- Hey, I'm MatPat
and this is the Wired Autocomplete Interview.
[upbeat music]
This is a journey in self-discovery today, my friends.
So join me.
[upbeat music]
Let's see what we got here.
What is MatPat's full name?
Matthew Patrick.
People to this day still ask me, what's your name?
And it's like, it's right there.
It's literally right there.
Wouldn't it be weird if it was like
Brandon Rogers or something like that?
So MatPat was one of those things
that came about in middle school.
So I grew up in Medina, Ohio
and at the time, two elementary schools
merged into middle school
and all the kids from the other elementary school,
they were like Matthew Patrick?
You're MatPat.
And all my friends from my original elementary school
were like, how did we never think of that?
And it just kinda stuck from there.
So MatPat became the go-to name.
What did MatPat gave the Pope?
So infamously about what, six years ago,
I was invited to be a digital ambassador to the Pope.
And so I got to meet the Pope,
and as representative of the online gaming community,
I gave him a Steam code for the game Undertale.
Not the physical copy, mind you, the Steam code.
For those of you who don't know,
Undertale is a game all about solving problems
with pacifist solutions.
Where it's not just about fighting and killing,
but actually coming to agreements with people
and finding out what they need and having conversations
with them, which felt like a really good example
of the positive messaging that gaming can have.
What is MatPat favorite game?
At this point, so much of the games that I play
have been for work,
things that need theories about or are popular games.
But my true favorite games are Chrono Trigger
and EarthBound from the Super Nintendo era.
Chrono Trigger is a game all about time travel
and manipulating the future
and saving the world from an alien threat.
And EarthBound is basically a wacky adventure
of you with psychic powers
going around your hometown fighting giant ants
and evil moles and again,
saving the world from an evil alien power.
What is MatPat known for?
I'm the nerdy guy online who says,
but that's just a theory, a game theory.
Or film theory, style theory, food theory, et cetera.
I'm the theory guy on YouTube.
I take science, math, history, and deep nerdy research
and fuse it with nerdy topics like movies, TV, video games,
things like that to come up with wacky solutions.
What is MatPat doing now?
I am retired.
I retired about three weeks ago as we're recording this.
It is great.
What does that mean?
That means that I have less time spent in a recording booth
polishing and writing episodes.
And it gives me more time to pursue things like
the podcast that I do and collaborations like this
and the mystery lo-fi project that I have going on.
Or creators in fashion where we spotlit
a bunch of different creators who are doing
amazing work in the apparel space.
So really at this point,
my job has transitioned away from online talent
and online personality
and into a creator who is telling cool stories
and trying to uplift the next generation of creators.
[whooshing]
Seamless.
Where did the MatPat PNG come from?
I was one of, if not the first PNG tuber,
that is you using a flat cutout
of yourself and animating it around on screen
so that way you don't have to appear on camera.
And that really was born out of, when I started my channel,
I was destitute in New York and in between jobs,
and I didn't have money for good camera equipment,
good lighting, things like that.
And so I didn't like the way that I looked online
and so I'm like, lemme just do everything in VO
and then just we inserted this little PNG
of me to represent me on camera.
So that image has persisted and withstood the test of time.
I think I can maybe do it again.
It's like.
I don't know if I'm getting the angle right,
but this is updated for 2024.
When did MatPat retire?
A couple weeks ago I did my last video.
It was March 9th, 2023, 2024.
And it has been great.
It has been so wonderful and celebratory to have this time,
and so thank you, thank you for 13 years,
and I'm so excited for what the next couple have to offer.
Why is MatPat so smart?
I feel like that is not necessarily
a sentiment that is shared across a wide swath
of the internet, so thank you.
What I would say is I was lucky enough to have parents
and teachers that really fostered
a sense of curiosity in me when I was growing up.
They told me that school was my job
and that the best thing to be in life is a lifelong learner
and to question everything.
