out and always have bared out. I lived through Napster. So I uh, you know, as an elder black bill, I kind of go just like, uh, yeah, no, not so much, you guys. The consumer will always be beholden to convenience and what lets them consume. And the thing with AI is it is getting better and better at a ridiculous and exponential rate, and it is becoming harder and harder to tell. An artist with an artistic eye will go, oh yes, I can tell, but a lot of artists actually think they have an artistic eye. I've seen people get fooled, I've seen people criticize things as being AI that were built five or ten years ago. Uh, and so I don't believe that even people who are seasoned and call themselves artists and think that they can see the human emotion in something. I don't think that they can. I've actually experimented and said, okay, I'm gonna tell someone that something's AI, but it's gonna be human-made, and they're gonna sit there and they're gonna say, say, yeah, I could tell, or they're gonna be like, actually, no, this was human-made. Here's all your proof, here's the thing. It's like, and people get frustrated, they get upset, but I go, You have a bias of and it's only your foreknowledge that gives you that bias. As a consumer, you like something or you don't. If I tell you how it got to you, and then you decide you don't like it, that's not your authentic feeling about the thing itself. That is a bias that you have about the process by which it was made, but when you only consumed it without the foreknowledge, you liked it. So that means that was your genuine feeling, that was how you actually are, that's what you actually believe, that's what you actually wanted. You only became upset after the fact. So if you taste something and you say it's delicious, and then you don't like it when I tell you what it is, that's your bias coloring your actual judgment because your authentic judgment, your authentic expression was you enjoyed it when you were consuming it, when you had no knowledge of how it got to you. So the consumer thinks that way. The creator, of course, is gonna be biased toward a protectionism of their craft and what they think, and so on and so forth. But here's another angle. Some of this is just gonna be a leveling of the playoff field of accessibility. There are gonna be people who have issues that won't let them be on camera or use certain tools. They're gonna have physical or mental um things that uh make them less capable of operating at that capacity. And there has to be a question as to whether they are allowed to prosper and they are allowed to participate, or are they only allowed to operate with the limitations that they have that are devastating because some creator somewhere thinks it's more ethical for them to not be able to participate than to allow this tool to exist?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Yeah, it's certainly interesting times. I uh just saw a video yesterday that um someone made with AI, and it was uh you might have seen it as well because it's just gone viral. Um, it's a video of Elon Musk and um Jeff Bezos and um Sam Altman, and they're older and they're looking back on uh how AI took all the jobs, and now they've set up this fitness company to um you know basically use humans to give them purpose, you know, to to look good and fit and um and at the same time provide energy for all the AI. It was actually really Well done. Did you see the video? I was trying to find it, but I couldn't I couldn't find it.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

I did not, but just hearing about it makes me chuckle, and that sounds amazing. And the fact that you can say it's really well done. This is what people want. People want the idea to take a thought and turn it into a thing and say that joke I'm telling, or the hey, what if uh Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman walk into a bar? You won't have to tell that joke anymore. You'll be able to show people that joke.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Yeah. So what's interesting for me about this whole development is that uh, you know, we went through these different stages. At the beginning, it was like, you know, uh Will Smith eating the spaghetti, and it was like all over the place. And it was uncanny valley. It was gone. It was it it was yeah, it looked dumb. And then it and it developed, and then it's like now again now that's not looking good. And it got to a point where people, myself, I would look at and go, hey, that's quite entertaining. I could watch that, but I still know it's AI. But this when you watch this one, for me, uh, and I've seen this a few times now, it it's at a point now already, and and you can see it's just it's just around the corner getting better and better, where you're watching it and you're going, This is real. It it it it there's no distinction here between what uh a previously real video production would look like and what the AI video production would look like. And we've we've now it's just down to is it good yeah, and now it's just a matter of it is it good. It is, and that's the thing, it is good, it's it is entertaining. Like you watch like like the video I just described with Elon and Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos, it's entertaining, but it it's it's not it's no longer uncanny valley, and it's no longer oh that that's entertaining and fun to watch. It's more like uh you know, if if they weren't portrayed as old and in the future, you might have second guessed it and and and thought, hey, this was a real video. Uh obviously it's like a uh uh a funny sort of satire sort of a video, so you can obviously see that it was you know it's done with AI. Um, but uh you can you can definitely um look ahead and go, hang on, it's getting so good now where we can't we won't be able to tell the difference. And so I guess uh just just firing a question back at you with that in mind, if if AI is getting to that point where it can essentially create or or we can drive it for the time being to create videos that are indistinguishable from ourselves being in the videos, so it's so it's an AI avatar, say, of yourself um and uh maybe the scripts are generated by AI, or maybe you sort of self-direct it and and fine-tune it a bit, etc. It's it doesn't matter, but the end result, it's it's an AI video of maybe you, a clone of you, and uh speaking AI content. What are your thoughts on that? And and do you think that is what what are your do what are your thoughts on what that will do to the creator economy uh and how that's gonna change the game? Are are people gonna actually adopt this? Are they gonna get sick of it? Of course they are. Of course they are. What's gonna happen here? What what's your thoughts? Future looking.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

