How to Build a YouTube Audience That Stays | Matt Whitman

0:00The number one piece of advice that I could ever give, and I, I just wish I'd had it so concisely right from the beginning, is it is not about you. It is about the audience. It is about the people on the other side. Think about what someone might need for their lives to be better, what questions they're asking. Make a crystal clear value proposition, as you've done here, Dusty, and then deliver on it to make their lives better. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's conversation on the Creators Hub podcast.

0:33I am joined today by Matt Whitman. Matt is the co-host of the No Dumb Questions podcast with Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day. He's also the The Matt Whitman YouTube channel, uh, the Ten Minute Bible Hour podcast. He's the author of the best-selling book, The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible, and Matt enjoys making funny, accessible content about history, academic Christian stuff, and the Bible. Matt, how are you doing today? Doing great.

1:02Nice to be here, Dusty. Absolutely. Well, I'm really looking forward to chatting with you. As of recording of this episode, your Matt Whitman YouTube channel has two hundred and eighty-one thousand subscribers. You've uploaded over five hundred videos, so you've built a really amazing community over on your channel. The podcast is doing really well. Can you let the audience know, how did you get into this? What was your first foray into the creator space, and how did that kind of happen?

1:29I've been writing and making music and acting and doing film stuff for just all kinds of creative stuff for a really long time. I mean, since I was a kid. I started editing in Premiere in, like right, right at the end of college, maybe like nineteen ninety-nine. I might get fact-checked on this. Maybe Premiere didn't exist until two thousand or something. But I think I remember editing in Adobe Premiere in the nineteen nineties, if that's a thing.

1:56And, uh, so I've just always liked stuff like this. When I was a kid, like in maybe eighth grade or something, they asked us what we all wanted to do when we grew up, and I said that I wanted to be like an adventure travel History Channel host and, and do things like that. Felt the same way through college. As, I, I mean, how can I put this? Okay, you can only unwrap a present for the first time once, right? And it's amazing to see something new, to have the joy of discovery, and then after that, the only way you can feel that again about that, that thing, that event, that person, that beauty, that work of art, that cultural text, whatever it might be, is to vicariously experience it through somebody else as they see it for the first time.

2:42And I love that experience. I love getting, you know, more… You go see Rome for the first time, right? It's beautiful, it's magical, it's enchanting. Well, the second time it is less so, unless you bring somebody along with you, and it's even more fun if they're kind enough to let you show them some things that you love about it. So I've, I've always liked making stuff that invites other people to unwrap a present I've enjoyed unwrapping, and then see what they see and, and learn from them as well.

3:10So I did that in a lot of different formats, you know, going back a long ways. And then in the early twenty-teens, I was working at a church in Wyoming up by Yellowstone, and it was, it was a really cool gig. I never meant to be a pastor or anything. I kinda just, I did the academic side of church history and religious studies and stuff, and there was a cool church, and they needed a pastor, and I was like, "Well, I think technically I'm trained to do that. Let's do it." So I jumped in and did that job in a beautiful place, but it was a very remote mountain town, you know, a big church in a small town, right?

3:44So everybody would travel. Like, if you go to Home Depot, that's a weekend. Mm-hmm. It's one of the most remote places in the Lower 48. But, you know, I know that you've got people listening to your show here who have varying religious convictions or whatnot, so I'll explain a little more than I normally would. But my preference for what happens in church with sermons is you pick a book of the Bible and you just chip away at it a little bit, and that way it kinda takes, you know, the pastor's biases out of it.

4:12The text kinda does more of the work, right? Well, that's really hard when every time somebody from your church needs to go to Home Depot, they're gonna miss church. So you get all these really faithful people, but it's hard to do a series when everybody's gone all the time for the whole weekend 'cause it's just the normal rhythm of life. So I started putting stuff on the internet, and the idea was that I would do like a, a Daily Show style, kinda quick 10-minute, "Hey, it's not church.

4:36We're just gonna have a laugh about things, but we'll keep you up to speed on what we're doing at church." And, you know, then I can cover books of the Bible the way I want to. And very, very quickly, that outgrew the church in 2014, I think I started working on it, and into 2015, and then it kinda decoupled from church. We got onto the next thing, and I was still going on this, this one book of the Bible. Some of your listeners might know it. It's called the Book of Acts.

5:00It's about, like, the early history of the, you know, Christian religion and all of that. And so I got done with Acts, and then I was like, "Well, I'll do some other stuff too." And just gradually, I found this whole community of people who were kinda like me Raised around Christian faith. It turned weird. Like, Christianity, I don't know whether you're into this stuff or not, but it went through, like, a gigantic overhaul with the advent of MySpace.

