Kirupa Chinnathambi: Founder of Kirupa.com (26 years in the making), Creator and PM at Google
=============================================================================================

by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Kirupa Chinnathambi (https://www.kirupa.com) traces how Kirupa.com grew from playful web experiments into a long-running creative and community project. He talks about why he started publishing, what online communities gave him, how he thinks about traffic swings and authenticity, and why AI becomes most interesting when it helps people feel more personally supported instead of more automated.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI
A conversation with Kirupa Chinnathambi | 59m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

Kirupa Chinnathambi tells a creator story that started long before creator culture had a name. The early web in this conversation feels messy, generous, and full of possibility: Flash experiments, GeoCities pages, and tutorials written because repeating the same answer by email stopped making sense. That origin matters. Kirupa.com was not built around a polished strategy or a personal brand playbook. It grew from curiosity, from the pleasure of making things, and from the practical value of sharing what he was learning in public. That gives the whole conversation a grounded quality. Publishing is presented less as self-promotion and more as a scalable form of helping.

Community is the other major thread. Because Kirupa moved around often, the web became a kind of continuity layer in his life. Forums, blog readers, and recurring online names created stability that geography could not. That experience also informs how he thinks about moderation. Healthy communities do not emerge from tooling alone. They depend on visible norms, a mostly constructive center of gravity, and enough care that members start reinforcing the culture themselves. It is a useful perspective for anyone who still thinks of forums or comments as secondary to content. For Kirupa, the community is not an accessory to the work. It is part of the work.

The final stretch is especially honest about the economics and psychology of making things on the internet. Kirupa talks openly about the power-law nature of content creation, the danger of using validation as your main fuel, and the reality that traffic can rise, collapse, and rise again. He also connects those lessons to AI in a way that feels specific instead of abstract. The best use case is not replacing taste or flattening human interaction. It is removing busywork around research, drafting, support, and distribution so that more thoughtful, more personal experiences can scale. Just as importantly, he makes room for luck, education, and family support in the story, which gives the entire conversation an unusual level of clarity and humility.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- Public explanations scale better than answering the same question one person at a time.
- Online communities can provide real continuity, friendship, and identity over time.
- Good moderation depends on clear norms and a constructive center of gravity.
- Traffic swings are survivable when the underlying publishing flywheel is understood.
- AI is most compelling when it scales personalization instead of impersonality.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 0:00 - The long arc of Kirupa.com: Kirupa is introduced through his Google work and the decades-long story behind the site. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=0s)
- 3:40 - Flash, GeoCities, and early tutorials: He looks back at the first tutorials, early hosting platforms, and the fun of making for its own sake. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=220s)
- 6:50 - Why validation is shaky fuel: Kirupa explains why content creation follows a power law and why intrinsic motivation matters more. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=410s)
- 11:00 - Community as continuity: The conversation turns to forums, friendships, and the stability online spaces can create over time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=660s)
- 18:00 - Creator questions about AI: He talks through the hesitation many creators feel around AI and the practical questions that come with it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1080s)
- 24:00 - Scaling high-touch support: Kirupa describes AI as a way to deliver more personalized help without losing the human thread. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1440s)
- 30:00 - How moderation really works: This section covers community norms, healthy behavior, and how good spaces start reinforcing themselves. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1800s)
- 33:00 - Traffic crashes and recovery: He reflects on audience cycles, rebuilding after downturns, and staying steady when numbers swing. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1980s)
- 42:30 - Authenticity and experience: Kirupa makes the case that firsthand knowledge is still the hardest thing to counterfeit online. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2550s)
- 51:30 - An AI workflow that helps: The conversation ends with a practical vision for automating busywork while keeping human taste in charge. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3090s)

TO LEARN MORE

- Kirupa's Blog: https://www.kirupa.com
- Kirupa's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/kirupa
- Kirupa's X / Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/kirupa

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=0s)

On the screen, I have with me right now the person I've been referring to as Kirupa. He's the Kirupa at Google, so welcome, Kirupa. Fei, great to meet you again. We had a chat a few weeks ago, and there were so many topics to cover that we weren't able to get to because there's only 24 hours in a day, as it turns out, so let's continue round two of it here. I absolutely love it, and I forgot to ask you how to pronounce your last name, so please, once and for all, we should learn how to say your full name.

Finally, for the first time, I even learned to speak your last name, and I'm super thrilled that you're here. I feel so grateful to have really met you online as, back then, not just a Flash developer, but a storyteller and a content creator. Back in 2002, I can still envision myself living in an apartment on Beacon Street here in Boston, Massachusetts, and just browsing your website for hours every day and emailing it out to people. I feel like it really gave me a voice. It felt like a project, a website created by a friend, Kirupa. Com, that's still live and thriving today. So yeah, this is fantastic.

Does this surprise you when I introduce you that way?

1:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=88s)

It does, because I typically don't have these type of conversations with people on a regular basis and I let my content speak for itself, so I try to protect myself out of the equation. Oftentimes- so many times- people have no connection with like me being the person and then the content doing its own thing, which is on, like you know, weird icons and logos and so on. People think it's just more of a brand, not an actual person behind it.

1:51 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=111s)

But you are very, very real. And, if I may, for those of you who are new to Kirupa's content, I just want to give you a very quick background and then we're going to delve into today's series of questions. I'm so excited to talk- all of talk- to all of you guys about what it's like to be an entrepreneur- an entrepreneur because Kirupa now is a product manager, also at Google, as well as continuing to run Kirupa. Com. And also we're going to cover AI, the AI mindset, what it means for your business, how to really leverage AI without the overwhelm.

So, Kirupa has spent most of his life trying to simplify app development by helping build a variety of tools, platforms, Frameworks and products, many of which you may have heard of- if it's only fitting that you continue to follow that passion as a product manager at Google, leading an effort to Reinventing how apps are built. In parallel, Kirupa is a popular content creator who has been blogging and recording videos about web development topics since 9- 1998, with a few best-selling Tech books and some total, totally sweet bios written- a third person, of course- sprinkled along the way. You can find all of his work on his blog: Kirupa.

Com- yes, that's just his first name his YouTube channel as well his Twitter account. Also search by at sign Kirupa, and we're going live on restream. If you're curious how to get started with streaming live streaming, there's a link all in the description below. With that said, Kirupa, I would love for you to finally share and talk about what was it like for you to be like a middle school student back in 98- and I thought you were at least 25 or someone I look up to and. What was it like to be a middle schooler and be able to like start from scratch and build an audience that way?

