dark, moody power. I don’t know about you, but After Effects has really never felt this powerful before. Because now we can build entire motion graphic worlds, build atmosphere, and tell stories in a way that feels cinematic. So, let’s harness this new power of After Effects, and get started. All right. There’s a lot of ways to approach a big epic scene like this. So, here’s my most organic approach without having to smash your keyboard in half. First, I like to start with a primary object that will be a repetitive object for later use, like a cube. And we can size it with the controls to make any design, like this rectangle. How creative, I know. But here’s the beauty of building scenes like this. Ideas will just come to you as you go. So, the next thing that I like to do is texture this beautiful piece of work. We can either add our own textures in the latest version of After Effects beta or you can still grab and attach free materials from the community asset site from Adobe uh like you know maybe this concrete texture as I really want that brutalistic feel. And we can also scale that texture down for that crisp detail and that’s going to make everything look good my fellow comrade duck. Now that we have a shape ready we need to attach it to a floor. So, use the plane tool to draw out a, you know, 15,000 x 15,000 plane and and no, not an airplane, of course. Set the X rotation to 90° and set its Y position to exactly 1080 as I like to have like a standard where everything kind of sits on the floor nowadays. Then, we can move our 3D object until it clips onto that floor. Though, at this time, I like to make a camera layer. And when it’s ready, we’ll use the pan under cursor tool to reposition the view. And don’t forget, we can also texture that floor as well and scale it as needed. And finally, to complete this starting build, let’s go ahead and create a background solid and add a gradient ramp. Choose your colors and use a radial style, which will quote unquote emulate the sun, so to speak. And you’ll see that later on. Now, to get the repeated scene going, we can duplicate your magnificent masterpiece rectangle or, you know, shape, whatever you’re using, you know, a handful of times. Then select everything, go to position, and you’re going to hold alt and control on your keyboard or command and option if you’re on a Mac to proportionally push these back into zspace. Easy enough. But for another idea that just came to me, we can manually vary the X and Y position of every layer for some great variation. Cool. But hear me out. Pre-ompose all these shapes here. And hear me out again. Click continuously rasterize and make the layer 3D. And now we can move this over to the side. duplicate it and move it over to the other side. So, basically, it’s 40 shapes in just two layers. I don’t know about you, but that’s just great organization. And next, we’ll go ahead and make this scene actually cinematic and easily produce cinematic work by After Effects and Premiere Pro templates, drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and powerful motion graphics that you can customize with a few clicks. You can access thousands of templates directly in After Effects and Premiere Pro, where you can edit them to fit your vision in seconds, allowing you to build client ready masterpieces in no time, the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel as you know, I don’t do any sponsorships here. So, thank you very much. But, okay, are you ready for the good stuff? And I mean the good stuff. At this step, I will go ahead and create a parallel light with shadows enabled to start visualizing that final look of the scene. This way, I’m not wasting my time if this idea is just a dud. Now, because we have a diffused sun here in the sky, move the light back in Z position space and over to where that hypothetical sun is going to be sitting at. And of course, increase the light intensity. And now we’re going to be able to see those crisp crisp sharp shadows. And that’s awesome, except the scene might just be too dark for you. So to augment the scene, go ahead and create an environment light with shadows as well. And first, we’re going to match the lights rotation to get that same shadow angle that we got from that parallel light. From here, you can easily adjust the intensity to feel your inner light or darkness. though to match your inner darkness. Make sure you go to renderer options and click fit the scene so that your shadows will spread out correctly. Awesome stuff. We now got the core principle for scene building out of the way because it’s now all about expansion. So for easy camera movement, go ahead and create a 3D null object and parent the camera to it. From here, we can just add key frames for position and push this all the way forward in Zpace to reveal the full scope of the scene. Now to create more variety, you can duplicate the composition here in the project panel and select one of the existing pre-MPs in your timeline and alt drag this over to replace. Then in that composition, we can rev the rectangles however you like. And back in the main comp, everything will update. This means you can duplicate these and move them around the composition to really start building this all out really quick. The idea is to populate everything. And one thing you’ll notice is that I’m using two views with Draft 3D selected here to help see exactly what I’m doing without melting my computer. But have fun creating duplicates and variations. You really don’t need too many unique compositions as you know there’s already so much detail in here just with one single rectangle. Now, if you’re itching for extra design details, keep in mind you can use this cube mesh and lengthen it out to create like a really long pathway. And of course, you can use this concept to create many other shapes for your scene. For example, if we use three slightly different variations of like a long rectangle, you can easily combine these together to create like a floating catwalk, if you will, and then populate the scene with this type of design as well. But to really, you know, really make the scene come to life, right, let’s talk about cinematic light. Firstly, for these moving particles that will emit light, create a point light with a smooth fall-off that has, I don’t know, a radius and fall-off distance of like a 200 or so with shadows turned off. That’s important. Then straight away lower this point light into your scene until you kind of see it affecting the environment around it. And of course you can change it colors. And I would also consider alt clicking the stopwatch for position to add the wiggle.5, 50 expression to, you know, have this animated. Now we can duplicate this light a bunch of times and move it around the scenes to, you know, light things up. And finally, to actually like see this light source, we can create a small matching circle with the ellipse tool, make it 3D, and then place it near the point lights. Then, of course, turn off except lights and shadows as well. Then, we can use the wiggle expression once again on its position. And finally, we can duplicate this a bunch of times and reposition each particle shape to really sell that creative light. Once again, awesome stuff. But to make this even awesomemer, let’s enable depth of field on your camera layer and then take a second to cry with joy because this is great. And pre-ompose everything here for some upcoming effects. Now, the first effect here to try is fog 3D. This is kind of a tricky effect to use, so just bear with me here. By selecting your background color and setting the depth here, you can help tie the entire scene with a slight fog and then maybe use the other settings to help dial that final fog look. Now, one of my favorite effects is light rays. So, with an adjustment layer, we can use the CC radial fast blur effect and set the amount to 95 and then move the center point to the, you know, bright area in your sky. Now, to dial this down, let’s set the blend mode to screen and use the curves effect to help fine-tune all these beautiful rays. with a top adjustment layer. Let’s dial in your look with the curves effect or maybe the lummetry color effect to get the right look. But ultimately do whatever you think looks best and subscribe to be the best and always be creating.
Author: davenkross2026
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09/22/2026 – Content Growth Engine
All right. All right. All right. What’s happening everybody? How’s it going? Go ahead and comment where you’re calling in from. We’re getting started a little bit early right now and I’m still getting ready on my side as usual. Um, but uh, awesome. I see a few people still from the VIP session. Um, admins of course should be answering any questions that the VIPs have. Um, awesome, Beverly. I I think Beverly, your audio is probably it’s probably because you’re opening it in the Zoom app and on the browser. Like that’s almost certainly what it is. So, pick one or the other. Do the Zoom app or the browser, but not both. Okay. Um, awesome. We got Mterrey, that’s where I’m from. Awesome. Laura, Mesa, Arizona. Louisville, Kentucky. Andrew, Portland, Oregon. Sage. Dupant, Washington. Thomas, Iowa. Rebecca, central Michigan. Kristen, upstate New York. Lauren Ste, uh, Stevenville, Texas. Kate, uh, calling in from Denver, Colorado. I used to sell in the flea markets up in Denver, Colorado when I was young. We would drive up to the flea markets from Kansas and sell uh, eyeglass cleaner. Uh, usually usually it was eyeglass cleaner in those flea markets. Like, very fun. Very fun. Good times. Angela, Pennsylvania. Michael Lemon, Colorado. I wonder if I said that right. Pronounced that right. JL, Florida. Malachi. Uh, Maryland. Dana Dallas. Uh, Kina Huntsville, Alabama. Yeah, Huntsville, Alabama. Lane, Seattle, Washington. Matt, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Zara, upstate New York. Chris, Columbus, Ohio. Patty, Clearwater, Florida. Uh, Daryl, Virginia. Michelle, Midland, Texas. Hey, my grandpa lived in Midland, Texas before he passed away. Um, that’s cool. S Orlando, Florida. Him, Florida, Tampa. Beverly, nope. On my phone, it skips uh from dot loud to soft again. Very weird, Beverly. Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. Uh, do you have the Zoom app on your phone? Like, maybe try listening to it on a computer. It might be better to listen to on a computer. Actually, out of curiosity, guys, how many of you are are on your phone versus your computer? Like, what what device are you watching this on? Is it a phone? Is it a laptop? Is it a TV? Is it a computer? Uh, comment in the chat what device you’re watching this on. I see we got South Africa. Devon, South Africa. Wow, you stayed up very late for this. Thank you, Devin. Um, but yeah, good evening to most of you. Uh, good morning to Sam from Taiwan. I was just in Taiwan about a month and a half ago. Uh, Emanuel Shaunie Kansas. Oh, man. I I recognize that. Nice. Used to live in uh Kansas as well. Okay, so uh guys, let’s count these up. By the way, admins, admins, make sure you count those up. That’s uh each of those.
Okay. Phone, laptop. I’m seeing a lot of phone, a lot of laptop. Um, very cool. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. Awesome. I I didn’t I don’t think I saw any TVs. I saw a few tablets. Anybody watching on TV or is Zoom not on TV yet? If Zoom’s not on TV, I think that’s a big mistake. Yeah, I feel like Zoom should get on TV.
Okay, next question, guys. Why are you here tonight? What brought you here? What is your goal uh of being here tonight? Go ahead and comment in the chat. Sherry from West Africa. Yeah, you can cast a TV, but it’s not I don’t I feel like it’s not really like native. It’s not easy to be on the TV, you know?
Yeah, TV is really having to catch up. YouTube is kind of taking over. It’s just they have so much so much more control with YouTube. Uh Bernard wants to learn. They should definitely be on TV. Agreed. Alan Natasha launch my own thing. Thomas make money. Laura to learn more and get motivated to start. Yavon curiosity. John rock YouTube. Iris money. Uh so it looks like we had Oh, just kidding. Um,
okay. So, most most of most of you were on your computer. A few of you are on your phone. I’m pretty sure it’s not PC. Excuse me. I’m sure there’s a few Mac users out there. Um, but I I get I get what you’re saying there. Um, George, uh, let’s see. Iris money. George, find out more. Miles, start a YouTube channel. Wanita, focus and momentum. Daryl, learn how to make money. Andrew, find something to make content about. Joanna, not sure. Sam, kill time. Robert on phone. LR, so true. Matt, start a YouTube channel. Sean, I’m trying to create a solo company on YouTube. Awesome. Oneperson company. You are in the right place. Um, okay. Learn more and move forward with YouTube channel content. And hi from Defiance, Ohio. Malachi, learn more. Patty Roach, uh, to start a business that can help others. Love it. Connie, learn more skills to use. John, your ads were compelling and I want to see what you have to say. Awesome. Cynthia, learn something new. Kurt, learning the correct way to use YouTube. Alan, Allan from North Texas. Leslie, need more income. Uh, Zara, need help growing my YouTube channel and making money from it. Awesome, guys. Good stuff. Okay. So, um uh next question is uh so the first question was why are you here tonight? Next question is what is stopping you from reaching that goal? So the the reason that you came here tonight that goal like what is stopping you right now from reaching that goal? Go ahead and answer in the chat what is stopping you from for instance from starting on YouTube or maybe you have already maybe you’re already started on YouTube. What is stopping you from continuing, etc. What is stopping you,
Phil? I’m considering a political channel. Yep, there’s a lot of lot of those out there. Basically, it’s a news channel. If you do a political channel, most likely it’s just a news channel. Deborah, learn uh learn to make a living in retirement. Awesome. Sean, nothing. Kevin, need more income. Michelle, how to Matt knowledge. Jody, focus. Kimberly, knowledge. Greg, me, Bent, or Brent, sorry. Uh, need guidance. Phil, niche. Charles, money. Malachi, solid plan. Kurt, confusion. Sean, currently have a new YouTube channel, but want to learn how to get more successful with YouTube. Crystal, I’m intimidated. Christina, confidence. Uh, John, I need to start a channel, don’t have a niche. Andrew, I don’t know where to start. Uh, Dustin, getting my first video out is killing me. Kevin, lack of knowledge. John, I don’t have a clear message. Thaddius, the right tech. Okay. So, a lot of people are saying, you know, lack of knowledge, fear of failure, I see shiny object syndrome, um, all these different types of things. And we’re we’re going to help with all of these. Okay. So, let’s go ahead. Let’s get started. Um, numbers are looking a little uh hopefully you guys are taking action on that. Um, okay. Let’s go ahead and get started. So guys, can you when I say something, can you respond so I know that you heard me? Okay, thank you. All right. Uh,
how to grow and make money on YouTube in 2026 without fancy gear, without techy stuff, and without spending hours on each video, provided you use this hybrid model and follow one simple rule. So, why you’re here today, guys, go ahead and do the thumbs up thing if you’re excited about one of these things. By the way, guys, um just to be very clear, I get this question every single time. Shane, is this for beginners? Shane, is this for people who are already on YouTube? It’s for everyone. Okay, I work with people who are exceptionally advanced on YouTube, people who are making tens of millions of dollars a year on YouTube. And this these same principles still apply and still work for them as what I’m teaching to people who are complete beginners. In fact, uh so yes, this is for complete beginners who have never made a video in their life. Uh but it’s also for people who are very advanced because even the advanced people are messing up on the fundamentals, right? So, I I know lots of people who have big YouTube channels and they’re not making money with the channels or they’re not making the money they should be making because they’re messing up the fundamentals. So, I’m going to be teaching you the hybrid personal brand method and I’m going to be teaching you the fundamentals, the most important things when it comes to actually properly growing a YouTube channel and monetizing that YouTube channel. Right? So, this is for you if you’re a total beginner at YouTube. You’ve tried YouTube already and you failed. You’re getting views on YouTube uh but you’re struggling with monetization. you’re doing well on YouTube already and you want to do even better or you’re absolutely crushing it, you want to crush it more or if you’re trying to do a side hustle or a oneperson business and you want to use YouTube as the traffic source to get clients for that business or you already have an existing business, right? So, this works for all of those different cases, right? If you are helping people solve problems, if you are making educational content that helps them solve their problems, this is the channel that’s going to work for you. Okay, so I get this question every single time. So, I just wanted to clear that up right at the beginning. So, let’s talk about why you’re here today, guys. Go ahead and do the thumbs up thing if you’re excited about one of these things. It should be on the bottom right of the screen. The first one is going to be views. Okay, let’s see how many people are excited about getting views.
Okay, see a good amount of people excited about getting views. Awesome. Awesome. Okay, but how about this second one, guys? How about the second one? Actually making money. Let’s see how many more people are excited about making money.
Oh, there we go. Okay, I see I see more excitement now. Awesome. Okay, so a lot of you guys are probably already, you know, watched my content. There’s countless amounts of YouTubers that get a lot of views, but they’re not making a lot of money. And like on other social media platforms, it’s even worse. You might see someone, they’re getting millions of views. You’re like, “Oh man, this person must be crushing it. they’re not making money because they’re not making the right type of content and getting the right type of views, right? But we’re gonna we’re that’s not going to be a problem after tonight. You’re going to learn that. Okay. Uh but how about this third one, guys? Having an impact. Okay. Basically, creating a business that you can be proud of that helps a lot of people. How about that one?
All right, that one is up there with money up there at that same level. Loved it. Love it. Love it. So, you guys are definitely the types of people that I like to work with. So, that’s awesome. I think money won out this time, right? But impact was probably number two and views were number three. But that’s totally fine. Um, you guys have your priorities straight. You want to make money. Love to hear it. All right. So, before we start, let me be straight with you. I’ve got two jobs today. Job one is to teach you the best YouTube lesson that you’ve ever gotten free right here with no catch. I am going to be teaching you the fundamentals of how YouTube works. The most important thing. So, if I don’t mention it tonight, it’s probably because it’s not important, right? Job two, at the end, I’m going to offer you a way to work with us directly, our coaching program where my team and I hand you hold you to grow and make money on YouTube just like the 1,000 plus clients that we have winning inside right now. Okay? So, this is going to be an opportunity to apply to our YouTube coaching program. And I’ll be honest, it is not cheap. It is expensive. So, here’s the deal. If I don’t give you the best lesson today, don’t book a call. Don’t give me a dollar. But if I do, if I actually change how you see this, then you owe it to yourself to take a look. And if the paid thing isn’t for you, stay anyways. Learn everything. It is yours for free. If that sounds fair, drop deal in the chat. Okay. Drop deal in the chat if that sounds fair.
Okay. See a lot of people dropping deal in the chat. Epic. Epic. Good stuff. All right. Now, by the way, we also giving away free stuff at this workshop. At the very end, you will get a chance to walk away with the Niche Validator Pro, both the Chat GPT or the Claude AI version, whichever one you like to use. And this is the newest version yet. And it is a massive upgrade over anything that we put out before. You’ll also get $61,494 worth of bonuses, but only for those who stay until the end offer. So, type staying if you’re staying until the end for the niche validator pro. This is by far our most popular tool ever. We have literally gotten thousands of comments about from uh about the Niche validator pro from people saying that they absolutely love it. Um, awesome. We’ve helped literally thousands of people choose the ideal niche for them with the the niche validator pro. So, okay, awesome. Now, before we start, I’m going to ask you to type things in the chat the whole way. And here’s why. This is the forgetting curve. It has been studied for 140 years at this point. If you just sit and listen, roughly half of what I say is gone within the hour. Twothirds are going to be gone by tomorrow. Now, the same guy who discovered the forgetting curve uh also discovered the fix for it, right? Which is active recall. Every time you pull something back out of your head, the line resets. So, you can retain information as we go. So, every time I say type it, that’s not me being cute. That is repetition. You are resetting the curve. And if you do that 20 times tonight, you walk out with knowledge in your head instead of that knowledge being gone by breakfast. So type locked in if you’re with me, right? This is going to help you actually engage, pay attention so that you can remember everything that I teach you tonight because that’s that’s ultimately my goal. I want to I want to to help you guys with the most important things and I want you to actually remember everything tonight. So type locked in in the chat if you’re with me. Locked and loaded, says Carl. All right. Awesome. Now, look at this. YouTube just uh debuted a slate of creator shows and new shopping tools. So, read the words right on the screen. Creators build trust for brands. That is straight from YouTube, not me. And think about your own buying decisions for a second. Have you ever bought something from a brand that you didn’t trust or from some random ad that you didn’t believe? Right? No. You buy from people that you trust. That’s the whole game. Brands don’t want billboards anymore. They want creators because people trust creators and that’s what matters for you. You don’t need millions of followers to have trust. A small channel where people actually trust you is worth more to a brand than a giant channel full of strangers. So the money isn’t in being the biggest, it’s in being the most trusted to the right group of people. And the way that you get trusted is you help people solve their problems. You give them value. That is how you give value is you help people solve their problems and that alleviates pain for them. And that is that is how you get trusted, right? So that’s exactly what I’m going to show you today. Now, one thing I always like to say is this is a maze. You start here at the top and your goal is to finish at the bottom. Uh whatever that goal is and you want to get to the finish as fast as you can, right? So most creators start with good intentions and then they fall into the maze. Okay? They end up burnt out, overthinking, stuck in analysis paralysis with zero views or close to zero views and zero income. And then they just give up. But actually, most people do not start in the first place, right? So, if you’re here watching this now, you are ahead of the majority of people. So, type burnt out if you felt this or not yet if you haven’t started yet. Type burnt out in the chat if you felt this or not yet if you haven’t started yet.
All right, we got a good uh mix here. Um, definitely good mix, but I’d say there’s a little bit of more of not yet. Okay. Now, additionally, one thing I like to say about this maze part is anything you’ve heard about YouTube outside of what I teach, chances are it’s probably you entering this maze. Because most people go into the maze, they get lost, they put their hands up, and they’re like, “Mazekeeper, come and get me.” And getting lost in the maze is focusing on all the stuff that does not matter. Like all the YouTube coaches that have entire channels about reviewing YouTube gear when that makes like 1% of a difference in the success of your channel. And that’s the maze, right? that’s the reason why you don’t get results because you’re focusing on all these things that do not matter when in reality you could just focus on the few things that actually matter and actually get you results. But let’s just say hypothetically you go into the maze and you just navigate it perfectly. Zero mistakes. This is what it would look like right here. Zero mistakes. I’m kind of outlining it right there. Okay, you navigate it perfectly with zero mistakes. Here is the fastest way that you could get from start to finish. Just like this. Okay, very unlikely that you’re going to make zero mistakes, but this is that’s how it would be. But actually, it’s not the fastest because there is another way. You can just not go into the maze in the first place and you can just go around the maze. Okay. Uh, pretty clever, right? But even this isn’t the fastest route because we learned from a young age that the fastest way to go from point A to point B is a straight line. And what if I showed you a way to do just that? Skip the maze completely and you literally just go from start to finish straight to the result. So, type straight line in the chat if you want the straight line. Now, while you’re typing that, I want to say something right now. Uh, I need you to forget everything that you think you’ve learned about YouTube. Okay? Forget all of it because there’s a lot of things that people latch on to, they learn it from somebody randomly on the internet and it’s incorrect. Okay? So, a lot of the things that you think that you know about YouTube, I’m I’m going to need you to forget some of them today because I need to teach you the right way, the the right foundations, the right fundamentals from the beginning because if you get the foundations right, everything else just goes so much more smoothly. Okay. Okay, awesome. A lot of people type in straight line. Good stuff. Awesome. Now, one thing I want to say about this part right here, a lot of other YouTuber advice out there, I don’t think they’re purposely giving you bad advice. A lot of them, you know, they’ll give good advice, but they give good advice for a gaming channel or a prank channel, etc., because there are a bunch of different types of YouTube channels, but I’m going to be talking about the type of YouTube channel that is the easiest to get results with. And it’s the type of YouTube channel that you can pivot to anything else later on down the line. And that’s why when it comes to winning on YouTube, I have the straight line for you today so you can get there the easiest, quickest, safest, and most comfortable way possible. And specifically, you’re going to gain access to the hottest opportunity to exist in the content creation business. Now, these are the newest stats that just came out. Before they said that YouTube and the content creator ecosystem in general was going to be worth about $1 trillion by 2034. And now they’re saying that it’s going to be worth $1.6 trillion by 2034. Right? So it said right here 1 trillion. Uh 6 months later they updated it said 1.6 trillion. Okay. So it has grown that much in just a six-month period. Okay. So the projections are just going up and up so much faster. And by 2035 it’s going to be worth 2 trillion. Right? So this is growing at an unprecedented rate even faster than the experts thought that it would grow. Right? And look at this going up while so many other things are going down. Right? It’s harder than ever to get a job. There’s so many industries that are being disrupt uh being disrupted. Meanwhile, content creation is just going up and up and that is a sign. And in general, alternative employment in general, just making money outside of the traditional job is going up and up, right? There’s more and more people that are starting, you know, semi their own businesses. Like it might be like on another platform for instance, but it’s their own business or they’re just literally just starting their own businesses. And like alternative employment is just going up and up. That is another trend as well. And that is a sign, right, that this is one of the biggest opportunities that I want you to get access to when it comes to content creation. And I want you to do this while bypassing all the traps, the gotchas, the limitations, and the barriers to entry that otherwise would lock you out, forcing to stand on the sideline as you watch generational wealth pass you by, helpless to do anything about it. And you will definitely want to take advantage of what’s happening right now in the creator economy because you are in the perfect place and time to start. And mind you, YouTube pays out billions every year, but it’s not going to lifestyle bloggers and entertainment channels anymore. So, type money in the chat if you want a piece of that $2 trillion pie. Type money in the chat.
All right. Awesome. Awesome. Good stuff. Got a great crowd here today. Okay. So, today you’ll be handed the key to unlock the prison cell that is keeping you trapped and away from the YouTube growth that you’ve been wanting for a very long time. And seriously, we’ve helped online businesses, of course, but also coaches, freelancers, job seekers, stay-at-home parents, nineto-fs, grandpas, grandmas, agency owners, service providers, digital product sellers, failed YouTubers, uh, YouTubers getting views but struggling with monetization, YouTubers with dead channels, YouTubers that, uh, want to pivot niches because they’re sick of their old niche, um, successful YouTubers who are crushing it, but they want to crush it even harder, people that own software companies or SAS, location specific businesses like dental cosmetic clinics, law firms, firms, financial adviserss, etc. Uh people doing paid ads that want to stop doing paid ads, people doing paid ads that want to make their paid marketing two times more effective by having a YouTube presence. Uh realtors, uh even physical brick-andmortar business owners, even people with disabilities do this, right? So, this works for almost any niche, and almost any situation because we designed this type of YouTube channel to be flexible so that you can go in so many different directions. And the good news is you don’t need to be a YouTuber or an influencer to win on YouTube. But to get there, I’m going to be exposing the dark side of YouTube and creators who are now slaves to the platform. Here’s an example. Boogie2988. Now, I am not trying to make fun of him at all. I actually respect him a lot for revealing his public income, but he’s got about 4 million subs, and he revealed on a podcast tour that he did last year that he’s only making about $44,000 a year, which is less than the average income for an American. So, he is one of the hundreds of thousands of creators who are promised success through views, but views do not automatically equal money. Okay? Meanwhile, I work with people who get 500 views per video and they’re making $10 million a year on YouTube. But there are also people who get a lot of views and don’t make a lot of money because they’re doing things wrong. So, type got it in the chat if you get that views do not automatically equal money. Type got it in the chat.
This is absolutely essential for you guys to understand. Like there’s so many people out there just automatically assume, oh, this channel has a lot of views. they must be making a lot of money. And that is simply not the case. And the inverse is correct as well. There’s a lot of people that see channels that are not getting a lot of views and they just automatically think, why is this person wasting their time? Right? They’re they’re not making any money clearly. And that’s also not correct. Okay? So, you are going to see things with new eyes uh after today’s presentation because I’m going to show you a bunch of examples of people not getting that many views that are making a lot of money, right? And seriously, I know there’s a lot of people in this crowd that are frustrated, burnt out, and stuck because you were promised a gold mine, and yet you found nothing. You’ve been uploading videos. You’re frustrated because you can’t even get started uploading videos because you’ve been told that you need to buy this camera first or that gear first. You need to be really good at editing or any of those types of things. But basically, you found nothing but regret. So, let’s talk about who this is for. This is for you if you’re a total beginner who wants to finally start and not burn out. And by the way, go ahead and drop your profession in the chat. I’m curious what all of you do for a living because an example of a total beginner is my brother Zach. And his profession was, you know, he’s in the been in the trades for 30 years. Mostly HVAC. He also did some welding stuff, too, but mostly HVAC, which is heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. And he uh he has his own business in the trades. Okay. We’ve got uh hospice nurse, chef, sales. We got a lot of lot of nurses in the program. A lot of people in sales, software trainer, we have a lot of people in um software uh joined the program. Medical doctor, we have tons and tons of doctors recently joined the program as well. Retired, awesome. Awesome. SAS, retired admin, instructional designer. Uh why do views not equal money? We’ll be getting into that later. Jennifer, uh Jay, accountant. David, tech analyst. Pat, health and wellness. Michelle, jobless. Uh, Diodon, uh, nurse, Eric, lawyer. Miles, retired. Roger, wildlife photographer. Lacy, nurse, LR, healthcare IT consultant. Uh, awesome. Okay. Lot finance. Looks like we got some of those. We have another instructional designer. Awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. Okay. Property management. Yep. Lots of people in real estate, too. Even uh even uh commercial real estate. We have people doing commercial, which like you would think that commercial real estate wouldn’t work on YouTube, but we have someone very successful in commercial. Okay, awesome. So, this is my brother. Um, and I’m so confident in this system that I literally used it on my brother who’s in his 50s, who isn’t techsavvy, who’s never made a video in his life. And first of all, for context, I use this system to start a new channel every single year. And the reason I do that is because I want to make sure that I’m updated on what the algorithm is like for a new channel. But last year, I decided I’m just going to make a channel for my brother instead because he basically came to me and he said, “Shane, I’m 50 years old. My body’s starting to wear out. I need to figure out how to make money without wearing out my body.” Now, he’s in the trades, right? And he thought I was going to recommend a remote job or some type of certification or some cushy office job or maybe a government job, like an easy government job, right? And I was like, “No, you should just start a YouTube channel.” And he was really surprised. He’s like, “Oh, well, I’m not sexy. I’m not good on camera. I’ve never made a video in my life. if I’m in my 50s, no one wants to listen to a 50-year-old. All these excuses started popping up in his head for why he couldn’t do it. And I just told him, just trust me, bro. Just do it. Just do what I tell you. Use our system. It is going to work for you. And the very first video that he posted blew up, got over 800,000 views, and less than one month later, 29 days later to be exact. You can see it right here, May 26th to uh June 25th. Uh he made $214 in a single day. That’s a $78,000 year run rate. So yeah, it works for beginners even with no tech experience. And by the way, update on Zach. He had an $18,000 month to finish off his first year on YouTube. Plus, he’s getting a lot of money from affiliate marketing. So, he’s not just making money from AdSense, right? And that’s one thing we’re going to talk about. AdSense is not the only monetization method on YouTube. There are lots of other ways where you can make more money. Sometimes you can make a hundred times more than what you make uh from AdSense on your channel, right? So, but he is without a doubt making a full-time income from this channel. And he’s even thinking uh he’s even trying to sell his HVAC business and just go all in on YouTube now cuz it’s honestly a lot nicer, right? This is also for you if you’re a faceless creator or you want to use YouTube automation. So, there’s a very specific type of faceless channel that we recommend if you do want to go faceless and I actually started off faceless myself. So, type face. Yeah, by the way, type face or faceless in the chat, whichever one you prefer. I want to see how many of you are in each bucket. So we do recommend making content where you show your face because there is uh basically just a lot of advantages to that. Um but there is a way of starting off faceless at least and then you have the option to show your face later on. Uh and people sometimes we uh show people how to do that. Okay. Face or faceless mostly face I see here but there’s some people who would like to do faceless. Okay. So here’s an example of a faceless channel. Now again guys there literally like there’s so many advantages to just showing your face on YouTube. I mean, it’s really kind of a no-brainer to show your face. Uh because again, like just think about your buying behavior, right? Have you ever made a purchasing decision from a faceless channel? Probably not. It could be somebody from India or something. You know what I mean? Like it’s like like you just don’t know who’s on the other side. It could be anybody, right? There’s no trust there. Okay. So, have you ever made a purchasing decision from a person who shows their face? Probably many, many, many times. Hundreds of times, most likely from YouTube. So obviously other people are going to have the same exact buying behaviors as you, right? So it’s much much harder to sell things if you have a faceless channel, right? But here’s an example how to do it the correct way if you do want to do a faceless channel. So the first thing is you use your real voice. You do not use an AI voice. You’re not making AI slop. Okay? I’m I know that there’s lots of creators out there that want to teach everybody how to make AI slop content and they get half of the people who join their communities banned. Uh we have had zero people banned and zero people demonetized in our community, right? because we don’t teach people how to make AI slop, right? YouTube is very clear that they do not want people making AI slop on their platform. And if you do it, it’s just a matter of time before you get banned, right? So, we do not teach that, right? So, you want to use your real voice. You also want to have a cartoon character that represents you. So, this is an example of of one of our clients, Whiz of Ecom, what he did when he first started. So, he had this cartoon character that represented him and he used his real voice and there was an an air of mysteriousness. So, they knew that he was a real human being, but he was anonymous and they really wanted to figure out who he was. And he kind of said like, “Hey, I’m going to do a face reveal when I get to a certain level.” And then he did. He did a face reveal later on. This was the actually the exact video right here where he did a face reveal. But he actually made got this channel to seven figures before he ever, you know, and and his an anonymous personal brand. He got it to seven figures before he ever revealed his face, which is epic, right? So, this is, you know, he this is him revealing his his handsome face right here. And now he just has a personal brand where he actually like shows his face. But the whole point is he grew his channel faceless before he made the decision later on uh to grow a personal brand, right? So because yeah, why India? Cuz there’s 1.5 billion people in India and you don’t want to compete with them because it costs them like $300 a month to live. Okay. And live a good life. They can live a good life on $300 a month. So you do not want to be competing with the 1.5 billion people in India uh who can live a good life on you know $300 a month. So when you’re making all this AI content like oh guys you just push a button make the AI content like yeah okay you’re making AI content and you’re literally what’s stopping somebody from India from making that exact same content 1.5 billion people like you just you just decided to have 1.5 more billion people competing with you right it’s absolutely nonsense it’s complete nonsense to think that that’s going to work what you should do is use your advantage which is if you are like from a first world English-sp speakaking country the other people from first world English speaking countries are going to relate to you a little bit more and so you should show your face use your your voice with with your accent etc and that’s the smart way to do it and that’s the thing that we’ve seen time and time and time again work really well right so yeah you can do the faceless channel but this is the only way to do it we do not help people do it any other way than this if you want to use some AI voice kind of thing go to somebody else right there’s plenty of other people that teach teach that nonsense and teach people how to spam YouTube Right. This is also for you if you’re a business owner, freelancer, or coach who wants inbound clients without paid ads. So, type clients if that’s you. If you want inbound clients without paid ads, go ahead and type clients in the chat.
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. So, this works especially well. This works especially well if you’re trying to get clients. Okay. So, um here’s an example of that. you know, Davis uh basically had a uh his sales went up by 400% and after working with us, he was making over 100K per month from just this one company. So, he has a company. It’s a management consultant company. Um it’s basically helping people become management consultants, right? But he also has a portfolio of companies. So, that’s not his only one. And he was spending just about 20 hours a week on just one of his companies, right? So, just one YouTube channel and one company. And that is obviously not sustainable. But eventually he outsourced everything on his channel to the point where he’s not even recording the videos anymore and he has other people recording the videos and now he spends zero hours a week. Even though he has multiple channels and for multiple different companies, he is spending zero hours a week, right? Um on his channels, right? So that is an option if you’re a business owner or you’re at a company where you don’t necessarily want the business owner or the CEO, etc. to be the face of the the company. um you just want to hire somebody else to be the face of the company and they can just record all your content for you. That’s definitely something that we help people set up as well. That’s exactly what uh Davis did and that’s exactly what a lot of people that are in that position where they have like bigger companies do too. So uh if you’re a super busy business owner, you’re super busy, you got a portfolio, you can actually have other people record the videos for you and get your time to make YouTube down to zero uh hours a month. And if you you can basically just have a system that takes care of everything. And we help people with that as well. This is also for you if you want to network so you can land high-paying jobs, find career opportunities, or become an authority in your niche by standing out with your YouTube channel. So, type authority in the chat if that’s you. If you want better opportunities to be an authority in your niche or network, right? Because as they say, um your your network is your net worth. It’s a little bit of a you know, it’s it’s a platitude, but there is a lot of truth to it, right? So, let me just give an example of this. I really like this example. Um Josh basically started making really useful videos for his channel uh on his channel for people in the IT and cyber security industry. And he talked about how to get better jobs, which certifications are good to take, what skills to learn that are valuable in the job market, etc., etc. And he was able to go from making less than $1,000 a month with his channel to actually getting offers from Fortune50 companies, including companies that are a part of Fang, which is Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. And these are some of the biggest and most prestigious companies in the world where it is literally harder to get into a fame company than it is to get into Harvard or Yale. Now, usually you have to apply to these jobs, but the companies were literally reaching out to him. So, he got an offer from several different Fortune50 and fang companies and he ended up going with one of them for his dream job where he got to travel the world. Um, he ended up living in Japan which was his dream country and he was working a remote job making multiple six figures a year, right? But then the YouTube channel just kept going. 5,000 a month, then 10,000 a month, then 30,000 a month, and eventually he scaled it all the way up to86,000 a month using my strategies. And of course, he quit his dream job because it just didn’t make sense for him at that point, right? And I like this example because it goes over every single stage. Just getting started as a beginner, using it to become an authority in his niche for networking to get his dream job, starting a side hustle, making a little bit of money on the side, starting a full-time business, making 10 to 30k per month, and then scaling his business. And you know, you like the tangible benefits of YouTube are very obvious. Uh, and you can make a ton of money just directly from YouTube. You can sell stuff from YouTube, etc. But the intangible benefits are arguably even more valuable than the tangible benefits because I’ve gotten to meet people that I never would have gotten to meet because of my YouTube channel. A lot of the people that I’ve hired that are absolute rock stars on my team, I never would have been able to hire those people if it wasn’t for my YouTube channel. I’ve gotten e like literally an equity deal in a company that will likely get sold for a hundred million or even a billion dollars and I’m on their board of adviserss because of my YouTube channel. So technically it’s not a tangible benefit like I haven’t made money directly from those things. But the intangible benefits are even more valuable than the tangible ones when you have a YouTube channel. It’s an absolute cheat code, right? Whenever I have a problem in my business, I have an entire network of people that I can reach out to that can solve the problem for me or for clients that I have immediately if I don’t know the answer, right? And it’s because of my YouTube channel. But you might be thinking, Shane, if it’s that easy, then why do most people fail? Because most people do fail at YouTube. Well, it’s because they believe in these myths. One, you need to be an influencer. Two, you have to show your face and have a fancy camera. Three, it takes 40 hours to create one video. Number four, you have to endure the process because it takes a long time to succeed on YouTube. These are some of the biggest myths that people believe in that caused them to fail. Now, the last one specifically, the reason that most people think it takes a long time to succeed on YouTube is because they think they need a big channel that has lots of subscribers and lots of views to make money. If you choose the right niche, you do not need a big channel. And guys, go ahead and type the number of the myth that you believed in the chat. 1 2 3 or four. Type the number of the myth that you believed in the chat.
Scrolling down here because these are these are the most common ones that I’ I’ve seen. I’m seeing a lot of fours here. Um, yeah, a lot of fours. Some alls. Looks like three is pretty common. So, you have to endure the process because it takes a long time to succeed on YouTube. Three. It takes 40 hours to create one video. I’ve seen a lot of threes and it seems like a lot of ones, too. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Cool. So, just as an example, when I started my second channel, Shane Hummus, the content growth engine, we actually made over 30,000 in the first month starting that channel. And a lot of that money was made before we even got to a,000 subscribers as well. And these are the myths that people believe in that stopped them from having success on YouTube. But in reality, one of the biggest reasons that you failed is because before today, you lacked the leverage to invade this soon tobe trillion dollar opportunity. And I’m going to help you mine this opportunity so that we can grow rich together fast. First though, who am I? My name is Shane. I’m an ex-farmarmacist. I have a 1.7 million subscriber YouTube channel. You can see it down here. And I’ve helped uh Oh, you can’t see it down here. Okay. So, someone forgot to to add that to the slide. Cool. So, uh yeah, I’m sure you guys can look up my my YouTube channel here. Oh, there we go. Next slide. Okay, there we go. 1.7 million. Uh you can see it right there. And I’ve helped over 20 businesses uh get to 100K per month on YouTube from scratch. When I say from scratch, I truly mean from scratch, right? So, I’ve helped create, you know, over 20 people get them to become millionaires from scratch, right? So, I’ve also helped countless businesses that were already successful or YouTube channels that already had some success. Uh I’ve I’ve helped countless people in that situation or people who are kind of beginners. I help them make it to like a side hustle income or just get started uh as well. Um and make lots of money from that too, right? So, part-time income, side hustles, second incomes, oneperson businesses, helped lots of people in that situation. Um, things that build to full businesses later on, but they make money right now, too, right? Um, and I’ve helped countless people in that situation as well. And I’m also industry recognized as an expert on growing and making money from YouTube for businesses specifically. So, basically treating YouTube like a business and making content where you’re solving people’s problems, like educational content. So, I don’t help people make entertainment content. It is only educational content where you are solving people’s problems. You’re helping them solve their problems. So, here’s a company that I work with, just as an example, Course Careers. They look uh they like working with me so much. They’re the one that I talked about before that I actually got equity in the company because I gave that much value to the company. And we were able to help them over 30x the amount of money that they made. With that being said, this is a startup and I usually like to work with individuals. And one of the reasons I like to work with individuals is because you guys remind me of myself. So, let me go ahead and get into my story here. This is me working as a pharmacist for 15 hour shifts. And before this, I came from a very poor background. I lived in section 8 housing, lived in trailer parks. I was even homeless at one point. And I did not want to be homeless anymore. I did not want to be poor anymore. So I did what society told me to do. This is the Salvation Army that I lived at for about 6 months in Lawrence, Kansas. This is the exact Salvation Army right here. Right? So I didn’t want to be poor anymore. So I did what society told me to do. I went to college. I became a pharmacist. Uh I got a doctorate. So, I got the highest level of college and uh I became middle class, right? I I got a good job as a pharmacist and I had to also take out a lot of money in student loan debt. I went over $300,000 in student loan debt to make this happen. And the thing is, when I was poor, I had a lot of time, but I didn’t have any money. So, I couldn’t really do anything besides play video games, watch movies, or whatever. But when I became middle class and I did everything right and I got the six-figure job, I didn’t have both time and money because I was spending all of my time working and all of my money paying down my student loan debt. So, it’s kind of an out of the frying pan and into the fryer type moment. And it was really a terrible situation because I started as a pharmacist right before the pandemic hit. And just to emphasize how bad this was, we got robbed three times in a six-month period. Right here’s here’s one of the videos of us getting robbed. Um, so on top of being burnt out and everything else, stressed out, burnt out, overworked, I was also in fear of my physical safety, right, on a day-to-day basis and and the safety of my staff, right? So overall, I can’t describe how stressed out, how depressed, how anxious I was in this situation. And like many people out there, I started wondering, wait a minute, is the stuff that society told me to do actually a good idea? Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I got tricked, right? And because of that, I tried just about every side hustle out there to make money. Every alternative way that you can think of, right? Shopify, Amazon FBA, SMMA, coaching, consulting courses, digital products, real estate, white labeling, SEO, flipping websites, flipping physical products. You name it, I probably tried it. Uh here’s one of them that I tried just as an example, a little bit embarrassing. This is the booty kit. Okay, so this is the uh you know, this is one of them that I tried, the the booty kit. I tried selling this on Shopify and Amazon FBA. It’s kind of like an at home workout thing where you can work out your booty. And um yeah, tried selling that. Uh but I pretty much failed at almost all these. I might have gotten a little bit of success here and there, a little bit of sales here and there. Uh but I couldn’t make any of them sustainable. And a lot of it had to do with me having ADHD and always just trying a bunch of different things. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD twice. You know, I do have, you know, shiny object syndrome. Uh trying a bunch of different things, right? But as you can see, my bank account was very close to $0. But YouTube is different than all these other side hustles. See, all the side hustles that they tried that I tried, they actually work. But they only work if you have traffic, aka views. If you don’t have views, it’s kind of like trying to sell something without having a store. It’s almost impossible to sell, right? It’s like trying to sell something without somebody knowing that you exist, right? If nobody knows you exist, how can you sell them something, right? And so I realized one that I really enjoyed YouTube, but two, I realized that I could make any of the other business models work if I just focused on YouTube and getting views. Another way of saying this is that you need distribution. This is a term that they use in business, right? When you have a YouTube channel that’s helping people solve their problems, that’s like having distribution, right? That’s like owning the store that people go to in order to buy groceries, right? If you own the store, it doesn’t matter whether the groceries get popular or not popular. You own the store. So you own the shelves. You own the distribution, right? So this is what happens when you have YouTube, right? Like you own the distribution because people know that you exist. So type distribution in the chat if that makes sense. None of these work without distribution. And all of them work if you do have distribution. Like every single one of these side hustles work if or or one person businesses or second incomes. They all work if you have distribution. Right. Awesome. Awesome. Now, there’s certain, you know, uh, side hustles and ways of monetizing that we do recommend, which we’ll get into a little bit later, but all of them work if you have distribution. Because of that, um, I gave YouTube another shot. And after I tried it again, at that time, I was basically in a household of seven guys trying to save money. One of those guys, he moved here from Lebanon, and he was an immigrant, and his name was Sam. And he, you know, when he first moved here, he could barely even speak English. And, uh, he couldn’t legally get a job. So, he actually had to start a business. Um, I think he even started it before he moved here. And, uh, he started this wedding photography business and he started talking about it on YouTube with this small YouTube channel with less than 10,000 subscribers. And he was making 10 to $20,000 a month from this, right? And uh, yeah, he was doing wedding photography in Las Vegas and on the West Coast. And before this, I’d spent time in LA. I’d met influencers who had a lot of followers, who had a lot of subscribers, and they were getting millions of views, but they weren’t making any money. And so I was like, Sam, how are you making money from YouTube even though you have a small channel? And he showed me what a proper monetization method looks like. He showed me how I can monetize a channel without having that many views. And he initially taught me how to make money from a small channel. But I took it to the next level to the point where there are some channels that we work with that only have like a few thousand subscribers and they’re making seven figures a year. Because there are some niches where you’re talking to an affluent audience and you get a couple hundred views and make $10,000 from a video. Now, you might be thinking, Shane, you are exaggerating. There is no way that you can get a couple hundred views and make $10,000 from a video. And you’re right. I am exaggerating in the opposite direction. Here’s an example of someone who got a couple hundred views and made $100,000 from a video. Carla, right? So, she made a video that got a couple hundred views from a small channel about 1500 subscribers. You can see her videos here like 17 views, 156, 158, 130. Uh she’s got one one video here where she got 200 views, right? So most people who uh you know would watch this channel would think like she’s wasting her time. But one of these videos that got a couple hundred views landed her $16,200 a year ongoing contract. So it’s $106,000 right right up front for the first year. If it continues working out, they’ll renew for a second year. So it’ll end up being $212,000 and then the next year if they renewed again it would be $318,000. Right? So assuming that they’re just let’s just say they just do it for one year. She made $106,000 from just one video. Okay now uh if her niche is helping big businesses hire people from the Philippines as well as Latin America for very specific positions. Um so that could be a renewable contract. Who knows, right? It could end up being $200,000 from one video that got her 100 to 200 views, right? So, yes, I am exaggerating in the opposite direction, right? Because there’s people that are doing even better than what I say in these slides, but there’s lots of people that I’ve worked with that, you know, have small channels, they get a couple hundred views, and they can make like $10,000 from a single video. So, this is where I found the secret formula of YouTube success where everyone else was not talking about it. Um, and so basically, I started posting videos and just to put this in perspective, I have gotten lots of views, 6 million, 1.2 2 million, 1.7 million, 4.3 million views. I know how to play the views game with the best of them in the educational content uh game, right? But this video right here, just as an example, um the most useless degrees, this video I posted about 6 years ago, made about $31,000. Okay? Um and it took 6 years to make that amount of money. This video right here, I posted this one 6 months ago, got 8,000 views, and it made about $48,000. Okay? So, I made more money from this view, this video that, you know, made $48,000 in 6 months than this video that got 4.3 million views. Uh, and it took 6 years to get that amount of money, right? I made more more money from this video, right? And one thing about this is by the time this video gets to the six-year mark, chances are we’re probably going to have made like significantly more money from it. Like it might be double or even triple the amount of money that it’s made right now, you know, cuz it has another 5 and 1/2 years. and it’s just going to sit there like digital real estate getting more views, uh, getting more, you know, leads, making more money, getting more clients, etc., etc., right? And so, this video just sits there and it’s going to make more money. Now, the important thing about this, this video right here is very difficult for me to recreate for anybody. I am very skilled at YouTube. I’m I’m exceptionally good at YouTube and I it’s I cannot recreate this video on demand, right? Nobody can. There’s nobody in the educational space that could just recreate a video like this and just get four million views on demand uh at the snap of a finger, right? Nobody is that skilled. There’s just too many variables that go into it. But a video like this, I can recreate this pretty much anytime I want and I do all the time, right? Like probably every week I have a video that does these kind of numbers, right? Uh without getting that many views, right? So this is this is kind of the point. This is a video that you can do over and over again and it doesn’t have to get that many views to make that much money. So, type more if you want to get less views but make more money, right? Cuz this is very important. It’s very important to have this down cuz you do not want to be reliant on the uh a lot of creators call this like the the the video hamster wheel. You do not want to be reliant on the creator hamster wheel of just needing to get millions of views after millions of views after millions of views to make money. And if your views ever go down, you stop making money. You do not want to be on the creator hamster wheel, right? That’s a very bad place to be. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. You guys, you guys understand. And just to show you guys proof, here’s how much I made about 3 plus years ago. So, this was uh three Septeers ago, I made about $283,000. At the time, I was running a business where I was just uh you know, I did have a YouTube channel and I was teaching people how to get remote jobs. Okay? So, uh, $283,000 just teaching people how to get remote jobs. And, and so I got my business to multiple seven figures a year before I ever taught a single person how to do YouTube. And then I actually didn’t even go up that much because before this time, I’d usually like doubled my business every single year before this. But I didn’t actually go up that much the next year. And this was when I was teaching people how to uh, you know, do YouTube. So, I actually probably made less money by doing that at first. But then the next year, same thing. you know, I double triple my business almost every year. I made $1 million in a single month, right? So, I’m not saying this to try to make people jealous. I’m just showing you the receipts so that you know that I know what I’m talking about because I’ve started multiple sevenfigure businesses with YouTube. So, there’s a lot of YouTube coaches out there that are just coaches, coaching coaches. They’ve never actually started a successful channel themselves. They’re basically cosplaying as successful YouTubers, telling you what you want to hear, right? teaching you how to be successful at YouTube when they’ve never done it themselves outside of just teaching YouTube, right? So, they only have a successful business where they teach YouTube and their only successful business was teaching YouTube. So, then that’s their only successful channel, right? But me, I actually started a successful YouTube channel before I started teaching anybody else how to do it. And I got that business to seven figures a year, the YouTube channel and the business. And the craziest thing is I did all of this while being able to travel the world and only having to work four hours a week. So, here’s a picture of me in Tokyo at the famous Shabuya uh crossing square. Here’s a picture of me in Singapore. Uh and here’s me in the uh San Juan Islands just off of Let’s see if I can say this correctly this time. Uh British Columbia, Vancouver, uh Canada. Okay, just Vancouver, BC, right? Whale watching, orca watching specifically. Now, I choose to work more than that sometimes because I genuinely enjoy YouTube and I enjoy helping people with YouTube. But the whole point is I only have to work 4 hours a week. Right? That’s the whole point. And there’s been many cases where I’ve gone weeks at a time, even a month at a time. There was even one time where I went 2 months at a single sitting without working at all. You know, when during one of those stretches, I had a, you know, pretty serious health issue. My my partner did and I couldn’t really work, right? So, I spent hours on my business that entire two-month period and the business actually grew. There were no in-person employees, no office, and uh it actually grew, right? So, I can do whatever I want and my business just keeps going up and up. So, type 4 hours in the chat if you want a business that only needs 4 hours a week to work, right? Type four hours in the chat.
Okay.