5:27The Western Christian faith was not ready for everybody being in the same room at the same time and talking about all of their convictions at once, and it, I mean, it just got pretty rocky. Uh, I would posit that a lot of the politics and culture that's happened in the last 20 years is because of that rocky transition. Well, I was caught up in that, you know. I went through the same thing everybody did. Like, I was raised with this thing, but now the world has changed so much.

5:51What do you do with it? You go through the ups and downs of faith. And so I just found a whole bunch of people on the internet who were like me, able to kinda have a laugh about some of the sillier things that go along with church and Christian religion and things like that, but also suspicious there might be something to it. I'd lived on both sides of the divide of belief and not belief, so I found it really easy to empathize with people who are coming at faith from either of those perspectives.

6:16And just gradually it, it grew into a really nice, functional community, and we just kinda did Bible stuff for four years or so. A buddy of mine and I, a buddy who's had great success on the internet, his name's Destin. He does-- Well, you mentioned it. Destin does Smarter Every Day on YouTube. He and I decided to do a show together starting about 10 years ago. We still do that to this day, and so that was kind of my second foray into internet stuff.

6:44And then it's evolved since then, but we can talk about that more as the conversation goes along. So that's how I got into it. What was… Or do you remember the moment when you said to yourself internally or even you might have verbalized it, "Hey, this may be more than just a hobby"? You know, you, you transition from kinda being a pastor, and you were kind of dabbling with YouTube and video stuff. Was there a moment or a specific season where you said to yourself, "Oh, wait, this might be something beyond just a hobby"?

7:12Yeah, it sounds kinda crass to admit that My first paycheck had a lot to do with that. But you asked an honest question, I'll give you an honest answer. You know, the church I worked at, I, I made a very nice, perfectly functional middle class salary. Nothing to brag about, nothing to be ashamed about, just, you know, the kinda thing you could raise a family on and make it work. So I had no gripes at all with where I was at. You know, I'm not gonna build, like, some kinda fortune or great retirement with it or anything, but it was great.

7:43I was very happy doing what I was doing with a great church. But, you know, uh, Destin's channel, Smarter Every Day, that's a much bigger thing, and he was ahead of me in the game in terms of sponsorship and how that works. And the first time that we did an ad integration on the podcast, I was like, "Oh, wow, that's… I did not expect the number to be that good. It's not income replacement, but dang, that's… Now I kinda know, like, X number of loyal audience people equals Y number of potential income." And yeah, I mean, I mean, what's the factor, right?

8:21If you wanna jump to this and you wanna do it full time, the question is, "Can I pay my bills? Can I provide for the people I'm promised to and beholden to?" And if you can't, don't go full time. So kinda just running the numbers and saying like, "All right, if I worked this hard and did this much stuff, I could earn what I earn currently with a church salary, and then I would have the option, if I wanted to, to jump over to this full time." And how did you learn the, you mentioned Premiere.

8:48Did you just basically, just what I call YouTube University, got on there, watched video tutorials, started learning how to do all this, and then basically you were… Or did you already have experience? Yeah, I mean, my, my experience with Premiere predates the existence of youtube.com. So, I mean, yeah, I started, like, you know, right at the end of college, right outta college. So what is that? Four or five years before YouTube was even a thing, right?

9:13So you just figured it out, I guess. I don't-- There were, like, little books that you could get at the library. And, and the, the books would, would tell you how to edit things. My wife was a certified trainer for Adobe and Microsoft. She's still really handy with the Adobe Suite and with Photoshop, so she actually was sort of my go-to for asking questions. And then, you know, since then, well- Yeah, sure. I mean, if I don't know what I'm doing, I just go to YouTube.

9:45Somebody knows, or I've got a couple buddies where I know some tricks and they know some tricks, and we compare notes. What, what's something that you wish you would've known sooner about growing a channel and just YouTube in general? See, Dusty, now we come to the fork in the road, don't we? This is the part where it's like, well, do you just give away the secret sauce? Come on now. We need that secret sauce. Or do you be all cagey about it, right?

10:10Look, here's the secret sauce. For the internet, for running a business, for running a church, for being a friend, for being a good parent, give value to other people for free because you love them and you want their lives to be well. And if they're unlovable, try to love them anyway. And if they're disagreeable, fine, disagree with them, but still try to serve them. There are two theories for how an economy works. One is stupid, and one is true.

10:37One is a dream that people like to have when they're in college because it's a fashionable way to think when you're in college. The other one is reality, demonstrated by all of human history. Wealth is created when people make things that make other people's lives better Reality financially incentivizes us to think about the needs of other people and meet them, and I think that is a beautiful thing about reality. If you exploit people, you will kill the golden goose.

