Meet The Genius Who Made Diary of a CEO Go Viral - Anthony Smith

0:00I'm the director of trailers at Flight Story.

0:07Which ultimately means I create the trailers for the diary of a CEO.

0:12Anthony Smith:Anthony Smith, the man behind the world's biggest podcast. The master of moments that make you watch and keep watching. How much goes into let's try and manufacture this moment. How you can almost hack into a viewer's brain. go into their psychology and pull out all the information that you need to entice them to buy a product to watch a show when you actually understand how the brain is wired you can get people hooked onto your content you can get people hooked onto your product we cannot stand living in ignorance when we have to live in ignorance and have to live with not knowing it we'll create a story in our mind which concludes the point and so always leaving wanting more is the cliffhanger technique that we use to make them go okay i now need to go to the episode to watch the full thing otherwise it's going to drive me crazy what is it really like having steven bartlett as a boss

1:13anthony thanks for being here thank you for having me i'm really excited for this one and we always start off the same way so who are you and what problem do you solve yes so i am anthony Smith I'm the director of trailers at flight story which ultimately means I run the team that create the trailers especially for the dialogue of CEO which is our I believe the fastest growing podcast globally now which is amazing and so my job there is to create an exciting and succinct and engaging emotionally driven trailer and introduction before every episode and my problem that I'm trying to solve I believe is twofold so problem a I believe it's to prove that podcasts channels brands any any of those can has the opportunity to have emotionally and narrative driven video content that achieves whatever their marketing goal is and you don't have to fork out hundreds and thousands of pounds which is what we've been led to believe in the past so that's problem a and problem b is to show that editors and to show people can become the editors to to solve problem one and so that's a lot of what i do on social media now and with my team is to give the tricks and the tips that I've developed over my career on how you can almost hack into a viewer's brain go into their psychology and pull out all the information that you need to entice them to buy a product to watch a show to take part in a particular service and what are normally the the symptoms that you might be experiencing I'm guessing one's going to be you think budget is going to solve everything what are the other things people might be coming up against i think so budget is a huge one i think when i ran a company for example budget was always that elephant in the room and i think for a lot of time is because we assume if you want something of the highest quality you have to pay for the highest quality and in essence there is some truth to that if you want a rolex you're not going to get a cheap one but i think a lot of the time what people forget is creating stories is something that we do with our minds and that we put onto a piece of paper or put onto an editing screen and so if you learn the tricks on how to tell a an engaging and an emotionally driven story everything that comes after that is just helping to create that emotional rollercoaster and creating that path forward you don't need the most expensive cgi to tell a compelling story you don't need to hire the biggest actors you don't even need the i mean we have like eight or nine cameras on the dial cio but you don't need all of that to start a podcast and to tell a story what you need is just that idea and you to know the certain tricks and elements within what makes people gravitate towards that idea so budget is a huge one and I think as well there's a there's a bit of the when it comes to video I still think depending on where you are in the world and depending on what stage of business you're at there's a lot of stigmas behind it and so especially when I started the company I think the stigma for video was video was there to make your landing page go a little bit higher on Google for example and so the business a lot of the businesses I worked with when I started out was I just need a video to push me up the Google rankings and in essence there was a part of that again that's true that's what you're being told by agencies and marketers at that point but the video still needs to work and it still needs to achieve a marketing goal there's no point making a video that just falls flat and has no impact on an audience just because it pushes you up on higher on a website because once they're there they can watch a video and then they'll click off again because it's it's not it's not sold on what they needed to sell and so i think the stigma of why people needed video is a huge one and i think for editors I believe the biggest stigma for them is that you need to go to film school to learn how to become a proper editor you need to be able to afford the highest spec of software in order to become an editor you need all of these elements going for you in order to achieve that goal and with me I accidentally found myself as an editor I had no intention of becoming one and now I I mean I hate saying this but it gets I get reminded of it I've sort of now found myself in a position where the work I've created has has become almost like the front of how podcast trailers and introductions are made I get messages about this all the time I have people asking me questions all the time on how to make it a viral video or how to make an engaging video or how do you tell stories or what can I do to boost the presence of my podcast through video and I never set out to do any of that because I never wanted to be an editor all I wanted to do was tell stories and how I learned to tell stories was completely free of charge and they're the sort of methods that I want to teach people we do owe you a thank you because we have I'll say the word borrowed so many ideas from you when it comes to our trailers.

7:11So this feels like it's going to be a masterclass in storytelling. You said earlier, Anthony, about hacking the human brain. So let's dive into it. Why is psychology so important? Psychology is so important because I think when you understand that there's this prevailing narrative that every single person is unique and it's a beautiful narrative we're all unique and and the reality of it is a lot of the time we're not our brains are wired in certain ways there's I mean if you a lot of the time people focus on the negative side of psychology and how the brain works and and hacking and manipulation like manipulation for example is a very negative connotation to it and if you look at how the brain is wired for example with addiction addiction is very much seen as a negative stance because for a lot of the time it is you know addicted to alcohol addicted to social media addicted to spending addicted to food all of that is coming from how our brains are wired and the psychology behind that and the trauma that we carry with all of this stuff they're all very different elements one's alcohol one's spending one's social media and for a lot of people you'd be you'd probably say i'm not addicted to tiktok i just like scrolling through tiktok and that's not as bad as being addicted to alcohol for example because alcohol has like it's clear with the evidence on how that affects your body and affects your systems so we almost feel like addiction is bad on certain things great on other things and the reality of it is the same mechanisms going on in your brain that's making you addicted to alcohol are the same mechanisms going on into your brain that's making you addicted to social media making people addicted to love for example that all of these mechanisms are working together and so when you actually understand how the brain is wired from I guess from a brutal sense if you're a marketer if you're a storyteller if you're an editor if you're creating podcasts or you're trying to sell a brand knowing how the human brain works means that you can get people hooked onto your content you can get people hooked onto your product you can get people you can drive people to a certain place in time or a certain moment that you want them to make a decision.