Okay. Awesome. All right. Now, one of the reasons that I know so much about YouTube, and this is a real problem with a lot of people who teach YouTube, is my first business on YouTube had absolutely nothing to do with YouTube, right? It was helping people land their dream remote jobs. And we helped literally thousands of people with thousands of verified testimonials grow their personal brands just to land their dream remote jobs, right? And that business got to multiple seven figures a year before I ever taught a single person how to do it. Now, most other coaches have never been in the trenches like that, which is why they’re not very good at getting results. But something that kept uh kept bothering me because I got the life that I dreamed of, but once in a while I would create a video just telling people what I was doing because I was seeing YouTube advice online. I’d watch it and I’d be like, “Hm, I don’t really think this works for most people, right? Maybe it would work for a gaming channel or a prank channel, but it wouldn’t work for most types of channels out there.” And so I decided once every 6 months, once every year, I would post a video about what I was doing on YouTube and what was working for me. And every time I do that, I would get comments, emails, DMs. Everybody would be reaching out to me being like, “Hey Shane, can you coach me? Hey Shane, can you help me grow my YouTube channel?” And I turned them all down because I was just too busy or I just didn’t really want to do coaching. You know, half the time I was in a different time zone, you know? Um or I thought, you know, maybe this works for my niche, but it doesn’t work for other people’s niche, right? But I felt bad about it and I shrugged it off for years until one day I decided, you know what? I’m going to do it, right? And the reason I decided that is because a friend of mine reached out to me and this is someone I thought was very successful on YouTube, right? And he was actually getting more views than me at the time. And he reached out and he said, “Hey man, I’m financially struggling. I’m not making any money and I saw your video and I saw that you were making a ton of money. What are you doing that’s so different than what I’m doing? Please help me.” Right? And so he asked me for help and so I decided to help him and I decided at the same time if I’m going to help him, I can also help a group of people because it wouldn’t really take me that much extra time. In fact, it would probably be uh more fun in a small group if anything, right? So, I decided to reach out to a bunch of those people and I decided to do a cohort where I worked with a bunch of them and it was a very diverse set of people. So, there was a professional truck driver for 28 years, a fresh graduate engineering student, a current engineering student, an Amazon FBA business owner, a coach, a freelancer, a failed YouTuber, a successful YouTuber who was crushing it but wanted to crush it harder, and a content creator for 11 years who wanted to shift over to YouTube. uh also a tech salesperson, a girl in cyber security, a coach, an agency owner, an online service provider, a fitness dude, a finance guy, um a physical uh business owner, a lady from Texas who works in the medical field, um etc., right? Just on and on. The point is they were all different. Some had YouTube experience, others had zero knowledge of how YouTube works. And then we applied the exact same format that I found to be working on my YouTube channel. So, same YouTube format, same proven way of making thumbnails, titles, and intros, same strategy for coming up with winning video ideas. And of course, a little bit of tweaking because every single niche is a little bit different. There are a lot of underlying principles, but they all do need a little bit of tweaking. And the craziest thing is every single one of them blew up. And the best part is they all got their version of rich by helping other people live better lives. And that’s the thing that made me feel so happy because I can only have so much impact with my channel, right? I can only talk about so many niches. Um, I can only represent so many things, right? But I got to help other people have impact with their channels. And so I was basically spreading my impact to so many other people and then they were able to impact hundreds of millions with their YouTube channels. And they all got their version of rich by helping other people live better lives. And the reason for that is because I taught them how to make a very specific type of content which is educational niche content. And the channels that are winning today are educational niche channels. In fact, educational channels make 10 to 20 times more money. Uh and there are more opportunities for every 1,000 views than any other type of content. So I talked about this already. In the first month after we launched my second channel, we’re able to make about $1,736 per 1,000 views. So it got about So it got about 24,000 views in the first month right off the bat and it made about $42,000. So our goal was to make $10,000 in that first month and the stretch goal was 30,000. We ended up making 42,000, right? So that’s about $1,736 per 1,000 views. And to put that in perspective, entertainment channels in general make about $1 to $3 per 1,000 views typically, right? So at $1 to $3 per 1,000 views, they might make about $24 to $73 if they were to get those same amount of views that we got with a Mr. Beast style channel. So 24,000 views, Mr. Beast style channel, $1 to $3 per 1,000 views, we would have made we would have made about 24 to $73. So about a,000 times less than what we made. Now uh with a normal education channel, um kind of like mass market education. So you can think like maybe Mark Robber or Veritasium, something like that. For that type of channel, uh, it makes about $20 per 1,000 views, right? So $20 per 1,000 views, $24,000 views. That type of channel would have made about $484. So right off the bat, that’s like 10 times better, right? 10 times better. So that that’s still a lot better. Um, but it’s still not really a full-time income. It’s maybe, you know, a side hustle at best, right? But with my niche authority channel, my making niche educational content where you’re solving big problems for people, uh, helping them solve their problems, then selling them solution to that problem, I was able to make about $1,736 per 1,000 views. And that was about $42,000 in the very first month that I launched that channel. Okay? So, that’s about a hundred times more than a typical education channel, if I’m doing the math here correctly. Almost 100 times more. and it’s about a thousand times more than a typical entertainment channel. Right? So, this is why it works so well because you can make a hundred to a thousand times more than a typical uh entertainment or typical education channel. Right? Now, one thing I will say about uh this niche educational channel is um uh you know it’s it’s properly monetized as well. So, you do need to properly monetize your content. Um but let’s just talk about this, right? So, this is a little bit more of a mass market channel. This is my main channel. And uh this channel makes about $400 per 1,000 views on average. And the reason it makes less than uh you know, my my second channel is because it’s a different demographic. It’s a different niche. And also, I kind of just talk about whatever I want on this channel. I started off niche, which is what we’re going to get into here in a moment. It’s very important you start off niche. But at some point, I was just like, you know what? I I have enough money to retire. I’m just going to talk about whatever I want to on the channel at this point. anything that I’m interesting. My current obsession is AI, of course, you know, so I talk a lot about AI on my channel, but I’m going to talk about whatever I want, right? So, this channel makes about $400 per 1,000 views. Now, the second channel that we started, Shane Hummus, the content growth engine, this channel started off at $1,700 per 1,000 views, but we actually got it to about $4,000 per 1,000 views. So, this was just the first month. Later on down the line, we got it to about $4,000 per 1,000 views. So, it still makes like 10 times more than my main channel. But we have clients that make, you know, in some niches that make $10,000 per 1,000 views, even $30,000 per 1,000 views for some of our clients in certain niches. And it really just comes down to who are you helping and what problem are you helping them solve? If you’re helping somebody, you know, like an affluent demographic who has a lot of money and they have a painful problem that you’re helping them solve, then you can make $10,000 per 1,000 views or $30,000 per 1,000 views, right? So, um, now one one thing I said is uh now you can do a little bit more mass market education channel kind of like this and you can properly monetize your content. You can still make a heck of a lot more money like than this, right? So, just as an example, like I said, on my main channel, I make about $400 per 1,000 views on average. Um, and I talk about whatever I want. But the point is that I want you to get is I started off niche on this channel. I made the decision later on to go a little bit more mass market and just talk about whatever I wanted. Um, and I probably would have made more money if I just stayed with the niche uh, from the beginning, right? But it’s important to note that I started off this channel niche and that’s what you need to do as well. That’s what I highly recommend that you do. Now later on you can make the decision if you want to talk about different stuff or go more mass market, expand your niche, pivot niches, etc. And I’ve done that many times on my channel and that’s definitely something you can do. But what I recommend is that people start off with is just talking about a very niche subject and doing that first. And I’m going to get into that here in a moment because you don’t always have to stay with the niche subject if you set up your channel with the hybrid personal brand method, which is something that we’ll talk about here in a moment. So, let me give you some examples of niche educational content. This is the organic chemistry tutor. He talks uh he makes about 43 to $119,000 a month and that is just from AdSense alone according to view stats. Now usually these tools actually underrepresent how much money people are making. For instance, if you look at my channel right now it’ll probably say I’m making about 10 to 20,000 a month if you use the same tool. In reality last month I made about 50 to 60,000 from AdSense alone. So it definitely underestimates how much people are making specifically educational channels. Uh for some reason it underestimates it, right? But let’s just say he’s making 43 to 119,000 a month like it says here uh from AdSense. Um and if he’s properly monetizing even remotely while you know selling something even affiliate marketing he should be making at least very conservatively $10 to $20 per 1,000 views. And that would be about $136 to $273,000 a month from the channel. And like I said that’s very conservative estimate. Now, the interesting thing is he didn’t upload in 177 days, guys. 177 days. That’s over 5 months. And he’s still making this much money passively from the channel without uploading anything. And that’s because he has been uploading these videos for a long time. And each video is like a little soldier that just goes out and makes him money forever. And he has a whole portfolio of these videos. It’s almost like having a portfolio of digital real estate. and they all make him a little bit of money every day. It might be a few bucks per day per video, but that little bit of money adds up over time. All right? It might be a few dollars a day per video, but when you have a hundred videos or a thousand videos, it really adds up. Okay? So, this is this is the power of YouTube. Once you posted enough videos, you have a portfolio and every time somebody, you know, searches a problem that they’re having, your video is going to show up at the top of YouTube, at the top of Google, and they’re going to watch your video and you’re going to make money from it, which is absolutely magical. And this is the closest thing to passive income that you’re ever going to get to, cuz passive income doesn’t really exist unless you already worked actively to make the money. But this is the closest thing to passive income that you’re going to get. Here’s another one. Scotty Kilmer. He’s in his 70s and he makes content helping people save money on their cars. Now, one of the great things about him, he is quite entertaining. So, when I say make educational content, I am not saying by any means that you cannot be entertaining. You can definitely be entertaining. Scotty Kilmer is hilarious if you’ve ever watched him, but he basically made about $24 million from YouTube. And he even said in an interview that he made more money in one month on YouTube than he saved in 40 years as a mechanic. And basically what he does is he just helps people pick the right cars, maintain their cars, fix their cars, and help them with different car related products. And that’s his whole channel. And basically this stuff is dead simple for him, right? And that’s one thing that I want to point out with the organic chemistry tutor as well. This stuff is dead simple for him. He is just talking about stuff that he was already tutoring people on. He just did the same thing, but he recorded it with a camera and he posted it online. And this is very common with people that we we talk to. It’s stuff that’s common sense to you, but what’s common sense to you is not necessarily common sense to other people. Now, this is probably the craziest story of all. Physics Walla, he came from a small village in India, and his first videos were in his parents’ basement, and you can see how bad they are. Like blurred face, etc., etc. Looks like it’s being recorded with a potato, terrible lighting, uh you can’t even see the whiteboard, but it didn’t matter, right? He started making videos about these standardized tests in India. And the standardized tests are incredibly important for your future. basically determines what schools you get into, what careers you get into, etc., etc. Uh, and it’s kind of like the ACT and the SAT in the US, right? So, he just made videos about these certifications and these standardized tests. And at first, he was just talking about physics and then he expanded to other stuff. So, let’s just put this in perspective how specific that this is. Physics India standardized tests only, very specific how he was tutoring people. And he started making these videos and he kept going. And then he launched a company that’s now worth $5.2 billion called Physics Wallet. It’s an educational app. It’s worth $5.2 billion according to this uh uh post here, right? Um and this happened on an actual exchange. So, this is like an actual stock exchange. This isn’t some fugazi woozy wazy uh valuation. Like this actually happened on an exchange. So, it actually got valuated at 5.2 billion on a real exchange, right? So, he is probably richer than Mr. Beast almost certainly because Mr. Beast’s valuations are just guesses basically, right? Plus, it would be very difficult for Mr. beast to actually sell his companies um because they’re so tied to his personal brand and they’re so tied to entertainment. Whereas physic koala he is actually solving problems for people and so people don’t really care as much about the personal brand as much as the fact that the problem is being solved right and so he could actually sell his company if he wanted to and that is the power of educational content because you are solving people’s problems so he is literally almost almost certainly richer than Mr. beast. Even though he came from India, even though he has a much smaller audience and, you know, he started off in his parents’ basement poor, he is literally richer than Mr. Beast. And chances are before you heard about it from me, you probably didn’t know that this channel even existed, right? Yet, he is actually richer than Mr. Beast. And that is the power of educational content, guys. So, this is the power of, you know, picking a niche that’s really good and just sticking with it and continuing to make that niche content for a very long time. So, type no excuses if physics wallet just killed your my setup isn’t good enough excuse. Type no excuses in the chat, guys. Like, if he could do this coming from a a small village in India, living in his parents’ basement, like it’s come on. Like, this is you can, you know, he could become a billionaire doing this, you can definitely make a a side income or, you know, like a start a side hustle on YouTube and make a few thousand bucks a month, right? Okay. Awesome. So now I’m going to hand you the formula for how to do all of this and there is a secret formula. So these are the most important things. So if I don’t talk about it, it’s because it’s not important. So type formula in the chat if you want the formula. Okay? Type formula in the chat. And again, if I don’t talk about it, it’s almost certainly because it’s not important. So if you’re wondering like, “Oh, Shane, I’m wondering about this like or that like, okay, if I didn’t mention it, it’s probably because it’s not that important, right?” So like I mean you can definitely ask me questions at the end for sure. I’m happy to answer them but uh if I don’t mention it it’s probably because it’s not that important. Okay. So first thing is you need a niche hypothesis statement. We call this the niche 2.0. Okay. Now generally speaking there are three niche categories out there that are the most profitable niche categories and that is health, wealth and relationships. With that being said, there are a lot of other niches outside of that and you can make money in all of those niche categories as well. But generally speaking, if you’re confused about what niche to go into, you should be looking into the niche category of health, wealth, and relationships. And the reason for that is because almost everybody in the entire world has a problem in one or more of those three areas. And then you need to go ahead and make what’s known as a niche hypothesis statement. So what you want to do is you want to pick a niche. And by the way, while we’re doing this, go ahead and comment what you think your niche is. Do not say health, wealth, or relationships, okay? But comment what you think your niche is. Go deeper than that, right? Uh in the chat, comment what you think your niche is. And uh I’ll probably read a few of them while we’re going through this. And I’m actually going to do this to illustrate something as well. Um so comment what your niche is. Let’s see what we got here. We’ve got technology, auto repair, addictions, do-it-yourself skincare. Uh Omar says gaming. Lee says, “Niche 2.0, know, help those who serve the homeless and avoid food poisoning. Oh, wow. Serve the homeless, avoid food poisoning. Wow, that’s amazing. Zara, wisdom. Jabby, uh, faith.
Phil, education. Don, product development. Melissa, overcome fears. Ricardo, personal connections. Jen, corrections training. Dawn, skincare. Carmen, formula. Matt trades. Roger wildlife photography. Shawn cyber security. John, ministering hope. Uh, hobby tech. Sarah, caregivers for special needs families. Uh, Greg, type 1 diabetes. Awesome. Janine, introversion. Awesome. Okay, so I know a lot of you are going to end up saying one or two word answers. That’s exactly what happened. And uh when you commented your niche, and I don’t blame you for that, but that’s incorrect. And let me show you why. The niche hypothesis statement goes like this. You select a market, a specific market of people. That’s going to be X. Okay. Then you find a specific problem inside of that market. Now, this this market might have three problems or 30 problems or 300 or 3,000 different problems. You’re not going to solve all their problems for them. You’re going to pick one specific problem. Uh usually, you want to pick a painful problem that they have and a problem that maybe isn’t being solved very well right now, and you’re going to help them solve that problem better. And you’re going to do that with a specific solution. That’s Z. So the problem is the market is X, the problem is Y and the solution is Z. Okay. Now it’s going to look like this. I help X do Y or I help X overcome Y. Uh now the Z part, don’t even worry about that right now. The Z is something that we can do later on. But the important part is you establish that there’s a market of people and they have a problem that isn’t being solved very well. And you are going to start with the problem. That is the core of entrepreneurship. That is the core of how markets work is you always start with a problem that somebody is having. A lot of people think that business is all about um I’m just going to like make something cool and people are going to like come and do it. You know, that’s not how business works. Business works by solving people’s problems. And if you look a little bit more deeply into every single business that’s successful, it’s because the business is helping people solve problems. Even the ones that you know you might be like, “Well, Shane, video games don’t help people solve problems.” Yeah, they do actually. They help they help them solve the problem of boredom and loneliness. So, it does help people solve problems, right? If you think about it, you have to you have to dig a little bit deeper sometimes. Some of them are more obvious than others, right? But markets are all about solving problems efficiently. This is something I did not understand when I was first getting into business. business. One of the reasons why I did not have success for a very long time when I first got into it is cuz I thought business was all about like, oh, I’m just going to like do something cool and then people are going to pay me money for it. That’s not how this works. Business is all about solving problems. That is the core found foundation of business and how it works. Okay? And markets are all about solving problems efficiently. And if you want to give value and receive money by giving that value, then you really just want to focus on solving as many problems for people as possible, which is what YouTube allows you to do in mass. So, type niche 2.0. If you understand why a one-word niche isn’t a niche, right? You need a market and a specific problem that people inside that market are having that you’re going to help them solve. Okay? Type niche 2.0 if you understand this. All right. Awesome. Awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. Okay, this is like I can’t even emphasize how important this is. Like so few people out there understand this guys. Like you need to understand this. Uh and you also need to be able to clearly state exactly who you’re helping and exactly what problem you’re helping them solve in one sentence, one short sentence. Okay. Now, let me give you a few examples of how to do this. Now, I’m going to use the accounting market specifically because for some reason I’ve worked with so many accountants. So, I’m going to use the accounting market, right? So, I’m going to show you a bunch of different levels. And all these people, by the way, are either people that are my clients, I’ve worked with them, or they’re business owners that I’ve met that are crushing it on YouTube. So, at the very first level is just teaching students basic accounting concepts, right? So, that’s more of a mass market channel, but it’s teaching people basic accounting concepts. So, they’re having a trouble because they, let’s just say they have a test that they have to pass, right? So, they they don’t know how to do accounting stuff and they look up on YouTube how to, you know, uh what is a P&L or or how to how to create a P&L or, you know, all that kind of stuff, right? Cuz they’re they have a test that they need to pass, right? So, that’s more of a mass market channel, but it’s basically teaching uh people basic accounting concepts. So, it’s kind of like the organic chemistry tutor, but for accounting. And this person is making really good money. Uh probably pretty close to seven figures a year. They’ve been doing it for a very long time, and they’re making really good money. And people who are in this market would be interested in a video like what is a P&L. Now let’s go to the second level um which is uh accounting specifically for existing accounting students uh or uh people who just graduated with an accounting degree, right? Um so they got an accounting degree and they are trying to pass standardized tests or pass certifications. So that would be like physics walla but for accounting, right? Because he was helping people pass standardized tests and certifications. So physics walla but for accounting and in the US instead of India. So that’s the second one and I know for a fact that this niche is making multiple seven figures a year and people who are in this market would be interested in a video like how to become a CPA. Okay, third level uh helping people land their first ever entry-level accounting job. Now I’m going to go over five examples. These are five, you know, real business owners that I know, real community members, business owners, etc. Um but I could do 50. I could do 500. I might even be able to do 5,000. Okay. uh just in this one market alone of of of accounting, right? Um with that being said, uh we’re just going to do five for the sake of time. Um but yeah, this third level is helping people land their first ever entry-level accounting job. That’s another business owner that I know. They are making multiple seven figures a year. So, who’s in the market there? People who just graduated with an accounting degree and they’re trying to get their first ever entry-level job. That’s the market. And that is different than all of these other ones, right? It’s totally different content than all these other ones. People who are trying to refresh their knowledge on accounting do not want to get an accounting job, right? Totally different content. And people who are in this market would be interested in a video like how to land a bookkeeping job. Then you’ve got the fourth level. People who are already accountants and they’re making $50 to $100,000 per year and they want to become what’s known as a financial controller. So this is one of my clients as well. He helps people who are already accountants making $50 to $100,000 per year become a financial controller who can make $200 or even $300,000 a year. So it is totally different types of content where you’re targeting that audience right and people who are in this market would be interested in the video like how to become a financial controller and then finally the fifth level which is basically helping businesses hire accountants. So hiring and placing accountants in businesses. So in that particular case it is either accounting businesses or big businesses that need accountants and they are actually trying to hire or place really good accountants in their businesses. So even though you’re talking about accounting topics, it’s still a completely different audience because these are people that are trying to hire other accountants, right? And the type of content that you’re going to make is going to be completely different for this and completely different for all those different ones, right? So I hope you understand why it’s so important to have a niche hypothesis statement even though it’s all the same niche, right? It’s all the accounting niche. Because if I would have asked you if you’re in one of those niches, hey, what’s your niche? You probably would have said, oh, it’s accounting, right? Just like all these people for instance that commented their niche, they probably said something relatively short like plants education or marriage relationship or teaching etc. And that’s why you need to have a niche hypothesis statement. If you don’t know your niche hypothesis statement, if you don’t know who you’re helping and what problem you’re helping them with, you have lost from the beginning, right? It’s so important to have a proper niche hypothesis statement. Now, did you find that valuable? Give a thumbs up if you thought that was valuable. And if you want the niche validator both in the chatpt version as well as the claude version that we’re going to be giving out in a short while which is our most popular tool ever and it will help you dial in your niche hypothesis statement. It’ll help you come up with your niche in the first place uh make a initial niche hypothesis statement or if you already have a niche it’ll help you make it 10 times better. Awesome. And people in this market would be interested in a video like how to hire the best accountants. Okay. So now I’m going to be handing you the blue pill that makes you invincible as a creator because once you have your niche down, you are already way better than most people. But you need more than that, okay? You need what’s known as a hybrid personal brand. Because you probably know what personal branding is, but when you mix personal branding with the correct niche and our YouTube automation AI system, you have what’s known as a hybrid personal brand. Now, one thing you need to understand is I just told you that you have to have a niche hypothesis statement. But I’m going to say something that’s probably going to confuse you a little bit, and that is you are the niche. So many people get this wrong. They think their niche is what makes them successful as an educational channel content creator. But when you have a hybrid personal brand, you are the niche, right? So yes, you are going to start extremely niche with the IHELX doy, but once you get traction, you build your channel in the correct way where you’re building a hybrid personal brand, you can then easily pivot to something else. So, type I am the niche in the chat if you get it. Type I am the niche.
Say it out loud and say it proud. I am the niche. Okay, this is very important to understand, right? Because yes, you want to pick that niche in the beginning. You want to have your niche hypothesis statement. But there’s a reason it’s called a niche hypothesis statement. You are making a guess at what your niche is going to be. hypothesis is an educated guess, right? And so if it’s wrong, you can easily switch, right? And if and if it’s right, you can stick with it. But if it’s wrong, you can easily switch. Or not necessarily wrong, it’s just you just want to change, right? Maybe there’s a better opportunity or a better niche or you want to expand or you want to talk about different things. You’re going to be able to easily switch to a new niche hypothesis statement, right? So awesome. A lot of people type I am the niche. That’s great. So let me show you an example. Alex or Mosie when he first started posting on YouTube four years ago his niche hypothesis statement was I help gyms do marketing and sales and now he can talk about anything. Now obviously he’s really well known for his business stuff with all the different types of businesses but now he can talk about his unconventional diet. This is why you’re not happy. He talks about his book launches. He talks about how to stop wasting time. He talks about uh you know how to eat different types of food etc etc. He can talk about anything he wants now. basically, right? But the point is he started niche and if he tried to do that from the beginning, tried to talk about anything that he wants from the beginning, he wouldn’t have had nearly as much success as he has right now, right? Cuz he started off being the king of a puddle, then the king of a small pond, and then the king of a lake, and then the river, and then the sea, and then the ocean. And you want to start off by being the king or queen of a of a of a puddle first, okay? And then you can expand from there, right? Uh you got to start small though, right? You have to start niche, but don’t make your channel in such a way where you can’t expand it. That’s how we teach people to do it with the hybrid personal brand method. Because when you create a hybrid personal brand, there’s so many different ways that you can monetize your channel. And there’s so many different directions that you can go both both in terms of the content uh and the topics as well as how you make money from your channel. AdSense, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, job opportunities, networking, memberships, SAS, high ticket offers. Alex Ramoszi basically opened up like an investment fund, right? He’s got a portfolio of companies that he invests in and he gets his deal flow from YouTube. So, he’s making money from eight and nine figure business owners and making millions of dollars from each one all the way down to doing a SAS that costs a few dollars a month. You can do memberships, you can do courses, digital products, and so many other things, even physical products. The point is, all these different business models work when you have a hybrid personal brand, traffic, and you have distribution. people that actually know, like, and trust you on your channel because you built it with the hybrid personal brand method and you’ve helped them to solve a bunch of their problems. So, they see you as an authority. And not only that, you can even sell the brand or step down as the face of the brand in some cases um as well, right? So, comment which one is your favorite um out of all these AdSense, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, job opportunities, memberships, SAS, high ticket offers. Comment which one is your favorite out of all these. I got to scroll down here and read them.
And uh guys, add those up, of course. Um affiliate. Okay. Jobs. Nice. Nice. Adsense. Seen a lot of AdSense. High ticket. Awesome. Uh sponsorships. Multiple. Okay. Fair enough. Uh affiliate marketing. Um AdSense. Affiliate marketing. Hybrid. Very cool. High ticket. High ticket. Awesome. Okay, great.
Now, speaking of physical products, let me give you an example of that. Uh Doug Demiro sells cars, right? So, you know, yes, you can use this to sell physical products. A lot of a lot of people wonder, yeah, you definitely can. So, you guys know Doug Demiro, he’s been uh doing car reviews for a very long time. And Doug Demiro launched his website called carsandbbits.com from his YouTube channel, a very large YouTube channel that he’s been doing for over 10 years now. Uh where he basically just reviews cars. And what’s interesting is in this uh business model that he started, cars.com, he ended up selling it for about $80 million. This was an online car auction website. And when he first launched uh started on YouTube, online car auctions were weren’t really a thing, right? It was a very tiny niche, so small that it almost wasn’t even worth doing, right? And everybody who did this, some someone completely butchered this. Everybody who did uh car auctions just did in-person car auctions, right? Then COVID came along and all the in-person car auctions shut down and this niche absolutely exploded, right? It got really big and he was positioned in such a way that he was able to launch this website, carsandbits.com, and then sell it for $80 million. Okay, but the whole point here is when Doug Demiro first started his channel, he had almost no idea that an online car auction website was going to be his big break. No idea because online car auctions weren’t really a thing, right? It was like a very very tiny niche. Almost almost nobody did them. But this is a secret way of building your channel where as opportunities present themselves, you can take advantage of those opportunities, right? So as things happen in the world, as products and services that you sell change, as the popularity of certain things change, as trends change, and as you grow and evolve as a human being, because we are all growing, breathing, evolving human beings. We want a business and a YouTube channel that can grow and evolve with us, right? You might change your interests over time or change what type of content you want to make over time or you want to build your YouTube channel in such a way but you want to build your YouTube channel in such a way where it can evolve with you right this is the ultimate advantage a channel that can adapt to changing circumstances right uh this is the ultimate advantage that you can possibly have and uh that’s the way you want to build your YouTube channel and your business right and that’s what makes it the that’s what makes it basically invincible at this point that’s what makes your YouTube channel basically invincible complete butchering by the way whoever changed that and by the way uh when we say YouTube channel obviously this is about YouTube but we also build it with the you uh build it so the YouTube channel is the center and then you can syndicate your content to all the other platforms and that’s what we teach people how to do right um and we’ve been doing this with extreme success ourselves right we syndicate our content to Facebook LinkedIn Twitter you probably see a lot of it on other platforms and uh we’ve been doing it with extreme success ourselves so we build the YouTube channel content that’s the main focus uh then we syndicate that content to the other platforms and AI does like 9 95% of the heavy lifting. So, it’s pretty much automated or semi-automated. And if you think this only applies to big educational channels, well, that’s just wrong. Okay. Um, here’s some examples of our clients. This worked for Waqen. So, Waqen was 18 years old when we first started working with him. He was a freshman in college and he was making all kinds of random content on study skills, productivity content, all kinds of different stuff like that. and he was making content on engineering as well because he was basically a business and engineering double major but he wasn’t really making any money right now. One thing about is he didn’t think he was an expert at anything and this is very common and you know of course he’s an 18-year-old of you know it’s like of course he thought he wasn’t an expert but we have people that come into the program that are like 30 40 50 60 years old sometimes they’re like Shane I don’t think I’m an expert on anything. I promise you, if you are 50 or 60 years old, you’ve lived enough years where you are absolutely an expert on on something. And here’s an example of an 18-year-old who thought he wasn’t an expert. And what we basically did is we sat down, we hashed out his niche, and it became very clear that he should help foreign exchange students get into elite universities in the US. Why? Because he was a foreign exchange student that got into an elite university in the US. So, we really dialed in this offer and the very first month that he launched or very close to the very first month, he made about $80,000. And he actually got so many client requests that he was oversubscribed and he had to stop making YouTube videos and weightless customers trying to buy his program because he just had too many people who wanted to work with him immediately. Now, that is a pretty good place to be as an 18-year-old business owner, right? And we joked around that he was making more money than the president of his university, which he was, which is pretty crazy to think about, right? As a freshman. Here’s another example. Richard, um, we helped him go from making almost no money whatsoever on YouTube and also being one of the busiest clients I’ve ever worked with. He was a product manager at a Fortune50 company. He was basically working like 60, 80 hours a week. Had a brand new baby, had lots of investments like real estate investment properties, etc., etc., all kinds of different stuff like that. Just a super, super busy guy. and he was basically able to grow his channel to $12,000 in a single month despite the fact that he probably could only work about 2 hours a month. So yeah, I’m very proud of this case study because it was quite difficult to get him results. He barely even had time to respond to my emails and my DMs because he could only work a couple hours a month, right? So type 2 hours in the chat if you can find two hours a month to do this. Now, just to be very clear, we do recommend four hours a week, okay? And if you don’t think you have four hours a week, go ahead and look on your phone and see how much time you spend uh, you know, scrolling on social media. And it’s probably like four hours a day. So, you definitely have four hours a week, right? You just need to you need to get your priorities straight, right? But yeah, you definitely have two hours a month for sure. And that’s what Richard was able to do it. And here’s another example. Guy, uh, this one’s a really cool story. He’s actually disabled and his goal before working with us was just to make a couple extra thousand a month because he was close to retirement. So that’s 1 to 2,000 extra a month and that was his goal and it was basically going to supplement his income and significantly increase his quality of life in retirement. And this would let let him go out and have dinners, visit his family more, go on vacations, etc., etc. Now he’s disabled and he has tenitus which is constant ringing in the ears. A lot of veterans have this. My dad has this too. Uh he’s a veteran and it is very debilitating. So he made this channel uh with the goal of just making a couple extra thousand a month in retirement and that was his version of rich. So, he was able to make it to $1,500 a month with less than 500 subscribers. He was able to reach his goal, 446 subscribers to be exact, right? Uh, now he’s getting closer to like 13,000 subscribers or something like that. Um, and so he’s making a lot more money than that. But the whole point is he was able to reach his goal even with a tiny channel. And his goal was to do this by helping other people who have tenitus manage it better and treat it better and basically improve their quality of life. and he was able to do all of that, right? So, if you don’t think that you can make money from YouTube with a small channel, you absolutely can. He got to his goal with less than 500 subscribers. And one more thing about him, this is a really beautiful story and it happens a lot in our program. Life gave him lemons and he turned those lemons into lemonade. And a lot of people in our program that have had success literally just pick a problem that they’ve already suffered from in the past and then they help and you know and they’ve probably figured out a lot of ways to make that problem better and they help other people overcome that problem. Right? So if you have a problem in your life you can help other people with what you’ve learned along the way solving that problem and make their lives better too. Sometimes that is one of the better niches to go into. So one simple rule guys to make this happen start simple and scale fast. You do not need to show your face all the time if you don’t want to. You do not need a fancy camera or fancy editing or a million-dollar studio or high production quality or top tier video editing skills. And you definitely do not need to make highly entertaining content to have success. Here’s what you do need, and these are the most important things by far. So, if I don’t mention it, it’s not important, right? Viral video ideas. This is the most important thing after dialing in your niche. Then, you need titles and thumbnails that get clicks. And not just any clicks, but the right clicks. You want the right people watching your video. And then you need an effective intro for video retention. And then you need to just deliver value to your audience, which is a lot easier to do than you think, especially when you’re using AI systems, which we’re going to be giving you a taste of here in a bit. Now, let’s talk about the most important out of all those things, and that is the viral video ideas. So, I got this from Carl Icon. He’s in the finance industry, and basically, he would find businesses that were making a ton of money despite being ran terribly. And I took that idea from the finance industry because I think some of the smartest people in the world work in finance and I applied it to YouTube. So, type icon if you want to know more about the icon method. Type icon in the chat.
All right, let’s see who’s actually watching because a lot of people you’re you’re going to spell icon wrong. I know who’s just listening and not actually watching. If you spelled icon wrong, ic n. I know you’re you’re just listening and you’re not watching. Okay. I know who’s doing it. So, uh, remember guys, I said you need to be engaged. You got to be watching as well as listening, right? So, icon is ic. That has a little bit of a weird spelling. Um, but awesome. So, let’s talk about the icon method. I was the first person to ever do this. So, what I did is I found YouTube videos that had a lot of views despite not having that many subscribers. That’s important. It’s important that they don’t have that many subscribers because, uh, if they have a big channel, they have a big audience and that audience is going to watch pretty much anything that they put out, right? So vid find a video that had a lot of views despite coming from a small channel and despite the video itself either being mediocre or preferably bad. Right? So the thumbnail, the title, the intro were either mediocre or bad. So just as an example, this guy right here, you can see his face is blurry. Um uh his audio is really bad. He was drunkenly ranting for 25 minutes about college degrees. And yet he still got to 760,000 views even though it was an objectively bad video. And this was the thumbnail, by the way, right here. Uh then what you want to do is you want to steal the idea of the video and you make a better version of the video, right? So the most worthless college majors. You could change the keyword a little bit or just keep the same keyword and boom, right? Most useless degrees. Um that’s what I did. The point is you just keep the title very similar. You change it slightly, make a better video, and boom, that’s what happened. So I made a better video with almost the same title, the most useless degrees versus the most worthless college majors. Very similar. and I made a better thumbnail, a better video, and it blew up and got millions of views. And this is what I’ve been doing for the last six years now, guys. This is my secret. The icon method is the most powerful way to do it. And there is a bit more to it than that. There’s different ways of doing the icon method, but that is the gist. This is the way to get started, right? So, once you get these down, you can join our uh and join our program. Uh finding video ideas will never be an issue forever again. And once you get this down, giving the value, quite literally, your videos will do all the work for you. So, type nice in the chat if you thought the icon method was valuable, right? Type nice in the chat. Nice. All right. Drinking my mini Coke Zero, guys. I do like mini Coke Zeros.
All right. Nice. George said nice with a Z. Very cool. Okay. Now, let’s talk about what it takes for you to be a part of this YouTube gold mine. Right? So, type ready in the chat if you’re ready to hear what it takes to be a part of this YouTube gold mine. Type ready in the chat. All right. A lot of people are ready. Okay. with no daily uploads if you don’t want to, no complicated editing, without having to show your face all the time, no expensive gear or software, no burnout or guesswork, no algorithm chasing, and no spending months without monetization. Instead, you’ll get an ondemand content plan tailored to you, a hybrid model that works with or without your face, proven video templates, plus AI assisted scripts, automated systems for publishing and repurposing, a 1-day permon content workflow, scalable monetization from day one, and top tier coaching behind seven figureure YouTube brands. Introducing the content growth engine. This is the easiest and fastest way to grow a cash printing YouTube channel, even if you’re not an influencer, right? So, click the link in the chat to get access to this early because there’s a few bonuses that we’re only giving to people that get this early access to. And you will have a higher chance of getting the bonuses if you actually book a call now. Or you can type in go.shenhome.com/coaching. Or you can scan the QR code with your phone. So, here’s what you get access to inside of CG. And by the way guys, we are going to go over all these bonuses here. Uh you’ll get all these when you join the program and some of them you don’t even need to join the program to get. And by the way guys, if you know somebody who’d be great at this, share this with them, like a cousin, a family member, a friend, send them this link because we can teach them how to do it the right way instead of spinning their wheels for years. We literally had two sisters join in before. I just interviewed one of them recently. She’s got a tiny channel, like 7,000 subscribers. She’s already making 7,000 a month. Her sister is right behind her. tiny channel like around 5,000 or so. She’s making about three to four thousand a month, right? So, she’s right behind her, right? So, I’ll probably be interviewing her as well. And by the way, who’s booking a call right now? Go ahead and comment in the chat if you’re booking a call because we have a special bonus for you. And also, you guys should only book one call, one person, one email, and one call. So, booking two doesn’t get you anything extra. The bonuses are tied to you, not to how many calls you book. And all a second booking does is take the slot away from someone else uh here on this workshop and our team cancels duplicates anyways. So you might even lose the time that you actually wanted. So if you accidentally booked twice, keep the time that you like and cancel the other one. And guys, last time we did this, uh every time we do this, we’re we literally get fully booked out. Uh we couldn’t even open up more slots even if I wanted to. So I suggest you book now while you can cuz once I drop those bonuses, people just swarm the calendar. And also we we only accept a certain amount of people at a time. We always have way more people that want to join the program than people that we can actually accept. But one of the reasons we do these live trainings is because it tends to like tell people exactly the types of people we want and it also educates them going in uh so that they’re much more likely to get results as well. Um so go to go.shenhome.com/coaching, scan the QR code or click the link in the chat. So first we’re going to help you pick a profitable niche. We have a bunch of YouTube coaches with 100K subscriber plaques, the absolute best of the best that will help you find and pick the best niche. And that niche will be in between being the most profitable one where it’s sustainable, it’s profitable, but also something that you’re passionate about. Picking the niche is incredibly important. This is the foundation for everything else. Uh but you also don’t want to make your niche too rigid, right? Which is the hybrid personal brand method. Next is the mindset section. Um you might be having a hard time starting even though you know that you just have to make videos consistently to be successful on YouTube. And I get it, it sounds easy, but it’s hard to put your mind into making videos or having success on YouTube. And you probably would have started YouTube uh or you would have had success on YouTube already if it was that easy, right? Even business owners face mindset issues. This module helps with that. This helps remove all the overthinking, all the imposttor syndrome, and it helps you take action fast. And this is actually when I ask people, these first two are usually their favorite modules. The niche selection, people are just obsessed with this. And then also the mindset section. Even though a lot of people don’t really think that they need the core foundations. Another thing that I’ll say about this is it’s going to help you understand that if you follow our system, success is inevitable. Right? If you follow the system, you’ll understand that when you go through this on a deep, logical, emotional, almost on a spiritual level that if you follow the system, success is inevitable. For some people, like my brother, it was the very first video that he posted. For some people, it takes 5, 10, 15, 20 videos. But if you follow the system, success is inevitable. And you will understand that on a logical level when you go through this. And you’ll understand that the only way to lose on YouTube, it is a game where the only way you lose is you quit posting. It is simply just a matter of time before you have a video take off is assuming that you continue posting. Right. Number three is the content genesis system. This shows you how to find viral video ideas in your niche that will have a higher chance of getting views and going viral. And in my opinion, this is my favorite module because I think this is the most valuable one out of all of them. This is where the secret is right here. Finding the right video ideas. Now, I just got word the slots are almost gone. We only have a few left. So, don’t wait on this one. So, go to go.shenomomas.com/coaching or click the link in the chat right now. So, the next is the holy trifecta. This is where we go over how you can make your thumbnail, your title, and your intro to package the viral video idea to have the highest chances of success for your video to get views. So, all three need to be good, and you want to make sure that they’re congruent as well. Next is the script writing alchemy system. This is where we help you write scripts with the help of AI to get your writing time down to less than an hour per video or in many cases way less than that. Just as an example, my brother whose very first video got to 800,000 views, that video took him like 15 minutes to write the script, right? In fact, it was less than 15 minutes. And we show you that exact same system. Next is the viral video creation system. Okay, so this is uh what makes it possible to only work one or two hours a week on your YouTube channel. in some cases, if you’re a very busy business owner, zero hours a week or a couple hours a month. And this is done with systems and our own in-house AI that we only allow our clients to use. And the niche validator that we’re going to be dropping here in a minute is just a fraction of a sample of the power of the AI systems that we give to our clients. We have systems for every problem that you could imagine on YouTube. And lastly is the cash code system. This is where we actually make money out of the views that you’re getting, even if you’re not getting a lot of views. And it’s very very important that you’re actually monetizing correctly. Now, I think we might have a few slots left. So, take those spots now. Go to go.shm.com/coaching or click the link in the chat right now. And that’s just a taste of what’s inside of the community. So, yeah, we had it looks like 27 spots and we’ve already had 86 people uh submit to uh fill those spots. So, like I said, guys, we’re always going to fill up um 86 people already and it’s it’s updating so it’s probably a lot more than that. Um, so yeah, uh, book a call as fast as you can. And that’s just a taste of what’s inside of the community. You don’t just get one or two tools, you get the entire arsenal. Custom GPTs, cloud skills, etc. All built for one thing, which is growing and monetizing your channel. And our clients are getting the updates in real time, and they are loving it. And the tools that we don’t build ourselves, we tell you exactly which ones are worth your time. Gemini, descript, pixels, and much more. So whether you run chatb or cloud, there’s a tool sitting here ready for you. No guessing, no piecing it together yourself. This is just a taste of what’s waiting inside. And out of curiosity, type in the chat which AI do you actually prefer to use? Type that in the chat.
All right. I’m seeing a lot of Clouds and a lot of chat GBTs. I see an Hermes. Hermes is okay. Yeah, you can do way more with with Claude than Hermes, but it’s, you know, it’s like um kind of automatically set up, so it saves you a little bit of time. Um, nice, nice. Okay, cool. Grock, I see some Grock. I see some Gemini. Grock is really good for news style content because it’s attached to, you know, Twitter, so the news comes out instantly on Twitter. Um, chatbt is great for coding. Good stuff. Um, but yeah, Claude for sure is the best when it comes to content creation overall, and that’s the one that we uh focus on most, but we do uh put put a lot of effort into the other ones, too. Like Cacheb is pretty good as well. Awesome. Plus, you get one-on-one coaching calls and a dedicated client success manager, one-on-one dedicated chat support with all of our coaches, uh, multiple weekly group coaching sessions, access to an exclusive group of hybrid personal brand YouTubers, and access to the most powerful content creation AI systems on Earth. And this is just a peek inside of our private community. These are real wins coming in every single day. One member just hit 10,000 subscribers, 1 million views, grew 5x in a few months. Another person finally got to 100,000 subscribers and one just closed a $75,000 a year contract inbound straight off the platform. Someone else made their first $10,000 from YouTube. Someone else 4xed their subscriber count in a single month. Another person crossed 5,000 subscribers, 39,600 views on a channel with just 800 subscribers uh that just started totally brand new, etc., etc. Right? So, this is not a course that you just buy and forget about. This is a community of people winning together every single day as well as one- on-one mentorship. Okay? And these are just a few, right? This is what our group looks like on any given day. So, if you want results like this, book a call with us now and we will look at where your channel’s at. See if you’re a good fit and map out what it would actually take to get you results like this and, you know, see if you’re a good fit for the program. So, go to go.shenhum.com/coaching. Click the link in the chat right now. I do just want to emphasize, I know this I said this I think earlier. I do just want to emphasize this is you applying to the program, right? We have way more people that want to work with us than we can possibly work with cuz this is one-on-one mentorship. But, you know, you can only do one-on-one mentorship with so many people at once, right? So, we have way more people applying. This is you applying to the program. On the on the normal channel, we typically accept about 18% of people who apply. On live trainings like this, we do tend to attract uh better better candidates. Um, and so it’s a little bit higher than 18%. Uh, but then on the call itself, not everyone is going to be a good fit. And it’s not just like us seeing if you’re a good fit. It’s also like seeing if we’re a good fit to work together overall, right? Um so for instance, we’re going to hold you accountable. That’s one of the reasons why we get people great results is we are going to hold you accountable. Um so some people don’t like that. Some people don’t want to be held accountable. So it’s like, okay, if you don’t like that, probably you’re not going to be a good fit for the program. Okay? So go to go.shinhome.com/coaching, click the link in the chat right now, and uh we’ll see if we’re a good fit to work together. And this is the exact system that’s responsible for 0 to10K in just 18 days. Here’s an example. Bro, I just hit my first 10K within 18 days of launch. I don’t even have 1K subs yet. This is nuts. Thank you, man. This is a system that’s responsible for these results as well. This person had been posting on YouTube for well over 5 years. They had never had a single video get over 100,000 views and then they worked with us and one of their first videos got 180,000 views. And all these people are crushing it as well. So, for instance, this person pretty much doubled the amount of money they were making almost immediately uh with us, right? Um, this person closed four out of five book calls. Um, this person right here is a what’s known as a category king. Um, uh, I I don’t know what’s going on with this. This person here is a category king. Um, that means they’re literally number one in their niche. And this is a very, very competitive niche. Like, you would know it. Um, with some of our clients, we they don’t want really to be like us to reveal their niche cuz they don’t want extra competition or anything like that. You’ll probably figure out who this is once you’re in the program. Um, but yeah, this particular person 50,000 a month just from AdSense alone. Last month, they made like $4.5 million. They’re absolutely crushing it. This person is a category king. Literally number one in their niche. We have a lot of category kings and category queens within the program. Um, and uh, yeah, for big niches as well as like medium niches and even small niches, we have tons and tons of category kings and category queens, right? So, uh, Bill transformed his YouTube channel’s impact among 177k subs. He’s now making over 30k plus per month at the time of this testimonial. And basically, he said, “Shane helped me out with his keyword research, titles, and thumbnails, as well as turning my YouTube channel into a business.” So, he turned his YouTube channel from a liability, sucking up all of his time to a business that works for him while having a full-time job. Shawn was stuck making about $30,000 a month. Uh, he scaled all the way up to over $500,000 in a single month. So, he said Shane knows what he’s doing. He’s done other fake guru. His program goes beyond just tactics, teaching you how to build a personal brand and master the back-end systems that actually drive revenue. Next is Cheryl. She helps people through spiritual awakenings. And before joining us, she was stuck under 50 subscribers for years with a great message but no strategy. We gave her the system, the content strategy, the title and thumbnail frameworks, and the hands-on coaching, and she immediately grew to 9,000 plus subscribers and got monetized in months. One video hit 128,000 views, and now she is landing brand deals. This is what happens when you stop guessing and you start following our system. Just like Jen here, she’s a healthcare professional who recently joined our program. Before joining us, she was a complete beginner. She had no idea what to make, no experience, and in her own words, she said, “I hadn’t dipped my toe into YouTube yet.” And now she has 61.4,000 subscribers, and her channel got to 10.3 million views already. Two of her videos already went over 900,000 views, and another one almost uh one almost at 900,000, right? And uh she was in the same exact situation that you guys were in like just a few months ago like I think 3 to six months ago. She was watching a live training just like this in the same exact situation that you guys were in and the rest is she she took the leap of faith. The rest is history. Right. So I spoke with her and she told me that she’s now traveling all over the US and even internationally sometimes in her camper van and she also quit her job as a nurse. Right? That that was not mentioned here. She didn’t she so she quit her job as a nurse and uh she’s now traveling all over the United States in her camper van uh and even internationally down to Baja as well. Right. So that was always her dream and it’s all thanks to us which is absolutely unreal. And she also records her videos part-time while traveling in her camper van inside the van itself. And this month she made about $10,000 from AdSense alone. These are numbers that most creators chase for years. And she started just like you guys a few months ago. So she attended the live training wondering this is for her or not. But she took the leap of faith. She booked a call and she built all of it on what she already knows which is healthcare navigation. So if you’re a healthcare professional or a professional in general, this could be for you. This is what happens when you follow the system. And by the way, this stuff that she was teaching was common sense to her, right? Because it’s pretty easy for stuff to be common sense to you when you spend thousands of hours doing it, right? She spent thousands of hours advising patients. They would ask her questions. She would answer the same questions over and over again. So, she took those common sense answers that were common sense to her, put it on the internet on YouTube, just recorded it with a video, put it on YouTube with a simple webcam as well. She literally records on her laptop webcam and the rest is history, right? She’s now making a full-time income from that, crushing it. So, I know all kinds of different people who work in the YouTube industry. I know all the different coaches, the consultants, the agencies, etc. And I’ll kind of tell you how this industry works, right? Usually the highest paid people, the best of the best work with big corporations and so they’re going to be doing like seven figure contracts a year. And in many cases working with these big companies, it’s at least a six-figure contract. Right now, the second highest tier of what you can offer is probably what’s known as a build and release offer. So, I have some friends that do this and they’re basically one of the very few people that are actually really good on YouTube besides myself that really knows what they’re doing and they charge $300,000 to uh to do a build and release offer. And this is basically where they work with like seven, eight, and nine figure companies and they build out their YouTube channel for the first 3 to 6 months. They hire everybody for the channel. They build it out. They figure out exactly how the channel works and they release it to them once everything is working and they’ve hired the team out to them. And they usually charge about $300,000 to do that. Now, I myself have attended four masterminds. Last year I was in two. This year I’m in another two that are $50,000 or more. And these are extremely valuable, right? I learned tons of stuff from these masterminds. And I pass it down to you guys. So there’s a lot of YouTube masterminds out there that are like $50,000 or more. And it would easily cost you 35,000 mistakes if you were to try to do it on your own. And 25,000 is more than a fair investment to make to even get one of the knowledge contained in the content growth engine. but a special offer only for this workshop. When you book a call within the next 24 hours, we are offering something that we have never offered before. And we’re going to talk about some bonuses that we’re giving out. And by the way, go to go.shand.com/coaching. Click the link in the chat or you can scan this QR code. And uh I just got note, by the way, guys. Um we had 23 calendar spots and we had 147 total submissions. We did open up a few more spots. Okay, so we did open up a few more spots. Um, so if you couldn’t find a good time before or if you tried on the calendar and the calendar was totally full, uh, click the link again. We open up a few more. Or if you’re on the page, you can just refresh that page and it should be opened up. Uh, after that though, I I can’t promise we’re going to open up anymore. Okay, so go to go.shinhome.com/coaching, click the link in the chat or scan this QR code. Bonus one, and this is a big one. You get a one- on-one dominate your niche call with me personally. Now, let me tell you why this matters. When I was starting out, I had a mentor named Sam. He was doing YouTube for his wedding photography business. And Sam showed me how to actually make money on YouTube, even with a small channel. And that changed everything for me. That is when I started earning big, not because I got lucky, but because someone who already figured it out showed me the ropes. And that one relationship changed the entire direction of my channel. And that is exactly what this call is. Everything that I have learned building a channel to 1.6 6 million subs and over $10 million in revenue applied directly to your niche, your channel, and your situation. And this is worth $12,000 easily. But this is only for five of the first people who sign up within the next 24 hours. So go to go.shinhome.com/coaching. Scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. And this is what the actual coaching looks like. I can already see people signing up as I’m talking. So wait on this one. Definitely don’t wait on this one. Go to go.shoms.com/coaching. Scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Bonus two, the viral title maker GPT. This is easily worth $7,500. Now, if you sat down to find winning ideas yourself, researching what’s working, checking view count, studying channels, you are looking at weeks of trial and error, probably months, and most people still pick the wrong ideas. If you hire someone to do it, like a real content strategist who knows YouTube, you’re paying $7,500 easily. So, we built a custom AI tool that finds proven video ideas for your niche in about 30 seconds. And this is not generic AI spitting out random titles. It is built on the icon method. It finds what’s already working and it hands you a better version. The titles, the hooks, the angles, all of it. And you get it both ways. A chat GPT version and a clawed AI version. So whatever AI you already use, you are covered. And this is included as a bonus. So go to go.shinhome.com/coaching, scan the QR code or click the link in the chat. So here’s what it actually looks like, right? And whether you use chat or claude, we built it for both. You give it a video that’s already performing. It reverse engineers why it works. Then it hands you five high-converting titles and hooks for your channel. No guessing, no staring at a blank screen. The winning ideas are already out there. This tool just finds them for you. So go to go.shinhomeus.com/coaching. Scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Bonus three is the noclick scriptwriter pro. This is worth $8,000. This is the ultimate content creation tool. You tell it the goal of your video to inform, to entertain, to sell, and it turns your spoken ideas into a polished, attention-grabbing YouTube script. It it captures your tone, your style, your voice, so that it actually sounds like you and not like a robot. And just like the last one, you get it both ways, both chatbot, whatever you already use. If you were to hire a professional content team to do this, like a script writer or a content strategist, someone who understands YouTube, you’re paying like 3 to 5,000 a month minimum. This does it all in seconds. So go to go.shenhum.com/coaching, shinhham.com/coaching. Scan the QR code or click the link in the chat. This is what it looks like. The same tool running in both chat and claude. It walks you through niche validation, your audience, your format preference, dialing in exactly who you are. Then you tell it the goal of your video and it writes the full script, a real YouTube script with hooks, structure, and a tone that matches your channel. So go to go.shm.com/coaching, scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Bonus four is the high converting thumbnail toolkit. This is worth $10,000. Your thumbnail is the first thing that people see before the title, before the hook, before anything. If your thumbnail does not stop the scroll, nobody clicks, nobody watches, and it doesn’t matter how good your video is. If you hired a thumbnail designer who actually knows YouTube, you are paying $1,500 a month easily. That’s $18,000 a year, and they might make a thumbnail that works for gaming, but not for educational content. So, there is a real psychology behind every thumbnail. This is my entire thumbnail system. the guide, the templates, the swipe files, the frameworks, you get it all as a bonus. So go to go.shenhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. And remember with thumbnails, guys, it’s not just making getting views. You want to get the right views, okay? That’s what every other thumbnail system teaches you, just how to get the most views, right? That’s not necessarily what you want. You want to get the most of the right views. Okay? So, on the left you get the full guide, the secret behind creating viral thumbnails, the psychology behind why certain thumbnails get clicks and others don’t. On the right is the thumbnail vault. Fully editable templates in Canva. You click file, make a copy, and it’s yours. And you see those annotations. That is me breaking down exactly why each thumbnail works, where the face goes, how big the head is, the rule of thirds, the spacing, all of it explained. So, you’re not just getting templates, you are learning the frameworks so that you can build your own. So, go to go.shenomomas.com/coaching, com/coaching. Scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Bonus five is the profitable hidden niche vault with live updates worth $6,997.
This is the one that everyone asks me about. What niche should I start in? What niches are making money right now? What niches are nobody talking about? This vault answers all of that. Profitable niches that most people don’t even know exist. We update it live so you’re not looking at niches that worked 2 years ago. You’re seeing what’s working right now. So go to go.shenomomas.com. /coaching. Scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Bonus six is the live icon method deep dive recordings with five real clients worth $4,997. This is not me explaining the icon method on a whiteboard. This is me doing it live with real clients in real niches. You get to watch over my shoulder as I find winning video ideas for five completely different channels. So, you see exactly how I think, what I look for, what I skip, and why. Most people hear the method and still don’t know how to apply it to their niche. This fixes that. you’re basically sitting on $5,000 worth of private coaching sessions for free. So go to goshomomas.com/coaching, scan that QR code, or click the link in the chat. Now, for those of you who stayed until the end, we made something special for you, and that is the YouTube niche profit accelerator, uh, GPT, uh, both the GPT as well as the cloud version. And this one is different than all the other bonuses. This is an AI that takes your niche and maps out exactly how you can make money from it. Not just AdSense, we’re talking affiliate deals, digital products, coaching offers, sponsorships, the full picture. Because here’s the thing that most people get wrong. They pick a niche and then they hope the money situation figures itself out later on. And that is backwards. This tool shows you the money map before you even record your first video. So, you’re not putting the cart before the horse. So, you know exactly what you’re building towards from day one. And like every tool that we give you, you get it in both chat and claude, whatever you already use. Now, here’s the catch. This bonus is worth $12,000 easily. and you get it just for showing up to the call that you booked. That’s it. You book the call, you show up, and you get it. So go to go.shenhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code, or click the link in the chat. The second you show up to the call that you booked, you get instant access on the spot. And whether you like chatbt or claude, you can use this either way. This is not some watered down freebie. It is the same tool that we use inside of the content growth engine, and it is yours for life. So go to go.shenhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code, or click the link in the chat. Uh, next is the 90-day YouTube growth guarantee. This is priceless. Here’s how it works. You got 90 days. You follow the program, you do the work, you show up, and if it does not work for you, you get your money back. We have about a 1% monthly refund rate in our program, less than 1%. Uh, that means that 99% of people who join stay because it works. And we surveyed all of our clients inside the program, and we asked them one question, which is, do you feel like you got an ROI from this? 91% of them said yes. So, I am not asking you to trust me blindly. I’m asking you to test it and see for yourself. So, go to go.shinhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. So, let’s add this up. Eight bonuses. Total value $61,494. Now, remember,
bonus one, the one-on-one session with me personally. That is only for five of the first people who sign up today. Once those spots are gone, they’re gone. And bonus 7, the YouTube Niche Profit Accelerator GPT. You only get that if you book a call and actually show up to it. That’s it. Everything else is included free when you join. Now, this workshop special is only available for the next 24 hours. After that, these bonuses go away. This exact package at this exact price with all eight bonuses. You will not see it again. And let me clear something up really quick because I get this question every single time. The 24 hours is for booking the call, not for attending it. Right? So, if you book right now and the next open slot on my calendar is 3 days from now or even next week, that’s totally fine. As long as you book right now, right? You’re still locked in. You still get every single one of these bonuses. You just have to schedule the call within the next 24 hours, right? So, if you’ve been going back and forth on this, now is the time to move. So, go to go.shinhome.com/coaching. Scan that QR code right now. Uh you’ll uh you know uh we’ll figure out if we’re a good fit to work together or not. Right? Worst case, you get on the call, you get some clarity on your niche, and you walk away with a plan. No pressure, no hard sell, right? Lots of people end up booking a calls and uh uh uh yeah, lot lots of people end up booking the calls and uh they end up getting a lot of value from the call. They, you know, they get the niche dialed in, etc., etc. Um and that’s totally fine. Um but there’s a lot of people who book a call and we don’t give them an offer, right? And and that’s totally fine as well. Again, we want to make sure that it’s a good fit on both sides. Um so, uh go to go.shenhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code or click the link in the chat. Now, one last thing, and this is important. Once you book, you are going to get two emails. One from Callumly and one from the consultant that you booked with. Both are titled CGE Masterclass Call. So, it’s going to look kind of like this. Uh, check your email right now. Right. Check your inbox right now. In Gmail, the best place to check is all mail. Um, on some of the other ones, it might be promotions, but it might, you know, spam, promotions, all mail, trash or junk, whatever. Uh, check all of those. Sometimes they hide in there instead of your main inbox. Those emails have your call details, so find them and open them. Okay. And with that being said, I am now going to answer some questions. Um, going to scroll to the bottom here. Taking a long time. Uh, looks like Michelle, I’m reading Michelle’s comment. She says link won’t load. Which link will not load, Michelle? You talking about the link to book a call or the link for the uh Claude? uh niche validator. Uh with the niche validator, guys, make sure you uh are logged into Claude and or ChatgBT. Whichever one you choose to use, make sure you’re logged into one of those. Ginger got my two emails. I’m super excited. Awesome. Ginger, love to hear it. Michelle, I got it. Thanks, Book Links. Uh thanks, Booklink. I got it. Thanks. Awesome, Michelle. Love to hear it. Gary
Gary said he has a challenge for me. Um, my challenge to you teaching me how to create content as a disabled would be techhelper content creator. Hey Gary, we’ve had people that are disabled in the program before and and they’ve had success. I even gave one example of guy who has tenitus. Imagine, guys, like I know it’s like kind of hard to imagine, but imagine having having literally a constant screaming shrill sound in your ears. Like it never goes away, right? That’s tenitus. It’s a constant ringing sound. Like it’s a very annoying shrill ringing sound in your ears, you know? And he has like pretty serious version of it. Some people just have it a tiny little bit. He he has it pretty bad, right? So, and he was able to make this work, right? like so like and he was able to help other people who have tenitus as well. Okay. So yeah um yeah you being disabled uh you know we’ve definitely helped us help a lot of people with that. And by the way guys he literally had us listen to his video for audio checks uh because he he couldn’t really do it himself. He couldn’t really fully listen to his videos cuz he has this ne neverending non-stop like ringing sound in his ears. Right. So, it’s uh yeah. Um
Cindy says, “I booked a call, but I got to run now. Have a good evening.” Have a good one. Appreciate you, Cindy. Cassandra, do we have to have a minimum views to monetize our YouTube page? Uh yeah, right now it is 4,000 watch 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers to join the YouTube partner program in order. If you’re talking about monetizing in terms of like let’s just say selling something from your channel like all the other methods that I talked about, you do not have to have a minimum views or a minimum anything. You can monetize from day one. Uh if you uh if you’re selling your own stuff or you’re doing affiliate marketing or some of the other methods that I talked about. Hopefully that makes sense. Don, where is a niche validator? We dropped it. Scroll up. Scroll down. Phil, I had trouble with the submit button. Weird. Anybody else have trouble with that? Javi, does the appointment call work with international numbers? Um, depends on which country it’s from. I’m not I’m not 100% sure on that one. Which country are you calling from, Javi? Uh, Rick, what is the cost of the program in order to receive all these free uh bonuses? Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah, the cost of the program. So, guys, we are totally transparent about this. With that being said, it’s a different cost depending on what your needs are. Okay. So, at the very highest level, this is probably like 5% of people who watch our stuff, um, is like big businesses or startups or people that work at big companies that have been tasked with growing the YouTube channel of the company. Okay? So, we probably about 5% of people who watch this are in that kind of boat, that kind of situation. The scope of what those companies need us to do is a lot. Okay? It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of done for you work. Um, for instance, they need us to plug into their systems. They need us to make sure that the YouTube uh program or the YouTube uh uh people uh can communicate with everybody else like the email marketing people etc etc. Everything has to be really dialed in and there’s a lot of done for you work on that side, right? With more communication as we all know if we’ve worked in big companies, everything happens slower because you have to communicate everything, right? So for that type of company, we usually don’t work with those companies like big companies, startups, etc. But uh if we do choose to work with you um in in the rare case that we do, we typically will charge anywhere from about it’s going to be a six-f figureure contract minimum. Uh with one of the companies I work with course careers, I got equity in the company, right? So it’s going to be something like that. It’s like it’s a large amount of money equity in the company. The scope of of working with big companies like that, it’s a lot. Okay. Um, with that being said, much more common, probably about 20% of people, maybe 30% we work with, they’re like small business owners, medium-sized business owners. Um, so six, seven, eight figure business owners or people that are very high up in those companies like the like the CMO or the CTO of a company like that. Um, so people uh like that that are in that situation, typically the scope of what they need is also different. So, a lot of the time, what’s most interesting to people like that is we help them hire the right people and do what’s kind of called a build and release offer. So, we hire a person for the channel. Usually, it’s like a a video editor or a creative director, someone who can do the video editing and more who’s experienced with YouTube. We source this person, we hire them, we train them, we place them in your business. Um, and uh we kind of oversee them and manage them uh while they’re doing that. Okay? And then at the end of six-month period, we release them to you. Okay? So that offer depending on the scope of what you need that is typically going to be anywhere from about it it really depends on what you need like in terms of like us doing done for you work it’s going to be anywhere from about 12 to uh $100,000 somewhere around there that range 12 to $100,000 for that offer. Usually it’s going to be around like the $30,000 range uh for what most people need. 30 to 36,000 somewhere around there. Um and then at the the bottom level um which is pro honestly like the most valuable out of all of them. We’re literally just going to teach you how to do it, right? So, with these other levels, like we do it for you, we build the machine that does it for you and hire the person to run the machine. Uh, very valuable as well, build and release offer. With this one, uh, down here, we literally just teach you how to do it, right? And we also teach you how to do the other stuff. So, we teach you how to build the machine. We teach you how to hire people for it as well. We teach you exactly where we hire from our entire hiring process. So, if you want to just do it for yourself, you can do it. So, we’re basically teaching you how to fish. With these other ones, we’re, you know, fishing for you, building a machine that fishes for you. With this one, we teach you how to fish, or we teach you how to build a machine that fishes for you. So, we feed you for a lifetime, right? So, in my opinion, like this bottom one is probably the most valuable one out of all of them. It is one-on-one mentoring plus a group coaching component as well. Um, but you do get one-on-one calls, one-on-one mentoring, and you get the group component, too. And that’s going to be about $9,800 or you can get it down to $1,000 a month or less. I think the lowest we can go is around $500 a month for the payment plans. If you’re willing to do in-house payment plans, we can get it to about $500 a month. Now, just to be very clear, I know I said this before already, we do not accept everyone who applies, right? We want to make sure that you have a good niche, you have the right channel idea, you’re the right type of personality who’s going to succeed in our program. So, there’s some things that we look at, for instance, like how how much experience do you have? Like, do have you done valuable things in your life that have you solved problems? and do you, you know, do you have experience where you could help other people do the work? What are what are your expectations uh going into the program? Right? Um do you have realistic expectations or not going into the program? We look at stuff like that, right? So, uh we don’t accept everyone into the program. In fact, we accept a very tiny percentage of the people who apply into the program. Um but if we think you’re a good fit to work with us, uh we’ll we’ll give you an offer. And the call will be valuable whether we end up working together or not, right? So we always make sure that anytime that we interact with prospects, customers, it’s going to they’re going to have a good experience. Uh whether we end up working together or not. So whether it’s the YouTube videos I make, these live trainings that I do, the calls that you book, etc., we’re going to give a lot of value on all of them. Uh whether we not whether or not we end up working together, we always want to give way more value than we receive. So that is the answer to the price question. I am only answering it one time. Okay? Uh, beyond that answer, you just have to book a call to see because if you’re like, “Hey, Shane, how much does it cost to do the build and release or what?” It depends on what you need. Like, do you want us to hire one person for you or do you want us to hire five people for you? If you want us to hire five people, then it’s going to cost more money. Obviously, right? So, it depends. Obviously, we have to see what you need us to do before we tell you how much it’s going to cost to do it, right? So, uh, if you have very specific questions, just get on the call you and those questions will be answered, right? So, hopefully that makes sense. Uh, okay. All right. Thomas, still feel suspicious. Need more time. Okay. So, we are totally down to uh we actually welcome people who are um, you know, just rational people, right? We welcome people who are, you know, they have they’re skeptical, they have questions, that kind of thing. Uh we welcome people like that. You know, we’ve we’ve had a lot of people join our program that have gotten burned, you know, doing buying other courses or going through other coaching programs. And we welcome people like that because it’s almost like if you had a bad relationship in the past, um you’re going to appreciate a good relationship when you have it, right? If you’ve never had a bad relationship in the past, you could have a great relationship and just not even know, right? So, we we actually uh prefer in some ways working with people who’ve been through like bad coaching programs or whatever because we know that when you see how professional our coaching program is and how good everyone in our coaching program is, they all have 100k subscriber plaques and how just like how we run this operation like an absolute machine. I mean, it’s just insane how good we are at getting people results. We get the best results in the industry. When you see that, you’re going to really appreciate the program, right? So, we’re we welcome people who are a little bit skeptical. Now, the types of people that we do not welcome into the program are people who are negative. Right? If you are a negative person or you are a pessimistic person, we will not welcome you into the program. We will we absolutely will not accept you. And there’s a couple reasons for that. One, if you are a negative or pessimistic person, you are never going to get results. And it’s because of you. 100% it’s because of you. It’s not because of the rest of the world. It’s you, right? That is why you’re not going to get results. But not only are you going to hold yourself back, but you’re also going to stop other people from getting results, too. if you’re a negative or a pessimistic person. So, we absolutely will not allow you into the program if you’re a negative or pessimistic person. But if you are a skeptical person, totally understand. That is completely reasonable. We will answer any questions that you have on the call and we actually welcome people like that because we know that we have the absolute best program in the world. We have by far the best results in the industry. Nobody else even comes close to our results. It’s literally not like we let we leave everybody else in the dust. It’s not even close. Um, and so we’re we’re happy to answer any questions that you have. Okay, so hopefully that helps, Thomas. Um, David, I have tenitus. Yes, Eileen has tenitus as well. Yeah. Yeah, it’s my dad has it as well. You know, a lot of veterans have it because of, you know, loud banging noises, cannons, guns, explosions, etc. Uh, my dad has it. You know, it’s like, yeah, it’s it’s rough. Chi Chiaku the niche validator Claude chose for me appointment setting.