It'll all become a it'll be all become a quality issue because right now, human slop and AI slop, the only differentiator of them is basically there's a lot of AI that doesn't make things good, it's obvious mistakes, it's uncanny valley. That's what makes AI into slop. Now, artists would argue, no, it's the fact that it's AI at all is what makes it slop. That's where I disagree with a lot of them. Is no, it's good or it's not, because humans can make slop too. So what it'll come down to is well, when do humans make slop? Well, there's a difference between uh one of my favorite novelists, um, you know, a UK native, uh, I don't know if you're a fan of his, David Gemmel. David Gemmel is this great fantasy author and novelist and everything like that. I would almost put him up there with, or you could just even say J.R. Tolkien. So there's someone who's J.R. Tolkien, and then there's a human who writes slop for the tabloids for the national enquirer or the the caller or whatever. So human beings make slop all the time. People make tasteless trash that is disingenuous or dishonest at best, and that's a normal thing. So they are tabloid writers, they're smut pedalers, they're people who make absolute garbage without a uh AI being involved at all. And so humans are capable of making slop too. So now everything will come down to the quality of the thought, the intention, the writing, and the execution, not the method by what it's made. I do not judge something's quality on the methodology that produced it, I judge it on its merits and its results and the actual output and the thing being consumed. So it's not that I'm going to now here's the thing: you are allowed to put a premium on something that was bespoke and human-made. And so the good news is, in my view, is okay, if we want to assign unique intrinsic value to human beings because they're human, they're flesh and blood, they have a soul, and we want to say, okay, humans are at a premium, plankers are generic, I'm fine with that because it actually, if you're saying human beings have more value, fantastic. So humans can price themselves at a premium, and then another human either agrees to it, or that other human says, No, I like affordability, so I'll just deal with the machine. And that's fine. The market can decide that. So, what we will do is if you feel like you're an artist and you feel you should be valued, you should charge a premium like artist of old did, and you should pursue a wealthy patron, what have you. Charge a premium for bespoke, unique, human value that is flawed and temporary and transient. Do it. People do artisanal things all the time, and they're valued by people who have the money to afford them. You just won't be affordable or able to compete in the mass market because AI will become generic. That lowers the ceiling. But also, the truth is, even with AI, there will just be a threshold or a baseline of quality that cannot be overcome because the visuals can be good, but if the writing is bad, if the direction is bad, the intention is bad, there are people who are human beings that got budgets and made absolute garbage films that were not cinema. So we'll have the same thing when you eliminate the budget constraint as well. And then it will all be down to talent in the writing and the intention and the art direction and the thoughtfulness. So the talent pool is not down to being a technician, it is being down to a thinker. And I am fine with that.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

So what's the future for you specifically, Roberto? Like when it comes to being on video, what what's your thoughts on like what's your strategy going forward? Like thinking uh six months, twelve months, what you know, three years, five years into the future. What given that we've got the proliferation of AI and clones and things like that? Uh, and given that it's becoming so good, what are you specifically gonna do to make sure you stay competitive? You I mean, you've mentioned already the human value and that that that you can put a premium on that, but does that mean you will be also using a clone of yourself to help you create content and to put messages out there with an audience?