9:50And ultimately, it does come through that word of manipulation, which has that bad connotation to it. No one wants to manipulate anyone. But that's literally how people go around their lives. That's how we buy things. It's through emotional manipulation a lot of the time. And it's not always a bad thing. You know, it's being aware of it. Of course, you need to be aware of it. But from a marketing perspective, hacking into people's brains and playing psychology to get the outcome of your goal doesn't necessarily have to be a negative connotation. It's just how business works. It's how marketing works.

10:29That's how you get people to make decisions is playing to their emotions and playing to those sort of elements of their brain. so if if we invited somebody in today a brand or a media company that we're doing they were doing everything wrong what what are the what are typically the things that they'd be getting wrong when it comes to storytelling or hacking the brain i think the first thing would be assuming that what they're doing without any evidence is correct a lot of brands are emotionally led themselves and a good example of this would be a brand that started because they had a problem and a lot of companies actually start where they've found either a gap in the market or something that's affected them that wants to push them so the actual idea of creating a brand based on a problem isn't a bad thing but it's when they then do not use data or the evidence or any of the marketing that's happened before them to drive them to make decisions on what they need to sell how they need to sell it or what they need to sell and so for example charities I use charities as a great example for this and so you'll have a charity say save the children and especially when tv adverts were more and more of the hype you would see an advert all the time it's usually in black and white it's sad footage sad music a voiceover coming over the top showing the reality of their situation now that's a charity that wants you to donate money to their cause on the flip side you have another charity which sells products for say cancer research or for a mind charity but their goal is to sell products and the money from that product part of that goes to the charity their situation on how they brand should be completely different in my opinion to how a charity like save the children would work because what you're trying to do with save the children is you still want to achieve the same you want to play to the human brain you want to like trigger certain emotions but the emotion here is you want people to feel like sympathy for the children you want them to feel almost feel a little bit of guilt there's that it's all about that negativity um yeah that negativity bias where you feel a little bit guilty of like everything that you have and yet you're watching these people suffer so you want to give to that cause whereas when you're a charity that's selling a product i don't think guilt is going to make me want to buy a pair of boxer shorts i don't think sadness is going to want to make me buy a pair of boxer shorts what's going to make me want to buy a boxer shorts is probably something that makes me feel good about myself and i might actually want to play to those emotions and so where you've got and this and successful charities that are doing this do this really well save the children raises millions and millions and millions companies that are selling products can also raise millions millions millions for example there's a company called oddballs which sells boxer shorts for i believe it's for testicular cancer and so when i see an odd boards campaign I feel good about myself I like the designs the designs are colorful they're bold and the they're selling me like how I would feel if I'm wearing these boxer shorts they're almost selling me the same way as how another product would sell if they're selling me the reality of where that money goes to I might not want to buy the boxer shorts they tend to be more expensive for example they it's not something that my brain just connects the dots to whereas this is just a simple cause if i give five pounds i know exactly where that's going this money's going towards a product more so in my mind and some of that money is then going to a charity but in essence you need me to be attracted to the product first before the charity and so So I think this is like a good example of where very similar brands in a sense that they're both charities and ultimately the end goal is to drive as much money into that charity as possible to make a difference.

15:04But how they outreach to their audience has to change because their business model is very different in just that one sense, one selling a product, one selling a cause. and I think that's one of the biggest problems a lot of people make and where that psychology would come in is you might assume as a charity we always have to sell on the harsh realities and the sadness and that guilt factor but that's not going to make people spend money on your product so it feels like from a make sure I've got this right it feels like if you're a brand you should start with what emotion am I trying to sell into before just going in totally blind with look how great we are yeah 100 emotions the emotions are the key driving factor for how you buy anything and so any transaction that you make in life is an emotional one whether you're buying a car a lot of the time you're but most people buy a car because of how that car will make them feel i've had this conversation with my friends where i don't care about cars i care about how much money I can save based on what car I get so that's my driving factor but when I go and see a car which I've recently got myself a car I there's still cars that I could have gotten cheaper in reality there was and I bought the fourth tier of that car because it made me feel slightly better each time he showed me the additional extra every time the screen got a tiny bit bigger and I felt a little bit the seats were a little bit higher and then I had a tiny little Ford Fiesta and my new car is now a four by four and that emotional I don't know what he it was a good car salesman but ultimately how I felt driving that car and sitting in that car led to the final decision i'm sort of because i'm more aware of this stuff and money is a very important factor at the time for me with car decision buying i did go back and forth on that ultimately led to the same thing but i'll talk to my friends and some of them never seem to have huge amounts of money they don't seem to invest they don't seem to do that they don't really care too much about the future or they'll moan about money and yet then they'll go and buy a very expensive car and you'll speak to them about it and they will go off on this tangent on how amazing this car is and it's almost like they're pulling out clear stereotypes of what it means to drive this car and they're very they're very different in other aspects of their life so this is like a societal emotional bomb that's gone off inside of their brain based on how this car was marketed to how you make them feel they won't feel like that about a house for example they won't feel that way about clothes but a car that's grabbed them in that emotional sense because of how that brand has positioned themselves and so emotion is key to any decision that we make and a key part of how we want to sell and how we want to grab people's attention is playing to emotions and this is something I share a lot which is this emotional roller coaster and no one's life is a flat line if if you meet anyone whose life is completely flat they're probably not that much of an interesting person to start with and they probably don't find themselves that interesting everyone goes through peaks and troughs everyone has their highs and lows and so any marketing that you create or any decision you make as a brand is you've got to understand that that's how that's how people react and that's how people also trust brands is when they find things that react closely to them and that they can reflect onto so yeah emotions when it comes to any brand should be one of the first discussions that they make is their brand has to make their audience feel a certain way so then flipping that from the creative standpoint so obviously there's data driven decisions that we need to make and i know you and the team are massive on that and there's kind of gut-based decisions which probably feel more like where the emotion lives so how do you balance the both and marry them together so a great example i mean an example that we use so we're a data-led company and a big part of what we do is when we test the thumbnail to see what what people are most engaging with in terms of topics and conversations and so when i start a trailer the hook for example is 95 data led very few times when i go with my gut and i have reasons and justifications for that it's never just my gut instinct it's always something backed up in the back of my mind which could have been previous data for example or previous life experience that i've learned from it but we'll receive the top performing trending topics that will then inform how the trailer is created so that's the data the emotional side is how i make those data points relatable and feel how i want them to feel within the trailer so you're still getting the data in so a good example is the winning thumbnail of the episode could be doing this will save you x amount a year or actually let's a real example would be we recently done a world war three round table and the winning thumbnail for that i believe was we are already in world war three and that's been tested against hundreds of other thumbnails throughout the entire episode of different topics so nuclear war ai war proxy wars etc etc and that was the winning thumbnail So I knew from a hook perspective, it needed to start with this idea of we are already in World War Three.

