The Formula Behind Diary Of A CEO's Trailers | Director of Trailers, Anthony Smith

0:00Olly Fawcett:There has been times where the show got a lot of heat. For you guys internally, how do you guys deal with that? I mean, I remember there was one time when I received a death threat.

0:18As of a couple of weeks ago, I left my position at the Dio of CEO as director of trailers. that for four and a half years was making two trailers a week non-stop on this constant constant hamster wheel we were so excited and their response was like i can't believe you sold your soul to the devil the only reason why i've ended up where i've ended up now is because i've made decisions

0:41Olly Fawcett:brought on by necessity so when i say how powerful a story is it has the power to change everything It was really, really important. And on the last shot, the camera just freaked out and we lost everything. Ant, welcome to What It Takes. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you for having me. Mate, absolute pleasure. Now you are, I was going to say a god in the podcasting game. So this is going to be an interesting episode, but I'm sure we'll get on to lots of things that you've done in the podcasting world. But how has the summer been for you so far? We're sitting here at the end of July. I think you've just been away, having a bit of resting time.

1:20Olly Fawcett:But yeah, how's halfway through the year looking for you? I mean, it's very different now to how it began. So full disclosure, as of a couple of weeks ago, I left my position at the Diary of CEO as Director of Traders to pursue a new adventure, start a new chapter. As all good stories have to continue on, you sometimes have to leave leave one behind in order to start a new path and so it's it's been an interesting few few weeks a lot of um a lot of going through those stages of grief you know you're at one moment you're excited the next moment you're terrified and next moment you're sad and you're a little bit lost and you suddenly it's in these moments when you're reminded that there is no set way to to live life and that there's nothing that prepares you for the decisions that you make, which will ultimately change the trajectory for your career and for your life moving forward.

2:29And so I'm at that stage now where I've realized that I'm now having to go back to being a student and relearn everything that I thought I might have known about life and careers and what it takes to make it and so it's a very exciting but nervous time right now and for you sort of stopping a role

2:52Olly Fawcett:you were there for about five years right coming up to five years four and a half years four and a half years the day you sort of stopped and didn't go back into the office that day what did it feel how you expected it to feel you know what's crazy is i it didn't feel how i expected it to feel to the extent where i thought i was going to be a lot i felt a little bit flat and that's why i find it really difficult to put into words that next moment because i'm someone who ultimately my whole life has been a life of extremes right so the content I create takes people on an emotional roller coaster journey to the extremes I make them feel uncomfortable I make them feel happy I make them feel sad to that extreme and so that's how I sort of live my life I live my life usually to the extremes I'm sort of like that that's the sort of lesson that I've learned from Disney is like you you feel high levels of like happiness and you feel high levels of pain and you feel high levels of sadness it's never flatlined um but that day when I woke up I felt weirdly flat and lost and I had no idea what to do for the first time I would say in about eight to ten years because my career up until that point was so fast moving I started a company when I just left university in as a requirement to try and get into the industry yeah I then left that company and within a month of just searching non-stop for jobs and creating show reels and spec work to try and get in all of that was fast moving as well plus also finding myself in a new relationship at the time that was fast moving and then I got a job at a agency working for Disney and Marvel and Star Wars and Bond and so that was incredibly fast moving because that's the pace of that industry and then literally when I left that agency a week later or so I was then starting with the Diary of CEO and that for four and a half years was making two trailers a week non-stop on you're in this constant constant hamster wheel and so for the first time in eight to ten years i woke up with no responsibilities no one to manage no one to teach nothing to post no one to answer to and that's a really weird feeling yeah because you sort of feel a little bit like you've just lost all of your purpose like that and you suddenly come to realize that life is going to be incredibly different it's um it's for for the time being it's going to slow down massively yeah and um you're in a bubble for so long of this high energy um highly emotive career and it's just gone to the complete opposite of that and so it is it's been it's been a huge challenge that i don't think a lot of people would be prepared for when when they do it and i'm just so thankful that i had people there when i told them i was leaving who had also left who just gave me very valuable advice which is you need to take this time off it's going to be difficult you're going to go through all the emotions but you need to do it because you need to completely reset and rewire your brain and in order to start again and so that's the that's the current path that i'm on at the moment yeah that intensity of the last like eight to ten years what was life like before that period childhood growing up well you were i mean i imagine there's a level of strong creativity i know you're massively into your your films and your disneys when you grew up but was it a lot of kind of hyper energy and wanting to kind of put that into creative things or were you pretty quiet individual

7:19i was i was too i think i was two different people and i think the the way i can explain it is growing up i wanted to be an actor and so i was i from a young age i was at drama school and I was then appearing on shows and then I was doing actual full-on musicals and all of that lot and so and I think the reason why I was doing that was because it was a complete opposite of who I was behind the scenes which was I wasn't I was someone who was easily intimidated by the crowds I didn't always feel like I fit in anywhere in school I felt like I didn't fit in because in school in order to be successful you had to be smart and I really struggled with those academic subjects and so I would put on that mask of trying to be the entertainer to try and make people laugh to to um to dance to sing to act to like to play a different character yeah because I felt more comfortable doing that than I did being myself at school around those people and so where even when I was at school I would sort of have pocket of friends where I would go and play football and be with the lads and I would have a little bit a little bit of a master show that I could just fit in with that group to play football and then I would have the other group who would like they loved science and they were they were into their books they were smart they were like I guess considered the nerd side of the school and I could just get in on that front with enough I wasn't smart enough to be fully in with that group I wasn't athletic enough or cool enough to be fully in with that group but I could sort of give a few little things away and it's almost like I guess a bit of a performance and so I sort of spent my whole life growing up trying to figure out how I can actually be more like myself and what I truly loved and what I truly loved was watching films and listening to film scores and I was that weird kid who when I put in a VHS I wouldn't fast forward through the film trailers I would watch the film trailers I loved them and so that was my life was like this hidden film geek that was trying to fit in with in different pockets of of society what was it you loved so much about film when you were younger I think it was the escapism yeah I think it was it was for 60 minutes or so which is probably what film like around like snow white for example i think it's about like 67 minutes long which is crazy when you think about it's only 60 minutes i think so i think something like that and then when you compare that to like what the odyssey which is like two hours 55 or something like mental if it's a story into that length it's um i think for i think for when i watched the film i just got completely lost into that world yeah and so I didn't have to worry about like me or or like not being the smartest person or not being the most athletic I'm not really fitting in I could just be someone who's just into this world of Disney or you know of this of musicals or even horror films I would sort of like immerse myself into that world and I could just focus on nothing but the story and the characters and um really feel the emotions and it allowed me to fill those emotions because if they wanted to make me sad they'd make me sad if they wanted to make me scared they'd make me scared and so i think that that for me was my real draw for it was a chance to just completely lose myself from the outside world and just be in theirs for like 60 minutes or so were you probably like in touch with the emotions when you're a kid i was probably yeah to the extreme to the extreme so i had anger problems growing up so um for example there was a time where my brother wouldn't let me into the house um and older or younger he's an older brother right um and he wouldn't let me into the house i maybe is messing around i'm not too sure but so then i throw a stone through the window um there was a time where i think i was playing a game and he like switched off the console or something like that either by it's and i was a joke and i threw the console at the uh the remote the controller at the screen and broke the screen there broke the greenhouse one of my oldest mates accidentally kicked a sponge ball at my face out of school once and like it was like back in the day it's like you had like these sponge balls that you play with and like when it rained or when it went into puddles it's like a rock so and he kicked her and it sort of hit me and then i just went nuts and then i'll just start a fight with him and he was like my mate at the time so you don't kind of cross as an angry guy these days well i had like like therapy and management sessions and things like that and obviously my mom helped a lot because she would um she would like teach me to cook so cook cooking would calm me down and we would watch films and you can't get angry when you're watching a film like you know and so um so again maybe that's also where a love of film came from um but yes i was very much i was i was when it came to emotion i was always at that extreme end so if i was angry I got really angry if I was upset I wouldn't hold it back I would cry I'd cry but I'd always want to make people feel if I wanted to make people feel happy I wanted to make them feel like the happiest they could be in that moment so I'll do whatever I could to make that person happy whether it's to make them laugh and so I'd put on little shows in front of my family just to try and keep everyone keep everyone's happiness levels up and so I was I was very uh emotive as a child but probably to maybe the unhealthy extreme end of it um but yeah but ultimately that's probably led me to where i am now which is to just try and provoke emotions yeah it's interesting isn't it and make content

13:40Olly Fawcett:for when did the acting dream die the acting dream died when i might not died i mean you've left no it's no it's died it's definitely died the idea of going out on stage terrifies me now but it's um um it died i think it was around about 17 oh and it was i think it was because so essentially i was about to to go out on stage and give a performance and i'd done this loads of times before i was used to it was fine and then for just for some strange reason that that performance i just got this huge stage fright and i was like i don't know if i can go out and perform this i I don't know what. And ultimately I did and everything went fine.