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Not until I'm older, because then I need to establish my immortality like a proper Sith Lord. I don't know how familiar you are with Star Wars, but I just need to make I am I do need to make an AI clone eventually so that it can train apprentices for the next a hundred years so that they can conquer the galaxy. So I just need to preserve myself with AI through immortality. I'm not joking here. I mean, you you just make a holographic clone Roberto, a holographic clone crowdo with my personality that can train my apprentices in the future when I'm no longer here, unless I decide to go ahead and do the cybernetic upgrades, become cyborg Roberto, and just live forever. So I could always go that route, you know, I can just be Darth Roberto forever. Um, and the but I'm being somewhat facetious, but also not. That's where technology is getting so good. Maybe I'm joking, maybe I'm not. But again, I'm not opposed to even just for my own descendants, being able to say, like, what would what would grandpa do? Like, it sounds morbid, but the idea that they would have some kind of repository that would be able to interact is not the most m macabre thing I can think of. There may be a comfort in that. I certainly, even after all this time, sometimes want to play videos or audio and hear my grandmother's voice. And thankfully, I have just a little bit of material to do that. I wish I had more. I only wish I had more. I'm gonna definitely feel that way when my mother passes. So I'm not against the idea of, I mean, I do have a back catalog of thousands of videos, but I'm not as opposed to immortalizing my thoughts, my knowledge, my beliefs, and my methodology and having it live far into the future past me. Uh, so that doesn't bother me that much. It's no different than writing a book or having an audiobook uh in perpetuity. It's just an extension of that. So it doesn't bother me to do that if I'm in control of it. And also I could benefit my estate in the future. If there is an AI model of me that I license or that I own propriet in perpetuity or can license or whatever, then my family can have royalties generationally throughout the ages off of uh the value of whatever following I built.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

All right. So shorter term, you'd you'd uh you would consider having an AI version of you if it's good enough, say given, you know, assuming that a decade from now, probably, but you know, God forbid. Okay, so all right, shorter term then, you you're it's just gonna be the real Roberto. It's not gonna be an AI version of you. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Yeah, no, absolutely. At best, at best, I would do it if I could get it perfect to help with audiobook recording. Uh at best, it would just be AI voice, uh, where I would have trained it on 30 hours of me and get the inflections right. If it can get that perfect, then I don't mind it doing the narration in my voice for an audiobook that people want to purchase just to make it easier and to not strain my vocal cords, that would be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

At what point would you if there is such a point, but if if there is such a point, at what point would you go uh AI? It's better to have an AI version of me creating videos and creating content than myself. Do you think that point would come for you?

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Uh having two to three children versus zero is probably the right answer to that because that's a really easy answer to not end up divorced.

unknown 33:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Right. You just get the clone to do everything, save your time, spend time with your kids.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

That's a really good way. By the way, gentlemen, it's a good way to stay married. Just give if you want to be on YouTube still, you get married, build an AI clone. It's a good way to stay married.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Save time, nice. Yep. Good advice there.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

I'm not joking, gentlemen. I am not joking.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yeah, it's well well, it's certainly it's the the the pain point of content creation is the time, right? The time to create good, valuable content that connects with you as the creator. And AI is sort of making that easier, but then that you lose that connection at the moment. Like I don't I don't see how people can have that strong connection with the clone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

It depends because the thing is if you do a mixed model, let's say you do the intro and the hook, and it was the authentic human performance, and you minimize that, and then you're going to have the AI clone just do the voiceover and the cutaways to A rule throughout now a 50-minute otherwise edited documentary, and you're just doing the narrative and voiceover with a few cutaways back to you, but you filmed the initial intro performance and you filmed the outro performance. At that point, they may not even know the difference of when the clone substituted in or out versus an understudy if you were a stage performer, or your stunt actor if you are an actual actor in cinema and film. They have stunt actors do aspects of their performance when needed. I love that idea of body double, it's just another body double.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Yeah, it's essentially a Frankenstein of content, then, but it's uh a beautiful Frankenstein that's essentially seamless because people can't, they won't be able to tell the real bits from the cloned bits.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

Uh so I can remember Frankenstein did nothing wrong. He was innocent and blameless, and it was the ignorance of the villagers that was the actual uh villainy in uh Frankenstein. Aside from Dr. Frankenstein playing God, Frankenstein himself as the creation did nothing wrong.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Are we playing God with content?