3:42 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=222s)

It was fun in many ways because today content creation comes with all these structures and criteria for success, including social media. Back then, there was not really any of that. My goal was simply, “I am doing fun stuff in Flash and learning cool things.” I shared it with friends, and they asked, “How do you do this? I want to create it myself.” I began emailing instructions, but that did not scale well. I decided to put the instructions on a website and played with FrontPage Express and Netscape Composer. They came free with browsers back then.

Whether you used Netscape or Internet Explorer, you got a basic Notepad-like editor where you could type content and display HTML. It did not matter that I had no idea what was being created with the HTML tags. I could upload images and other content. GeoCities was a popular web-hosting service that was just getting started. You had perhaps one or two megabytes total for uploading content and received a really long URL, but that was good enough for me. I could share the URL with people, and they could learn more without me personally emailing them. Newsletters were not really a thing back then, at least not something anyone could easily start independently.

Today, people might ask, “Why would you move away from newsletters? They are the best thing ever.” Looking back 30 or 20 years, maybe they are, but the web and URLs were just getting started then. It was exciting to create and upload content. There are supposedly some Mega Zip drives in my parents' attic containing the first versions of these websites. In the HTML, the image paths were hard-coded to locations on my hard drive. I had no idea the paths needed to be relative to the hosting server, such as slash images.

That shows how early it was, both in terms of my knowledge of web development and the resources available for learning it. I think Webmonkey was a popular website then, and Lynda. Com was just beginning to create content. At the time, I did not need sophisticated distribution. A working page and a shareable link solved the immediate problem of repeatedly sending the same instructions. Some of your audience may think this sounds like 80 years ago. For the most part, when it comes to technology, it might as well have been.

5:59 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=359s)

Wow, it's just incredible to hear that mindset of being a kid and wanting to share the work that you're doing, and not having so much fear and doubt. I love talking to folks like yourself because now, fast-forward 20-plus years, 25 or 26 years if we're doing the math, do you feel any different? Along the way, when you hear other creators today say, oh, I have so many doubts, I'll never be able to be successful, I won't be able to make money and quit my full-time job, did that anxiety follow you, or do you feel like your intention these days is different? I'm just curious what goes on there.

6:44 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=404s)

I mean, it is very different. I just picked up a lot of creators explaining what it would be like if they want to make a career in content creation and so on. The hard part really is that, as with any kind of creative endeavor, the power law applies, where only a very few people succeed, many are in this middle where they're basically breaking even, and a large number are not profitable or successful in that way.

So what I always tell people is: do it because you genuinely enjoy doing this, not because you're seeking external validation or the kudos that come from being a popular content creator, because there's a very good chance we may not be a popular creator forever. Do it because you want to learn better, better articulate your ideas, and reach a new audience. Those reasons will never change, and they'll give you a goal you can keep working toward even when the external world isn't giving you the validation you think you deserve. I also explain to people, and to myself as well, that I was very lucky in many ways.

My parents are both very highly educated, so I didn't have to worry about juggling school with a part-time job and then also being able to do all this. I had all the resources to have a computer, internet, and all the software I needed. Those gave me an advantage too, and I'm never going to discount the role they played in helping me have this mindset. I grew up where a lot of the books I read as a kid were biographies, but also business books and books on stocks and investing that my parents would always read.

So in the back of my mind I had all these active resources that incidentally led me to doing some of these things and thinking about problems in a way that gave me an advantage.

8:31 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=511s)

Wow, I love to delve into your childhood a bit more because I realize you're probably living pretty closer where I was at the time as well, where I still am. For those of you who are joining us live, I know that I can't see all of you, especially if you're tuning in from LinkedIn, but we can see your questions. You don't have to come on live to join us on the live show, but if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. We're going to do our best to organize them and answer them live throughout this conversation. And so, Kirupa, back to you in terms of upbringing.

Should I assume that you grew up in Massachusetts or somewhere in New England, because I know you ended up going to MIT here? No, all right, no, no.

9:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=550s)

Actually, you know, I grew up in a few places. My dad was a materials scientist, and so in the 80s Europe was really big into like lighter, more fuel efficient vehicles, and so Italy was one of the first countries that I lived at the age of two actually have moved to Italy.

You know time within the first languages I learned, and then I went to Germany a few years later where I did my kindergarten, first and second grade, and then it was the US ever since, you know, the early 90s was the US started investing heavily in, you know, vehicles that were more fuel efficient, lighter weight- the same thing that Europe did about 10 years ago, and- and ironically, Alabama was a place that so much auto manufacturing and investments in R&D happen in the US, at least you know, at that time.

And so I lived in Birmingham- several Birmingham Alabama called Hoover, and that's where I spent the most of my life until I went to college in Boston, and then I moved to Seattle where I live now for work, and you know this we enjoy here now, oh, wow.

10:04 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=604s)

What a journey do you think? You know I do you think this moving around, especially in an earlier age? Do you have any memories of it? Do you feel like you belonged? You know, there's some backstories when it comes to creators and technologists, so that I'm trying to like, dig in a bit here. Maybe I don't know, maybe it's a normal, very normal childhood.

10:25 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=625s)

I mean, I think it's a, it's normal in many ways, I think. I think kids adapt to our situation, they're put into. I do enjoy the idea of having moved around in many places. You know, initially I always felt like, you know, I wish I could stay in one place I can have like friends for longer than x number of years, and things like that. But in looking back at it, though, you get to learn to think on your feet. You get much better at like adapting to a new environment, new school, how to make new friends very quickly.

But I do also think that because I moved around so much, I really, you know, glomped off this online World in many ways, because the online community you build online doesn't change no matter where you went to. So once I started creating the blog and then once I figured out how to create an online Forum, Ezboard was the first like software as a service kind of thing we just went to. You signed up, you got like a very basic Forum again. The URL was like completely bizarre, but that's okay though.

And then I moved to vBulletin, which is a very popular service in the early 2000s and for creating large communities. Yet you know, Invision Power Board and so on and so Place creating that online community, I was able to kind of in some ways form friendships and people that I met there that I still meet with today. In fact, actually, today at 2PM I'm going to be meeting with like a bunch of people online from the community I've known for like 20, 30 years who have actually never met in person and we just kept this, like you know, monthly or every two months.

We just have this like hangout where we just chat and just like catch up on life, and a lot of them were also are on the same age as me when they got started with web development and the forums and so on. They're also like working in various tech companies or working their own companies and so on, and that's been an interesting way for me to kind of balance out the my real world, where it was always changing. Even if you're like Middle School to high school, even in the same city, it changes. So you know, include college and later on.

You never really make long-time friends like this, and so therefore, it's actually great to have this online community that always an anchor for me where, no matter where I went to or what I did. I always ended up like having that connection with these people who always stayed there regardless of what was going on in my personal life. Wow, that's a staple right.