21:15The emotional part is how I sell that point. And so that would be the music that I use, the B-roll that I use, how the guest says it. Because they can say the same thing about six, seven times in a podcast. You choose the right one or you restructure it to make sure it has that huge impact. And so all of those elements is that emotional side. And that's how I get people to make decisions based on emotions. But it's all data backed up from that one win and fun now. I'm going to sound like an idiot now, if I have permission, because a lot of people will be listening and they are wanting to be better editors, better copywriters, better marketeers.

21:55So from your experience, how do you perfect the perfect hook?

22:04what secrets can i give you everything i'll give you everything so how to perfect the perfect hook ultimately you want it to achieve i believe there's there's three main compartments of a successful hook one does it have the emotional impact that is needed and you can achieve that in several ways it could be the music that you use it could be the statement that they say it could be the text that you use it could be a whole host of different things working together but you need to have that emotional impact straight away if I'm watching something and within five seconds I feel meh I'll scroll on and so when you I mean some topics are easier than another having someone say we're already in world war three is it's quite an emotional statement in itself and so where i would then combine that and enhance that is through the music or through a reaction shot from steve or from another guest if it's a round table for example the text will use a certain font for war and um all of those will then drive that emotional factor but you want your first five seconds to almost like have that emotional punch and so the way you can do that is you can put the end first for example usually a lot of the time the conclusion is more impactful than the opening because the opening is all about context but the conclusion is where they might sum up that point and that has the most impactful lines that they have and so that makes it way to the start and then as an editor you then need to try and bridge that gap to then bring it back into the context and again there's ways you can do that through sound design there's where you can do that through spoken language and so a lot of what we try to do is hit them straight away with maybe a fact with a statistic or with an emotional trigger word that will make people be like okay okay i need to listen a little bit more than this so that's the first side is the emotional the second time i think um is consistency so especially as a brand with doak we have we're lucky in a sense that we have the consistency of the studio background for example or we will test out using steve because he's a face that people will know who watched the podcast and so that consistency i think is quite important because it creates that familiar familiarity this is where i used to have speech therapy as a kid because i couldn't speak so there's certain words that come out which come out completely random um so that creates the familiarity uh for the audience so instantly it creates a bit of trust there if you're a fan of doak for example you'll know that this is a doak you can sit back you can watch because based on everything else you've watched with doak you've enjoyed the episodes etc etc and again the way you can do that That is through brand colors, backdrops, certain hosts having the same host, for example, a logo.

25:16And so that creates the trust with the audience that you're getting something that I might have seen before in a certain sense. So I know that I can go on this journey with you. And then for me, the third one, which started off at the end of the trailer, it only used to be at the end of the trailer, but now has actually been brought in for the hook as well is this idea of always leaving wanting more which is one of the great lines of show business and ultimately it's given away that promise within the first this is probably extending now to about the first 15 seconds that promise is if you watch this you're going to know the solution to that and so the reason why i brought it forward was because people used to love, hate the cliffhangers that I used to do at the end, the traders.

26:07And the big reason for that was because humans just want and know the answers to everything. But that's just how we work. We cannot stand living in ignorance. Very few people can. And when we have to live in ignorance and have to live with not knowing it, we'll create a story in our mind which concludes the point. And that's usually a lot of the time why a lot of arguments and a lot of disagreements happen on social media for example is because you're not getting the full picture so you create the end picture and that disagrees with someone else's end picture because you're not being told what the end picture is so it's left open and again this is that's a human psychology trick that seems negative but it can actually work in your favor because next thing you know you've got your viewers debating and talking with each other and creating this community of whether they agree with this person or not even if it's got nothing to do with the actual end point and i i weirdly find that quite fascinating when people are having these full-on debates about something it's like this this ain't even the answer right you just jumped to this conclusion and you've gone you've run away with this and you're and you're sort of trying to figure it out and so always leaving one to more is the cliffhanger technique that we use to make them go okay i now need to go to the episode to watch the full thing otherwise it's going to drive me crazy and thank you i see a lot of those comments was like okay you got me i'm going to youtube now and um i brought that in sooner because from the date just from the data in terms of trying to get it to the point where most people might start clicking off statistically so I'll try and move that a little bit closer and closer and closer so they get that little promise of a solution so every so often they go oh I need to know that oh I need to know that oh I need to know that and the only way I'm going to do it is through watching the entire episode so they're the three most important things I would say for a hook nice it's it's beautiful because obviously you're creating art that is completely science-backed in terms of there's there's an answer and there's a reason for everything she was saying earlier Anthony about how we all think we're this individual being but we're all very very similar so that that helps us when it comes to hacking the mind but there's probably also a bit of a contradiction of like knowing your audience and we could go out on the streets of London all three of us and speak to a thousand people and 999 might be DOAC fans and there might be one schmuck that says what's a DOAC So how do you understand your audience and how do you appeal to them?