I recognize that I was in a really fortunate position
where not a lot of people have that support around them.
And so if I can serve as that to the next generation
of people watching online video, that's awesome.
How does MatPat edit his videos?
Poorly and slowly.
I believe the videos that I edited myself were compared
to a bad PowerPoint presentation at one point.
[laughing]
That's why we hired on a lot of editors, my friends.
I recognized early on about maybe two
or three years into my YouTube career
that I was not an editor.
And for me to actually make the show
what I had always envisioned it could be, I would need years
of practice and training and I just didn't have that.
And so that's when we partnered up with
one of my earliest collaborators.
His name was Ronnie Edwards,
and he was an expert in flash animation
and he was the man who truly made "Game Theory"
look the way that I always wanted it to look.
And together the show was able to really thrive and grow,
and at this point now with us producing
between 11 and 13 videos every single week.
So that's unsustainable and why I had to retire.
[laughing]
At this point, we have an army of around 20 editors
and they are fantastic.
They're some of the most talented people in the world.
And as a result, it's one of those things
where the editors now have their own editing school
where they train up the next generation of editors,
and it's kind of a rite of passage in a lot of ways
to bring in kind of the upcoming group of editors.
[grunting]
Smooth.
[chuckling]
Is MatPat coming back to YouTube?
Yes and no.
Yes, in so far as I'm popping on for new projects.
I just did this fashion show over on "Style Theory"
and "Game Theory" where we spotlit a bunch
of creators doing awesome work in the apparel space.
There's a new project
that's gonna be launching in a couple weeks.
It's this music mystery project where it's a lo-fi channel
and you can lean back and relax and do homework to it,
but hidden in the cracks of it,
there's a mystery and a narrative attached to it
for all you lore hounds out there.
So is there a day where I might start a new channel?
Maybe, but not for a long, long time.
Is MatPats?
Is MatPat on "Jeopardy"?
No.
500,000 people signed a petition to get me on "Jeopardy".
Nothing.
Not even the college tournament.
The kids tournament, come on, throw me a bone, man.
[chuckling]
It has always been a life goal of mine
to be a game show host.
I think it would be super fun.
I love playing games, but I also love hosting games,
and then someone else connected us
with people from "Jeopardy"
and they never got back to our emails.
[chuckling]
So, I feel like that ship has sailed.
Is MatPat a millennial?
Very clearly, yes.
You can tell a person's generation
by what they call Instagram,
but I'm not cool for any of
those so I just call it Instagram.
[chuckling]
But we have members on our team
that keep me hip with the trends.
We have Ash on our team who's our resident Gen Z.
And so anytime I'm like, hey is this cheugy to say?
She's like, the fact that you called it cheugy is cheugy.
All right, duly noted.
Is MatPat in the new "FNaF" movie?
Yes, yes I am.
It was an incredible experience.
Never before in my life would I have imagined
that I would be able to be on an actual film set
of that size, of that caliber.
And not only to be in a movie,
but then to see reaction compilations
of people seeing me in the movie
and theaters erupting in cheers.
I am at 28 minutes and 22 seconds into the movie
and the go-to line there is the classic line
that I say all the time.
But hey, you know, it's just the theory.
And audiences really enjoyed that.
Will I be in the new "FNaF" movie?
I don't know, time will tell.
My schedule's open, Scott.
Transition.
[whooshing]
All right, does MatPat have a podcast?
Kind of.
Our GT live channel, which is our live streaming channel,
I've always kind of run as a podcast where yes,
there's gaming attached to it,
but really I want there to be
a large conversational component
at the beginning, at the end.
So that way it feels like
you're just hanging out on the couch.
So that is probably the closest thing that we produce.
I am also the official host of "Like & Describe",
YouTube's first official trends podcast.
But no, do I personally have an official podcast?
No, I don't.
I host one, I have a live stream, but I do not have one.
Does MatPat regret selling his channel?