12:26 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=746s)

There, there. May I ask if the community is private or public? If people do want to learn more about it?

12:32 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=752s)

It's just on my website, Kirupa. Com. If you go to the forums, you'll see there's a link for a hangout meeting, and people can just go there and join it.

12:40 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=760s)

So casual about this. Oh, I still have some follow-up questions, but first we have a question, also from a long time follower, Adam leffert: are there parts of how the tech industry is talking about the future direction of AI that you feel are closer to reality and others that maybe miss the mark?

12:58 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=778s)

Wow, that's a very good question. I think, as with any new technology, there's a bit of a hype cycle that gets created where everyone is going to talk about how this is going to change the world or destroy the world, all the extremes of it. Then once the dust settles, you get to the point where, if you look at the tangible problems AI is going to be solving, I think a lot of us have seen many of these cycles come and go over the years. Chatbots were the really big thing maybe 15 years ago, and they keep coming back every five years.

I think we're probably due for another cycle where chatbots become the next big thing again and are going to replace humans completely. Crypto was the other one that kind of keeps coming up in various waves and cycles as well. I do think AI is much closer to reality in many of the things people are saying because it does solve a very tangible problem. If you take a step back and take away all the fantastic narratives created around it, a lot of the work that we do, whether in our personal life or professional life, is repetitive memorization and regurgitation-type activity.

If we say that level of work is not really the thing our brains are best suited for, can we automate that away so we can spend more time doing higher-level thinking and higher-level tasks? As it turns out, AI has been fantastic for this. We talk about AI today as this brand-new thing, but we've been having AI for many, many years. We just don't always realize it.

When you type in a URL in your browser and you happen to connect to a network somewhere else in the world, like in Europe, and you get a really fast connection, we don't think about the smart routing and machine learning behind the scenes that decides where to send that traffic based on time of day and load. Or when you look at your photos on your phone, on both iPhone and Android, and its ability to search based on what you type in from the images it's been analyzing, that's been going on for years and that's fantastic. I can type in cat and it knows exactly which pictures are of my cats.

Spellcheck, autocomplete, seat selection on airlines, all these things, we've been benefiting from AI for a very long time. What has happened recently is that we've hit the technological tipping point where it's no longer just something that very smart people with deep technical knowledge can take advantage of while the rest of us benefit indirectly. We can now access some of those capabilities directly, so I do think in the future we're going to see more things that AI takes care of for us because those tasks may not be the most important things that we should be focusing on. The downside, of course, is that creative destruction has two sides.

One is the utopian idea that people are freed up to do higher-value things. The downside is, what if there aren't higher-value things available, or what if those new things don't pay as much as what was done before? Is quality of life something we can continually sustain? Those are open questions that the entire industry is grappling with and trying to figure out. But I'm definitely an optimist when it comes to AI. Another great example is credit card fraud detection. They have so much data about you that they know if you're not in this region making a purchase and they can ping you very quickly about it.

I'm always amazed by the number of things that aren't really called AI but realistically are AI. It's a large dataset with a computer trained on it, and it does interesting things. Ah, fantastic.

16:43 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1003s)

I love it, and thank you, Adam, for the question that kicked us off into this AI direction, because I feel like I live in this bit of a dilemma, almost like a dating situation. On a regular basis I get emails from AI companies, and you can tell it's always something-something-AI, phase-world, and they say, I would like to collaborate with you on creating content, video review, blogs, and we really want to connect with creators and even small businesses.

On the other hand, I also run these creator communities and I'm very happy to have first-hand insights into why creators are hesitant, where they struggle, and the unique challenges they find in adopting AI. It can be quite difficult, or maybe not in a way that's very sustainable.

So I'm going to break down the questions here because, Kirupa, given your experience in tech and now working as a product manager at Google, I would love to pitch you the first question, which is related to what are some of the trends and things you have seen the general AI, whether it's generative AI or other AI companies, doing that are helpful versus not very helpful? Or maybe when it comes to product marketing, what are some of the common mistakes they're making that make it more difficult to reach the audience they want to reach?

18:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1090s)

It's tricky to answer that, and the main reason is that everything is changing so rapidly. With many technologies, we often have this cycle where something brand new is introduced. We hit the wall maybe six, seven months later, and then the water then bounces back and it hits steady state and at that point you can take a step back and be like, okay, what work, what didn't work, and let's now figure out the best practices are in this. Even though chat, GPT and some of these technologies came out over a year ago, we still haven't hit that wall yet.

You know, there's still this massive influx of change that's continuously coming in, new things that are coming out that people were like I didn't know. It was possible to do some of these things, and so we're right now observing the world changing a lot of these content creation areas without really knowing, like, what the boundaries are yet. So for me to say at this moment: you know, here's what the best practice are and here's what aren't. It's very tricky because whatever idea I have today of like, oh, this is a really bad idea, tomorrow overnight becomes a massive success and I'm like I was wrong.

You know, it turns out my assumption here was not correct. There's still more energy left in this, in this current beam of, you know, AI technologies that hasn't fully hit a.

19:19 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1159s)

Yeah, it's very true. Now I think about different tools, whether it's one or many. Things change so rapidly, and even the AI features that exist within a certain tool are changing so rapidly, so one severe customer support ticket could easily be solved by tomorrow. Things are constantly changing. I do think about some of the things that you have learned. I worked as a project manager and briefly as a product manager as well back in the day, more than a decade ago, so I'm trying to learn as much as I can from you.

One of the things that comes to mind is that we spend a lot of time marketing and creating content, but once the product is sold, a lot of companies complain that there's very quick cancellation and a lot of dissatisfaction from customers. But then I look at relatively successful companies and notice certain trends. One is definitely the sense of a community, whether it's Discord or a Facebook community or whatever it may be, to gather people who are actively using this, including influencers and active users, to address their questions and really listen to their feedback. I think that's really helpful.

The other is human support, somebody understanding what the issue is and being very attentive. And third, more generally, is how to think about integrating whatever it may be, whether it's a feature or the entirety of the product, into a creator's workflow. It's one thing to say, look at this, generate show notes, so easy, automate, but the company doesn't fully understand how creators actually think and do their work and the different variations of that. So I would love for you to comment on my observation, whether I'm off or maybe there's something I haven't paid attention to.

21:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1270s)

Yeah, I think you summarize it very nicely in terms of, like, what companies are trying to do and why some of them are having difficulty here. Because AI is not going to solve, ultimately, your inability to talk to customers or understand Market needs. Maybe it will. You know, I may be wrong. Maybe five years from now you can just tell the AI to automatically solve some of these things for you, but it still requires you to do some homework to make sure you understand.