14:27It was great. But then I just remember walking off the stage going, I don't feel I'm ever going to do this again. And just like that, that entire dream, because I mean, I wanted to when I wanted to become an actor, it was because my year six teacher, who was always basically calling me like an attention seeker, felt the way he could control my um i guess my hyperactivity or this need to want to entertain the way he thought he could control is to put me in a show and um he's i guess he saw something in me that must have loved performing so then he actually sent me to a little drama um summer school project which was so sweet of him and that then started this journey of wanting to become an actor and so that was in year six so I don't know what age I am then like 11 or 12 something like yeah so for about even for them for probably like six seven years or so that was the dream and then to suddenly just be like I physically can't do this again that was like my first moment of being a bit lost in terms of what I wanted to be and so and I knew I couldn't become like a lawyer or a smart person because that's just not how that's just my brain didn't work in that way yeah and so I got very lucky around that time that I was also doing media studies and I was making short films and I was writing short scripts and I was falling in love with that process of actual making a film I used to love watching films but this is making the films and it came around the time when DVDs were being released and they would have the behind the scene featurettes on the on like the

16:18Olly Fawcett:bonus disc at the back exactly and it was I think that came at the time when I sort of realized that I was like oh shit you can actually make this a career you can do this people make these films it's not just magically here and so I got quite lucky that around that time those two were overlapping and um so what left about performing in front of camera on a stage just turned into okay how can i channel all this energy and do something behind the camera and in the wings yeah it's so mad like i feel like i kind of resonate with a little bit of your story because i was very similar when i'm not very academic at all like at all and i remember the first thing i made was this like it was when i could come in the program but it was like a stop motion program so it used to come the program came on a dvd in like a vhs box i mean my mate made this thing over a weekend where it was like play-doh like you know like a stop motion thing and that was it for me i was just like the fact you can make something the fact you can create something was just cool and like it just felt like there was a process to it and it was we spent hours and hours and hours on it but i think i found it a couple of years ago god knows where it is now and i was just like it's so weird how when you're younger when you find that one thing that you really like and you really feel like i could do this forever and ever and it doesn't really feel like i'm working that hard because it's so enjoyable do you remember the first thing you made like that was like a completed thing that you really were proud of the first thing i made that i that i remember being proud of was probably my first my first gcsc film and i remember it now because it's so bad so bad it was it had no substance to it no narrative it was it was a horror film and my mate yeah exactly my mate jamie was in it um he played the killer and i love jamie to bits and he's just he's so incredibly camp and so he it was like this is really supposed to be like this demonic serial killer and he and like he just had like he's not like he's walking things like that and it's that's in the walk and i was just like how would we have ever been scared that moment me and him doing this and um it was essentially i just remember the shot so it was basically chase it was almost like a halloween style scene right where the the the um the victim will run and but somehow he's always just a few moments behind even though he's walking while she's running for her life it was that sort of thing so it's like taking all the cozy conventional these horror films and then i'll just remember one shot where she would run past and he sat on a tree uh on a tree ledge because it's like this idea of like oh he's in the background doing that and then when you look at now it's like why the fuck is he up on the tree how did he get up in the tree what he's literally walking over there a second ago now he's up on the tree um continuity's not there continuity's not there um i think at one point we changed outfits because we filmed on multiple days so he just changed outfits in there and so it was so bad but it it got very well reviewed by my teachers in gcse media and i just remember the amount of fun we had making it it was me jamie and um a lady called sandra and it was just so much fun you know we just during school school hours we left the premises with um a crappy little cam yeah little video camera yeah something like that and we just filmed in our local park people walking in in the background and stuff like we found the little woodland piece we storyboarded it there and then was there's no dialogue there's no and like we're making this and like in our heads i can only imagine that we feel like we're making like a christopher nolan-esque piece that is so good it's like oh we've done a low angle shot we're so good at this so good at this um and like and then i remember putting it into the editing and then you're choosing the music and it just like the the music is so generic horror doesn't quite match the tone but in your eyes you've heard this music that feels like it's something from the exorcist so it must work um but it was so much fun and it was it's a project that will forever remain in my heart and it's um i think it's somewhere somewhere jamie probably has it bless him um and we still remember it fondly and that that was the piece that i remember making and before that i was writing short stories and obviously I was putting on shows but that was the first time where I made a film and I was like oh yeah this this is fun I should get into this yeah did you have an idea of like how to do this forever like because back then I think we're somewhat similar age but like back then there wasn't as much I mean YouTube was around there was there was ways to learn but like I mean I started editing like 20 years ago or something stupid um but like you couldn't really learn without doing so for you was there a bit of like a blank where you're like i want to do this thing but how do i do it yeah i think the the problem we had was it was never taken seriously as as a as a medium especially like in the area i was you know it no one in the area was make like you wouldn't have heard any of them gone to film or gone to la to make hollywood star films and and when you're young you sort of see that's the only route right so if you if you want to make films or if you want to make anything like this the only natural foot and step is to somehow make it to hollywood you know that's wherever all the glitz and the glamour is that's where the actors are that's where the films are being made and so that's a near on impossible task and so you always felt like it was just a dream and it would only ever remain a dream and i think the only reason why i've ended up where i've ended up now is because i've made decisions brought on by necessity in that moment in time so i couldn't get in the film and tv industry because of the guard rows i guess that they had and the boundaries that they had at that time you know they do what were they what were those badgers well a lot of the time it was things like i think money played a part if you had a lot of money you could go to a slightly more prestigious school and those people were taking more seriously in those schools because you go to uni for editing i went yeah i'd done film production at university and for me that for me i thought that was going to be enough what i needed to get into and then you sort of realize that it's then being called a mickey mouse course and essentially it's where a lot of people who wanted the uni experience who don't want to study or work that hard a lot of those people choose courses like film production or media because it's very much like how hard can it be to point a camera and say like say action type of it so when you start there was i think there was like 55 of us or so on this course and when we left I think there was maybe like 20 odd people or so and even still after that maybe about four people work in that industry now really and so it's you go into it thinking and and I guess part of it is because you you feel like the education system what you're taught is like the if you do this if you go down the education system path you're sorted right that's how you go and get a job that's what you're told um apprentices apprenticeships weren't really a thing especially in that in that field and what we found was when we then tried to get into the industry you couldn't just go in with your cv and like the the projects that you worked on and be like oh can you hire me to do this that and the other it was there was a lot of it was like the doors were just shut and you couldn't even find the contacts to get to get involved you really needed to know people in that industry from what i was hearing and like there was one time when so we started a company out of necessity to saying we as in you and your friends me and my former business partner we started a company so you were both struggling with this you're both yeah we're both we're both doing film production we're both really passionate about it and we both saw in each other the eagerness to to make films and to tell stories and our skill set complemented each other perfectly you know he was on the cinematography side he had like an incredible eye for that sort of thing you know he was also he he's father is a businessman so i think that really helped him from a producer angle he sort of saw things from that logistical side and i was very much more on the script writing and like um the storytelling element of all of that sort of thing and i loved working with actors and so we complemented each other really well in our final projects and the reason why we then worked together was because in the third year we were asked to make our final film right and i pitched a film that i wanted to make to my lecturers which was called the average dead and it was a comedy about zombies and they looked me square and square in the eye and they said honestly if you make this film we think you will fail or you will not get good grades on this i was like what do you mean is like that i don't think there's a way you can make this good which was really weird because they hadn't really seen the script it was more like a it's really weird it's like if you pitch a lot of films that are very successful now in that way there are so many films if you were to say what the film's about you're like sorry what like genenomy it doesn't quite make sense it's kind of weird that door was shut i think it's because when you're at uni and you're studying film the people you need to look at are very alter style filmmakers right the ones who have a very distinctive style or voice you don't look at hollywood no you know i think for a lot of lecturers the idea of star wars is not a great film it's like it's flawed it's all it's not true art it's not do you think it's a bit snobby oh yeah 100 it's it's i i mean i remember when when me and joe started the started the company we were really excited because our first client was asda which was um quite a big client to go and are you like what how old are you at this point 18 19 i know he's like 21 21 yeah yeah and so we went we went to one of the lecturers at uni at the time and we told him and we were so excited and their response was like i can't believe you sold your soul to the devil i was like what are you on about and he's like like we were teaching to make art with like to make film things that matter if you're literally doing this stuff for money now you're you're selling out for big corporate and things and i was like but i i need to pay rent i need i need to get into this industry i can't just make music videos for bands that no one's ever heard of for 400 quid a pop for four years apart um we've all been there yeah or or do little or to make a short film that goes out in some sort of short film festival that okay it gets a little um rosette rosette that's the word but that's it you know that that can't be where it goes and that's where i think a lot of people then struggle um and even that it was like you've sold your soul and it was it was so interesting how a lot of the decisions i made was based on i guess the the westernization of film like i loved star wars i loved i grew up in the night like with those 90s films like the mummy armageddon like bad boys you know proper hollywood films that like make you feel something um but then also watching films like science of the lands and life is beautiful so i had this real mix yeah of films that i loved and for me they were just like you can't compare them because they're just very different types of films it sounds like you love the escapism if you like that sort of breath of films like yeah i always find that like my film taste is pretty rook like love a chick flick but then big boy bad boys fan i'll watch anything the guy richie makes because i just like the style and i like the comedy and i like the juxtapositioning and stuff but then i can watch crap and i watch the same films on repeat all the time but it's because it's very i like the escapism piece for me is exactly what film is it's like the the reason to watch film and i think sometimes i think we sort of go into a rut as a society where we forgot about this but the reason to go and watch a film was to feel something yeah and often or not to make people feel something you sort of have to go a bit more into the extremes right you have to you have to make things relatable but then you also need to heighten the the conflict you need to heighten the cost you need to heighten the stakes and so those films made me feel something and that's what i've always wanted to do when i'm created content it's the same with the same with the average dead it was it was a it was a a stupid comedy film but it had heart and it was she made it i mean oh yeah oh yeah spoiler alert i um i full-on ignored what they said i was like look i want to make this yeah yeah and joe i'll always remember this and why i'll always be thankful for joe is he came up to me and was like i want to make this film with you i think i think it could be really good were you guys pals or were you just like classmates we we'd worked we worked with each other a bit we obviously was on the same course so we knew of each other we both liked each other we both respected each other's like work ethic um but we'd never actually worked on a project as in us two together properly at uni you do like a feature film module and so it was on the feature film was on the same unit so we sort of saw it but neither of us was actually doing the roles that we wanted to do in the film on that on that project and so I think he sort of saw something in me and I saw something in him and so we went and made this film and then I guess cut long story short we got a first you know the film done great we played at the screening it had the reaction that I wanted it to have people were laughing the delayed laughs that are purposely put in there was happening and that was beautiful to see like one one gag that I sort of subtly put in I'm thinking like the third minute or so people then was figuring it out in like the eighth or the ninth or the tenth minute and then they were starting to laugh and then when you'd ask me it'd be like oh it's because I've just noticed that joke come in there and it's like all of these different things were coming in and i just remember feeling so good about it and so that's um that then formed the partnership that me and joe had create uh creating um emotionally and narrative led commercial films for some of the businesses around lancashire just a quick question on that that final because that was that your final piece of work from uni yes how much of that piece of work like everything you made it seems like you were very proud of that item how much of it do you think was from what you learned in the classroom versus the passion you had outside the classroom could you have made that film without going through university yeah 100 i think well uni is an interesting one because i think maybe this is the same with most industries and most topics but i can only speak on film and i think with film you learn more by doing than by learning yeah you know i think there's only so much you can learn from reading books and learning from the greats yeah and ultimately need ultimately you need to get out there with a camera and start shooting some shit you know that's the that's the only way you're really going to learn this stuff and so what i am thankful with the union was like it gave me the resources yes you know it gave me the editing software it gave me the equipment it gave your time it gave me joe yeah you know it gave me everything i needed to do it when all the and it also gave me i guess the mission to do it the brief make this film to do it um but how i made it why i made it that came from a sheer passion of wanting to make people laugh in their mind wanting to tell a story and having a story with a bit of heart behind it you know it's you know there's elements of disney in there there's elements of the office in there there's all of these things that i loved watching yeah being bringing them all together and so 100 you can look you can do pretty much anything and you don't need like university to do it you know apart from like brain surgeon and pilot apart from that um and so what yeah creatively i mean we'll discuss you do not try to test out doing brain surgery on your cousin um and so i think everything is how you take it and i and i think the best example for that i've got was actually when we had the company we still had this dream of wanting to get into nfts which is like the national film school and we went to an open day once me and joe and we took x amount of trains and taxis and buses barbara to this open day and i just remember being there and the people around us i did i i didn't feel like i fit in because you know i heard one there was a kid next to me talking to another one and they were just talking about how oh my dad flew me back here from from our holiday um he had to he had to rent out a jet to get me here for this open day because i'm really interested and then i had uh one person who i did speak to on the open day one student um around the time something quite personal was happening in my in like my family life and it sort of came up and then it was like so tell me tell me how does that make you feel and it was like and I was like putting me aside because I really want to use this I really want to use this moment I was like we've just met and like you know when you're giving off a bit like oh you want to be that director you know where it's like okay I get it mate like calm down a bit um it's an open day and so I'm sort of in this room and it i didn't feel like i fit in and it sort of reminded me a little bit of that lecture was saying i was sending my soul it reminded me of the other lecturers like you shouldn't make this film because it's not like a ken loach film or something like that um and then i went away ultimately i then found out how much it costs to go there and i was like oh okay i can't afford this anyway it's a shit ton really i can't remember the exact cost but it's a lot is it only two years yes yeah yeah it's shorter right um and again for me that was that was my answer to getting into the actual industry you know we're doing so well as a company but we're still we're making tv commercial type projects we weren't making feature films it wasn't like that goal so that was that for us was like that's what we need to get to get there and we were like constrained because of the cost of it all and um feeling like out of our depth and like we're not the type of people that go here and so i then started doing some research onto it and started looking at the reviews and so many people are like i graduated from here and i'm still not in industry and they were obviously they're bad mouth in the school and other film schools at the same time like bad mouth and it was like i've done all this and why is my fit and it made me realize it's like you still need to do a lot of hard work yourself to get anywhere near that dream like you can't just go to this school and then here's your open invitation to direct to fucking avengers like it just doesn't work that way you know and so i was reading all of these reviews of all these really disgruntled students so upset and annoyed with the school that they were not in the career that they wanted to because they went to this school and that really opened my eyes to like i'm on i feel like i could be on a level playing field here i've just got to try really hard i've just got to keep making stuff and i've just got to see where this journey will go and i mean the journey's definitely not gone where i thought it would go but arguably it's gone better than i could have ever imagined how did you um find running the company at a young age with joe