28:49I love it. What's a Dalwack? So how do we understand our audience? Again, it's through, like, we release two episodes a week. So that works out to about 104 episodes a year, 104 trailers a year. I've worked here for I guess like three years eight months or something so that's like 400 odd trailers 400 odd episodes where I've sat through the comments I've sat through the community I've spoken to people we've used we've gone through the data in terms of where people stop watching the most where people are most engaged we listen to the comments of what people have liked what people haven't liked and i think ultimately where we know we've known our audience is the impact that it's had for us i mean we're the fastest growing podcast and we're doing we're doing so many different things and that's where i guess it gets also quite tricky is like which are the things that work and which other things are not um for me a big gut instinct is when people start borrowing your elements and then those people then message me and say this has actually had a huge impact on it we have guests who like will pin the trailer for example to their channel we've had guests who actually use the trailer as a way to introduce themselves when they're about to walk out on stage to give a speech so for them it's worked in a sense that this sells me completely this is perfect for my audience to know exactly who i am and what i offer and so it's all of these tiny little nuggets that are coming in to what we feel an audience works and partly as well is thinking broader so for me from a trailer perspective trailers have been around for hundreds of years like it's just not been in the podcast industry because the podcast industry is still, I mean, I still think it's a sleeping giant.

31:04It's still a baby in that sense, you know, but trailers have had a significant impact on marketing for years and years and years and years. And I think part of that is because it goes back to the core of what makes a good trailer, which is storytelling and playing to emotions. data points will always show that people make decisions based on emotions that's always been said people we know how people can get addicted we also know how people can get emotionally attached to certain points we also know how for thousands upon thousands of years the way people consumed news the way people reacted to news and the way people got an understanding of the world they live in is through thousands of years of people telling stories you know back in the times of gathering around fires that's how news first broke out you know frank i always love mary shelley's frankenstein because that started with her telling a story around a fire literally and then it became a book now it's become films now it's become tv series now it's a roller coaster epic universe now it's a character people queue up to go and meet now it's a character that people dress up as halloween that one story around a campfire has created one of the biggest legacies in in the horror genre and so i think when it comes to knowing what your audience wants this again this is where the psychology aspect comes and so it's understanding there's tools obviously that a marketer needs to know what platform works best for your audience how do you find that out well it's through testing it's finding out where people are going from how many people are clicking on watching these videos how long are they staying to watch how long is the retention how what links are being clicked on most at what points on what social platforms so there's all of that stuff but there's also what in its purest core what does a human want and what does a human get in life and how do they react in life and when it comes to knowing what your audience audience wants it's sort of combining that data led of tests constant experimentation of thumbnails of topics we've tested so many different aspects of a trailer people just don't know how many aspects of the trailer that we test but we've tested certain music certain texts certain length of hooks certain length of um full foundation we've tested whether we start on Steve whether we start on the guests we've tested whether we have a backdrop behind the text we've tested when the b-roll comes in we've tested what type of b-roll we've tested all of these aspects so we're getting tiny bits of data which are also coming together to create this cohesive experience but then we also want to make it as different as we can and make it feel as fresh as we can because again we feel we want the audience to have that familiarity of doak but we want them to feel like they're watching a brand new film every single time they're clicking on a trailer so they're the tiny elements of what we know an audience wants but then you also need to take a step further as a brand and realize that there's a whole history of human knowledge and how humans think before us and it's tapping into those elements and realizing that you can actually then use that to find out what your audience needs and I think a really good a thing I think about a lot because i read a lot of comments on the direct trailers because part of it is i want to know what the community are thinking i want to know whether it's working and that's part of the that's the aspect i want to see if if 99 of the comments are them absolutely hating the trailer okay maybe i should start thinking about what is it about the trailer that they're hating and but the thing that i always find really fascinating is we release the same trailer on three four different platforms and we release it on youtube every single platform has a completely different stance on the guest on the trailer on the episode on the copywriting so if you're purely going based on the audience feedback you're never gonna quite get the big picture because a lot of time people don't really know what they want and again this is coming back to psychology we think we know what we want but we're always drawn to certain things that we can't explain nor do we know that we're being drawn to them and again this is where negativity bias comes in for example we are inherently more and more drawn to negative stats negative emotions we're driven by fear i mean this is why true true crime true crime podcasts and true crime documentaries are some of the most watched genres on netflix and on tv true crime people and the one of the biggest demographics for that is a female audience more i think more women watch true crime documentaries than men do and if you were to talk to someone you might not inherently think that you might think our men are more drawn to the danger side or they're more drawn to the murder i love true crime i'm obsessed with true crime if they're or any sort of conspiracy crime document i love that sort of stuff and then when i started diving deep into it you realize the psychology of it is one of the things i read which i blew my mind was apparently the reason why a huge core of the audience is female is because when they're watching it they want to find out parts of the villain that made them a villain so they can stay away from finding someone or being near someone who is a villain so they're actually watching it from that perspective also because of empathy they're more likely to empathize feel sorry for yeah they're more likely to feel sorry for the victims and the victims families which then means they want to know more about what's happening in the future and how they're going on more and more in life and how they've dealt with it in the off chance that they have to go through something similar with their family member and so the reason why they're watching it is very different to why men are watching it but you just wouldn't naturally assume that's the reason why they're watching true crime documentaries and if you ask a lot of people they probably won't say that's the reason why they're watching true crime documentaries but it's all coming back from like this history of what we know about how the human mind works which is why people know exactly that there's a future for true crime and there's a future for horror and it's just like i mean i read the other day that watching a horror film burns as many calories as doing a 30 minute run i read that stat the other day which sort of blew my mind so genuinely i'm now going to watch horrors more this year so i can try and lose more calories and it's like so i'm i'm genuinely going to do that i'm when it comes to hot i'm going to have an entire horror season and i'm going to try and track in a way my like a calorie deficit to see if it works and um but I love horror anyway that's not the reason why I would say I watch horror the reason why I say I watch horror is because I love the suspense but that's in my brain that's not true it's it's creating this negativity bias of me being drawn towards death and destruction and the suspense and what happens next and all of this stuff this this dark part of our brain that's ticking off that's the thing that's drawing me towards a horror the second i see a monster in a horror film i switch off if i see a monster in a trailer of a horror film i switch off and part of that is because i think that fear that is gone because i know i now know that's the monster i don't have to worry about that anymore if i didn't know what was causing this all these deaths and all this destruction in this film that makes me want to go because maybe there's a part of my brain going is it someone like me is it is it someone i know is it this what is it like is it something that i'm inherently doing that's causing like which will make me have all these problems so that's the that's the part i think of knowing your audience where the psychology really comes in that was the longest answer i think i've ever it was amazing it was amazing i go on tangents um let's stick with that negativity bias then so there's something that i think would be silly not to ask you about so there's probably an editor right at the start of their journey they've got a core skill set down and they're ready to go and take on the big wide world but they're seeing what ai can do i'm probably thinking i'm too late is it is it worth it what would you say to those people this is this is actually one of the most asked questions i get at the moment which i never thought i would ever get as an editor is being asked about ai and technology but that just goes to show how fast this has moved and i think i probably got asked it maybe once last year this year i've been asked it probably about 40 percent of my inbox at the moment is about ai i'm worried about ai i think that's the most important thing it's not even what tools can i use it's i'm thinking of quitting because what's the point AI is going to take it anyway and it's a really difficult question to answer because anyone who thinks they know what the answer is is making it up anyway we don't know the truth we don't know how humans are going to react in a world that's fully AI what I do know is that AI has been around for a long time we just don't really think of it think of certain things as ai so my answer right now to any editor that's pondering the idea of quitting because ai is going to take the job wondering what tools they need to use wondering if there's any future in cgi in hollywood or if there's any future in editing whatsoever at this moment in time we actually have an insane opportunity to become best friends with ai when it comes to editing and any content creation and i say best friend because the idea of a best friend is they're there for you in your highest points are there for you in your lowest points and that's how i sort of see ai ai helps me most when I'm really struggling to create a certain sentence that I want to get across.