Um as a sales executive, lead generation analyst and customer service for 10 years plus. Uh what is your take on this? And I want to do this faceless too as a start. Hey uh admins um look into claude choosing appointment setting. It seems like it’s appointment setting for a lot of people. I think it might have gotten the instructions wrong. You might you might have messed up the instructions and it’s doing that for for some reason. Um, yeah. Uh, appointment setting. That’s odd. That’s really odd. Um, yeah, I’ve had multiple people today tell me that Claude told them to to do appointment setting. Um, give us about an hour. We’re going to update Claude and then try it again. Anybody else get appointment setting on Claude? We’ve had like multiple people today tell us that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, appointment setting is a great niche, but I have a feeling there might there might be a little bug in the code uh on on the on the the GPT that we made. So, wait about an hour and we’ll probably update it.
Deborah, already booked. What to do next? Uh, next, great question. Check your email. Make sure you confirm that you are going to uh attend the call in your email by clicking add to calendar and confirm your appointment. And then what I highly recommend that you do, Deborah, and anybody else who booked a call is go ahead and uh keep the thank you page open. So the thank you page is going to look like this or this. Okay? It’s going to look like one of these two. There’s a short video here. It’s about 26 seconds. Uh the other one’s a pretty short video, too. It’s a little bit longer. It’s still pretty short. And then follow. So, watch that video obviously. Then follow these instructions. Mark, I know the sender. Uh, confirm that you’re actually going to attend the call and then look at all these results that we’ve gotten our community members, right? You’re just going to see result after result after result after result. It is just an endless scroll. It is literally an endless scroll of results that we’ve helped people get. Okay, so check these out. um endless scroll of results and uh you know you’re going to see someone who relates to you. Okay. Um like you know like for instance let’s just say you’re like oh does this work in the Polish market? Boom. Voytech Polish market. It works. Uh you’re going to be like oh does this work in uh let’s see uh does this work uh for uh investing offers? Yes. It works for an investing offer. Does this work for uh like art, like singing for instance? Yes, it works for art and singing. Again, as long as you’re helping people solve their problems, it works. Um, does this work for physical products? Yes, it works for physical products, Tiffany. Yeah. Um, does this work in the German market? Or actually, I think I think I’m getting the Yeah, I’m getting the clients mixed up. This one’s not a German market, but does this work to get clients? Yes, it works to get clients. Um, does this work in self uh self-help or self-improvement niche? Yes, it does. Does this work in the spirituality niche? Yes, it does. You’re you might have all these questions. Does this work? Oh, here we go. Here’s the German market right here. Yeah, you might have all these questions, right? Um, for different people. Does this work if you’re selling a traditional uh pro service based business? Yes, it does. Carla places people for recruiting, right? Etc., etc., etc. Okay, so you might have there’s so many different questions you might have about different aspects of the program. Like check out this thank you page. It’s going to answer probably 90% of your questions. Highly recommend you listen to some of these videos, listen to the people’s stories, and you’re just going to see how people are absolutely elated with the program. Okay. Um, additionally, if you have any additional questions, you can ask me right here, or you can book a call and just ask uh the rep the questions. Okay. Um, so hopefully that answers uh your questions, Deborah, on what to do next. So, check that out. Um, make sure you uh look at all that stuff and that’ll answer a ton of the questions that you have. Pat, uh, how do you help businesses that want to expand their brand? No current content channel in place yet? Um, yeah. So, if you’re, let’s just say you’re a big business, right? It depends on like the size of your business, like how much time you have, that kind of thing. Um, we we do it’s pretty much full stack. We do everything that you need. So, for instance, if you want us to hire someone to if you want us to hire someone from the Philippines for, you know, very affordable price, we can do that, right? Um, if you want us to hire, we we had a guy just recently request that we hire someone who can literally travel with him cuz he lives in Miami, right? And he travels all over the world and he wants somebody who can literally like travel with him to help him make content. We can do that as well. Okay, so um it depends on what you need. It’s a full stack type thing, but obviously hiring someone that specific is much more expensive and so we’re obviously going to charge a lot more for that, but it is full stack. We take care of literally everything that you need as a business owner to the point where we could even hire someone for you to be the face of the channel as well if you need that. Um, so yeah, we it’s full stack. We can take care of all all of that for you. Um, John, how do you balance a channel name for niche thesis and hybrid?
Um, well, the easiest way to do it is just to use your name or what you want your business name to be. So, just as an example, Gary Vee, his real name is Gary Vaynerchuk, but on the channel he calls himself Gary Vee. So, you don’t have to use your real name. You can use like your middle name or whatever, but have a name that sounds like a name, right? Uh that’s the easiest way to do it. Um there are other ways to do it. Um so, for instance, you could use your name or like your first name and then a dash and then you could do um what your channel’s about. Generally speaking, you do want to try to keep that somewhat open-ended. So, just as an example, when I first started, my name on YouTube was Shane Hummus, uh, the success GPS, right? So, it generally speaking, I was talking about what the channel was about, which is getting people success, uh, specifically was with careers and stuff like that, but it was kind of open-ended so that I could easily pivot to something else, right? And that’s this that’s the trick behind creating the p uh hybrid personal brand is you want to leave it open-ended. You want it to be specific and non-specific at the same time so that it’s open-ended and you can evolve later on. But yeah, easiest way is to just use your name or something similar to your name. Sandy, thank you Shane and your team. Awesome. You got it, Sandy. Yeah, shout out to the admins. We got, you know, five people working full-time to make this happen for you guys. Uh Aaron, Kevin, Alexis, Stephen, and even Justine, right? So, even even the the the sixth person there. Um, so working full-time to make this happen for you. Okay, so uh almost forgot about Justine. Sorry. Sorry about that, Justine. Um, this always happens. I’m sorry. Just kidding. Um, so yeah, we got six people working full-time to make this happen for you guys. Um, these these events put take a lot of time and effort from all of us. So, shout out to the admins for uh helping out here. Um, Carl, how long will the call run for? Um, I’m going to continue answering questions for a while, Carl. Um, I’m going to try to answer as many questions as I can. I’m guessing I’ll probably do it for another 45 minutes or so. Something like that. Somewhere around there. Jennifer, once you find your niche, you record the videos, do the trifecta, and post it. If you found the right niche and the right thing that people are searching for, it should get views. But I thought you had to have so many subs and so many views to have it monetized. How do you monetize on day one? By selling your own stuff. That’s how you monetize on day one. Like when you when you say the word monetize, what you’re talking about is the YouTube partner program where you get paid by from the AdSense, from the ads that pop up on your channel. That’s what you think monetization is, right? That’s what you’re when you say monetize, that’s what you think it is. That is one of like 20 different ways you can monetize, right? And that’s like a very tiny slice of the pie as well. So we make far more money. Like it’s less than probably less than five or even 3% of what we make comes from YouTube AdSense.
Kate, what is a better strategy? Resurrecting an old channel eight plus years or starting completely fresh. Just resurrect the old channel, Kate. 100%. We’ve helped so many people do that. We have story after story after story of so many people that have used their old channels and resurrected them. We just recently uh helped uh somebody Dr. Danny, Dr. Danny Fischer and uh she had an old old channel about makeup. It was kind of like a makeup channel and like cosmetics channel. She’s really into that and she wasn’t really into it anymore and she kind of just didn’t think it was like something she wanted to do. But she’s a doctor and so we kind of found a really good in between for her which is aging well. So it kind of combines health and also what she was interested before which was kind of like aesthetics, right? Like makeup, aesthetics, cos cosmetics. Um, and so her channel is now about aging well, right? So, it’s a really good kind of like in between uh between what her passion was and what her actual expertise is. And she uh had a video recently that got 1 million views in 3 days. So, she’s absolutely crushing it. Um, so yeah, uh that’s uh she had an old channel. She she had a channel that like was like six years old. Like she got a few some views like a while back, but didn’t get get much. Yeah. Go to go.shoots.com/coaching. shooting.com/coaching guys. Scan that QR code, click the link in the chat. To be honest, guys, I don’t think I’m going to stick around for 45 minutes. Probably just another 15 minutes or so. So, make sure you click that link while you still can. Um, Deborah, I heard it was going up to 8,000 watch hours. Is that true? Yes, it is in February. Yes. So, you still have about four or five months or so um to uh to get to that 4,000 watch hours to become a part of the YouTube partner program before it doubles in the difficulty. So, um would highly recommend that uh starting now cuz it’s going to go from 4,000 watch hours to 8,000 watch hours about four or five months from now. So, now is the best time to start. Ingred, do you help those of us uh dear in the headlights or new this? Yeah, most of the people that we have helped get results are completely new to YouTube. Um this this is an opportunity cuz what we do is we help people who have experience, who have problems that they’ve solved, who are experts monetize their expertise. That’s what we help people do. Um and YouTube is the is the mechanism that we help people do that with. Um, but we help people who are experts who have experience monetize their expertise, right? Um, so it doesn’t matter if you started on YouTube or not. Of course, we do help a lot of people who are already on YouTube. Many people, you know, start their YouTube channel, they they do the wrong thing and so they either didn’t get results at all or they’re getting views, but they’re struggling with monetization. They’re not making any money. And so, we help those people as well, right, Phil? I had trouble with the submit button. All good, Phil.
Diego, I got email confirmation from Gloria atchainhomeus.com. Is that it? Yep, she’s on our team. Good stuff, Jeff. Thanks for the niche validator. Awesome. Love it, Jeff. Um, you got it. Miles, I had a book a call this morning with a pre-conultation. However, did not get the emails. Weird. Yeah, go ahead and leave your name and your email. Um, and by the way guys, we’re responding to your comments. So you can scroll back up and look at your comment. Admins responded to your comments, Miles. Uh, so uh, scroll back up and look at the comment. Your ad the admins responded to it. Michelle did the appointment where uh, I did the appointment. Where’s the niche validator again? Just scroll up, scroll down, Michelle. It’s, uh, we we posted it many, many times now. Alan, I already booked and had a call on Sunday. How do I access the links? When do I go? Uh, if you’re talking about the niche validator, scroll up, scroll down. If you’re talking about the YouTube niche profit accelerator, just ask the person that you had your call with. So reach out to that person that you had your call with. Um just you get you do have to ask them and they’ll they’ll give it to you. Omar, so what I understand is I found the problem and solution, but I don’t know how to put it on YouTube and you help us in management setting up YouTube. Am I right? Yes. Uh we help you with the full stack. Everything involved in starting a successful YouTube channel that makes money. We help you with full stack. Whether it’s choosing the the niche, helping with the problem, choosing what to sell, um setting the channel up, uh getting views, and also making money. Beverly, what about all the other bonuses? I went over the bonuses in great detail exactly how to get them. Um I already went over those in great detail and the admin also responded to you, Crystal. Will there be other uh days other than the next three days or the one to one as I’m going out of town? just go ahead and schedule your call and then reschedule it if you want to keep all these bonuses locked in. So, you can schedule your call and then reschedule it for later on. Um, there’s an option to do that in the uh uh uh uh calendar. Uh Mary did not get my email confirmation. Hey, Mary, did you check your all mail, your spam, your promotions, and your trash folder? If you if you don’t say that you checked all those folders, uh we will assume that you did not and uh then we’ll just tell you to check all those folders. But if you did, leave your name and your email that you used to book the call. Okay? And uh we will look that up for you, Mary Phil. And you can also, if you want to, you can just send to uh admins host or host and panelists. Send to host and panelists. You uh don’t have to send to everybody for privacy purposes. Phil booked. I think I had trouble with the submit button. Awesome, Phil. Good stuff. Michelle, link doesn’t work. Um, uh, yeah, admins responded to your comment, Michelle. The link should work. Devin, I booked a call. Awesome. Hey, Devin, thanks for staying up. You’re you’re great. Appreciate you. Patrick night. Good night. Have a good one. Uh
Melissa, I’ve got a motor Shane. Are you wrapping up? Um I I am I am wrapping up here in a little bit, but uh I’m going to answer questions. So I’ve got like in terms of the the content, we’re done with the content, but I’ll be answering any questions you guys have. Um but yeah, go to go.strainhome.com/coaching, scan that QR code, click the link in the chat, guys. Uh I will be leaving here very very soon. So make sure you get that uh dialed in. It looks like we got 196 submissions. Um and uh yeah, so a lot of people tried to get it in. We did open up a few more spots, by the way. Um so if you did try to do it before and there wasn’t a good spot or wasn’t um a good, you know, there were no spots open at all or there there wasn’t a convenient time for you, go ahead and try that again. Click that link in the chat. And also guys, why are you on the fence? Comment in the chat if you are on the fence about booking a call or not. Tell me. Yes, the call is free and valuable. But comment in the chat why you are on the fence if you are on the fence.
Scroll up, scroll down for the niche validator. We posted it many, many, many times now. Okay. What is the typical time it takes to launch a solo channel? We always tell people about one to three months, Mark, is when you’re going to see results. About 1 to three months if again, you know, if you follow the instructions and stuff like that. Yeah, about 1 to 3 months. Uh that’s realistic.
If a channel is currently No, if you’re currently monetized, Kate, you are good to go. You grandfather into the program or grandmother into the program, right? you’re you’re good to go if you’re currently monetized from all indications. That’s what YouTube says. Uh Kim, not sure of a niche. That’s what the call is for, Kim. That’s why we uh that’s why you that’s one of the reasons to book a call because we help you dial in your niche. So, mess around with the niche validator, of course, but uh when you book a call, uh we can actually help you dial that in. John, cost is an issue. Um we can get people if we think that you’re a good fit to work with us, guys, we’ll figure it out on the cost side, right? We again we can get people started for as little as 500 a month uh if you are you know willing to do in-house uh funding. Okay. So like we can get people started for a you know very low amount. Um if we think that you’re you know you’re a good fit and you can pick the right niche and that kind of thing. We can get you started at a very low amount. So Mark says thank you. Awesome. Mark Katie this invitation come after a call that we were scheduling. It should Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the invitation should come after the call that you schedule. Yeah, 100%. Cheat. Um,
yeah, sales can be uh there’s a ton of opportunity in sales. So, for instance, one one huge opportunity in sales is to do a specific type of sales, right? So, um, instead of just doing sales in general, you could do, uh, sales for pest control, like pest control sales or sales, you know, something very specific, like a specific type of sales. Um, and that’s like a huge opportunity. We’ve seen a lot of people have massive success with that. Um, there’s one person who blew up recently, Shelby Sap, and she does sales specifically for women, and I mean, she’s just absolutely crushing it. I think it’s even more specific. It’s like remote sales specifically for women. Um, and there are certain uh offers, for instance, where it just makes way more sense to hire women for your offer. Um, women are just better. They’re just better at certain types of sales roles, especially if you’re selling to other women. Like, a lot of the time you’re going to be better, right? So, yeah, it’s uh, yeah, it could be really good, Kate. Giant uh, sigh of relief. Awesome. What is a better strategy? Resurrecting an old channel. Yeah, already answered that, Kate. Hopefully, you heard that. already answered it. Trices, I’m trying to open the niche validator. Awesome. Um, I think I shoot, you know what? I think I uh asked people why they are on the fence and then I did not scroll to the bottom. My bad. Um, yeah. What? I think
Sandy not on the fence. Broke. Broke. Hey, watch my videos. Get a good job and come back later on. You’re all good. Ter uh Theres or Terrace, I’m using Chat GBT. Link doesn’t work. Uh just go ahead and scroll up, scroll down, click that link. Make sure you’re logged into the Chat GBT account. Make sure it can be a free account. That’s fine. But make sure you’re logged in. Kevin, all my career experience has been very specific to the companies I work for. So tough envisioning it being of value to others. I’m excited about the idea. So I booked a call and we’ll see. So Kevin, great. A lot of people think exactly the same way as you. So just as an example, we worked with a guy, his name is Steven, and uh he was in a very uh niche engineering career where he we ended up choosing he he kind of thought the same thing. He was like, I have no idea how I’m going to teach anybody else how to do this. But we ended up uh choosing his niche being uh he had a very specific software, a CAD engineering software that he got really good at using because he spent thousands of hours using it because he needed to in his career. and he made this YouTube channel and this program uh where he was teaching other people how to get really good at using that that CAD engineering software specifically a again the very niche type of engineering that he teaches and uh he had within his first couple months he had $12,000 in sales. One of the people who bought uh his program was a Facebook meta engineer um who bought that very specific CAD program. Then he started having Fortune50 companies reach out to him to do trainings for their company because he was basically established himself as the authority for using that extremely niche piece of CAD engineer software. Okay, so I get it. You probably think like, oh, I don’t know what I’m an expert in. This is what everybody thinks. This is what we help you unlock, right? We are really good at doing this and we help you unlock that. So that’s why you should uh book the call and and we can help you do it. We help you unlock it. Maybe even on the call, we help you unlock it. But if not on the call, in the program, we definitely will. Okay. All right. Good night. Have a good one, Curtis. Have a good one, Stephen. Aubrey, thank you. Shane got my call tomorrow and we’ll get started immediately. Love it, Aubrey. Good stuff. Katie, I got mine. Looking forward to working with you and your team. Awesome. Katie, looking forward to working with you a few of you as well. Jav, uh, talk to you tomorrow. Bye for now. All good, Javi. Adrien, inbound sales. Awesome. Adrian, outbound sales. Yep, for sure. For sure. Rebooked everyone. Thanks Shane and everyone. You got it. Ingrid. Only see one email but nothing to confirm with. Interesting. Um, is that correct guys? Is there should be something to confirm. Yeah, like mark I know the sender. This is what it should pop up is I know the sender. Uh, should it should look like that. Um, but yeah, we did confirm based on like looking up your name and the admins did uh respond to your comment.
All right. Um, Lisa, originally I was going to have a tar divination channel, but I realized this would require more regular posting versus a video becoming long-term passive income. Any ideas? Actually, we already had a girl who started off in that. Um she had kind of like uh yeah she was into um she’s actually quite young too. Her name is Farah. You can look her up on YouTube. Fourth dimension Farah and she started off with like the kind of turret divination stuff and then she kind of pivoted over to more um like uh law of attraction stuff cuz she was she kind of got tired of the tarot stuff. Dan also the Claude niche validator is money. Awesome. Love to hear it Dan. That’s what we love to hear. We worked hard on it. Um, Katie, the invitation came after the call that we were scheduling. Uh, Katie, scroll back up and look at the admins. The admins are asking you questions there. Uh, Kate Carrie, I did. Thank you. Awesome, Kate. Love it. Okay, Parmir, what if too many people on YouTube have the same type of niches? Um, it really doesn’t matter because what ends up happening is as a market progresses, um, all you got to do is just get more and more niche. So you just have to niche down further. So if for instance, if there’s a lot of fitness channels, you’ll see that you just niche down even further. So instead of fitness, you do people who are trying to lose weight versus people who are trying to get buff. Those are two different types of fitness. And then if there’s a lot of channels that are all about like, let’s just say losing weight. Well, guess what? There’s a lot of different ways to lose weight. You got channels that talk about peptides for instance these days, right? So you just it just goes further and further. You niche down further and further. So you know my favorite way of losing weight is to play pickle ball, right? I love playing pickle ball and that’s a great way to lose weight. So, uh, and along with a, you know, a common sense diet, right? So, um, yeah. Yeah, there’s like it it it doesn’t really matter. You just niche down further and further. Um, in fact, a lot of the time it’s it’s quite easy to to have success in these very very busy uh niches.
All right, Ricardo. Does it matter which claude mode and uh and effort to use when the niche validator? I mean to be honest like the be the the the deeper one is going to be better but I think for practical purposes um ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha coup is really good or sonnet um like what’s it called the fast one? It’s haiku right Alexis haiku right? Yeah. Yeah. I think Haiku is probably good just because you’re going to go back and forth with it. But if you do want to at the very end after you go back and forth after it asks you a bunch of questions, if you do want to set it to the highest one and just have it run for a while, it might give you you can just be like, “Hey, can you scan this entire conversation with the highest one and have it run for a while?” That might give you an even better answer. Um, but really like it’s designed like we we painstakingly went through this to make sure that it’s designed so simply, so step by step that even with the the less good models, it’s still going to give you a really good answer. Um, but if you Yeah, great question, Lori. Need to reschedule uh listen to the entire podcast. Love it, Lori. All good. Uh, Brad, 23 years plus truck driving. What would my niche be? Um, play around with the niche validator, Brad. Um, mess around with that. That’s something we can help you out with on the call. But there are a lot of great niches related to truck driving. I mean, I don’t if you you probably aren’t aware, but truck driving is one of the hardest careers to hire for. And uh if you could help companies, for instance, to hire truck drivers better. Um that would be a great niche. Or you can help people get into truck driving career. That would be a great niche, right? Or maybe it’s a very specific type of truck driving. Maybe there’s some careers that are better than others. So, for instance, you help long-distance truck drivers get a highpaying job where they can go home to their family every night, right? That’s a pretty big pain point. You could help people do that. So many different things, so many different problems, so many different things you could help people with, for sure. Um, there’s a lot of really good ones within truck driving. Mark, how long is the typical length of a YouTube video? Uh, we recommend between 8 minutes and and 14 minutes and 59 seconds. That’s the ideal length. Katie says, “Got mine. Looking forward to working with you and your team. Awesome, Katie. Love to hear it, Aubrey. Thank you, Shane. Got a got my call tomorrow and we’ll get started immediately. Love it, Aubrey. Good stuff. Um, very difficult to scroll up the message to see the response.
Uh, nope, it is not difficult at all. You just you just scroll up. Yeah, it’s like it’s not difficult at all. Um, just booked my call, Stephen. Awesome. Jyn, I’m dropping off my calls tomorrow. Awesome. Jen, have a good one. Yeah, guys, I’m going to drop off as well. Was a was a great call. Guys, I’m going to say one more thing before I jump off. Um, uh, screenshot this page right here. If you are like doing the dishes or whatever and you, for whatever reason, you cannot um, uh, uh, see, you know, uh, uh, book a call now. Just make sure you do it within the next 24 hours. Screenshot that page. Also, I’m going to go ahead and drop the thank you pages in the chat. So, I’m dropping the two thank you pages in the chat. It’s either going to look like this or like this. Um, so definitely check those thank you pages out. I just dropped both of them in the chat. You can copy and paste them and check them out. Um, and again, check out all these videos on the bottom. Like, this is going to give you so much inspiration. It’s just an endless scroll. It never ends. And these aren’t even this probably not even 1/5if of the total results we’ve gotten people. Not even close. And it’s still an endless scroll. It just never ends, right? So, check out that page. Um, also, so I dropped that in the chat. Additionally, um, I’m going to drop the link to apply for one-on-one coaching in the chat. Um, if for whatever reason, again, you can’t do it right now, you’re doing your dishes, you’re on your lawn mower, whatever, uh, you can screenshot this and then just, you know, save the go.hm.com/coaching or the QR code for later, or just copy and paste the link in the chat. Just make sure you do it within the next 22ish hours, 23, 22 hours. Okay, with that being said, guys, thank you so much. Have a good one. Bye for now. Going to going to log off. It was great, guys. Also, shout out to our admins, Alexis, Kevin, Stephen, Aaron, and even Justine, right? Justine as well. He’s he’s new on admin. Okay, so shout out to the admins, guys. Have a great one. Uh Miles, have a good one. Uh Ingred, uh Corey, Phil, have a good one, guys. Cheers. Take care. Bye for now.
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09/22/2026 – Building With Hermes Agent
Hello. What are we doing today? We’re going to be talking about That’s a great question. Great question. Um, yes, I will be talking about Hermes setup cuz I made a couple videos about it. Let me know, comment Hermes if you’ve seen any of my videos that I made about Hermes, but I feel like I didn’t really do it justice. And we do have a workshop that’s currently enrolling right now. So, this workshop, I’m actually going to be like teaching you how to build all these things, too. So, I really want to like show you guys what it is that we have. I have spent like months building this up and I am very proud of it. And I’m also like um cuz I’m connecting it to stuff like the Aura ring. So, thank you guys again for people who suggested that I get the Aura ring. Um connecting to that uh and also using like other like hardware and stuff like that. So, experimenting using like really small uh devices and then being able to run Hermes and then also run different local models too. That’s what I’m experimenting with and it’s actually really cool. like, okay, getting ahead of myself. Really cool. Really cool. Um, Hermes bag. No, no, I don’t have a Hermes bag, I’m afraid. Hermes. Yes. Nice. Okay, some of you guys have seen my Hermes video. Okay, great. Some of you guys have not. So, I want to show you guys what I have. Okay. Um, so I want to show you guys uh let me share my screen.
Okay, one second. Hold on. Let me share my screen. Okay, there we go. That should work. Great. Hermes live stream as you guys can see. Okay, cool. So, I want to show you guys a couple demos first. So, the first one is Tacobot. Um, so live demos, guys. I hope it works. Oh my gosh, it’s a live demo. So, this is like actually our Discord. Um, for us, our internal team, we use Discord for everything. We use Slack for like external team and stuff, but I want to show you guys like Tacobot. Um, actually, let me start off. So, we use this a lot for work. So, I can go like at Tacobot, remind me in 5 minutes to move on to livebot. Okay, so it should be able to set that reminder for us. And it can do certain things like for example I can go to our work updates for example and then I can say something like at Tacobot uh what is everybody working on right now
and it should be able to do that and let’s see. Okay. So, you can see that it’s connecting to notion. So, we have our meetings in notion as well. So, it’s connecting there, our meeting notes, and it can see what’s over there. It can also read all of Discord, um, calendar, and a lot of other sources like GitHub as well. So, it’s able to gather like what everybody on the team is doing. So, let that run for a bit. Okay. So, yeah, and it’s able to schedule reminders for us. Let’s go back and stare at this for a bit.
Okay, cool. So, based on the latest team meeting notes, here’s what we’re currently doing. So, setup guide for the Hermes workshop uh workshop calendar, lifebot access rollout, uh what this is what Joy is doing. Jonathan and Cthur are doing this, Ken is doing this, and the whole team is prepping for our Hermes workshop launch. Actually, have you guys seen the Are you guys on the newsletter? comment workshop if you are registered for the Hermes workshop. I’m very excited to see you guys there because we’re going to actually I’m going to be like teaching you how to build all of these systems um during the workshop. So comment workshop to if you if you are going to be there. Um, another thing that I can do here is say for example I we have like this YouTube trends tool, right? Like or let’s see, let’s see like here. Okay. Um, I can ask it to like create a process doc on how this product works and it’s able to like go through and actually explain how all our products work and things like that. Um, and all of it is actually being stored in Obsidian. So, I know some of you guys have been watching the Obsidian video. So, I just want to show you like what that looks like uh in Obsidian as well. Let’s go to Obsidian.
Yeah. So, everything gets stored here in Obsidian like here um YouTube topic engine and it would actually just like have all of these process doc. So, then every time you need to have documentation for things, you’re able to very easily document it. For any business owners out there or people who work in teams, this is like it it is honestly so useful to be able to just have this bot that can tell you and document everything that you’re doing. Uh they can generate reports for you as well. So we have weekly reports that are generated um through a taco bot as well. So you don’t have to like go and make your own dashboard’s own reports anymore. Yeah, pretty amazing, right? All of this is being run by a Hermes agent. Um let me go back. No, wrong one.
this one. Cool. Yeah. So, all of this is being generated uh by a Hermes agent. So, it’s actually one of the only that is one of the profiles that we have on my on my Hermes agent. Comment Taco if you get the vibe why that it’s useful. And do you do you think do you guys think like something like this would be useful for you? Like have you implemented something like this before? Hey, okay. Some of you guys are here from the workshop. Amazing. Thank you so much. I’m very excited to see you guys there. I do not have the funds for enrolling the workshop, but it sounds exciting. No problem. I also have lots of free resources that you can check out from my videos as well. The workshop is for people who want to be able to build all of this within a span of 2 hours because it took me like months and months to figure out how to build it, right? So, for those of you who go to the workshop, it’s going to be like a 2-hour sprint and we’re going to get all of this done. Talk about taco. Nice. Amazing. U is this workshop suitable for beginners? Yes, it is. It is completely beginner friendly. Um I did get your point. This is something definitely useful I need to build up. Right. Like yeah, like I will literally show. So this is only one of the profiles that I have. Um and I want to show you like the others I have quite a few profiles, but the other profile that I use a lot um is called Lifebot. So this one is Lifebot. Oh, by the way, I’m actually just going to put this here if you guys want to check out the workshop. Um, enrollment is open now. So, enrollment for Hermes workshop here.
So, do check it out if you are interested. And doing that, let me just pin that comment as well. Pin message.
Okay, some questions. Who is the workshop for? I just joined. workshop is for people who want to build the things that I’m going to be showing you right now and do it in two hours as opposed to like be like me and spend like months doing it. That’s who the workshop is for. Completely beginner friendly as well if you wish. If you wish. Um if you’re not free during the workshop time, do you record it? Yes, everything is recorded as well. And you also get resources and ideas like how to build like step-by-step guides on how to build things as well. So even if you not only will we be building this like I will be building it. You can also follow along build it if you care out there. It is recorded and we also have like full on checklist and guides that you can look at yourself and then build it too.
How is it different from open claw? So Hermes is actually pretty similar to openclaw but in terms of premise but I find that it’s easier to build around. That’s the major thing. Like openclaw is really cool. was like very magical when you first use it. But I found that after about like a month or so, it started to get clunkier and clunkier. Things started breaking. U maybe because they had like new updates being done. But with Hermes, when something is actually built, it doesn’t just break. So, for example, Tacobot, uh I’ve been using for like months now, and so is Lifebot. Speaking of which, let me show you guys LifeBot. I’m also going to be going into more detail about like my building process a little bit later in the live stream as well. So, just want to show you guys the demos first because I’m pretty proud of them. Um, okay. So this is like for example it actually uh notes down everything like I track everything using livebot like what the stuff that I’m building um like what I’m working on and also I also track like how much food I’m eating and things like that. For example, I had an egg tart and half sandwiches today. So yeah, I’m able to do that. Um, and I’m able to ask it questions like, let’s see, uh, how is my progress for today compared?
Like, how is my work progress today, for example?
It should actually be like not that good, I think, cuz I don’t think I log too much time. But let’s see.
Um, yeah. So, I use it to just like answer. Okay, there you go. I use it to just ask it a lot of questions. Um, because it has like it’s based upon my actual data, right? which means that it’s able to give me very very specific and specialized advice. If you ever had like you know productivity people like tell you oh like you should use this calendar you should do this you should do that where like I was trying to do fasting for example often times like it’s not tailored towards you specifically so then you end up not being able to do it but because lifebot is built using like your specific data built using Hermes that’s how it’s able to make sure it’s giving you like very specific advice and it’s I’ve been using this for about 2 months now and it’s freaking amazing. So, for example, it shows that my Pomodoro log today is for one session. Um, my health metrics are stale right now. It my health metrics I update this every night. So, it hasn’t come in yet cuz it’s only 10 p.m. And also says that here’s the things that I’ve done like review live stream slides and Tesla demos end to end before going live, you know, which I did. And yeah, right now we are running the 10 p.m. live stream active now as it knows and it tells me like what my work in progress is um as analysis log volume. this is well below your historical median. So, it’s able to compare that ex um executive execution shape. Today was not a built or deep work day. So, it knows like the type of days that I’m having, it’s able to give me like the best advice for that specific day. Like it’s it’s very subtle sometimes, I feel like I’m not able to like explain it, do it justice, but because it’s so tailored towards me, it’s able to give me very very tailored advice. Like I can also ask it questions like how do I improve my productivity overall and log more deep work hours, right? Like I can ask it something like that.
Good morning. So excited for the workshop. Yes. I’m really excited to show you guys during the workshop. Like, I think you’ll be blown away how much you can actually do, especially with the setup that I’m going to show you guys how to do it. Like, you’re able to build things so quickly now if you know how to do it. It’s pretty crazy. Um, okay. Let’s see. It is reading. It’s going through the skills
right now. Have I used run pod? Yes. Um, I’ve used runpod. use it mostly for to rent GPUs. That’s what I’ve been doing with run pod.
Once I have Hermes plus Hermes bot set up on my MacBook Pro with only 18 gigs unifi, how do I choose LM? How do I choose different LM once I get computer with more memory? Honestly, 18 gigs is completely enough, especially if you’re using cloud models. Latency is crazy. Yep, I also do have a VPN on right now, so I think that’s not helping. Um, okay. So, see how it’s able to give me very tailored advice like, uh, anchor your first timer by 1 p.m. Basically, my my number one lever for me specifically is that if I’m able to start working before 1, like by 1:00 p.m., I’m able to get a lot more work in. And this is so true. Like, every hour past 1 p.m. cost you 20 to 25 minutes of total daily focus. So, the rule is that lock in at least 20 20 minute timer before 1 p.m. every day, even if it’s just planning or light prep. This has helped so much. A long time duration for 20 to 25 minutes. I am someone who is incapable of focusing for long periods of time. So if I do like an hour, try to work for an hour, that’s just not going to work. I’m just going to give up. Like literally, I like just like I just give up. So Lifebot was able to figure out like I need to be doing 20 to 25 minute um pomodoro sessions to for it to work for me. Using 10-minute task bridges to protect scripting. So depending on the type of task that I do as well, there’s a different percentage of completion rates. So a hack that I’ve been doing is that for me like scripting is really hard, right? Like it it takes up like a lot of my mental energy. So I would do something like do some task first to kind of ease into scripting and then always like making sure that I don’t stop working immediately after a scripting session. So it’s like these very subtle like little tweaks that you can do, little hacks that you can do that’s very specific to me that has really genuinely like it changes the way that I work and I feel so much more productive now. I’m able to get so much done as well. So, etc., etc. It’s able to do all this and all of this data. Um, like how I was able to get all these data. I’m going to show you guys as well. It is Where’s my little guys? Oops. Give me one second. I had to restart my computer. So, let me show you my little apps.
AK. So I am able to do this because of these little guys over here. So this one is I’m able to have the checklist of everything that I’m doing. And then here it’s like I have the pomodoros and every time I log time into this I can do like one minute test for example all of this and when I check things off it all gets logged into Obsidian. So let me show you in Obsidian.
Um this is such a game changer. Honestly such a game changer. So my typewriter I’m able to log like every single day that I’m doing. And the more days that I have the more data uh LifeB is able to get like Hermes is able to get. Again, this is all running off Hermes right now. Um, and also with my workouts. So, there there’s like workout stuff and my Pomodoros, too. So, all my Pomodoro logs that I’ve been doing, the more data that it gets, the commentary that it gets, the better that it becomes. So, over time, since I’ve been using it for about like 2 months now, it has been it it’s gotten so good at giving me very, very good feedback. So, genuinely highly recommend doing that. Um, yeah. So, that is a little demo of what you can do with Hermes. And I’ll tell you guys some other stuff I’m doing with Hermes, but I don’t want to just like have this only be a demo. Um, but yeah. Do you guys have any questions so far
about what it look of what it is? Let me see. Do you guys have any questions? Avocado. Cute and helpful to stay focused. Indeed, it is.
I signed up with the screen refreshed before I could look at the other offer that appeared. I did email you. If you emailed us, we will get back to you. Um, please give us a couple hours. We should be able to get back to you. Uh, thank you for emailing us. So, yeah, the we also are selling the like lifebot completely. Like you can just get it all. So, that’s what it was. Anyways, do you really use LM successfully? I mean, all of this is based off of Hermes, which is using LMS. So, what is Hermes? Good question. Hermes is an agent harness that allows you to build custom agents that you can do things like Taco Bell, which I just showed you, Lifebot, that which I just showed you. So, these are all built using Hermes. And let me actually show you, let’s dissect it a little bit. Okay, so we saw Taco Bell earlier. Um, oh yeah, I got really excited. So, what are we going to be covering today? So, I guess I showed you guys the demos. Um, so we’re going to be talking about Taco Bot’s profile and also Lifebots’s profile. And then I want to show you the stack underneath. So what are the tools that I use in order to build this as well as the step-by-step process that I use to build something like this? Cuz before to build something like this, this would have taken me like weeks probably to like get this done. But with like a certain I do like a certain sequence of steps that I do. I’ve gotten it to a point in which I can get it done um probably like half a day like and during the during the workshop I’m going to show you how to do this like I’ve gotten it the way I can build using Hermes now I can like get entire things like entire projects done within like 10 20 minutes. It’s crazy. Uh and it totally works on like other devices and things like that as well. So it’s like spent I perfected the way at least for me I perfected the way to be able to to do that. Um and then I want to talk about some other build some ideas as well as some ideas that you can build using Hermes as well. Okay. So Tacobot. So for each Hermes agent it requires certain parts. You can think of it kind of like Lego, right? Like you have um your Hermes agent and you can customize it depending on how it is that you want to do. So for Taco Bell for example, we can see that it lives on Discord, right? So Taco Bell lives on Discord and the model that I’m using right now is using Gemini 3.8 Flash because it’s really fast, but sometimes I do want to have it completely local. Um, which I would use the Quen 3.635b model. And the home for Taco is on the Mac Studio that I have here. You don’t need to have a Mac Studio. You can run it in a lot of different places, including like a VPS, um, on your computer, a lot of different things. But I happen to just have it on my Mac Studio and you can and then you need to give it a certain data access. For me, I gave it a data access to notion, GitHub, calendar, meetings, uh recordings and discord threads. That’s why it’s able to answer questions, right? It’s able to answer questions uh that I ask it and it’s also able to store that information as well. So, in a memory, it has what is called honcho shared memory. So, it’s able to have like specific memory. Not going to go into too much detail about that. Um but it also has long-term memory, which is on Obsidian, which I showed you guys earlier. Any questions about Taco, how it’s built?
Will you hardware requirements recommendation prior to workshop? Yes, we will. But honestly, I would be shocked if you don’t have the hardware requirements. The only thing I can think of that would make it make you unable to do it is if you don’t have a laptop at all. If you have like only if you only have a phone, I think that’s going to be hard. But pretty much even if you have like a Raspberry Pi, that would be fine. um as hardware. Like really with hardware, I think people don’t realize how accessible it actually is now. Like if you have like 4 GB of RAM, that’s enough for hardware. Yeah, you don’t get to have like local models, but you can always use cloud models. Um hi Tina, I’m using Grobot for very similar kind of bots. How do you compare both things, right? I think they’re completely different, right? They’re very different sorts of things. With Hermes, it’s the whole point of Hermes. Like why is it that we use Hermes as opposed to something else is because it allows you to switch out models. You’re not like bound to to like Grock, for example. You’re not bound to OpenAI, for example. You’re able to switch out models and you can also make it completely local, too. So sometimes there’s things that you maybe don’t want these tech companies to have the information that you have, right? So um you can use completely local models and have Hermes running locally, too. So none of this information ever gets out. so powerful, especially if you’re in a team and you don’t want, you know, your team secrets to be leaking out. Um, workshop. Yes, I’m excited to see you guys. So, what amount of memory would you recommend for local models? I think to have a decent local model, 16 gigs is I would say you can get a very very decent model with 16 gigs. 8 gigs I think is okay. Like you can have a decent conversation with it. Um, you know, like I you want you guys want to guess what do you think is the smallest mo model that you can run that um is able to run a model like smallest amount of RAM available to run a model. I was curious if you guys can guess. A little hint, my ESP32 is able to run a model. Like this tiny little thing over here is able to run a model. Take a guess.
0.5. Yeah. Yeah. 0.5. Exactly. Um, so the ones I think I believe it is three megabytes. It was able to run a model that is three megabytes. That is and you’re able to have like you’re this one you can’t really have a conversation with, but it’s able to generate stories. These are called like tiny stories models. And yeah, like that’s that’s it. This is how like how small of a device you can actually use in order to run models. So don’t be worried that your device is not good enough to run Hermes or run models. Yeah, good guess. Yay. Good job. Um,
okay. So, I I already showed you guys LifeBot. So, that’s the way that Lifebot works. Um, if you guys have seen my Obsidian video, Lifebot is heavily dependent on Obsidian because that is where it gathers all of that data and stores it as a AI database in Obsidian. And Lifebot, which is a Hermes agent, is able to access that directly. Um so because of that database like very very high quality data that is what makes lifebot really really good
and here are the specs for lifebot. So communication wise it’s on telegram as I have just shown you the model that I use I currently am using deepseek v4 pro um but I also sometimes use GPD 5.6 picked terra uh depending on I don’t know the the vibe that I feel like that day where sometimes there’s like free credits for certain things I would use that. Um but they’re both really good and if I want to use a local model, my favorite model is still the Quen 3.635B. I honestly think it’s one of like the best models to be able to run locally cuz yeah, like it’s just good enough where you don’t need like a massive machine to be able to run it. Uh but it’s able to pretty much do everything that you need. The home is also on the Mac Studio. Again, it doesn’t need to be. It can be on any device. Like if you have a laptop, chances are you’re going to be able to run it completely fine. Data access, as I said, Pomodoro, typewriter, Apple Health or Ring, and food tracking and exercise logs. Like I have this all stored in the AI database. And in terms of memory, um is the same setup as Tacobot. Uh so Honcho shared memory. So it’s able to get information as well as long-term obsidian memory. Any questions about Lifebot?
question. Obsidian is more of an archive/ library than persistent memory. How do you deal with outdated or superseded material in Obsidian? Great question. Uh so the short answer is that I make sure that what is being written is of a high quality. For example, if I’m doing logs and stuff, right, it’s not going to be information that’s going to become irrelevant because it’s very very well formatted. The long answer is that I use something called an LLM wiki. So, it’s able to prune that information over time. It actually does it automatically. Workshop. Yes. You see everything I just showed you, right? Lifebot um and and Tacobot like we’re going to be you guys will be building this yourselves on your computer or whatever device it is that you’re choosing to VPS whatever machine. Um yes, we’re you will have your very own versions of you can build these things. Um, let’s see. Which Gemma model which Gemma model? Not sure I understand the question. I do have an anthropic cla subscription. Can I use it with Hermes? You can use your claude code with Hermes. Yes, that’s fine.
Okay, next slide. Okay, so makes sense, right? Very cool. comment lifebot if you understand why lifebot is is is amazing and useful and important. Um,
if you get if you get if you get a livebot if you get it. If you get it if you get it. You get it. If you get it.
Yes. Yes. Okay. I’m really glad that you guys get it. like life bought single-handedly has really really changed how productive I am. And not just that, like also like tracking stuff. Um I’m the kind of person that’s like I always wanted to track my exercise. I wanted to track like my food intake and all these things, but I’m just I’m like way too lazy. I can’t handle it actually having to track it myself. So I just get Lifebot to do all of it for me. Someone said Wifebot. Hey, you can try you can try Wifebot. I don’t know. I cannot confirm or deny if that is good or not. Um, okay, let’s move on. So, let’s talk about the actual tools that I use. Okay, so the stack underneath all of the Hermes agents that I build. So, obviously the first one is having Hermes agent which is the home base. So, um, it has a desktop app, a terminal or a dashboard. So, you can have all these different things. Um, let me actually show you
I’m try to do this without like crashing the system. Okay, I might end up having to crash it. Okay, I’m going to try um I do
I’m going to actually log into my Mac Studio right now and I want to show you like the Hermes itself what it actually looks like. Hopefully it lets me do that.
Okay.
Okay. I think we’re being a bit laggy because my laptop might not be able to handle this right now.
Okay, I’m going to try. If it lags then alas. Wait, that’s not gonna work. Uh, okay. Okay. So, this is me logging in to my Mac Studio, right? Where a lot of these Hermes agents are running. And you can see that this is Hermes over here.
Um, yeah, it’s really slow because I’m trying to live stream at the same time, but this is the Hermes desktop app and it’s really easy. This is what I mean. You don’t even need to know how to code. Like you can say like install life file for me. I’m not going to run this right now just cuz you know we’re live right now. But this is what it looks like and you can have like different agents that you can talk to directly um as well. So there’s like different sessions that you can talk into directly. So that’s one one way to access it. You can also access it through terminal. So for example, you can go in terminal over here and say something like oops. You can also do say h
live chat
and that loads the Hermes agent as well. So I can say you can see that has Gemini 3.8 flash. You can be like hi.
Yeah. and it’s able to talk to you. So, there’s like um this is what it looks like. Just kind of show you guys what that looks like. That is what it looks like. Um so, you can do it through your terminal using code, but you can also do it using the desktop app. So, either way, if you know how to code, you don’t know how to code, you can do it both ways. So, it’s actually really really accessible. Okay, let’s see if anybody has any questions. Does anybody have any questions about what Hermes looks like? How many of you guys have actually tried running Hermes agent? Just write Hermes if you’ve actually run your own Hermes agent just for me to kind of get a vibe.
Let me just also move go back to the slides. Okay, cool.
How many of you guys have ran you done your Okay, nice. So, a lot of you guys have done it, right? Okay, great. So, a lot of you have tried. So, for those of you that have tried, who haven’t tried, um, do you feel like what you’ve built has been useful for you so far? For those of you who haven’t tried, I hope that kind of shows you like it’s really not super scary, intimidating to actually get started using Hermes. There’s like they have a full desktop app now, so you don’t even need to know how to code, which is pretty cool, right? Me, I don’t know how to create more than one agent/bot in Hermes. You can make multiple profiles. That’s what they’re called, multiple profiles. So useful. I have Hermes, but I don’t know how to set up the different agent you got set up. Hopefully can learn that from you. Yeah. Um, you can. So, I have a lot of free content on this where you can join the workshop where I actually be taking through this with you like step by step. But really, like I promise you it is not as difficult as you think it is. Um, once you actually get the hang of it.
I don’t have API key so I can’t use it a lot. That is fair. Olama versus Llama CPP for Hermes. Great question. Yeah. So, Olama is actually built on top of Llama CPP. So, it’s a easier way for you to access um local models if you use Olama. However, if you want to have more control and also be faster, you would just use Llama CPP directly. I use Llama CPP directly. Uh you do need to know like you you got to like do a little bit of code if you’re going to use Llama CPP. So, you know, it’s not that hard, but you do need to know a little bit of code. So, if you can, I would use Llama CPP. Uh, but if you want to just get it like really fast and running, you can use Oama. That’s the distinction.
Okay. All right. So, anyways, so what do you need to actually build what I just showed you, right? These things I just showed you. So, obviously, first you need to have a Hermes agent. It’s free. Just download it. Um, then you need AI chat. So, with AI chat, what I mean is I like to use Claude or OpenAI um in order to think through what I’m going to be building first. I’ll show you guys in a little bit uh what I mean by that. But I actually always want to like think through what I’m building first with AI before I actually go and execute it. Um you also would need an AI coding agent. I mean you don’t need a coding agent, but it does make things a lot faster if you have an AI coding agent if you’re using codeex cloud code where you can use just open code an open source version because this can help you execute a lot faster if you’re using an AI coding agent. Um another thing that you need is an Obsidian AI database. So, queryable record, which I just showed you earlier, of past builds, specs, like a lot of information that you can store into your Obsidian AI database. And then this one is kind of optional, but I think it’s really helpful. It’s an Obsidian LM wiki. How many of you guys have heard about an LM wiki before? Comment LM wiki if you have heard about it before. Um, put simply, an LM wiki is a managed library of different sources that you can query and it’s fully managed by AI. So, it’s like you’re able to take notes and then that a the AI is able to like go through it, scan it, get rid of stale stuff, update it over time, and you can also query and ask your questions too. So, I kind of want to show you guys. I have a LM wiki that’s dedicated to Hermes actually because every time I find something new that I think is interesting, I would put it into my LM wiki so that when I want to build using it later, I can ask my wiki bot um who access this by LM wiki to be able to give me information about it. For example, I’m just giving you example. I’m like maybe I come across this really cool like holographic memory, right? Wow, so interesting. What is holographic memory? Who knows? And it’s like what’s this is in Chinese? What’s that mean? you know. Um, and I can do something like I hope this works. Live demos. Oh, please work. Yeah. So, all I have to do is put the link over here through my wiki bot. Again, wiki bot is also a Hermes agent. So, see how flexible Hermes agents are. Um, it also a Hermes agent. Let’s wait a little bit. Hopefully, it’s able to digest the information that I give it.
LM wiki. Okay, great. Some of you guys know. Nice. A lot of you guys actually have done LM wikis. That’s pretty cool. Please. Why is it being so slow?
Okay. I hope I’m not like crashing it. Let’s answer some questions. Please. I know. Live demos, you know, live demos. I mean, it’s actually worked thus far. So, if this doesn’t this doesn’t work, I’m not going to be super shy. I wouldn’t even be mad because honestly it’s been like pretty decent up until now. As you see, I was like literally testing it at like 6:42 p.m. and it was fine. So, but it’s a live demo.
Okay, let’s see if it’s going to work or not. I’m going answer some questions. Oh man, obviously it’s going to not work right now. Okay, I’m going to try again. I’m going to try to query it. Um, tell me about how to make a conbon board.
Oh, okay. No. Okay. Never. I’m sorry. It was It was It was just being slow cuz
ah darn it. It’s okay. Let’s answer some more questions.
Um, don’t worry. It happened to me in my presentation yesterday, right? Like obviously if it’s going to fail it has to do it. It has to do it during your live demo. Always. Always. Um show us the live loss is working on LM as it’s working on LM wiki. Uh I’m not going to do that right now cuz I got a SSH into my Mac Studio and I don’t want to crash everything cuz I’m live streaming right now. So going to have to trust that it’s doing Hey, see look look it’s doing it right now. Actually you can just read here. Yes. Um,
you’re brave just for trying live demos, right? I’ve been showing you guys live demos the entire time. So, thank you. I I feel I feel like I’m I’m being acknowledged for how brave I am right now. Thank you. Glad you have issues, too. I have issues every day, like constantly. Uh, what do you use SSH to your Mac Studio? I just uh use Oh, I use tail scale. Yes.
What is the cost of ingesting data in LM Wiki in terms of token usage? Great question. It depends on the model that you’re using. If you’re using a local model, it’s free.
Any good resources to find models that work with one or two gigs of GPUs with Olama? Uh, you can just ask an AI to do that. Just ask like what what works, you know, that works. Hey, it actually worked. Wow, isn’t that amazing that it actually worked? Okay, so let’s see. Let’s see. Let’s see about holographic memory. So, holographic is experimental local first persistent memory engine for AI agents. Its main features are blah blah blah. So, it tells you like and then it also tells me how to create dedicated combon board. So, blah blah blah all these different things. Okay, so what does it actually look like? If I go to my Obsidian, I can actually show you what it looks like. What my little this version of my LM wiki looks like.
Please work. Please. Um, okay. Obsidian over here. Um,
so go to my wiki. Okay. Whoa. Okay.
Queries, concepts. So, I have a lot of concepts that are here. Raw. Okay. So, here are the raw things that I ingested. I think it’s cuz I interrupted it earlier due to my impatience that you don’t actually see the um I’m just going to try this again just cuz I do want it to ingest. So it should ingest. So let me just try this again. Um it’s going to ingest it at some point. But you can see like here’s the things that all the raw things that it’s stored. So it would actually document all of this and then it’s able to make a bunch of connections. um based upon these. So this is what the LM wiki actually looks like. So not going to go into way too much detail right now just cuz not that much time. Oh wow, we’re already at 10:47. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So then um it’s able to ingest it and then it’s also able to query it. So that’s why it’s able to tell me like oh here’s how you can build something like a combon board, right? Um and it’s able to cross reference that with my actual Hermes build. So it can tell me exact steps for doing things. So that’s the other tool that I like to use when I’m building. Um, yes. Let me go back to the slides.
I get so excited when I talk about the builds. Okay, cool. So, let’s let’s let it do this. It’s currently extracting and ingesting all of this into DLM wiki, but let’s go back to the slides first. So, these are the things that I use in order to do my builds. All right. Um, does anybody have any questions about any of these tools that I just described before I talk about how I use these tools to build it?
Open obsidian stuff about my life. No. Obsidian versus Ellen. Wiki comparison. Why I need both? Obsidian is a tool. LM wiki is the implementation of an LLM managed uh Wikipedia page. It’s not Wikipedia page like it called like wiki like wiki resource. You’re just you’re using Obsidian in order to implement an LM wiki and to visualize the LM wiki. So completely different things.
Does LM wiki work the same way Hermes does? So, I actually used Hermes to build my LM wiki. My LM wiki is managed by my Hermes. Everything I’m showing you guys because this is a Hermes live stream. Like everything I’m showing you guys, I built using Hermes. Yes. Pretty cool, right? I’m telling you, like Hermes is freaking pretty magical in my opinion. Um, okay. I’m going to Okay, so it says that it has been captured. So, it’s going to show up in Obsidian now. So, let’s actually see if it shows up in Obsidian.
I want to show you guys real quick before I move on.