37:53um really difficult but it it was fun you know we were never i never felt like we were in trouble like i i never felt we i was terrified of loans for example so i never took out loans for the company and so when we first had our clients we would then invest that into equipment we done a we had a deal with the university so we could actually rent out some of their equipment as well um because we were students there and graduated and it's like an enterprise scheme that's cool um but yeah any money we had would sort of cover those costs and so i was we weren't really living on anything at all at the time and we but we i've always felt a little bit safe and maybe that was joe because joe was really reassuring he he was very strong as a producer and as a production manager he also i get he sort of had that experience i guess and knowing his dad who who ran a really successful company or companies and so it was scary in a sense that i always was thinking will i ever get paid will i will i ever go broke well that's so there was always a little bit of fear but i felt i never felt like i was going to foul miserably and end up homeless and you know it was like there was there was like it because joe always had my back then was always really smart about it yeah um it always felt like if we if we did fail that we would we would still be okay and we'd we'd sort of figure it out and so ultimately it was this scrappy journey of figuring it figuring it out as we went along because we had no training in this we that's not a module a teacher teacher and film um is how to how to run a company and so it was literally figuring out how we pitch how we find clients how we create ideas for clients how we then work with agencies how we sort out deliverables how we sort how we figure things out if things go wrong like I remember when we got one of our biggest clients at the time was for an agency and it was for new housing development in Manchester.

40:15Right. And it was to create like a promo for this housing development in a strong narrative style. So it's more than just showing the building. It was like taking them on a journey. Yeah. Based on a wonderland of this book. And we got to the final shot. This was our biggest client at the time. big big money for us it was really really important and on the last shot the camera just freaked out and we lost everything the entire s this was like um when black magics first came out and you had like the massive ssds and so and we lost everything and we were doing the last shot and both of us inside were freaking out because we knew obviously the clients there and um what made it worse was our client wasn't the housing development our client was the agency and their client was the housing development so they were like extra nervous for us um throughout this whole process and so we got back to the car said said goodbyes was like the longest did you tell them at that point not at that point no because we're like okay we just like it might still be there still might be there it's not showing up on the menu and the female's plugged it all in nothing um we sent it to a company um i think i've used the same company where they try and bring back the storage yeah it's like if you don't you don't have to pay yep um or you it's half price or something like that i use them many times yeah send it to them they sent back us an email i was like i'm sorry this is very unprecedented for us we cannot get any of this there's nothing there and so we're like fuck we've lost everything um this was a higher paying client through another client and then we had to have that conversation and ultimately it was the worst the worst um a moment of our career at that point i think i remember i was going to york that weekend on like a little trip and i just spent the entire week just flat because the client obviously was very upset and we were like we will redo it with rich and we do it again and it's like but obviously you need money to pay for the for the models and um for all this sort of stuff which we had to like find ourselves and um so i think we've done another job which then we didn't take any money for that that then paid for that and we've done all that and that taught us a very valuable lesson of backups and ever since then we backed up fucking rigorously like we've all um i can't remember what it was but it was like like um uh like an atmos way like you you would run it through and it'd back it up there and then we'd always do data backups we invested in other hard drives so after like x amount we'll take that out back that up that one was going whilst we was doing it so then we go into this really really solid workflow of backing up and clients loved seeing that yeah and they were like fuck these guys know what

43:35Olly Fawcett:they're doing it's just the industry of making mistakes isn't it exactly and it is and it all stemmed from us losing everything in that moment and and that was for me that was a great way to learn because i learned the power of backing things up even now like where i always make sure things are backed up at least twice and um and so it was very the whole experience was so scrappy it was no two days were the same it was emotional it was traumatic it was exciting and um i don't regret any any moment of it yeah where did it all come to an end you obviously then moved on to work with other agencies but what happened to your and joe's relationship or partnership i should say yeah so it's sort of like a strange one it was so i was in a relationship at the time and we met more we sort of like became more or less like a couple in like the final few months or weeks of university yeah um and that relationship was ending but that the reason why i moved up north was for that relationship and also for the company at the time and so So I think there was a mixture of things going on.