For context, I sold the Theorist brand
and the Theory channels
to a company named Lunar X at the end of 2022.
Do I regret it?
Not in the slightest.
It was the single best decision
that I could have possibly made.
The ability to kind of scale out what we've been doing
and have more resources to attack more of these projects
that were outside of my personal expertise,
our team's personal expertise,
our wheelhouses, has been wonderful.
One of the things that you don't really appreciate
until you're in the position is when you employ people,
that's a heavy burden
and that's a huge responsibility to take on.
And so to be able to offload some of
that responsibility onto a separate company
and to know that there was financial stability there,
to know that they were experts in hiring and processes
and this and that has been tremendous.
MatPat movies and TV shows.
The "Five Nights at Freddy's" movie
is probably one of the biggest ones
and the most known of all of those.
I also did another movie called "Hero Mode"
where I played myself
as an online commentator talking about,
oh, this game company's making terrible decisions.
I'm in two "Transformers" series,
two animated series featuring the Transformers.
And that's a huge deal.
In fact Mark Hamill is one of the voices
in one of those series.
So it's like, oh my gosh, I did a project with Mark Hamill,
if you squint at it.
We were at booths in probably separate parts of the world
at two very different times, but we worked together.
MatPat sub count.
I honestly don't know, we have so many damn channels.
I think my last total ended up being about
41 million across the YouTube channels.
And then on Twitter, I think I'm like 5 million followers.
And then on Instagram, it's 1 million.
And so in total, it's probably around 50 million.
At the end of the day, the thanks goes back to you.
Without you watching, without you subscribing,
without you clicking on that video giving us a chance,
we wouldn't be able to do this.
I wouldn't be able to employ all those people.
I wouldn't be able to have a team of 20 editors
and a full staff of 40 people around us
to make the videos that we do.
So you're welcome.
Without you, none of it's possible.
So thank you guys.
Transition.
[whooshing]
And I think this is the last board.
Who did MatPat married?
I married a beautiful woman named Stephanie Cordato,
now Stephanie Patrick.
She's my best friend.
She's my partner in everything.
We met in college.
We met programming video games together, funny enough.
We both needed an extra math credit in college
and neither of us wanted to take calculus.
It would've been 3D calculus and it's like, why?
That's stupid.
So instead we took this course that was considered
to be an easy A, it was video game programming.
We ended up sitting next to each other in the class.
While everyone else was coasting through the class
because it was very much an easy A course,
Steph and I were the try hards of the group.
[chuckling]
The two of us kept trying to out compete each other
for best game in the class every week.
But the final project was you had to partner
with someone in the class.
We ended up partnering with each other.
Everyone else did one level of a basic mini golf game.
We did a five level quest with eight enemy types,
all with different attack patterns, scrolling backgrounds,
and a final boss battle with multiple phases.
It was the second half of freshman year in college
and we've been hanging out together ever since.
Who bought MatPat's channel?
Yeah, who bought MatPat's channel?
It's a company named Lunar X.
They see YouTube brands as kind of the next generation
of the biggest brands in the world,
both entertainment wise and product wise.
And they're able to kind of deliver the resources,
manpower, and expertise of really scaling those out
and doing things that we ourselves always wanted to do
but were holding ourselves back on.
And last, last and hopefully not least,
who is Ash to MatPat?
Ash is our resident Zoomer.
Ash is 24.
They are my co-host and producer on our GT live channel.
To me, our relationship is one of older statesman
and younger person teaching me
how to stay up with the times.
They tell me when I have
to transition away from using the word drip.
[chuckling]
And just in general, keeping me up to date
on all the spiciest of TikTok memes.
Awesome, we're gonna toss it slightly off camera
so I don't knock any.
Oh, I definitely ruined something
behind the camera at this point.
Thank you Wired for this Autocomplete Interview
and I will see you next time.
And that's not a theory.
That right there, that's a fact.
See ya.
[upbeat music]