There you go. See, it showed up in my Obsidian now. Great. Um, okay. Let’s go back. I want to show you guys the actual process that I built this cuz I think this part is really important. So, I don’t want to rush that. Uh, okay. Yes. So how do I actually build this? So from idea to running the agent, right? So what I do is like I have a I basically collect a bunch of things that I want to build where I think it’s interesting for my um for my Hermes build, right? Cuz you can customize and build so many different things with it. So I collect it and I use my LM wiki in order to send it links of like cool things that I find so that it’s able to store that in that wiki. Um it’s filed by Wikbot which is managed by Hermes. When the time comes I’m like I actually really want to build this thing. I would query the LM wiki like I did earlier. Say like I want to build stuff using a combin board. It would actually tell me like step by step how does I do it. So in order to implement this um I would then go to a chat like claude or open AAI and then I would come up with a runbook. So I can’t actually show you my Claude right now because I don’t have a VPN turned on cuz I worry that it’s going to kill my stream right now. So I’m going to show you what the runbook looks like though. I work on this run book um with Claude. Where is it? Please show up. Where’d you go? Run book.
Okay.
Okay. Yes, it is not beautiful. So, sorry about that. You don’t have to read it. Like, it’s just the concept of it. So I basically come up with this run book using claude based upon the information I have in my in my LM wiki and then it would come up with like for this is like literally one of the builds that I was doing right so it’s called the Hermes expansion road map and it would come up with different phases this is when I was building taco bot which is the LOL team bot um and then phase B which is lifebot uh phase C retry patterns blah blah blah so it literally has this run book and then what I do which is this is the part okay are you guys ready this is this is like the magical part okay After I build this runbook, I would go and just use a coding agent and just give it to the coding agent and ask it to build it for me. That’s it. It just does it. It like that’s that’s what you do like just open cloud code or like open code or codeex whatever you want to use and then just give it like I want to see like I just go and type in like I want to run this runbook, right? So I would just give it like phase a like this is what I want to do and just give it to your coding agent and it’s able to implement this. It’s not crazy. So in some ways like what is the most like useful thing in terms of what you’re building is the actual runbook itself. Once you actually have the runbook in terms of what it is that you want to build and you figure out what it is that you want to build the rest of it you can just hand it off to a coding agent. So what I said here the slow step is the point. So put the effort into figuring out the runbook up front. Even if it takes days or weeks so you’re not spending even more time fixing to build afterwards. Cuz if you don’t spend time on your run run runbook then you’re not going to be building the right things and then you’re going to be very sad as you’re trying to fix things. So this part is the most important part. I was telling you earlier like why is it that I can like build this entire thing on live stream and I can like during our workshop I can do this in two hours, right? But it took me like months to actually get to this point is because I was trying to figure out what the run book is supposed to be. But once I figured out how to do it, the execution step is so fast for using a coding agent. Okay, any questions? I think this is like legit like probably the most important part like the process of execution of building your Hermes. Um, is this so any questions?
Why does Hermes sometimes give me answers that are trashy? Why does Hermes sometimes hallucinate? Um, it can be a few reasons. Maybe it’s because you’re not using a good model. It could also be because you’re not prompting Hermes. So, you’re not prompting it, giving it the right prompts. That could also be the case. also one of the reasons why you want your runbook to be really good because if you are that’s probably like two of the major reasons why that could be the case.
Do you read it? Read the run book. Um I do read it. I skim through it like just to make sure it’s okay. But as I’m building it with Claude War Open AI um as I’m building it I would be like asking it to just going back and forth like I try to understand everything that it’s actually building. So I do try my best to actually understand what it’s building and not just like oh whatever like do whatever you want you know I do try my best to actually understand it. Yeah, I don’t read it like I I don’t like look at every single command on it. Uh cuz that would take me forever, but I do read generally speaking like what is in there. Like for example, we look at phase eight, right? So I I get the steps. So build plus test. So I’m like, oh okay, like stage one is building both bot presents in both servers from day one. Um staging is done by access control. And then like okay, this looks about right. And then I go like stage two is team roll out. This makes sense, right? is if I’m building a bot when I was putting it taco bot into discord I wanted to actually test that it worked first by itself before I put it into discord where the entire team has access to it right so that’s why um I do have this like general staging that I would do I also asked it to give me like time estimates which is kind of like it’s not always very accurate because of the coding agents you’re able to do it much faster than the time estimates so it would tell you that oh it’s going to take like a week or like you know 30 minutes or something but if you use a coding agent um it takes like a few minutes to implement something like
Um, is it actually true that Hermes gets better or improves the more we use it? Yes, it is true. It creates skills by itself. Yeah. Your runbook is PRD plus implementation. Am I correct? Yes, I think that’s a good way of Yeah. Yeah. You know what? That’s a good way of putting it. Yes, it is. It’s like PRD plus implementation and done so in a way that I can give to coding agents so that they’re able to build the thing that I want specifically how I want it. What model are you using for your Hermes? Depends on which agent. I use different models for different agents. How do you optimize which model Hermes uses for each task? Oh, okay. That’s kind of like general understanding of different models. Um, for example, if I want something really fast and I don’t want it to be costing me like a lot of money and I don’t want to be running a local model, for example, I would just use probably like Gemini or uh GPT terra or GBT Luna. If I want something to be super fast, I would do that. Uh, I’ve actually I really like using Claude code for example and Claude, but I very rarely use Claude models for my Hermes agent because even though it runs on my like I have a subscription and I would run using my my Claude subscription, I just feel like it’s really expensive and it doesn’t work. Um, it’s not really worth the amount of money. It just it burns my credits really hard. So, I actually don’t generally use any cloud models for Hermes. Um, do you have courses to learn more fundamentals on how you build? I do. I have a lot of videos on that. You should check them out. Um, how do you prompt to get a good run book? That is a very good question. I kind of like I can’t really show you right now because of the VPN situation, but I think that that is a skill. Like I just like I’ve gotten really good at figuring out like what’s the right questions to ask. So, I think you’re just going to have to like see it at some point. Um, you just need to like think about all of the edge cases as you’re building the runbook and you gain that intuition over time. Sorry, I hope I can I wish I can give you a better answer than that. Um,
how to add knowledge in Hermes since it doesn’t support rag by using something like AI database like I showed you in Obsidian.
Use Tina’s videos for learning. Her videos rock. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. What model are you using for building the agents? Oh, that’s a good question. So, I’m using coding agents to build it. So, I primarily use codeex and cloud code. Those are my two. I sometimes use open code as well, but I primarily use codeex and cloud code. call code is what I would um use if it’s something that is pretty like linear and just like it just needs to implement code directly, right? But if I want to build something that has more like images um that has needs like you know visual stuff, I would use codeex for that. Yeah.
Okay. Well, 1058. All right, I’m going to continue on. Oops. just because we’re running out of time. Okay, so yes, I have some other builds which I don’t really have time to show you guys right now as demos, but um these are some other builds. Hopefully, you know, some ideas that you have. So, for example, I have a coder one that is able to draft a spec. I can draft a spec on Discord and then it would go and just ship the build directly by itself. So, this is like autonomous coding. Um, so I have that. I also have a watchdog which is kind of boring but it’s a alert channel that makes sure all my agents are online and doing okay at all times. Um I have the wiki bot which I showed you guys already. This guy over here. Oops. Oops. Ignore that. I have Rebal bot which I’m building as well. This is an always on research agent that is turning things that it finds like ideas that it finds online into different ideas for content um also for execution like for like building software and stuff like that. So this is Revalbot um that I’m building as well. And then the newest one that I built is called Sensei um and it turns books and resources into skills. So, I don’t know about you guys, but if you ever like read a book, especially like a non-fiction kind of like self-help kind of book, it would give you like exercise. It would give you like this framework here like what and as you’re reading it, you’re like, “Wow, yes, amazing.” You know, makes sense. I’m going to execute on this. And then by the time you finish reading the book, you just kind of like forget about it where you’re too lazy and you don’t actually do any of the exercises. So imagine if you can turn a book into a personal coach that’s able to like go through everything and actually get you to execute on the books that you read. So I built Sensei um in order to do that. So testing it out. Um this one I did on my BPS as well. So yeah, this one is a really cool one. I think if you if you want to experiment with something and you like reading books, especially like non-fiction, self-help books, things like that, this is a really cool one to build. and some other ideas that I’m currently looking into as well. Maybe some ideas for you. So, it would include things like productivity like dictation uh to structure document. If you’re someone who likes to talk a lot into Telegram, for example, you can like dictate it and can just directly make it into a structured doc. Uh people who have like X to notebook LM podcast. So, you can pull like XL books like you know just pull them there and then compile them into a notebook. um meeting auto transcriber self-explanatory. So these are some ideas. Um health and wellness like journal into obsidian so you can dump your day’s log at night and it gets filed properly into your obsidian. So this is another Hermes agent you can build. These are all like different types of Hermes agents ideas that you can build with on the life side. Plain English home control. So if you have like um what is it called like Alexa or you know like any type of um IoT devices that that can control your home, you can also have a Hermes agent that controls that directly which is pretty cool. So you get your like Jarvis situation deal watcher. You can have an agent that is able to look at prices for you. Um say if you’re want to buy something, you want to see when it’s going to go on sale, you can have a Hermes agent that’s constantly looking at it and will alert you when there’s a sale that’s happening for the thing you want to buy. Um, on the op side, group chat digest, we have that already. Um, so it’s able to summarize a bunch of chats. I don’t know if you have like a lot of WhatsApp groups or discord groups. So, it’s able to summarize everything for you. Compiling skills into code. This is a really good one as well. um over time if you build a lot of skills using LMS if you want to it might be because like LMS um if you’re using text it’s inherently going to be not as stable as deterministic right so you can also compile your skills that you’re building your pipelines into code to make sure that it’s much more stable over time so this one is a little bit like abstract but it’s a really useful one if you’re someone who wants to make sure that your workflows are very very streamlined and you don’t potentially have issues that pop That’s that’s a good one to build. Yeah. So, question, which one are you excited to build with Hermes? I hope like this kind of gives you some ideas of things that you can build like all the things that you can build using Hermes. And put into the chat. I want to know like what kind of things do you want to build with Hermes
Sensei? Very good ideas. I have a lot of books. Right. Yeah. Um, how many Telegram bot I can connect to Hermes? You can have as many Hermes profiles as you want and you can connect a Telegram bot to each of them if you want. Yeah.
Sufu can sense SU to debate a topic. True. Uh do you have local agent? Yes. So Hermes agents are inherently all local agents and if you use a local model, it’s a fully local setup. So is it it is like a Jarvis in real life if you tune it correctly. Yes, if you build your runbook properly, if you do that properly, then yes, you can absolutely do that. How do you get the books to the bot? Good question. So you can have PDFs or audio versions of it. Um that’s usually the best. Honestly, if you just like look at summaries that people have, like a lot of people have like text summaries as well. So you can use that to ingest into your Hermes to build out the skills. Do you stream on Twitch? No, I do not stream on Twitch. No, I do not. Maybe I should.
How are your electronics learning going on? It’s going good. I was showing you guys earlier like I’ve been building a lot of stuff with electronics. Um kind of like building with models, but I started off like just connecting with like literally just like sensors um and like different LED lights and stuff. And I’m trying to figure out like how to use AI models to control them. So using an AI model in order uh using AI model with Hermes usually with Hermes or without Hermes in order to control these like hardware stuff. Yeah. So it’s going good. I would say I’m still too scared to actually solder. I feel like that’s like the ne next step for me is to learn how to solder. And I’m just kind of scared. I did have to take a hardware class when I was in school, but I was I think I almost failed that class. I’m just Yeah, I don’t know. Oh, I think at that time I was just not into hardware. Hi. Hello. Is there a better choice between Telegram and Discord? Yeah, there’s a lot of choices. I just happen to use Telegram and Discord a lot. You can use WhatsApp. You can use like they I think there’s like 10 15 different ways that you can use I can’t like think of them at the top of my head. Like I message like there’s a lot of ways that you can communicate with it. It doesn’t need to be Telegram or Discord. Is it hardware you’re talking about IoT? Yes.
Learn to solder at 14 years old. Dang, that’s pretty cool.
My local AI on Hermes agent is so dumb. What do I do? Depends. Make it less dumb. What’s wrong with it? I mean, like I said, I really think like learning the fundamentals, like going through figuring it out. It took me like a really long time to figure out as well. Like seriously, it really did. So, if you’re just like trying to figure it out all by yourself constantly and assuming that your full-time job is not learning things, which is my full-time job, it makes sense that it’s not like great in the beginning, right? Like it’s fine. Um,
what’s the best free API provider you would recommend? I think like if you have um it kind of depends cuz some people sometimes they have it on honestly local models right cuz that’s completely free if you just download them locally and use them then they’re completely free. So that’s I guess the the best API the free the best free API if you just download the models locally. Open router. Yes. Did I say open code? Yes. Open router. That’s what I meant. Open router. Yes. Um. Yes. Okay. Any other questions? Let’s see. Uh, okay. Yes. Little plug again. If you are interested in building all of these things, I will teach you like all the basics. Um, as well as how like the runbook, right? Like how to actually go through it. Like I’ll be actually building it on the spot. Like we’ll be doing the workshop. You’ll be following along. So, pretty much everything I’ve learned over the past few months and all the experience that I have, I would be showing you all of that into like a 2-hour workshop. So, if you’re interested, you can check it out. And yes, I do have a guarantee as well. 7-day 100% money back guarantee, no questions asked. So, I am confident that this will be really, really helpful to people who actually are interested in building the things that I’ve just shown you guys. So, that’s why 7-day 100% money back guarantee. Sounds good. Any questions?
Oh, and for anybody who wants the slides, uh, I do send out these slides as well. So, feel free to Here, I’ll put that here. You can sign up for this and then if you sign up for it, I will send you the slides that I just showed for this live stream there.
If we can’t be there for the live workshop, can it be available for later? Yes, it will be fully recorded. You also get the runbooks. Um, everything will be there so you can use it anytime. When is boot camp coming? Ooh, good question. I can’t make any promises right now. We’re restructuring a lot of stuff. That’s why I haven’t done like another boot camp yet cuz I do feel like the boot camp I want to like make sure everything is like very up to date. So yeah, not yet. When is the Hermes workshop? It is on October 3rd. Have you tried OpenCloud 2.0? Lots of changes since you last used it. You know what? I haven’t tried it in a while. So, you know, maybe I will try it. Thank you for the suggestion. Yes, please. The size. Okay. Yeah. If you want to do the slides, then please um sign up for the newsletter and we’ll I’ll send you a size in like a few hours. Yes. Oh, yes. Boot camp. Yes, boot camp. The AI agents boot camp. Yep. We’re revamping a lot of stuff. So, do sign up for the newsletter as well. We will be giving you more information about that. And if you do the workshop, you also get $100 off for the um boot camp as well. So, if you wish. Is this beginner friendly? Yes, completely beginner friendly. No coding required. You can code if you want. Uh but no coding required at all. I’ll be showing you how to do everything, which I’ve spent months and months doing trying to figure this out. So, trust me, it’s going to save you so much time. Will you be launching an IoT workshop soon? Would you guys actually want me to do that? I’ve been thinking like, should I make more content at least like starting off with content first? Should I make more content about like IoT um and like how I’m building stuff and running models like using devices and things? Maybe I will if you guys are interested. Can you show the Quen model you said earlier was very good? Yeah, I actually send you I’ll do you better. I’m going to send you a link for it. Um, okay. Let me find it for you.
This model is the one I use locally the most.
There’s also a um smaller version of this. Like quen models are really good in the sense that there’s so many different sizes available. So if you can’t do the 36B pram, you can do the 27B pram. That’s also pretty good and they have lower ones as well. So just choose whichever. Like I think if you’re starting off with a model, um going with the Quen family is usually a good choice just cuz they have so much variability. So much not variability, variety that you can choose from depending on how big your device is. That would be my suggestion. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you supporting the channel. Thank you for the super chat.
I can’t actually see your Oh,
thank you so much for the super chat. I appreciate it.
Happy Cape Dogs. Thank you so much, Lei. Appreciate it.
How would you recommend attending your class if you already have a lot of things partially set up? Oh, yes. Great question. Everything that we do is going to be on different profiles. So, if you do have a Hermes set up already there, don’t worry at all. Like, everything we’re doing, it’s not going to affect your current Hermes. So, do not worry.
Uh, there’s a new 27B that is faster. Yes, I think in the Quen family, right? Yes, I think so. I haven’t tried that one out yet. How is it? If anybody has tried it. Do you think I can run locally with Lenovo Yoga ThinkPad? Honestly, you can I can run local models on this little guy over here. Okay, so this has like I think 8 megabytes of RAM. So, yes, you can pretty much run if you have like a laptop, you’ll be fine. Of any fashion, of any sort. If you have a laptop, you’ll be fine.
Uh, thank you, Roxy. Have you tried a new Quen 3.8? I have tried it, but I haven’t really tested it extensively. It’s not I think Quen 3.8 is not open. It’s the one that’s not open source, right?
I haven’t tried it like extensively. So, I did try I just tried it, but I’m pretty sure this is Wait, is Wait, wait. Is it the open source one or is it 3.7 that’s not open source? No. No. 3.8 is the one that’s open source. Yes. Yes. I think I think No, this one was good. This one was good. Oh, yeah. This one was really good. 3.7 is the one that wasn’t open source. So, I tried that one, which I wasn’t sure. Can’t make it on 3rd of October. Well, if you want, it is all recorded as well. And you can always email us if you have extra questions, too. So, that works. But up to you guys if you wish. If you wish. Um, do you try DeepSync models? Yeah, one of my favorite models is the DeepSc V4 Pro. That’s probably my favorite model to use because it’s cheap and it’s also very multiunctional. Like um, it can do a lot of different things.
Bonsai is the new 27B smaller in the size. Interesting. Okay, thank you. I need to check that out. There’s always so many new models coming out. 35B A3B is so much faster than 27B on my 8 GB of VRAM. How are you running a 35B model on a 8 gig VRAM laptop? Are you just quantizing it a lot? Cuz that shouldn’t work. I think um Deep Sync Pro is deprecated. Deep Flash is the new one. That’s Wait, I thought No, no, I think those are two different families, right? Is it? Are you sure? Wait, I’ll be using Deep Seek Pro. I can’t keep up. There’s too many updates. Okay. Okay, good to know. I’m going to try that out. I think I still am using Team Sync Pro. Okay, cool. I’m going to try it out. Um, why Hermes and not Open Claw? That’s a good question. So, I did start off using Open Claw and somebody did say that, you know what, maybe Open Claw is good to revisit again. But the reason why I switched to Hermes was because I wanted to build more like capable more like extensive things that that’s more stable over time. And I found that Hermes was a lot more stable and also because it’s self-learning. I felt that it was just easier to use as well. That was the major reason. Although OpenCloud does have more integrations for sure. So that is true.
Okay, I’m going to stay for like a couple more minutes and then I shall go to sleep cuz it’s 11:15 p.m. Um,
open call open call two. They said, “Okay, I will try it out.” But I don’t know. I’m kind of liking my Hermes build right now. I think al the one good thing though is that you can actually transfer Hermes to open cloud and open cloud to Hermes. I don’t know if you guys knew that. You can actually do that.
11:15 p.m. Where are you based? I am based in Hong Kong right now.
Open clan 2. Are you still connected to notebook LM? What does connected mean? I I use Notebook LM. I don’t have like personal connections to Google or Notebook LM though. Do you pay for Hermes agent monthly plan? Yeah, I do. Um, so I pay for Hermes the news research the news. It’s called a new subscription. News portal. Yeah, news portal. Yes, news portal subscription. I do pay for it monthly. I do like the $20 one and I kind of like top it up if I’m doing something that is a little bit more expensive. Okay. Oops, I disappeared. Okay,
cool. All right. Thank you guys so much for joining. I hope this was helpful to you guys. I really hope this is helpful. This is a lot of fun. I haven’t done a live stream in a while. Um, okay, cool. Thanks, Richard. Deep Seek Pro is still there. Good to know. Great. Yes. I hope this was helpful for you guys. I hope you can see like how much stuff that you can build with Hermes. Uh I’ve had so much fun building with Hermes in the past like few months. So I really hope that you guys are able to have fun doing it as well. And for those of you who are attending the workshop, thank you so much for choosing to attend this workshop. Um I promise that we will try our absolute best to give you the best value possible and everything that we have learned, experimented, done for all these months of pretty much grinding it out every single day. We’re going to compact that all together so you’re able to build these things that I’m showing you right now as build anything really. After you learn how Hermes work and the mechanism for building, how to come up with a runbook, how to use coding agents, literally you’ll be so shocked by how many amazing things that you can build using Hermes. So really excited to be able to unlock that for you guys. Thank you so much and I will see you guys in the next video or live stream. Have a good rest of your day. See you.
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09/22/2026 – Agentic Trading Explained – Can your AI Actually Trade For You – Webull Tech CEO Jack Keating
Most people’s entire relationship with the market is just with a green button in an app. But that’s not the case for Weeble’s head of AI and CEO of Weeble Technologies. He’s handling everything behind that green button. The rails that let software touch the market, the intelligence that can read it and explain it if you let it, trade it in plain English, plus everything that comes next. I’m Allison and today on Market Conversations, we’re going to get into open APIs, API agents, Vega, and what your money will look like 10 years from now, all with the person actually building it. Jack Keading, the head of AI and CEO of Weeble Technologies. Thank you for being here, Jack. Great to be here, Alison. Let’s get into what your role entails and what is Weeble Technologies. Absolutely. So, excited to be here. Uh talk a bit about Weeble Technologies. Uh we’re a startup uh still in many ways and I wear a few hats. So as part of Weeble Technologies, I cover our AI, our UIUX. Uh I also lead our Weeble institutional business and am the senior manager here in our St. Pete uh Florida headquarters. That’s a mouthful, just a bit many hats. Yeah, I’d say a few spinning plates, but uh it’s an exciting exciting role. Yeah, it sounds it. So what is your day-to-day like? Day-to-day? So, uh, we’ll get to work on a lot of different areas. Uh, that includes new product, which I’m excited to talk about today. Um, a lot of, uh, people management as well. So, we’ve got, uh, about 200 people here in St. Pete, Florida. And, um, many of those managers roll up into me. So, it’s not just all software and AI. We are still dealing with people. Yes. Many people problems. And, uh, I also have our our risk team, our institutional group uh, rolling into me. So, a little bit of business, a little bit of operations and uh product as well. Okay. Well, you did mention a lot of things just now and all the hats that you wear. So, let’s start at the beginning and discuss what open API is. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh open API, uh it’s a feature that’s been around at Weeble for a while. Um historically, it is a capability to expose certain connections to the public uh that would allow them to interact with their Weeble account through software. So uh for many years that required you to know uh a coding language. Python uh was Weeble’s um way to allow engineers, developers to create software that would interact with their account. Uh with Chat GBT and the other uh AI developments in recent history, uh this has changed uh the game so to speak that you don’t need to be necessarily an engineer to interact with open API. Well, I was going to ask you who’s using Open API because when I first looked at it, it’s a little intimidating if you don’t know how to do all of those things because it does look like you’re coding software. So, to start it was uh not a huge number of people. You needed to kind of have technical expertise and um it was something we’d made available. um hadn’t been really uh I would say a wide market that was attracted to it uh because of that you know high level barrier to entry with the the ad the uh increase in capabilities for LLMs for the connectors um which we’ll get into a lot of these terms today um it’s opened the floodgates so we now see u you know thousands of customers engaging uh through the open API um it’s a kind of a a change in what used to be mobile was the way you interacted. Uh we’ve now expanded the the platform into this API uh connectivity. Um and that includes direct clients also includes partners or uh connect API partners who can use our API to build B to C or their platform is then connected by other customers. So it’s kind of fits both. Yeah. And he said something really interesting cuz I would have thought the opposite that it would go from desktop to mobile and you’re saying it went the opposite way. So the the way I think about it is that we’ve kind of expanded the surface area. So you know the the history of brokerage you had to pick up your phone and call your broker. Then we moved into this mobile area era where you could log on to a website and log in and place a trade. Uh then yeah, I’m cutting out decades here, but you you shift to mobile, all of a sudden it’s in your pocket with you all the time. Uh now we’re entering a AI era of technology where mobile isn’t going anywhere and a lot of customers, most of our customers are still engaged in a mobile first way. This is a new kind of way to interact with your financial life and it’s growing very quickly. So how broad that adoption is I think remains to be seen long term. Right. Well well I’m sure it’s coming up quicker than we think but like you said you know this is becoming so popular and so many more people are in getting involved in this. How is open API affecting the markets? So the markets are is it is that happening? Um it’s a good question. I think it is affecting the markets. We’ve seen a few things. um my new favorite marketing term, flywheel. But there’s been some regulatory uh developments that coincided with the technology advancements. Um so the pattern day trade rule was something that had uh plagued uh many retail investors, particularly small retail investors. Um when there were their account was under $25,000, there were limits on how they could trade, right? uh those rules have changed slightly opening up the avail ability for them to trade uh much more frequently throughout the day. Something that you know uh I think uh a bit of classicism removed where um young active trader um maybe didn’t have the balance sheet that rule that 25k was in place for a long time. Uh now it’s been removed. So, opens up the ability for maybe a college student who just wants to test out a new uh theory um to use their account to do that and uh they’re not limited the same way they used to be. Okay, interesting. So, with that mindset, would you say open API is more of a product or is it a strategy or is it both? Again, good question. So, uh I would view it as a product uh maybe because I’m in a product chair and I view things as products. So this is a uh new way for our clients to engage with a Weeble account starting you know if you want to check your balance on a regular basis you can connect if you want to submit uh trade information and prepare to submit that order or submit that order straight through you have that ability. So it’s a product in the sense that it’s a way for our clients to interact with our platform. Um it’s something that we’ve gotten a lot of interest uh inbound about. Um and I think at times um we’ve been we are one of the leaders and at times I think maybe we’ve been the leader in the space. You should never get in front of a bull. It’s a bad idea. So um you know it’s exciting for us to be we have active traders as one of our key client bases and um kind of being giving them a leading product um is exciting place to be. You mentioned how you’re seeing users interact with the product with open API. Is there anything that you’ve seen them create or a strategy, a tool that you were like, whoa, I didn’t think of that. Yeah, so that this is the kind of sandbox um element to it. And um the way me I’m not a I’m not writing Python. I’m not writing my own trading bots. Um but I you know, in the back of my head, I think, oh, I could run a hedge fund. I I read the newspaper. I have all these ideas about where Jackie is going and and this and that and um if only I had the time or the traders to work for me to kind of execute what I think uh I should do because um we talked about a few hats I wear at Weeble. I don’t just sit in front of my screen uh trading my personal account all day. That’s not one of the uh parts of the job. So the ability now to create these different strategies through the open API uh and then let them run autonomously, let them run with your supervision um is pretty exciting. As a investor, you might have a few different theories. you want to uh have 50% of your portfolio, be a very conservative um steady buying into the S&P 500 index, but you might want to take 10% and have your research agent go out and comb the market for, you know, one to 100 opportunities. Um you have that ability to simultaneously implement strategies um in a very kind of a hands-off or high power way. Well, so how do you balance that supervision to the user where okay, you’re doing this, you’re making these decisions, but maybe I should chime in. You’re doing this wrong. Do you find it hard to Absolutely. So, uh, my career started in compliance. So um I find uh you know I’m always bringing that compliance uh eye to some of these discussions where um the there are new risks created by uh open API and um you know you can have a a runaway situation where a novice trader or novice engineer doesn’t really understand the Frankenstein uh trading bot that they’ve built. all of a sudden it’s doing things that they didn’t expect. So that is uh certainly a risk. Weeble as the broker has a lot of responsibility around controlling that account. So the buying power for example, we couldn’t let a customer with $1,000 go out and buy a million dollars worth of something. We will check at every point that they are in a position to fund the purchase that they’re attempting to make. um if there’s velocity of orders coming in, we have controls uh on our APIs so that customers who bump into these uh limits uh it’s setting off alerts either for them or for us internally um if we see strategies that look uh manipulative or suspicious, we’ll take action as well. So, our compliance team um you know their their job got a little more complicated as this product came to life and has grown. Um but it’s not something we weren’t prepared for. Um it’s high frequency trading and API trading has been around for for a long time. the expansion of the access to it is the new twist and um we had to bring some of those kind of controls and capabilities into the more traditional point-and-click retail space. Uh but it’s been something that they were up to the challenge and uh um something we’ve thought about throughout the process. Yeah, you beat me to it cuz I wanted to bring up your compliance background and you know this is kind of a whole new world with technology and all these different programs and it must have been a difficult transition to some degree of you know finding all these nuances and little things to watch and make sure okay this isn’t what you should be doing. Yeah, I think it’s a it’s a new role for me personally kind of taking on the uh business perspective uh and you know pushing certain uh business points. Um I work with a lot of my former team in compliance so we already have kind of good working relationships there. Um, I think the challenge layered into that is it’s new technology and a lot of uh while Weeble wants to be out there at the front of the pack offering kind of the latest and greatest um it’s also brings you know what exactly is being released um by our partners or so it kind of comes back to keeping our house in order and those compliance controls, trade surveillance, market access. We need to make sure that our suite of controls is uh tight and you know what the client is then able to build outside of the open API is something we’re kind of prepared to um monitor. Yeah, I would hope so and then assume that takes a lot of time and involvement. But you brought up control and you know you’re using all of these new programs software getting AI involved. you know, who should be making the final choice on these deals? Should it be from the human or are we like, okay, you made the choice, you know? Yeah, sure. I I think this where my compliance background helps here in that um Weeble, most of our customers are self-directed. So, every trade, every order, um it’s their choice. And if they want to use a certain tool to empower them, Yeah. Uh I I look back not so long ago where like recurring investment was kind of a a cutting edge feature. You could say I want to buy $100 of this every Monday and that was a somewhat set it and forget it uh tool that clients could use. Um this very similar is just much more dynamic in the capabilities. But for the self-directed clients, this is just another tool for them to use. They may be taking the analysis and taking the input, but Weeble especially Weeble Financial is not the one giving them the recommendations and the advice on what to do. I think we’re have a uh a RAIA or an investment advisor, robo advisor as part of the Weeble family. uh we look at that as maybe there’s an opportunity to provide that advice to provide that guidance to clients to say um we’ve done the analysis and we think this is the best for you uh and giving AI the capability to do that for certain clients in certain cases um is a kind of a new frontier um so it’s it’s kind of split between the two regulatory sides is it self-directed or are you hiring ing an adviser to help you manage your money. But at the end of the day, it’s your choice where your money goes. At the end of the day, it’s the client’s choice. Um, if they select the adviser, they’ve they’ve chosen that advisor. Weeble hasn’t kind of made that for them, right? But so let’s hypothetical. What if you know someone makes a bad choice and they’re or because they misread something they so now they messed up their whole trading plan for the day. Is it their fault? Are they coming back on the broker? Are they coming back at the AI? What happens there? Yeah, it’s a good question. And the uh electronic trading world is um built on software. So, uh software is not without bugs. We do our absolute best to get some pest control, try to clear out the pests and get the pesticide out there. Uh but the, you know, risks, especially with the open API, are magnified. So I think the the challenge there on the traditional side would be you’re a customer and you you know tried to buy a 100 shares of Apple. Weeble system malfunctioned and you ended up with 10,000 shares. You know we would own that issue. That’s our bad. Um the concern I think is where the open API then outside of the Weeble environment is being uh connected to by the customer if they make a mistake on their side of uh outside of Weeble. How would we know uh as a broker that they actually meant to only buy 100 or they typed in the wrong symbol or they their AI that’s using the open API kind didn’t follow what they thought it was going to do or what they had intended it to do. So that uh there’s a lot of risk disclosures and legal ease around this but the clients at the end of the day are responsible for their account. they’re responsible for their uh credentials if they opt to use open API. They’re aware that it’s bringing new risks. Um it has a lot of upside as well. So uh definitely some balance there. Yeah. And I think it’s important for people to know that going in, right? It’s not just the magical world. And maybe maybe one uh great place to start for customers is we’ve launched a paper trading uh platform for the open API. So, you can take your paper trading account and test out some strategies with the open API, monitor it. We’ll give you I think it’s about a million dollars in play money. Uh not your money, but you can test the strategies, make sure the thing you’re designing is working as you intended before you uh give it real money and put that at risk. I think that’s a great concept. Have you been seeing success with that? We have. that was just launched uh a few weeks ago and uh I think it’s a necessary uh step for a lot of people who are coming new to this area. Well, let’s talk about launches because you’ve done a lot of them lately. So, we’ve had Vega, which I wanted to get into, but we had Vega, then there’s Vega Analyst and Vega portfolio. So, let’s talk about Vega first. Excellent. So, Vega is our uh old friend now, but Vega is the first AI product uh that we launched for our customers really uh first as a client service uh tool to help you if your account was restricted, why is my account restricted? AI was able to through Vega uh solve some of those customer service customer service tickets lower hanging fruit. uh quickly uh we moved Vega towards more of a decision partner or uh support trade support or uh co-pilot throughout your Weeble experience. So uh we Vega then becomes a somebody you can ask questions to. You can ask about financial products. You can ask about the market in general. You can ask about specific stocks, trends you’re seeing, theories you have, um more specifics about the the options ladder and certain Greeks uh within that options ladder. So extremely uh capable uh knowledgeable financial trading assistant for your Weeble uh journey. So depending on what a a client wants, if they’re an active trader uh trading options or they’re more of a long-term investor, the Vega co-pilot can be like a conversation that they can have a chatbot experience with. And we’ve seen uh tens of millions of engagements with it. Many customers uh very uh deep in conversation with it on you know how to trade, how they can implement the strategy they’re thinking about. Now, how does that compare to Vega analyst or is that all in one? Uh Vegas, there’s different aspects of Vega, correct? Vegas, uh you’ll see all over the place that I think kind of the umbrella uh AI uh client uh tool Vega analyst one specific skill within the Vega uh overall world. Uh this is kind of a research analyst. So it will provide deep research custom reports um more similar to what you would get as like a stock research desk. It’s going to give you a very excuse me very thorough in-depth analysis on a single stock and the user is able to customize uh how that report is generated and kind of do their research up of uh what they analyst is doing. So this is a new feature. Um it has uh different uh payment tiers. So if you become an avid user of it uh because of the underlying kind of token costs around producing the more deep thinking um there are different costs associated to it than Vega which is just free for all users. Makes sense. So make me think harder. You got to pay for it. You got to pay for the good answers. That’s a good thing to know. So when then when it comes to Vega portfolio now that’s described as an AI powered portfolio advisor. So now we’re dealing with three different types. Yes. So uh Vega portfolio we talked a little about the RAIA and the investment adviser with a Weeble Vega portfolio starts to bring in those concepts of giving the investor some guidance around their portfolio. So does their portfolio fit with their individual profile? If I am a if I say in my questionnaire that I’m very risk averse and I have long-term um you know my or near-term capital leads uh but I’m trading you know uh a very aggressive strategy, volatile stocks, penny stocks. Um, the Vega portfolio is going to be able to kind of give you a a view of your activity versus what you say that you uh your profile is. And it will also kind of give you guidance on what are some things that might suit your particular background. So, okay, if you’re really new to investing, uh this is a great tool to find some kind of basic ETFs or a good way to get started. In all three of these, you know, you’re getting advice and information, but where’s the line drawn where you’re not overly giving too much advice, you know, I’m sure that’s in the programming of how it’s created. Yes. So, that’s under the hood and uh in some of the fine print on the disclosure side as well. We’ve got those disclosure. We we do a we make sure the client knows which tool they’re interacting with and which regulated entity they’re interacting with. Um again the compliance uh uh DNA that I have that’s kind of built into things. Um so our prompts um the underlying logic within Vega and the different Vega skills all kind of follow the flow uh based on you know which skill is being used and which regulatory um entity is being impacted. It’s all really incredible because you launched this November of last year and you’ve already created so many products within it. Is there anything that you’ve seen clients and users use it for that you were surprised or anything you didn’t expect? I think the adoption was uh shocking for me. I did not expect to see kind of the hockey stick curve which uh in fintech that’s you know you always want to experience that. All right. So, we got to see clients not really in the uh customer service ticketing side. Once we stepped beyond that into more of the co-pilot for the platform, uh we saw that’s where we saw the millions and tens of millions of interactions and uh clients really enjoy and using the tool uh a lot. In your compliance side of things, is there anything you’ve seen or that you’ve programmed that VA won’t answer? Yes. And it won’t take you long if you’re using Vega to hit some of those guard rails. So compliance-wise, now that that’s the goal, just wanting to know if there’s a fine line in a boundary. Absolutely. So if you say uh Vega, should I buy Google? Uh you’re going to run into compliance uh stock language. So of that kind of decision tree that’s been built out for how the AI uh will answer your question. There are many deadends that uh compliance is sitting behind say we can’t answer that because X Y or Z. So so it comes out specifically and says that we can answer. Okay. So um maybe not the answer everyone wants to see. Clients are looking for more. They’re looking for direction. They’re looking for help. But on the regulatory side, we needed to kind of design that uh framework. Of course, it’s an AI, not a magical, right? Absolutely. Are there um when it comes to Vega, are there things that Vega can’t see that a chart could see for, you know, a chart veteran or vice versa? Absolutely. I think it’s still a uh you know a way to well some traders will uh religiously view charts and uh follow the market with a very emotional uh pulse. So uh kind of feeling the market in a uh sixth sense kind of way. Um, so plenty of traders like that. More uh analytical or datadriven strategies. I think AI there is really where you’re seeing uh AI’s capabilities come through. So uh one kind of an analyzing large amounts of data um that would take humans a long time to get through AI can do it relatively quickly. uh have figuring out that six sense of when a market is going to move. Um I think AI is not quite there. Maybe there’s still some human uh human, you know, uh a human touch, human touch to it, involvement. Yeah. So it really depends on your strategy. I think as traders study their own activity, they can leverage AI for that as well. Okay. Um, and I think uh, Vega is useful for that as we’ve expanded the ability it has to see into your account and your trading history. Um, well, let’s talk about that. How it can see into your account. How personalized is Vega getting for each individual user? Yeah, so it’s it’s a overarching model. Um, but it does have access into certain points related to your account. So, um certain traits within your investor profile, uh certain data around your holdings, uh your trading history, uh Vega does have the ability to call in and see that. Um, and I I liken it to the way a client service rep might uh pick up a phone call and go into our back office system and look up an account number and find an answer for a customer. Um, Vega has the ability to kind of take those steps. I think it’s it’s good to know that it’s watching everything because you don’t want them coming up with their answers just like all the way out of left field. You know, it’s kind of staying in competition with the other AI services that are out there now that you know, they all kind of figure out who you are and what benefits you the most. So, it only makes sense it started coming into the market. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s uh many aspects of life are are being impacted now. um you know there’s traders uh have different schools of thought and traders are not all alike. Uh but I think the to the monitoring point uh the ability to not lose money is as important or more important for a trader than it is to hit the home runs. So, uh, having Vega be able to monitor your account and, um, on a regular basis, uh, either through the open API, um, or just in the system is is important. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be losing. That’s not the goal. So when it comes to, you know, your compliance background and regulators getting adjusted to working with this type of technology, is there anything that you wish that they knew moving forward to kind of either like back off and let you have more access to creating things or do you think they’ve been adjusting well to the new systems? Yeah, I would uh give uh FINRA and our regulators a real kudos. um they have kept an open mind about AI from really day one. Um we’ve had open dialogue with them dating back years now starting with kind of the earliest implementations of uh here’s a news article Vega has the ability to summarize that news article and it creates novel questions. Um, and I think where it’s easy, and I I’m a former regulator, it’s easier for a regulator to say no and kind of squash um what’s new and uh kind of not understood or new and risky. Um, they’ve been on the other side. They’ve been very kind of open-minded, um, transparent. We got to work through these issues. Um there’s requests out right now from FINRA for comments around uh how to review advertisements and uh how to review advertisements in the context of AI where things are much more dynamic real time maybe personalized um that the traditional model of if you’re sending an ad out to 26 people needs to go through a compliance officer um and get a stamp from that officer. are there new ways that we can use AI for these uh new capabilities? So, uh I think they’ve they’ve been very uh open-minded and kind of forward thinking on this. So, uh I don’t have really any complaints on it. I think there’s uh certainly risk and we’ve tried to communicate with FINRA throughout these steps of whether it’s the trading or manipulative trading compliance um bringing these kind of new elements very quickly to the the retail space. No, that’s great to hear because you want to stay up with what’s going on in the industry and stay competitive and so it’s good that they’re on board and not holding anything back. So, with everything we’ve discussed with Vega, it really seems like it’s moving along very quickly and keeping that hockey stick uh uh uphill that you mentioned keep going. Is there anything new to come that you can share with us? There’s a a long road map uh on its way. I think with uh Vega portfolio analysts we were talking about, that’s a um skill that’s going to continue to see uh more and more capabilities through the end of the year. Um, we have some very exciting new products uh to launch in early Q4, which I won’t get into just yet. Oh, come on. Just a little bit. But, uh, I think we’re we’re excited the the amount of data that we plan to feed into Vega, uh, and then allow our users to, um, leverage and create trading strategies and alerts and, uh, new actions for them. um it’s only going to grow. I’m excited to see what’s happening and what’s going to happen. So, what do you think the future is going to look like? You know, like let’s say we’re in like 2031. We still look as good as we do right now and a young 20some is opening their brokerage account for the first time. Is there an app? Is Vegas still present? What do you think it’s going to be like? I’ll probably be a little skinnier. Um just but the uh experience I kind of liken it to like we were talking about before the desktop the mobile I do think there’s I mean my own uh growing up kind of through mobile um I was logging into facebook.com when Facebook came out right uh that changed over time uh so I do think we’re going to see a big shift uh in favor of the AI or open API being the primary way you interact with your financial services and your accounts. Uh that might just be consolidation so you can track all the things that are important at once. Uh there might be an AI in your pocket that’s tracking those for you and only messaging you when things are important. Um we all might be wearing brain helmets and there’s no, you know, thought needed to go into it other than what happens. Scary scary thought. Remember, the human still has to make the final choice. Yes. Are you still going to believe that? On the Weeble Financial, I will believe that forever. Okay, good answer. Is there anything about your day-to-day with all this technology that you’re surrounded with? Does anything ever keep you up at night about it? the uh markets have changed, the retail markets especially uh where they used to be uh during market hours. I think if you’re an institutional trader uh you’re probably uh 24 hours following global markets before but for retail and particularly uh managing a retail platform with the addition of uh overnight trading with the addition of uh autonomous or or API trading uh and then now new products being introduced whether it’s futures whether it’s our prediction markets uh those are trading during the Super Bowl. So, uh, we have not a lot of downtime. So, I think that, you know, 24 by7 is here to stay. Um, it means, uh, I don’t really get to like unplug that much. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it. No. So, I have to work on it. So, that’s what’s keeping you up at night. That makes sense. Well, this has been fantastic. I want to end with a fun little rapid fire. Okay. So, just give me like a one-word response to what I’m going to say to you. Okay. One word for market structure in 2030. Uh, quick, quick, quick. Have another sip of coffee. Um, growth. Okay. Most overhyped term in fintech right now? AI. A book or paper that changed how you think about markets or AI? The Bitcoin white paper. Oh, interesting. Okay. The regulation you’re gladest that it exists. Reg. the first thing you ask a new AI model to do. Um, help me arrange my calendar. And there you have it. Well, thank you for making space for us in your calendar. This was fantastic. I enjoyed hearing everything that’s going on in Weeble Technologies. Thank you for today. This has been great and uh look forward to doing it again. So, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, send it to a friend who’s constantly asking a chatbot what to do with their money. And let us know in the comments, would you let an AI agent place a trade for you? I’m Alison and I’ll see you next time.
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09/24/2026 – OpenCV Live
Dr. Satia Malik, our stalbert host. Where are you coming from today? I’m back back in San Diego. I was actually in India for the last couple of weeks. Uh three weeks actually. Um so I’m I’m back now. And Dimma, our guest, where you joining us from?
Natalani, Israel. It’s like north to Tel a Viv. Right on. It’s a global community here on Open CV. We love having the guests from far-flung reaches of the world. I think this year I think our guest, if I I looked at the YouTube uh history recently, and I think we’ve had a little over 50% of our guests this year have been uh not based in the US, which is pretty cool. But folks out there watching, let us know where you are coming from. I’m here in San Francisco. Satia’s down in San Diego. Dimma’s in Israel. Let us know where you’re coming from in the chat. We’d love to see the global OpenCV community chiming in on this beautiful Thursday morning and we hope that you are having a great one. We’ll get started in just a few moments as you get into wherever you’re watching Open TV. We are live, excuse me, we are live on Twitch, LinkedIn, YouTube, and our Patreon account as well as on Zoom. We’ve got some folks over on Zoom saying hey already. We’ve got Stefan Sarna from Vancouver, Canada. We’ve got Nome from Ethiopia. We’ve got Venitesh from Shennai. We’ve got Andre from the Moscow region. We’ve got Lux Intel over on YouTube from Kosovo. How’s it going out there? Got Bruce Wright from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, home of the professional wrestling heart dynasty. We’ve got uh Utkur. Uh it’s a tough one for me from Sweden. How’s it going, Sweden? Shout out to all the Swedes out there. I was just at IKEA the other day [laughter] here, the the the Swedish embassy here in San Francisco. [laughter] That’s right. It’s It’s all right, though. I talked [clears throat] last time I was out of the country, I I talked with someone that said that uh the American embassy in their town was Hooters. So, [laughter] that’s I think I think I think Sweden got the better deal out of that one, you know. That’s right. And we’ve got uh Marco from Germany. We’ve got RFSI from Boston, East Coast, a slightly inferior coast to the West Coast, but we’ll allow it here on OpenCV Live. I think now is a great time to get started. Boss, you ready to go? Let’s do this. Let’s get started. Hello everyone. I am OpenCV CEO Dr. Satcha Malik. Welcome to OpenCV Live. This week we take a look at Clickins who run inspection for insurers, rental fleets, and car dealerships from ordinary phone photos. The models behind it are trained almost entirely on synthetic data. 3D vehicle models with procedurally generated dents, scratches, and defamations across uh makes color, lighting, background, and auto annotated at every pixel. In this episode, CEO Dimitri Gizerki will cover how the pipeline works, where synthetic data holds up against real world imi imagery, and where it breaks, and what it took to close the gap in production. If you have weighted synthetic data for your own inspection or QA problem, this is a practitioner’s view of what actually deploys. And uh you know this is going to be a very interesting episode because right before uh we started uh you know uh this episode we were talking about various things with Dimmitry and one of the things uh he mentioned was that it’s very difficult to do uh hail damage detection because hail damage is invisible to the human eye and they have a method that allows you to do this uh using uh phone cameras. So, I’m very excited to learn about these techniques uh in this episode. But before we get there, as always, with me is Phil Nelson. He’s the director of content and creative at OpenCV. He organizes this show. And if anything goes wrong, Phil, it’s your fault. Good morning. Yes. What a what a warm welcome I get from Satia on this show. I wrote that. I wrote the script. It’s fine. It’s me. It’s me. It’s phi. I am your co-host with the co-host, the second banana. who’s second to none. I’m also your plus one and only. You know it’s Mr. Nelson if you’re nasty. But you, my dear friends, can call me Phil. And I’m here to remind you of a few things that we do on every single one of these here episodes. This is episode 2. Jesus, what episode is it? 237, 227. I don’t even know. I lost my notes. But it’s fine. We’re taking questions from you in the audience. Use the Zoom Q&A button if you’re over on Zoom or just ask your questions anywhere in the chat. I’m monitoring those chats. We are live on Twitch, LinkedIn, YouTube, Patreon, and on Zoom. So, ask those questions anytime. We’ll bring them up later in the episode or try to flow them into the conversation if they make sense in practice there. We’re also doing a special giveaway to you out there in the audience as we do on every week. Stay tuned later on in this episode. I will be asking a trivia question based on today’s presentation from our illustrious guest Dimma who excuse me and the first person to answer that question correctly will win the OpenCV University course of their choosing absolutely free of charge. You can see what courses are on offer by going to opencv.org/ university. Now um got a little bit of business to take care of at the tippy top of the show here. Big announcements in the last couple of weeks. Satia, um, you want to talk to the folks a little bit about the latest moonshot here from OpenCV, OpenCV Enterprise, the newly released, newlyannounced, I guess, uh, yes, enterprise version of OpenCV. Tell them all about it, will you? Yeah. So, OpenCV Enterprise, this is the supported version of OpenCV. Uh the very first thing I want to make clear to everybody is that OpenCV will remain free for everybody for individual users even for corporations. It is completely free. Uh as you know we have Apache 2 license which basically says that please use it. Don’t you don’t even have to uh acknowledge us. Uh but uh you know don’t sue us if something goes wrong. So that’s the Apache license in a in a nutshell. I’m not a lawyer but that’s pretty much what it says. Yeah. Yeah. So uh but this enterprise version is the supported version of OpenCV. So what happens is that uh once you let’s say we just released OpenCV 5 right at some point we will stop supporting OpenCV 4 3 2 etc because you know we have a very small team and we cannot keep supporting the older versions but a lot of corporations they are still using I found out one corporation that is using one uh you know OpenC 2.4 4 uh in one of their products, right? So, wow, that goes back. That goes back, right? Uh the benefit of OpenCV 2.4 is that it was a tiny it had a tiny memory footprint and so uh it you know it works uh really well which was the style at the time because it was 20 years ago. [laughter] Right. Right. So, and now what happens is that there are security holes, right? Uh that get reported but we are unable to fix them for free. Right. So most of these uh you know uh the support basically comes uh with with security right we will basically fix uh as soon as any security is uh you know uh asked for any any uh hole comes up and we will offer it to all our enterprise users. There are other uh you know enterprises that also uh need they have their own forked version version of OpenCV right they they started with OpenCV but they forked it and we are happy to support those versions also. So basically it is uh and then some of some people may want special uh collaboration with OpenCV so that they can make OpenCV fast on their platform right companies like Qualcomm ARM they are already working with us so for them OpenCVs there are three tiers of enterprise one is LTS which is long-term support then we have the premier version which is slightly higher uh level of support and then we have uh the partnership version which basically says that okay we will we will make OpenCV work better right not just the previous versions but all the future versions also on your platform and we will actually have your device or your configuration in our continuous integration pipeline so these are for corporations but if you’re uh you know if you’re from a large organization which needs OpenCV support they want to make sure that you have a secure version of OpenCV sometimes you’re legally required to take u a supported version of opensource if it is available and if those are the cases please reach out to us uh you know uh at hellocv.org or uh or go to this URL and sign up and we will reach out to you. We’ll give you a link to have a 30-inut call with us once you have filled out all the information. So uh please uh check it out and let us let let your company know that this exists because this is not for individuals. This is for uh you know medium to large uh organizations and uh you can help by telling your managers that now we have OpenCB enterprise. So that’s that’s about it. Thanks. Yes. Scan that QR code I put up on screen. That’s opencv.orgenterprise.
It is not a secret new Star Trek television program. It is the latest release of OpenCV. OpenCV.orgprise.