45:02So obviously the relationship wasn't working out anymore. I think it was very much a product of constant distractions, which is why it probably went as far as it did. It was building businesses or renting this house and renting this house and renting this house, et cetera, et cetera. And so there was a lot of distractions there, which I think sort of hit some of the cracks, et cetera. and then when we bought a house I think that was almost we bought a house and the company was doing well and then suddenly those sort of cracks started to realize that we were we were quite different people from university etc um so that relationship ended and I was also missing my family like crazy you know like they were only down the end 25 or whatever it was but um i was missing them like mad and so i felt a bit homesick um relationship and so i felt like i needed to move back down south and start again yeah and so literally in in i think it was like in a space of 24 48 hours everything just changed um and it was the crazy 48 hours as it as it always is and um it's it's like it it didn't end in a way that you thought it was ever going to end but um you know every so i still speak to joe so often like he's doing incredible things now he's in the film industry you know he's working on film sets you know he's doing the thing that he really wanted to do at the start and seeing that brings me so much joy it's unreal and so so did you end the partnership with joe yes yeah was that like a pretty hard chat to have did he want to end it in turn too i don't i don't think he wanted to it was it was really difficult because it's you know you build something together you see each other every single day you know you go from you go through really hard times and it doesn't end in a way that either person would want it to end right it's um so i think it was obviously it was hard for me but i imagine it was also really hard for joe because from his end nothing was different you know you know he's um you know he he had his life and he's like you know his life was going strong etc etc and so i imagine it would have been really really really fucking hard um and probably the way i dealt with it wasn't great in the sense that it was so sudden and it was so final um why do you think your mind was so kind of like wanting to make it drastic i think i think i just needed to get out i think it was um i was going through a lot behind the scenes you know at that point i was seeing a therapist i I was, you know, I had a few breakdowns.

48:25I was having panic attacks. I was, I remember I used to text Joe and basically be like, I'm not feeling too good. I might, I'll see you at the office, like in a couple of hours time. And reality, I was just lying in bed. And the crazy thing is, is obviously you never really know what, like, what mental, like depression or anxiety. you don't quite know what the symptoms are when you're going through it yeah and it's i guess it feels a bit um i'll say like it's not it's not like this sudden feeling of our i'm feeling depressed it builds up and it sort of changes your character and so then during that time i then started seeing a therapist um i went to the doctors first they gave me that antidepressants which basically was just turning me into this zombie and so and i think when you're when you're like a kid growing up and you want to entertain people and your whole personality like i said was being the extreme you know having extreme joy extreme anger to then be taking pills and feel nothing yeah it's it's so different to the person that you are and the person that you

49:47Olly Fawcett:want to be um it's really interesting as well we had um a comedian called ishan on the show who's brilliant and like you know toured with mickey flanagan like been around for a long time and he talks so much about like you know comedians who are obviously classic clowns and they're attention seekers etc and he just talks a lot about how all of them have to like between each between comedians just talk a lot about like be it feeling a bit shit because they just they generally like no one wants to feel shit of course but like for them it's even worse because they are performing all the time that's who they are it's like such a key part of their identity and then when it creeps up on you as you say you're just like you don't have the tools to deal with it if that's your character right did you experience the same thing 100 you don't you don't have the tools and you are just you feel nothing but shame for feeling it because you don't know who you can talk to about this stuff either without feeling like they're either just going to be like just man up deal with it or they just don't believe you you know these these are just the things going on and you questions like well do i have any right to be feeling like this like you know i've got a relationship i've got a house i've got like a company like i have so common though i think that's so common especially for like like you say people that feel that they're in a good position compared to others who are not you know you're living in the uk compared to other countries in the world like you're already got a leg up in many ways and it's like i think that's the biggest thing i've experienced is like you're just like how can i be feeling shit when i've got what i've got and other people have got fuck all like you know what i mean yeah that is the comparison thing is really difficult it is and it's and you feel like you're failing at life to even be considering this and because there's such a stigma you also don't know anyone else who's going through it because they've been stigmatized by it so they've not told anyone so you don't know who of your family of your friends who have gone through this stuff because obviously they've been feeling probably the exact same thing that you're feeling so you don't tell them they don't tell you no one tells each other so everyone feels like they have this shame in them that they're failing at life that they're not very worthwhile that but if they go off and talk about their issues they're just either going to be told to man up or that you know there's worse things in life you know yeah yeah over it etc etc um and so you sort of find yourself like stuck you know you just you don't really like the thing you loved you just don't love anymore you know making film you don't how did you fall out of love with it oh i was yeah and i think it was it's because again like when you're sort of whether you're whether you're on these tablets or whatever's going on in your mind at the time it's very hard to concentrate on the things that you love yeah when all you've got is um either suppression of emotions based on pills or you feel like you have to hide what you're feeling at the time and what i've found when making the direct trailers for example part of the process of what i used to do was when i was reading the script based on the guests i would play a soundtrack based on the genre of that guests that i wanted to make the trailer for that's cool so if we had like a a um ex-cia agent on i'd be listening to sort of almost like that conspiracy-esque music where there's a bit of tension building up yeah because that would get me in that emotion of when i'm reading it to to make something and really push the emotions out but how can you do that when you're trying to suppress everything and so see ultimately you're sort of left you're not doing what's best for you and you're also not doing what's best for your relationship and you're also not doing what's best for your company and and all in this all in the bid to just try and keep everything secret because you're so ashamed of doing it and so there were so many things going on and you know at the time I was still young you know I was never taught this stuff and I think the people who knew me always knew me as super happy smiley disney loving aunt who loves to entertain people loves to put on loves to do a show or you know is always happy is always bubbly is all and so again you find yourself just needing to try and be that person because you think that's the person that they like and they're not going to like nuan which is because i don't like nuan at that time and so you you don't really know what to do how to do it or what the answers are um and so for me I felt like what I needed to do was I I needed to I needed this clean break you know and I think when when the relationship ended that almost felt like that's your permission to to to start something new to start a new life um and so that's why when i look back on it i'm just so thankful and so happy that i had joe there um and the fact that what he's doing now is just so incredible yeah because you know with everything with everything that sort of happened he just he's just risen and he's got a career that he loves you know he's in a great relationship you know he's got his place and stuff and he's um there's been such a nice outcome that's what's beautiful about it for i think for everyone involved in this whole story everyone seems to have come out of this in a great in a in a great way yeah and so ultimately when you look back that's the only thing that's the only thing you could ask for really oh totally and also it's nice to think that that wasn't even that long ago as well really you know you guys have already everyone in the story has kind of come back from the dark times and it seems like they're doing really well so from there you you headed back down south and then end up at an agency yourself yes and this is where i guess the dream is starting to happen a little bit more for you in terms of the work you were doing is this is this the moment in the story i believe so yeah it was well it was dream meets reality and so what you it's when you, this is a part of the story when you realise the dream that you always wanted to have.

56:33That is not the fairy tale that you was hoping it was going to be.

56:38Olly Fawcett:That's happened many times on this podcast. Yes. It's very much like, be careful what you wish for type moment. And so I got this job at the agency and the clients were incredible when I applied. It was like Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, you know, the brands that I watched growing up and loved so much. Bond, Harry Potter. Did you think you were going to get the job? did you think you would get the job no because at the time they were looking for a video editor and my background was i guess more in a creative creative director role so i'd pitch to clients i would come up with the ideas got it naturally i would edit because at the time sometimes we couldn't afford an editor especially at the start um but that's sort of what i never really wanted to become an editor that that was never the goal and so when I saw it it was more about the brands that were there and I was like okay I could do this and you know I enjoyed editing it wasn't something that I thought it was going to be my career but you know I enjoyed it and the problem I had was there wasn't really anything that I had created that linked to that agency you know we've done a lot of stuff with like say asdo and the army and um housing developments and apps and you know like some real corporate stuff yeah and then it's like you're gonna have to use that work to try and sell yourself to a company that's like disney and star wars and you know full-on cinematic hollywood what was the agency doing they post production house no so they ran the social channels for some of these companies like the uk pages for some of them and they would also pitch and run the campaigns for certain films and run like the social campaigns for them so they would be a partner in that front and so the job for me was essentially you know you'll make a you'll make social content for this disney page and then you'll make social content for bond and then you'll make social content for the harry potter show in in um in soho so you would sort of create these and then every so often a film like no time to die was being made and so you would then pitch to run the social marketing side or one strand of that social marketing side for that film yeah um and so that would then comprise of like social trailers countdowns featurettes all of all of that sort of thing and so i had no idea how i could sell myself based on this criteria for them um i guess i got quite lucky in a sense that a couple of the projects that i worked on had that cinematic feel which was the goal we always wanted to achieve for that company with you and joe with me and joe and so one of the projects for example that we'd done for the nhs was a local NHS hospital wanted to improve their dementia care.