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Uh human beings have been playing God for before you and I got here, Gideon, and they will continue to do so long afterward.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Yeah, interesting. Um we could probably talk about this AI stuff for a very long time, but there's this there's another thing that I wanted to cover with you, and it's um it's the it's the brain rot thing. There's there's been I watched uh the interview with uh the uh diary of a CEO with uh Stephen Bartlett. He interviewed a couple of experts on that uh recently, and and I talked about Brain Rot, aka a short form video uh that is uh I believe it started even before that, but yes. Yeah, that's right. So so it was interesting with the interview how it was short form video in particular that they associated with brain rot. And I was thinking, hang on, brain rot's been around for longer than that. We've just it has been much labeled it. Yeah, we've we've we've labeled it now and and sort of associated specifically with with short form because that's a popular thing. And I I almost think it's a little bit unfair towards short form, that's my personal opinion, because there's other, many other brain rot things as well, like the gaming industry, like our kids, for example, they're on they're on do they're on, you know, they're on, I won't say the name necessarily, but they're on some training apps and educational apps, and they're designed to hook you and and get you in there. It's like, okay, so they're learning something good.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

And it's built-in uh addiction, there's built-in addiction elements, gambling elements.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah, so is so is that so is so you can you can argue the benefit of of a tool like that that you know that's good for the kid, they're getting educated and stuff, but but then there's also the brain.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

I think screen time in general is bad. I think we're gonna find screen time in general is bad, and that that's causing the attention span. It's the blue light, it's the vision. Like Gideon, my vision is gone. If I take my glasses off, I can't even read my own name on the screen. Um it's I'm staring at the screen. Yeah, it's so many years.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

It might be an age-related thing too, Roberto.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

But uh a little bit, but I think it's the compounding of how many years in front of the screen over the years of that age. I'm with you. Because I've been a I've been a screen worker since I was 13. So it's a problem. And now every child that's not even a nerd, and at least getting the educational value or even monetizing is doing it now as a consumer. I was not consuming screens like that when I was a child for consumption purposes, only when I decided to literally start at 13 years old being a knowledge worker. Uh, and that was in the uh late 90s. And so what I'll say is I think it's the phone. Because, see, the brain rot doesn't matter if it's a centralized screen in your house. It matters, but that's a limited time experience. You don't want to sit still, you have to. So there was a built-in uh cap to the screen time that you could have when it was that, or when it was a centralized computer in the home, you have different people competing for access to that computer. So there were built-in limitations. The phone is with you all of the time throughout all waking hours of the day. That's where the brain rot and the addiction is. So I take it back to about 2007-2010 with the ubiquity of smartphones after the iPhone. I blame the Brain Rod on that, but I also remind everybody, and you were around for this, Gideon. YouTube didn't release um upload file size and length limits until about 2010. So that means that for the first five years of YouTube, all videos were short form videos, they just weren't vertical.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Good point. Good point.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Yeah, and the phone wasn't ubiquitous because YouTube was a flash website and you could do it on a phone, but it kind of sucked. So everyone was watching on laptops, computers, or rigging their laptop or computer up to a television screen. So YouTube was all short form videos, it wasn't as addictive or ubiquitous because the smartphone was not everywhere. The first YouTube app was built by Apple and not YouTube, and it sucked in uh 20 uh 10, and uh when they got off of um Adobe Flash and went to HTML5, and YouTube didn't build its own proper app until about 2012, and that's the beginning of the peak of YouTube and social media in general, becoming a household name post Facebook, post-social network um film uh making this uh broader spread. And so that's when you really get into it, and it short form platforms have always been addicted to youngsters. Before it was YouTube and TikTok, it was Snapchat and Vine.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Exactly. Now, back back with that interview with uh Dusty almost a year ago, I loved how because he he he went into this as well because already Brain Rot was already a you know that's you know it feels like an eternity ago, but it also just feels like yesterday kind of a way, in a way. So everything's changed, but nothing's changed.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