Why are people, what's the main problem you're trying to solve, what is the price point they want to solve this at and how are you going to build something that's going to meet their appropriate needs? But to go back to the first part of your question on how do you mention make sure that companies are successful? Here I think so much of the industry, and this is purely from both academic and from Best Practices. There's a huge emphasis on what's known as customer acquisition costs. It's like you have a customer, how does it cost to acquire them? And everyone optimizes heavily for that particular metric.

But then there's a long-term value of how much does it cost to maintain the customer, because we also know that when a customer churns and leaves, your world. Getting them back in is either possible or exponentially more expensive than it was to get them back in and the amount of feedback they might give to other people were Word of Mouth spreads and they say why they're dissatisfied with you. It's all trust and brand loyalty that you'll never get back.

I think two big companies over indexed on just acquiring the customer, but then, once they have it, they don't spend as much effort into how do you make sure they continue to be happy. This is where I think AI could play a role. On one hand, the idea is you want to be genuine, you want to make sure that. You want you know. You don't want to be seen as like a corporate entity. You want to put you know, your human face forward, because that's a surprise, surprise- humans relate to humans more than they relate to machines.

But the child, of course, is that it takes time, it takes effort, it takes difficulty to scale. How to actually make sure that you can make the communication happen in an efficient and timely manner. If you have millions of customers, for example, how do you give them a personalized experience? This is where I think AI can play a huge role because, as you've seen already with various startups today. They have used AI extensively to make not just a chatbot experience- we have a problem- but also with the follow-up conversations. I'm like, hey, how's it going? You know, you've been using the product for X number of days.

You've done a, b and c. How? What are you experience doing that? The AI has the knowledge of being able to kind of personalize the message almost the same level that a human being can, which is something that is going to be interesting, because that kind of a high touch experience was often limited to very expensive deals, expensive products, where you had a dedicated human being, a signed account like a hand for these products.

What we're going to see, that is, that level of service might be given to a lot more individuals who are using a free service or freemium service, for example, who may never have had the experience of what it's like to have a first-life follow-up. That generally seems to indicate that there's interest from the company or the service provider in doing something better for you.

24:01 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1441s)

Wow, I love how you tied it right back to AI being able to help in a very specific manner without interrupting the human intervention. A lot of companies, even from the AI company perspective, focus on automation, but I also find it really intriguing when certain AI companies emphasize the human capabilities, where whatever the tool or feature may be, it's only assisting you as a creator or the company to have your stories be heard and to share your products and connect you with the right audience. So that's fascinating. I would love to touch upon community.

I feel like community can be a little bit of a rough subject for me because over the years, especially most actively since, I would say, 2015 or maybe 2017, I've been trying different angles and trying to build a community, and now I end up with a very small, intimate mastermind community of creators. I can't even fathom how huge companies with millions of users try to build a community and service them, because oftentimes it really depends on where you're going with the product and where you're traveling as a company. I mean, that could go from public library to public bathroom pretty quickly with all the complaints and things like that.

So somehow you built a very successful community. How do you think about community building, and how do you nurture the community members?

25:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1535s)

I think the number one thing is moderation. You know, one of the things that when I, you know, manage the communities that I, you know, for cryptocom, for example, it's very particular: the there's not a three strikes in your out rule, it's at one strike on your outro, because it's just noise, and so it's been a very strict policy and it's also been a great team of moderators over the years that you know have done a fantastic job making that happen, and I get a lot of questions for it. You know I get criticized for you know you're being too strict.

You know why can't we talk about, you know, a, b and c. You know, like there's very strict rules and like you know, if it's, if you're going to talk about something that's going to cause unnecessary drama and negativity and friction, do I talk about it, which means most political topics are off topic. Anything controversial going on publicly, you know, because the community's laser focused on one thing, which is foreign development, building cool things, designers and developers coming together to create interesting things. If it's not related to that, I don't want to hear it.

You know, because it's not designed for that kind of a world and so it's very much a. You know I have a very strong point of view on that and that you know I it helped, you know, work with a lot of moderators to make sure that point of view is actually in many ways in four.

So it's not a democracy, it's not a Town Square in that sense, and that's one way to maintain a community without having the massive amount of work that goes into what you might see from like, let's say, facebook, slash, meta or Google or Twitter in how they have to handle it, because one of the things is that I still am the only person officially works on quebecom and all the various things and I automated so much of everything else around it.

Or then I work with, like Volunteers in a crowdsource, whereas other capabilities for it, and my goal has always been to keep it that way, like it should be something where if I don't touch it for like a month, nothing should be on fire.

I come back and just pick up where it goes on, because life gets in the way, work gets in the way and all these things, and I always made sure that this would not be a situation where I have to basically sacrifice quality of life to maintain the side project of, you know, writing and creating content with the fun part needs to always be there, and Community is one of those things where, like you mentioned, it can go from being fun to being a terrible experience very, very quickly. So I'm always very conscious of in the slightest amount of like things.

From like this is this country's not going the right direction. It gets immediately pulled because it's okay. The nice thing is there are many other communities that you can go to have those kind of conversations and it doesn't have to be this one. Well, very.

27:56 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1676s)

Clear and concise, thank you. Since you brought up Kirupa. Com again, if you guys are watching, now is the time to ask any questions. My question is related to thinking about building a team, because I know that when you were a middle school student and started out this project, you probably did not expect the massive impact and growth rate that it had, maybe in just months or within a few years. At one point, and I don't know which point because I wasn't there, did you realize that you needed a team or someone other than you to support it?

And then today, as we're recording this in 2023, is it now a project, a company, something you can walk away from for one month and things are not going to be on fire? Could you give us an idea of how to think about structuring a team and who you have on the team to be able to do that?

28:43 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1723s)

Yeah, in many ways there's never any full-time, you know, people working on it. You know, the only place where I had people was in the moderation side says the forums got more popular, there were hundreds of thousands people online at any given time. I, you know it was easier to have like a group of people who were already on the forums, already spending time there, to be able to, you know, help clean up and make sure that things are going well. And even for that it wasn't like a full-time activity for anybody.

You know it's most people, and when they, the thing is that when they see the center of gravity of your content being generally positive, generally on point, Technical and factual, it creates this idea that okay, here's acceptable content, here's unacceptable content. So it's not a case where every new person is going to need to have a Hello of hand holding to be moderated. It's more of a case where some- you know a very small minority of people will have to be, you know, educated on the proper ways of how this forum operates.