11:09Now, I think it's just morally wrong to exploit people because of, you know, religious convictions. I'm not saying I always get that right, but I, I hope I'm not exploiting anybody. But the market, I think, backs up the value-- what I would call the values of the Kingdom of God, which is if you wanna be great, become a servant. If you, you know, if, if you wanna be the first, be the last. If you go into a big fancy banquet and there's a fancy seat up at the front or a lowly seat at the back, take the one at the back.

11:39If you get invited to the front, fine. If not, fine. It… The trick is think about other people. The problem with YouTube right now, and I don't care how much I sound like a get off my lawn old-timer here, I am. I've been doing this a long time. The problem right now is it got gamified, and it got turned into a way to exploit and hack an audience instead of serving an audience. The algorithm has been catered to temporarily play along with YouTube hacks.

12:10But it doesn't work. Go look long-term. Name a creator who has had a meaningful long-term career, whose life isn't ruined, whose reputation isn't in shambles for treating people that way. But look at all of the people in, in any kind of business or YouTube or podcasting or media or anything, look at, look at the people who are celebrated and loved. Dolly Parton just passed away yesterday as you and I are recording this. Why does everybody love Dolly Parton?

12:36'Cause she serves everybody else. 'Cause she, she cares about everybody else is doing. The number one piece of advice that I could ever give, and I, I just wish I'd had it so concisely right from the beginning, is it is not about you. It is about the audience. It is about the people on the other side. Think about what someone might need for their lives to be better, what questions they're asking. Make a crystal clear value proposition as you've done here, Dusty, and then deliver on it to make their lives better.

13:08You might get a lot of views, you might not get very many, but if you're serving other people, eh, it'll go to plan, and if you don't get all the views you want, you'll put your head on the pillow when you're old and be like, "I treated people well. I did something that was honest, and that's cool." I- it's interesting because exactly what you said is, is the premise of a lot of what we talk about in marketing, or in this case specifically YouTube and growing a, a brand and an audience of, you know, what is your thing?

13:36Are you going to entertain? Are you going to educate? But it all circles back to, like you said, you know, you said it very well, serving the audience or serving the person that you're trying to target. If there's someone listening to this and they're kind of waffling about in terms of they know what their niche is, or maybe they don't, but how would you-- If you could go back and talk to yourself years ago, a- and you mentioned you wish you kinda would have known this sooner, how would you tell those people listening of this is how you can find, you know, how you can serve your audience better?

14:07What would you say to them? Okay, first make the metric, make the thing you think about the most how served and how benefited the people who trusted you with their precious time are. Do not make the primary metric YouTube numbers. I mean, literally today YouTube changed the way they count. So today, YouTubers everywhere are like, "I'm popular. My thing is great," because now one second of hovering counts as a view. Whereas last week, the same YouTubers were like, "Ah, I'm miserable.

14:39My numbers are down. Everything's terrible." That's been the vibe for two years for established YouTubers. They changed the counting a while back, it all got worse. Now they change the counting, it all got better. Who cares? Are you serving your audience? The primary metric, the primary answer you should be trying to get to is Am I hearing what people need? Did I make a good value proposition, and did I deliver on making people's lives better? Do they feel cared about by me, and is the stuff I said true?

15:09And if you're-- Like, the other stuff is gonna come into focus if you're, if you're doing that well. Um, I have more thoughts, but I'll, I'll bounce back to you. Yeah, that, that translates to, you know, I've mentioned before on this show, my dad is a big fan of a guy called Zig Ziglar, and basically his-- Zig Ziglar was a big proponent of, okay, you give everyone else what they want, and you're gonna get 10X, basically is kind of the premise of what he would say.

15:35And my dad, as I was growing up, he would always tell me as, as a good father, and, and my mom was right there with him, "Hey, listen, you know, care about other people." And, and on YouTube, it's, it's the same way that if you want to be a part of the YouTube Partner Program, which is a big milestone, it's a big thing people are trying to reach, and I don't blame people for wanting that goal, but you have to figure out, number one, who your audience is and then how to serve those people.

16:00And what your freebies, which is what I call them, Matt, you may call them something else, whatever your freebie is, whether it's a YouTube video, an email newsletter, a course, a, a book like what Matt has as well, whatever you're offering needs to answer those questions or serve that audience. And so no, I completely agree with, with, with what you're saying. And YouTube, unfortunately, you're right, has been muddied up a bit with not only artificial intelligence, but the way that things are kind of going.

16:29So I think that it has been-- it's more important than ever to find your audience and serve those people. The money will come. The views will come, right? Yeah. You've-- I mean, no doubt, Dusty, you have seen use-- not washed up, used up celebrities- Mm-hmm … over the course of your life, right? Like, I remember when I was a kid, Britney Spears was the big thing, and she was so pretty, and all the boys had a crush on Britney Spears. Well, now she's a punchline, right?