But um tell me we had it with gotcha games and uh things like Farmville in the um early days of social media. We had it with gotcha games, we had it with uh the biggest of online news. There was even brain rot cartoons, uh Beavis and Butthead, right in Stimpy. There were they were literal brain rot cartoons back in the 90s when we were coming up.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Okay, so so I want to touch on something that you mentioned to Dusty and and in terms of how you can approach this situation given that there's brain rot, and brain rot's been around forever. It's like so so the the moral dilemma you might then have if you watch watching these programs or listening to these reports saying, Hey, hang on, I'm in the I'm in the brain rot industry, I'm creating short film video, I'm I must be a terrible person. But but I think you had you had a really nice antidote to it. And I'm not sure if you remember what you said, but you you were saying I would love for you to go over that again and and maybe how your thoughts have changed or evolved since then as well, because I thought that was like a really brilliant take on it.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

Right. So the short form content itself isn't the problem, it's the nature of it. So if the if there's all this brain rot, this hyper stimulating, hyper additive, low-value garbage in the market, then this is sugar and candy. Interject fruits and veggies and healthy food into the market, interject, interject substance. You don't you can make short form that isn't brain rot. You can make short form that is delicious and nutritious if you really want to. You can make short form that, if consumed, makes someone's uh life better. And remember, short form doesn't mean it has to be under 30 seconds, it can be up to three minutes. It's still short form. So you could slow down the pacing, not hyper-edit. You can deliver value and substance, but in a way that still is encouraging, inspiring, useful, helpful, encourages people to go deeper, possibly could lead them to wanting to watch something that's long form or wanting them to do something offline. If you are making content that are 60-second uh book summaries, for example, it could literally be the thing that saves someone from brain rot because it gets them to read an actual book and slow down and to read it in person. You could even inspire them to do that if your 60-second book summaries also open up with this sprawling, beautiful scene of your home library and you reading and enjoying and being outside in the sunlight or reading as a couple uh cuddled up together. It can make somebody want those things and make them want to slow down their life. You can literally promote um what you might call slow-fi content via short form instead of hyper-stimulated brain rot. And that would be, in my mind, an antidote to all of this in terms of the fact that people watching this, you can make them desire that slower pace and to slow down. You can offer that level of comfort and a lack of overstimulation while still being satisfying.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

I love the analogy with uh the the fruit and I think the junk food um version. Junk food versus fruits and veggies, yes. Fruits and veggies. Now, okay, so so then here's my question about that, and we've got to start wrapping things up, Roberta. Uh sure, but because this is a short form. That's exactly. But uh the the question I have is you know, with the the growth of AI, the the way that the algorithm is rewarding junk food kind of content, um, and then for you as a an ethical, say, morally driven creator who wants to make the world a better place, how do you compete? How do you create content in such a way that you still get picked up by the algorithms, that you still go viral with your content? Well, maybe not necessarily, but that you can still build an audience even though you don't cater for the junk foodie version of the brain rot world, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

Just remember that you're not in the business of converting everybody. J.R. Tolkien didn't water down Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit to reach anybody, he made something that you would want to assume. Aspire to being able to take on, and that you'd be rewarded if you did. So J.R.R. Tolkien didn't lower his standard to be more inclusive of a broader audience of um low information or low IQ or low literacy readers. He made something so enjoyable that you would learn to read if you had to, just to be able to participate in it and to be able to talk to people about the grandeur of Middle Earth and the Smareleon and the Lord of Rings and the Hobbit and so on and so forth. He didn't water it down, he didn't dumb it down. And I don't think a content creator needs to do that. Be so good and be good enough to where people aspire to a level that allows them to consume what you make, attract them. Don't worry about making slop if your consumer is not a pig.

SPEAKER_00 44:51

I love it. I love the I love the example you have there with Jared Tolkien and and not lowering your standards. Uh because I think you'll you'll still attract the right people when you keep those standards up. And I mean if you're just creating slop and if you're creating the junk food version of videos and short form videos, then you might be attracting the junkies or the people who love junkies.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