But the as long as you maintain the quality of content in general, it creates a self-documenting kind of a philosophy where, yep, it makes sense. I would not go and do you. You know these kind of things, just like you wouldn't go to using your library example. Go to a library and start, like you know, playing the drums for some reason you know, you just kind of know that, okay, this is a library. The general idea of libraries is meant to be very much a you know place of you know required.

You're trying to learn, you're trying to be respectful of other people doing things in a personal space and all of that. So therefore, you know what it's exactly what connectable Behavior. I think it's very important for a community to kind of have that same level of like. At a glance. Here's what is and isn't acceptable and that greatly reduced the amount of extra work they need to do on there. The content itself: you know this is a pro and a con in some ways. Right, you know I'm the primary writer for it.

I've tried hiring writers to do you know content, you know on my behalf, and it pros and cons of it is that, yes, I get more content out but I do spend a lot more time editing it because it doesn't quite fit the style, the tone that I want to have for the content to be. So I stopped doing that.

You know, a few years ago, I said, okay, you know what, no more excellent writers again, because I think it's just best for me to create some of this content early on, though some of the early writers that we had were fantastic, and they were ones that were actually Learners, just like me, because they were genuinely doing this, because they were learning and they want to share their knowledge as a way of, you know, retaining that information, and that was actually a really great way for them to create some of that content, and that content is still on the website. It's still fantastic.

I'm still highly, you know, educated, you know inspired by seeing some of it as well.

31:04 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1864s)

But he started hiring people, though, who are not deeply immersed in creating content or in that beginner's mindset of, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who has never done this before, how would I do this? It gets trickier because that little bit of genuineness is often missing. Today, when someone brand new comes to me and says, hey, I want to write, I'm learning about this, can I write for your blog, I'm like, no, please don't. Actually create your own blog, because it's so easy if you go to WordPress or Squarespace or any other website builder and start building your own portfolio and brand.

I no longer need content anymore, but it may be beneficial for you to have your own platform where you can do this, and I'll be happy to link to it instead. That's the approach I take nowadays. Back then I was really into the motive of, yeah, it's difficult for them to do so and they have no opportunity to get their content out, so let me go ahead and make this be a place for them.

But nowadays I think it's much better to create your own area, and that's something to talk about in the future as well: how do you make sure to create your own brand, especially in a world where the idea is for each of us to be diluted into nothing but a metric in some of these big social networks? Wow, no, I had to write down personal branding. It wasn't even part of what I thought about in the agenda, but again it naturally surfaced. So right now it sounds like you have community moderators, people who are already in the community and know the ground rules, and then you create the content.

I just have a couple of follow-up questions in terms of cadence, because traveler-blogger burnout, and I think in general content creator burnout, is very real because of the competition on Google. These days I notice it takes a lot longer, for example, for some of our top-ranked content. A lot of it was written six months ago or even before that. I think that's actually a secret sauce for people who are creating a new website or starting a new blog: don't expect things to just start surfacing into top ranking positions on Google within days or weeks. It doesn't work that way.

So I wonder how you think about metrics, because you mentioned SEO and the cadence of your content creation and publishing schedule.

33:08 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=1988s)

Yeah, I played a long game, as you can probably tell. Right now, you know, I'm still doing this, even though I started 1998, and the number of times my traffic on the website has dropped by 90, you know, over a period of like six, seven months. It's probably, like you know, eight, nine times. In fact, right now my traffic, you know, compared to what it was, let's say, like eight months ago, it's down about 80, and I'm completely okay with it.

And the reason is this: is that the way I create content nowadays is that my goal is to reach as many people with my content as possible, and one of the things I've realized is that there's only so many people you can reach online. A lot of people still like physical books and so on.

So a lot of my time nowadays is spent working with Publishers on taking some of the content I have and creating, of course, a lot of new content and going into these areas, especially, like you know, around the world, in educational institutions, in schools and college universities, where they just are much more accustomed to learning from a book instead, and so I mentioned earlier that I like to write books.

A large part of the books are based on the kind of already created product for free on the on the website, but the other parts of the tune to what teachers are trying to do to teach their students on some of this material as well. Because at the end of the day I'm my goal really is that I want to have people learn enough to create cool content, create cool ads, cool websites. I can check out and be like, oh, that's a really well done website.

You know it's probably the nerdy side of me coming out, but that's the ultimate goal of like why I started doing this a long time ago. How do I keep doing it right now? It's less so that they only learn from me or they only use content that I've created or only spend time in my community.

So I realized the best way for me to democratize some of this is that there are millions of teachers and millions of college professors around the world who are looking for content on all these various topics, but it's often written by people who aren't people like you and I, who actually, you know, learned about programming, learn about this the hard way, and care about these kind of things is done purely from a lens of like: okay, here's an academic topic, here's what the job market requires this: have top skills. How do we match the those two equations together and create something?

And some folks that area have been quite good, but I'll say most of them are absolutely not relatable to a student who is trying to learn something for the first time. And we touched up on this when we chatted last time as well, about, like how I had great difficulty, you know, doing computer science in college because I felt the material was just like not speaking to me in a way that made sense. I'm like first, like give me the why, why don't you know about this?

Like give me a reason for what I need to learn this giant wall of text, because just learning for the sake of learning, so I can regurgitate on the exam, it's not a good reason for me. Oh, in the back of my mind, I always wanted to go back and if I had the time and the bandwidth to go back and revisit some of this, how would I create a better book, A Better Learning material? That's part of it and that's what I've been feeling like my time on.

So my content creation on the website has gone down significantly, which is, of course, as you know, unless you create more, keep creating more content. You're not gonna. That flywheel has to keep spinning.

Anytime you stop it, that means that traffic is going to drop as well, and I am fully okay with that because you know, a year or two from now again, I'm gonna get back to creating content again for the blog and the website and the YouTube and all the videos and all of that stuff, and it's gonna get back up again as well, because once you see the formula- like what it takes to build an audience without get traffic from it, you don't really forget it and it's really changed. It's human nature doesn't really change much either. You know people are looking for a problem. How can you solve it?

Well, and then how can you do some very basic SEO optimizations to make sure that your content reaches Their audience? And so, from to answer your question again, it's: I don't think about analytics and success in quite the same way as a content creator might, because you know I'm not using the website or the blog or success from that in any way to sustain my everyday quality of life.

It's a thing that I do outside too: kind of reinforce the things I learned, to retain the knowledge of things that I'm learning right now- but it's not in any way designed to you know- continuously have to grow because I need to meet the external needs of investors or audiences and things like that. So I can take a break like that for a year and come back and it's okay. Nothing would have ever.