16:58Like, she's someone to be worried about, and she's the kind of person you look at, and it raises questions about mental wellbeing and the cost of fame. She's a cautionary tale. But she was the it girl for five years. Okay. How many times do-- I mean, how many of these cautionary tales could we just brainstorm off the top of our head? Hundreds? Thousands of, of people who got what they wanted. They got the audience. They served the audience, but they got the wrong audience, and it had the wrong influence.

17:31It created the wrong feedback loop on them, and then when it was over, and it will be over. If I stop publishing, my, my book will run for a while 'cause I got Harper Collins behind it. But, like, everything else will just fall out of the algorithm, and I'll be gone and forgotten. And that's kinda comforting in a way to, to know that, that we really can just go away when we step off of the treadmill. That's a good thing. But- But how many people do we know who, when it's over, they're miserable?

18:01They don't-- Like, life doesn't have meaning. They don't-- All the relationships that mattered and that were moored went away, and they got obsessed with some metric, whatever it was. In our line of work, you know, downloads or retention or click-through rate or whatever, and y-you just lose your voice. You lose your mind. And, and we've seen this from others. Well, it happens to people like us too. So this is the next cautionary thing that I would throw out.

18:26But it's not just a cautionary thing. This can go either way. If you get this right, it's one of the best things in the world. Mm-hmm. If you get it wrong, it will destroy you. Okay. The audience you make will be who you become. I'm gonna say it again because I care about the people we're talking to, and I'm just talking to the people we're talking to. I care about you, and I care about your soul. Some of you are ahead of me in this game. Probably a lot of you are just getting started on this.

18:51I am telling you, the audience you cultivate is what you will become. So if you just care about the stupid numbers, you will figure out hacks for how to get those numbers where you wanna be. But not all numbers are created equal. Mm-hmm. And you will, you will have a feedback loop with your audience. They will be the most influential people in your life. So cultivate an audience full of virtuous people who are going in life where you wanna go, and you'll go there together.

19:23If you cut corners and you cultivate a bad audience, you will get numbers. People won't even be that impressed. They'll pretend to be 'cause socially they're obligated to, but they'll probably just be envious of you. But you won't get anything for the numbers. It doesn't really matter that much. But you will lose your voice. You will forget who you are, and you will become that corrupt audience. So be careful with it. It's a monkey's paw. If you use this thing the right way, you will be a magnet that draws virtuous people to yourselves, and you will create a feedback loop with them, and your life will be rich.

19:58If you cut corners because you love numbers You'll hurt, and when it's all over and you step away from it, you will hurt, and I don't want that for you. I interrupt this conversation just for a few seconds to tell you a few things that we offer to creators. If you're someone looking to take your channel to the next level, I think we have something for you. We have a creator mastermind group, five, 10 bucks gets you in. We do mastermind calls every month, sometimes two to three times a month.

20:24We also have channel reviews where you pay a very small amount for me to take a look at your channel, and then I record a six to seven-minute video around your channel of where I think you can spend your time to improve your channel. And then if you wanna go even farther than that, I offer one-on-one creator coaching where you get to sit down with me, 30 minutes all the way up to 90 minutes, and we break down your channel. We talk about things that you think you need to work on and more.

20:51And so if you're looking to take your YouTube channel to the next level, check the show notes, and I think you're gonna find a service for you. Now, back to the show. Yeah, this platform in general, not just YouTube, but just the internet as a whole, whether it's TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, it is a responsibility, and it, it, it can be a, a drug to some people, and they can search for the wrong things as you, as you mentioned. But if you serve your audience well and you give them what they've-- they're seeking when, when they found you or discovered you, you're generally going to have the results you want and, and some.

21:26A-and so I hope that people take away from this that what Matt and I are speaking of is that, listen, your audience is important. The people that you cultivate around your brand and community, that's important. How you do it is important. But once you kind of find that golden goose per se or, or the sauce that Matt talked about in the beginning of that answer, you will see the power in, hey, listen, yes, it's important to look at numbers. We're not saying that that's not important.

21:50These things are all auxiliary. You need to look at the watch time and the things that matter and the things that I talk about on this show. But if you really wanna get to the backbone of what a creator that is successful does For the most part, it is serving their audience well and knowing who that audience is. Th-those are the two big, important things. Now, you mentioned numbers, Matt. Can we talk about money a-and how you make money? So let's talk about, let's break that down.