59:47So how they would train nurses and doctors on treating dementia patients. And so we essentially worked on a project that was a 25-minute short film that then got split into moments, which would then be taught in segments of a class. And so the beauty of that idea was that we made a fully fledged training video, which when put together, we then entered into short film festivals as a fully fictional piece. and so it's the weirdest combination of nhs training and artistic short film you know and so it was you know it is a it's a project i'm really proud of because it achieved those two things you know it won awards and it won awards in film festivals and it won awards for the nhs and so it won it won awards for teaching and won awards for just film and narrative and so i'm so proud of that project and that project then got me the job with this agency so it achieved so much got it and that was just through rethinking of a way to create an asset that can then be used in different areas and for different industries and that was probably my biggest learning of just how powerful storytelling is because story was used to train doctors and nurses story was used to entertain people at a festival and story was used to showcase my quality as a storyteller and an editor for a job and so that's why I think story is king because it was able to achieve so many different goals with the exact same product nothing changed nothing changed whatsoever and um so that's why that particular project i'm so proud of and they brought me in they gave me like a trial uh to make so it was imagine there was a collaboration between adidas and disney so i had to make like a crossover promotional asset and i thought i got really lucky there because i love Disney I know Disney inside out and so I knew exactly what I needed to do for this moment and I didn't know Adidas very well and so what I would do is I would I just downloaded a whole batch of Adidas TV commercials and I was sort of watching through them and I was like okay so how can I combine the two and I was thinking okay match cuts and so the beauty of knowing Disney so well is when i was watching these tv commercials and i saw a certain shot of someone diving into a pool i was like that reminds me of a shot in pocahontas that i hadn't seen for years and i was

1:02:49Olly Fawcett:like they also reuse some of the shots as well don't they in disney there are bits where they've reused the sequencing and changed characters yeah yeah exactly yeah especially in the olden days because it saved a lot of money doing it but yeah so i remember i was like i was watching these all of these commercials i was like that's it there's a shot like that in disney there's a shot like that in disney there's a shot like that in disney that's cool so then i was able to create this collaboration between adidas and disney through these match cuts using um a mixture of i sort of done a remix of disney music so i had like moana in there um i think i had zootopia in there um i was like mixing all of these things because i remember the quotes of the films and obviously disney's if you if you look disney's got so many motivational quotes about just like being the best you can be as it's like and that's what adidas is all about right it's like pushing the boundaries be be as good as you be as best as you can like push and so i created this thing with so much excitement got the job from that uh i remember i tried to be i wonder if they actually knew this or not i tried to be extra cheeky and sneaky where um because i knew one of the kinds of star wars i wanted to sort of subtly show that you know i'm in this world and so i bought a star wars uh type in with the millennium falcon on it and so i'll sort of subtly pull it there in the hope that they would spot it and i always wear a star wars type in um like on reflection i think it might have been really fucking obvious i mean i would have spotted that yeah so um so he might be a bit too keen this one yeah it might have been too um but i got the job and it was again it was a very challenging role but you know i'm so thankful for it and uh finn who was my manager and the creative director is like one of the greatest mentors as ever you know he taught me after effects um which plays such a heavy role with the diary of ceo it came from him because i needed to do certain things and um he was so patient with me and he was he's such an incredible mentor and it was like really sort of like the first time i sort of had that sort of person and um that i mean that was an incredible incredible um career opportunity what was so challenging about it obviously going from what you and joe are doing you know i imagine much bigger team bigger clients you know the pressure's on because you love what you're doing as well and i didn't that that makes it a bit more challenging but what was such a big difference from what you expected i think it was i think it was at the time was the the demands of a market you know i think hollywood especially um this is also around the time with covid as well so you know funding was getting scrapped left right and center you know budgets were being halved studios were struggling you know they're starting to come back but there was there was a time like especially because of it's pretty rough exactly and it's um but i imagine like covid it was cinemas or stuff things like that that films weren't being made you know everything and usually a lot of time the first things to go is marketing budgets right you know all this sort of thing and so i felt really i feel a lot for especially smaller agencies because they'll be they're constantly competing with huge agencies and the only thing really that they can sort of have an edge is through i guess a slightly more personalized experience because we're smaller etc etc yeah and probably money it's just we can undercut it yeah and i think that's the brutal reality of the film industry especially at the moment and especially in marketing and that's also my theory of why i think there's so many fucking remakes being made is because instantly you can halve your marketing budget if you think about say oh yeah when they remake ghostbusters it's happening in tv like all the old tv show that all the formats that are coming back like love island doesn't really need to be marketed anymore and they just churn that fuck around because you just like you don't have to explain what ghostbusters is no you just because everyone knows what's ghostbusters so you just have to make the trailer and a few places but you don't have to go through so like you can you can sort of streamline that process the marketing process and so i think the demands of the industry compared to what was required how fast it needs to be turned around meets budget yeah like all of those constraints um and ultimately it's it's a it's a very cutthroat industry you know it's i i mean i was on sets for like film and tv shows filming behind the scenes and all this stuff and it's like uh obviously again because of budgets they try not to overrun but then sometimes they do and because the second they overrun most people on set are on contracts and freelancers so double they get double pay so obviously they don't want to go over so then everyone gets annoyed when they do go over apart from these people because they're getting double paid but on the flip side they are also annoyed because it's like 5 a.m and we're also in the next day filming and then with me i had that but obviously i won't get in overtime because i've worked for an agency but then i'm still in the office the next day because i still need to do the editing and then i need to go back out and set and so it's it's it tapes a lot out of you yeah you know it's constant go go go go go and um and so i think for me it just got to the point where you know i was editing and i was having like panic attacks and i was uh that i still remember a time when i was i was i was editing for a show and i was bawling in tears because i was having these panic attacks freaking out and i was um what was causing them just the whole environment just everything you know you felt you felt like you couldn't stop for a moment you know and you know you never really felt like you could breathe because you had pressure from the clients and you have pressure then from your boss and then you'd have pressure on yourself and you i'm someone who if i'm gonna do something i'm gonna care the the most i possibly can about something when i'm in that moment you know if i'm got if i'm going skiing for the first time i'm gonna care so much about skiing yeah because i don't know what it is it's it's whether it's just something in me or something that i just got taught from a young age i don't know but when i'm when i'm doing it i'm pouring my heart and soul into it you're trying to be good at what you do just that yeah and so like you've put that so much pressure onto yourself as well and so you've got all of these sort of commitments and responsibilities going on and you just feel like you cannot breathe because the second you do you're losing time and you need to get back to it and so that's why i was crying whilst i was working because i I physically felt like I couldn't walk away from the computer to just cry.

1:10:12I felt like I needed to work if I wanted to cry. I had to do both at the same time. And so I sort of burnt myself out massively.

1:10:25Olly Fawcett:How do you define burnout? you i guess it's very i i sort of i sort of see it as very similar to i guess that depressive state where you just find no joy in it yeah you know it's a hard slog and when when i think about the bigger picture of what i do which is just making like films and making edits it's you know it's not heart surgery it's not like saving lives it's so fun you know i literally just make stuff for a living you know i mean and so that's how it should feel because it's not you know there isn't um there isn't the huge risks or the costs there or the life-changing elements to it and so when you're feeling this slog of just like i just can't be bothered i just don't want to i just can't like i just i feel like the second i log in everything's gonna bottle up and i'm gonna start crying again and it's like you you feel for me burnout feels like a trap right you know you feel like you're closed in and you can just try and get out of it through smashing through a wall in a hope that eventually it'll collapse or you have to somehow just try and calm down and just stay in this box and then that in itself makes me feel like claustrophobic and panicky and so um do you think it's a part of growing because i would imagine that when you're at the agency you're probably learning quite a lot without realizing how much you're learning right because it feels like you are someone who absorbs everything around you and you want to be great at what you're doing in that space do you think looking back and maybe in experiences at DOAC and other areas that burnout points are partially part of a growing cycle?