42:38AI helps me so much when we have guests on where they're talking extremely articulate about theories or about a certain aspect of science and I'm like and I don't understand it and I genuinely struggle because part of what my job is as a trailer editor is to make every single part of that trailer relatable and understandable to the core broad audience. AI helps me so much with that. AI, the other, I actually done LinkedIn posts about this the other day, where I think it was about a year, year and a half ago, we had Dynamo on the show. And he opened up about a part of his life that was really emotional.

43:21And there was a bit that really shocked me where he would say he would stare into a mirror and he hated his reflection so much he would smash his head repeatedly against this mirror until it would start to bleed and the storyteller in me instantly thought this is a visual moment this is something that I think will have a lot of shock core to the audience and again you always sound it always sounds really weird to me with this because it inherently it does sound evil that this is someone talking about a really dark time in their life and the first thing I think of is like how can I visually bring this to a screen and when you then counteract that to the fact that every morning what from the day I started I gave all my team members a hug when there was like eight nine of us I now do that every morning I come into the office and there's about 70 of us so I'll spend about 15 minutes of my morning hugging people good morning and I'm not gonna stop so there's that I'm a Disney freak I love Disney I literally listen to Disney songs on the way and everyone sort of sees me as like this really like like happy go lucky everything's a musical type apparently I walk with a like I'm I walk someone said this to me the other day I walk like I'm in a musical I walk like I'm about to just go into a slide or something like that and so there's this really weird juxtaposition of who I am and the fact my brain instantly goes into how can we make this dark moment even darker and that's because the marketing hat comes on and I know that this will work for an audience but anyway so a year and a half ago I spent probably about two and a half hours creating when I look back a rather a naff piece of b-roll because obviously there's no real footage of this so i had to create everything from scratch and i used a tiny bit of chat gpt at the time but then i would pull it into after effects and it was two images i created three versions of the image one with a clean glass one with a cracked glass one with a guy with his uh heads behind his head moving back and i would pop it his bone i would mimic his bone structure on the image so i'd create a puppet dot on where you would move your elbow your wrists and then I would individually move those parts of the puppet all of this was for a second of a half of him doing that and that took me two and a half hours just trying to recreate the human body based on an image and then the other day I thought of that moment and I went on um I went on VO3 typed in a prompt 10 minutes later I had something that was arguably a thousand times better it even had like a deck of cards spread out on on the floor to um to really like sell the point that he is dynamo and he's a magician the crack of the glass you saw the cracks come in it create the sound effects of the glass it had the movement after of where he was dazed and coming through so I saved myself probably like two hours and 20 minutes doing that and that's something I really struggled with and on the flip side I learned a lot okay I learned a lot and that is another side of AI that we can probably go into which is what I think is the bad side of AI but the good side of AI is that became my best friend in that moment because that saved me an hour and two hours and 50 minutes those two hours 50 minutes I can either put more effort into the narrative I can put more effort into another one percent I could put more effort into the music or I could go home and spend more time with with my girlfriend that's the beauty of AI is when you use AI as a friend when you use it as a like a partner in crime you can do so much more and you can elevate your work to ways that you never thought you could do some of the work that Cam who does my b-roll for the trailers is doing now just blows my mind and if this is stuff where i would think you would need and originally you would need hundreds of thousands of pounds to do and so when we think about that from the diary of a ceo perspective we're creating assets now that when you look at it should look like they've cost thousands upon thousands of pounds we're not doing that with thousands upon thousands of thousands of pounds i think I think on average it costs about 90p per prompt, like per generation that it creates.

47:55And so we're creating blockbuster style B-roll to now go with our blockbuster style trailers in our blockbuster style narratives on the exact same budget as we had before. That's the beauty of AI. And so that's why I say for an editor, lean into AI as much as you possibly can because it's not going anywhere. We've seen the results of how great it is. We've seen how much money it saved Steve and the company. We've seen how much time it saved the entire flight story crew. We've seen how much it's helped in healthcare. We've seen how much it's helped in Hollywood. We've seen how much it's helped in therapy.