37:02 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2222s)

Wow, so I must ask this question because I think we are in a slightly different situation. I'm someone who is a full-time entrepreneur. I don't have any dedicated clients, I don't have a corporation paying me a salary. I do have three to five clients at any given time, and this has been the case since 2016. These days, about 50 percent of my time is spent on Feisworld, blogging, video, content creation, everything. So just like Kirupa. Com now, could you imagine one day doing Kirupa. Com full-time? Because I'm sure you have multiple revenue streams and all that at this point.

Do you think you would be happier, or do you still like this hybrid approach? I think this is something very relatable to people, and possibly more people prefer having a salary and working on something on the side. I just want to break it down a bit.

38:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2280s)

So I tried it actually for a year. You know, I was at Microsoft HMI. You know, hit my like, I think Vibes like eight years. To that point I was like, okay, you know what, I'm gonna just take, take a year off and just do this full time. And the thing is that I had a hunch going in and my wife wasn't telling me- you know, I'm not. Are you sure you want to do this? For you know these reasons. Well, the website was more successful than ever, the content was more popular than ever, and so on.

I was extremely unhappy and the reason is that I genuinely enjoy the conversations and the challenges my day job in some ways often brings I often like to talk about. Like you know, I like to specialize in working at very large companies because there's a certain survival skills you learn at being, you know, in a large environment, and I really enjoy the.

You know both the ups and downs of like, what large companies provide, both in terms of, like you know, political drama you know exists in any large organization, but also the ability to have impact at scale without having to do a lot of the typical work that smaller companies have to do around, like you know building up their brand, building up their awareness and figuring out the scale prompts itself, so you can really swing really big and hit for go, aim for defenses when you work at large companies. And I miss that.

You know, working for myself, I was like I need the drama, like I'm not creating any drama myself, North aiming drama for me. I don't talk to people about an interesting, challenging problems. I love, like you know, work with other PMS. You know mentoring and managing and editing all these things. I missed all of those kind of things as well. And so, about you know, a year later, I wrote three books under the same period of time actually. So it's a very productive time for me in many ways. But I say, okay, you know what.

This is great that that can now go on in parallel for a couple of years, you know, because books have a lifetime that goes for a while and I'm gonna go back to getting back to like doing work again and so, yeah, I tried it. I like keeping it as a hobby, not as a full-time job, because I'm just like tuned some people.

39:49 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2389s)

I think that's such a positive message for people who are watching this segment, to know that you don't have to quit, whether it's your current or future full-time job or even part-time jobs, and still be a content creator. I think we're all born differently, with different brain chemistries, and also depending on the seasons of our lives, different ages, who we invite into our lives, whether we become parents or not, all of that truly has a lot of impact on how we design our work and personal lives. With that said, Kirupa, are you currently working remotely? Where do you prefer to kind of go into the office?

40:33 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2433s)

Yeah, I prefer to go in the office. I live very close to the office as well, so, you know, multiple times a week I go to the office and, you know, do my usual work there, and then I work from home as well, which is- and I think, what working at Tech job is- that as long as I have a laptop and an internet connection, you can be productive pretty much from any where you want. And so you know, the only miss, of course, is the in-person interaction with various people you might be working with. So there's a nice combination of it.

So I think the world's going to figure out how do we navigate back into? Is it going to be fully remote? It's going to be fully in office? It's going to be hybrid, and you know the pendulative keep swinging, you know, you know different directions depending on which month of the year we're talking about right now. So I think right now we're going to this like a hybrid world where you know you spend some time in the office, you know, and then you spend some time remote, but you have to have a balance between them. Yeah, absolutely.

41:19 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2479s)

Agreed. So, I kind of pivot a little bit away from personal branding when you brought it up, so I do want to talk about it in case I think still, on both our channels, there are a lot of people who are very new into their personal branding Journey, or those who are, you know, just build a website, wrote a couple of blog posts and they're also people, sitting there feeling like this is something they've been wanting to work on and this, frankly, could be people of any ages. I know people in their 50s, you know, still working corporate and thinking about this for the first time.

So I would love for you to talk about how to get started. When people are thinking about their personal brand, you know different niches that they should consider like: where are these? What kind of mindset? Where should they start?

42:04 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2524s)

I think the important part is to start start somewhere, and you know I'll talk about why I think it's important to have your own personal brand. You know, and it's involved over the years in terms of how I've seen the industry evolve as well.

But in many ways, there's probably something unique about you that is that makes you very successful in your job, are your things that you do, and that knowledge is something that only you can actually share and get out to others, because others can be looking for information on this very topic, and that's where I think the first place to start with is find out what sets you apart from everyone else out there. You know if you're not.

You know if you're someone who enjoys- let's say you're very good at like mountain biking or hiking or anything like that- that absolutely share some of your insights onto, not just why you like it, but how to be. You know how to get better at it and things like that, because of the love of genuineness and authenticity that comes from you're talking about it that others can't really replicate, and then, over a period of time, you'll be known as the person that's like: oh yeah, there's something about, let's say, hiking.

I'm going to talk to this person because they know all of these things about it and it used to be that that's all you need to do. It's like, yep, just put your content out there, you're going to be good and you're going to be fine. The challenge, of course, is that, but you know, I like to say, like we're living this world right now, where every minute of our day is in some ways, you know, being competed for by various proper products and companies and services, because in at this point, they realized we could maximize everything X the number of hours in a day that we have.

And so, even you know, it's like you used to be that, yeah, you know you, except for sleep, you had all this time of day to do where it's things that you know company couldn't. You know companies will, like you know, look for you, but even now, like you know, you're sleep tracking. There's so many companies that are trying to like buy for your attention on, like you know who's. Yeah, there you go, and so on.

So I think it's no longer just important for you to just have you know, create content and build your brand on your own is to actually own that messaging of it on the platform as well, like own your own platform. Like you know, you have phase world, for example. It's not twittercom, face world, it's not, like you know, facebookcom, Facebook, it's face World itself.

So it doesn't matter if you know, 10 years from now, 20 years, about 30 years from now, the platform goes away or they decide that, you know, we don't really care about content creators anymore, so we're gonna download any content, content we're only going to talk about content that results in people buying, you know, product a, b and c instead, and having done this for such a long time, I think I stumbled upon this accidentally, but I'm glad this happened, because if I had built my entire website and blog on, let's say, on a third-party platform, whether it was even WordPress or whether it even was like it's a geot or so on, you know, except for WordPress.

All the services end up going away, which means all those links and URLs went away, people's emails, addresses would have to me, would have gone, would have bounced and all these things, so that it was a hassle, but that it happened to build my own platform was probably the one thing that I always go back and say: like: I have no regrets at all in any of it, not even like an ounce of regret on it.