22:14You have a book, you have the YouTube channel. What are the different buckets that you as a creator are able to make money and provide for your family? Yeah, and what you just said, like, that's the magic word for me. I'm, I'm lucky enough to be a husband and a dad, and it is-- I had no idea this part of me would awaken when I got married and we started to have kids. But I met my first kid, my little girl, like she still had, like, goop on her, and my heart changed.

22:41My priority-- Like, in that moment, trying not to drop my baby who z- doesn't even understand the world yet, it's like, oh, it just hit me right then. I-- This will never end. This is, this is what I will be doing for the rest of my life. I will be caring for this new human who I'm about to bestow a name upon. And then two more came along. I mean, yeah, it is such a privilege to get to lay down my youth in part to serve my family. So I care about this very, very much.

23:15Beyond that, we don't need much. We don't have great ambitions. So everybody should take that into account. Everybody has different financial goals, things you're trying to accomplish. I want my debts to be paid. I wanna be able to pay to help my kids get a good education. I wanna be healthy, and I want, I wanna be with them for a long time. I wanna love my wife well. These are my goals. I wanna be generous. I wanna give money away. So with that in mind, I, I kinda built it this way.

23:42Maybe five buckets that produce income. The first one was a Patreon on my YouTube channel. YouTube channel was the original thing. Right now it is the second biggest thing I do. My, my daily podcast is much larger than the YouTube channel in terms of audience and, you know, listen time and all of that stuff. It's- Which is the 10 Minute Bible Hour. That's the- Yes … the daily podcast that you do. Okay. Yeah, and we should talk more about why that works.

24:13I think, I think that would be interesting for your audience as well. Absolutely. The value proposition on that one is the strongest of my three internet things. So I started a Patreon. I don't know. It, it grew pretty well. The reason it worked is because the audience liked my vision for the world. I think there were a whole lot of people, and still are a whole lot of people in my audience who, like I was saying earlier, they, they have one foot on each side of the historical divide that is the internet.

24:45And I would say myspace.com is that dividing line in history. I think historians from the future will look back and say, like, "Yeah, two thousand and five, that right there is where history-- That's where the postmodern era ended and the early internet age of thought, the AI age of thought." I don't know what they'll end up calling it, but our brains and our relationships became different after '05. Well, there's a whole bunch of people who think there's a God who like my content.

25:13They also think that the way we did it and languaged it before Myspace was already a problem. It did-- It wasn't making sense. The languaging was broken. Then Myspace happened, and it exposed that, and it became more evident, and that made some people very religiously angry at other people. Like heart-- like take-over-the-government kind of angry. It made other people be like, "Just get rid of all the stuff the Bible says, and let's just go hard, hard, hard, hard, hard left, and the values of, like, leftism will just be our new ethics." Okay, that's another way to do it.

25:49I don't do either of those. Then there were other people who were like, "Let's just go back to traditional, like, Orthodox Catholic stuff. Maybe that'll feel better." Other people were like, "Yeah, but theologically, you know, I, I like kind of the Protestant version. I just don't like how we language it." Okay, well, th-this is very scattering. So what people read between the lines and saw in my content was a dude who was wrestling through the exact same questions they were, and I had a few constructive proposals.

26:18I think if we do it this way, I think if we talk about it this way, I think if we think about people we might disagree with in this way, that would be a way forward, and this could work. And so then what happened was people jumped on that Patreon to support me, number one, and number two, to invest in a vision for the world or the discourse or faith that they wanted to see win. Is it perfect? No. I mean, I'm always thinking and, you know, it's a, it's a hard nut to crack.

26:49I'm working on it, you know. But, but a bunch of people who believed in the approach that I was taking wanted to invest in that. That was the value proposition of the Patreon. What I never did on Patreon was a mistake, and I think it is a mistake. No disrespect to all of your audience members who see this different. Don't make it transactional. I never made it transactional. Destin and I have both always used the language, this is a goodwill engine.

27:14We will underpromise and overdeliver. So the underpromise is I make this content on the internet. If you support me You will then be supporting me, and I will still make this content on the internet. So basically, if you want to give me money, thank you I'm not gonna send you some dumb hat. I'm not gonna obligate myself to make a bunch of, you know, a- additional bonus material. Like, like what? I'm gonna hold back stuff that should go to the larger audience, but it's gonna go to the smaller aud- Like, I'm not gonna make my best stuff for the smaller audience if I do that.

27:50I'm gonna make my best stuff for the bigger audience. It's not a good model. It's, it's not the right strategy. And go-- Everybody, just go run a poll. See how much your people actually care about the gimmicks. They don't. If your Patreon is working well, it's because there is something you do, an artistic vision, a vision for the world, an ethical vision that they love and understand, and they want to invest in you, and they want to invest in that.