You're also making yourself disposable. Like if you're going for that, you're making yourself disposable because that kind of consumer has no loyalty to anything, they have no standards themselves. And it's no offense to anybody, it just is what it is. It's like, how could they? So the thing is, you'd have to make something that makes people attracted to it and to raise a standard and say, no, you can't think about it. Anyone can go to an establishment that says, Oh yes, come as you are, but everyone wants to get to a place in life that they end up everyone wants to do so well in life that they would have to dress up and put on a dress, a shirt, a tie to get into the best places in the world. If you had to, it's like, okay, I will literally, if that's the place I get to go, I guess I have to meet the dress code. But if something is available and open access to everyone, you're like, well, why do I have to wear this? Why do I have to that? But you, if you get to a place to where it's like, I will do whatever I have to do to get in there. You said it's a shirt and tie, yes, sir. You said take off that, yes, sir. It's uh let's go, and that's what it is. So wouldn't you rather be the place that everyone changes literally who they are, how they present, just to get near the thing that you created instead of something where no one feels they have to put in any effort whatsoever? Yes, one of those things will have more people, but with what but one of those things is more desired by everyone.

SPEAKER_00 46:45

And attracting the right people into your world, the people that actually make a difference to your life and make you happier.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Exactly. You don't, why would you want to be for everybody? I don't believe in that. I tell creators that you want to attract your tribe. You don't want a try so what does attract your tribe mean? There means that there is a group of people with shared interests, shared beliefs, share values, and everything like that. That by its nature cannot be inclusive of everybody because then there's no standard.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

I love it, Roberto. It's uh I'm we should have we should have set up this call uh or I should have interviewed you much, much earlier. I I love, love, love this conversation that we've just had. Uh unfortunately we've run out of time a little bit. Um but if possible, I might get you on the call again and explore some of these ideas. Happy to do it again in a regular fashion. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

Yeah, happy to do it again. Just let me know. Give me a ring.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

Legend. Thank you so much. Before we go, I'd love to let people know about where they can go to find out more about you. You mentioned already uh if people go to at Roberto Blake on any of the socials. I just want to dig into that a little bit more. There's, for example, your YouTube channel, but I know you've got an active Instagram channel as well. So it's at Roberto Blake. If people want to go and check it out, this is uh Roberto's YouTube channel. Um, you also have your own website here called AwesomeCreatoracademy.com. Do you want to quickly just tell us a bit about that? I know you've got some coaching programs in there as well. Feel free to dig into that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

Sure. I have uh one-on-one coaching. We also have our group coaching program uh where we have our uh members. We meet twice a week for office hours calls. Um it's a chat, kind of like uh this, but we get together as a group for that. You also get access to all of our uh resources. Uh, there's some custom tools that I've been building. I've been using AI to do a little bit of vibe coding. So we have some proprietary tools. Uh, we're very results oriented. And the real goal is I I don't care about helping people go viral. I hell about I care about helping people become sustainable and to be able to make an income that is stable from their content creation. So we have a variety of offers, resources, and tools around that. We have a great community. And again, if you want to work with him one-on-one, we also have options available for that. Uh, so that's that's a lot of what we do over at the Academy.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

Yeah, so everybody go and check out awesome creatoracademy.com if you want to get in touch with Roberto and of course also go to his YouTube channel and any other socials. Uh, I do follow Roberto on uh on X as well, some pretty interesting stuff happening there. I I wanted to talk about this uh 2026 State of the Creator Economy report that you just casually posted there today, but we don't have quite time for that. Maybe that's a topic for another conversation, uh, some other things. Hey, we've got all years.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

We've got all we've got all of 2026. I mean, the most I'll say about that is uh there are over 200 data insights aggregated, all cited and sourced, over 70 cited unique sources uh for that, uh over 20 interactive uh graphs and data charts and panels. It's incredibly robust, over uh 50 sections. Um, and we also highlighted uh some very important statistics, uh, some uh specific platform statistics, even some uh background on creator mental health and burnout. So we did uh the most robust report we could put together to make it holistic for creators, and I'm very proud of what we were able to accomplish with that. There's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 50:18

I mean, that's it's insane. There's so if you people want to check that out, it's at 2026, that's 2026.com. If you do want to check that out as well. Roberto, that was enlightening to say the least. Thank you so much. And um, I can't wait for us to talk again. But thank you, that was uh so much fun, and I learned a ton from you. And I wish you all the best.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

Thank you so much. No, it's all pleasure, Gideon. Long overdue.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Thanks for tuning in. If you want to grow your influence with daily short form videos, Vubli makes it effortless. Post everywhere, be seen everywhere. Try it free at vobli.ai. I'll see you in the next episode.