48:34AI is not going anywhere. And so the idea of putting your head in the sand and hoping it goes away, that's not gonna happen. So you've got two options. You either outright refuse to learn it and outright refuse to use it and unfortunately chances are you your job will become obsolete because of that or you lean into it as much as possible and you make it a skill set and you become flexible with this skill set and flexible with this role because they will always need people to help drive the AI they'll always need people to use storytelling there will always be those sort of jobs people are going to go towards someone with AI experience and can do all of that than someone with all that experience but with no ai experience and so that's my biggest that's my biggest piece of advice for any editor and you said there's a bad side that we need to be aware of what did you mean by that so for me this is more of a i guess on a broader point is from so there's two there's two elements which i think for me stand out potentially the most negative one is a study recently came out where they had people i think they were writing a they were writing a paper or something like that one used chat gpt and one didn't and they done brain scans on those individuals and then they found the people who use chat gpt i think it was something crazy but like 40 or 60 percent was using less of their brain than the people not using chat gpt and that sort of i don't know exactly what uh the results were in terms of the actual stats but when i was reading through it all i remember was that it blew my mind and it reminded me of if you don't use this thing it will slowly start to blur and melt and disappear whatever word we want to use and then i started thinking of real life scenarios where years ago my dad and my granddad never needed sat nav they just used they just used their brains they never they they knew all their numbers off by heart i can't recall a single phone number i know mine that's it i know mine and i know my house number because i grew up with a house with a house phone and that's how i remembered it because at the time you didn't have that i don't remember anything like that I barely know where I'm going most of the time on navigation if I'm going if I'm driving anywhere I could have driven to that place 50 times I'm still putting on google maps as a safety but I'm still relying on google maps and so when I get a car and it's got a camera when you reverse I no longer look around and I'm no longer thinking about okay what's going to happen here I'm relying on that camera to make sure that I don't hit anything when you have self a self my dad got a self-driving reverse car thing and he was so happy with it and he just pressed the button and it reversed in and it's just like if you do that over the course of like a few years you're just going to forget how to parallel park and there's some things that aren't that important that you need to remember you don't need to remember a phone number because your phone has it but what i'm saying is is that there will be cut there will come times in our lives where we're equally forgetting more important parts of our lives which we do need emotional connection for example talking to people working within a team talking to a partner how to deal with conflict how to how to problem solve you know part of the reason why I'm I'm good at my job is because there will come times when we have an episode that's out within 24 48 hours I can go on to every single thing I've learned and I can make a trailer in that short amount of time one that I know will work one that I know I can do to the highest quality I can possibly do in that time but I'm that I have that insurance of everything that I've learned is ready to go when it needs to if I didn't have that if there's one sense of a panic or a problem I don't know how I'd react to it because I've not learned it when when there comes a time where you do need to think outside of the box will you be able to do that which then leads on to my second my second problem with AI which is we're becoming so used now to watching the exact same thing and there's a difference between inspiration copying aspects and i guess stealing so a lot of people will take elements of our trailers and use it in their trailers that's for me i only see that as a positive thing because people are learning elements of our trailers they're putting it into theirs they're testing they might be testing whether it's working for them they might have seen where it's working in certain areas they might be trying different they might realize actually this doesn't reflect well on the style of our podcast so they'll try something else all of that stuff's good because you're still learning you're still taking elements of it um when i go on tiktok or instagram reels now there's so much copying of just general social content I feel I feel my brain is just mind numbed from it and I was and I've been thinking there's like this certain comedian in the US and he got really famous by doing reels where it would be a POV of him and he would look over there and then he'll cut to someone on a construction site like and falling off a tractor or something it'll cut back to him he'll look over there and then he'll see someone else on a construction site very different and it's all like stock footage and it's all these funny files that are happening then he'll look again to someone else it was hilarious when i was watching it and i i mean that just speaks to the sort of thing that i want but i just found it so funny how he created this narrative of like he was dressed as he had like the hard hat on and he do this for so many different situations and it was just watching his reaction he created this narrative of lust like this 40 towers slash monty python construction site that's out in front of him and it was so funny and whenever he does it i still watch it and i still laugh now every time i scroll every other video is someone else doing the exact same thing where they're looking over there something happens they look over there it's just not funny and i don't know whether it's because they're not getting the exact mannerisms right i don't know whether it's correct because they're not thinking of the outer picture whereas this guy thought really hard about the clips he would use and in what order these guys are literally just doing a reaction cut to somewhere that's completely different cutting back and it's like creating this fragmentation of my brain of like what's going on here i don't quite get it or is it because in my head i'm like yeah but you're just copying that guy and this guy's like a bit of a goat when it comes to this stuff and um and i think it's a combination of a few things and i think that's my one worry with ai is we're gonna end up in a