28:16If you turn Patreon into a transactional gimmick, you get customers instead of benefactors, and those customers are gonna want customer service. And when they don't get the customer service, they will be unhappy, and they will complain, and those complaints will happen publicly, and it will sour other patrons. And all of a sudden, your home base becomes a place that is not at peace. So just don't offer it. Make five tiers and be like, "20 bucks a month is great. 40 bucks a month is also great."

28:49Right. And that's it. And then every now and then be like, "Yeah, this is something cool I could send everybody. I'm just gonna do it 'cause I thought of them and I love them and they make my life better, so surprise, I mailed you all a thing." That's it. That's the secret sauce on Patreon. If you, I'm talking straight into the camera again here, if you, folks in the audience, are noticing that your Patreon is not getting traction, I don't think it's because your gimmick isn't clever enough.

29:16I think it's because your vision of the world or the artistic value that you're asking people to invest in has not been clearly articulated enough, either in your brain or out loud and communicated to your people. Show them a vision of the world that they can invest in and invite them to invest in it, and then deliver on it by being somebody who's representative of that. And that-- I know a whole lot of people's Patreon numbers. I'm intimately familiar with a whole bunch of fancy people you probably know from the internet.

29:46We talk. And the people who are coming at it the way I'm talking about, it works. The people who are trying to get customers, they're always, always battling, uphill battle all the time. Dude, I barely even got through the bucket. I got through like one half of one bucket. What am I doing? Oh, that's all right. Uh, so quickly- You wanna know three more about the, uh, rest of the model or should I shut up? Yeah. What are, what are the other ways that you're monetizing?

30:08Okay. Okay, I got preachy. That was bad form. I'm not gonna do that again. I'm stopping right now. No, I like it. I like it. That's good. I agree with you. Okay. After that, you-- we launched No Dumb Questions. That's a two dudes talking podcast. You know, look at Destin's stuff. He's wildly successful. Of course that podcast is doing great. I would like to think I'm very helpful on that, but you're not idiots. I mean, if Destin makes a podcast, you know, someone with that level of audience, it's gonna go well, and don't tell him I said this 'cause I don't want him to get, you know, weird, but he's just enormously talented, and he's funny, and he's good at stuff.

30:47It's not an accident that his YouTube channel has done very, very well. It's a reflection of his talent, and it's a reflection of him literally being the most gifted person I've ever met at the art of audience empathy. That dude is empathetic toward people he's never met and can understand who they are and what they need and refuses to exploit them but sees them as people, and that's the secret sauce behind his channel. He, he loves his audience and wants wonderful things for their lives.

31:21It comes through in what he makes, and so they love him back. He deserves everything that he's built. Well, I learned a ton from him making this podcast together, and, you know, pretty quickly we launched a Patreon on that. Again, certain people could see what we were going for, that the show is ostensibly about a rocket scientist and a humanities guy picking a topic, giving each other a hard time, but really doing, you know, educational on-the-fly work in a funny, entertaining way.

31:51Some members of the audience figured out this is about adult friendship. Like, this is This is about the ups and downs and ins and outs of how you do that in a very weird time where friendship is hard to come by. And they wanted to invest in that. So our Patreon, we've sent out, like, some stickers and stuff, but our Patreon is just basically a place for inside jokes. There's not a lot of discussion there. Not much really happens there at all. It is just Destin's words, not mine, a goodwill engine.

32:26If you like this and you think it's redemptive and you wanna kick in, cool. If you don't, we will still do it until it makes zero money and we can't afford to anymore. That's the plan. Right. Then we started running ads on that program, and we, we were running ads in the golden age when the money was flowing. Not like yacht money or anything crazy like that, but man, pay off school debt money. It… Like, the reason I finally paid off our family student loans was because HelloFresh, like, I don't know, Raycon earbuds, like just a handful of products that we could genuinely believe in, came along and they wanted to work with us, and we never-- we refused to do ad reads.

33:10We integrated, truly integrated everything into the flow of the show. So if you skip the ad, like, you are skipping what you're here for. The jokes are gonna keep going. It's gonna be woven right together with whatever the subject matter is. We did an episode about guns one time. Yep, that was problematic with that sponsor. We worked through it, whatever. We were like, "Look, you knew what you were signing up for. We talk about everything." And, and so people don't skip the ads, which is just, yeah, wonderful.

33:41And so back when there've kinda been two generations of ad buyers, you know, people in charge of the integration thing. There was kind of an old school group, and the philosophy used to be you want to, you wanna sell the product. I know that seems obvious, but it's not obvious anymore. Mm. Then I observed kind of an influx of folks who studied something else, didn't find jobs in it in college, and kinda got into the content creator ad space. And that generation of ad buyers and ad reps just totally lost the plot, and it became about, like, I get in trouble if we don't say this sentence And we'd come back and say things like, "If I say that sentence, my audience will hate your brand.