It is something we’re excited about. We’ve talked about implementing I think for multiple years now. you and I have gone back and forth on this and with the OpenCV team and community and stuff and we’re really excited to have it out there in front of people. Um, as a nonprofit organization, we depend on the support of companies that use OpenCV. We put out free software that you can use however the heck you want. And uh, you know, lately it feels like we’re kind of being punished for it. [laughter] So, please please check that out. If What’s that here? Here’s a quick question for uh, for the audience. Which of these Google products use uh OpenCV? Google Lens, Google Meet, YouTube, Google uh you know even the main Google uh you know search uh app. Um which of those? And the answer is all of them, right? All of them. All of them. uh they use um uh OpenCV and pretty much you know any you know Snapchat any any app you can think about where there is yeah any image or video analysis being done they use OpenCV so it’s a good you know it’s it’s everywhere and we want uh to provide enterprise support so that all these organizations that are already using it benefiting from OpenCV can also have a more secure more stable version that is tested across you know multiple devices Uh and that’s that’s what OpenCV Enterprise is for. Yeah, we have it on on good authority that uh the Amazon’s lens feature on Amazon Prime video that shows you like what actors are in what scene uses Open CV as well. We we got the we got the Iggy on that from a a kind-hearted engineer over at Amazon. But enough of our yapping here. Welcome Dimmitri Dimma as he asked to be called. Uh, I love a good nickname. That’s a pretty good one. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on here. Oh [ __ ] Sorry, I muted you. Back. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, yeah, we’re excited to learn about how you’re using synthetic data. As I as I said before, we’ve we’ve talked about on the show off and on for several years and had some kind of deep dives and it’ll be great to see what you all are working on. Good. Let me go ahead and bring up slides here. Yeah, let’s do it. I got your Bringing up your screen share. There it is. Take it away. [snorts] Good. So, picture this. You’ve got a standard sedan, right? It’s [laughter] parked. It’s parked uh you know on a city street, broad light. uh and to the human human eye I mean it is uh undeniably there right? Yeah. So obviously we cannot miss it. So but if you run the life fit of a street with this car through the state-ofthe-art object detector like AI object detector let’s say YOLO or any version of YOLO. Okay. This this uh vehicle registers as completely invisible. Is that true though? How did how did you get this picture of John Cena’s car? [laughter] Yeah, we generated this one. Okay, this is a synthetic data. Okay. So, uh I tried this uh so um you know there is this uh there’s this company that I don’t know whether uh which company it was but they said that uh people wearing this kind of patterned shirt are not recognized and I ran it a standard yellow and yeah it nailed it right it nailed it. I have not tried it on this car but um I would be surprised if uh it doesn’t get it. What about jungle face paint? [laughter] Yeah, I came across that uh that article. It was it like was very popular last week. Yeah. And this is a designer that created this uh texture Yeah. texture shirt. But this pattern it’s a bit similar to what he did. Yeah. But this is the original one. Okay. That was created by the researcher. So I believe his work was some kind inspired by this thing. And this this patch is unique. So this patch we just generated it and put it on cover the car. Yeah. And and it make it completely invisible to YOLO including YOLO 26. Okay. Yesterday I tried this. Oh wow. It doesn’t see this vehicle. Okay. So and uh what’s wild about this like if you think about this that that this glitchy kind of psychedelic camouflage wrap that covers the car. this makes all this uh uh thing invisible. So h and this is like the problem the challenge that the today modern vision models must deal with. This is the level of intentional obfuscation that uh in reality requires complete rethinking of how we train our models today particularly vision models and uh and this is what actually clickens is about. Okay. And if you see this uh this one it’s we not only covered this with this uh uh rep but we also introduced synthetic damage on this car. Okay. So, uh just a few words about myself and we will move forward. I’m a technology expert, software architect with 30 years of experience. My major fields of interest are visual intelligence, ontology, I love ontology, uh domain driven design, computer vision, open CV of course guys, I love OpenCV, uh deep learning and graph uh algorithms, high performance and uh to mention but a few those are fields of my interest. uh previously I architected uh intelligence solutions uh worked with law enforcement uh with anti-fraud systems architected enterprise and startup uh solutions so quite a wide range of uh of solutions that I had experience with. I co-ounded a few companies, professional services company and one that dealt with transportation that but that was in the past. Erh and uh also co-invented a few patented technologies related to AI and computer vision and uh I’ve been for to the last 12 years I’m serving as a CTO and co-founder at Clickens. So I’m in charge of the technology and the scientific research and the solution architecture of clickens. So uh let’s see what clickens is all about. So that’s Satia just uh made this intro. Clickens is a AI uh vehicle inspections platform that is completely mobile seamless no hardware required. uh you just send the link and the user goes through the guided session and uh everything is also available through the API. So we can automatically or we can easily integrate seamlessly integrate with with any client any native client or other client that the users may have. So uh just to see it in action that’s uh as simple as that user takes pictures. Okay, no video. It’s just still pictures through the guided session. A user is is required to take pictures according to the protocol that uh uh is set for this particular session. Okay, it’s ab absolutely flexible, customizable. Uh the system has a safeguard. So if the wrong picture, wrong side was taken like in this previous shot uh you will see that uh red flag already firing that okay that’s the wrong side. So no tricks no hanky panky with with our system. Okay. And uh the uh nearly immediate response he gets automatically all the damages even a minor scratches segmented out and uh uh the result is is comprehensive conditional vehicle condition report that uh uh maps all the damages to to the specific panels. Uh one of the things that stands out for clickings we we measure each damage and as you can see it’s not in pixels it’s in absolute units like centimeters inches uh and uh all the damages are not only measured we use photoggramometry for that by the way not AI h all the damages are also positioned and and uh uh put on the body style map that uh shows the layout of the are and uh through this map we can communicate with the uh companies and map different areas that is let’s say have a lower granularity that parts the panel. Okay. So uh also we measure damage severity and tons of other things that we we do uh uh on uh during this inspection process and uh the user can see this nice HTML breakdown and drill down into the pictures and see the exact damages. Uh but also it is sell sent in the structured format to the user. So the customers will get a comprehensive report to their systems and they can present it to their users in a nice and convenient way. Okay. So actually the but the real life is in the real life nothing is ever clean. Okay. So as you see this is a real car that I pictured somewhere. I I don’t remember where. Okay. But uh this uh you see this livery uh I believe it will trick most of the AI systems trained on part detection okay on object detection because this pattern can be considered as an adversarial one but uh uh you never know until you you experience this the first time. Okay. So our domain is absolutely complicated. I mean this is extremely complicated. Yeah. So th those are real examples that came that that were sent through our system and we processed them. Okay. On the left you see the car that like this is a closeup of the car with the markings made by the adjuster. Okay. So this part must be replaced and you see those crayon marker markings. But you have a lot of damages here that must be dissected from the uh adjusters command comments. Okay. So that’s a very tough one. But if you look at this at the right side, you will see this uh uh uh car sharing livery texture that this texture hides or camouflages the damage behind this. If you look at this uh door, okay, at the lower part of the bottom part of the door, you will see a damages, okay, there are few damages here, dent and there is also a scratch. So you must be able to act in this chaos. Okay, so for it’s like AI cloak, you know, that’s it’s a a a it’s a very challenging situation for any vision model. Those cases are not simple. Okay, but it can get worse. Okay, look at this. Those are reflections. Okay, those reflections uh through those reflections, you must see the damage. So, you must be able to tell the real damage from a reflection. And the problem is that the the modern cameras, the standard standard cameras, they actually perceive uh the 3D environment through the captured light and contrast. Okay. So actually we got a 2D images that don’t have any depth or uh or any 3D interpretation but uh sometimes because of is of the three of the 2D nature of those photos some damages or some some reflections mathematically may be similar to damages. If you look at the dent or scratch a scuff, it can be visually interpreted as a for instance as a reflection. Okay. So the in fact you can in fact have a scratch on the wall which is getting reflected off the surface of the car and that scratch would be uh it would be you know almost impossible to uh take that you know notice that it is actually not a scratch on the car but a scratch on the reflected wall. Right. Abs. Absolutely. But it it can be even worse. I can tell you the real case. Usually you park, you take pictures on parking lots where [snorts] with a lot of damaged cars. Just imagine this gray car that parks next to this uh to this car has a damages and these damages are reflected on the other car. So mistake mistakenly you can pick them as real damages. Right? So uh and just imagine chasing after all these patterns if you work with real images it is endless process like you need to spend countless hours on acquiring those images annotating them. Okay. Yeah. And uh if you look at the annotator’s work you will imagine that that’s like it’s extremely tough. Yeah. because when you you look at the image you never know as an annotator what’s the ground truth is unless you are familiar with this vehicle. So uh we started our journey as I said in 2014. This is where when the company was established. So we started uh as an anti-fraud solution for insurance companies and then we transformed our business model to to vehicle inspections and we work in insurance area still work in insurance area and the automotive space. Uh so the first generation of our synthetic data as you look at the left side was like nonrealistic. Okay, it’s absolutely largely artificial. Okay, I must admit I did this when I had zero knowledge of 3D and simulation. Okay, that was my first attempt and exercise. But uh it was successful because the model that I put a very simple object detection model uh that was able to generalize even over those artificial samples and uh find the major panels on the vehicle. Mhm. So then it’s evolved into second generation of our synthetic data which you see in the middle and it is more realistic scenes still uh pretty rudimentary right and this uh uh still object detection. Yeah. But but when you go to the market and we started selling our solution we started talking to the customers and we realized that customers require fine segmentation. You cannot use bounding boxes because you need to be able to h to absolutely accurately create a list of detect defected parts. Yeah. And you cannot touch adjacent parts and the damage must be measured across each and every panel. So if a damage spans multiple panels, you need to measure the relative portion of the damage on that panel. Without fine segmentation, instant segmentation, you cannot do this job. Okay. So uh uh when we started growing up and we raised money, we hired professionals. Okay. So today we have a 3D team. Uh those are 3D ninjas that are absolutely you know uh 3D killers. So you see the quality of third of the third generation of synthetic data which we are having today and it is even more profound today. page is more sophisticated than those two examples, but you can see different patterns that can be simulated. A professional adjuster will not tell you if it is a real car or a fake one. Okay? And we can make sure that he will not. Okay? But again, this is not the idea. The goal is not to be as realistic as possible. The goal is to make our models learn and perform well on those uh things, right? So as you see the the uh the customers require an unprecedented level of accuracy in such a noisy domain with all those reflections and uh and all those uh uh things you know you still have to be accurate on each and every panel. You still have to be accurate on each and every scratch and uh uh still you cannot be 100% accurate. Okay. So we never replace human inspectors. We just empower them with our tool. So we give them the ability to tell okay you know this is a hallucination let’s remove it. Okay so it’s just one second toggle and this uh scratch is gone. Okay if AI let’s say mistakenly marked something but uh those are the things okay those that the things those are the expectations from us. So how do we measure the model performance when we generate synthetic data? Okay, that’s a very valid question. Okay, so the ex excellent synthetic data absolutely is not the same as an excellent model on real data. Yeah, it’s it’s like uh different things completely different things. So uh if you look at this so synthetic data examples okay on the in the first line on the left you see that those are excellent photo realism right so it looks like those are real ones. Mhm. Okay. But still you have uh your model underperforms on real in the real world. Okay. Because in the reality we face uh absolutely insane and bizarre patterns. So when you measure the distribution you see that there is a synthetic data distribution and there is a real world distribution. Okay. So essentially there is a gap between them. But you need to realize you need to to to to figure out what kind of a gap you have. If you have a data gap or a model gap and that’s pretty essential question. Okay. So if you have a data gap then you need to simulate more data. Okay. But if you have a model gap, oh, you need to stop and review your algorithms. Okay. So I will not deal with the let’s say our model algorithm because it should have a secret source and some parts of it are patented uh technology but still the model must be uh trained to ingest synthetic data and to process synthetic data to work on this. Okay, I will not tell you like it’s not a window dressing that it’s we we don’t use 100% of synthetic data for everything. It’s just absolutely impossible at this point. Yeah, but uh most of our data is synthetic and we use real data for absolutely uh specific patterns that we cannot simulate and we cannot reproduce. So how do you validate those gaps? Okay. So, we actually partnered with incredible guys from Latis Flow back like some years ago. This is a Swiss company. They are doing governance for AI. Okay. Very very bright minds there. So, we partnered there and they use their platform to analyze our synthetic data. So, if you look at how this looks like, okay, those are synthetic patterns loaded into the into the platform. Okay, this is a synthetic image of a car. It has certain characteristics, attributes and uh each and uh every image is actually uh represented as a point in this uh latent space. Okay, so it’s uh the computer vision models they don’t see pictures as we do. They see embeddings. Those are highly dimensional vectors with numbers. So usually similar pictures uh will be clustered together. Okay, if you look at specific embeddings, so in this embedding space, if you map this embeddings to this latent space, you can see that the similar images are grouped together. In this case, those are uh images that uh any expert will immediately tell you that those are front views, right? Yeah. So, so that’s uh that’s pretty easy. Okay. So, I picked this cherry picked this one because it’s it’s easy for a human to uh to understand this. So, uh have you uh by any chance uh tried uh this uh similar company actually it’s called three lines of code and they allow you to visualize uh the embeddings as well. Um very interesting. We had an interesting webinar with the Yeah, shout out to the homie Paul. Yeah, Paul. and unfortunately not but I would love to learn what these guys do similar uh yeah it’s basically uh so he won uh the one of the Kaggle challenges by removing data right so the data actually had two uh synthetic data sets and four u regular data sets and he found that one of the synthetic data sets uh when you embed it uh the embedding was outside you know when you cluster it was clearly outside the uh real domain Right. So, uh he removed all that data and he removed I don’t know maybe 90% of the data to win the challenge. Instead of using all the data, he actually removed all the data to uh win the challenge. Very interesting. Yeah. Garbage in garbage out. Yeah. Still true today. Exactly. But we are coming to this actually. So this is coming. This is coming. Okay. So uh what what’s going on here? Okay. Look at this embedding space and this is a synthetic data. Okay. So now let’s add real data. Okay. That’s exactly what you mentioned now. And you see that real data has a different distribution. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So what happens when you look at the cluster of the real data? Okay. That is definitely not synthetic. Okay. Yeah. So those are not represented in synthetic space. And uh when you look at this it requires a bit more expertise from domain expertise. But again that’s one is still pretty simple. Anyone like any professional will tell you okay what is common about those images? Any guess? Let me carefully see. Uh
it’s it’s tough because um it is see if anybody in the audience out there may be having the same trouble as me. We’re we’re very close to the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. And so all I can see in the in the early renders, okay, Grand Theft Auto 4, now Grand Theft Auto 6. They’re all in the garage. Maybe that’s that’s the Oh, nice. Yeah, you have a sharp eye. Yeah, exactly. Those are indoors images. Yeah. So those are inside the garage. Okay. And what happens that the these images are that stand out. Okay. And they have a different distribution. But okay. So what though real them real images have those and synthetic images do not have that. Okay. But what happens actually the question is does this affect the model performance? And if you look at at the at the slice, okay, so let’s slice this data set and let’s pick a few uh indoors images. Okay, those are positive examples. And this tool actually has also the ability to mark negative with X. Okay. So we explicitly tell them the platform okay those are positive and those are negatives. So it it can better classify the examples. Okay. And when you run the model on those on this slice of indoor images you see that the model performance degrades. Actually it drops by 70% 17%. Right? Okay. So it means that these indoors actually contribute 70 17% to the model accuracy. So what uh what’s next? Next actually we we are back home and the uh 3D team uh starts working hard and they say okay we need a lot of images okay and the idea is not to produce millions of images. It’s the idea is to produce enough images with different pattern that can cover and close this gap. So we created those indoors images in different context in different environments. Okay. And then we added this corpus to the data. Okay. Now let’s see what happens with the distribution. We are now adding the newly created data. And you see it gracefully joins the distribution of real. Yeah. So if you see here you see a mix of synthetic and and real images. So these images nicely join the distribution right? And if you measure the uh the matrix nice, if you me measure the performance of the model, okay, then you see that the uh let me just go back here that the model improves by 19% 19.7% overall but a very nice observation that the model improves on also on outdoors images. Okay. Plus 6.3%. Yeah. Okay. And it can be explained by just it was simply overfitting on the outdoors, right? Okay. So this solves problem for both indoors and outdoors. Okay. But you cannot chase after each and every bias all the time. So in this case, so this particular system also picks a automatic uh automatic ho highlights. Okay. So for instance uh one of the automatic uh picss automated slices comes to the picture and you see that uh if you slice this by this particular finding the model degrades to to 45%. That’s a very wild thing. That’s a very bad thing. Okay we have to analyze this. Okay. Do you think what’s the problem with this slice? Uh that’s a I mean I if you uh snow or what can you go back uh to the uh grid view? Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s one particular vehicle type which is maybe not that common, right? It’s uh whatever that vehicle type is. It’s a Citroen cactus. Yeah. So it’s a Citroen cactus with this air bumps. You see those air bumps? Those are were particularly designed by company called Bus, a German company. By the way, we won the first digital damage recognition competition by bus. It was a world competition. So, we are familiar with this one. So, believe me, we we have created a lot of Citra and cactus. Okay? So, we reproduced this cars. Okay? And still, okay, I’ll go back. So still the model underperforms. Okay. We have a lot of synthetic cactuses. Okay. But but the model underperforms. So so what’s what happens? Okay. So here the collaboration with Latis flow. I’ll put it aside. Okay. And let’s go to the next tools that we are we are developing internally. Okay. And this one it’s uh something that uh that you guys uh can do uh without any buying any software or commercial system. So what we do we actually use here a a dino v3 backbone. Okay. So it’s a frozen backbone. It means we use internal weights coming with dynino v3. We don’t train dino v3. Yeah. Okay. So you can use it out of the box because it has the particular knowledge of the entire world or it knows all the objects. Okay, definitely cars. Okay, so using Dino V3 we actually create patches of real images. Okay, so it creates a grid of patches and we create a bank of patches. So whenever we analyze a synthetic dam synthetic image okay we actually compare we use a KN&N algorithm to to tell how how far our synthetic pattern is from the real one. Okay. So and uh this we call a realism map. So we actually measure the distance and this distance is represented by a heat map as you see. So look at this example and you will see that this entire air bump was flagged as unreal. Okay. Right. It means it was very far from the real world. So let’s look back at this the left side and you see our synthetic data. It looks pretty nice, right? Yeah. It’s pretty realistic. Okay. Yeah. But still there is a problem with that. Okay. So what’s the problem with that? The problem with that there are two problems with that actually. So first of all the problem the first problem is if there is anything like this in the entire real corpus. Okay and this is the first question that we need to ask and second question we need to ask if this particular patch is actually close to anything that uh that is real. So for for the first problem for the first question and we we absolutely must answer the two questions. So the for the first question the answer is actually we can use a train discriminator. Okay. So h this discriminator actually trained on those uh patches created by by uh Dino V3 backbone and uh this one tells us actually uh okay if you have ever seen this okay if you seen something you have seen something like this and this discriminator actually is trained to detect a a bad pixel a dead pixel or some artifact and it stops processing immediately there. So it says okay there is a pattern okay that’s that’s one is actually positive and the second one is actually a frozen feature KN&N it measures if it has seen this pattern in our data set so when you answer let’s say we have those patterns in our data set but discriminator says okay there is a problem with this patch so here actually is a uh we need to hand it over to the professionals. Okay. And at this at this point we hand over this heat map to this 3D team and they immediately spotted. Believe me the domain experts they immediately see the problem. Okay. So the problem is that this uh material uh has a lack of specularity. It doesn’t have Yeah. Exactly. So it should be a map. Yeah. And when we uh look at the reference images and we see the cactus, it is matte. Actually, it doesn’t have those micro, it has those micronormals that scatter the light on this material. So, making it matte and less reflective. Okay. So, this is the idea. And uh uh what you see on the right side is actually the reproduction of this material by our 3D team. So we recreated it. Mhm. And we fixed those materials and we ran it through the same procedure and uh these heat maps are gone again. This one this problem goes away. Yeah. But of course the next one will pop up shortly, [laughter] right? Okay. Yeah. So uh quick question. Uh you know uh you mentioned that you’re using a 3D team to generate all these images. why not use uh a generative uh approach where uh you know then you will not have this kind of uh problem. So here obviously the 3D team selected a material uh initially which was specular but uh if you actually used a generative approach then uh you would never get that right. You have excellent questions. You know why? Because I have perfect slides for [laughter] those. Okay. Sorry jumping jumping ahead. mutual appreciation society over here. [laughter] Yeah. So what what happens that first of all we started this 40 years ago. Okay. Yeah. No one heard about generative AI back then. Yeah. Okay. So we were pioneers in this space, right? I know that even Nvidia in their internal meetings and we partner a lot with Nvidia guys and they say they mention clickens all the time. Okay. Because we were ahead of time. We were ahead of their of their omniverse thing. We developed the same thing like many years ago for our internal purposes. Okay, we have our proprietary environment. But the the uh major problem with generative AI it’s not a problem with generative AI. Our system it can it built actually has a CAD CAD component. M so this component is actually the one that automatically annotates those images. Got it. Generative AI produces specially incorrect images. I mean recently they started improving. Okay. We we have seen this nana banana model like the latest version is absolutely mindblowing. Yeah. But still there are glitches here and there but uh this is the one problem. You must be absolutely pixel perfect with your annotations. Okay. And when you create generative AI thing, yeah, you never know where this lands you because it reconstructs the image. It doesn’t preserve the original geometry, the original uh pixels, the original h details that we want to emphasize, we want to particularly simulate. Okay. But if you want to bring more realism, that’s where generative AI comes to rescue. Okay? Yeah. So look at those. I picked two samples of synthetic data on the left side and we augmented them with generative AI actually generative AI and it was like a long journey to make sure that generative AI does not change the dimensions the position of panels and the all the engineering aspects of the vehicle but only only adds ad hoc objects those that happen in real world. Right. Here it also uh hallucinated some damage and put it a ruler which is very common in insurance by the way. But you you see those generated images are they were cherrypicked but uh this they bring more realism to and bring more noise real world noise. Okay. Sometimes it’s even noise of the sensors matters. Okay. Right. Today our latest uh latest synthetic data uh is has already all those things in inside. I mean we have all this uh distortion and uh all other things completely simulated but generative AI uh it’s a very good thing. The one problem I’ll tell you frankly it is very expensive. Yeah. So if you want to get a decent result, you need to use the uh top-notch model from Google, right? Okay. And if you use it, you will pay you will pay a big bucks for this. Okay. It just doesn’t pay off. So at this point, the the other problem with geni is that you do so much any model you choose, right? It’s actually not going to be perfect. So you build a lot of things around uh this model so that it it works decently and two months later all that work is useless because the new model that came out doesn’t have those problems right so that’s uh we started with we started with diffusion models like uh quite a few years ago before before it became a hype okay we started using diffusion models because one of our PhDs uh he’s actually his professor invented stable diffusion in Germany. Nice. Okay. So he he actually contributed a lot of his knowledge to this uh to this thing and uh we tried different versions of table diffusion but uh all of them were not specially specially correct. Okay, that they were not pixel perfect and of course they distorted the reality. So you couldn’t you couldn’t maintain the automatic annotations aside the those generated images but if it is completely reconstructed and generated you have no control over the objects and their positions and their and their masks. Okay. So this is like a kind of a dead end but uh we are trying to maneuver still we are using our core and sometimes we use generative AI to augment our synthetic data with even more chaotic and uh and uh bizarre scenes. Okay. So what is the size of the data u what is the size of the data set for these things? Are there like uh 100,000 images? Are there 10,000 or million images? A a good thing with synthetic data that uh whenever you have like 1 million real images annotated, you just roughly need maybe 100,000 of synthetic. So um synthetic data requires less patterns significantly less because it is absolutely generalized. Okay. So since it is abstract, it covers a lot of scenarios. So, but you can maneuver and you can simulate every scenario very fast. Okay, that’s something that you cannot do with the real data. Mhm. Because chasing, you know, it’s very difficult to find this uh let’s say this Mercedes or or this clever shuttle. Okay. Okay. Uh that’s very challenging. Yeah. So, so synthetic data comes to rescue but still for some edge cases we still annotate real data. Okay. But this is a specialized team which is like uh skilled and these guys do only this. Okay. So they just learned a lot of things through the tenure of clickings. Yeah. This is the same team that does this all the time. So they are extremely professional already. Okay. And we also have a quadrails on our side. We have a safeguards our QA team that uh checks those things and make sure that no bad annotation leaks into the model. Okay, I cannot tell you that it doesn’t happen. Okay, it happens but uh we are trying to to minimize those cases as much as as possible. Okay, so uh but this thing that let’s this sets the stage for the first slide that I showed you. Okay, though this adversarial attacks and this is something that is maybe underrated today or is not talked about uh talked through extensively but that’s another selling point of the synthetic data. Okay. So uh what if the real world is designed to fool the detector and what happens that those uh uh researchers uh around the globe what they do they actually do uh object detection in reverse. Okay. So they try to uh to find they use gradient descent to try and find the patches that uh uh that cause the uh actually in maximize the detector’s error. Right? So once they find those patches, it’s very simple to fool any vision model with those. Okay, those are real ones. By the way, those are three different researchers that I picked with permissive licenses. Okay. So, so that those are that’s why I I safely using this in in the presentation. So, we just use this patch and they covered the car with those uh with those reps. Okay. So uh but again if you do one of this and you cover the car it will make it will register absolutely nothing on many uh object detectors. Okay I don’t know about all of them. Yeah but but many of them will fail and uh let’s pick this one. Okay, that this is an example that the left side is is a synthetic car absolutely fake car simulated by our environment with some kind of synthetic damage. Okay, so we covered it with a with a pattern with a few patterns and ran this through the uh through YOLO. Okay, so this is a print screen from YOLO YOLO 26. Okay, interesting. So I have it running on my on my computer now. What’s the size of the model? Uh is it the I used the largest one? Largest one. Okay. So that’s Yolo large actually. And so Yolo is just thinking why does this guy keep showing me pictures of John Cena? [laughter] So the the the thing is that I don’t know uh I have not read that paper but it is also possible because YOLO is so popular that it was specifically designed to break YOLO. Right. You you actually mentioned that I believe so. Yeah. Right. The the the paper actually the original paper was specifically designed to attack YOLO 3. Okay. Okay. But again uh we just a bit uh uh we use that this pattern and uh we tried it on different angles. Uh it’s not the same on all the viewpoints. Okay. on some on some viewpoints where you see a lot of real car features like wheels like you know antennas uh the detectors actually detect the car okay sometimes they say that it’s a train sometime they say it’s a truck I have seen oven I have seen a kite okay I I have seen different things but uh it’s never a private car okay it’s never a sedan but uh uh the good thing here that uh the model, the same image runs through our system actually lands us on a very perfect segmentation and object detection. Nice. Why? Because our system is mostly trained on adversarial patterns. So when we architected this solution, we had this in mind that this system can be attacked. when you deal with fraudsters and that’s what I said we started with as as a counter fraud solution you must be ready for any adversarial attack and this is a I would say a significant advantage of the synthetic data so think of it as a let’s say as a biological immune system okay so if you see the same patterns all the time okay uh you you don’t have this uh vaccine in okay you will fail on each and every each and every attempt. Okay, but if you are actually simulate for this, you are synthesizing a vaccine for this. So we we are synthesizing this and we are prepared for even uh you know more bizarre patterns. Okay, I have a lot I have a folder called exotic patterns on my computer. So [laughter] I try different stuff and whenever I you know I travel and I see uh very interesting patterns I always picture them and run through the system to see that it doesn’t fail us. Okay. Right. That’s very important. Okay. So uh and the good thing that this is not only for cars. So this the same technique. Okay. I probably I didn’t mention that the core of the system is ontology. Okay. So we have the ontology of this domain. Yeah. So it’s not only the visual simulation, it is a visual simulation with automated annotations that come from ontology. And whenever we do inference, we also use ontology to infer on our ontology to make sure that we reduce the hallucinations of of the model. So it’s a comprehensive approach. It’s not only just uh you know render millions of images and solve the problem. So you don’t have to render millions of images. You just render enough images that close the gap and that’s why you need to Yeah. Also I mean for people who uh you know who are new to computer vision or uh who are uh learning uh what Dimmitri makes a very important point here is that it is not millions of images. The information uh I like to say the information is not in the number of images. it’s in the variance of your uh information is in the variance of the data right so in the extreme case you can think that oh if I have the same image copied million times it has zero variance right it’s the same image uh copied a million times so it’s not adding any more information right but if you have 100,000 images or even 10,000 images which provide a lot of variety then the model learns right and if you you may think that oh If you have more more data, it cannot be bad. It can be bad because you’re spending a lot of time and energy in processing all that data which which is not adding anything to your final uh accuracy. Right? So cleaning up the data to get the sort of minimal set. You just need to close the gap uh as Dimmitri said uh not just flood the thing with millions of uh images. Right? So this is a very uh common rookie mistake. people who are new they try to get uh you know they say oh if I had a million images no you don’t need a million images for a lot of things you just need the right uh amount of data absolutely go ahead I will second that yeah I will second that I will tell that’s absolutely correct and uh imagine that we would have rendered millions of of those citrine cactus with air bumps which are not realistic okay imagine if if we have done that we just spent our we wasted our resources. Yeah. GPU time and uh you know our team time and at the end of the day we would just overfeit on those patterns and we would never we would have never h address the real pattern. So it it’s sometimes it’s enough to have a even a few dozens of images taken from different colors with different colors and different scenes. Okay. so that the model will generalize on those patterns. Okay, of course they must be realistic. Okay, they cannot be like out of the blue but uh they should be the realistic and the same approach the same approach applies to any domain. Okay, so we tried this on boats, we tried this on two wheelers by the way all those are uh generated by our environment. Okay, synthetic environment. This B2 fighter is actually uh nice. Okay, I love this. All I can see still is Grand Theft Auto 6 [laughter] one track mode. It’s with Clickens logo by the way. Okay, so uh and you can also use it with aerial images and the satellite imagery. Okay, the same principles everything everything applies. Okay, so the good the I would say the the major advantage here is automatic annotation. Okay. So you can produce you you can use generative AI first but be sure that you have the tools to automatically annotate it. Yeah. Okay. Because uh that’s not straightforward. And uh this actually uh the takeaways here is that synthetic data is a control knob here. So it’s um become something that we dial that with uh generative AI we can actually even improve more we can introduce more noise more real world uh chaos into synthetic data still controlling the accuracy of the annotations and the accuracy of the model. Okay. Then we we need to be able to find the gap uh either using a third party software or developing algorithms like this uh uh realism maps that I showed recently. Uh robustness actually is a data problem. So all this uh adversarial wraps that blind the generic detector, it’s just another slice to render, simulate, label and train. Okay, so uh if you have this in place and you have models that can learn from synthetic data, that’s a very important thing because any model tends to do shortcuts, you know. Yeah, it will it will all of them are prone to shortcuts. Your job is is actually to make sure that model doesn’t do shortcuts on on any synthetic pattern so that it treats it as absolutely real. Okay. And of course the same engine can be applied to different domains. So actually that’s the end of the presentation. I’m curious with the new Astra model which can do amazing things with CAD. Have you found that your 3D artists can now create these 3D assets very quickly compared to before? Since it’s pretty new, we are still learning this. Okay. I can tell you that uh they announced that there they have a native integration with Blender. Yeah. Okay. And uh Blender is one of the tools that we use behind the scene, but it’s not the only one. Yeah. And Blender it is it does this integration through the MCP, Blender MCP. And I can tell you that we exhaustively tested this Blender MCP and we found it uh um like it is it is very limited I would say. Okay. Okay. So it’s it’s some tasks we resorted to human work. We tried to automate some manual tasks and at the end of the day we resorted to a human professional 3D expert because it he can done that uh faster and more accurate. Sometimes it is very difficult to explain the model the intricacy of the geometry that you need. Yeah. Okay. And maybe it’s not a model problem. It’s a human model interface which is sometimes uh challenging. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I believe Astro I believe that we are we’re living in the era where everything is so dynamic and and we see new new models arriving like every week and uh I believe an amazing things are coming and definitely we will keep an eye on all those new models and see their capabilities and once they can uh replace any parts of the uh this sophisticated R&D uh of course we will consider that. Nice. Yeah. Thanks so much for the awesome presentation. I certainly learned a lot. I hope the audience out there did as well. And we’ve got some questions for you here. But first, it is time for our trivia segment. Before we get to our trivia question, I want to remind everybody out there that OpenCV is a nonprofit organization that releases open- source software. And as such, we depend on the support of our sponsors and partners. Um, I want to take this moment to thank them right now. Big shout out and love to our gold sponsors, ARM, Futureway Technologies, Google Summer of Code, Qualcomm. Silver members Rooflow, Orbit, the British Machine Vision Association and Devpost, and bronze members Jet Brains, the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, Open MV, Tanggram Vision, AMP Software, Intuitivo, Rerun, Intrinsic, Buyers Dev, and Big Vision because every company needs a big vision. I’m contractually obligated to say that at the end [laughter] of it.
If you’re joining us for the first time or you just need a little reminder, one of the things we do on this show is a special giveaway to you out there in the audience. I’m about to ask you a trivia question. Put it up on screen here about today’s presentation. I have cooked up a pretty esoteric one. I think I’m going to stump you guys. I feel pretty good about it. If you’ve won in the last couple of months, please don’t answer and give somebody else a chance to win. Type your answers in the chat wherever you’re watching. And if you’re on Zoom, make sure that your settings are set to everyone and not just hosts and panelists so we can make sure that we we see your answer. Um, without further ado, here comes our trivia question. So, uh, today we talked a little bit about synthetic data and how Clickins is using it for vehicle inspections. And at the top of the presentation, our guest Dimma said that there was no hanky panky. [laughter] What band had a number one hit in 1966 with the song Hanky Panky? I’ll give you some hints here. This is a Michigander. [laughter] Um he’s he’s from my hometown of Niles, Michigan. He had a band. He they also had a couple other hits. Mooney Mooney, Crimson and Clover, Crystal Blue, Persuasion, a couple of big ones in the late 60s and early 70s. Uh he later went on to be a part of some a couple other bands, but I’m just, you know, how long will it take people to to Google this or ask Claude and and does Claude get it correct? Let’s find out. So, what band had a number one hit in 1966 with Hanky Panky? It was not their original song. They It was It was a cover that was written by somebody else and became It’s kind of an interesting story. It was back in the days where you could have regional music hits like a song would get very popular in a certain part of the world uh certain part of the country and then that would lead to a band becoming big instead of now where it’s just kind of everything happens all at once it seems for a lot of these and we’ve got our answer in Zoom. Uh, Carito Gr, the answer we were looking for was uh, actually you’re you’re off. You’re off. Uh, Carito, you’re you’re this the last name is incorrect. And so, and we need the full name of the band. We got some close ones, Tiana. All right, Caro. He he he amended his answer. We’ve got the We’ve got the correct one. We had some close ones in there. The answer we were looking for was Tommy James and the Shondell’s. Tommy James and the Shaondell’s. A uh Tommy James grew up in my hometown of Niles, Michigan. One of the one of the claims to fame of that of that Littleberg. Um so yeah, congratulations to Caro. We got there. Uh please send one email to me. That’s Phil opencv.org and we will make sure that you get whatever course you want. You can see what courses are on offer by going to opencv.org university. Um, Caro says he hasn’t heard that song since his last visit to Lancing. Yes, indeed. Uh, Michiganders, respect, respect to Michiganders. So, we’ve got some questions here in the chat. I’m going to bring up one on screen here from one of our longtime viewers. Uh, Tiana on Zoom asks, “How do you identify meaningful images to reduce the amount of images when you’re training models like this?” It’s we talked a little bit about how important that data integrity is and the data quality is famously the May West once said back in the day too much of a good thing is wonderful. That is broadly applicable to many things in life but it is not true of data like this. H how do you think about the data and how do you inspect the data to make sure that you’re not wasting time as we talked about here with unnecessary or even uh harmful to your model data. So first of all you must absolutely control the distribution of your data. So since it’s a sulated data you have a full full command of all the makes models conditions and environments and whatever. So you must absolutely track all the parameters and you must distri manage the distribution. But it doesn’t mean that you need to have let’s say 50% of black cars and 50% of white cars. So you just need to follow the distribution of cars according to the specific geography. So if you’re deploying the system in the US or deploying the system in other countries okay we have the same system that serves everyone. It’s a multi-tenant cloud solution but uh the model must have representation of all of them all of those geometries and geographies and you need to control the distribution first and uh that’s uh something that I also mentioned this in the presentation you need tools for that either commercial or your proprietary tools today I believe you can use all those uh VLMs uh vision language models that uh um uh that that can classify images and they can help you with those captions and uh and embeddings. But uh that’s the job of uh uh embeddings. Okay. So you need actually to analyze this in in different latent spaces and and see which clusters pop up. So if you see the new cluster appearing and it’s under represented you need to address this because uh and you need to be able to track the model performance to to measure the accuracy and uh be able to slice the data and see the accuracy on each and every slice. That’s pretty tough uh challenge. So for this you need tooling okay and either your proprietary tooling or other tooling it doesn’t matter but you need some automation in place. It’s not that a human can chase after all those distributions. It’s just not not not a human task. Okay. So, we just need some automation and uh and analyzing analyzing the data. But uh you never have uh the proper distribution. You always chase after new trends and after new ge geometries, new vehicles released to the market. Our system works on any car. Actually doesn’t matter if this car is a new car that is a concept car. We we will detect the panels on each and every car even not released to the manufacturing yet. That’s due to the synthetic data. But uh you must be able to process all the different panels. So you need to know them. You need to represent them. So you have only doors in your system. Then you will fail on fenders. If you have fenders, you will fail on bumpers. So you just need to add enough data but don’t be that uh I mean you not you don’t have to be obsessive with that. Don’t create millions of images. Start with a decent number and measure the performance and see if you need more. Yeah great great answer there. Anything to add to that Satia? No that pretty much covers everything right. It is um like I keep repeating that the information is in the variance of the data not in the quantity of the data. And so we have to capture the variance of the data and uh you could do it incrementally right find where you’re making mistakes right uh and that you know unfortunately most of these tasks require a human to go sit with the data and analyze it figure out what’s what’s going on right so a lot of times people just look uh look at graphs and say that oh my my accuracy is this much what should I do without actually spending the time with data But uh most good u you know engineers I know they spend a lot of time um looking at the data and fixing the problems. So I’ll give you [clears throat] an example and I’ve given these examples before also Davis King uh he had a facial landmark detector and uh you know he had produced a model uh the paper was the same. So somebody an intern at OpenCV uh Google summer of code had produced the same model using the same paper right so uh but the accuracy was not as good right so I um I mean I finally reached out to Davis and he mentioned that you know uh it’s all about it’s the exact same code not exact same code but similar uh code but he had spent like seven days right he put on his headphones and seven days he looked at each and every uh image in his data said there are 68 points on the face. Each and every point was manually verified uh and he put it in the data and that made the the difference. Right? And I know several several um uh examples of people who uh basically produce spectacular results just because they spend time with the data. [clears throat] Yeah. Sometimes you just got to read all the papers as we as we said. In fact you know in imageet visual recognition challenge they have this human level accuracy. uh they say that it is 95% uh hum a human gets about 95% accuracy that human was actually Andre Karpathi right and say why would why would karpathy spend uh you know seven days or whatever huge amount of hours looking at the data because because he wanted to understand it he wanted to understand it right I think I think you give too much credit to humans because the professional adjusters we were told by one of our uh uh customers they measured the accuracy of the professional adjuster in Europe, okay, which is very pedantic and like at least 30 40 years experience, his accuracy in damage recognition was not above 80%. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. [clears throat] Those insurance companies, I tell you what. [laughter] So, uh, thank you for those answers, guys. We’ve got a couple more questions here. A little bit of time left. Uh, Caro on Zoom asks, “Is there a contact email for Dimma can refer us to to communicate with the Clickins team? What’s the best way to get a hold of the Clickins folks?” Dimma,
dimclickins.com. That’s simple as that. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Dima at clickins. Right on. Appreciate it. Dima. Yeah. Um, this one is a little bit similar to our uh previous question, but I think maybe we covered it, but uh this person’s working on a project that can use only synthetic data, but the test will be on real photos. Do you have any tips or guidance or advice for uh Mike Watson here on his project?
It’s actually depends on the domain. So if they have only synthetic data just for for the training I believe it can be anything medical or maybe insurance because they don’t share the data with with the companies uh and if they have access to real data uh let’s say different real data from a different domain they can measure as I mentioned using like Dinov3 and KN&N they can measure the distance uh between the their synthetic data and real data just to see if they are close. Okay, because they can be completely off. Okay, but if they measure the distance to real images even not the real ones that are used by this customer but real ones that used in the same industry, they can at least have some kind of a baseline. Okay. But if they are completely uh they don’t have any access to the real data. So they need to to train measure it’s you know it’s trial and error. You you train the model you measure it on performance you uh you see the shortcuts. If you see that the model doesn’t learn anything you will see the loss dropping dropping immediately. Okay. because due to the shortcut okay and when you train those models you need to identify those shortcuts and see okay let’s do a lot of augmentation okay let’s add augmentation maybe gener generative AI okay let’s augment those images to to look more real okay and see if if this closes the data gap so when you close the data gap you must be absolutely confident that you don’t have a model gap so that that the algorithm is perfect for for this uh for this type of data. So that’s a like uh multi-step process.
I I I hope it answered the question. Yeah, I think so. Um any anything to add to that one, Satia? Uh well, first of all, I think that you should get you should try to get, you know, beg whatever client it is to get you some real data. It is extremely difficult and you can get blindsided if you are trying to u do the synthetic data without access to any real data. I’ll give you a very simple example to just illustrate the point right let’s say somebody tells you about oh they want to do person detection it sounds like a simple problem right but then uh so you you basically train a person detector model it’s easy to do you get plenty of data and then when you look at the test data it could be a thermal image right it could be an image which is from uh looking from the top of a building uh down and you had not even thought about it right and I’m picking these simple examples but uh in In the real world the examples are much more complex right the situations where uh you could it’s sometimes beyond your imagination no matter how hard you think it is very difficult to come up with all the situations in which you will land when you see the real data right so uh I would say that you know u you know try your best but try to get some samples right from uh from the client which are representative samples even if they say that okay uh we cannot give to uh 10,000 images ask for 100 that u include some representative and some corner cases right so you need to have some idea of the real data otherwise you can be shooting in the blind yeah there is another thing that you can ask the customers to anonymize the data so let’s say some of the customers are actually not uh ready to share the data because of a privacy so in our space in our domain Those are the license plates. Definitely. Okay. So for license plates, it’s pretty easy to blur them. Okay. So blur the license plates and blur the faces. By the way, that’s what we do in our system for the customers that care about the GDPR and privacy for those one that explicitly ask. We do this. We aposcate the faces and and reflections of faces and reflections of reflections of faces. everything that okay that can reveal some human humans in the image but for the medical in medical it can be challenging okay what you cannot obiscate the MRI scan that’s just not possible so that’s I don’t think that we have a a meaningful advice to these guys rather than try and uh try and error and try to achieve some data maybe from a similar area. Okay. But real data to be a reference. Yeah, get as get as much real data or as close to real data as you can seems to be the advice here. So, uh, best of luck out there, Mike. Got a couple more questions here. Uh, Sedarth asks on LinkedIn, “Do [snorts] camera specifications like focal length, aperture, etc. matter for training data? Does your data set need different types of cameras, different focal length, different uh even uh you know uh different angles, right? Like a 30 degree lens versus 180 degree lens are going to produce very different data. When generating simulated images, do you need to have a data set for different types of cameras or um and how does your system work with this demo? Brilliant question. uh uh you absolutely must simulate sensors, camera sensors. So when we simulate when we do simulations, we actually simulate sensors, we simulate aperture, we simulate everything. We simulate atmosphere. Uh this is where the simulated data, 3D simulated data outperforms the generative AI because simulated data uses geometry and uses HDRI to uh to accurately deliver the physical aspects of this scene because the physics is preserved. We follow the real physics of the reflections, the phys real physics of the light. When in generative AI or all those uh you know language models that produce images, they have zero knowledge of physics. Okay, they can create reflections that do not resonate with the backgrounds with the back plate. Okay. So uh so those things are not yet resolved. Okay. And you see Lun working on physical AI. Yeah. Okay. and and the other companies working on on this space to make this AI aware of the physics of the physical world of the optics. But you absolutely must simulate data on different uh uh uh camera specification. Again, it depends on on your uh use case. What is your uh usual input to the system? Do your users use mobile devices or do they use digital cameras or maybe uh stationary cameras? Okay, so if your uh your system must deal only with stationary cameras, why why would you uh simulate mobile shots? Okay, so you should focus on on the stationary cameras but have a wide range of those. So uh when you do simulation, you actually control every aspect of the scene and everything matters. Distortion matters, barrel distortion, radial distortion, everything matters. The specularity, the ambience, the diffusivity, the reflection of material, the glossiness of material, everything makes sense. Everything is very important and that’s why, you know, it takes like uh 14 years or 12 years to to develop the tech because it’s a very very deep tech.
Indeed. Thank you for that thorough answer and thanks for the question, Sedarth. I think that is all the questions we’ve got here today. Yes, indeed. Thanks so much for the presentation, Dimma. It was great having you on the show. Um, I learned something as well. Yeah. And, uh, I hope everybody enjoyed my thirst for Grand Theft Auto 6. [laughter] And, uh, our trivia question about Tommy James and the Shondell’s. go listen to some uh some late60s American pop hits today out there folks. Uh you want to any any final thoughts for the audience uh here Dimmitri?
No I’m I’m happy to be here. Thank you Malik. Thank you Phil for inviting me. It’s absolute pleasure and absolute privilege speaking to you guys and the audience. uh so I would say that uh simulating the physical world I would say it’s the next uh standard or the baseline for the training data because we are running out of real data and uh humans humans it it becomes more and more complicated and challenging to annotate insane amounts of real data and we’re just running out of this data. Okay. So, synthetic data beames the becomes the next uh training data standard and it should be as uh real realistic as real one. Yeah. Thank you Satia. Yeah. Well, uh thank you so much Dimma. It was a pleasure talking to you and u the presentation was very very insightful. I’m pretty certain that a lot of our audience feels the same way. Uh amazing amazing presentation and uh thanks our audience for being here every Thursday and uh thank you Phil for organizing this show. Uh this is uh this is great. I learned a lot myself. Yeah. Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks so much everybody. Thanks for joining us out there in the audience. Thanks to our guest Dimma. Thank you Satia for your your hosting duties today. We’ve got uh another one coming up for you next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. We’ll be walk welcoming the uh founder of smallest AI to talk about speechtoech AI technology. It’s going to be a new topic for the channel and we’re really excited to see what the state-of-the-art is in that. You can find us here wherever you’re watching. We will be there again next week for you. That’ll be episode 227. Until then, take care of yourselves out there, folks. Take care of someone else if you can and have a great day wherever you may be. Adios.
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09/24/2026 – Alliant Webinar – THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY – ANNUITIES
All right, we’re about to get started. Uh, let me know if my audio is okay. If you can hear me, please, that’d be uh great. Make sure I’m uh okay on the audio side.
Uh, just reply in the chat if you could. If you can hear me, just say yes. Um, you can hear my audio. Oh, terrific. Okay, I got some replies. So, it looks like audio is good to go. Hopefully, you can see my video and I’m ready.
Okay, it’s 2 o’clock uh Pacific time. So, welcome everybody. Uh good afternoon again. Uh thanks so much. Really appreciate you joining us today. Uh discuss annuities. Uh just talk about annuities, how they work. And today is meant to be an introduction to the topic of annuities. Um, and you know, if you’re interested in additional details, things like that, uh, it’s kind of meant to be the first meeting or maybe the second kind of presentation and for followup u, uh, together onetoone. U, annuities have certainly changed a lot over the years. Um, how they’re used, the way they’re constructed, the financial engineering that goes into them, um, much different than they used to be, you know, even 10 years ago, 20 years ago for sure. And the types of annuities. So today we’re going to go over uh you know just the good, the bad, and the ugly about annuities and uh you know what they are, who would want one, and then kind of build from there. Um by way of introduction, my name is Christian Chaplua um financial consultant here at Alliant Retirement Investment Services working with members clients on the west coast primarily. Uh so that includes California, Hawaii, also Washington State. Uh so I’ve been in the industry 15 years on the personal side. um you know helping uh families, individuals with uh investment management, financial planning, estate planning primarily and everything that goes with that. There’s always subsets of financial planning like budgeting, long-term care, um you know, tax tax savings, Roth conversions, etc. So, happy to kind of answer any questions today on any topic as we go through the the discussion. you’ll have a chance to uh ask a question in the chat or uh the Q&A and then also always available for a one-to-one meeting um on annuities, financial planning, estate planning, other topics. So you can uh you’ll have a chance to just reply uh to a meeting invite uh and then I’ll contact you and then we we can uh schedule that meeting.
Want to mention just housekeeping. Uh this presentation uh tended for educational purposes only and it is proprietary. We do work really hard to get this information to you. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes. We ask just to help us protect the integrity of our content um privacy of all participants and do not uh record, reproduce, distribute any uh or part of this presentation. So that includes video, audio, screen chat, uh capture, AI tools, uh without prior written consent. Uh by continuing to participate in this webinar, uh you acknowledge and agree to these terms. So very much uh thank you for your cooperation. Appreciate that.
Before we get started, just a couple of advertisements about upcoming annuities. So we’ve got one on uh October the 1st, uh 2 p.m. our regular scheduled time. Um that’s going to be on the home stretch. Seven things to do in the decade basically before you retire or that’s five years. Um nice checklist to get think about uh financial planning uh you know holistic financial planning and uh getting ready for retirement. So if you’re interested in that uh would love to have you join us. On the 8th we’re going to be discussing uh Roth IRA conversions. It’s one of our most popular webinars. pack strategies always are. Uh so that’s again 2 pm Pacific and just talk about how they work, some of the variables for success, uh operationally um what you need to do. Uh so lots of great information. Hopefully you can join us as well. And then we’ve got our webinars uh invest podcast and also our website blog. Uh all resources, great information for to help you in your financial planning journey. the website blog that’s at our um uh aerys.aligncreditun.com uh location and you can also get our invests podcast uh there as well.
This is a great summary slide how we can help you. Uh so we always encourage folks to think about planning um so important especially as you appro approach retirement. Uh just get a baseline in terms of where you are uh what you need to do. um always opportunities to uh change things, improve things um as you approach that great big milestone. Uh so basic plan uh which is which we call a complimentary foundational um financial plan is um is available to you uh no charge fin foundational financial planning um no obligation no fee. Uh so that includes kind of a a great snapshot and road map uh to your retirement plan. uh advanced planning which includes Roth conversions, tax planning. Uh we do ask for a client relationship there uh to help you with that and that is also no charge for clients and the same goes for estate planning. We have a digital planning estate planning partner uh help you get your living trust and other important documents completed. Uh also available no charge to clients. So we try to incentivize uh everyone to consider seriously becoming a client. We think that we uh offer a very compelling uh service um and uh and very very uh you know lots of value uh very very cost-effective uh on the investment management side and then things like annuities and market length notes and other strategies. So uh again if you’re interested please do reply to the invite um at the end of the presentation and we’ll set up a meeting.
Okay let’s talk about annuities now. Um so annuities our agenda here uh we’re going to go over what is annuity the different types uh kind of some misconceptions talk about taxation um a little bit about the you know sales practices in the industry and uh talk about you know how to look at your annuity if you have one or if you’re considering one. Uh how how to uh update replace your annuity get out of your existing annuity if that uh if that makes sense. and then who generally buys them.
Okay, so uh just quickly read off this definition uh in terms of what is an annuity. Annuity is just, you know, it’s a contract. It’s between you and the insurance company. Uh you put up money up front and then receive payments um either down the road deferred um or over a period of time. So again, that depends on the type of annuity. um you can receive an income stream last your whole life or you can um you know receive a lump sum down the road. Um there’s different objectives when it comes to annuities just like there are different objectives when it comes to portfolios. Um so there could be a growth objective, an income objective, uh you know a conservative uh goal, safe money strategy. Um so lots of different ways to use annuities. um three main reasons that people decide to include annuities as part of their overall uh portfolio maybe as part of their protective income. Uh number one um they’re tax deferred so you pay tax later unless it’s in a Roth account then you there is no tax as long as you meet all the requirements. U there is the opportunity for fixed returns. It’s a CD bond alternative. Uh so you know there are fixed returns available. uh the 10 year is over 5% now uh which is the benchmark for all uh interestbearing kind of securities loans things like that so um you know fixed annuity rates are on the high side and generally you know we can do better with a fixed annuity than we can with a CD so if you’re comparing CDs at line credit union or elsewhere uh we can almost always do better with a fixed annuity um but the term is generally 3 to 5 years so there is the opportunity potential for fixed returns there. And then an insurance company is the only kind of company that can issue an annuity um and provide income for life similar to a pension. A lot of pension plans, they outsource their um income uh obligations through insurance companies and annuitizing those payment streams. Uh so you have the opportunity income for life also.
So here’s some questions you know to think about in terms of uh you know should you buy an annuity think about it how can it fit into your financial plan you know one question is you know have you maxed out your 401k and IRA in terms of tax deferred savings. Uh so the nice thing about nudity is that it offers you an opportunity to um increase your tax deferred account. So, if you max out your 401k, you max out your IRA, um you could actually contribute to an annuity and um there’s no limit on a uh taxable account um with an annuity. So, you maxed out your retirement plan, but um you could also use an annuity, which is a um which is a retirement product, and uh increase your tax deferred uh balance as you prepare for retirement. The nice thing about annuities is that you’re not taxed until you withdraw. So there um unlike a CD, there is no 1099 issued on an annual basis if you have a gain. Um the 1099 is issued when you make a withdrawal. So um annuity is another way to kind of increase your tax deferred balance as you say for retirement as long as it’s in the budget. Uh so another option for you in terms of planning. Uh, another thing to think about is the income stability ratio, uh, your ISR. So, income stability ratio is calculated by looking at all of your, uh, guaranteed sources of income. So, that includes a pension, social security, um, and then also annuity payments. And then you know thinking about how much of your income is coming from uh stable secure guaranteed sources versus variable sources like growth in a portfolio um or or something else. Um so again annuity can supplement um you know your income stability ratio. it can add to your tax deferred savings plan um and you know again mitigate high taxes uh so that you’re withdrawing when taxes are lower or if you again want to add to your retirement savings so that um you have more uh more of a next nest egg as you think about retirement in your horizon.
So there’s different types of annuities um I’ll describe them really quick. So an immediate annuity uh is basically as it sounds it’s annuity that starts income um you know right away. You might have heard of a SPIA single premium immediate annuity. Uh so that’s kind of turning on income right away maybe next month and u and that might be for a certain set period of time like 10 20 years or could be lifetime. There’s also deferred uh annuities which provide either income or accumulation. Uh accumulation is another word for growth. And then in there the subcategories fixed, variable and indexed. So we’ll go through those three different types. But basically at this point in the presentation, you know, it’s a decision in terms of do you want income or do you want growth and then from there we decide what kind of annuity uh might provide some of those uh uh financial planning uh goals. When we talk about fixed annuities as I mentioned uh good CD alternative uh they pay a designated rate of return designed for people want to set aside money draw fixed amount of income maybe um again protected from m market downturns 100% downside protection um you again pay taxes when you withdraw the money in annuity and that happens whether it’s a taxable account or a retirement account um and then you have access at the you know to the funds Depending on the terms and conditions of the annuity, you could have a portion that’s available during the contract period or you could have the the entire amount available at the end of the contract period which is maybe 3 years or 5 years. And then uh you know we have to factor in uh taxes, early withdrawals, things like that. That’s part of the discussion. But that’s kind of uh you know fixed annuities. Again uh the main takeaway here is it is a CD kind of uh you know bond alternative. uh fixed annuity rates these days are kind of in the you know 5 and a half% area um guaranteed for you know a certain amount of time and uh can you know do a little bit better than a CD or um maybe US Treasury
variable annuities um that’s you know they they work basically as they sound they’re variable uh earnings are tied to other assets uh inside of a variable annuity sometimes they’re called sub accounts where you mutual funds inside of that variable annuity. Um, and they benefit or they kind of uh, you know, they grow uh with, you know, with the uh, the performance of the investments inside. Uh, they’re designed for people want to take advantage of both uh, you know, growth um, and maybe income because you can turn on income with some of these variable annuities down the road. Uh, really depends on your goal, the company, the terms and conditions. Um but variable annuities are designed for growth whether or not you have income uh goals and um um and you know that there also um you know some considerations in terms of you know how they work and the fees the potential fees that uh go along with them. We have some of variable annuities that are no fee no charge. Um the biggest category in there is called a RIA registered index linked annuity. uh we work with a lot of people who um you know who purchase a RIA um you know it makes a lot of sense in the right circumstances and then there’s the you know traditional variable annuity which has mutual funds inside of it um typically we’re not working with those very much anymore um even you know historically um I always thought that the costs inside of a variable annuity were kind of high there’s other ways to uh you know to achieve growth. Um but with ARIA uh which is a more current type of variable annuity um you know that you know we we’re getting a lot of um benefits on the cost side because um you know can be uh no fee uh some of these products can be no fee and then um you know the other benefits that they have in terms of growth opportunity and downside protection. So that kind of summarizes in a quick nutshell variable annuities and again if uh you know you’re you’re interested to learn more about this uh category then then do please let me know.
The third category is an index annuity. Um so which is kind of a you know a a blended version of annuity. uh mixes some of the fixed attributes that uh are in a fixed annuity and some of the uh growth characteristics of a variable annuity. They’re often tied to an index like the S&P 500. Uh but uh the biggest distinction about an index annuity is that they are protected against losses usually 100%. Uh almost always 100%. And so uh a fixed index annuity again just like it sounds. a kind of fixed contract meaning that you um are guaranteed against any losses by the insurance company but it also provides the chance for growth. Um and that could be you know 6 8% per year really depends on the type of annuity depends on the performance of the index but it’s kind of a good in between version of uh an annuity. Uh it’s for a little bit more conservative investors. Uh people who don’t want to um lose money but have the um the time frame to uh let the annuity uh work do its thing. And index annuities are typically 5 years or 6 years sometimes 7 years. Um so uh all three of these categories of annuities they have the same attributes you know um death benefits uh they have deferred taxes available and then um again that 1099 uh exposure when you withdraw.
So again kind of think back to you know where we should uh position annuities in our portfolio if we want to learn more about them or decide that this is a good part of uh the overall financial strategy you know decide on you know whether we’re looking for kind of fixed returns or growth related returns and then from there um you know understand you know fixed indexed variable um characteristics whether or not um you know one or the other makes more sense and then you know think about income and whether or not that should be a component of the overall financial strategy of the retirement plan. Uh you know again um looking at income versus other sources which might be pension rental income uh dividend income uh fixing uh you know um uh fixed income portfolios uh all of the above.
So let’s talk about uh some misconceptions and ideas here. Um I you know even today 2026 talked to lots of people that kind of had this impression that annuities are bad, the fees are high, the holding periods are long, the insurance company’s going to kind of uh try to run away with the money. Uh so um you know in UDI’s uh you know my take on the whole sector these days again in 2026 versus 20 30 years ago you know uh my honest opinion is that they’ve changed a lot um they are really um different than they were uh just like many technologies are um again versus 20 30 years ago. So if you had this idea that annuitity is bad um and somebody told you that I would really you know challenge you or suggest you kind of do your homework and you know credit to you for signing up for today’s discussion um cuz you know I do meet a lot of people that still have this idea but um you know that we’ll talk about the fees and the holding periods in a sec um but they have really changed a lot the amount of financial innovation that has occurred in the insurance industry is kind of very impressive they have a lot of PhDs he’s working for them these days and they know that they’re in a competitive marketplace and they know that they have to um you know clear the hurdle in terms of folks like me. Um so you know they have to get through you know my my practice first before they kind of get to a client opportunity uh because annuities can only be sold through agents. And so um you know that’s forced them to be more competitive um you know more innovative and you know the products that we recommend these days are actually quite impressive in terms of you know how they work and the value that they provide um and also their cost effectiveness. So again something to consider not for everybody um but something to consider. Here’s a fee schedule of what the fees used to look like and this is certainly not something that I would recommend. um when we add up all the fees alto together and this is why annuities kind of got a bad reputation uh because they weren’t you know they weren’t a good deal um a long time ago or if you come across annuity like this today um it’s really hard to overcome fees of you know 3 and 1 half to 4%. you know, blending in mortality and expense ratios, sub account fees, which are mutual fund fees, rider charges, um you know, anytime you get to 3 4%, it’s hard to make money. And so we um never recommend something like this. Uh if you come across it, my suggestion would be to give me a call. Uh probably decline um you know, that opportunity because this is way too much in terms of fees to be paying. Um but you can see all the different categories of fees. me and sub account rider charges and they can add up. If you have an annuity today, make sure that you understand what it’s costing you and because it’s really going to impact the performance. Add up all these charges. If you need help calculating all these charges, more than help more than happy to help you kind of think through this and calculate those. Um so again, um you know, if you got one of these legacy older type of annuities, it’s definitely time to consider a replacement uh because these fees are too high. Um, again, just on this topic, you know, I’ll reinforce it. Today’s annuities, um, uh, without an income writer, uh, most annuities that we’re recommending are no fee whatsoever. So, think about it. That’s 3 and a half to 4% that goes in your pocket versus kind of paying for benefits. Riders, which, uh, you know, another word for rider is basically a benefit. Uh, so whether that’s on car insurance or home insurance or in an insurance product. Um so you know my goal u I believe investor goal should be kind of to be aware of their fees reduce them and uh as much as possible in order to get good value. Let’s talk about the holding period surrender charges. So um with annuities um remember it’s a retirement product it’s in a retirement product category. Um there is a commitment period, there is a holding period and if you um cancel the contract, if you cancel the annuity early, there are surrender charges and penalties. Um this is no different uh in my mind at least from a IRA or 401k. Uh IRA and 401ks when you make a contribution there is definitely a commitment period. Um you’re not allowed to take uh money out of your IRA or 401k until you’re 59 and a half basically. um you know there’s some rules around that with a workplace plan if you’re still working there but generally the the idea is that uh until the age of 60 basically you can’t take money out of your IRA or 401k you know people are contributing for decades and they know the deal going in there’s a 10% penalty that IRS will charge you if you withdraw that money sooner and so you know again annuity is a retirement product um there is a commitment period there’s a holding period and if you um withdraw money early then you’ll pay uh a penalty. These uh contingent deferred surrender charges CDSC fees they’re different depends on the company depends on the strategy the product you know could be as high as 8% and then they decline typically over time. So here’s an example of a 5year CDSC starts at 5% by the fifth year you’re at a 1% penalty and after the fifth year um then there’s a zero penalty. you can totally walk away penalty-free. So, that’s how these uh holding period surrender charges work. Uh but keep in mind also that typically again in 2026 um you know insurance companies have had to be more innovative and and competitive most insurance companies and again 99% of the time with us um there is a 10% annual free withdrawal amount that’s available to you annually. So set another way if somebody puts in example $100,000 to annuity they have 10% uh which is $10,000 available to them as a free withdrawal no penalty annually. So um you know there are ways to get you know funds out of the annuity um after you purchase it if unexpected you know expenses come up. Uh but typically you know and I always recommend this always want to think about this with clients is that you know this is a longerterm strategy this is the money that you want to set aside for 3 years 5 years 6 years and that you won’t need to tap it. Um so if you need the money if you need the liquidity then we’re going to go in a different direction. We’re not going to go towards an annuity. Um and we’re always going to respect those holding periods. And that’s why it’s so important to have a financial plan so that you know uh and can think about what your guidelines are, time frames, and uh make sure you’re on the same page with you know both spouses as to when you need might need these funds.