world where everything's copy and paste everything is created because they know it works in that exact same moment and they're not testing anything new of what else could work what else could we test and um ultimately could that then lead to a generation of video content where we're just watching the exact same thing and we're just getting the exact same response each time and eventually that just goes if you're watching the same construction video again and again and again just with a different face doing it um and so they're the two they're the two things which i'll worry a little bit about ai but luckily obviously with the the team at diary of a ceo you've got the innovators and the pioneers i think when we think about our audience i think there'll be two people two types of people that we watching this they'll be the the people that are the creatives the freelancers that want to kind of learn about what you do how you do it the psychology and I think we've focused about a lot of the like what happens after the episode but you will also have your diary of a CEO fans people that understand want to know how much goes into it and things like that so I was really really curious and you might shoot me down and say well actually that's not how it works and what do I know but obviously that we're sitting in a room with somebody that knows what works so when you're having those pre-conversations we've got Jimmy car we've got rory sutherland whatever it is how much goes into let's try and manufacture this moment or we we know that in the trailer this moment will hit off can we get this scene or can we get them to say this how much actually goes into the the preparation and the manufacturing of it oh i see um no we've from a trailer perspective we've never asked a guest to say something a certain way or to repeat a line in a certain way or we've never done anything to I guess construct what would go into the trailer during the episode and there's a few there's a few reasons for that but the main one is is in that moment in time we just want the guest to do what they need to do for the full episode and the biggest challenge that I've always faced is obviously you're then left in the dark of how do you make this but for me that's the most amazing challenge ever one that i feel like i've never um sacrificed on and one that i feel like we've always managed to achieve with the trailers so when a guest is about to go on the episode they'll have research calls with the guest booking and the research team and they will they will talk to him in terms of like maybe like the data that they found that's in like that's interesting that's prominent that relates to their work they'll talk to him i guess in terms of um how you can like maybe present yourself for the episode but when it comes to when you're when they're in that seat it's it's all systems go in a sense of steve doesn't have questions he won't list out questions there he'll have points from when he's read in the brief that's like sparked his interest but he'll let the conversation go wherever it needs to go and so that's how that's a method that we think works really well with the guests because it allows them to to speak their mind it allows them to get their points across it allows them to do what they need to do and that in that sort of makes it a bit better for me from a trailer perspective because at least then i know that they're happy with what they've said and what they've got out there but the biggest challenge is yeah is how do we construct it in 90 seconds from a three-hour conversation to make it cohesive succinct easily understandable and that's where I think a lot of the editing magic comes in and we'll have guests that come on who use certain words that like I have no idea what they mean and then I'll google them and then I'll find out okay so this is what the meaning is and so I will then go back into the episode for example and I will try and see whether they've said it in a slightly different way or explained it in a certain different way or i'll take one element from this sentence and an element from this sentence and then paste them together and so and the reason why we do this is because the goal is to make it as digestible as possible we never the aim is never to take it out of context from the guest perspective so for example we'll never have something where steve asks a question and the answer is yes and we construct it to say no we'll never do things like that but we'll construct elements to make a moment succinct and easily digestible because if an audience has to stop and think about this like i would they lose their flow they lose their they lose their sort of investment into the narrative and i feel like in that moment that's when you lose them that's when they're more likely to scroll that's when they're more likely to not have an interest in the whole episode they might feel i mean for example some people when people feel like they might be stupid an instant reaction is to move away from that moment and a really interesting moment we had when we went to the prisons um one day because uh the diary ceos played out in prison cells and some of the prisoners was like we love these episodes but we just can't digest them they're using certain words and they're using like terminology and stuff that just we just can't compute and I relate to that because when I when I grew up I don't understand big words I was never that academic I was always on this creative side I was always I always loved listening to music and watching films I was never good at the sciences or the maths or anything like that and so from my own experience I know how jaunting and how off-putting it can be to make feel like you're a bit of an idiot because you don't inherently understand what this person is saying and so I never want an audience member to feel like that and so when there's a when there's words I feel like are complicated I mean I'll even and ask the team we'll sort of do a bit of a poll on how many people understand it who don't and we'll sort of do a little bit of research on google on these sort of things like with keywords and then from there we'll make a decision on whether we need to expand on it on on or how do we make it more simplified for an audience in a moment and plus we've only got 90 seconds we can't have a minute and a half of someone explaining something and so ultimately we leave the guests to do what they need to do and all of that stuff comes in post and that's one of the biggest challenges that we face with most trailers is how can we make it so digestible for an audience in 90 seconds and i was i was watching a behind the scenes episode in preparation for our conversation and i saw something steven was talking about 6 000 people or it might have been even more applied for a job at Flight Story.