34:34You, you just simply don't…" This is gonna sound patronizing, and I don't care. "You simply don't get it, young man. If I say the sentence you want me to say, my audience will smell fraud, they'll like me less, and they'll hate your product because your product in their mind will be the thing that ruined the show they liked. So we can't say that. If we act like humans and talk about why we actually like the product, 'cause we only advertise things we actually like and we reject 85% of what comes in, they'll know we mean it.

35:10You just need-- you're gonna have to trust us on this." And we lost clients over it. Others loved us for that. What I know is this, one of the comp- the comments we get the most on our show is best ads on the internet. Like never, never ever skip an ad on No Dumb Questions. Stupid skits, dopey sound effects. Like it's just we made them unskippable. And it was, it was frustrating to me when I saw that kinda shift around 2021 toward, like, people just, just fundamentally don't understand the exercise- Understand dictating these stupid terms, and they made ads worse.

35:48That's bad for everyone. Gradually, you know, right at the height of, you know, before things kind of flipped politically, you know, people might not remember, but in the 20-teens you got punished for thinking more traditional conservative things, like punished pretty hard socially. And then it flipped around '21 and then some of the more antisocial, unpleasant types from the other side who had felt persecuted, they kinda had the upper hand for a while and weren't super pleasant to people who now had the lower hand.

36:29I don't know when this tit for tat thing will end. I think it's cruel and no way to do a society. Hopefully at some point things like, you know, forgiveness will- Mm-hmm … kick in and we can like each other more. But for now, um, that flip happened. The iceberg, the, the cultural iceberg rolled over, right? And, and so we kinda caught the end right before the iceberg rolled. We felt like we were being told… We felt pressure to just signal things that we were like, I don't know, not for or against.

37:00That's just not, I'm not doing that. It's not what we do here. It's not what this is about. So we started turning down ads for that reason. You know, now there's kind of pressure to signal things the other way a little bit. I'm not doing that either. Mm-hmm. So for me, there's still money in ads, but there are so few products that I believe in that haven't graduated to kind of being, you know, real products now that don't really need us or that don't come with weird baggage.

37:31So there's ads, but that's a monkey's paw too. The show's better without them, and there are strings. So that paid off my student loans, and then we quit running them. And now it's, now it's just, it's mostly all, all Patreon. I think, I think you may- mentioned so many good points in regards to the monetization options that you've chosen. The Patreon thing is intriguing. Um, I love the statement you made about making your ads unskippable. I think that's really important in-- You know, most of the podcasts that I listen to insert ads to make, just, just to make ends meet, right?

38:10Like you can tell they're not passionate about the product. It's, they don't probably use the product in their day to day, and so it becomes a thing of just this is a transaction of, hey, I'm putting in all of this work. We have to have some way of making money from putting all this time and the research and the effort that this show takes, right? So I think for you it's, it's really interesting. I think you can apply the same thing to your call to action, and what I mean by that is in, in this podcast that you're listening to right now, if you're listening to this conversation, you know, I offer YouTube coaching and consulting, and we have a mastermind group.

38:41All of these things are my items that I want my call to action to lead to, and what I want these conversations to do is to provide enough free information and enough value that the person says to themselves, "I trust Dusty. He's having these conversations, and I listen to him every week." And I want those times that I come in and mention these things to be unskippable. I don't want it to be just something that is so static and stiff. I want it to be real.

39:10I want people to know that I care about them. I want their YouTube channel to succeed. And if you never hire me, that's fine. It's completely fine. And I think that's when you're mentioning what you're talking about with your Patreon, it's a really good point. I think I've made some mistakes leaning on the other end in my journey a- as, as a creator. So it's interesting to hear you talk about the, the journey that you've been on. Now, I wanna ask you this.

39:31As we're approaching the forty-minute mark, I keep these around thirty to thirty-five minutes, and I don't wanna rush this conversation. I'm sorry, man. I had no clue. I apologize. But I want to, I wanna ask you this. Not really a question, but more of kind of a statement To succeed on YouTube in 2026, like a creator listening to this, they're struggling, you know, YouTube's throwing up all kinds of mixed signals. I just recorded an episode that's going out tomorrow about the new thing that YouTube's doing of every time you, you click on a video, they're gonna count it from frame one.

40:01But really that's not the whole picture. Like, you gotta go into the advanced me- you know, analytics now to see that there's another kind of views that people may not even know about called engaged viewers and then unique viewers, and there's so many things that YouTube is kind of hiding behind. People are gonna think instantly, "Well, that means I'm making more money." That, that's not the case. So I think YouTube can be a confusing and convoluted place.