Here’s the third part of the uh kind of misconceptions that we sometimes hear. You know, the insurance company’s going to take all the money and uh and run away with it. Uh so um you know again a long time ago um you know 20 years ago um really differs with the insurance company. Um there were some you know products that were what’s called annuitized and uh it was kind of like a pension. You know if the um if the annuitant passed away um the insurance company would uh keep any remaining balance. Uh so uh that certainly kind of uh left a a bad reputation with with some of these strategies and that you know word got out. Um so the insurance companies they did change um you know nowadays uh there’s typically always a death benefit. Um people rarely ever annuitize um and you know depending on their income needs you know there’s different terms and conditions but uh you know the takeaway from this slide is that there is almost never where the insurance company runs away with your money. If somebody purchases annuity uh almost always at least the one the products that we recommend almost always a death benefit. Uh so you might get you know back a portion of what you put in if you pass away prematurely. Um but again you know this is another misconception to be aware of and to understand that the landscape has changed and uh and like I said before like every technology um when it comes to your 401k your IRA you know the money managers inside there um insurance products these things have all changed quite a bit in the last 20 30 years. Um, so it’s important to keep on top of all the information and innovation. We talked earlier about taxation. So again, annuities are tax deferred. No annual 1099, not until you withdraw. Um, you benefit inside of a annuity from triple compounding, which is earnings on your principal, earnings on your earnings, and also earnings on the taxes that you are not paying. And then if you want to replace an annuity that you have today, um it can actually that transfer can be tax protected. You don’t have to pay tax when you go from one annuity to another. Uh we utilize what’s called a 1035 exchange, which is an annuity to annuity exchange, and you’re tax protected by doing that exchange. So that’s a way to kind of keep your tax bill down until you actually need to withdraw the money. Uh but again, swap out your old annuity which might have uh high fees or might not be working for you or uh not generating the return that you’re looking for. Uh change it out of that old uh annuity strategy into a new annuity strategy and keep that tax protection status uh for any gains that you have there.
Really quickly, here’s kind of a hypothetical comparison of tax advantage vehicle versus a taxable account. So, where you’re paying taxes annually. Um, so no surprise, year 1 through year 2025, um, you obviously have a lot more inside of a um, you know, tax advantage vehicle versus a taxable account. Um, and so the the compounding, the triple compounding really takes effect over 10, 15, 20 years. And you could see these numbers in comparison. Uh so by year 20 uh tax advantaged um you know you’re looking at 739,000 for initial investment of 200,000 uh versus 487,000 again benefiting from all that triple compounding. So most of us are aware of this kind of math uh but it’s uh worth reinforcing.
uh that that chart was based on an 8% return and u some other factors and fees uh but just gives you an example.
So again you know the insurance companies one thing to remember and we all realize this um you know they are in a for-profit business they are looking to kind of uh reap a rate of return return on assets return on income for all of the activity and hard work that they do and uh that’s the case for any service or product that we purchase. Um, so just, you know, remember that the CDSC fees, M&A fees, riders, investment fees, those are all ways that they make money. Um, but they’re not always part of every single annuity uh that’s out there. And uh, you know, the annuity companies are the insurance carriers are basically looking uh for a positive return on their investment. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in this business. Uh, but that’s certainly not a reason to avoid them. Um, you know, that’s the case with uh lots of different mutual funds, money managers, and other approaches to saving for retirement. And so, um, you know, as long as the fees are reasonable, the insurance companies deserve to be compensated. Um, and then, um, you know, you deserve the benefits inside of these strategies. Also, you know, sometimes uh uh insurance agents kind of uh offer a complimentary dinner, dinner, seminar at a a nice restaurant. Um if you do attend one of these, um just give you heads up that you want to be um just want to be smart going in there. Ask good questions. um you know realize that um it is a sales presentation and um um you know just ask good questions and um don’t be kind of swayed by a nice presentation. Do your homework, get your financial plan done. Make sure you’re working with somebody you trust. U if you hear anything like uh you know double in 10 years um you know ask how that happens. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible, but you know, be aware of high fees, be aware of long surrender periods for sure. You know, typically, you know, greater than five or six years. Um, ask about commissions. Uh, we disclose all of this information up front. Uh, you’ve got your own smell test, you know, when it sounds good to be too good to be true. Ask better questions, ask more questions, and be convinced. You know, that’s how I approach every conversation. you know, I you know, first I have to be convinced and then anything that I recommend. Um, you know, I make sure that I’m working with the client to have a good one-to-one discussion. Um, so ultimately they’re convinced that there’s value there also. Uh, so you do, if you do attend a presentation, uh, just go again in there, um, aware of all the kind of, uh, uh, you know, issues with that sales discussion. If you have an annuity, I would be happy to review that with you. No obligation. Um my my main goal is to think about your financial plan and uh make sure that the asset allocation, financial strategies that you have inside of your uh all your accounts, retirement and taxable accounts make sense for you. And if there’s a chance for an improvement, um then, you know, we talk about that and and see if uh we should implement that. Uh again, uh if you have an annuity today, give me a call. be happy to help you with that. Uh again, I’ve said a few times, but annuities have changed dra dramatically over time. Um there’s a big emphasis on growth and um accumulation products these days, and they do work. um you know I’ve seen people do very well over five or six years um and uh you know uh see see a lot of growth in their accounts um you know and with all the other benefits that come with annuities you know for in for instance downside protection uh protection against losses those can come from fixed annuities from rias from other products um so it’s worth kind of doing your homework and uh seeing if this is a good fit uh again the fees have come down significantly. Um, you know, gone are the days of those 3 4% fees. Uh, these days, um, no fee is typically 0% fee is typically the rule of thumb. And then, uh, the only place people are paying for fees is in an income writer. Um, and that kind of makes sense, um, in most circumstances. Uh, but those fees need to be reasonable also. Um, so again, you got 1035 exchange options available to you. And then again, you know, do your homework. Do that cost benefit analysis.
This is a nice summary. So again, if you’re looking for tax deferral, fixed rates, growth with downside protection, could be 20, 30% downside protection. If you’re looking for income, the death benefit, you know, you want to get some credit protection potentially depends on the state you reside in, u you know, this can come from an annuity. Um, you know, I heard a really interesting, uh, quote today. Uh, so I get a lot of research coming from money managers. I thought I’d share this with you. Um, you know, we’re at recent market highs and, uh, a lot of people are concerned about whether or not there’ll be a correction. And, uh, this statistic I thought was really interesting. Um, you know, basically over the last 20 years through like February 2025, so about the last 20 years, seven of the S&P 500’s 10 best trading days came within 15 days of the 10 worst. So, we’ve got again, seven of the S&P 500’s 10 best trading days came within 15 days of the 10 worst. So seven out of 10 times uh the market snapped back so quickly that it was hard to capture that gain. Um so you have to be real nimble and really quick and most people um financial adviserss included aren’t really equipped to uh reverse course within 15 days. So this I thought was a tremendous reminder of why it makes sense to stay invested even though there are some bad days out there. Um and you know the the volatility that we see in the market it’s kind of the price of uh um you know the price of uh being invested uh but you know another great expression that I heard once um you know volatility um is the toll it’s not the exit. So, an annuity can be a great way to keep you invested. Um, you know, go through uh the downside protection, understand how that might work for you, but it can be a great way to stay invested um to add diversification to your portfolios and give you some of these other benefits.
Again, uh annuity might be right for you. It might not be. there are many many instances where annuity is not the good choice. Um so you know that’s best covered with a you know a one-to-one discussion. Um but if you want to supplement social security if you feel that your longevity is in your family you’re going to live a long time if you want to re reduce risk on your part of your portfolio. Um, those are all reasons to consider one. Uh, and then we’ve talked about being, you know, the expense side, hidden fees, high commissions, uh, holding periods, CDSC fees, confusion. Um, after today’s discussion, you’re halfway there in terms of understanding how these annuities works. Um, so it’s important to boil these down into simple concepts so that we can utilize them um, in our financial plans.
So that brings us to the end of our presentation. Um thanks for for listening. Um again this is our value ad. You know talk about financial planning all the different components. Talk about completing your personalized financial plan. Um and then also estate planning coordination. Again we’ve got access to investment portfolios, annuities, dividend portfolios, passive active strategies. The list goes on and on. So, um, you know, there’s a financial plan that’s right for everybody and it’s just a matter of thinking through the different options, uh, with a trusted advisor. And then here’s a quick snapshot of our estate planning. Uh, so trust and will is our digital estate planning partner. Uh, they can, uh, provide, you know, a great platform service to get your, you know, living trust completed, your will, your power of attorneys, uh, all completed at no cost if you become a client of ours. So, I manage the estate planning dashboard. Uh, I basically send you a link. You get 100% discount if you are a client of ours and then, uh, you’re off and running. Uh, it takes about, uh, 2 hours or so to complete this process. Tremendous saving versus going to an attorney. Uh, but if you’re more complicated, then I would advise you go see an attorney. you know, if you got complicated family issues or, you know, real estate or complicated questions, international topics, um then it’s best for you to go see an attorney. But if you got a simple estate plan like most of us do, 90% of the people I work with, then um this service with Trust and Will works very well.
Okay, here um here’s my contact info. Uh that brings us to the end of our presentation. I’m going to launch the poll so you have a chance to set up a meeting with me. Uh so again, if any questions um if um you want to talk about financial planning, get your financial plan done, your estate plan done, um open door uh available to you uh to to get all that completed. So hope to hear from you and uh would love to work together. With that, um I’ve got the chat open. I’ve got the um uh the Q&A open. I’ve got one question so far. Uh so please do uh you know put in uh enter some questions in the chat or in the Q&A and I can uh do my best to answer them and it can be on any topic. Uh happy to talk about almost anything. Um again other financial planning uh or investment topics uh whatever is on your mind.
Okay first question. Um, can NUD be a good choice to provide income for a child who needs support? Uh, does not qualify for government support or special needs? Um, isn’t likely the choice. So, disability or Medicaid, um, special needs trust isn’t likely a choice. Um, so, uh, possibly, um, you know, there it’s on a case- by case basis. So this annuity can be uh structured different ways. Um in this situation it can be providing income you know through the uh the parent or the person um who purchased the annuity u and then funnel through to the child. In some situations there can be um you know a child depends on the age of the child. There are some rules around the age of the child um that we need to verify. I would investigate it. Um especially when you know there there’s a need for income. Um but this annuity might be you know supplementing other sources of income too. Might be other types of strategies. Um okay so the person’s uh thank you for the update. The person’s 20 years or older. So they’re basically an adult. They’re an adult child. Um so that’s good. Um and part of this depends on the annuity company. Um so when you know annuitants are uh younger we’d have to look at like ownership issues uh versus the annuitants which can be two different people. Um and then also whether or not the estate planning uh is a factor component for this. So I would say the answer to the question is it’s possible. Um we don’t get this question a lot u but it’s worth investigating. Then, you know, in these situations, we always bring on our our advanced planning team to help um anytime it gets comp a little more complicated. In this case, I would kind of bring on an advanced planning team. Um, and I’ve got lots of resources for that to help you, but it’s worth investigating uh just to make sure that you’re thinking about income uh providing income for this uh for this person down the road. Okay. Any other questions in the chat um in the Q&A? Let me just scroll through here. Um, kind of a quiet group this time. Only one question. I’ll give you a minute to think about things. Um, like I mentioned, we’ve got those other webinars coming up. Uh, so if you’re interested in kind of, uh, just financial planning in general, uh, Roth conversions, uh, you know, please do join us. Um, you know, the the, you know, I’ll leave you with this idea. Um, you know, the markets are always changing. You know, we can see again the 10-year uh these days is above 5% which um um is quite of a quite a threshold to go through. We’ll see what happens in terms of whether or not it stays there. But, you know, planning for uh you know, different market scenarios over the next 3 to 5 years is an important part of the investment management process we all kind of you know uh have as part of our retirement planning. So uh would very much encourage you to kind of think that through and uh think through all the topics and again whether or not annuity is right for you. Um so uh again things are always changing, products are changing, money managers are changing and you know it’s a full-time job for me just to keep up with all this stuff and to uh you know be a fiduciary and pass on all this information to my clients. Um so um you know I would offer that also for you to consider uh you know make sure you’re you’re planning accordingly and holistically and and uh you know adding all those different things um into your financial plan. Uh you know with retirement planning um you know another tidbit offer that I would give you is that um you know some things remain the same. they’re evergreen. Uh but some things change and so it’s just understanding the difference between the two. Uh got one more question here. Uh so thank you for that. Um person’s asking, can you look at my existing annuity? I think I wanted to roll it over to something else. Um yes, please. Um would be uh really excited to work with you on that. Um so if you uh I’ve got your name. Um, so we’ll uh schedule a meeting and kind of look at your your annuity today. Uh, see how it’s performed, see how the uh what the fees inside of that annuity look like and compare it to another alternative and that could be another annuity or a different strategy. Uh, but yeah, that would be great. Thank you for offering that. Uh, we’ll set up a meeting and uh just review that uh that current annuity.
Okay, I think that’s all the questions for today. um
question. Oh, somebody just asked um you know, can is there a link to review the webinar again? Uh so, uh this is a good question. Uh we do not record these webinars. Uh sorry about that. We do have some recorded content. Um we’ve got some YouTube videos. we have um you know our podcasts but we use these webinars more as you know an opportunity to introduce topics in financial planning and encourage people to give us a call. Um so they are very introductory. We want to make sure that uh when people consider these these strategies that you know we’re working with them and we could you know provide our full advice and counsel. Um so we encourage a one-to-one meeting. Um and again there’s no obligation. Uh so I’d be happy to go through all this information again with you um so that you you you know you get the update or you could catch the the webinar once again. We have a recurring cycle on these topics. You can look on our calendar. Um there’s other advisors that provide uh these webinars um on annuities throughout the country. Um so if you’re on the West Coast, you can catch one of theirs and then kind of you know review things uh you know give me a call again whenever you’re ready. Um and uh and you know that way you can get an update. So sorry that we do not provide the recording. Um uh I know there’s a lot of content available but uh just you know the way we kind of want uh want to work with folks is uh have a one-to-one discussion. Okay, I think that’s all the questions. So again really appreciate participation and uh and all the nice questions. Thank you. Uh have a great end of the week and look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.
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09/22/2026 – Arrived Webinar
Fantastic. Cameron and team, thanks so much for prepared remarks as always. Cameron, what are you sipping on this Tuesday morning? Well, it’s uh it’s getting cloudy, so I need my second cup of coffee. Absolutely. I know. We just had fall equinox. It’s it’s getting gloomy in the Seattle area, but not complaining. Cozy fall is right around the corner. Pumpkin spice season is upon us. Absolutely. Cameron, you probably saw we have folks from all over the country today, which is absolutely exceptional. Uh for folks that are new here, feel free to drop any and all questions in chat. This is your time. We want to be sure that you’re getting your questions answered. U so I’m going to get started here with Rick’s first question and then I’m going to drop a few details on our $25 credit uh if you attend a webinar and the FAQs with that. We can chat through that live if anybody has questions as well. Uh first one from Rick. Can a boutique finishing lodge be used for an investment property with your company? I mean, I would say technically yes. There there’s not a reason why it would be precluded from being an offering on arrived. Uh with that said, you know, primarily we’re investing in uh real estate where there’s some more passive operations. So, long-term rentals, you know, there’s a two-year lease on a property. collect rent, utilize the property manager, a fishing lodge. Um, you know, to the extent that it’s kind of like an Airbnb, you know, I I I think that that’s within the realm of possibility. Where it starts getting a little bit more difficult is if there are more like commercial fishing operations, there may be licenses, things like that. But, you know, to the extent that it is more like a vacation rental, but there’s fishing amenities, I think that’s very much within the realm of possibility. So, interested in hearing if you have more detail on that, like whether you have the fishing lodge property and would be interested in having arrived uh manage it or it’d be an investment offering or um you know, let us know some thoughts there, but happy to take that thought further. Absolutely. Yeah, Rick, great question. And I did drop a link to um our survey monkey which essentially our investments team reviews on a bi weekly basis. I would say even um quicker than that. So feel free to drop any and all details there or if you have more in the chat today that’s great as well. Taylor I see you’re having a hard time downloading that document. Um if other folks are also facing that definitely let me know. It looks like it’s had like 47% on here with 16 clicks. Um, but let me know if there’s issues there. I can add it to the screen and we can walk through those details live. All right, let’s see here. Another great one from Jason. Will there be more properties purchased in the Seattle area? Also, Vancouver, Portland area. Good question. Yes, for sure. So, we’ve got individual rentals in Battleground, Washington right now, and it is very close to the Vancouver area. I think it’s maybe 15 20 minutes north of Vancouver, Washington. And that particular area is um attractive because you have the no state income tax in Washington and then no sales tax in Portland, which is right across the state border. So, a lot of people live in Vancouver, Washington. They may work in Portland. So, that’s the reason why we liked it as a very specific investment thesis while being in the Pacific Northwest. Um, in the Seattle area, we do have our Seattle city fund. And the way that that fund works is that we have uh both rental properties in there as well as credit investments. And those credit investments are really oriented towards being a higher yielding cash management. So some of the rental yields up in the Pacific Northwest, they tend to be a little bit lower because the more expensive that your property values are, whether it be California, Washington, Seattle, any of those places, then you tend to get a lower dividend yield on it because rents can only go up so much. You can’t borrow against rents as an example. Whereas home prices, because you can borrow, that tends to produce kind of a dislocation between the amount that somebody’s willing to pay for a mortgage versus rental income. All that to say, that’s kind of why you have the dynamics where the more expensive property that you have, the lower dividend yield that you have. So, we do utilize uh that cash management through our credit investments to increase the yield. But as we get more net investment into the fund, then we’re able to purchase another property. Our average property in our Seattle fund, I think, is about $830,000 um across those couple properties. Um, so it is kind of a high mark to wait until the next property, which is why we haven’t seen some in a while. But in addition to that, it’s not just rental properties and credit funds. We also have different um investments in in different funds as well in the Seattle area. So, we have a we have a property that we’re co-investing with a local operator that is doing a value ad apartment um like I don’t want to call it a flip because that kind of is the wrong um timeline. It’s really a 5 to sevenyear project, but you know, we are able to invest in those types of assets in the fund itself. So, we are getting more properties into the fund, but they’re not always arrived managed rental funds or single family residential. They may be co-investments into individual apartments or different type of value ad operations and flips within the greater Seattle area. But really the mechanism to uh distinguish there is that we allocate cash towards high yielding credit investments. You you get enough cash into the fund then you put it into assets and they kind of rinse and repeat. So then as more money comes in you deploy that into credit investments. So that’s really the the cash management strategy to get higher yields than you normally would with just owning a rental property in the Seattle area. So to kind of recap, that’s the Seattle fund. um and when we get more properties there. And then Vancouver, Portland area. I do think that if you’re going to be in the Pacific Northwest, those lower cost of living areas, um newer inventory, a little bit less big city feel, but very convenient for a specific tax reason, um is the play. So, look out for more properties there. It’s, you know, still on the road map as a strategy uh for Arrived. Fantastic. And it looks like we have some a couple quick rapid fire Cameron on uh markets in the area or not in the area, markets all over the US. So do we have properties in Charlotte, North Carolina? I believe there was another one in here from Ter uh Georgia as well. Yep. So uh Charlotte, North Carolina, definitely we have some properties in there. Uh you we Charlotte’s gotten uh fairly expensive some from the time that we’ve been purchasing. So we started in um 2021 purchasing there in Gastonia kind of second and third ring of the metropolitan area in Charlotte. Um those have been good investments. So definitely Charlotte as a market is attractive. It’s it’s actually got the second largest banking uh financial operations in the in the country behind New York City. So it’s actually very much a financial hub of the southeastern part of the United States. So um definitely have conviction in Charlotte. just there’s there’s sometimes a difference between feeling good about the market and like the right time to to purchase a a property. So, um we’ve been streaming them in somewhat slowly. You know, I would I would say that we haven’t invested a ton in North Carolina in the last 2 years, but definitely have properties there. And if you are interested in Charlotte, you can always buy properties on the secondary market to the extent that they’re available. So uh investors who already own shares in that property if they need to exit for whatever reasons they can put their shares on the secondary market and then you trade it just like a stock market on a monthly basis. So the stock market is open from you know 9 to 1 every every day um or 9 to 4 actually um but we settle on a monthly basis. So, you know, can answer more questions about secondary market later if you all have them. But basically, long story short, if you do want to invest in Charlotte and there’s no active new offerings, there’s always an opportunity on the secondary market. Um, there was another question about which part of Georgia? It was Georgia in general. Oh, Georgia in general. Yeah. So, we’ve been pretty active investors in Atlanta. I think it’s actually our largest metropolitan holding and we primarily purchased there in 2021 and 2022. Um good market high eviction rate though which is why we pulled back. So during that um COVID runup time we definitely saw some market weakness on the operating side. So long-term conviction still feel good about appreciation. Operating risk was higher than we had appetite for. So we pulled back some but again shares available in the secondary market. We’ve also invested in um some of the coastal markets there. So uh Savannah as an example, Savannah, Georgia. So a little bit more affordable price points than um where we had been buying in Atlanta. So there are some properties there. Uh but again we’ve also kind of cooled off there. Uh North Carolina, Georgia, we bought more four years ago. More recently, we’re buying in um Tennessee and Arkansas as two of our primary convictions in states. So, still in the southeast, still similar economy, kind of got that very big interstate freeway system down there, very good fundamental economy with um movement of goods and um you know, industry, trucking, shipping, um but you know, just allocated more towards Tennessee and Arkansas. Fantastic. Awesome. Thanks so much for walking through it, Cameron. Great questions in the chat. Also, if you go to our invest page, you’ll be able to see all the markets we’re in. We’re over um 60 markets to date and north quite north of 500 properties on arrived. So, uh lots of growth over time. Let us know if there’s any other questions on markets as a whole. Good one from Arnold in here. What is the cost to purchase shares or does it vary per property? Yep. So, for new offerings, then we uh price them at $10 per share. So, what’s variable about that is the number of shares available to purchase. So, if you have say a $300,000 uh total raise on a property, then you would have 30,000 shares available. And then if there were a $400,000 total investment, then there would be 40,000 shares. But each one is priced at $10 and then it’s a minimum $100 purchase. So, in that case, or investment, I should say. And so, that’s 10 shares at a $100 investment per property. And then if you are on the secondary or market or funds, those prices can vary because the the $10 is when we initially offer them. So funds can change value over time and it’s based off the net asset value, which is really just a calculation of the total equity uh in an investment divided by the number of shares. And that ends up being the price of it, just like a stock on a on a stock exchange. Um and then secondary market the buyers and sellers they set their transacting prices. So you know to the extent that somebody wants at market above market below market whatever they consider market there’s different definitions of market then they would have the choice to transact at that price and you would get in at whatever the book is matching your prices at. Fantastic. All right I’m going to take a few here Cameron for rapid fire. Uh one from Jason. I invested last weekend for the first time. Thrilled to have you on board, Jason. Absolutely exceptional. Can I invest in the secondary market in October or do I have to wait until November? It’s a great question. To access secondary market, investors must have made their first investment at least 60 days before the start of that window. Uh, so we will definitely notify when you’re eligible. For folks, and I know Cameron walked through this, our secondary market is open on a monthly basis for one week at that time. So, uh, for properties that you might be interested that are fully funded, it’s a great way to get in, uh, to different markets, different asset classes, uh, so on and so forth. We also have a webinar on secondary market as a whole. So, I’m happy to drop that in chat if any folks have questions on that. All right, a good one in here from Keith. After opening an income fund, how often can I add to it? Great question. So all of our fund investments, so Seattle city fund, uh single family residential fund, uh real estate income fund, they are always open. You can invest at any time. So let’s say for example, I invest $100 today. I can go make a new investment in that fund a few days later, a month later, depends on whatever cadence that you choose, and go make that investment. As a note, it won’t go back to your original investment. So, for the dividend, it’s going to follow the date in which you invested for that new one. Um, but you can add and increase that investment at any time. All right. And moving back over here, one good one from Joseph. How can I open an account? Love to hear this. Uh, Jake walked through this briefly, but you’ll go to arrive.comregister.
I think we timed ourselves, Cameron. It’s right around four minutes. Uh, so it’s rather quick. Uh as a note, we do require your social security number. That is for KYC, know your customer, and AML, anti-moneyaundering. It’s a standard in the investing space. Uh that’s used to verify your identity and then for tax purposes. And then you’ll walk through all the standard on boarding. Um and then move them right in to invest. So uh if you do not get an auto pass there, that’s not anything abnormal. It’s just asking for more documentation. I like to compare it like similarly if you go to the airport and you’re asked to do like extra screening. Sometimes it’s it can be random. So just as a note there in case that does take place. All right. A good one in here from Dennis. What happens if our property is destroyed by fire or weather? Would we move our renter into an another property that we have? Cameron. Yep. So, we carry insurance on all of our investments just like you would your own owner occupied residence or any other investment. So, we have a master policy that kind of gets the benefits of aggregating all of the properties on arrived into a single policy. So, you get better pricing, better coverages, and more commercial protections. So, one of those protections that I’m mentioning has to do with the second part of your question about moving a renter into another one of our properties. So the first part of it is that as a landlord, if you don’t have habitable premises, then you as a tenant are entitled to break the lease. So if we have another property that is vacant in the area that a renter does want to go into, they certainly have the option free market, they can apply um to that property and get in, but the main point is is that they are not bound to the lease anymore because the landlord is unable to provide those habitable habitable premises. So that allows the uh lee to get out of the or the yeah lee to get out of the out of the lease. Um but now the follow-up part related to insurance is that one of those commercial protections is loss rent coverages. So, if we have a, you know, when we have the policy on and there’s a uh event that qualifies, which is really any event where that would trigger the insurance and you have a renter in there, the insurance company will continue to pay the rents. And you get this coverage because as an investor, you’re really looking to monetize and extract income from your investment. It’s not your home that you’re living in. So, it’s nice that having insurance helps you rebuild the property or cover whatever parts of the damage are minus the deductible, but really you’re in it for the income. So, this allows you to also collect the income because that renter is not entitled to um or not obligated, I should say, to pay you the rent anymore. Uh so, that insurance policy will subsidize the rents in the meantime, help you rebuild the home and then proceed from there. But yeah, they’re not obligate, the renters are not obligated um to stick with arrived in any meaningful way. They can go figure out whatever their living situation is. Fantastic. All right. And then Kim, remember we talked about like the in the other like insurance too and how many properties if they’re in FEMA flood zone, those details as well. Yeah. So, as part of our underwriting process, we look for any sort of elevated risks and we check with our insurance carrier beforehand because they’re going to have the ultimate data sets that give you guidance on which additional protections you would need because they may not be covered. So, if you go into an area with a hurricane risk, your default policy is not going to be covering that. So, you have to get the additional coverages. Similar with flood zones. Now, we tend to not invest in properties that are in um high-risk flood zones. So, that is usually more of a preventative uh issue where we are not purchasing that property rather than purchasing the additional coverages. But, you know, sometimes a good deal is a good deal and you’re willing to take the risk and take the gamble and then you would just buy that elevated protection. Usually we’re buying it for uh like the additional riders that we’re purchasing are going to be in hurricane related areas just because the southeast part of the United States is a lot of it is in a hurricane zone. So that’s one that we would commonly um add on to the policy. Fantastic. Awesome. Thanks for walking through Cameron and move back over. Lots of good questions today. I love the um engagement that we’re seeing. Uh Joseph had asked, “Is there a prospectus review?” Yep. So all of our U securities offerings and all of our investment offerings they we file them and get them qualified with the SEC the security and exchange commission. So you can go on to our website and there is a link directly to that prospectus where you can review all of the uh securities information related to the investment the risks how you get u you know like secondary market liquidity. So that perspectus is available on every single invest page that we have at arrive. So whether it’s a fund, an individual property, there are links to those SEC filed qualifications where you can see yes, the SEC has reviewed our offering statement. It is according to um you know what the securities rules are and then you can also read additional information on there about uh the investments themselves. Fantastic. Awesome. And then I did link to all of our filings where they’re consolidated in there as well. All right, a good one in here from Marshall. What is the anticipated hold time? Uh they noted that they’ve seen five to seven on IPO and 5 to 20 years elsewhere. Yep. So there’s that good observation that some places say 5 to seven, some places say 5 to 20. Um I would kind of differentiate this by um individual offerings versus fund offerings. So in general, we’re looking to um get kind of quicker returns to the extent that we can. Say with a levered property, get a good interest rate, wait for some appreciation, sell it quickly, and then that’s the really the way to maximize the the return on your capital in a short period of time. Sometimes the markets don’t play nicely with interest rates, so we would have to hold them longer. So, as interest rate environments have changed over the last couple years, we extended our anticipated hold time uh to 20 years for some assets. Um, and then some fund investments, you could hold properties that are like real winners for, you know, 20 years. I think that the the the reason why I kind of differentiate an individual offering versus a fund investment is that when you invest into a fund, you own a share of the entire portfolio like by default. So, if you’re in our single family residential fund, we have 56 properties in there. Um, conceivably you could hold one for a really long time in there just cuz it’s a great performer that you want to hold. Um, and the difference between that and say like the individual offering is that, you know, there’s um you have the secondary market, but you know, everybody is locked into that one investment. So, everybody’s capital is tied up into that one investment. So to the extent that we can get um that faster return then we would anticipate on selling it in a quicker time period so people could then reinvest their capital elsewhere um funds it’s much easier to hold that individual property for 20 years if it’s you know a a great contributor. So our north star is really just to maximize the you the investor’s return. Um but you know there are people that need their money sooner which is why we created the secondary market or if you’re in a fund we have quarterly redemption um as well. So lots of liquidity options um but you know different investments are going to warrant different hold periods but our northstar is like make sure that we can get the highest IRR which is internal rate of return which is basically your annualized return um for the investors. Fantastic. All right, moving back over. I can take this quickly from Arnold. If you have questions after today, how do we get them answered? Great questions. So, you can always email supportive.com and then we have a live chat function in the bottom right hand corner of arrive.com. So, you can simply go there. As a note, we do have an auto AI agent right away there. You can always request a human at any time. Uh, but I always recommend trying it out if you especially if you’re asking a few basic questions and then requesting a human at any time. That said, if you prefer not to, zero pressure. We want to be sure that folks don’t have to say operator operator operator in order to get to a human. So, one mention of human and you’re good to go there. All right, moving back over. Oh, a good one from Andrea. We walked through liquidity paths for individual properties. I know Ryan briefly touched on liquidity options in prepared remarks. Uh, but Cameron, can you walk through how redemption works for just clarifying it’s for all funds. So, Seattle City Fund, real estate income fund, um, and then our single family residential fund. Yep. So, in a general fund, we have a redemption program that works very much like a mutual fund where Arrived updates the share price on a quarterly basis. And then in that window, you’re able to request redemption where Arrived acts as the intermediary to pay you out on the shares. So, if you bought in at $10 and now the share price is $11 and you have 10 shares, then, you know, we could uh cash you out at that $11 share price for those 10 shares. So, it, you know, is a little bit different than the secondary market in the sense that the secondary market for individual offerings is where buyers and sellers directly transact with each other. for the funds themselves. There’s no, you know, counterparty that is buyer and seller. It’s that arrived pays you out and redeems you on those shares and then, you know, we bring them back into the pool and you get your um number of shares times whatever that price is. So, it’s it’s less of an open market mechanism between buyers and sellers. It’s stated on um the arrived net asset value that is updated on a quarterly basis. And to date, I don’t believe that we’ve ever had to um like couldn’t fulfill a redemption order. 100% of redemption orders um to my knowledge have been fulfilled through arrived. They have. Yes. Thanks for walking through it, Cameron. Uh I dropped that FAQ. It’s a great one to peek at as well. Again, that minimum hold period is 6 months and then we have those specific windows with dates. I always recommend taking a look at those. Obviously, we’ve said that all investments are arrived are intended for long-term. I would say our liquidity pass are semi-liquid. It’s not one that you can invest in today and then go liquidate tomorrow. Um so on and so forth. So we always like to be as transparent as possible uh when folks are choosing where to park their hard-earned funds. All right, moving back over here. I think this is our last question here, but folks keep me honest in the chat if I’ve missed any. Joseph had it asked, can I purchase in the name of a trust or IRA? Uh so yes, you can invest in the name of entity. So whether it’s an LLC, a trust, those are all possible. With IAS, they are also possible, but it’s a little bit more of a skinnier version um of an individual retirement account. So in this case, it has to be a selfdirected IRA, in which case you kind of have the control of the the checkbook to to make the investment. They’re sometimes referred to as checkbook IAS, um kind of indicating the mechanism by which you invest and who has control and the authority to make the investment. But specifically, if you do have that self-directed IRA, it can be in the name of that. And then um you know, to my knowledge, most uh entity type investments, you know, whether it’s LLC or trust, those are also fine. Absolutely. All right, I think we cruised through all the questions today. So folks, uh give if you have any more, I’ll give you like 30 more seconds. Drop them in chat. Monica, I know you had asked once I register, am I ready to invest? Good question. So you should see essentially blocks at the top of your page when you’re moving through those where you are in onboarding. So if there’s any questions that you have on that, definitely let us know. But theoretically, you should be able to create an account within four minutes or so and then move forward and invest there. But we’re always here to support you. That chat agent in the bottom righthand corner is a great resource as well. All right. A good one in here. Uh Rashid said, “I live in Canada. Can I invest in this?” So currently arrived is limited to permanent residents and citizens of the United States. There is um like a tax hurdle to get over uh in in terms of when could we open this up to more more of the globe you know more people outside of the US. So uh you know Rashid I would say that today unfortunately it’s not a possibility unless you are a permanent resident or um you know which it’s possible to have a permanent resident in the US and kind of live in Canada in in some ways you know depending on how you um go back and forth. But with that said uh future roadmap item you know open it up to more of the world but unfortunately right now it is limited to permanent residents and citizens in the United States 18 and older. Absolutely. Yeah. Echoing you, Cameron. Definitely hope to expand in the future and so appreciate your interest. All right. Oh, they are Canadian. Yeah, we’ll definitely be sure to share when we expand. Um, but yeah, it’s always great to get those questions. Very cool to see though that the message is kind of expanding to um, you know, outside the US border. So, you know, appreciate your attendance and interest and just kind of blown away that it’s, you know, people from outside the country are attending the webinar. Absolutely. Yeah, allocating the time. It’s pretty exceptional. I can take this one quickly from Keith. Do you have automatic reinvesting? If not, when? Fantastic question. This has probably been, I would say, in one of the top five requested features that we’ve seen over the years. I think it goes right in line with our passive investment. So, good news. We are working on recurring investment um actively right now. I don’t have a specific launch date, but we will absolutely be sure to share that from the virtual rooftops when it does come. Uh, I know I’m personally very excited about it, so I don’t have to jump in. I can like set it and forget it, which is how a lot of my other investments work. So, very excited for that. More to come, Keith. Um, and appreciate the question. All right, Cameron, I think we cruised through all the questions today. Any uh closing remarks before we shut our virtual webinar doors? Always appreciate everybody’s interest and time in attending these webinars. You know, a couple of really cool things to look forward to. I would say that arrived is always evolving both as a technology platform as well as the investment offerings that we um are excited to bring. So always a lot of stuff in the works, a lot of platform improvements and you know we’re bringing real estate investing online. So I think it’s kind of crazy that there’s not a real you know online mechanism to invest in real estate. Uh Arrived is becoming that company. So always appreciate uh everybody’s interest. Fantastic. Well Cameron thank you so much for your time as always. I don’t even know the number of webinars I’ve had the pleasure to do with you. So I’m very grateful. U you’ve been at the foundation of all the products that have been built on arrive to date which is exceptional. Uh so thank you. Thank you for your time today and always. And for all the folks that spent 53 minutes on your Tuesday morning and afternoon, we so appreciate you. Uh if you have any questions regarding the credit, definitely let us know. You can email supportive.com or you can use that chat function in the bottom righthand corner. I did share details on that $25 credit in chat, but I’m happy to send over that document if you send an email in. Uh, super easy on my side. So, essentially, I’ll just walk through it really quick before we close our virtual doors. If you attend an arrived new new user webinar, which is this one today, um, and if you qualify, you’ll receive a $25 in arrived credit. You can apply towards an investment. So, that’s not cash. you can withdraw and you just have to create an account, link your bank, and then attend this intro webinar. So, if you’ve done that today, uh we’ll be sure to allocate those within the week. But I think that’s all we have. Cameron, did you any thoughts? Um, no. I was just going to echo the the sentiment that it that it’s been great being on all these webinars with you as well. Yeah, it’s been a blast. Awesome. All right. Well, happy investing everybody and hope you all have a great rest of your day. All right. Thank you all. Take care.
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09/22/2026 – Alliant Webinar – The Anatomy of a Recession
An official welcome to everyone and thank you for joining me for uh our third quarter edition of anatomy of a recession. So if you are joining the webinar for the first time, uh welcome. I’m Michael Marx. I’m certified financial planner and adviser with Alliant Retirement and Investment Services or AIS for short. We’re the wealth management division of Allian Credit Union and I am as I said earlier based right here in Houston, Texas. I’ve been doing this for I don’t know more than 30 years now. Uh so today we’re going to take a look at some of the uh latest economic and market indicators and what those might be telling us. We’ll look at a little bit of historical perspective from recessions. We’ll talk a little bit about some modern stuff and I and I understand so this will be there’s a lot going on in the market. Today was even a mixed market and you know we have the UN General Assembly. Um, so if you have some just general general questions, that’s cool. I’ll try and field those the best I can here. Um, as long as it’s not too far out of the realm of of what we’re talking about today. Um, and in the interest of time, but we should have some time. We should have some a fair amount of time at the end here. So, um, just a quick, if I can get the slide to change here, just a quick housekeeping item. Uh so this session is intended for educational purposes in includes proprietary materials. So protect content and privacy. Please do not record, reproduce, distribute, screen capture or use AI based tools to capture any part of the presentation without prior written consent. Thank you for for your cooperation.
So before we turn to the economic outlook, let me just talk a little bit take a couple of minutes about talk about Aerys and how we can help. So our our goal is really full understanding of financial pictures for for the clients and and helping you educate that. But we are primarily adviserss and wealth management. As I said, I’m a certified financial planner. So that includes, you know, your income, expenses, cash flow, savings, investments, insurance coverage, retirement goals, estate planning. We’re very broad-based in what we can do. Will’s trust. Um but the important thing is that look conversations always come first. Uh and any recommendations so these are really really general right so they should be based on individual goals risk tolerance and your overall circumstance. So if you’ve joined us either through an email through us or directly on the credit union website uh this is what we do from broadbase. We’re actually going to be changing our name or so we’ve been told by the marketing department. So we don’t we don’t know what that’s going to be changed to. So stay tuned.
So webinars, we we do webinars throughout the week, different topics, different presenters. Most of us will uh do two a month. I’ve been doing one in the evening such as this and one in the afternoon. If you go to directly to our website right arisaligncreditun.com events you can see a list of our webinars uh you can also see our savvy invest savvy podcast some blog articles in there and other resources so if you haven’t looked I encourage you to take a look um also you can find us just directly on the credit union website in the upper right hand tab it’s a parent invest My next webinar will be October 1st. Sure the weather will be better by then. Uh back in the afternoon, we’re going to be talking a little bit about Roth conversions. This is actually a very effective retirement strategy. Uh a lot of our clients, we’ve actually been able to help save a lot of money in taxes over time. It’s important not to just look at it from that perspective during your lifetime, but as far as how you uh from a legacy perspective, right? If it’s going to go to your kids, grandkids, etc. We want to take a look at from the the tax planning perspective of that
one. After that, we’ll be right back in the evening, October 20th, 6:00 Central, 7:00 p.m. Eastern, and we’re going to be looking at retirement income, the fragile decade. So, and what that is is we look five years before your retirement and five years after and kind of where you should be and things you should be looking for to give you an idea of that. And actually that includes conversions, right? So, so Roth convergence as we were talking about that earlier, that’s something that depending on your situation, you might actually want to start before. And those decisions can also impact the timing of your social security um and the impact of that because it can impact your RMDs as well, required minimum distributions who are unfamiliar with that term. Uh you have take those at 73 or 75 depending on when you were born.
So let’s move into the economic outlook. There’s a great deal of information. So we’re just going to focus on some of the main messages behind each chart rather than every data point. Uh so with that, let’s jump in. So always start with the first one, right? Because that’s what that’s what everyone wants to know is our our recession dashboard. So it just gives you kind of a general headline. Uh and we’ll we’ll kind of examine the details. So this is as of August 31st. So the overall signal remains expansion territory. As you can see, green is good. uh well it’s supposed to be yellow but that looks a little burnt orange to me here uh is is a little bit of a caution and red can be a recessionary indicator. So this is always as a snapshot at any given time. Now this is one framework and it’s not really a forecasting guarantee right signals change as new data arrives. So this is as of now and some of this data will be from Q2 right as we talk about Q3. So I’ll try and give you a little bit of an update and this also gives you an idea of you know how this looked in March and then at the end of last year. So we’re seeing some improvement overall in in many of the factors out there. It might not feel it. I know prices are up. I know inflation is still quite a bear. the Fed is also dealing with it. So let me give you some context on past recessions. So comparatively when you look at current situation now obviously 2020 will have a lot of green and that was a very short period right so that was during co so that was essentially the economy was shut down uh many cities were shut down businesses oh there’s an echo if I’m having an echo let me see you might be logged in twice. Have you even You’re logged in twice. So, if if there’s an echo, I can What I can do is I can maybe you’ll want to um There you go. So, um so, sorry, back to it. So you’ll see with a lot of the historical look backs as far as recessions, there’s a lot of indicators that things went red before things actually went south there. Um 2020 was the exception to the general recession because that was just a general shutdown by the government and global shutdown. So that’s why it was relatively short-lived. It was one of the shortest recessions that we’ve had, but it was a quite the spike. So labor market. So we’re looking at this some of the labor market. So you’ll see some of those those non-form payrolls. Um labor matters. It matters a lot here in the US. And I know we’re talking about AI replacing jobs. We’re talking about well if we went through government um layoffs, things like that, reductions, what companies are doing. This does matter on on unemployment though because I will say this. So when we look at labor markets and non far form payrolls, I don’t remember if it’s in this one, but you really want to look at where the jobs are being created, right? So if the government’s creating the jobs, a lot of times that’s things like healthcare, schools, things like that. Um, and that can be a problem. And the reason why if the expansion is through education and the government spending on that, education doesn’t generate revenue in the public sector. So where we really want to see job creation, it’s over on private uh because there’s revenue that is generated and then there is taxes associated with that and less less so of a burden as far as deficit goes.
So I will tell you just a quick uh on the on the non-farm payrolls. I know that looks great and it is still relatively strong. There is some weakening out there, but not to be confused with a weak labor market because we’re not quite there yet, but we are seeing some softening. So, this is relief at the pump. So, we love this, right? Because we know this is not correct. So, this was as of the end of June. So, when you look at oil is coming down, we know that that is not the case. Actually, oil is well, it did close under 100 today. So that’s actually good news, but it spiked over just a little over 100 as of yesterday. So it came down on hope. Um obviously diesel is part of a concern right within that oil. They generate that regular gasoline. They they generate diesel. They generate jet fuel out of all of those. Um and diesel is is the big push right now. So some folks have asked that question. We might ask that later. So I’ll just address this now. So when we’re looking at the price of diesel versus gas, why is diesel so much higher? It’s because it becomes uh the refining ability, right? It becomes a capacity. It becomes a supply versus that demand. So you are seeing a little bit of a difference there. The pump is still terrible for all of us, especially if we drive bigger vehicles or we have to drive quite a bit. But a lot of your biggest your the biggest rub right now is I would probably say diesel because that is used by everything else, right? So you’ll see those costs start permeating into other goods now. So this is kind of good. So basically higher inflation, right? Borrowing costs, interest rates are higher. So borrowing costs are a little more expensive. So this is a meaningful measure. So and this is the probability of missing a debt payment, right? So it rose over several years but you’ll see this coming down. Now if this improvement persists right then you’ll see some of the spending remains a little more resilient. So we still have a very resilient consumer. So if you’ve heard about a K-shaped economy they’re talking about maybe a C-shaped economy. I’ll kind of give you a little a little touch on that. And this is going to matter going into the fourth quarter, right? Because we go into holiday spending. Um so right now if if you break the economy into into five different income brackets. So there’s the the talk of the K-shaped economy. And what that means is if you look at a K where you have the the the vertical leg and then one going up and one going down. Basically what’s happening is is for those in the upper 40% things are improving, right? and and that’s households 100,000 and up. If you look at the lower 40% and and that’s really households of about 55,000 and below income wise. So it’s more difficult for them, right? Because if if food goes up, there’s a lot less discretionary income. So when you’re seeing travel, things like that, all those records, a lot of the consumption that’s going on, it’s actually being supported by by the upper 40%. So when we talk about this I and we say hey things are good. This is from a very high level. I I don’t want you to think that that I’m not acutely aware profoundly aware that it is difficult for some people because it very much is. Um but at least for an economic discussion that’s that’s kind of where we’re at on this. Um as far as debts go right now we still have really really low default rates. Um, so that’s so good, right? Um, hyperscaler capex. So AI, everybody talks about this. This is, oh my god, this is probably the news for the most part. So I would say this is probably one of your largest economic themes for the US right now. Like your chat GPT, you know, Muse is is the latest. Um and that spending is is construction, equipment, semiconductors, power demand, right? Other parts of of the economy. So so it is a little bit broader. Now this is what matters. So that higher investment doesn’t necessarily guarantee attractive returns for every company, right? So, we do expect to have some long-term winners, productivity gains, profitability, and this buildout, you know, that remains a little uncertain. The expectation is this buildout will still continue for a bit. Um, if you’ve watched the market, for those of you watch the market, so so for the the first quarter, maybe through April, the markets were pretty much flat. And then you see the market just kind of take off. And what that was is is when a company reinvests um it’s basically reinvesting profits. So you know if I’m a if you’re a farmer for example and I’m going to buy two more tractors uh so I should be able to produce more of whatever product I’m growing. So that more product would generate more revenue. Therefore more revenue means my stock price if I publicly traded should be worth more. Right? So when you see this money spent on hypers scaling by those bigs out there in theory they’re going to be able to do something with it. So the the trillion dollar question is what is that something right? How does this get monetized? So that drove the stock price up which drove your uh the stock market up as of pretty much April. So now you’re starting to see some questions. You’re saying okay is that stock price that was here now it’s here. Is it worth it? How long do we have to wait? So that is uh to be determined. So do I think it’s kind of like the the dot? No. There’s a lot of money behind this. So So it is a very different animal. So you’re it’s very well funded by very well profitable companies with huge cash, but there’s a lot going into AI. Um now I will tell you this when you look at I always think this is really interesting because we’re talking about AI when you’re talking about capex and capex is is capital expenditure right is how much companies will will invest in product services whatever building their infrastructure uh when you look at it as a percentage of of GDP so you go through big technology booms and I know when we think about technology we think about it in terms of of what’s going on right now right the internet or or in this case an improvement of technology which is traditional technology which is artificial intelligence but really any kind of technology. So this goes back to railroads, right? Or the electric motor or just the auto infrastructure, right? When you when you look at um the assembly lines, right, that mass production. So then you get into tech and telecom in the ’90s when you start doing internet. So all of these have been huge innovations of US technology and and really technology it improved almost every sector, right? From from even from well, I’m here in Houston. So when you’re looking at oil and gas, right, with with the new tech technology, their ability to find oil, their ability to drill at angles, their ability to frack, whether that’s good or bad, it’s definitely more production, it makes it the possibility for more revenue, right? And as a company, that’s kind of what you’re looking at at the end of the day. So when you’re looking at this as as compared to the size of this country’s GDP, you can see that AI is actually relatively small. And just as a reminder for those unfamiliar with GDP, it’s your gross domestic product. And how they calculate that is they look at the total consumption, which is usually us, right? That’s our goods and services, the stuff that we spend our money on. They look at government spending, right? Defense, schools, roads, etc. You know, infrastructure. They look at business investments from the private sector and then they add net exports which is kind of one of the things that Trump is is kind of flipping out about, right? Imports of when we look at trade deficits. Um to give you an idea, uh second quarter for 2026, our GDP was about 32.5 trillion with a T. So we have a much much even though those are large numbers that are being spent in AI, we have a large economy now. So so relatively speaking it is it is it’s just a lot bigger. So
I would say that there is room to grow and for the cycle to continue but that also means the expectations are rising right on your return on investment. So the message is it’s balanced. It AI investment can support economic activity while investors should remain mindful of valuations and execution of of how they deploy AI and any disruption risks that might be that might be as a result of it. Um I think this is actually pretty cool, right? and it’s creative dra destruction and there’s a lot of concern that AI is going to replace a lot of jobs and it probably will at some point as every technology does at some point but what we found is that as you’ll see that oftent times this new technology even though it eliminated some jobs it created jobs that did not exist before. So, so there is a double-edged sword, right? So, if you are impacted where you lose your job to some type of technology, hopefully there’s another opportunity in some other aspect of it. But, but that I mean with this type of technology, right, it’s it’s different, right? Because there’s education, there’s retraining, um business investments, those matter. So I know that we say this and this is just a chart but we are talking about real people who will lose their job. Um and it does happen but over time you’ll find that that more jobs are created than than jobs that are removed and in theory it makes our job easier and our life better unless you’ve seen Terminator. I’m joking about that. So uh so we’ve covered an economic backdrop. Uh so let’s take a look at some of the market outlooks. So the the economy and the market are related, but they’re not necessarily directly related. So so you know the economy can go up one way and the market might not necessarily agree uh because because markets are forward-looking and they reflect expectations about earnings and interest rates, right? What’s the Fed going to do? What the Fed won’t do? uh stock valuations risk associated uh and that’s why market performance can improve or fall before the economy headlines kind of feel that impact. So right now things are okay. Um it’s a little it’s a little volatile to say the very least. I know there are some naysayers that are saying hey you know the market’s going to crash etc. We’ll talk a little bit about that. Uh but but but is a different time right now when we’re talking at tech boom. So we’re going to party like it’s not 1999.
And as I had said before, some of the differences I was around during that.com crash and and I’ll tell you a really interesting and little story. So back in the 90s, we were still talking about allocations, measuring risk, and things like that. But if you were investing in the 90s and you grabbed one of those dotcoms, right, that stock was just crazy and they were hot issues and you know, we’re trying to tell our clients and most of whom listened. They’re like, “Hey, you know, these are kind of targets. There’s really nothing that’s that is backing these new companies. It’s just out there.” Um, so we all know how that story ended, right? So there was these inflated prices and a lot of and then the bubble popped and then most of those companies ceased to exist and a lot of people lost a lot of money there. Um and really those people who lost a lot of money are the people who didn’t listen about allocating and risk management and things like that. But with that said though um it’s a cautionary tale. This a little bit different right? So yes, there there are some concerns about concentrated positions and things like that, but the difference is I had alluded to the the difference is is these are very different players. Um they’re wellunded, they’re actually profitable, and they’re taking that profit and investing it back in their infrastructure. Now, with that said, it doesn’t eliminate downside risk. So today’s market, it just has more fundamental support than a simple bubble narrative, which I’ve heard that talked about. And I can tell you as a general rule, uh, most recessions happen with some type of bubble somewhere, right? Whether it was a dot bubble, whether it was a real estate bubble. Um, but usually it happens with kind of a bubble. We don’t really have a bubble right now. So you secular bull market. So the long-term chart talked about secular bull and bear periods. So we talk about cumulative highs right there and we had a fantastic run right through the ‘9s late 80s 90s and then we’re looking at 2010 to right now. Obviously there are some difficult times when you go from 2000 to 2010. That was actually a negative decade. Um so folks who are investing and they’ve been investing relatively recently let’s say in the last 15 years when they when they say hey you know I’m really really aggressive investor that’s fine you might very well be because the belief is the stock market always goes up that is not the case you can take that period from the 2000s where it was actually a negative return over that period you can go into the 70s where where there were negative periods and you can go into the 30s where there were negative stress stretches like decades long. So be mindful. It’s always cautionary tail. I know we’re saying, “Hey, things are good, but you still want to be cautious.” So that was my precursor to this slide. Prices, a lot of prices are back to pre-conlict levels, but not all of them as we well know, right? food food issues. A lot of that is energy issues and that is probably not going to fix itself in the near term despite what Washington is telling us. Um even if something magically changed in the straight uh it would still take months to get everything back running. I can tell you so I think Goldman came out with this that they said about 80% of the oil is traveling through that. I’m not sure about that number and I would question that number because somewhere because about 20 million barrels a day roll through that you know pre-conlict and and now you look at 7 to maybe 15 or 12 million barrels a day. So it es and flows. Maybe it peaked at that point, but as far as sustainable movement on that, we do have the east west pipeline which they just redirected some of that through Saudi so they can backdoor that and load that elsewhere. But I do think at some point one of the things that we learned from that is is you don’t want to be the unreliable deliverer of energy, right? So as they build out these pipelines that impact on the straight will become less and less and less important. Uh but it isn’t going to happen tomorrow, right? That’s going to take some time.