1:12:23Olly Fawcett:Or do you think they are completely avoidable? I think they are part, I think, to the extreme end. Can it be avoidable? Yes. Okay. I think it can be avoidable. I think it's, I don't think becoming burnout, I don't think things like imposter syndrome, you know, I think you can learn from them. Yeah. And there are signs there of, of growth and, and, you know, you know, healing from trauma, for example, is a good example. Yeah. Sort of all of these elements. I don't think it's a requirement. you know i think you can become a fantastic editor or you can become a fantastic employee or fantastic content creator whatever you want to be i think you can achieve that without needing to be pushed to the limit where you feel like there's no return because ultimately when i got burned out and i left i never wanted to work in editing ever again really the the like the goal was that bad yeah the goal was to never to return fuck it was i never watched films anymore i didn't watch netflix for two months because every time i saw that logo yeah yeah that was my heart just every time i turned it on i was just getting almost like this weird anxiety of like everything came flushing running back to me and flush flooding my brain and so i hated the industry i hated film i hated um editing and my goal was to just get a normal job to the extent where i was like how can i become a train driver yeah you know it was that's what i wanted to do i was like i want to become a train driver and so i was talking to helena about it and she was like look if you really really want to do that i'm not going to stand in your way but i can tell you now you're going to fucking hate it and so please give it one more chance and so um it was that that was it was interesting because that was a really dark moment in my life but it i was thankful that i'd learned the skills from therapy before on how to do it and i was so incredibly thankful that i had helena there yeah who is the most supportive human being on the planet um and so that's the risk of burnout and so when you sort of when you sort of ask in terms of like is it like that is it sort necessary for growth the reason why i want to say no is because you run the very real risk of losing people who feel like they were born to do this because if i didn't have helena there the doak trailers wouldn't exist i wouldn't be doing what i'm doing now i wouldn't be talking here i'd probably be in some sort of office or on the jubilee line on a jubilee line or maybe work my way up to Elizabeth fine for that air con no the reason why I ask is because I mean we've obviously interviewed some amazing people on the show and I've met some like fortunate to meet some exciting people doing cool shit and I don't know anyone that hasn't burned out like this yeah it's kind and obviously I've experienced it in different way and I think the burnout phrase has got a big scale I personally think I think there are really big versions of that I know people have been at very extreme ends of that and people have been at ends which for them is is a light burnout but for other people it's like what the fuck you know but i just i don't know like i think for me my experiences looking back at every moment that's happened to me it's kind of been the end of a slight chapter for me it's always and that's one of what i was resonating with what you're saying is like with joe there was a burnout and obviously lots going on new chapter begins with the agency is a burnout new chapter like that's how i think about it and because i run myself into the ground yeah and it's kind of that and obviously we'll get on to doak and and what happened there but like it feels like for a lot of people it's kind of the levels you go up against and also the realization point of what you really want and what it what it feels like i think burnout is a bit of an overused phrase personally like i think there's it's just a very easy word to understand for a lot of people and phrase maybe that's why maybe it's maybe it's because it's so overused and so um i guess it's now got such a spectrum to it right yeah um whereas every single successful person probably has gone through the extreme end of burnout of what they would call burnout whereas they probably see like how even even probably for me what people would say my sort of burnout would be oh that's nothing that's just yeah and everyone's so different in that and i think it's there is an element to it you know it's they they um it's like the the pain of being the artist you know i think there's a i think there's an actual like phrase for it which i can't remember what it is it's um you know when you think about people creating art like the amount of pain that a lot of them go through and a lot of the sacrifice that a lot of great people have gone through i think it's it's probably one of those things where you don't necessarily need to have it whether you will then reach your fullest potential that's the thing is probably the trade-off yeah you know and i think with me what's what's crazy about my journeys i never i'm i've never been someone where i'm like i'm gonna be the best at this really i've never been like no i didn't think i thought you would be that guy yeah quite a few people have said that um and it's um that's so interesting it's it's sort of interesting i've sort of lived the life of someone who wants to be the best at something and go through all the perils of someone who wants to be the best at something without wanting to become the best at something why didn't you want to become the best i think it's because growing up i you know it it wasn't instilled in me that you need to be the best at something you know i think you know when i think about my friends and my family most of them in fact probably like 95 percent of them have normal jobs you know they done decent in school you know they've done well to get the grades that they got to then go college or to go university and then they got a job and now they're working a job now they have a house now they have the family they're living the textbook life which is a lovely lovely life and that's the life i wanted you know i wanted to find my dream person which i have found you know i wanted to live in a house with that person who i have i want to have kids i want to have the family i want my family to be ingrained with her family and i want my kids to have their grandparents etc i want to go on holiday i want that life disney storytellers yeah i want that fairy tale life but the way i'm going about it is very fucking difficult because the career choices i'm making is not really suited for the person who wants that life and so i'm always in this constant crossroads and and i think this is where it's that pain of the artist of what i want based on everything that I've seen in my life and I think what I need are very different things and so my passion for storytelling and for creating something that sends me off in this direction and so it's a lot harder to get back to that one compared to the linear path and so that's why when I was like I want to become a train driver I just want to get a like a normal job is because that's that's me going down that linear path that so many people I know have gone down you know um I don't know entrepreneurs you know I never grew up knowing entrepreneurs I never knew any of this sort of stuff and so I've never had that lifestyle my lifestyle was almost play it safe very fucking British right I was literally talking to uh to a mate of mine earlier and he went to he went to like school in america and he got his first job in america and he was just like and he was saying how he moved down here uh essentially he couldn't get a work visa in america because he says a bit like a lottery so he was working for a huge huge um technology company and they sent him to their office in london so then he's been living in london and he was like he's noticed the differences of like hope between those two countries and in america it's like yeah man let's let's do this let's do it let's make money let's do it let's do all this and in britain it's like hold on have you thought about this have you thought about that what about this but what about that and it the perfect perfect example i can give that sums up britain versus america is our comedy if you look at american comedy friends the american office yep all of their shows well most of their shows are based on hope and success and you know support and all of those all of those really positive aspects of life right you know you watch friends they people end up together people end up with kids they get married they end up getting the houses the dreams that they want to achieve now you look at british sitcoms only fools and horses they cannot become millionaires for for the life of themselves you know they keep failing every episode they keep failing In fact, when they do become millionaires, the show was no longer funny.

1:22:51So then they made them broke again. You know, you have Forty Towers and he cannot for the life of it, for the life of him, run a hotel. You know, Forty Towers is just based on a hotel owner who cannot run a hotel. In between us, a bunch of four lads who cannot get a girlfriend to save their life. The most tragic human beings. and so um british humor is always based around this idea of failure and america seems to be more based on hope yeah and that see that seeped into our societies i think that's why it works so well is because there's the relatability there right and so i think for my whole life has been like you know what i want to do requires so much hope and so much risk and you need you know you need so much support to do that because it's so hard so hard just on that element as well as all the hardships of life that everyone else has to deal with and so the you have this constant calling when you're british of like just play it safe just do just do the right thing just do this earn your money have your family live that life because it's beautiful have premium bonds it's amazing you know you might win 20 pals this month how good does that feel you know and so that's that's my mind that was always my mindset but the career path i've gone on is one very much of like you have to be the best if you want to try and make anything in this career and so So, you know, this is why when the shock of DOAC happened and suddenly I'm the guy who innovated podcast promos and marketing, that was a huge shock to the system, you know, and one that, you know, you struggle to deal with like in that sense.

1:24:53and um but ultimately in those industries i guess that does lead to inadvertently that might lead to the burnout because you have to try and be the best did when you first went to doak