40:25Can you just maybe leave us with, with what you would say to those people who are kind of in that spot? Yeah. YouTube is tough Think of it like a foreign currency, right? Like at any given point, there's a dominant currency in the world. That's the one unit of currency X is the best, and everybody measures their currency relative to that. Like, ah, I hope, you know, USD is worth .75 of the best currency in the world. YouTube is the third strongest click currency right now.

41:00I mean, the garbage currencies, the penny stocks, you have to mix the metaphor a little bit, would be a Twitter engagement, Facebook view. These things, they just… You don't get anything for them. You can get 'em-- Like, I guess you get prestige. You can tell your mom, "I got a million views." It doesn't matter. You don't get anything for that. YouTube is still a pretty high value currency. Of all the video formats other than a movie theater view or a Netflix stream, it is the top normal person video creative currency.

41:32So it's very valuable, and I'm very interested to see what these new changes do to YouTube's currency rating in that regard. Above that would be an engaged podcast listen. That is better than a YouTube view. And above that, if you can count as a currency, would be like a Substack or a book. If you can get… Books never go away. That's a, that's a pretty cool thing. It's a privilege if you can do something like that. So YouTube is pretty valuable, and com- you know, understanding that currency exchange is important for knowing, relatively speaking, you know, what is your level of succe-success compared to this other stuff.

42:12There are shortcuts to just getting numbers on a screen on some website. Don't think about any of that. If you're gonna deal in YouTube, these are the things you gotta do. Crystal clear value proposition. You need to demonstrate that you are an actual human being who actually has some sort of qualification by either training or sheer effort to actually serve your audience. And with the AI cluttering age, I think that's the most important thing that's going right now.

42:42Be an actual person You can even be wrong about things. Every time you're wrong, it's an opportunity to demonstrate that you're a human who can be wrong about things. You don't have to edit out every single mistake. You can correct yourself on camera. It's fine. Like, if anything, the-- if anything, your weaknesses and frailties as a person right now benefit you because we're so sick of all the polish on everything. And, you know, uh, think about yourself.

43:09Do you mind that other people have flaws? Do you mind that other people don't know everything? Or do you find people who pretend to know everything by googling stuff between every jump cut insufferable? Nobody wants to be around the person who knows everything. They wanna be, uh, around the intrepid explorer who is trying and who has a certain set of principles that go along with what they're doing, and they wanna be around people that they think care about them.

43:34So throwing your energy at that stuff is always right, even though the YouTube algorithm is a moving target. If I tell you what to do right now as we're recording this on August 27th, 2026, and you watch this in 2028 I will have, I will have sown chaos in your life, 'cause you'll be listening to stuff that is outdated. The algo will change. Hacks are temporary. They just come and go. Loving other people, being forgiving toward yourself and toward others, being gracious toward other people on the internet, not wasting people's time and trying to give them value and make their lives better, that transcends every iteration of all these currencies I'm talking about.

44:20It transcends political divides. It transcends all of the changes to the algorithm, and what's hot and what's not, and all of the trending stuff. If you do those things, you can figure out the little, you know, tricks that work for six months here and there to figure out how to get some traction. You're smart. You can do that, but principle, principle, principle. People don't care about what you know until they know that you, you care. Serve other people.

44:46That's timeless. Yeah. It, it really is about the audience and, and giving them what they're coming there for. I think you've done a really good job in a lot of kind of angles in this, in this episode talking about that. And so Matt, I really appreciate your time. Again, if you wanna see what Matt's got going on, y- I'm gonna have all of his links in the show notes of this week's episode. It's Matt Whitman, W-H-I-T-M-A-N, his main YouTube channel.

45:13Then he has the 10-Minute Bible Hour podcast, as well as some other stuff that he's doing with his friend Destin. Uh, he also has a physical book, The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible. It's behind him right now if you're watching the, the video there on, on his bookshelf. But Matt, we just appreciate your time, and, uh, hopefully we can have you on again in a couple of years and when you're about half a million or a million subscribers and, uh, do this all over again.

45:37Yeah, I'd love that. Great job. Great questions. Thanks for your patience with me going a little long. No worries. Thanks, Matt. And that's a wrap on this week's podcast. I'm so thankful that you stayed to the end. Don't forget to check out all the services that we offer for creators. Everything from our mastermind group, channel reviews and audits, one-on-one coaching. If you're looking for something, we have it. Check the show notes for all of the things that we offer creators.

46:01With that said, don't forget to subscribe to the show wherever and however you are listening or watching to the podcast. That way every Friday when we go live with a new episode, you will be notified. And with that said, we'll see you guys next week