1:04:00So I think people would be curious, what is it really like having Stephen Bartlett as a boss?

1:04:09What is it like having Stephen Bartlett as a boss?

1:04:14It's one of the most challenging paths of my career that I've ever had. and and I say that with a smile because which is really weird because again it's this it's this feeling where certain words just have this weird negative connotation to it and for me challenge is only ever a good thing with with Steve you're working with someone who is so driven I mean there's a reason where he is where he is today because he's this he's so driven in everything that he does and he's so passionate about it and so what that means is is you have someone who's fully invested in not only the podcast but in my role as well in trailers you know I think he understands the importance of what they need to get across and just you know just how important those first like 30 to 90 seconds are at the start of every episode and so yeah it's it's one of those where you are in an environment where you need to push yourself and you need to keep pushing yourself and this is where the one percent rule that we all abide by comes in that was one of the first things that I got told by Jack and Steve was like can you elevate your work one percent each time and it's really daunting to think of when I think I've say if I've made 400 traders it's really daunting to think that i have to improve these trailers by 400 that's quite a daunting thing if i have to think that i have to improve this trailer by one percent that's easy that's a sound effect that's a bridge that's a moment that's a look from steve that's that can be anything a one percent just to make it that little bit better doesn't take that much time and then when you take a step back and realize this monday's trailer is 400 better than the first ever trailer made that's when you look back and be like okay this this one percent uh rule has completely elevated my career has elevated my life and that's all come from steve i never would have had that from steve and it's like the the beauty of what you get from working at this company is we're very strict on how we hire and who we hire and that ultimately then means you're only left with what we call a players so people who will go and above and beyond every single time and from my perspective i can definitely say that with my team so with live and cam neither of them actually came in for traders both weirdly came from clips department and there was something in Liv who came on first where her work if her work ethic is insane her humanity is incredible the way she makes you feel when you're working with her just just elevates you so much these are such important skills and so I she obviously had editing skills and like you could see that side but there was a part of her that i don't think not as many people have and the fact that i get to have that on my team is incredible we then found that with cam who again was in still a lot of people from clips but it seems like but he started on clips and his talent with animations was so incredible and how he was pushing that so quickly it need it needed to come into the trailers because we wanted to elevate the trailers so much with the skill set that he has and again he has this tenacity of always wanting to learn more and push further and further and further and we've had employees at the company who have got through who might not have that mentality might have all the skills in the world but they don't have the mentality of wanting to be better and wanting to improve and it just it falls off it's so it's so weird on how easy you can see when people start to tail off when you're in a mindset of you're always wanting to push further and further it's it's weirdly quite easy to see that and so that's why it's such a huge part of when we hire people is they've got to have that mindset of we're only at the we're at the bottom of the mountain we've still got this to climb you know and it's constantly climbing climbing climbing climbing and then when you reach the top oh shit there's the bridge and now there's an even bigger mountain so now we have to start climbing again and it's having that mentality i think is the most important thing i think for this company we can i'm i like to sort of see myself as proof as someone who can teach themselves how to edit like i said i was never born to be an editor i never wanted to be an editor all i wanted to do was tell stories and i naturally found myself coming into here i always get this weird imposter syndrome with editing because i still don't know what half the buttons mean like I've been in rooms with editors and they're talking so technical and I'm I'm stood there like what is that the thingamabobbing that makes you move forward a little bit oh yeah I might have used that I don't know but what I do have is other buckets of skills of storytelling of knowing how to make audience members feel of my own personal background with film and nostalgia and how I feel when I watch certain things and also this idea of like I just always want to be better the next day and I always want to push myself and I always want to improve and they're the skill sets that I think are really hard to teach and they're the ones that I think people need to really need to grasp especially in a world of AI this is these are the skill sets they need to grasp if they want to find themselves on a really strong career path do you think it's important that the motivation changes or have you kept the same motivation from day one around that getting one percent better i think the the motivations always stayed the same the goal posts move so um you can have many you can have loads of different goals your goals can change obviously and like you can pivot as a company you can go different ways i mean when when our first side is just doak and now we're an agency that's producing other podcasts so the goals are changing my role the goals of my role have changed in terms of it I just started making trailers and now I'm training other people to make trailers and then I was then being brought into meetings to help pitch to potential podcasters on how we can use their brand in the trailers and how we would make their trailers different from Doax and using that sort of expertise so my goals are I've always changed but that one thing of being one percent better that's allowed me to keep pushing towards those goals no matter what the goal or whatever the goal post is and so for example in in its simplest terms the goal for me Monday to Wednesday is to create first a trailer for Thursday say that's the goal ultimately the goal can sometimes change where on Monday a guest got recorded and it's such a hot topic that needs to go on Thursday the goal is completely changed now and it will even mean I need to get Liv working on that trailer and so I need to make sure she's ready for doing that I'll need to get Cam the elements that he needs to be able to work on that or it might be that I just need to lock myself in a room for 24 hours and work on this myself so the goals are changing but that one percent like mantra never changes in a sense of like okay this is coming out on Thursday but how can I make it that one bit better and making it that one bit better not only then means this trailer is as good as the one which would have had more time on it but it's even arguably a little bit better even though the time scales have stayed the same so for me the one percent has changed my career but it's also been such a huge thing in my life like he and this is why i feel like this is such important advice because whether you're an editor a content creator or if you're just working any job adding a one percent element into your life can enhance your life in ways that you never thought possible a good example for this is when we had someone on the podcast who spoke about only two percent of people will choose to take the stairs over the elevator it was american over the elevator um and i made a conscious decision as part of my one percent was i'm always going to take the stairs first then escalators but i'm going to walk up the escalators then escalators stand still and then lift and so now all i do is take the stairs as much as i can or uh or an escalator and i'll walk up the escalator just because it's like it's a tiny tiny thing but it's just that one little bit of extra movement that i'm not getting otherwise you know especially if i'm sat down all all day that that for all i know those steps could be some of the most important steps i take when i'm a lot older and my legs are slowly starting to give in if i stopped years and years before that the legs might have given way a lot more before then you know and so like it's like when i drive if i drive to tesco i'll park as far away from tesco as i can so i have to walk to tesco's and then i have to walk back with the shopping if i i'm now i've recently moved into a new home and i'm going to get a standing desk so i can stand for the first two hours when i do my work at home i'm then going to get a walking treadmill so i can walk for those first two hours on the trip and it's those those tiny little bits for my health side well one percent in a busy life that I have which I think will add so much gain to my life overall and that's why I think having this one percent mindset can really make a difference on how you live your life where do you see the next year two years one percent where what's left to do so from a from trailers or from life life trailers everything so i think for me one percent in life would be to regiment my time a lot more and how much allocation i give to certain parts of the day um doing a ratio of what's important what's not important setting aside to make sure that i'm present for family i want to i want to increase the amount of times that i spend with my parents um and i also want to again I want to walk more I want to do less in that sense so that means walking to the shops a little bit more and ordering less online and going out to get the thing itself so that's from a life perspective from a work perspective I want to I want to continue to train live and I want to give cam everything that they need to excel I want to do a lot more testing with the traders I want to get ahead in a sense that I can test so much before I even need to think about making the trailer.

1:15:40I want to lean a lot more into data, which I think it's possible. I want to lean more into AI and AI agents on how that can become an assistant for trailer editing. I want to create more narrative structures. I currently have five written on my whiteboard, but I want to try and increase that because the more narrative structures I get, the more broad the prospect of a narrative for a trailer can go. I want to expand our checklist for the trailers. Currently, we're at 10. When I first started, I think it was at 5. There's now 10 things that every trailer needs to tick off before it goes live. I want to expand that to maybe about 20 in the next year.

1:16:23So they're the small aspects of it. and again i also i want to learn more about sound design i want to learn more about i want to learn more about b-roll and i want to learn more about animation myself because i again i can then push the ideas that i have in my head on how a trailer can go with ai could be like almost like unlimited if i know what i can and can't do with it and my skill set in there so there's a lot the beauty of it is there's so much that we can put into it and again with it being one percent is that it doesn't have to be that daunting first step it's been um a very inspiring conversation i know people back home will be listening to this thinking fuck yeah i can do it like it's very inspiring so thank you so much if people want to find you check out your work get in touch with you pursue with questions how is best to do that anthony best way to do that is through linkedin if you want to send me a message or if you want to learn some more from my social posts i'll do things like trailer breakdowns i'll do my like top tips on narratives top tips on finding music and if you actually want to watch the work then go over to the diary cea on youtube and it's the first 90 seconds of every episode or you can check out steve's social pages for the trailers that come out every monday and thursday beautiful thank you so so much thank you thank you for having me