1:25:06Olly Fawcett:were you more reserved before you walked in the door and going in the door made you way more ambitious did the did the the podcast the production the team steven everyone did they change you i think so yeah i mean i'm still you know imposter syndrome it's so interesting because i'll have uh chats with a few friends about like the idea of imposter syndrome and whether it's an actual thing whether it's real whether it's not what it actually is yeah and i believe it is a thing because i believe it's something that i deal with every single day um so i'm i'm still like that you know there's still parts of me that lacks a little bit of ambition or is afraid to have ambition because afraid to afraid to have ambition and so but that was like a thousand times worse when I walked through the doors initially and um I think the one thing that Steve and Jack and the Graces and Liv and Berta and Dom and Will and you know and Sophie and Alex and all of these people have done for me they a they gave me back my purpose of a love of storytelling a love of editing a love of psychology a love of marketing they made me so passionate about it um they really them and and Helena they they're the ones who have reminded me that actually what I am doing is worthwhile and is actually relevant and is worthwhile pursuing you know you know I've had a couple experiences like even like last year on on holiday where you know you're sort of reminded that you're you're never going to amount to much if you want to go down the media route etc etc um and so they they they've always been that they've always been on my side of like you're you're you're great at this you know you're you're made to do this sort of thing keep doing keep doing it keep doing it and then sort of I guess naturally posting on LinkedIn posting on Instagram people messaging me you know not gatekeeping like my techniques and my methods have you dealt with the internal and external praise of what you do i don't deal with it at all well um you know it's i think this is this is a common curse of being self-taught i think it's a vital characteristic to be self-taught i think you learn so much more from being self-taught yeah but the the con of that is i think a lot of the time you never quite know with if what you're doing is right or the correct way you know and so especially at the start when we weren't as data-led for example or when we was building something and you know you'd get a lot of um hesitation and um a lot of i guess feedback from people like in the outside world in podcasts like why are you making a movie style trailer for a podcast it's just two people talking like what's why are you doing that what's the part you you know when you get all of those reservations cost of an emotional yes exactly and so when you have that the imposter syndrome being self-taught so you never quite know what you're doing is the right answer you're you constantly doubt yourself all the time and that then brings out another element of you of like okay they'll have to try extra hard now to try and prove them wrong and myself wrong and then that person then fights back and be like well that's now wrong and you're like well now i need to battle that and so you're literally you're inadvertently climbing up this ladder so many opinions of um of trying to prove so many things that you probably don't even have to prove you know and so um i always found it quite tricky to take compliments because in my head if i took compliment it meant i'm admitting what i'm doing is right and the second i admit i know what i'm doing is right people someone's going to come up behind me pull the rug under my feet and be like no you were wrong and now you're going to suffer for that do you think there's a point where that would just put no i don't think so i think it's um when you work in an industry so subjective as social media as content creation and podcasting and media nothing you ever do will be right and nothing you ever do will be wrong yeah essentially you know you you when you look at the content out there there are things that are shocking but there's an audience for it you know there's content that's so boring and dull but they get millions of views and people interact with it you know there's you know there's there there really is no right way of doing anything in this industry yeah and so because of that there is no definitive proof to say this is right and this is wrong and so I think the problem I've always had growing up was my whole life was being told that in school this is right and this is wrong and if you're wrong you suck and you're not going to become successful and a lot of the time I was wrong because I wasn't academically gifted you know so my whole life has been you're wrong and wrong means failure and whereas in the media one person says it's right the other person says it's wrong so then you're like balancing up as like who do you decide who who's right and who's wrong in this situation the reality of it is neither of them are right or wrong or actually both of them are actually right and wrong and so you've got it's if you try to i guess prove the doubters if that's if that becomes your single biggest success metric i think you're probably just going to drive yourself insane and so um when it comes to compliments i'm getting better also because i've i understand now that it's actually rude for me to not accept compliments i think that's you know it's um i saw i saw a post on social the other day and it really changed my mindset of like and someone's giving you a compliment they're giving you a gift and in essence if you're not accepting it you're basically being like i i don't want your gift thanks that's not quite the gift that i wanted you know and so what i'm trying to do now is take that compliment not always give one back because that was another defense mechanism that i'll do that'll be like oh you're great at this i'll be like i'm great you're fucking and it and then again could that be that's uh this guy was also like that can also be disrespectful because it's like you're almost saying well this is your compliment here's my compliment bitch you know you're sort of doing this sort of thing and so i'm i'm trying to get better at accepting the compliment because for someone to give me a compliment it is a gift and it truly does mean so much to me yeah no matter who the person is every time someone has said something nice about my work whether it's a comment or it's a dm or to my face it really really makes me feel something like warm inside and um it reminds me that there's a reason why i'm doing what i'm doing of course and so what i just need to learn now is to not then dismiss it you know is to take it on board and say thank you yeah so why did you leave oh um i feel like so much happened there for you like you went into a a different person in a way struggling challenges you guys achieved a hell of what you achieved a hell of a lot in that period of time what made you decide this was the next chapter time the honest truth of why i left the diary of ceo is

1:33:47the truth is there's no there's no one answer and i think that's that's why it's so complicated and it's you know there were huge highs there were huge lows and there were great reasons why i left there are also some negative reasons why i left you know there's you know there's reasons that i can't divulge due to respect there's also reasons i'd that i i i feel like doesn't need to be shared to go into it and there's also reasons of why i've left that i'm so happy to talk about and it's it's it's the craziest thing because you think when you leave a company it's black and white you know it's this thing happened caused me to leave here's my resignation blah blah blah and it could be oh i've got a job offer that job is better oh this pays better oh i don't like the manager oh blah blah blah um when you're in when you're building something like the diary of ceo and when you i guess have a role that i had which was the director of trailers it genuinely becomes like a part of you you know um you care about that show more than you ever thought you would care about a show you know it's um you know for a long time it was the reason why i was getting up every single day because i i had you know there was a trailer that needed to be made yeah you know there was you know it was also the reason where i found some of the greatest friends that i'll ever have because they also worked there building this show you know it's the reason why i've seen like people like dom and danny become fathers for the first time you know it was that show gave me so much and so leaving it for one reason just it i couldn't doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense you know and so um it felt like the right time ultimately in in in my career you know i you know i i i'm i'm leaving an incredible team in the trailer squad you know and you know live who who i i started training live maybe about two two and a bit years ago she was working on clips and um i needed someone to help me out because creating two doak trailers a week on your own is fucking is is is very hard it's a lot of early morning starts late night finishes stop not going to birthdays not going to family events like stopping anniversary breaks halfway through the anniversary you know there's a lot of that and so when they gave me live and you know Liv's been the most incredible person to train.

1:37:09And seeing where she is now is so incredible because she had to meet me at a standard, which took me two years. She had to get there faster. And so having that incredible team is such a gift. And it was hard leaving them. Do you think that's why it works, that show?

1:37:32Olly Fawcett:It's just purely down to the team. oh yeah i would say the single biggest denominator of why the diocio is successful is the people who made that show yeah a hundred percent because um it's it's interesting because a lot of a lot of um uh what's the word like a lot of people say well yeah of course it's successful they're they've got loads they've got loads of money loads of cameras and loads of people behind it that of course that's of course that's why they're successful but i think what people forget is is that it didn't start off with loads of cameras loads of people you know that you know the for example the trader squad is it was interesting i saw a comment the other day about it where um someone it's so weird because you're reading comments it was it was a post um it was a post about me which is very flattering and then in the comments people are talking about you and you're just reading it and you're like i don't know what's going on like why are you talking to me in third person like um but like what's interesting is they start making their own stories about your your own career journey and you're still reading this fascinating how different the stories are and um one of them was like lovingly praising the trailers and how much work must go into them and yeah someone applied was like well yeah but i've heard they've got five people working on it and they have two weeks to turn it around and i was just like i mean a it's not five there's four of us not all four work on the same trailer like it's mixed up we still only have two days exactly and it also for two and a half years it was just me and then for another i would say a year to yeah about a year it was two of us and then in the other like year and a half to two years there was like three of us and then to four of us you know it's all built up gradually and it's the same with it was saying with everything else you know but also like the quality of the show has gone up alongside it that's the thing if you put out episode one i think the first episode that is still on the channel is eddie hearn's episode like if you look at that now and you had that many team behind that episode arguably everyone would be like what the fuck is this if you know i mean if you had that many people yeah they're comparing what they they're comparing the now to where they should be comparing to themselves to which is the then yeah you know and and yeah that's a i mean that's a common mistake we all make right we all you know even when we're trying to grow our own personal brand with very very very conscious of the people who have like a million followers who are getting excellent abuse that's amazing engagement and we're like well why the fuck are they so successful why is everything they're posting just banging and mine's not working was that yeah because they've been working for six years to get to that point you know and so um the reason why the dial ceo was successful isn't because of the thumbnails it isn't because of the trailers it isn't because of the money it's those elements yes obviously contribute yeah but you wouldn't really have them if it wasn't for those core people who worked their absolute ass off every single day to make something that we were all so incredibly proud of you know and so we always felt doak was gonna be more than a podcast we always saw it as a show and we always treated it like a show when you treat someone like a show you have to pour so much care and love and attention into it and so the biggest you know the business the biggest success of doak was its people and the fact that those specific people poured their hearts and souls into it you know and they worked so hard at it and they you know they gave so much to that show that that when they you know the ones who are still there or the ones who have left if they've left they can feel proud of the work that they've done as the ones who are still there can still feel proud of what they're building um did that like i guess it's sort of um unity isn't it that you guys all had together yeah obviously being a public product there is going to be negative opinions on doak i think there is too much negative opinion on doak i watched it for ages i fell out of love with it when it became very health-based i just didn't watch as much of it because it wasn't the kind of content i want to watch as much and then every so often i see a guest i'm like epic guest love to speak like you know there's there's pools to all podcasts i think that's very similar now but there was there has been times where the show got a lot of heat for you guys internally how do you guys deal with that or was the unity so strong that you it would just kind of bounce straight off a great question how it's it's so interesting because you're never taught this stuff are you like we're not you're we we definitely weren't media trained we're definitely not pr trained and i mean i remember there was one time when i received a death threat and it's like how the when you were when you're at the show well i was at the show yeah uh like um and i think jack received one as well we were receiving threats and um is that due to like political guests and that kind of thing ironically due to a health guests oh really yeah it's um because health and fitness is is so it's so sparse yeah and there is no one one size fits all and you know and i think there's some really interesting things like there's great content there as well 100 % and so um yeah when when i when i received that for example that takes you back because you don't know how serious it is you don't know whether it's just a very angry keyboard warrior you don't know hell if they're where they live what they're doing um it was in my it was in my request so obviously they didn't see that i'd seen it and so you you know you just like you were poor and you're ignoring things like that and um so it it's crazy and and you sort of and you know why you got it is because they feel like they can go for you right because they obviously they like they they're more likely to get through yeah to me for example and no one's running your pages like is yeah and it's like i mean at the time i think i probably had like 600 followers or a thousand followers or something like that so when when you get things like that when you know you when you see the the negative side of it you you do have to go through a constant i guess debate internal debate of this dilemma in your mind of um what people are saying whether it's right or wrong what what their point is what's going on and for me what really helped me was always to go back to the first principle of the idea of DOAC especially in my mind was for people to have conversations of all kinds whether they were comfortable or uncomfortable and allow people if they wanted to listen to those conversations to listen to it and in the hope that the reason why they're listening to it is either because they're curious or it could be affecting them and if they can learn something from it that can positively impact their life that's amazing even if it's just that one person you know and i thought you guys did that pretty well you know i hope so i mean there's like there's been a few examples where i'm like to counteract the the death threat scenario i i still remember a linkedin message i got from someone who was battling cancer and he messaged me personally it was like i don't really i can't always watch all of the dark episodes but i always try and make sure that i watch the trailers because for 90 seconds of my day i just enjoy watching them and it makes me forget about the cancer and that like i mean it made me cry but it was um to to like have that impact on someone going through such a horrific experience i can't even imagine like again it goes back to the whole i guess like the um going for the mental health stage of like when you look at what other people are going through this guy's going through fucking cancer man it's like it's i can't even imagine and the fact that he took the time to message me to say that i have played a little role in yeah like helping him yeah um how can that not like balance it out of like okay maybe what i am doing is worthwhile has got like um is making a strong impact you know it's um so when you think about those two moments together yeah there's so much in the middle which is people who whose lives have gotten better through doak and other people who might take one lesson away you know i've taken so much from the like i have to like me and my editors like me and live have to read every single episode before we make the trailers so some of these episodes are like 120 130 40 pages long and we have to read all of them because we need to understand the core of that episode to make sure the trailer we make perfectly represents that episode the amount of information that i've taken from over 450 episodes is incredible you know that i've implemented this like the idea of my rich life you know always taking the stairs you know all of these tiny investing i didn't know fuck all about investing until the diocese you know um what's it to an event of a nuclear war no which country to run to you know it's um it's given a lot to you and stony people exactly and so when when i sort of you do have to go through this moral dilemma i do think you you run the risk especially when you become big and we've seen examples of that with creators in the past who haven't had that internal discussion of am i doing what's best for the audience and for the guests and for the show um and they do things potentially just for the clicks or they do things just for the response and then they get found out and it happens so much yeah and it's super hard right super super easy mistake to make at that level yeah and it's hard to come back from that mistake yeah yeah and so one thing that i'm so proud of during my whole time there because my goal as as the director of traders is to entice people to what i'm creating a marketing asset here you know i have to leave things unanswered i need to leave with cliffhangers i need to hook you in yeah i need to make you feel uncomfortable in order to offer you hope you know if if you go and watch a trailer and by the end of it you don't feel anything you're not going to watch this episode you know i need to make you feel uncomfortable I need to make you feel like the stakes are high for you to care enough to then by the end of the trailer when they be like, but there is a way around this to go like, OK, let me find this out.