So, let’s talk a little bit about a one-year outlook. So, what’s going to happen? Obviously, we got midterms coming up uh very soon. I think some states have already started their mail in ballots, right? The early voting. Uh we are not quite that that early here in Texas. Uh so we’ll we’ll talk about these six themes and we’ll talk about the influence over the markets over the next year some of the fixed income midterm as I had said market concentration some of the market leadership some of the non US opportunities and maybe some of the common pitfalls out there so these things are all interconnected right so interest rates will affect valuations politics can affect settlement or sentiment sorry about that um and concentration influences right diversification currency movements and so all of this kind of matters as far as international returns and those international the global politics can impact what’s going on right here in the US so fixed income or bonds which is what most people know that now we do call so someone asked why do we call that fixed income versus bond so we call it fixed income so fixed income are bonds but Not all all bonds are fixed income, but not all fixed income or bonds, right? It might be preferred stocks or or um LLC’s, right? Or real estate investment trusts, things like that. But for the most part, we’re just going to talk about bonds and their impact because interest rates are moving. Now, if we had talked about this last year, interest rates were the belief was restrictive. So the Fed was going to lower rates but but interest but inflation has been a bit difficult. So right now you know we had our last rate hike. There will probably be another rate hike. The expectation is one more rate hike before the year end and maybe one in the first quarter of next year. So let me just point something out. So, for those of you who might remember back from economics 101 or finance 101 back in college, or if you’ve just heard this in passing, when interest rates and bond prices, they move opposite to each other. So, when interest rates go up, bond prices go down. When interest rates go down, bond prices go up. The expectation is we are in a rising interest rate market, which is a bummer if you are looking to buy a house right now. um or credit cards that you carry balances, right? So, those can be impacted. But where it matters for um why this matters for those of you who are investing, if you hold those bond funds, right? If we go into some hikes, some of those can get hit. So, there’s some some allocation changes that you might want to do. There’s some changes that we’ve done on our side, look at a different fixed income. But the other aspect when you look at bonds, the longer the bond is, the more sensitive it is to a price movement. So I’ll give you an example. So what this does, we’ll just stay on the top sector because there’s different types of bonds like high yield, corporate, right? Municiples, but a treasury is easy. Everybody knows the T bill, the Treasury bond, all that stuff. So when you look at a 2-year versus a 30-year up there, when they talk about a one-year rise or fall, how does that impact the return? So the 2-year, you see some difference on a 1% movement, but when you go down to the 30, right? So if interest rates fell 1%, that bond price would go up 22%. If it if it went the other way, you’d lose 9%.
be mindful as we move forward on that, right? Interest rates are probably going to rise and that’s the expectations. Munis are pretty nice right now if you’re in a high tax bracket and a lot of folks talk about that. They’re say hey you know what’s taxfree taxree is always nice on paper. Um and basically what this does is assumes you’re in the highest tax bracket. So the highest tax bracket in the US for those who aren’t familiar is 37%. If you make over 200,000 then they add an additional 3.8% on that. So if you you know if you’re earning something that’s tax like like a treasury is taxable. That’s your green line right in the middle. Your municipal is your blue which is right below that. You’re saying well why would I buy a municipal over a treasury? Well you don’t have to pay taxes on that income on that municipal. So, you know, if you’re in the higher tax bracket, that 4 1/2 could be close to a 7 12% return. So, there are there are times where it’s a good idea. One of the things that we look at when we allocate for people when we’re building portfolios, we’re looking at what is in your pocket, right? And that’s part of the planning wealth strategies, taxability, profit conversions, whether it should be in something tax-free, whether it should be something taxable. is it taxes long-term capital gains which are lower than income taxes. So, there’s a lot of moving parts. Um, and obviously each one’s different, right? Because you start looking at when you start getting into the munis, there’s credit quality, there’s which state, um, there’s a lot of different options in there, but it is something to consider. So, the dollar still dominates. Now, it is a little bit weaker. So, this is actually important, right? So this is the leading currency as far as reserves and international debt and global payments. So there was a time so so the US the US dollar has really been the global trade the the preferred currency for global trade since World War II. It hasn’t always been the case. It might not be at some point in the future, but it is the preferred choice probably in the near term, probably in my lifetime. Um, and you know, at some point it was the pound, some point it was a the Swiss Frank. Uh, and and the reason for this is quite simple. Now, the dollar isn’t as strong as it used to be, but it is still hook is still she’s still the best looking girl at the dance. So, she’s the dollar is still very strong. U just not as strong. And the reason for that is when you look at global currency, there’s a few things that you need to look at. So you need to look at as the scale of what it can handle. There’s really only three currencies that can do that at this point, right? It’s the Chinese one, the euro, and the US dollar. So the the case was made back in oh gosh 2008, so 20 years ago, that hey, maybe the euro should be the trading currency. And that was well that was an absolute joke. But um and the reason for it is simple is that the US is the only one that has a unified monetary and fiscal policy which means the Fed makes decisions on rates and the federal government and they’re still in lock step. They might disagree with things but they’re still one and the same right we fought a civil war for that. So when you go to Europe, right, they all use, not all, most use the same currency, the euro. However, Germany can do what Germany wants, France can do what France wants, Greece can do what Greece wants. And we saw that problem happen in 2008, so and 2000. So that’s where we say the euro would probably be a difficult a difficult global currency at this point, but things might change later. And as far as China goes, there’s there’s really just a lack of transparency. They certainly have the scale, right? That’s a big economy, but but at this point, they don’t fully float to the US dollar. There’s there’s a a peg. I mean, they stopped pegging, but it’s still kind of along that. So, the US is still the greenback’s still it. H midterms. What a circus this could be. So, but exciting to watch. So, look, it the election cycle, it can certainly influence the sentiment and increase the volatility in the market, right? But you don’t want to use it as a standalone on on market timing signals or anything like that, right? So, so we’ll talk a little bit about some of the historical patterns on the earnings as far as, you know, back like for 2026. So when we look at the second year of the president’s cycle, right, you probably have some of the lower cycles as far as returns go, you know, amongst that four-year term for the presidency. And that’s actually pretty it’s pretty normal. It’s very normal for the incumbent party to lose seats. So if the Republicans lose seats, it wouldn’t be unheard of. It’s probably more in line with history. I think it’s only happened twice where the incumbent has actually gained seats. So it’s not a big deal. What usually happens though is that because you lose seats, cuz somebody’s always mad about something at this point, right? Someone’s messing up somewhere. You’ll see a lot a lot less delivery of things, right? because they might actually have to negotiate, which would be a would be a fantastic thing if they work together, but I don’t see that happening. Um,
we usually have a lot more volatility, right? So, that’s pretty normal. So, don’t be too concerned about that because again, that’s normal. We kind of look at those in the midterms, turns, movements, things like that. Um, so we normally show some pretty strong recoveries after one year after these corrections happen. So it’s it’s those lows are only obvious in hindsight, right? When you’re in the middle of that storm, it is a rough go. So hopefully with whomever you’re working with, and if not, ARIS is a great choice to work with or even review where you’re currently positioned. U the expectation is volatility is going to increase. it’s certainly not going to go down as we go into the midterm. So instead of attempting to like identify that exact bottom in the market, right? Um it’s really more disciplined allocation and positioning, rebalancing, things like that. Uh we’ll talk a little bit more about that. Um I love this chart because one party always blames the other and I think and and although don’t get me wrong, policy influences things, right? It it definitely matters, but businesses are in business, will always be in business. So, the long-term trend on the market is up. It is there’s been some volatility and and some difficult periods for certain. Uh but you really want to look at a portfolio built for outcome, right? not not necessarily, you know, you don’t want to create like this unnecessary concentration or timing risk. Speaking of market concentrations, so I think this is actually pretty cool. So, you know, probably the S&P is probably the most popular and well-known index here in the US for investors. Hey, buy the S&P 500. And for those unfamiliar with what that is, the S&P 500 is the largest 500 US companies. Uh so you would think, hey, you know, that’s really really well allocated. I’m in 500 different companies. But they are weighted. So not all companies are equal. So the bigger the companies the bigger companies control more movement both up and down um within that index. And that’s not necessarily bad. It’s just it’s just something that you should know because it could definitely impact your positions. When people say, “Hey, you know, I want to invest in AI,” you’re invested in AI. If you own anything like any large cap, anything, those companies are big players before they were being held. They’re still held now. The S&P um to give you an idea, this was what is this? How many stocks? 10, I think. So, yeah, this is the 10 largest companies. They control 38% of the movement of the S&P. So, as a general general general rule, your top five companies run anywhere between 20% to 25 26% of that S&P. So, you might not be as diversified as you think. Again, not bad. Just more cautionary. Uh ah trees don’t go to the sky. Okay. So speaking of that concentration, right, how they’ve outperformed the index before reaching that position, what you’ll find is that larger companies remain successful, but over time it’s really hard to sustain that that same rate of growth. And an easy example that I would give you is Coca-Cola, right? So Coca-Cola, half of the world drinks Coca-Cola. So Coke can’t just say, “Ah, you know what? We want the whole world to drink Coke. We’re going to try and grow that way.” They really can’t do it. There’s too much competition obviously there’s Pepsi. So the way they go about that is through different types of beverages right they might do monster energy drinking they might do water through Dani so they they diversify that other companies will diversify in sense that they just go into completely different models altogether right a completely different business line uh so this supports diversification right beyond just the the concentrated positions where you’re like yeah I want Nvidia yeah I want Apple, etc. And and Apple’s had really a rough go, so most people probably wouldn’t do that, so that’s not the best example, but Nvidia would be one. Um, and Meta, etc. So, know that there’s a lot more opportunity as as those bigger companies become more concentrated and more and more expensive, then there looks at opportunity there, you look at opportunities elsewhere. Um, so this is just some of that com mania, right? when you look at at some of those top companies back then where they were now or where their return is right so that S&P uh equal weight this goes back from March 2000 so actually this is a pretty fun one obviously Microsoft did well exon did well IBM Intel Cisco etc you know less so less so but then you look at like group right it’s absolutely smashed Lucen technologies which is pretty much non-existent So, so this is one of those things. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the other indexes, so your big ones out there, and there’s many, many, um, how are we doing on time? Okay, we’ll probably want to speed this up. So, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ, um, are probably your big three that everybody sees on the news, uh, when they’re looking at news feeds. So, this is not your father’s S&P. And the reason why I bring this up is a general rule, right? It’s the 500 largest companies where where the NASDAQ uh and that’s exposure, you know, if you buy QQQ, right, as an ETF, you’re buying that NASDAQ. Well, before that was like, hey, we’re buying technology and and it tends to be more volatile. Well, what’s happened is those technology companies that were on the NASDAQ before have become these behemoths. So, now they’re part of the S&P 500. So, you’re seeing a lot more overlap. uh where the where the NASDAQ used to be very very different than the S&P 500, not so much. Uh it’s it’s still different but less so. So just be mindful of that. You’re like, “Hey, I love the NASDAQ.” You probably have a lot of exposure to NASDAQ companies as it is right now. Um market leadership. So again, not the com. And I think we want to focus on that because there’s really a lot of talk about AI and concerns and I think some of those concerns are safety concerns um you know going rogue hacking things like that. Um, so, so there are still some lower valuations, right? When you’re looking at at the S&P 500, I mean, yeah, when you’re looking at the technology side, when you’re looking at some of those earnings and you compare them to like the ‘9s or even in the last 12 months, you’re you’re seeing not as as inflated of a price. So, so we’re not saying, hey, we did say earlier that look, it’s becoming more and more expensive, but we’re not like talking.com or anything like that. So, diversification is a key, but there’s still opportunity, and we think there’s still going to be some opportunity for for a little bit at least, probably maybe through next year, but we’re going to have to see how that goes, right? The Fed might have something to say on that. So, uh, the Russell, so this is just some of the small caps, right? So, you know, you have the bigger companies, the Metas, Nvidas, etc., etc., Walmarts, Home Depots, but you have those small companies where they’re looking for the next Bill Gates, right? They’re looking for the next Zuckerberg, um, next Warren Buffett. So, as those bigger companies are becoming more expensive, you’re starting to see some of the opportunity in small companies where they’re a little more nimble, they can make some adjustments. Uh, historically, they they’ve really underperformed some of your bigger companies since well, certainly since COVID, right? because the bigger the big got bigger and wealthier. But we are we are seeing some of the small companies and the small and midsize their price is actually looking pretty good relatively speaking.
Let’s go overseas. Right now we have the UN General Assembly going on. Uh so
we’ll talk a little about this. Now there is a home country bias, right? And I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. So, so the US of our investments, it it it’s a percentage, it’s the vast majority of percentage of in people’s investment portfolios. But when you look at like market capitalization, we still are, you know, almost 2/3 of the global economy. But when you look at like GDP, it’s different, right? We’re we’re about a quarter of it. So there’s a whole world out there that’s still doing stuff. So we do think there’s some opportunity going into this year um and maybe into next year. So a little bit broader base on some of the international plays uh global leadership cycles. So I can tell you there’s always an eb and a flow between US and international plays. Lately some of the international plays have outperformed the US. Uh, we’ll see if that continues on or if that if that cycle will shift. Weaker dollars. Supercharge is a non US stock. So, here’s the cool thing about weaker dollars, right? If you’re traveling overseas, it’s a bummer. If you’re buying stuff, it’s from overseas. That’s a bummer, right? Because you can’t buy as much. But if you’re selling stuff overseas, which helps us on our exports, uh, they can buy more stuff. So, um, also with with a better exchange, people come to the United States. I know there’s a little bit of a, uh, tourism push back, but, you know, when you’re looking at trade deficits and things like that, so this could this could help a little bit. So emerging markets they are very much relevant to the AI theme and and emerging markets are are non US but not just non US right they’re um I want to say they’re smaller countries but not necessarily because China and India are are considered emerging markets but generally generally speaking you know it’ be like Brazil or Chile or or some place like that um there’s a lot of there’s a lot of energy development down like Guyana so this can matter Uh so what will happen is that that IT weight in the emerging markets as as those countries start adopting this you can start seeing some movement there. So that could be some opportunity. Now when that happens right you’re looking at like the currency geopolitical concentration risk. You still have to look at that. You can’t just say hey there’s money down there. I should start investing overseas especially in emerging markets because things can change a lot. Um, so final final contact. We’re going into the u into the home stretch here. So I would say this, right? So there’s always a reason to panic when it comes to the market, and this is not the reason to panic, and I don’t think anybody is, but there are some folks that are talking about these really big big pullbacks, market’s going to crash, etc., etc., um, some severe declines. Now I would tell you that when we look it through these things right whether it was a tech bubble or liberation day which was in 2025. So what normally happens is you’ll see these pullbacks and then you’ll see new highs in a relatively short-term period. Obviously some of them have lasted longer but almost every year you can come up with something bad that is going to happen. Um right now we have a war and we have tariffs. So, so that is not helping. And we have the Fed that is looking to raise rates because we have an inflationary we have an inflation concern. Um, but the long story short is, hey, if you’re invested long-term, good quality stuff, long-term, hedge some downside. We can help that if you’ve never done that. Uh, but you don’t want to fall victim to panic attacks. And this goes back 2006, 2025, so 20 years. And basically what it is, it looks at what stocks have done and real estate has done and some international equities and investor returns. And generally speaking, the investor return is usually about half of what the market is because the market will go up and people love that. And then when it falls, they exit out. Um, and they’re waiting for things to get better before before they go back in, which is when you think about it is ridiculous, right? if if you wouldn’t sell your house if your market fell, right? If the if the stock market if the housing market fell for a little bit, you’d probably sit there and hold it for a bit. Um or if you wanted a pair of jeans or something and the price fell. You wouldn’t wait for the price to go back up if you think that’s quality that you’re owning. Quality is the key. And and I and I would say this, right? So, I don’t want to be so flippant or cavalier about this, but if you’re freaking out about the market, that might say something about your risk. And maybe that is a reason to work with the wealth management side. So, you can say, “Hey, look, you know, are you even in the right thing to begin with? If you are concerned about that, this is how we hedge some downside.” Uh, so this is actually kind of cool, right? So, this goes back. It’s the S&P 500. And what they do is they say um so this goes back to 1983 and basically the gray bars are the return for the S&P for that year. So December 31st, right? January 1st to December 31st. So as you can see most years are up years as a general rule. It’s about 3/4 of the time. Now the other part of that are the blue dots. And those blue dots are how much of a pullback the market had during that period from January 1st to December 31st. So people invest knowing that the market is up most of the time. 3/4 of the time I win if I hold it long term. The problem is is what they don’t know is that those blue dots happen every year. So there is always some difficult thing that happens. So it causes a little bit of heartburn. So I think this is a really good chart to talk to people who are brand new to investing or a little worried about markets to say hey look this is really normal this is a really normal cycle we just want to be positioned accordingly.
So can you time the market shortterm maybe a few here or there historically not so much. So they just did a h 100red bucks buy and hold since 1945 versus selling 12 months prior to the peak and buying it back 12 months after that trough. Uh you can see there’s a really big difference on that. Uh and look, I hear great stories are like, “Oh, I bought this. I timed it perfectly.” But but usually and and you might have that, right? You might very well have that happen, but consistently doing it over time is pretty difficult. and you certainly don’t want to concentrate a position in that. So this is what I always think is great because it’s always context, right? This goes back to 1928. If you look at this one over here, how many times the market since 1928 has a market lost over 20%. Right? Six times between 10 and 20. Another six times between 0 and 10, 14. Nobody loves losing money at all ever, right? But when you talk about the upside 14 times, 22 times between 10 and 20 and 36 times that the market closed out over 20%. So, there’s a really, really good case for long-term market investing, but again, you want to match your risk tolerance. You want to match your timeline depending on where you are in that. Um
I would say we’re probably near the end. So this is what we can do. Look is before we close I want to just bring this back to financial planning allocation because that’s always what this is about. We want you to become smarter investors or if you need some help with something we can help. So we can help evaluate not just your asset allocation, right? how social security, how Medicare, how pensions, cash flows, taxes, that retirement income, how you build that structure, how you build that plan, right? Your estate planning after you pass away. So, we do more than just the allocation out there. Um, we can help you build that coordinated plan. Uh, whether you’re dealing with whomever out there, right? Aerys Aerys is a very a very much underutilized resource to the members here. There’s a lot that we can do. Uh if this did raise questions about how you’re allocated or your retirement plan, look, we’d be happy to do that. Uh what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to the Q&A. Oh, this is just one quick one that we added um trust and wills. So, some of your basic planning, trust, wills, power of attorney, living wills, HIPPA, which is your advanced medical directives, etc. Um, I want to thank everyone for attending. We still have a few minutes. So, we’re going to go to the Q&A. Uh, so whether that market’s up or down, uh, you know, you’re uncertain about your risk, we’d be happy to help you. So, if you have any questions, go ahead and put those in the Q&A or in the chat. And during that period, what I’m going to do is I’ll put up a poll. So, that’s my Q&R code and my contact information. If you want to schedule some time for us to look at what you’re doing specifically, double check what you’re doing, uh, see how we can compliment, send me some of the things that you’re already doing out there, uh, go ahead, schedule time with that QR code or give me a call. I will actually put up a poll if you want me to give you a call to do that. Uh, we can look at this from a financial planning perspective, Roth conversions, impact for social security, etc.
and let’s see what questions we might have out there.
First question,
how safe are bonds? Can you lose money in them? The short answer is yes, you can. Uh in in bond funds uh especially, they are there’s no really end date, right? uh bond has a a start date and a maturity date and they come back to what’s called par. Uh but bond funds don’t really have a maturity date. So those turn over. So that can be you want to be careful on what type of bonds you own, what type of we’re in a rising invent uh interest rate market. So you want to be more cautious than ever. Um but there is still a case for fixed income. Uh is 401k good or bad to retire? Um that’s a loaded question. So the question is a 401k good or bad to retire? Uh in general it is a great we’re huge advocates of 401ks, right? It’s pre-tax dollars. It you pay yourself first. You usually get a match. Um but there are some downsides to it. It’s the whether it’s a traditional or a 401k or a or a Roth 401k. What we normally do is when we look at when we’re working with the members, when we do the planning side of it, we look at how it’s positioned. We look at how much of it is positioned. If you have a large 401k, that can come back to bite you a little bit later from a tax side uh during your retirement through required minimum distributions or through a legacy perspective because they changed some of those tax laws uh not too long ago. Um, what I would do is if you haven’t if you’re not one of the yeses, go ahead and schedule some time or just hit the QR code and we can look at where you’re at and percentage of assets and things like that and you want to look at your cash flows and then we can say, hey, you know what, you maybe don’t want to contribute as much here. Maybe you should do a Roth. That’s an option. Maybe you should dial back on that and do some things that are non 401k uh because that’s taxed differently. But as a general rule, I think 401ks are are really a good thing. Great question. Thank you so much. Uh are you a fee or hourly CFP? So we are not hourly. Uh I’d ask about that. We don’t do that. So we are we do both. We do a uh percentage of assets under management uh or we do some transactional but there’s a lot of things that we can actually do from an investment side that actually don’t carry commission or and we don’t have to charge you a fee. We are cognizant of costs um cuz you know we’re part of the credit union. So so that just depends on what you’re trying to do. But we are very transparent. And I can tell you from a fee structure, from the uh from just the traditional managed money where it’s a percentage of assets, we’re actually pretty we’re pretty much in line with everybody else or actually maybe even a little bit, but we can probably save you some money because there’s a lot of your portfolio that I would argue that you don’t even have to do uh as managed money. We can do some things without having to charge you on that. Uh great question. Thank you so much. Uh next question. I know we’re bumping up against the time, but I want to make sure we answer everyone’s question. Uh overvalued with the recent highs. So, so the short answer is I don’t think the market is overvalued with recent highs. I do think uh I do think you’ll every high even if it pulls back, you’ll see another high. There’s no bubble out there. But you still you you still want to be aware of how you’re invested. you you don’t want to take the market as as just a that’s high I shouldn’t invest anymore, right? Because it depends how you’re invested. Some things uh function independently of the market.
Yes, I am a fiduciary. Oh, should we invest in gold and Bitcoin? So to to a certain percentage, right? Um there’s some cryptocurrency in most allocation models right now. I would probably caution against a huge percentage or concentrated allocation for for just a litany of reasons that I don’t have to cover I don’t have time to cover here. As far as gold goes, you’re seeing some of that pullback. Um if you if you view gold as kind of a currency, right? That’s a better way of viewing gold, not as a precious metal. Um so weaker dollar, some some un unrest or or or a lack of confidence in the dollar. You’ll see you’ll see some of that uh that gold up. But but as as the dollar strengthens and things, you’ll see some of that gold pull back. Gold had a great run. If you look at the historical run, gold’s pretty flat, but it had a beautiful run for a while there. But precious metals, yeah, we hold some of that in there anyway. Um, if you’re nearing retirement,
if you’re nearing retirement, is there a general guideline how you should be invested? Um, that’s a good question, but that’s a tough question because that’s a very specific question. And so I’m going to give you some general general general general as a rule. As you get close to retirement, your portfolio becomes a little more conservative, but that depends where you start. Like if you start way up here super super aggressive, then you’ll back it down some, right? You might even back it down quite a bit depending on your allocation. If you’re already super conservative, you don’t want to, and I’m going to jokingly say this, you don’t want to become recklessly conservative because you still want to outpace inflation. Uh should you invest in startups? Well, those can be I guess it depends how much in which startup right so the thing about startup is there’s usually a high payout potential uh but because they are startups the risk uh the evaluation on the risk it just kind of depends on that uh depending on your age and depending on what percentage if you’re close to retirement I would maybe caution against doing really really big percentages in into something like that just because of the risk modeling. Um, but if you have some questions, just give me a call on that and we can talk about it in specifics.
Maybe time for one or two more questions because we’re 2 minutes over. My apologies. Uh, do you see any potential risks going forward? Um, well, there’s no bubbles. So, so I would say this, um, obviously the caution is technology, right? That’s the big one, but we don’t consider that a bubble at this point. debt is one of those other things. Um, but the economy is still pretty strong and the consumer is really strong. So, I still want to be cognizant and respectful of everybody’s time. We’ve run a couple of minutes over.
Let’s see. Maybe maybe I think there’s one more question.
Read that. Are there ways to earn income other than CDs or bonds? Hey, that’s a good question. Okay, so if you’re in bonds, right, and you know interest rates are going up and your bonds might actually take a hit, what are the other ways that you can earn income? Um, you know, like dividend payers, preferred, things like that, real estate investment trust, unit trust, uh, some structured notes, things like that. Um, but if there’s any questions you want us to look at that, by all means, give me a call. Interest rates, it’s a really good time to enter some of the interest rate market right now. like we have some guaranteed things that are over five. So, um it’s fantastic. Um so I think that is all of the questions. Thank you so much for everyone’s participation. Thank you for those great questions. It’s always good to see everybody. Um with that said, I wish everybody a wonderful evening. Um and we will see you on future webinars. Thank you so much. Take care. or have a good night.
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09/20/2026 – Content Growth Engine
Alright, what’s happening everybody? How’s it going? Go ahead and comment where you’re calling in from. We are getting started here. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Getting started over here.
Let’s see. Very excited to do this live training today, guys. We’ve got Kahuku Hawaii from Maiva. Joyce says, hi from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Mark, greetings from Portugal. Christina, hello. Karen, I don’t have sound. I think I have sound, right? Just making sure. Alex from Muskegon, Michigan. Selwyn from Tampa, Florida. I’ve heard Tampa is really nice. Scott, hi everyone, Private Space. Terry from Bergen County, New Jersey. Eric, hello all. Samuel, Stafford, Virginia. Mike, Las Vegas. Awesome, lived in Las Vegas. Bill, hi all. Salma, everyone. Salma from Morocco. Holly, Toronto, Canada and Vancouver Island.
Awesome, I spent some time there as well, Vancouver Island specifically, not Toronto, but Vancouver. Scott, Kerrville, Texas. Joanna, San Diego. Hello from Panama, Ferdinand Berger, awesome. Jennifer, Nebraska. Fred, Georgia. Mystery Florida. Kansas City area, awesome. I lived in that area as well, Lawrence, Kansas specifically. But spent a lot of time in Kansas City, really good barbecue there.
Singapore, Fort Worth, Texas, South Florida, Iowa, New Jersey, Washington, Miami, Santa Monica, California, San Diego, California. Nice. San Diego is probably my favorite city in California. Japan. Nice. We were just in Japan probably about a month and a half ago somewhere around there. Shana, Carson City, Nevada. Taiwan. We’re also in Taiwan about a month and a half ago or so. Malaysia. Guys, for those of you calling in from Southeast Asia, do you guys see the smoke too, or is it just me? You guys see the smoke everywhere? It’s like there’s a forest fire in Indonesia. And I’m seeing we’ve been seeing the smoke for like the last few weeks. Anyone else seeing that?
Yeah, the smoke, it sucks, right? It looks like fog, but it’s actually smoke and it’s kind of a bummer. So there’s some huge forest fires in Indonesia, apparently, and apparently they were illegal as well. So yeah, the haze is really bad here in the Philippines. I’m in the Philippines right now. So it is what it is.
Alright guys, next question. Why are you here tonight? What brought you here? It’s tonight for most of you, of course. Good morning for some of you as well. What brought you to this live training tonight? What is the outcome that you would like to get from this live training?
Mike Volcano, Michael Money, Douglas Curiosity. Curiosity, start making money. Jeff, Money. Thomas, want to work for myself. Malachi, opportunity. Terry, I want to monetize my YouTube channel. Michael, a job. Lisa, to learn to monetize. Dawn, to learn and to make money. Sugumaran, I want to make money via YouTube. Roberto, starting my YouTube channel. George, making money. Sifiso, wisdom. Sue, looking to learn more about figuring out a niche to make money online. Okay, awesome. Yeah, we’re going to help you guys make money. We’re going to help you guys figure out the niche.
Laura, I’m a retired naturopath. I’d like to do wellness YouTube. Tanya, knowledge to be successful with YouTube. Karen, I accidentally have a YouTube channel and I kind of want to do something with it. M, Independence. Joe, Coke Zero. Specifically the mini Coke Zeroes. This is the way. Lords, take control of income. Lee, ready to start another YouTube channel, but this time with direction and a plan. Philip, YouTube. Claude, trying to master YouTube. Kathy, curious. Wanda, is my third time in your webinar. Tony, need a productive YouTube channel, have a great product in a great industry. Ben, get monetized before the YouTube conditions change. Viridian, money to make dream come true.
Last question, guys, before we get started. What is stopping you from getting the result that you want? What is stopping you from getting started or posting more videos or getting whatever the result is that you wanted? What is stopping you? Lack of knowledge, time and knowledge, noob, time investment, not knowing the path, having assets, knowledge, fear of haters. Bah, don’t worry about haters. There’s always going to be people that throw the rotten tomatoes and they do absolutely nothing, but they complain about people who actually try to do stuff. So don’t worry about the haters.
It’s just like water under the bridge. But with that being said, I was kind of concerned about that at first as well. I thought I was a little bit scared, like, oh, people that I work with are going to find out I have a YouTube channel or something like that. And I’ll tell you guys right now, nobody figured out that I had a YouTube channel because I just didn’t tell anybody. I just literally didn’t tell anybody. Nobody figured out that I had a YouTube channel until I think I had 300,000 subscribers or something. It was like two or three years in. So don’t worry about it. Believe it or not, nobody really cares. And even if they did find out about the YouTube channel, they’d talk about it for five minutes and then they’d forget about it.
I always say that way more damage is done by the thought of something bad happening rather than the actual bad thing happening. So don’t worry about that. Shout out to our admins: Aaron, Kevin, Justine, Alexis, and Steven. They will be answering questions while we’re doing this. Someone just said they have ADHD. Well, I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD twice and I’ve been able to make it work. I know there are unique problems that you have when you have ADHD, but I think at the same time it gives you some unique advantages too.
Let’s jump into it, guys. How to grow and make money on YouTube in 2026 without fancy gear, without techie stuff, and without spending hours on each video, provided you use this hybrid model and follow one simple rule. So this is going to be good for you whether you are a complete beginner. You’ve never uploaded a single video in your entire life. You’ve never even thought about YouTube. This is going to work for you. I’m going to teach you how to do it the right way from the beginning so you don’t waste years spinning your wheels, just completely wasting your time.
This is also going to work for you if you already have some YouTube experience. Maybe you have a channel that’s getting views, but you’re struggling with monetization, or maybe you have a channel that is kind of a dead channel. So it had some initial success, but then it kind of died down, or maybe you have a channel stuck in a niche that you hate and you want to pivot. This works whether it’s a side hustle, some kind of side income, a one-person business, scaling a business that already exists, or actually monetizing social media.
So why are you here today, guys? Go ahead and do the thumbs up thing if you’re excited about one of these things. First one: getting views. Do the thumbs up emoji. Okay, people are pretty excited about getting views on this one. How about the second one: making some money. Okay, much, much more popular. Good, because at the end of the day, this is the end result we’re trying to get to. We’re trying to actually make some money at the end of the day. Views are just a means to an end and making money is the end. How about this one, guys? Having an impact. Actually creating a business or a side hustle that you can be proud of that helps a lot of people. All right, that one is very popular as well. I would say it’s kind of tied between money and impact.
Now before we start, let me be straight with you. I’ve got two jobs today. Job one is to teach you the best YouTube lesson you’ve ever gotten for free right here, no catch. Job two, at the end, I’m going to offer you a way to work with us directly, which is our coaching program. This is where my team and I handhold you to grow and make money on YouTube, just like the 1,000 plus community members that we have winning inside right now. And I’ll be honest, it is not cheap. It is expensive. So here’s the deal. If I don’t give you the best lesson today, don’t book a call. Don’t give me a dollar. But if I do, if I actually change how you see this, then you owe it to yourself to take a look. And if the paid thing isn’t for you, stay anyways, learn everything, it is yours for free. So if that sounds fair, drop “deal” in the chat.
All right, lot of people put deal. Awesome, good stuff. By the way, we are giving away free stuff at this workshop. At the very end, you will get a chance to walk away with the Niche Validator Pro, both the ChatGPT and the Claude AI versions. This is the newest version yet. It is a massive upgrade over anything we put out before. This is our most popular tool by far. And it has helped literally thousands of people at this point pick their ideal niche.
You’ll also get $61,494 worth of bonuses, only for those who stay until the end offer. Type “staying” in the chat if you’re staying until the end for the Niche Validator Pro.
Before we start, I’m going to ask you to type things in the chat the whole way. And here’s why. This is the forgetting curve. If you just sit and listen, roughly half of what I say is going to be gone within the hour, two-thirds will be gone by tomorrow. The fix is active recall. Every time you pull something back out of your head, the line resets. So you can retain more information as we go. Every time I say type it, that’s a repetition. You are resetting your curve. Do that 20 times tonight and you walk out with knowledge in your head instead of that knowledge being gone by breakfast. So type “locked in” if you’re with me.
Look at this. This is James Wan. You probably know the films: Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious, Aquaman—billions of dollars at the box office. He is as far inside the Hollywood system as a person could possibly get right now. Last week at the Variety summit, they asked him about filmmakers coming up on YouTube, and read what he said: “You don’t even need to be in the system anymore to get something made.” That is a creator saying it. That is the person who is a representation of the system saying it out loud about itself. And he kept going: “Technology makes it so easy today just to go out there and shoot something. If you make something great, no matter how big or small it is, people will find it.”
Here’s why I take him seriously. The very first movie his studio ever made, Lights Out, happened because a filmmaker named David Sandberg put a short film online and it went viral on YouTube. Wan saw it, signed him, and that movie turned a budget of about $5 million into roughly $149 million at the box office. So the people who used to decide who gets made and who gets to be successful are now going to YouTube to find them. You don’t need the system, you need something worth finding. And how you make the thing people find, that’s exactly what I’m going to be showing you today.
Now, one thing I always like to say is this is a maze. You start here at the top and your goal is to finish at the bottom. Most creators start with good intentions and then they fall into the maze. They end up burnt out, overthinking, stuck in analysis paralysis with zero views and zero income, and then they just give up. Actually, most people don’t start in the first place. So if you’re here watching this right now, you are ahead of the majority of people. Type “burnt out” if you felt this, or “not yet” if you haven’t even started yet.
Anything you’ve heard about YouTube outside of what I teach, chances are you’re entering this maze, because most people go into the maze and they get lost and they focus on all the stuff that does not matter. Like all the YouTube coaches that have entire channels about reviewing YouTube gear when that makes like 1% of a difference in the success of your channel. An iPhone for instance is going to be just as good as any camera out there these days for 99% of purposes. That’s the maze. That’s the reason why you don’t get results, because you’re focusing on all these things that do not matter, when in reality you could just focus on the few things that actually matter and actually get you results.
When it comes to winning on YouTube, I have the straight line for you today so you can get there the easiest, quickest, safest, and most comfortable way possible. Specifically, you’re going to gain access to the hottest opportunity to exist in the content creation business. These are the newest stats that just came out. Before, they said that the YouTube and the content creator ecosystem in general is going to be worth about one trillion dollars by 2034. Then six months later, they came out with some new stats and said it would be worth 1.6 trillion dollars by 2034, and even two trillion by 2035. So it has grown that much in just the last year. And the projections are just going up and up so much faster than even the experts predicted.
And look at this, going up while so many other things are going down. It’s harder than ever to get a job. There’s so many industries that are being disrupted. Meanwhile, content creation is just going up and up. Type “money” in the chat if you want a piece of that two trillion-dollar pie. And by the way, guys, that money that they pay out, the tens of billions that they pay out every single year, that’s just AdSense money. Those are just the ads that pop up on the channel, and that’s a small fraction of the total amount of money that you can make from YouTube.
Today you’ll be handed the key to unlock that prison cell that is keeping you trapped and away from the YouTube growth you’ve been wanting for a very long time. And seriously, we’ve helped online businesses, of course, but also coaches, freelancers, job seekers, stay-at-home parents, nine-to-fivers, grandpas, grandmas, agency owners, service providers, digital product sellers, failed YouTubers, successful YouTubers who are crushing it but want to crush it even harder, SaaS owners, location-specific businesses, real estate businesses, brick-and-mortar business owners, and even people with disabilities. This works for almost any niche and almost any situation.
The good news is you don’t need to be a YouTuber or an influencer to win on YouTube. But to get there, I’m going to be exposing the dark side of YouTube and creators who are now slaves to the platform. Here’s an example: Boogie2988. I am not trying to make fun of him at all. I actually respect him a lot for revealing his public income. But he’s got about 4 million subs and he revealed on a podcast tour last year that he’s only making about $44,000 a year, which is less than the average income for an American. So he is one of hundreds of thousands of creators who are promised success through views, but views do not automatically equal money. I mean, 4 million subs and he’s making $3,700 a month. You would not think that someone with that many subscribers is struggling financially.
Meanwhile, I work with people who get 500 views per video and they’re making over $10 million a year on YouTube. But I’m going to show you a bunch of examples later on. So you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. But there are also people who get a lot of views and don’t make a lot of money because they’re simply doing things wrong. Type “got it” if you get that views do not automatically equal money. This is the first and most important thing that you have to understand.
Let’s talk about who this is for. This is for you if you’re a total beginner who wants to finally start, not burn out. Go ahead and drop your profession in the chat. I’m curious what all of you do for a living. RN, apothecary, IT, nurse, system admin, graphic design, software trainer, student, tech support, marketing, retired, photographer, welder, freelancer, IT manager, engineer, mom, property manager, architect, Uber, special education teacher, finance, audiobook narrator, orchestral conductor, consultant, FPNA.
So a lot of people here in demanding jobs. We got a jet pilot here—Bryan’s awesome. A lot of people here in demanding jobs, psychotherapists, doctors, nurses, real estate, finance, business. A lot of high-level professionals, people that have had problems pop up in their lives, they’ve solved those problems, they’ve helped a bunch of other people with problems, and you probably have a lot to teach on YouTube where you could give a ton of value to other people.
Let’s give an example of that: Zach. Zach was in the trades for about 30 years, specifically 20 of those years he owned a business in HVAC, and he was in his 50s. Last year I decided, you know what, I’m just going to make a channel for my brother instead, because he basically came to me and he said, “Shane, I’m 50 years old. My body’s starting to wear out. I need to figure out how to make money without wearing out my body.” Now, like I said, he’s in the trades, right? And he thought I was going to recommend a remote job or some type of certification or maybe some sort of cushy office job, like a government job. And I was like, “No, you should just start a YouTube channel.” And he was really surprised. He was like, “Well, I’m not tech savvy. I’m not good on camera. I’ve never made a video in my life. I’m in my 50s. No one wants to listen to a 50-year-old.” All these excuses started popping up in his head for why he couldn’t do it. And I just told him, “Just trust me, bro. Just do it.”
And the very first video that he posted was this one right here: May 26, blew up, 800,000 plus views. Less than one month later, June 25, he made $214 in a single day. That’s a $78,000 a year run rate. So he went from zero to a full-time income in less than one month. So yeah, it works for beginners, even with no tech experience, even if they’re in their 50s. And Zach also, when I first told him to do this, he literally thought, “I don’t think I have anything to talk about on YouTube.” Turns out he actually had a ton to talk about. And this is actually one of the reasons why we like to recruit people that are a little bit on the older side, people that are more professionals, people that have really good jobs, business owners, etc., because you definitely do have value you can give to society. You have experience, wisdom, knowledge that you can’t just look up on ChatGPT, and you can share that with other people.
Update on Zach: he had an $18,000 month to finish off his first year on YouTube, plus he’s getting a lot of money from affiliate marketing. So he’s not just making money from AdSense. And that’s one thing we’re going to talk about: AdSense is not the only monetization method on YouTube. There are lots of other ways we can make more money than AdSense. Sometimes you can literally make 100 times more than what you make from AdSense. Sometimes it’s even more than that.
This is also for you if you’re a faceless creator, you want to use YouTube automation. So there’s a very specific type of faceless channel that we recommend if you do want to go faceless. And I actually started off faceless myself, but we do actually recommend showing your face. With that being said, sometimes people want to get started like their first few videos without showing their face just because it’s easier to get started. Type “face” or “faceless” in the chat to talk about which one you want to do.
It looks like most people want to show their face, which is what we recommend as well, because if you think about it, how many times have you made a purchasing decision from a channel that doesn’t show their face? Probably not that many times. How many times have you made a purchasing decision from channels that show their face? Probably hundreds of times. And that is simply because it’s just harder to trust. People know, like, and trust them if you don’t see their face. Now, there is one exception to how we recommend doing faceless content if you want to do faceless content: it is still a personal brand, it’s just a faceless personal brand channel and you’re anonymous.
Here’s how to do it right here: Wiz of Ecom. You can see his older videos, they started off like this. At this time he was anonymous, and he basically just had this cartoon character that represented him. There’s a lot of mysteriousness with this channel too, because a lot of people were very curious, like, who is this guy? And of course he was using his real voice. There’s no AI slop, AI voice stuff going on, guys. Please get that out of your head if you think that’s what you want to do. YouTube just absolutely nukes channels that do that left and right. That is complete noise pollution. Think about it: if you can create an entire hour-long video with a fake AI voice, what’s stopping somebody from India from doing that? There’s 1.5 billion people in India. So you’re competing with 1.5 billion people. All right, so don’t do that. It just makes zero sense to do that. And plus, YouTube’s going to nuke your channel anyway if you do, almost certainly.
So use your real voice, use a cartoon character, and have this air of mysteriousness if you’re going to create a channel like this. That’s exactly what Wiz did. He made it to seven figures with this channel right here, faceless. But then later on he did a face reveal and he basically made way more money after he did a face reveal.
This is also for you if you’re a business owner, freelancer, or a coach who wants inbound clients without paid ads. Type “clients” in the chat if that’s you. Davis’s sales went up by 400% and after working with me, he is making 100K per month. Davis owned a portfolio of companies and he was spending about 20 hours a week on just one of his companies, just one YouTube channel and one company, and that is obviously not sustainable. But eventually he outsourced literally everything on his channel to the point where he’s not even recording the videos anymore. And he actually has other people recording the videos. And now he spends zero hours a week on his channel. Even though he has multiple channels for multiple different companies, he is spending zero hours a week. So if you’re a busy business owner, you’re super busy, you have a portfolio, you can actually have other people record the videos for you. Or if you want to record the videos yourself, but you’re willing to take some time to set up the system and then also hire people to actually run the system for you, you can get it down to about two hours a month. Basically, just show up, one recording session, two hours, just hammer them out, non-stop recording for two hours, and you’re good. You just made content for the entire month at that point.
This is also for if you want to network so you can land high-paying jobs, find career opportunities, or become an authority in your niche by standing out with your YouTube channel. Type “authority” if that’s you. Because this is probably the most underrated one out of all of them right here. Like this is the one that I think usually a lot of people are not as excited about because, like, become an authority? Like, does that mean I’m going to make money? Like, I just want to make money. But this is the one that indirectly gives you the most value.
They say that your network is your net worth, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Josh basically just started making really useful videos on his channel for people in the IT and cybersecurity industry. And he talked about how to get better jobs, what certifications are good to take, what skills to learn that are valuable in the job market, etc. And he was able to go from making less than a thousand dollars a month with his channel to actually getting offers from Fortune 50 companies, including companies that are a part of FAANG. And these are some of the biggest and most prestigious companies in the world where it is literally harder to get into a FAANG company than it is to get into Harvard or Yale. Now, usually you have to apply to these jobs, but the companies were reaching out to him. So he got an offer from several different FAANG companies, and he ended up going with one of them for his dream job where he got to travel the world. He lived in Japan and he was working a remote job making multiple six figures a year. But then the YouTube channel just kept going: they got to $5,000 a month, then $10,000 a month, then $30,000 a month. And eventually he scaled all the way up to $186,000 in a single month using my strategies. And of course, at that point he quit his dream job because it just didn’t make sense for him at that time considering how much his time was worth at that point.
When it comes to becoming an authority, guys, I can’t emphasize how much of an advantage this gives you. I mean, it is insane. I’ve gotten to meet so many people that were able to help me whenever I have any sort of problem in business. My network—like, I know exactly who I can reach out to to solve that problem. I have like 10 different people I can message to solve that problem. And that’s because I’m an authority. I’ve gotten invited to speak on stages. I’ve gotten invited to masterminds that people usually have to spend $50,000 to be at, and I get to go for free. I’ve gotten an offer to get equity in many different companies. I accepted one of them where this is a company that will likely get sold for $100 million to a billion dollars, and I got equity in the company, on their board of directors as well.
You might be thinking, but Shane, if it’s easy, then why do most people fail? Because most people who try to start on YouTube absolutely do fail. Well, it’s because they believe in these myths:
- You need to be an influencer.
- You have to show your face and have a fancy camera.
- It takes 40 hours to create one video.
- You have to endure the process because it takes a long time to succeed on YouTube.
The last one specifically—the reason that most people think it takes a long time to succeed on YouTube is because they think they need a big channel that has lots of subscribers and lots of views to make money. If you choose the right niche, you do not need a big channel. Go ahead and type the number of the myth that you believed: one, two, three, or four.
When I started my second channel, Shane Hummus: The Content Growth Engine—I haven’t posted on that channel in a very long time, but we actually made over $30,000 in the first month starting the channel, and a lot of that money was made before we even got to 1,000 subscribers as well.
Before today, you lacked the leverage to invade this soon-to-be trillion-dollar opportunity. First though, who am I? My name is Shane. I’m an ex-pharmacist. I have a 1.6 million subscriber YouTube channel, and I’ve helped over 20 businesses get to 100K per month on YouTube from scratch. I’ve also helped countless businesses that were already successful or YouTube channels that had some success but then kind of died down. I’ve helped countless amounts of those types of people have success on YouTube and make lots of money from that. And I’ve helped countless beginners start part-time incomes, side hustles, second incomes, one-person businesses, etc., things that built into full businesses later on, but can make money right now too.
I’m also industry-recognized as an expert on growing and making money from YouTube for businesses. Here’s a company that I work with. I mentioned them just a few minutes ago: Course Careers. They like to work with me so much that I actually got equity in the company because they gave that much value to them. And we were able to help them over 30X the amount of money that they made. With that being said, this is a startup and I usually like to work with individuals. And one of the reasons I like to work with individuals is because you guys remind me of myself.
So let me go ahead and get into my story real quick here. This is me working as a pharmacist for 15-hour shifts, very burned out, very stressed out during the pandemic. Before this, I came from a very poor background. I lived in Section 8 housing, lived in trailer parks. I was even homeless at one point. This is the exact Salvation Army in Lawrence, Kansas that I stayed at for about six months. And I did what society told me to do because I did not want to be poor. I went to college. I even got to the highest level of college. I got a doctorate. I became a pharmacist and I got a good job, a six-figure job, and I also had to take out a lot of money in student loan debt to get there—I went over $300,000 in student loan debt.
When I was poor, I had a lot of time, but I didn’t have any money. So I couldn’t really do anything besides play video games, watch movies, or whatever. But when I became middle class working as a pharmacist, I didn’t have both time and money because I was spending all of my time working for all of my money, paying down my student loan debt. So it’s kind of an out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fryer type moment. And it was really a terrible situation because I started as a pharmacist right before the pandemic hit. And just to emphasize how bad this was, we got robbed three times in a six-month period. So overall, I can’t describe how stressed out, how depressed, how anxious I was in this situation.
And like many people out there, I started wondering, wait a minute, is the stuff that society told me to do actually a good idea? Maybe I made a mistake. And because of that, I tried just about every side hustle out there to make money: Shopify, Amazon FBA, SMMA, coaching, consulting, courses, digital products, real estate, white labeling, SEO, flipping websites, flipping physical products. And that’s just to name a few of them. You name it, I probably tried it. Here’s one of them that I tried: the Booty Kit. It was basically an at-home workout thing so you can work out your booty. And I sold this one on, I think, Shopify and Amazon FBA.
I pretty much failed at almost all of them. I couldn’t make any of these sustainable. And a lot of it has to do with me having ADHD and always just trying a bunch of different things. But as you can see, my bank account was constantly very close to zero dollars. But YouTube was different than all these other side hustles. See, all the side hustles that I tried, they all actually work, but they only work if you have traffic, AKA views. If you don’t have views, it’s kind of like trying to sell something without having a store. It’s almost impossible to sell. Another way of saying this is you need distribution. If you own the store that people go to to shop for food, well guess what? You’re going to be able to make money from that because you can put any product you want there. That’s what having a YouTube channel is like. When you have distribution, people go to YouTube because they’re trying to solve a problem that they have. They type that into YouTube, and then all of a sudden your videos start to pop up. People know that you exist and you make useful content, and then they know that you are helpful. Type “distribution” if that makes sense.
Because when someone’s hungry, they go to the store to buy food. When someone has a problem, where do they go? They go to Google or YouTube. And guess who owns YouTube? Google. So the chances are a video is going to pop up at the top. That’s where people go.
After I tried it again—at that time I was basically living in a house full of seven guys to try to save money—one of the guys that I ended up meeting through my entrepreneur network was Sam. And Sam was basically an immigrant from Lebanon, and he was starting a wedding photography business, and he barely even knew English. And he started this YouTube channel where he was making about $10,000 to $20,000 a month from this YouTube channel. I think it was less than 10,000 subscribers at the time, as well as his wedding photography business in Las Vegas and on the West Coast. Before this, I’d spent time in LA. I’d met influencers who had lots of followers and lots of subscribers and they were getting millions of views, but they weren’t making any money. And so I was like, “Sam, how are you making money from YouTube even though you have a small channel?” And he showed me what a proper monetization method looks like, and he showed me how I can monetize a channel without having that many views. And he initially taught me how to make money from a small channel, like 10 to 20,000 subscribers. But I took it to the next level to the point where there are some channels that we work with that only have a few thousand subscribers and they’re making seven figures. There’s even one channel that has around 500 subscribers and he made $500,000 in a single year, because there are some niches where you’re talking to an affluent audience and you can get a couple hundred views and make $10,000 from a video.
Now you might be thinking, Shane, you’re exaggerating, right? There’s no way you can get a couple hundred views and make $10,000 from a video. And you’re right, I am exaggerating in the opposite direction. Because here’s an example of someone who got a couple hundred views and made a hundred thousand dollars from a single video, Carla. She made a video that got a couple hundred views from a small channel with about 1,500 subscribers at the time, and she landed a $106,200 a year contract from this channel. Look at her videos here; they usually get a couple hundred views, and she does maybe two videos a month, and she landed a hundred-thousand-dollar contract from this channel. This is a renewable contract, by the way. So if that client ends up renewing, that means that they’re going to renew for the next year—it’s going to be a $200,000 contract.
This is where I found the secret formula of YouTube success where everyone else was not talking about it. I started posting videos, and just to put this in perspective, I have gotten lots of views: 6 million, 1.2 million, 1.7 million, 4.3 million views. Okay, so I know how to play the views game with the best of them. But this video right here, “The Most Useless Degrees,” this is my first-ever breakout video, and it got over 4 million views. But in its whole lifetime, it’s made about $30,000 from AdSense because it wasn’t making money outside of AdSense. And I’ve had several videos just last week that got less than 10,000 views—in fact, several videos a week I’d say they get 10,000 views or less—but make $40,000 to $50,000 from all income streams.
One of the biggest points that I want to make is it doesn’t really matter how skilled you are at YouTube; it is very difficult to recreate a video like this that has this much success, especially in education. Very, very difficult to recreate the success of a video like this where it has like 4 million views. But this one right here, where it only has to get 8,000 views to make $48,000, it’s actually quite easy to recreate the success of a video like this, which is why you really want to pay much more attention to the money that a video can make rather than just how many views it gets. This video right here also took six months to get to $48,000, whereas this one took six years to get to $31,000. So by the time this video gets to the six-year mark, it might have made 100,000 or maybe even 150,000. And so it’s just going to keep going up and up because these videos sit on YouTube and they’re like little pieces of digital real estate. Every single time someone has a problem, they’re going to search that out and they’re going to end up finding your video.
So it is way easier for me to reproduce a video like this than it is for me to reproduce a video like this. Type “more” in the chat if you want to get less views, but make more money.
Typically you want to target topics where people are having problems and they’re searching for the solution to those problems, or videos that would be complementary to someone who’s having those problems and searching for the solution.
Just to show you guys proof, here’s how much I made about three plus years ago: three September’s ago, I made about $283,000. Two Septembers ago, I made about $325,000, and then this last September, I made about $1 million total. I’m not saying this to try to make people jealous. I’m just showing you the receipts so that you know that I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve started multiple seven-figure businesses from YouTube. And there’s a lot of YouTube coaches out there that are just coaches, coaching coaches; they’ve never actually started a successful channel themselves. They’re basically cosplaying as successful YouTubers teaching you how to be successful at YouTube when they’ve never done it outside of just teaching YouTube. But me, I actually started a successful YouTube channel before I started teaching other people how to do it.
The craziest thing is I did all of this while being able to travel the world and only having to work four hours a week. Here’s a picture of me in Tokyo at the famous Shibuya Crossing Square. Here’s a picture of me in Singapore. And then here’s a picture of me in the San Juan Islands basically on a whale watching tour, orca watching specifically. Now, I choose to work more than that because I genuinely enjoy YouTube and I enjoy helping people with YouTube, but I only have to work four hours a week. That’s the whole point: I only have to do four hours a week. There’s been many cases where I’ve gone weeks or even a month, or even one time where I went two months at a time, without having to work at all. During one of those stretches where I went two months without working, I actually had a pretty serious health issue myself and my partner and couldn’t really work. So I spent zero hours on my business that entire two-month period, and the business actually grew. No in-person employees, no office. So yeah, I can do whatever I want and my business just keeps going up and up. Type “four hours” into the chat if you want a business that only needs four hours a week.
Now, one of the reasons I know so much about YouTube—and this is a real problem with a lot of people who teach YouTube—is my first business on YouTube had absolutely nothing to do with YouTube. I was helping people land their dream remote jobs, and we literally helped thousands of people with thousands of verified testimonials grow their personal brands and land their dream remote jobs. And we actually found that growing your personal brand was one of the most effective ways to land your job. Now that business got to multiple seven figures a year before I even taught a single person how to do YouTube.
Something kept bothering me because I got the life that I dreamed of, but once in a while I would create a video just telling people what I was doing because I was seeing YouTube advice online. I’d watch it and I’d be like, “Hmm, I don’t really think this works for most people. Maybe it would work for a gaming channel, but it wouldn’t work for most types of channels out there.” So I decided once every six months, once every year, I’d post a video about what I was doing on YouTube and what was working for me. And every time I do that, I would get comments, emails, DMs. Everybody would be reaching out to me being like, “Hey Shane, can you coach me? Hey Shane, can you help me grow my YouTube channel?” And I turned them all down because I was too busy or I didn’t really want to do coaching or I thought maybe it works for my niche, but not for other people’s niches. But I felt bad about it and I shrugged it off for years until one day I decided, you know what? I’m going to do it.
The reason I decided that is because a friend of mine reached out to me—someone who I was very successful on YouTube. He was actually getting more views than me at the time. And he reached out and he said, “Hey man, I’m financially struggling. I’m not making any money. I saw your video and I saw that you were making tons of money. What are you doing that’s so different than what I’m doing? Can you help me?” So I decided to help him. And I decided at the same time, when I help him, I can also get a group of people and help them at the same time, because it wouldn’t take me any extra time. It’s the same amount of time for me to tell people what to do on a call with a group of people versus one person. So I reached out to a bunch of those people and I decided to do a cohort where I worked with a bunch of them, and it was a very diverse set of people: a professional truck driver for 28 years, a fresh graduate engineering student, an Amazon FBA business owner, a coach, a freelancer, a failed YouTuber, a successful YouTuber who was crushing it but wanted to crush it harder, a content creator for 11 years who wanted to shift over to YouTube, a tech salesperson, a girl in cybersecurity, an agency owner, an online service provider, a fitness dude, a finance guy, a physical business owner. The point is they were all different. Some had YouTube experience, others had zero knowledge of how YouTube works.
Then we applied the exact same format that I found to be working on my YouTube channel: same YouTube format, same proven way of making thumbnails, titles, and intros, same strategy for coming up with winning video ideas. And of course, a little bit of tweaking, because every single niche is a little bit different. There are a lot of underlying principles, but they all do need a little bit of tweaking. And the crazy thing is, every single one of them blew up. And the best part is they all got their version of rich by helping other people live better lives. And that’s the thing that made me feel so happy. And that’s when I realized that I had found my life purpose, because I can only have so much impact with my channel, but I got to help other people have impact with their channels. I got to help other people help tons of people out there with various different problems and so many different niches that they were having.
So I was basically spreading my impact to so many other people and then they were able to impact hundreds of millions with their YouTube channels, and they all got their version of rich by helping other people live better lives. And the reason for that is because I taught them how to make a very specific type of content, which is educational niche content. The channels that are winning today are educational niche channels. In fact, educational channels make 10 to 20 times more money and there are more opportunities for every 1,000 views than any other type of content.
In fact, in the first month that we launched my second channel, we were able to make about $1,736 per 1,000 views. It got about 24,000 views in the first month right off the bat and made about $42,000. To put that in perspective, entertainment channels in general make about $1 to $3 per 1,000 views. So if I would have gotten 24,000 views with a typical entertainment channel, kind of like a MrBeast-style entertainment channel, I probably would have made about $24 to $73—definitely not worth it, not a full-time income.
Mass-market education content, like Mark Rober or Veritasium, makes about $20 per 1,000 views. So at $20 per 1,000 views with 24,200 views, I would have made about $484. That’s a nice part-time income, but still not a full-time income.
With my second channel, which is a niche authority channel, it makes about $1,736 per 1,000 views. And with 24,000 views that made $42,000. Now, this particular channel got to about $4,000 per 1,000 views before it kind of stabilized out. We have clients that do $10,000 per 1,000 views. We have clients that do $30,000 per 1,000 views, sometimes even more than that. So this is actually not even that impressive for more of a niche authority channel. There are some channels that we work with that make a lot more money per 1,000 views. And it really just comes back to the niche and what kind of problem you’re helping people solve.
Now, you can do a little bit more mass market education channel and you can properly monetize your content and you can still make a heck of a lot more money than this. Just as an example, on my main channel, it has 1.7 million subscribers now. On this main channel, I make about $400 per 1,000 views on average. And this is despite the fact that, honestly, guys, I talk about whatever I want on the channel because I can, but I started the channel off-niche. That’s the important thing: is it started off very, very niche. And that’s what I highly, highly recommend that you do. Later on, you can make the decision if you want to make a channel where you talk about different stuff, you go more mass-market, you expand your niche, you pivot niches, etc. I’ve done that many times on my channel and that’s definitely something you can do. But what I recommend that people start off with is just talking about a very niche subject and doing that first.
Let me give you some examples of niche educational content:
- The Organic Chemistry Tutor: makes about $43k to $119k a month, and that is just from AdSense alone according to ViewStats. And if he’s properly monetizing even remotely well, he’s making about $10 to $20 per 1,000 views. That means he would be making about $136,000 to $273,000 a month from this channel total. And that’s very conservative. Now, the interesting thing is he didn’t upload in 177 days—five months—and he was still making that much money from the channel passively without uploading anything, because each video is like a little soldier that just goes out and makes him money forever.
- Scotty Kilmer: he’s in his 70s and he makes content helping people save money on their cars. Now, one of the great things about him, he is quite entertaining. Scotty Kilmer is hilarious if you’ve ever watched him, but he basically made $24 million from YouTube. And he even said in an interview that he made more money in one month on YouTube than he saved in 40 years as a mechanic. And basically what he does is he just helps people pick the right cars, maintain their cars, fix their cars, and help them with different car-related products and services. And this stuff is dead simple for him.
- Physics Wallah: He came from a small village in India, and his very first videos were in his parents’ basement. Bad lighting, can barely see the whiteboard, blurry, etc. It didn’t matter. He started making videos about these standardized tests in India. And at first he was talking about physics and then he expanded to other stuff. So let’s just put this in perspective: how specific this is. Physics, India, standardized tests only. Very specific how he was tutoring people. And he started making these videos and he kept going. And then he launched a company that’s now worth $5.2 billion from his YouTube channel, called Physics Wallah. It’s an educational app. He launched it from his YouTube channel and it’s now worth $5.2 billion. And it all started in his parents’ basement just making videos about physics, which is what he was already tutoring people on. So he was literally just doing what he was already doing in his job; he just did it on camera and posted it online and he became a billionaire.
Now, he is probably richer than MrBeast, because this company was evaluated on an actual stock exchange at $5.2 billion, whereas MrBeast’s companies have never been evaluated like that. Plus, MrBeast says that he actually loses money every year because he’s just so aggressively reinvesting, and it would be very difficult for him to actually liquidate his companies, even if they were technically worth that much money, because it’s too tied to him because he’s an entertainer. Whereas Physics Wallah, he could absolutely sell his company because that’s an app that is not tied to him; it’s tied to solving somebody’s problem. And at the end of the day, that’s the valuable service that he’s giving: he’s solving their problem. And so he could easily sell this company if he wanted to.
Type “no excuses” in the chat if Physics Wallah just killed your “my setup isn’t good enough” excuse. If somebody can come from India, a small village in India, have everything going against it, and start a 5.2 billion-dollar YouTube channel, then you can make a side hustle income or a second income or even start a business that does 10K a month or 20K or 30K a month. You can absolutely do that.
Now I’m going to hand you the formula for how to do all this. Type “formula” in the chat if you want the formula.
First thing is you need a niche hypothesis statement, guys. This is so important. This is what everyone messes up. I like to call this the Niche 2.0.
Generally speaking, there are three niches out there that are the most profitable niches: health, wealth, and relationships. With that being said, there’s a lot of other niche categories outside of that, and you can make money in all those niches as well. But generally speaking, if you’re confused about what niche to go into, you should be looking into health, wealth, or relationships, because almost everybody in the entire world has a problem in one or more of those three areas.