And so even today, when I see people saying like I'm gonna post all my content on Twitter or I'm going to go to Hash note and create all my content, I'm like it's great to start off on it, maybe create a duplicate parallel. You know copy and paste version of it, but own your own domain, own your own URL, because that is never going to be going away anytime soon, whereas everything else you're at the mercy of the algorithm or your emergency of the concreation, because the incentives aren't aligned. You know the incentives you might have, for why am I sharing content? Why do I want to be successful?

Why do I want to do? Things are often counter to what networks have as their main reason for motivation, because, at the end of the day, they are for-profit corporations and their goal is to optimize for what will get people to spend more time?

My product, so we can get more data about them, so we can then use that to better influence what purchases you might want to make, because we know that if you're searching for, let's say, you know, you know the food of these type of type- things you might be interested in, like the ingredients for buy that instead, so here's a link for it and so on, and that flywheel for them is very different than the one that you want, which is: I just want to teach people, I want to make people successful in these areas and, for the most part.

There's not a lot of money for them or for you to be making this outside the internal satisfaction you have of having thoughts among these things and so own your own platform absolutely critical, and your brand needs to be tied to that, not to be anything else, because you know Twitter, stockxcom. What do we do now? Do we all go back and change the blue bird to an X? I have no idea. Oh, that's true. I.

46:20 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2780s)

That's true. I did not even think about the impact of all our signatures and things like that. I forgot to show you my shirt, which says, “Teach everything you know.” I wore it especially for today's interview because I feel that message is true to your brand as well as mine. I wanted to ask this question at the beginning, but I think this is the right moment. When you started in 98 as a young child, people might not have been able to understand Kirupa's impact. By the time I found it, the site was already very popular.

To me, it is one of the most successful tech websites of all time, and it is still thriving today. Coming in at such a young age is like being a little Hollywood star—someone like Macaulay Culkin. Many of those people did not end up in good places. But you were an entrepreneur at a young age with one of the most trafficked websites. Now, 25 years later, I am sure there have been ups and downs. What have you learned about setting your expectations and mindset? How have you felt over the years? Based on this conversation, you have certainly come through it all.

47:41 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=2861s)

You know, I think it's just one of those things where party survivorship bias I think I just happen to be at the right place at the right time where technology was getting to be like the hot industry we want to be in, so the blog was doing its own thing. I went to a, you know, a good University, so it's easy for me to get my first job and then, you know, do interesting things on the on that side there. So I think, a lot of it.

You know it's hard for me to figure out exactly how much of it was like tangible things that I explicitly did to get to where I am, whereas how much of it was just the environment that I was in that just naturally led me to being where I am right now because, as I mentioned, I was at MIT, which means for me to get a job at Microsoft was I just walked in the career fair. You know I'd say like, hey, I'm interested in joining. You know, doing this. It was like a 10 minute chat and then they flew me in. You know they think the chat went well.

They flew me in and then, like you know, I was interning there and then, you know, my internship went okay. So I got a job offer. When, you know, went back a year later, it was, in many ways, like the things you know. When I look at it right now and I Mentor like a handful of students who are currently, you know, in graduating from business school, right now in product management, and talking to them about, like how their job experience is going right now and things like that, it is very different, you know, because the environment, the economic environment, is very different.

The expectations on people on what it means to be, you know, to be successful in industry, is very different as well. There's no social media. There was no pressure for me to have to compete against, you know, all these various people. Yeah, there are headphones, websites that I, you know, always cracked as, like you know, am I doing better than them or worse than them? Or you know, how are they handling all these things? But it was entirely casual. It's like, yeah, I can see indirectly, but I don't know, like exactly, like you know, what are they doing day in and day. There was no Instagram and all these things.

So I think the pressure on people today to be able to Veer off any direction and not be focused is very, very high. For me, it's always laser focused on being able to make sure that there's always going to be a hobby. It wasn't going to be a full-time business because, you know, I knew enough about myself to know that wasn't going to be a good idea and, of course, I got to prove that out many years later, when I actually tried to make this a full-time thing. I'm like, yeah, I'm not good for this is not my cup of tea. In so many areas, I think those really helped.

You know, having a strong, you know family, you know Foundation, having strong set of friends, having the real world, you know. In many ways, for me, it's like it's a real world. I'm like this is the online world and this is real. This is the real world. Like what I'm doing right now and being very conscious about that, I think, always played a big role in as well, because I always knew that you know, friendships and things you make online aren't the same as the strengths, the bonds of the friendships you make.

I think it's a it's a big one, and I knew that there had people I met online who I've met in person and or you know, lifetime friends with, but then a lot more people in real life, though, that I tend to rely on. Wow.

50:15 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3015s)

So how sweet of a statement and it's so truthful to you, your brand, and yet you're so humble. Yes, it's true that perhaps in many ways, both of us are privileged and blessed to have lovely family days and our education at the same time. On top of that, it still takes a lot of effort and self-esteem. They're going to keep pushing forward, especially in today's climate, and we have, you know, just about like six, seven minutes left for those of you who are listening, watching. Thank you so much. Please drop your questions and let's you, whatever time we have left, we're going to try to answer them with us.

That I do want to Pivot a little bit to the maturity of a content creator, and one of the pain points that I've been thinking about, and I aim to talk about it, is the mindset of Automation, and clearly AI is inevitably part of that conversation. For Content creators, so especially for my community, people are running- in this case, they're blogging regularly, they're creating podcast content, a bunch of people are moving towards video podcasting, live streaming, like what we're doing right now, and at the right newsletters. It just this overwhelm, has been hovering, you know, over us for for quite a number of years. So, yay, automation.

So I would love for you to talk about the AI mindset for Content creators as opposed to for companies. But for Content creators, you know some how to actually think about it, like to actually integrate whatever it is into their workflow, without the overwhelm, without the regret, and still be able to learn something new.

51:47 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3107s)

I think the way to think about it is: AI is a way of scaling your abilities, great things. And so if you think about you know, let's say you're one person, you know shop, creating content, you know you're playing the role of you know. Here's my: I'm going to Source ideas for the content, I'm going to create the content. Now, I'm going to edit the content, Market it and undo all these things, but with, with AI, as a content creator. Put yourself in the mind of, like, an editor-in-chief of a really large magazine. Let's take wired as a magazine example.

Right, they have a large number of people who are making, you know, creating content, doing the website, doing all these things, but they have an editor-in-chief or someone whose primary job it is to make sure that content is going in the direction that needs to be going, whether it's the design, the editorial, the art content. You know the content of the text and all of these things. With AI, we didn't switch the mindset around a bit now? Now you're no longer going to be playing the role of all these eight different you know wearing all these eight different hats.