1:49:05That's my job.

1:49:06Olly Fawcett:You can tell your trailer talent is like bedded into you as well, because like the way you're like the way we've been speaking for like an hour and a half now, the way you talk and the way that you put passion and emphasis on words that you can see that now the way you think about your creativity has now become who you are. Does that make sense what I'm saying? yeah yeah like it's like and i think yeah but it's also just like thinking about your you know your past wanting to be an actor wanting to build these things up it's kind of interesting in a way how like you've probably become even stronger at being able to tell stories in real life through this work you've been doing which is all social and digital and podcasting and digital formats all that kind of stuff yeah 100 and you know this whole thing has just taught me just how important storytelling is you know story i say story is king but i truly mean it and you know it's it's something that i think loads of people struggle with but it's something that i think so many people have inside of them yeah everyone knows how to tell a story because we've been told stories our entire life we've so many different mediums you know when you're a child and you've read a bedtime story that's what's going into your brain at that age you know when you're listening to all like audiobooks when i was i used to listen to harry potter on on the cassettes when i would go to sleep so in my brain oh i'm i'm dreaming harry potter you know i'm learning how to tell stories and then you then think about stories in the outside world you know when you when you think of war of the worlds for example which i think was like in the 1830 1838 or something there was like um hg wells done a radio play of well uh war of the worlds and people believed that story so much that they thought it was actually happening that aliens had landed in in the united states and was destroying everything the reality of it was and this is what this is again shows the power of storytelling is so you had that group of people thinking this was actually happening because the story was so real even as far-fetched as it sounds they believed it to be real that was the power of that story but then what makes the power of story even more fucking powerful is the fact that it wasn't as bad as we all thought it was yeah the newspapers who were scared of the rise of radio at the time then made their own story of how bad the radio stations made people panic that they then turned it into mass hysteria against radios so they conducted their own story for their own agenda against the radios who then had their own story to do so it's like the power of story going through all of these today isn't it's like you know when you think about when you think about frankenstein so millions of people know frankenstein right there's another of film that's about to come out about it there's a dark rider epic universe with frankenstein in it they have you know he's he's a character that's so well known and it started um through an author called mary shelley who i think the story was they were sort of um they they were in a hotel and like there was extreme weather so they couldn't leave and so they were given the task of an hour to write a story and i think i think the way it goes is maybe one person wrote frankenstein and another person wrote what was then going to become dracula so two of the greatest horror videos of our generation of all time and the way that the story of frankenstein has just evolved and outlasted decades and decades and decades going through scaring children at campfires to then being a book to then being like a tv show to then being a film to then being a ride to then being a character you can be that's all started with a story yeah so when i say how powerful a story is it has the power to change everything it has the power to to choose what mood you're going to be it changes how you're going to buy something it changes how you're going to perceive someone how you're going to perceive a client how you're going to perceive a service how you're going to perceive the government how how you're going to go through life depends on the story that you choose to believe or the story that you tell yourself yeah and so that's why i'm so passionate about it and why i also think everyone can tell a story it's in them because it's around us you know we've been absorbing this all i do now is i sort of delicately push it out of people and try and help them find ways to understand that story and then also how to implement certain psychological tricks to elevate that story to to some way that is yeah look and i think we're running out of time but i was gonna actually finish up by asking what it takes to be a great editor but i'm gonna change it based on what you just said and what does it take to become a great storyteller what does it take to become a great storyteller

1:54:21to be a great storyteller you have to become very curious and very receptive to what it is to be human and the reason why i say that is because it's it's it's trickier than it might sound Because when you do that, you're basically allowing yourself to the challenges of life, of emotion. You're allowing yourself to be upset. You're allowing yourself to laugh. You're allowing yourself to put yourself through uncomfortable situations. You need to allow yourself to be empathetic. You need to allow yourself to understand what makes people laugh, what makes people cry. You know, you, you, um, to be human is an incredible gift and it's something that I think people actively actually try hard to avoid.

1:55:21You know, they, they don't, they feel uncomfortable being human. You know, they, they feel uncomfortable showing their true feelings. They, they feel uncomfortable having those conversations to open up, for example. But you, the only way to be a great storyteller is to be that open because that's how you can understand how other people can feel. when you're writing these stories, when you're creating these stories. You know, stories are only great when they can provoke emotion, right? Disney are the masters of this. You know, they... Disney is a family-friendly franchise, and yet most of them start with someone dying in the first five minutes.

1:56:02You know what I mean? Like, Tarzan, parents are mulled to death by a, like, leopard. Or, you know, Frozen, the parents like a shit you know like so much um there's so much emotion in in those stories and the reason why you the reason why they have to do that is because you have to take people on that journey you have to make people feel down in order to then make them feel great you know you can't have you can't just if every the best example i can give is if every single player was like Messi, you would never have a great player. You would never be able to say Messi is the greatest player of all time because everyone's like it.

1:56:50In order to have the best, you need to have the worst, you know, and you need to have that spectrum. And so that's what storytelling does is it takes you on that emotional journey. It takes you through that spectrum of highs and lows. And so for me, the only way to do that is you have to understand what makes humans tick, what makes human think, what makes humans feel. And the only way to understand that is you've got to become incredibly human yourself and allow those emotions in. Amazing.

1:57:22Olly Fawcett:And thanks so much. It's been a knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb with you. And thanks for opening up about the story of your life so far. I feel like the next chapter is going to be exciting. I'll let you tell that story yourself, probably on your socials. But thanks for coming in and telling everything congrats on everything so far because it's been a pretty big journey and a huge amount of success so thank you and thank you for coming on the show thank you for having me cheers man