And then you need to go ahead and make what’s known as a niche hypothesis statement. While we’re going to do this, go ahead and comment what your niche is. Do not comment health, wealth, or relationships. I’m going to say this right now: I’m still gonna get people to comment this somehow. Do not comment health, wealth, or relationships. You need to go deeper than that. Health, wealth, and relationships are a niche category.
The niche hypothesis statement goes like this: you select a market, or what most people would traditionally call a niche, but I call it a market; and then you pick one specific problem that that market has; and then you find a specific solution for that one problem. And that is your niche. So it’s going to look like this: I help X do Y, or I help X overcome Y. That is what it’s going to look like. Now the Z part, don’t worry about that right now; the Z is something that we can do later on. But the important part is you have a specific market, that’s X; a specific problem that people inside the market have, which is Y; and then the specific solution. And the most important part is you establish that there’s a market of people and they have a problem that isn’t being solved very well, because that is the foundation of how markets work. Markets are all about solving problems efficiently. A lot of people think that business is about making something cool—”I just want to do something cool” or “I want to entertain people”—no, business is all about solving painful problems, guys. The definition of giving value is alleviating pain. When you solve someone’s painful problem, that is how you give value to them.
Type “Niche 2.0” if you understand why a one-word niche isn’t a niche, and you need a market and a specific problem that the market has, and you need to help them solve that problem.
Let me give you a few examples of how to do this. I’m going to use the accounting market specifically because for some reason I’ve worked with so many accountants, so I’m going to use the accounting market.
- Level 1: Teaching students basic accounting concepts. That is more of a mass-market channel, but it’s teaching people basic accounting concepts. So it’s kind like the organic chemistry tutor, but for accounting.
- Level 2: Accounting specifically for existing accounting students or someone who just graduated with an accounting degree, trying to pass standardized tests or pass certifications in order to become an accountant. So that would be kind of like Physics Wallah, but for accounting.
- Level 3: Helping people land their first-ever entry-level accounting job.
- Level 4: People who are already accountants making 50 to 100K a year and they want to become what’s known as a financial controller, making 200 or even 300K a year.
- Level 5: Helping businesses hire accountants.
All of these are the accounting niche, but they are completely different audiences and the type of content you’re going to make is going to be completely different for all of those. So I hope you understand why it’s so important to have a niche hypothesis statement.
Now, once you have your niche down, you’re already way better than most people, but you need more than that. You need what’s known as a hybrid personal brand. You probably know what personal branding is, but when you mix personal branding with the correct niche in our YouTube automation AI system, you have what’s known as a hybrid personal brand.
Now, one thing you need to understand: I just told you that you have to have a niche hypothesis statement, but I’m going to say something that’s probably going to confuse you a little bit, and that is: you are the niche. So many people get this wrong. They think their niche is what makes them successful as an educational channel content creator. But when you have a hybrid personal brand, you are the niche. Yes, you are going to start extremely niche with “I help X do Y.” That is something that you’re going to do, and that is important. But see, once you get traction, when you build your channel in the correct way where you’re building a hybrid personal brand, you can then easily pivot to something else. Type “I am the niche” in the chat if you get it.
Let me show you an example: Alex Hormozi. When he first started posting on YouTube about four or five years ago, his niche hypothesis statement was: “I help gyms do marketing and sales.” And now he can talk about anything. Now, obviously he’s really well known for his business stuff with all the different types of businesses and different business content that he makes. But now he can talk about his unconventional diet, or this is why you’re not happy, or he talks about his book launches, or he talks about how to stop wasting time. And now he can basically just talk about anything he wants. But the point is, he started niche. If he tried to do that from the beginning, he probably wouldn’t have had nearly as much success as he has right now. He started off being the king of a puddle, then the king of a small pond, and then the king of a lake, and then the river, and then the sea, and then the ocean. And that’s what you want to do: be the king or queen of a small puddle first.
Because when you create a hybrid personal brand, there are so many different ways that you can monetize your channel and so many different directions that you can go: AdSense, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, job opportunities, networking, memberships, SaaS, high-ticket offers, courses, digital products, physical products. All these different business models work when you have a hybrid personal brand traffic and you have distribution—people that actually know, like, and trust you on your channel because you built it with the hybrid personal brand method and you helped them solve a bunch of their problems.
Speaking of the person who just asked about physical products, Doug DeMuro sells cars. You guys know Doug DeMuro, he’s been doing car reviews for a very long time, and Doug DeMuro launched his website called carsandbids.com from his YouTube channel. This business that he started, carsandbids.com, he ended up selling it for about $80 million. When he first started on YouTube, online car auctions weren’t really a thing; it was a very tiny niche. But then COVID came along, all the in-person car auctions shut down, and this niche absolutely exploded. He was positioned in such a way that he was able to launch his website, promote it hard on his YouTube channel, and sell it for $80 million. But the whole point here is, when DeMuro first started his channel, he had almost no idea an online car auction website was going to be his big break.
As things happen in the world, as the products and services that you sell change, as popularity of certain things change, as trends change, as you grow and evolve as a human being—because we are growing, breathing, evolving human beings—we want a business on a YouTube channel that can grow and evolve with us. You might change your interests over time, or change what type of content you want to make over time, and you want to build your YouTube channel in such a way that it can evolve with you.
Here are some examples of our clients:
- Joaquin was 18 years old when we first started working with him, a freshman in college making all kinds of random content on study skills, productivity, etc. We sat down, hashed out his niche, and it became very clear that he should help foreign exchange students get into elite universities in the US. The very first month that he launched, or very close to it, he made about $80,000. He actually got so many client requests that he was over-subscribed and he had to stop making YouTube videos and waitlist customers trying to buy his program.
- Richard: We helped him go from making almost no money whatsoever on YouTube and also being one of the busiest clients I’ve ever worked with—a product manager at a Fortune 50 company working 80+ hours a week, with a brand new baby and real estate investments. We were able to help him grow his channel to $12,000 in a single month, despite the fact that he probably could only work about two hours a month.
- Guy: He’s actually disabled and his goal before working with us was just to make a couple extra thousand dollars a month because he was close to retirement. He has what’s known as tinnitus, which is constant ringing in the ears. He made this channel with the goal of just making a couple extra thousand dollars a month in retirement, and that was going to be his version of rich, especially if he was able to do it by helping other people who have tinnitus. He made it to $1,500 a month with less than 500 subscribers—446 subscribers to be exact. Now he’s getting closer to 13,000 subscribers, so he’s making way more than that.
One simple rule, guys, to make this happen: start simple and scale fast. You do not need to show your face all the time if you don’t want to, a fancy camera, fancy editing, a million-dollar studio, high production quality, or top-tier video editing skills, and you definitely do not need to make highly entertaining content. Here’s what you do need: viral video ideas (specifically the right views, this is the most important thing after dialing in your niche), then titles and thumbnails to get clicks, then an effective intro for video retention, and then you just need to deliver value to your audience.
Let’s talk about the most important out of all those things: the viral video idea. I got this from Carl Icahn in the finance industry. Basically, he would find businesses that were making a ton of money despite being run terribly. I took that idea from the finance industry and I applied it to YouTube. Type “Icahn” if you want to know more about the Icahn method.
What I did is I found YouTube videos that had a lot of views despite not having that many subscribers. That’s important. It’s important that they don’t have that many subscribers, because if they have a big channel, that means they have a big audience and those people are probably going to watch just about anything that they put out. So, you find a channel that has a lot of views despite having a small channel, and despite the video itself being either mediocre or preferably bad. So, small channel, lots of views, the video itself that got a lot of views is either mediocre or preferably bad.
So here’s an example of this: this guy right here, his face is blurry, the door is in better focus in the background, this is the literal thumbnail of the video. The thumbnail is just a screenshot from the video. He was drunkenly ranting about college degrees to his potato of a camera that had terrible audio and terrible video for about 25 minutes while literally drinking beers. And yet it came from a small channel and yet it got 760,000 views. This is what we’re looking for: videos that get a lot of views despite coming from a small channel and despite the video itself being either mediocre or preferably bad.
So what you do is you want to steal the idea of the video and make a better version of the video. “The Most Worthless College Majors”—you could change the keyword a little bit or just keep the same keyword and boom, “The Most Useless Degrees.” That’s what I did. I made a better video with almost the same title, I made a better thumbnail, a better video, and it blew up and got millions of views. This is what I’ve been doing for the last six years, guys. This is my secret. The Icahn method is the most powerful way to do it.
Once you get these down and you join our program, finding video ideas will never be an issue ever again. Type “nice” in the chat if you thought the Icahn method was valuable.
Now let’s talk about what it takes for you to be a part of this YouTube gold mine. Type “ready” if you’re ready to hear what it takes.
With no daily uploads, if you don’t want to; no complicated editing; without having to show your face at first, if you don’t want to; no expensive gear or software; no burnout or guesswork; no algorithm chasing; and no spending months without monetization. Instead, you’ll get an on-demand content plan tailored to you, a hybrid model that works without your face, proven video templates plus AI-assisted scripts, automated systems for publishing and repurposing, a one-day-per-month content workflow, scalable monetization from day one, and top-tier coaching behind seven-figure YouTube brands.
Introducing the Content Growth Engine. This is the easiest and fastest way to grow a cash-printing YouTube channel, even if you’re not an influencer. Click the link in the chat to get access to this early, because there are a few bonuses that we are only giving to people who get this early access, and you will have a higher chance of getting the bonuses if you actually book a call now, or you can type in go.shanehummus.com/coaching or scan the QR code with your phone.
Here’s what you get access to inside of CGE:
- We’re going to help you pick a profitable niche. We have a bunch of YouTube coaches with 100K subscriber plaques, the absolute best of the best, that will help you find and pick the best niche—one that is profitable, but also something that you’re passionate about so it’s actually sustainable.
- The mindset section as well as the foundation. This helps remove all the overthinking, all the imposter syndrome, and it helps you take action fast.
- The Content Genesis System. This shows you how to find viral video ideas in your niche that will have a higher chance of getting views and going viral.
- The Holy Trifecta. This is where we go over how you can make your thumbnail, your title, and your intro to package the viral video idea to have the highest chances of success.
- The Script Writing Alchemy System. This is where we help you write scripts with the help of AI to get your writing time down to less than one hour per video.
- The Viral Video Creation System where we actually turn things into a system. This is what makes it possible to only work one or two hours a week on your YouTube channel.
- The Cash Code System. This is where we actually make money out of the views that you’re getting, even if you’re not getting a lot of views.
Plus you get one-on-one coaching calls and a dedicated client success manager, one-on-one dedicated chat support with all of our coaches, multiple weekly group coaching sessions, access to an exclusive group of hybrid personal brand YouTubers, and access to the most powerful content creation AI systems on earth.
This is the exact system that’s responsible for zero to 10K in just 18 days. This person had been posting on YouTube for well over five years and they had never had a single video get over 100,000 views, and then they worked with us and one of their first videos got to 180,000 views.
Let’s talk about the bonuses:
- Bonus 1: A one-on-one YouTube niche breakthrough call with me personally. This is worth $12,000 easily, but this is only for five of the first people who sign up within the next 24 hours.
- Bonus 2: The Niche Title Generator. This is easily worth $7,500. We built a custom AI tool that finds proven video ideas for your niche in about 30 seconds based on the Icahn method.
- Bonus 3: The Voice Command ScriptWriter AI Deluxe. This is worth $8,000. You tell it the goal of your video—to inform, to entertain, to sell—and it turns your spoken ideas into a polished, attention-grabbing YouTube script.
- Bonus 4: The Hummus Thumbnail System Deluxe. This is worth $10,000. My entire thumbnail system: the guide, the templates, the swipe files, the framework.
- Bonus 5: Behind the scenes of my 1 million subscriber YouTube channel. Stats and breakdowns worth $6,997 easily.
- Bonus 6: The six and seven-figure YouTube channel case study vaults worth $4,997.
- Bonus 7: The Niche Monetization Launchpad AI. This is an AI tool that takes your niche and maps out exactly how to make money from it—affiliate deals, digital products, coaching offers, sponsorships. Worth $12,000, and you get it just for showing up to the call that you booked.
- Bonus 8: The 90-day CGE Advantage money-back guarantee. You’ve got 90 days, you follow the program, you do the work and you show up, and if it does not work for you, you get your money back.
Let’s add this up: eight bonuses, total value $61,494.
Book your free strategy call. We’ll figure out if we’re a good fit to work together or not. This is an invitation for you to apply to join the program. A very small percentage of the people that apply to join us actually end up getting accepted into the program. We can only onboard a few people at a time. It’s one-on-one coaching.
Once you book, you’re going to get two emails: one from Calendly, one from the consultant that you booked with. Make sure you check your inbox right now and make sure you add to calendar. If you do not see these emails for whatever reason, look in your spam or your all-mail folders. And if you don’t see it, make sure you type: “Checked spam and I still don’t see the email,” and one of the admins will help you.
Go to go.shanehummus.com/coaching, scan that QR code, or click the link in the chat.
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09/25/2026 – Opus 5.5 is Here. Set it up right
What is happening everyone? It is Luke here. Let me change the screen over for you guys. Let me pull this over here and let me go ahead and pull up our slides for today. Yes, we have got slides. [clears throat] Um,
cool.
[snorts] Awesome. Um, I’ll turn my camera on, too. Why not?
[snorts] Hopefully, it’ll pop up here. There we go. What is up, guys? Good to see you all. I’ll take this down a bit. There we go. All right. Cool. What’s up, guys? Good to see you all here today. Let me go ahead and say hi in the chat. If you guys are here, let me know. you give me a thumbs up uh before we get started. We want to do something a little bit different today. Um with our weekly session, uh today I’m going to do a session. It’s not going to be as long uh as our normal ones. We’re going to just try to make this one uh 60 minutes, maybe even under an hour, 45 minutes to an hour. um and just go through essentially just the key things um for this week that I want you guys to focus on cuz we haven’t really done a bit of a recap. Um while while you you’re going to learn some brand new things today that again is pretty pretty insane because again that’s that’s the AI world right now. Every week there is such insanely new things happening. Uh, I want to make sure, you know, we’re all on the same page and have a plan uh of and make sure that everyone’s do using these AI tools the way they’re meant to be used. Um, and it can be hard when when when new models come out, you have no idea. you you’re told how much more powerful they are, but you have no idea really what settings to put them on and are you getting getting the actual peak performance for best value um at the settings you have your AI tools set to. So, that’s kind of like the core thing today that I want to go over as well. Uh as well, the core thing I want to go over is Opus 5.5. this literally released maybe 6 hours ago. And it’s also why I was saying in previous weeks, it’s it’s frustrating um if I have a topic set for a webinar and then something like this will happen where where a brand new model comes out um that um it’s hard to know what like to do sometimes if I should push what what we’ve got planned aside. Should I should I teach everything? Um, but I think uh what I’m I’m going to try to do on our weekly um just completely free value sessions is have a basic topic and then uh just just be I’ll just be mindful that most likely there’s going to be something brand new that comes out every week. And that’s what it’s that’s what’s happening right now, which is crazy, but it’s also it also gives everyone it’s like a double-edged sword. The positive side is every time a new model comes out, everyone has the same chance again to get to the very front of this industry and space and use AI in the most effective uh automated way. You know, anyone that picked up that picks up AI this week for the very first time and learns an hour of training [clears throat] is going to be still 100 times more uh efficient, effective, um, and capable than someone that has an AI model from 6 months ago and it has been an expert at AI for 20 years, All right. Like that’s how crazy these models are now that every time a new one comes out, it’s a substantial leap forward. Uh and if you are on my um if you’re in my top 1% audience, I was going over this in our training the other day when I was talking about how all of the AI companies, they’re on a race to what is known as AGI. Now, let me go ahead. I’ll just pull up a a just a Google document just in case we write a bunch of notes today. But there’s not not going to be too many notes that I can think of, but I want to just do it anyway just so we have it here in case. So all AI companies are on the the race to AGI. This again is artificial um general intelligence and actually a really good documentary. You can actually I watched it last night. Uh, and it’s it’s already kind of dated in the sense that like this was filmed maybe I don’t know when when when they would have finished filming, but they even say in the in the documentary that by the time this gets released, uh, it’ll already be will already be substantially closer to agi. Um, but let me just see what it was called. Netflix AI documentary.
Yeah. The AGI doc. How I became an AI apocalyp aopimist.
Apocalyptimist. So, watch the AI doc. How I became an AI apocalyptus.
I think that’s how it was spelled right. Apocist
lot to miss. I don’t know. We’ll just leave it at that for now. You get the idea. Um, and actually [clears throat] just uh that’s going to annoy me that that that there. So, I’m just going to copy this here. There we go. Didn’t know that was a word. Um, so [clears throat] yeah, go ahead and watch that. It’s on Netflix. Um, and it’ll give you a really good idea. He gets a bunch of the CEOs of these different AI companies because again, whoever gets to a artificial general intelligence first, whatever AI company, whether it’s in America or anywhere else in the world, is going to be the most powerful company in the world and the most powerful people in the world, the ones that run it and have control of what it does. Uh essentially a AGI again is when um AI works at a level of intelligence um that is equal to or greater than that of humans. So I was um long long story short when this happens this is essentially the point when it makes more sense to use AI AIS for work than humans. uh when we’re at this stage, you can put AI models into robots, into uh machines, into different uh different use cases. Uh and it’s, you know, you don’t ever have to pay them uh anything like you can pay them 100 times less than minimum wage. They work 24/7. They don’t have sick leave. They don’t get um mental health days. They don’t need anything like that. and they are just working better and they never get things wrong uh or very very rarely. So that’s uh what we were talking about the other day. Now um in terms Well, give me one second here.
Um, I’ve got got someone that’s asked for the link to the webinar today cuz I know there was a error it seemed for some people.
Um, but yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. Did you Did you guys have have an issue with getting on today session at all? I know it was um frustrating. For some reason when I started it, there was not a bunch of people in the room. So, I had to send an email out with the webinar for today. Let me see if there was anyone on my Gmail asking for it, too, because I just want to make sure everyone’s got the chance to get in here. Um,
it’s all good. It seems like everyone’s all right now.
Um, cool. So, I’ll turn that off. That’s going to get annoying. So, for today though, the cork thing that I want to cover today is uh our Opus 5.5 and just make sure you guys understand how to use it. This is obviously with Claude. This came out last night uh literally only hours ago and I wanted to do a session on that today. So if that sounds good to you guys, give me a thumbs up in the chat. Let me know. Uh you see this again. This model guys, if you if you guys remember the last new new model we got was Fable 5.1, which was almost double as powerful as Fable was. Opus Fable was the biggest advancement in AI since the launch of AI. FA Fable 5.1 came out maybe less than a month later, twice as powerful as Fable. Now, the biggest issue with using these models is that they use a lot of tokens. If you have used them before and you’re on a lower or the basic level uh subscription of Claude, you’ll find that you will end up using them quite quickly. Now, when Fable 5.1 came out, not long after um Chat GPT released their chat GPT 6 model, which is literally like using Fable 5.1, even better in some areas, and um is much cheaper, right? It still is expensive. It’s like it’s still um you might even need not even the basic level subscription. I think it was the level up you needed to even access it. um at the time it came out, it might have come out to everyone now. That’s usually what happens. Um but what um Opus has done now is or what Claude I should say has done now or I really should say what Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, has done now is they’ve now just released Opus 5.5. And I’ve been waiting to see what they do because it had to be big. It had to be a big move this time again so that Claude also sorry that Chat GPT doesn’t get too far ahead uh in the power of what they’re releasing because it’s the first time in probably 2 or 3 years that chat GBT had a substantial or even was in front of Claude in terms of the capabilities of what the AI tools could do. Um, so Opus 5.5 has come out, which is literally the same as Fable Level Bra in terms of brainwise, and it’s 40% cheaper to run. This is going to be your brand new default go-to model for 90% of the work that you do. And I recommend changing to it now by updating your Claude. All right. And here in the bottom right, see it says opus 5.5. Have it set to this for 90% of your work. And here you can see the speed medium. I’ve got it set to start with it at medium. And I’m going to we’re going to cover what it what it means at these different levels. Right. So we’ll set it over 5.5 at medium for now. And then um Oh, you can’t see. You can’t see right now. Let me go ahead actually and change the screen over. share something else. Okay, own claw here down the bottom right here. Opus 5.5 and I got set to medium here right now. Again, if you’re in normal chat, by the way, guys, up here in the top left, this is how you change between normal um normal normal chat with Claude and then um Claude code is the top right one. Remember, use Claude code for anything we’re building. It is so much more powerful than trying to build it in chat over here. Again, for complete beginners here, when you use chat, uh you’re literally going back and forward with the Claude one-on-one. This your one agent is doing tasks for you. You’re then responding back to what it says, going back and forward and back and forward, and it tries to then get things done as quickly as possible. Um, as well as understand some things take a bit of time. So, but it you know it’s not the most efficient way to build things in claw code. This is where each chat that you have it each chat man uh each answer that you get uh the actual AI in claude code has the ability to launch uh different agents in the background side AI tools to launch and create and get access to third parties and and um bring in more resources to your builds. It could launch up to a thousand uh side agents to do work in different areas if it feels in your project’s big enough and that’s what’s needed and that gets things done so much quicker. Um but again here bottom right open 5.5 set. Boom. And we are good to go. Now let’s jump back over. Let’s go through the slides first. Let me go ahead pull this up.
Cool. Um, and now I’ll turn my camera off real quick just so you can see this a bit bigger. So, let’s go through these. Now, again, this has only come out literally hours ago. I had I got these done literally before today’s webinar. Um, after playing around with it a little bit and doing a bit of more research into it. Um, it’s still going to come down to you using it and triing it with me to uh get a bit more use cases and whatnot, but uh this is what I found so far. So, essentially, you’re getting more brains for less money and delivered faster. Fable level performance on most work. And this is what Anthropic says. It even tops Fable 5.1 on every benchmark they publish at launch. This means it actually works better than Fable 5.1 when it first came out. Fable 5.1 has improved since. However, at launch, uh, this Opus 5.5 now works better than that. It’s 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5 on a typical workload. So again, this is huge. Not I think I said before, it’s cheaper to run than Fable. It’s 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5. And this is where where the last model was at Opus 5. Opus 5 um literally was so much cheaper than using Fable 5.1 or even Fable. So now to use 5.5 Opus 40% cheaper than Opus 5 was uh is insanely cheaper than than Fable 5.1 which is one of the key reasons why this will be your new workhorse. Um so yeah, so that’s that’s how much cheaper it is on typical workloads. lower token prices. Plus, it finishes tasks with fewer tokens as well. So, you get more work done quicker but less token spend, which is you can’t ask for anything more more than that. Um, and it’s 30% faster than Opus 5 as well. So, less waiting time on long builds, less rambling in the answers. Um, Opus 5 had an issue sometimes where it would just write you these giantly big responses and you it’s like, I’m not asking for you to talk. I want you to just get the job done. Give me a thumbs up if you’ve experienced that at all. And you’re like, “Okay, stop talking. Just deliver me the link that I need.” Um, if you’ve used it at all, you would have you would know what I’m talking about there. So, this is what’s [clears throat] changed since the last Opus. Uh, price per tokens, it’s gotten cheaper. So instead of $5 um to $25, um it’s now we’re now at um the cash reads per 1 million tokens, it’s about 20 cents. Uh default effort is on high versus medium. So you can use a lower level model and get even cheaper uh usage than Opus 5 was giving. Now thinking uh which you know is it’s what would happen in Opus 5 you had the option to choose our deeper deeper thinking on uh now with Opus 5.15 it’s always on and you just use the effort dial um to to basically say how much thinking you want it to do. um 30% faster as we mentioned. Writing style over 5 was chatty and it had a lot of loose ends. Over 5.5 is plain English key info first. Reading charts and screenshots, it was all right with Opus 5. It’s now much sharper even at low effort. Um and Opus 5 was okay at staying inside boundaries. Wasn’t the best, but um sometimes for some reason it’s one of the key problems that AI AI tools have always had. um especially the cheaper models and whatnot, they always try to escape to doing other work that you haven’t asked it to do, right? It’s like you’ll start with with with concept A in your head and now all of a sudden you’re building some side thing for your tool that you never even wanted 10 minutes ago, but you still haven’t got the first thing that you wanted completed, right? Um this is going to happen a lot less um as they’re getting better at ironing out how to stop this happening. where you’ll fill the upgrade. Long hands-off builds, multi-hour audits and migration runs, end to end with sub agents and little babysitting. Better re code review. Actually, what I should say with long hands-off builds, this is when when you’re building things um completely hands off. Um and I recommend doing these overnight and then just letting the permission let letting Claude have permissions to everything or setting it to bypass permissions. So we can literally just build overnight and not [clears throat] stop. You’ll literally wake up every day with every project that you’re going to build completely done. It’ll be finished. Um if you go start before you go to bed, you’ll wake up with it ready to go in the morning and it’s a really fresh place to then start your new day. Better code review uh catches more real bugs and fewer alarms and explains it in plain English. Few wrong numbers much less likely to state a wrong figure or site the wrong source. Um, decks and sheets need less editing and straight talking updates. It’ll tell you what it did, what it found, and where it needs what it needs from you. No trailing loose ends. Now, this is going to compare it to Fable 5.1, the top highest model of Anthropic and Claude. So obus 5.5. So you can see here it’s called it calls it the daily driver versus the specialist. And that’s a really good way to think of it. Obus 5.5 will be your daily driver for everything. And Fable 5.1 is your specialist when you’re really demanding some high-end uh work that involves a lot of reasoning um and maybe a lot of research and um and things where things could get a bit fuzzy or confusing in how to perfectly piece things together. Use Fable 5.1 for that. The major literally the majority of things you can just use Opus 5.5. now. Um, and that’s what I would be doing anyway. And, uh, then having Fable 5.1 go over your Opus 5.5 work to see if it’s up to scratch with everything that it would do itself. That’s something you you see me consistently doing and teaching is whenever these expensive new models come out, I’ll use one of the lower models to build out a complete project. And from there, I’ll then have FA the highest model go over and double check the work. Sometimes I even have Chad GPT come in or codeex come in and look at Claude’s or build work to make sure it’s done everything right and it hasn’t missed anything. And it’s often good to do that because it’s the second set of eyes essentially and it’ll often find things. So Opus 5.5 costs about 60% less per token than Fable 5.1. That’s a huge huge saving. means you literally can do over double the amount of work. This is what I suggested as well before you switch models to say from Opus 5.5 up to Fable 5.1 or even Fable 5, start off at Opus 5.5 on medium. If something misses something in what it builds for you or if it’s not at the level you want it, uh,
uh raise it to the higher level and then to the extra high level.
Then um after that it’ll say yeah after that um if it’s still missing at extra high you call in fable 5.1. So yeah, start low you then then move the model up and then from there we’ll see how uh close you can get to what you’re wanting and if it’s not there go to fable 5.1 skip straight to fable 5.1 though when with the job is broad fuzzy or across um or across lots of domains hard reasoning where one miss is expensive a document conflict or a bug opus keeps missing. Now again, say you’ve got like a live project and there’s paying customers, you might want to just use Fable 5.1, invest a bit more of your tokens or money into that so you don’t then have uh an issue. Although in saying that um 5.5 will be able to do the job in 90% of cases. Uh I’d say uh low to max how hard Claude thinks. So low there’s a quick reflex sub aents rewrites formatting fast answers medium which is the default uh everyday pro most chats copy and research and routine claude code include code work now that’s where I I’ve always set my uh opus at I sometimes move it to high though if I need a careful expert if I’m doing something like a sales page strategy tricky bugs or multi-step builds extra high is going to be the deep work mode, agent builds over 30 minutes, big refractors, audits, and max uh which is the no limits, which is going to be frontier problems that beat extra high can overthink simple jobs. That’s really important to know. Can can overthink simple jobs. If you set your chord to max and um and [clears throat] you’ve got it there and what happens is um you then ask it a really simple question, it’ll it’ll it can get confused. It you can actually think it’s you’re asking it a lot more than what you are. You you might be asking it it’s just plain old basic uh response of what does it want? um like what’s its goal? Like yeah, just you you just want the simple answer. But because you put it to max, it will think that you that you’ve got a trick question hidden in it. And it’ll ask itself the same question a 100 different ways to try to make sure that it doesn’t have uh a trick answer and it might even come up with like a trick meaning that that you’re trying to say uh or that it thinks you’re trying to say even though you’re not and and then all of a sudden you’re getting all these token spend and this really weird answer. So, just be aware of that. Uh, this is a good way to think of it. Medium on Opus 5.5 matches or beats high on Opus 5. So, if you’ve used Opus 5 in the past and you’ve had it set on a high, medium on 5.5 beats it on there. So, effort names don’t mean the same thing across models. Don’t copy your old settings across. Start at medium and then test up. And flip side, at the same level, 5.5 thinks more per turn. So the old extra higher max settings run longer and they burn more tokens. So just be aware of that. Um, pick the model and effort by the job. So subject lines, quick replies, rewrites, opus 5.5 or low or medium. Sales pages, webinar decks, launch models, opus 5.5 or medium or high. Claude code feature builds and fixes opus 5.5 on high. Overnight away from keyboard builds, big migrations, Opus 5.5 on high. Market research across messy sources. Fable 5.1 on high. The bug that beat Opus at extra high, uh, which means that you’ve tried to fix it on extra high and it doesn’t work. Use Fable 5.1 on high and then on max if it still can’t fix whatever it is then. So, keep it simple. The three rules to run with. Default Topus 5.5 on medium for almost everything. Turn everything up before you switch models. Fable 5.1 is a specialist, not the daily driver. Right? So, does that make sense with you guys? Give me a thumbs up if that all makes sense. Have you got any questions on any of that so far? Let me know.
Now, let me I’ll give you guys a second here. Awesome. Good. Appreciate you, mate. Now, since since I had to send this link out last minute, um and I’ll share this with you guys in just a second here. Give me one second.
Um, what I’m going to do is, uh, if you guys haven’t seen the webinar that I did for my top 1% audience the other day, which which some of you wouldn’t, uh, if you’re not in that exact audience, but I did send an email out in the and the replay out the past couple of days to my top 1% audience that Oh, yeah. I just read your question, Adam. Um, okay, give me one second. Um, what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you access to the webinar replay from the other day in just a moment here. It says, “So, replace on um, but before [clears throat] I do that, Adam says, “So, do I replace Sonnet with Opus [snorts] even on the $20 a month plan?” Yeah, I would. I would do that at first and just see how you go um, token wise because um, it’s that much cheaper now. It’s not going to be as cheap as Sonnet. And until Sonnet does another update, you know, the work you’re getting, you you’re a little bit literally getting fable level building for less than Opus was 40% less than Opus. I’m not sure. Let me even just ask here. Let’s find out. I’ll find out here real quick. How does Opus 5.5 compare to Sonet? Let’s find out real answers right now.
It’s just loading up.
So on an artificial analyst index, Opus 5.5 scores 58 against Sonnet 5 which is at 38. 12 benchmarks. Uh it’s reported for both models. Obus 5.5 wins all 12 uh which also include the SWE bench pro and the terminal bench which are the coding ones that matter for claude code. Uh, Opus 5.5 is $4 in for $20 out per million tokens, which is exactly 2x Sonet 5’s $2 in, but $10 out. So, it’s it is more expensive. It’s at double the amount of of double the cost. Um
and Sonnet um right now has it’s made its cost permanent. So the costs won’t be changing for Sonnet at that price. But I would just test I would test and see for your use cases how uh how much you how much more better is it using set uh using sorry opus and the results you get compared to just using sonnet and if I put it in the context of sonet of opus 5.5 is performs better than fable 5 yet is 40% cheaper than the last opus 60% cheaper than Fable 5.1 and I’m not sure how much cheaper than Fable 5 it is but be more than that I can I know the actual work the actual um it’s the actual what do I say the work results that I get from Opus 5 is so um sorry from Fable 5 is so much bigger than like than what you get from Sonnet that I think you’ll you you’ll be able to justify the cost um in terms of the quality of work you get and how fast you get it [snorts] um than just using Sonnet. But again, it could be your use case. You might not need to at all. Any other questions on this one? let me know because I’d love to be able to answer them for you before I run I run you through some what I shared on the last session um yesterday or the day before whenever it was let me know
[snorts]
[snorts] that okay cool so what I’m going to do here let’s jump back over here. What I shared the other day was my brand new tool. And I’m Let’s Let’s even use it right now. My brand new tool here called um Billboard Mate. Now, what this is, I’ll show you here. This is a tool that I essentially had been wanting to build for a long time and had tried to build it with OP um Opus in the past and and even some of the earlier models and it just wasn’t getting to where I wanted it. But basically, I wanted a tool where I could create a banner or a billboard of any sort. Now, these are the ones that just get made inside of my tool to tool billboard made itself. But if I wanted to use this uh if I wanted to get create a banner inside of say chat GBT um and bring it in here, I could do that. Uh any AI tool, any AI image or non any image at all I can put in here really. And I then want to put this billboard here directly into an email, right? Or a sales page or an app or anywhere that you can possibly imagine in the email footer. This is a really good place. And then I wanted to change what’s on the billboard a week later. Uh even if even if I’ve already sent the email, well, I can do that. So say I’ve sent you an email today saying, “Hey, you got a webinar tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. Eastern. Well, the webinar has started. I then want to change the billboard to say webinars doors are open now and then say you click on yesterday’s email. It won’t just say register here. It’ll say webinar doors are open. But then say if tomorrow the day after you then um open the email for the first time and the and the webinar is already done. Well, if it’s if it’s if it says um join here or the doors are open now and that’s it, you like what the hell? What a waste of me even opening this. I I’ve missed this email. But if the billboards changed to saying something like, “Hey, you missed the webinar, but here’s your replay.” You still get value out of it. And then that’s an extra viewer on my replay. That’s one way of using it. And I actually what I’ll do is I’ll show you here. Here’s an example on the screen here. Say right now that the webinar tonight, but then tomorrow I’ve I’ve got a launch week that that I want to change it to. Boom. It’ll just change to my launch week one. And then after Friday ends, after the Friday midnight ends, I’ll go boom to my evergreen offer. And wherever this billboard’s been pasted is what will show. So, let me go actually go ahead here and even share this with you. Um,
let me open this. I’m going to mute my microphone so I can open it. One second.
Every blog post you ever wrote, every page, every link in every bio, they’re all still out there, still being [music] seen. Most are advertising something that ended years ago. What if every one of them was a billboard you still controlled? [music] That’s billboard, mate. Paste one snippet once, then change what it shows and where it sends people from one dashboard forever. Wherever you can put a banner, it works. Your email [music] footer, your homepage, inside a blog post, your social bio, any clickable [music] link. Launch week. One switch puts your launch on every board you own. Cut closes, they flip back by themselves. 40 old reviews pointing at a dead product. Change one link. Every post now sells what you sell today. Put it in your emails. When someone opens one a year from now, they don’t see the old offer. They see what you’re selling today. One QR code on every slide. Registration, then the replay, then your offer. Your work stops expiring. Every page, every email, every link you make keeps [music] working for what you’re selling right now. And it grows every time you hit publish. Paste it once, [music] change it forever. Billboard, mate. All
right. Hopefully you heard that. Okay. Can Can I get a thumbs up if you heard that? Okay. Um, and actually, it made that video yesterday for me or like right before the webinar 2 days ago, plus this cool sales page as well, all in one hit. Uh it did both for me in one hit inside of Chord which was pretty cool. Now [snorts] why I’m sharing this? Well um I’ve just extended it just for you guys here or if anyone that watches watches watches this replay um I needed I need five people for this and I got those five. I decided I’d release another five spots for people that watched the replay. Um but only for 24 hours. Now three of those spots got taken. There’s two spots left to grab this. But the main reason I think a lot of people are grabbing it is because of the wild bonus pack that I’ve done with it. So, let me run that through that with you really, really quickly. Um, let me go ahead actually and go resume here. Cool. So, basically the first thing I’m giving you guys is access to my um almost like my new AI AI workforce masterass which is going to be next month. Um, I wanted to create a master class, a single master class that went through every key area as uh that I run in my AI business um to get everyone up to speed and up to scratch on where things are at. Um, and how to do it all in literally one week. Um, and by one week I mean doing one one to two hour session a day or I might do it over two weeks and do three sessions a week. I’m still working it out how I’ll break this down. But um I it things have changed since we’ve first launched AI um master classes, right? And that you don’t need to do a lot of the things that you used to have to do, but there’s some new things you have to do as well. See underneath here it says the old manual way which would be you would do a prompt to AI, you get an answer, you copy and paste that answer and then you would have to do some of the work uh and type things together and copy and paste things into different tools to get things to work. Now you can literally it’s the new AI agentic way is you then tell AI what you want. It’ll ask you questions. AI will then plan out how to do it. It will then use um use the tools and then it will execute um on the actual jobs and then it will check the work that it’s done and then it will give it to you for your final approval. Uh which is so much easier but it’s gone further than that. Now let me even just share this with you guys. Let me go ahead and share my full screen. So day one’s going to be going over chat GP6 Ultra and um sorry Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 now since that’s come out. If these models update at all will be covering the latest updates. Now we’re going to build the AI brain again. Now we don’t need to do things as how we used to, right? And essentially, um, I’m going to show you how to update your AI brain or what your AI tools know about you. So, you can essentially have one master brain and then have all your AI tools um, work on on the same brain. So, all no matter what AI tool you use, whether it’s CHP, Claude, Grock, Gemini, any of the free models, they all know where things are at at the same exact time. And let me even share with you. See here, this is my AI brain that I’ve got set up. I’m going to make this look prettier, but chat GBT, Claude, Codeex, and Manis, which is Meta’s tool. These all are working on my same AI brain. These are the different jobs it’s been doing on different brains right now, um, or in different tools, but it all runs off the same master brain. So, we’re going to cover how to set that up. Then, from prompting to delegating. So, how to actually get AI agents and and um tools to do the work for you. And again, as we said here, AI does the work from idea to done. How to be completely hands off. How to have called and chat GBT use computer use, which means they can now take over your computer, literally launch browsers in front of your eyes and and use your mouse and go click on different links and sites and actually do any tasks that in the past uh it wouldn’t be able to do. So, you don’t even need to have direct access to certain tools. You could have Photoshop and you might not have zero idea how to use Photoshop or say Final Cut Pro, a video editing tool, and your Claude or your Chat GPT can become an instant expert at video editing. Uh, and it can edit a full video for you. Uh, or um fix or color grade a video or optimize an image or make additions or whatever it is you need done. And it can do it without having a direct connection uh to um those tools. It can literally just open them up and use them by studying the manuals online of these tools and becoming an instant expert. It’s pretty crazy. Then we’re going to build our own AI workforce at the end. Uh which is again down the bottom here. That’s when we’re going to go over Hermes and custom agents, Grock agents, multi- aent orchestration, triggers, and verification. Now I’ll share with you my um cuz I restarted my computer. They’re not open. But it’s good that I open them now. Um
here is my Grock agent right now. Here’s my design agent at the top here that I’ve been using. I said, “Hey, can you go ahead and actually um Whoops. can you go ahead and and make a variation of this? And it went ahead and created a couple of variations here
[snorts] um that I could [clears throat] use. I think they even look a lot better. Then here’s my CEO. My CEO I’ll ask at different jobs and then this agent will then will then create sub aents. Like these are all sub agents for my business. So you can see here CEO is the is the head of things. Then I’ve got um my traffic agent here. this this agent’s ready to go out for me and start to post my my different software solutions on pages pages like Future Tools, SASHub, Alternative to SAS City. It will go in, it’ll make it’ll make listings and it’ll add in screenshots of my software and add in reviews and launch announcements about them. So, it’ll get traffic coming in that way. Then product scout. This looks this is a radar agent that goes out and finds tools and idea suggestions that it thinks uh I might want to do. Side quest. This is a side agent that I have um which I’ve got running right now to like look at working on creating me an iPhone app. I’ve always wanted to create a video game. So it’s actually looking at different video game ideas right now. Competitive research bot automation Anthony B. So, this is this is going to automate things in my business that it sees it can automate. Then I’ve got my marketing and my launch uh bot for when I do a a software launch. And then I’ve got a a product pass. This is this is a subscription I got down here that I wanted AI I wanted an agent to see how I could best use the tools in that product pass uh and and set them up together. The cool thing with all of these is in the top right corner, you see this little computer screen? Each one of these agents has access to their own computer. So, if I click on this, it’ll pull up their actual uh computer that when they’re doing work, you’ll be able to see them doing it live literally as if they’re an they’re an a an actual um agent or like like an employee, I should say. See, look down the bottom here. I’ve got it’s Oh, whoopsies. We’ve got Chrome, we got their file manager, and the terminal. They can do everything they need through those three areas. If I minimize that, let’s have a look at the CEO’s one. Let’s see what their background looks like.
Same thing. And you I can even teach it tasks up here if there individually specific ones. Let’s have a look at the head developers one. again probably the same thing as well, but they all will have their own uh VPS or virtual servers, right? So, when they’re doing work, it’ll work uh completely seamlessly. And then I’ve got my Hermes agent that I’ve got set up currently through my Telegram. So, I just I literally just text on [clears throat] on my app um what I want it to do. And yeah, so that’s this whole thing is going to be uh it’s it’s going to be like a couple of grand to be a part of. I’m letting everyone be a part of it uh when they get Billboard Mate if you get one of those final two spots. Uh on top of that, you also get Well, here’s what you get. You get access to Yeah. that course, my AI sales video training, which is again how I created sales videos just like that one. or if you’ve seen my perfection tool, this is look, if you haven’t seen this video yet, um you can watch this later on. Um but I’ll show you a claimation
Anyway, you get the idea, right? So, how I built uh these plus you’ll get free credit to actually build these on the actual software that I do and I actually build it inside of Claude. Um, which is pretty cool. I can actually even see and show you a quick example of one that I’ve been doing recently. Now um where are we here? See here here’s for um my overlay mate. I had it storyboard some different ideas and it’s been building this out directly for me. A world where a billion videos get watched every single day. So these are just examples that I have been building. But again, we’re going to go through how you can do that. So by the end of the webinar, you’ll be building your own sales videos for your tools. Uh you’ll also be getting Where are we? Where are we here? Yeah, the AI agent setup which is going to be building our own agent team. So, we’re going to be doing that. These these two this adds to this actual webinar for the sales video training. The AI agent and then the AI pass toolkit which again um I’ll share with you where I’ve got it here somewhere the example. So, I shared this other day tools anymore. You don’t need them right. So, normally like Apollo is a big research tool for contacts and work emails. you don’t need this anymore. Um you can actually um just use the the API for this tool which again is a simple connection from Claude that will then you’ll get just charged per what you use inside of this tool. So you might only need it for one search or you say you need need to do something but Claude can’t do it or Chad GBT can’t do it directly but there’s a third party tool that can instead of needing to actually buy that third party tool, you can just pay and and um get access to using the full features of that tool without needing a monthly subscription. Uh, now this will be for over 3,000 different tools and you just pay per lookup, not per month and you never need to sign up with any of them. It’s kind it’s it’s it’s like the same thing as open router is for AI models. Open router, we talked about this before. This allows you to use any any AI model from Claude, Chacht, Grock, any of them, even all the free ones, all the value ones, like they’re all in here. You can use any of these without needing a subscription to any of them and you just pay for what you use. Now, there obviously becomes a time where having a subscription is better value than paying for what you use. Um, that’s why for me with like cuz with Claude, you get like like I showed you before, I think it was like for every $4 spent, you get $20 worth of tokens. If you if you didn’t have the subscription, you’d be paying $20 for $20 worth of tokens. So, it’s four times better value getting the actual subscription with Claude. And if you’re using those tokens, then yes, but if it’s only the odd thing you need it for, then having a full subscription is not worth it. Perfect example is um the video [snorts] uh sales video training. I paid $1,300 for the year for the for the actual um software. um access to do that. Uh and then I still have to use tokens inside of it. Now you don’t even need the subscription. You can just pay for what you use which is much better than having to commit to a whole year um subscription. Um, now the best part about it too is if you ask AI something like, oh, what is it? Um, what’s um, I want to do this and even if you don’t know what what the tool is, um, that that can do that thing that you’re asking it to do, uh, AI will go through those 3,000 tools and make and if when it finds the one that it can that can do it, it’ll tell you, hey, we want to use this tool that can do this task cuz we can’t do it directly. it’ll cost this many cents. Are you okay with it? And if you say yes, we’ll go ahead and do it. Simple as that. So, those three are going to be on tomorrow’s bonus webinar, right? Tomorrow’s bonus webinar. Now, the biggest uh bonus on this, right, is what what I’m doing on on Billboard, mate, um if you came to the website, [snorts] which I I don’t suggest doing just yet, but if you come down, it takes you through everything, how to use it and and whatnot. Um if you get Billboard mate today, it’s normally 1,500 bucks using the coupon code billboard five for the five people. But the biggest value one is that I’m giving you guys a $997 coupon which which basically the investment then becomes $997. Um there’s a PayPal option to pay in four as well. Um and I also created a split pay option um for those on the replay too. But um 997 and then you get a $997 coupon to use on any of my other tools. Here’s some of ones that I said you can use it on like perfection stepmate overlay mate advert mate talkmate URL fam the agent suite uh suit agent 72 and there’s many more which I’m going to be sharing as well but uh or you can keep it for for the future but basically this the 997 you invest you instantly get it back in a coupon that you can then apply to any of these uh you can even use multip you can use this coupon on multiple tools if it adds up to that Right. So, um that comes with this too, but I want to give you guys the replay page for that. Um because I did I was going to close that off for today. Um but I’m just going to leave it open for those that want to check it out further. And then what we’ll do here in a second, we’ll build a billboard in Billboard mate. One second here. Cool. Now, let me go ahead and I’ll share this over here in the chat. Um,
also that’s that’s um good. If you can go ahead um can you message me on WhatsApp right now? I’ve um cuz to cuz some of those bonuses I also gave away in Neil’s promo from last week. I’ve asked everyone to message me on WhatsApp um for those. And I’ve sent you guys through the links for the webinars which are tomorrow as well. Um I’ll send the replay out to everyone as well. Um but uh if you message me on WhatsApp right now again for Neil’s promo 61
that will then uh add me WhatsApp for Neil’s
bonuses. I’ll also go ahead and send everyone that was a buyer of that um an email today. Uh I got the list off Neil last night. So, I’ll get you added into those uh if you have not got access already
and awesome Jol. I appreciate you my friend. Um
Um, awesome Joe. I love that. Joe goes, “I’ve been pitching a physical billboard accident attorney. I think this would um be a big help.” Yeah. And you can use this on clients as well. The cool thing is when you build your billboards, you literally can then just go over here on the right. So, we see where it says partner or affiliate version. You can then make access for your partner. So, they get access to this one board. Let’s even make one right now. Let’s make a new board. We call this one webinar replay. Um, and where should we send people? I’m going to just send people right now to We’ll send people to Where’s this replay link? I sent it in the chat, didn’t I? Did I? Yeah. We’ll send people to this link here to the replay for now.
[snorts] an example. We’ll create the board. So, there’s no banner in here yet. We’re going to make a banner. We’ll call this one um Whoops.
Um,
I need to change where I want it to look like. But let’s say, okay, I’ll leave it at that. Email or blog banner, email footer. But let’s just go here. We’ll leave we’ll leave all the colors. Let’s see. Or let’s change the color. Let’s go to a green maybe. Or let’s do a
Cool.
Let’s go save and make it live. So, this is up and running. And now all I need to do is take this and over here on the right where it says for emails, I just need to copy and paste that into the email section or onto my website or onto a blog post or onto um anywhere really at all that you can post or share something. The cool thing is as well is you can share a QR code, but the cool thing is that QR code you can then change forever. So this specific QR code, I can download the images wherever I paste this or post this in future. uh it will always share whatever link I’ve got over here. So say um it’s on a physical business card and I print this out a thousand times. I’m not then stuck to what to one link with most QR codes. Uh you’re stuck with whatever you’ve made that to. Now you can change that link here uh to be for something else. Now that’s the replay being uh live. Now, what I might want to do is a um let’s make another banner saying register for
Wednesday’s webinar
free. No catch pure value training [snorts]
or even I can just go webinar
webinar. Um, click here to register now. 100% free
for my students only. Oh, wait. What? I just clicked out of it again. I’m so silly.
I need to figure out how I can stop that happening. Um webinar Wednesday
register here
for for your pure value training.
sun up here. Make that color a bit more yellow again.
And what I’m going to do, I’m going to go save and make it live or just save to the library. So now I’ve got this one and what I’ll do is I’ll paste these
in. So what you’ll see in the in the next in the next um email that I send out, what I’ll do is I’ll put one of these in at the bottom or somewhere in the actual session. And then um what I’ll do is I’ll show I’ll show you an example of if you open it tomorrow and it’s uh it’ll be set as the webinar for Wednesday for next week. Then if you don’t open it though until after next week um it’ll change to this session. It’ll say your replay is live, right? Or what I might even do with today’s replay, I’ll have it go out and I’ll put this banner here. It’ll say your replay is live. But if you for whatever reason then didn’t open the the actual email till next week, it’ll then change to the other other one here for the webinar Wednesday when it’s closer to Wednesday next week. Basically, it means you can still use the power of your emails, but not just your emails, literally anywhere. It can be your bio link in your social media. It means you can actually manage and track and um and use all all the links you’ve ever posted. If you’ve got at least one Billboard made link on there, it means you can use those pages as an asset to your business forever ongoing. Right now, the cool thing is there’s a few other ways banners we can make here. You can make a countdown banner which again gives you an actual count um actual countdown date and time and everything. So say if I went from let’s say
here um right let me go sorry 9 to the 10th
And then I can change the words. But then what it’ll do when I hit live, it’ll have a countdown. See at the top here, see it says clos in 36 days, right? And then after that countdown has come down. Uh I can have it. It’ll say you’ve missed this. So up here closes in X amount of time. So today’s uh Billboard mate, that’s going to actually close in a couple of days from now. Let’s say where are we today? Um October 24th, September. Where are we? September. So let’s say in how many days? 3 days. Um
and
price will go up when the price hits zero is what I got set to. Um [clears throat]
spot access only
closes. Never get one time access again.
All is removed.
Now I need to figure I need to make this a bit smaller here, which I’ll get sorted um after this. You can see there’s a little bug happening there. So I’m just going to screenshot that, but I’ll get that fixed. um I’ll say get and so I’ll do that afterwards. Now over here on the left you can see there’s also the ability to have uh a carousel. So I can actually create a carousel with my pre-existing banners and then I can embed this in individual carousel that which shares multiple links to different actual locations. So now my footer can now take one link and now turn it into three different things. And that means I can increase the number of potential clicks that that email gets if they are not interested what’s in the core email itself. Now I always say don’t overpop populate. They always have every email about one specific topic, one clear goal, but um there will be times where it’s just a pure value email, but and then having something in your footer of free value. Um that’s where something like this would be great or in a clickable link in your bio on social media or or anything like that or in a URLFam site. I know many of you have my tool URLFam. Um, you can embed these instantly again for emails. Um, and [clears throat] you can see there’s a moving carousel and there’s also side by side that you can choose. So, it’s carousel and columns. Uh, I need to get a column visual um, set up a bit better here. But yeah, and then one of the coolest one is is the new takeover feature that I’ve added, which means every prior board that no matter where you’ve placed it, say I have a big launch or something coming up, I want to do a takeover. That means under going and clicking on takeover, it’ll change every board that I’ve got anywhere. And I can actually select the boards that I want if I don’t want to do every single one. Say I want to do all of them besides one or two. Boom. Select where they go. And then uh and then I’ve got full access to that um here and wherever that is, it will then actively allow me to release that. Right? So, um, for a big launch, I can use every link that I’ve ever posted ever in the past, every email that I’ve sent that, uh, because emails still get open weeks to even months after someone sent them. Um, and usually they’re obsolete and useless after after a certain date or period, right? Because a sale’s finished or a promotion’s done or whatever it is. This is a way you can keep people up to date so they don’t miss out on going. Now, you get the entire funnel. You get no restrictions, full access um in this and you then get all of the bonuses and you then also get uh so including the so the entire investment of it after you use the code billboard 5 at which I think I’ve auto applied it now. It’ll take it from 1,500 bucks down to 997. You then, as soon as you pick it up, you then message me on WhatsApp via this number here. You can then get access to any of the other tools that I have or you can keep the coupon in for in future, but it’s 97 coupon. So, what you’ve just invested, you get back instantly as a coupon, get access to my multi,000 AI workforce masterass coming up next month. uh you get access to the sales video training uh AI agent setup and AI day pass toolkit which are all this week on tomorrow’s webinar and I’ll send the replay out as well. Um and all you need to do is either go to billboardate.com and enter that uh coupon there at the buy button. But if you want the split pay option, there’s two ways you can do it. If you come here, not here, sorry. Let me just find the link here. You can come down and then there’s the 997 option or the split into three. What you’ll find though for many of you, if you go 997, if you go here, it’ll come up. So, see, it hasn’t auto applied it yet. So, you’ll need to type in billboard five. Hit apply. Takes [snorts] the $500 off. But see over here it says pay in four with PayPal. For many of you, you’ll have this option. So that’ll bring it down to 250 bucks and you can just pay the rest on on going through PayPal’s paying forward. There’s no interest or anything with it. It’s just done. Alternatively, if that’s not there for you, you can come back and you can actually then use the three pay option here, which again is 397 today, 397 a month from now, then a month after that. There’s only three two spots left actually. Wait, no, three three or five spots left. So, there’s three or five left. Um, I was only only going to do five spots for it because the whole thing with this guys that I want as well is I want to get access um to I want you guys to be cool with sharing your results with me. You don’t need to share the sites. I just want to share share the actual increase in traffic that you get as sales proof. And I want to know what your actual um use is like and any features you might want included. I want to see and understand uh what things you want added and I want to add them before I then launch this as a launch. I was mentioning on the webinar the other day for everyone else when I launch this this has to be a recurring product because every single time a billboard is shown to a customer that’s a request from my servers and it costs me money. So, say someone has an email list. Say they’re like me. If I send an email out, if I send send it to 50,000 people, if 10,000 people open it, that email, that’s 10,000 requests to my servers that that my servers have to deliver that billboard. If they send an email a day over a week, that could be if they if there’s 10,000 people a day on average that open that one person’s email, that’s like 70,000 calls that I’m paying for for that one person. Now, if you have a hundred of those people and a thousand customers, it starts to cost money. Um, so I have to do recurring for everyone else. Uh, anyone that gets this here though is not going to get recurring. Single um like onetime deal. You’re not restricted in any way. Unlimited boards, unlimited everything. And I’ll cover the cost through the recurring once this gets launched and my other tools can too. So, um, yeah, really cool opportunity. Up to you. I’ll put the link in the chat one more time. And what I’ll even do is I’ll make the link in a minute. Um, this is what the actual link is if you want to copy that, but I’ll make it lukeworld.com/buildboard,
which will then access this above link. It’s not that it’s not live just yet. Um, I’ll make that live here in a minute for you guy, guys and girls. But yeah. All right, guys. In saying that, I hope you guys enjoyed today’s training. Let me know. Is there any questions you’ve got so far that you have from today that you might want to know? What I’ll do is I’ll share this document here as well. If you guys wanted, please let me know if you got any questions.
[snorts]
Okay, cool. Joel, Joel, I’ll do that right now. The offer bump for one for 120. Can you shoot me your email if you got it here, Joel? And I’ll get I’ll get you the um I’ll get the link for you for that. Um otherwise, I’ll find it in WhatsApp. But if you can shoot me your email here where you emailed him from, awesome. I’ll do it right now. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Jo. Um, I didn’t realize it was you. Some sometimes I know your emails better than you than your names in here or I know a lot of Joles, but then um that’s the only one that I know.
Um, also if you picked up Neil’s offer, please reach out to me too, guys. I want to make sure you guys get set up and get in. Let me just go ahead and make this second link live. Plugins. [snorts] We’re here. Pretty l
URL. Oh, not that one. Where are we?
Okay, [clears throat] now hopefully
hopefully hopefully oh wait mate VIP Hey.
All right. Luke.com/buv. Let’s see if that cool. That works now. In saying that, guys, appreciate you all. Any more questions, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll finish it for today. And look, still been over an hour, but still less than an hour, 2 hours. So, what it’s been maybe hour and a half. And yeah, Joel, I I probably I will do a webinar with um with with um them. I’ll get that sorted. I’ll definitely get that sorted. Appreciate you, mate. Ken, you’re an absolute legend, too, my friend. Appreciate you as well. Hope you enjoyed this Opus training. Anything else you guys need? Again, just WhatsApp me. I’m here for you all as always. Um, please, if I haven’t responded within a day or so, if that ever happens, just reping me. I apologize. Sometimes my messages get full. I’m also a dad to a young boy on school holidays, which you can, if anyone has kids, knows what that can be like. Um, but yeah, you guys all rock. I really appreciate your time. Oh my gosh, I’ve got all of I got all my toothpaste in my beard. How weird. [laughter] All right, guys. You’re the best. I’ll speak to you soon and I’ll get this replay out play out ASAP and I’m looking forward to everyone on the bonuses tomorrow. Um the bonus trainings tomorrow for these. Um that’ll be a lot of fun. Cool. Thanks guys. See you soon. Bye.