The Neuron: AI Explained
He Got 1 Million Followers in 30 Days—Here's How AI Changed Everything
12 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Brandon Baum grow his YouTube following so quickly?
shoot all of our content on iPhones, which I think is quite unique. These phones, they're not really phones. They're just, they're supercomputers that are incredibly small, that have these like really advanced gyroscope sensors on them. Also have these really advanced LiDAR sensors on them.
The idea that anyone could imagine that there'll just be this one broad stroke where a single person could write a string of words and that output, the level of quality that goes into any form of like art at scale is preposterous. I'm basically trying to offload as much of my administrative tasks that I do as physically possible because I don't ever want to do any of them ever again.
So if I can basically offload all of them and just focus on being creative for more of my life, I'll be very, very happy.
Welcome, humans, to the Neuron AI Explained, the show that helps you make sense of what AI is changing, who it's changing for, and what all of that means in the real world. I'm your host, Corey Knowles, and as always, beam again with enough enthusiasm to power a small inference cluster. We have Grant Harvey with us. How are you, Grant?
So in this scenario, I am a solar-based space-based data center. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Cool. I'll channel my enthusiasm appropriately and... Well, I am actually pretty enthusiastic because today we're talking about one of the places AI is moving fastest, which is internet video.
Our guest is Brandon Baum, better known to millions as HeyBrandonB, a creator who spent years making mind-bending cinematic videos for YouTube and beyond. These things are sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, seriously.
We'll get into how he built all of that creative engine, what his workflow looked like before AI, what it looks like now, and whether these new tools are actually democratizing storytelling or just raising the bar for everyone.
Brandon, welcome to The Neuron. It's great to have you.
It's a pleasure to be here, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Also, what a lovely intro. What a great, what a warm stage to welcome into.
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Chapter 2: What unique filming techniques does Brandon use with iPhones?
So I kind of divulged in the space that I was really passionate about, which is these kind of visual effect videos using, um, like after effects skills that I'd learned at a younger age again through YouTube. Um, and. putting that kind of like visual trickery into my videos. Originally very inspired by Zach King.
To be honest, he is still an incredible inspiration to us today, but kind of went down that avenue. And I guess at that point, because I then had the experience of both working in production, but then also on YouTube, kind of brought those two worlds together and within a month managed to grow about a million followers. Amazing. Oh my God.
that is really fast what the heck so at that point i kind of looked around i went okay cool i think i think i think there's a real opportunity here to start trying to grow and scale this out and thankfully i got a ton of support from woody incline who i was working with at the time who then really kind of helped me on my journey and my path onto that next stage and uh from there the rest is history i guess five years later we're now up to it's about 25 million across platforms and
It just, day by day, just consistently keeps blowing me away of the scale and how far this thing keeps growing.
How many videos did you make in that month? Was that like, you made like 20 videos or was it like you made three or four that just blew up?
Like what? Yeah. So it was about one a day. I was really just pumping these. I mean, my life cycle back then was, I mean, incredibly unhealthy. It was COVID. Everybody's in the same boat. Yeah. I remember thinking at the time, this weird thought, like, I know I'm going to look back at this time and go like, how did I survive this?
Like, I was so almost like breaking the fourth wall aware of like how crazy that stint in my life was. But it was like, I would wake up and I'd then have to just ideate kind of on the spot on my own, try and come up with a video idea, but within the confinement of a house and what props that I could source.
And then also only being able to have the production team that was my family that of course have no production training or experience whatsoever. So kind of like...
on the fly teaching them how to shoot and like how to be like prop hands etc and sometimes help me build props but anyway i'd come up with the idea which some days were easy and i'd do it within 10 minutes and other days i would drain half a day with nothing just still spinning sitting waiting for the idea um to develop i would then go and try and source or build whatever props i needed to try and choreograph with my parents my brother um to help me try and shoot the video and then for the next
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Brandon face while creating videos during COVID?
At Adobe Max last year, when they showed off the auto rotoscope tool, like you could hear the oxygen suck out of the room as people were like... Here's the thing we hate doing. Nobody likes rotoscoping.
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, that was really, really exciting. So I would then work on the video, I guess it's traditional After Effects pipeline. And then I would bring it back into Premiere to do my last little time remap and last touches doing add a mix, add a grade, and then send it off and post it. And my cycle would start again. Amazing. That was the before.
And how much time does that take from beginning to end then?
Good question. Well, to be honest, I was forcing myself to do it within a day. So it was a sprint. So it was whether this video should take three weeks or not, you got a day to do it. And that was a really fun exercise for me. And I think that was the experience that made me lose the whole like perfectionism idea and just go. It's really where I've kind of like embodied this philosophy that
you know, of a project that you do 50% of your time is spent getting 90% of the project together. And the other 50% is spent getting that last 10% together. And I always just think now it's like, cool, maybe get your projects to like 95%. Maybe that's like a good number, but ultimately that, that last 5% is really only the things that you notice.
You think it's the stuff that's going to bug everyone else, but ultimately people are just engrossed into the story and the last 5%. Well, if it's at the last 5%, it's too late. And it, It's not because of the story. It's because you've noticed a tiny little weird thing in the background that there's a voice in your head that's eating at you to fix it.
It trained me to drop those and just really focus on the things that the audience really cares about. So that was a great experience.
That's awesome.
I relate to that doing a daily newsletter because we have to publish every day. So I can't be precious about anything. I often am and I'll sometimes work really late because of it. But even still, it's like you got, I think it's a really good process to just publish daily if you can. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How has AI transformed Brandon's content creation workflow?
And these two major passions of mine have now just merged together into this one space where I get to be doing the two things I love.
at once I think for filmmaking to be at its core problem solving to continue to like really live on I think the pipeline needs to keep changing I think we as filmmakers need to keep being on our toes because I think every time there's innovation a new format for telling stories emerges and I want to be a part of one of those those new cusps
You know, that George Lucas moment where, you know, he found ILM because suddenly there's a new way to use compute to create these incredible stories, stories that no one had ever been able to tell before. Or kind of the Steve Jobs Pixar moment where suddenly compute's got good enough where you can create these animated...
toys and characters inside of films to tell stories that had never been told before. Like I really hope and think that's what this is and what's happening right now with AI. And we are going to find a brand new way to tell stories that no one thought was possible a decade ago. And I really hope that we get to be a part of that journey discovering it.
So a couple of lightning round questions. So what is your favorite model that you're using right now? If you have one. And then the second part of that question is what do you want from the models that they can't do now, but you're excited to see them do in the next like 12 months?
Great question for, uh, from an interface standpoint, um, I'm using Firefly more than anything, uh, from a model standpoint, I'm probably using like a Gemini, like nano banana for like actual image asset creation. But my future wish is, uh,
agentic i think agentic is really exciting me right now and i'm sort of in my infancy spoke about the ed sheeran analogy of like the dirty tap i'm in the dirtiest tap of agentic right now and i'm creating some bodged agents right now that are a little bit messy and all over the place what are you using Co-work.
Awesome. Cool. Awesome. Had to ask.
Had to ask. Yeah. Which I'm having a lot of fun doing and I'm learning a lot very quickly. But it's interesting. It feels like at the speed I'm learning, new tools are coming out as rapidly. So it really is just a constant kind of speed run, which is exciting. But... I kind of like purposely try and jump around a ton of different tools as well.
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