You're going to play the role of This One Singular person who has full creative control over the output itself, and your job now is to write the right prompts. So imagine you had a staff of writers. You know, write me a topic about a, b and c. What type of a, b and c? You go to the team and say, like the research team, and say what are the topics you should be writing about? All those things cannot be done by an AI system instead, so automate as much of that as you can.

So when you wake up every morning in your inbox, you see here the top five topics that are coming up in all these areas. Here are the Articles you've written on these topics. Here the images are generated for it. Do you like this or do you not like this? And your answer should be: I like this, don't like this change. That change this. 30 Minutes later, the AI system comes back and gives you here the things that we want to do like great.

Ship it, and that gets shipped on your blog, on YouTube- if it's a video on Tick Tock, if it needs to be turned into like a video automatically, and then on your newsletter and all these things. And as the air is getting more and more capable, it's going to be a point where you know, when you're Tick Tock and YouTube videos will actually look like you're actually speaking. You know, even though you're not active in recording or you're into speaking, your face is absolutely perfectly representing.

Your voice and your tonal inflections are perfectly represented and the output is essentially the same as what it would have been had you been in the studio recording in all these great detail. That's where I think the future is really going to get into, which means there's going to be a lot more quantity of content, which has always been a thing in the past where you had crowdsourced firms. Oh no, you know, externalizing just creation of content and the quality of it is, you know, often hit or miss, just like before. Higher quality content will win out. Lower quantity content will naturally not win the aggregate number.

The quantity of content will, of course, probably exponentially grow and this is going to be, you know, more incentive than for you to be able to be on top of your game. But this also means that a lot more people who would have been intimidated but a Content creation process who would not be able to say, like, confidently, I can write this really well, but I have a great idea that I'm not right or I can write really well. I don't have really good ideas.

These large number of people can now make up for some of their- you know- skill gaps by using AI to you know, close that for them and then be very successful as well. So we're going to see is like our jobs can become more difficult.

We're gonna have a lot more competition, but I think, in aggregate, Society will benefit because the higher quality content created by a human being, you know, augmenting their skills with AI and not needing a large number of people to make some of these things happen- will probably create content that is almost going to write with Wikipedia in level of depth for a large number of a trade topic that you wouldn't normally think about.

You could have the most you know, very precise, you know hobby or ideas only like 10 other people in the world might be interested in, but those 10 people now will probably get content that was almost like it was designed for a millions of tens of millions of people kind of an audience. So I think there's going to be a lot of great things that automation's going to bring here. Wow.

55:28 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3328s)

I feel like we all need to take a pause, rewatch this, and think about the fact that we could literally start an online magazine. This time around, it doesn't require hiring dozens of writers or a big budget. You could literally start from your little office, your bedroom, wherever that is, and that is so powerful. You still have creative control. I think that's so important to emphasize: you should make decisions, good or bad, then ask, “How do I iterate based on this?” May I ask, Kirupa, what are some of the AI tools or technologies beyond AI that you're interested in exploring?

Your reading about your testing out?

56:07 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3367s)

Yeah, I'm a big video gamer. Yeah, I love video games. I love, like you know, that entire world of like being able to play role-playing games from early so I can like try out you know what works and what doesn't work without doing it in real life, and so the Fallout series is one of my favorite series of all time.

You know, it's basically a post-apocalyptic world where, you know, early 1900s, 1950s, America discovered nuclear technology and found like really great things with like Robotics and all of these things, and then the world kind of went haywire because the robots kinda, you know, did some you know things, and then the world ended and people were in college shelter. You know it's a great story in that sense.

But what I always loved about that game is how sophisticated robots became to be able to do everyday chores like you know, clean their, you know clean your car or like walk around and, like you know, do all the things that you might not be interested in doing. And they also had the ability to learn from what you're doing. You know, in the past, so five years ago, to be, like I told, science fiction still further away and so on, and you know Boston Dynamics was creating really nice videos of like what robots can do and not do and things like that.

It's in the last two or three years we've seen this massive shift where, like you, went from, like you know, roombas and like iRobots- it's like robotic vacuum cleaners- to really having robots that do you know. In the industrial sector, like you know, machinery and Manufacturing robots have been doing a lot of great work for quite a while. But just like with chat, GPT, I think, when you go to see the consumerization of that into our everyday lives, and that to me is for terrifying and fascinating because, on one hand, robots have almost unlimited strength and they have unlimited capacity to work and to process information.

Now imagine that now they have access to being a able to not only realize what their shortcomings are and how to address them, but also the ability to go and make those addressing automatically happen. It's not going to be us going like, oh, here's any firmware updates, I'm going to go inside for them. Like they're going to know how to go to the computer, install something, get it on your machine and insert it into their brains, and I'm absolutely fascinated by that world. So I know some people are going to be like that's gonna be the end of humanity as we know it?

Maybe, but it's inevitable, and so I'd rather embrace it and be ahead of the curve on that as opposed to, you know, being too worried about it. And so I'm reading a lot about.

58:12 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3492s)

Yeah, fantastic. Well, the last question to ask: what are some of the newsletters that come to mind, or resources, or people or creators that you follow? We all follow Kirupa. Who do you follow?

58:24 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3504s)

Oh, this is gonna be a tough one for me to answer because, no matter what I answer, I'm gonna end up offending a subset of my friends and people that I, that I follow, and so I'm gonna say, in general, you know I'm I'm not abandoning Twitter- you know X right now, and so I still use that as my primary source for being able to Source content. I do cure that very heavily to the people I follow and that information out loud in my news feed. It's very heavily tested.

My areas of Interest, which is really fun- and design development, a lot of cool artwork and, of course, AI related things, and through that I've met a lot of interesting people and, of course, my day job keeps me very inspired as well. Oh.

59:00 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3540s)

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time and we're right on time for anybody who's looking to learn more about career. But please do follow him, especially your front-end developer. But in general, I think you're a content creator. You don't understand the AI designed. You know development philosophy. Kurupacom is the way to be, and it has been for the past 25 years. Thank you so much, Kirupa. What a dream come true to finally meet you in person and be able to talk like we're, you know, friends and peers, and this is such a blessing for for me.

59:31 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3571s)

It's a great conversation, Fei. You're fantastic at this, so keep doing this.

59:34 - Fei Wu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYBkels5jI&t=3574s)

Thank you so much. You're going to take us offline now. Hey everyone, leave your comments and we will read them and reply to them later. Thank you so much for joining us.


Browse all Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm