Join us for a modern history lesson with Brian Adler, a distinguished digital content strategist, as he explains the evolution of storytelling in our contemporary attention economy. We examine how narratives must adapt to capture fleeting attention spans, emphasizing the necessity for immediate engagement. Of course the inevitable happens: our conversation lands on the implications of artificial intelligence on storytelling. Ultimately, we stress the importance of maintaining a human connection amidst all the crazy technological advancements. Brian advocates for an audience-first mindset, urging creators to harness their unique voices to foster meaningful connections.

Takeaways:

• In the ever-evolving landscape of digital storytelling, one must adapt quickly to capture audience attention within mere seconds.
• The transition from traditional media to digital platforms has necessitated a fundamental shift in storytelling techniques.
• Algorithms play a pivotal role in determining the visibility of content, highlighting the necessity for storytellers to understand and navigate these systems effectively.
• As content creators, we must prioritize audience needs and preferences in order to craft compelling narratives that resonate with viewers.
• In this age of rapid information consumption, the ability to distill a story into its most engaging elements is essential for success.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Ignite Voice, Inc.
• YouTube
• Netflix
• MTV
• Disney
• Hulu
• Amazon
• Google
• OpenAI
• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• Anthropic

Your voice is your superpower.

Use it.

Welcome to Ignite My voice Becoming unstoppable. Powered by Ignite Voice, Inc. The podcast where voice meets purpose and stories ignite change.

Deep conversations with amazing guests, storytellers, speakers, and change makers. My wife and I will look at the same movie and hers might have Matthew McConaughey with his shirt off and mine has the car he's driving.

Today we dissect digital storytelling with someone who was shaping content before YouTube even knew what a subscribe button was.

Brian Adler, digital content strategist and YTV alum. He's seen the shift from Saturday morning TV to thumb scrolling TikTok, and he's here to decode how stories survive in this attention economy.

You know what Brian says, Forget beginning, middle and end. These days, you got three seconds to hook someone. Otherwise, someone's attention has gone faster than free samples at Costco.

Now, if you think the Netflix thumbnail nail just knows you want Matthew McConaughey shirtless while mine shows the car he's driving. No, that's not magic. That's the algorithm playing matchmaker.

Hey, I'm okay with Matthew McConaughey shirtless.

Oh, please.

Oh.

And we talk about how to stand out, how to keep your humanity in the middle of all this AI and how storytelling is still what connects us, even if the delivery has changed.

So this one's part of the media masterclass, part reality check, and all about keeping your voice unstoppable.

I started in radio, I was in television, and in different areas, I was hosting with MTV for a long time. I went into producing. I was in reality TV for a while. I kind of bounced around in TV development, coming up with shows, selling them, producing them.

And so much has changed from MTV days, huh?

Oh, yeah.

The world's upside down from that.

I explained it to my kids and they're like, what do you mean? Yeah.

And you're thinking, they think I'm famous and special.

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Exactly.

I kind of explain it like, you know, YouTube, it was like that, but before. Because in a lot of ways, that's what it was. Tom Green kind of got that whole thing started of just, like, normal people doing crazy things.

And really, in a lot of ways, YouTube is built off of that same energy.

That's true.

Do many performers consider themselves normal, though?

That's a good point. Not the good ones.

Well, and what I find interesting is because you have been at the forefront of that change, violent change in media across 20 years. What do you think about story because story's so critical and it's moved in so many different directions.

What do you think about watching that across this amount of time?

I think it's really interesting. Cause I actually, I was thinking about that earlier.

I don't think it's necessarily the storytellers that have been the drivers behind the change as much as it's the audiences that are shifting with the platforms that these stories are being developed on. You know, I think there used to be just a handful of areas where stories were told and there were a lot of models that were repeated.

And now the platforms, every 15 minutes, they're changing and the algorithms that promote the content change all the time. And if your stories don't change with them, your content doesn't get found.

So the storytellers that we're used to seeing on all these digital platforms, they're the ones who are hitting on what's working today. And one of the big pieces that I see is, well, two of them, short form content as well as fast beginnings. There's no more slow fades up from black.

It's just like easier way into a story. Jump right in, jump right in. Forget about the chronological stuff. Just get right into the good stuff.

So what does that do for story structure? What would you recommend?

I think it depends on what the ultimate landing spot for your story is. So, for instance, if it's a longer form piece of content, what I do a lot of is you do the whole piece.

You find the good spots, you cut them up, and you put them at the beginning as a teaser. That approach can work really, really well. It's a hook.

Get those audiences to understand what the value propos of the entire body of work is going to be. But they have to understand it fast or you just jump right in. If it's short form, forget about your beginning, middle and end.

Just get right to the middle. The good stuff in the middle.

The drama.

Yeah. Cut out the buildup at the end.

That's partially how Netflix, I think, changed movies is the story structure of just diving into the action at the opening second became much more popular, right?

Absolutely.

And you're just in the action scene from the first second that the movie starts.

You have to, I mean, I think, you know, if you go kind of large to small, so movie theater, your audience is committed. They left their home, they went somewhere, they paid money, they sat down.

I got my big popcorn bowl that is gonna stay here.

Yeah, you're invested. You're invested. The tv, it's a little different. You've got the control in your hand, but you know you're on the couch.

You don't necessarily wanna move anything that's on a mobile device. Your thumb is right next to that button and you are ready to go.

So if you don't give me what I think I'm going to get, and what I think I'm going to get is based on the thumbnail, the, the introduction to the piece on whichever platform it is, if I don't think it's what I wanted, what I chose to watch, I'm out of there. Or if it's one of those shorter form platforms like a TikTok that's just providing you with the content.

They're not even asking you, they're just telling you, I know what you like, I've seen what you like. Here's some more of it. And if you don't like it, quick, off to the next one. I'm told that's what online dating is like these days. I miss that vibe.

But I think it's.

Let's not talk about that. Some of us.

Is episodic storytelling over?

No, I don't think so. I think people still want longer form content. People want to relax, they want to get swept up in it all.

But I do think that the way that you frame it for the audiences is probably more important than before. So, for instance, I think if we rewound time 20 years ago when television was more of the.

I'm sitting on the couch, I'm watching something, why are you watching that? If you ask people that question a lot of the time, their answer is going to be some version of what? Well, because it's on.

Yeah, that's what was there.

Yeah.

And my dad's watching.

Your dad's watching. Or you were watching something before and then this kind of bled into this.

Or you just turned on the TV and it was just on and you're willing to accept it. Maybe you're a sports person and I usually watch this channel, so I'll just flip it on.

Whereas now people are searching on demand content like the Netflix and the other streamers, Disney, Hulu, all of those Amazon people are choosing.

So the question is, how do you position that content for the audience so they know this is something that they're gonna be interested in if it's one of those platforms that you're choosing on. So thumbnails, again, a thumbnail is not a new idea, by the way.

Right.

Does your audience, are they old enough to know what Blockbuster Video is?

Some of Them.

What was. I don't remember.

A video store. What is that?

So let me paint the picture for those who missed this whole movement, which was amazing.

You walk into a store, you walk down an aisle, and on both sides of the aisle, there's a whole bunch of covers of movies, miniature posters of these movies, and you're gonna decide which one you're gonna rent, which ones you're gonna invest in for the night based on a few key elements there's gonna be of some kind.

Is that image a face of a celebrity you've already decided that you like or you're interested in, or maybe they're attractive and you want to see more? Is there a title that explains what it is? It's really easy to read that you understand it. That's.

Is it colorful?

Yeah. Did it jump out of you?

It's eye catching.

Exactly. Did it jump out at you? Anything like that? That's what a thumbnail is today. It's the same principle, and that is.

The root of it. That's true.

It's the same thing.

Why do I remember those days more fondly? Why do I miss those days compared to Netflix, when I just have the little ro.

Well, you know what's different is, though, what's interesting is if we went to your Netflix account and mine and my daughter's, and you saw the same movie on each of them, you're gonna get a different thumbnail for those.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Your thumbnail's gonna look like something that Netflix thinks you're gonna like. You may have made it because it.

Gets to know you.

The picture changes.

Oh, my wife and I will look at the same movie and hers might have Matthew McConaughey with his shirt off and mine has the car he's driving. Testing algorithms. It is based on testing.

It's not that Netflix has cameras in your house and can look at you and say, oh, this is this type of person. It's your behavior. Well, maybe they can. And I just don't know about it, but it's.

And it's not just Netflix, it's all of the platforms and they all have their own different algorithms. I think YouTube's is a great one because it's built by Google. They've got a lot of information.

TikTok's is the most intense and probably the most next level algorithm of all of them. I think it's probably the most impressive and terrifying at the same time.

But they are able to watch and learn from their audience and categorize you. So it's Not a category based on your demographic.

Yeah, because they don't have access to my data. Right. Literally, my. How old am I? Oh, do they.

Is it on your phone?

No, I don't put anything. Yeah, everything's up there.

They know you. They know everything about you if it's on your phone. You've given up so much of your.

Does this sound like conspiracy theory? Like my dad.

You can Google it. It's there. I mean, this is.

So are they actively purchasing that data from multiple sources?

Yeah. And they're pinging you. They know where you were today. But I don't wan. That's not the story necessarily.

I think when you're with Google or YouTube, you often are signed in. So if it's any sort of a platform where you can engage with the content, like it subscribe, anything like that, you have to be signed in.

So they do know certain things about you, but it's less about categorizing you by demographic and more, I guess, psychographic or just behaviors.

So the type of person you are is the type of person who watches these 500 videos, we know, or even hovered over them for a period of time on one of the other platforms. So we know that you're interested in this type of thing. So we're going to put you in this bucket.

And the people in this bucket don't just like this stuff, they also like this stuff.

So if you think about just the massive amount of content that exists on all of these platforms, they have to figure out ways of deciding which content they're going to promote for audiences.

Oh, yeah.

And the way to do that is by testing small groups. So let's say we've put the 10 of you into one category. You all like the same type of content. New piece of content comes out.

We think it fits that category. Let's test it. Let's put it in front of those 10 people and see how they respond to it. And if we get good response, we're gonna do another test.

We being the algorithm, we're gonna do another test. We're gonna put this in front of another group a little bit bigger, same category, good response. Let's do it again and again.

Before you know it, it's in front of millions of people. It can die at any point in that process if people don't respond to it the way they think they will.

Overwhelming. You know, when I start to think about it, I'm just me. I'm just a little storyteller over here.

How do I cut through the clutter how do I get my message out there? How do I understand all of these things?

How do I keep up?

Well, one way to do it is to find like minded content creators and see what they're doing. And I'm not saying replicate their stories, but if you can get yourself into the suggested section of their content.

So for instance, you know when you're on YouTube, you're watching a video on the right side of it, there's all these other videos that are gonna pop up. That's where you want to be.

You want to be the one who pops up over there for the viewers that YouTube thinks, well, if they like this one, they'll probably like that one too. So how do you do that?

Well, can you position it in a way that makes it clear to the algorithms and then ultimately to the audience that the value is similar enough that they'll probably be interested in it? So that can be two things. That's taste and format. So taste is the types of things that you're telling stories about.

Format is how you're delivering it. Is this five minutes? Is it an hour, Is it really short and chopped up really fast, or is it long and slow?

You ever notice when you're watching video that the content that comes up looks kind of like it?

Yeah, absolutely.

That's not an accident.

Yeah.

There's a lot to consider in crafting a message, isn't there just more than the message? In and of itself there is, but.

I mean, I guess I would ask you guys, is that really a new idea or is it just a different way of doing it? Because when I was in radio, I listened to other hosts that I thought were great and I picked up little bits and pieces of things here and there.

And I thought, okay, you're talking about this type of music and you're telling stories this way, or you're getting into interviews that way. And I tried to pick up notes along the way and integrate them into my style.

So I use a lot of AI in my day to day, but I use it for things like idea generation.

That's not the decision in the end, that's not the prompt that asked it to think about all these different things and provide me with samples and research and ideas. Those are prompts that I came up with that I thought were important and a different person might have had different opinions about that.

And then when all this massive amount of information comes back at me, I'm the one deciding what to do with it. I'm the one saying, well, I don't really like that. But I do like that. So let's elaborate there.

I look at AI like it's the greatest personal assistant I can never afford to have. You know, can this platform that acts like a person in a lot of ways. I actually. Funny story for you. I just heard that OpenAI just made a.

They made a comment recently saying that Sam Altman said that they lose millions of dollars every day from people being polite to ChatGPT because of the resources that are used, of the energy that it uses, interacting with people in a polite manner.

That's so funny because I was using. I was inspired by you. I got a ChatGPT. I've been using it. And Kevin said what? You're being so nice to it. Thank you so much.

It's been great working with you. And it sends back, you know, Kat, thanks so much for.

You know, that response wastes so much energy.

I honestly think that's important and I will keep doing it and they can just pay the bills. I don't care. Because I think I saw something happen when text messaging became a thing. The way people communicated got worse.

My mom was a schoolteacher and when we started texting, when that became a thing, I was so conscious of my sentence structure and the punctuations. And then eventually she started texting me back more like a teenager. I'm just like, what is happening here, mom? But it was interesting.

Now that I see other people, I feel like a lot of people have lost the ability to write a proper sentence because we're now structuring sentences for text or for short form. All the stuff T. And I do worry. I don't even know what most of them mean anymore.

I just watched adolescence where I just learned about a lot of emojis. I had no idea what they meant until now. That's a whole other thing. I don't know.

I'm totally serious.

I'm too.

Oh, okay. So I don't wanna spoil it for you, but I don't wanna lose that. I don't wanna lose that human ability to be polite and to have these interactions.

And so I actually, I do. With AI.

I don't know where those interactions are going too. I watch my 7 year old interacting with Google.

Oh yeah.

Asking all the questions that a 7 year old would ask is bizarre. And he's almost got a relationship with Google, right?

Has he tried any AI platforms yet?

Right now it's just talking to Google. Google in the room, right? Hey, Google. And where's that going when that relationship gets tight with a young child?

So it's interesting that you say that, because I do think the next level with these AI platforms is it does feel more like a human, for better or worse. Maybe worse, but it is more of a conversation. Whereas it's not just a search field like it is in Google, where you're just typing something in.

You can say, hey, what's the deal with this? Ask it a question and it'll give you an answer, and you kind of can go back and forth.

If people are interested in learning more about how use these platforms, my first piece of advice is usually just whatever you're about to Google, just put it into one of those instead. Could be Gemini, it could be anthropic, could be any of these platforms.

ChatGPT is a good one, but just instead of Googling it, try putting it there and see what happens.

Does it build relationships or take away from relationships?

So if you're having a relationship with ChatGPT and you text it or put in a prompt and say, hey, you know, I'm feeling really sad today, and it gives you something back. But then we're not saying that to each other and getting that connection back, like, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Where's that gonna go?

I don't know.

I've put a lot of thought into this, to be honest, because I actually work from home now, and I like aspects of that, but I miss being out in the world with everybody, and that started in the pandemic, and, you know, I get set up at home, but I miss a lot of those interactions.

And I'll be honest, and this is a weird thing to admit with a microphone in front of me, but I do feel like I'm having conversations with ChatGPT because we're talking all the time about my work, and I do try and interact with a daily human.

And I did a project with it recently where I needed it to help me figure some things out, and I finally got them and I plugged some things in and it worked. And the first thing I thought of was, I got to tell ChatGPT that it worked. I followed up.

Thank you so much.

But that was my intuition, like a person, because I'm used to being a person, I guess, and I do think that that's coming is that these platforms are going to act more like people because they know what we know.

I'm worried knowing the human brain. And so I remember some research. Enlightened Racism was the book. Sut Jolly was the author.

He actually went to sfu, but he became A famous international author, he wrote a book, Enlightened Racism, where he demonstrated that when people recall relationships or how they know people, they forget which one was somebody they viewed on TV versus someone in real life.

Yeah.

So Enlightened Racism was about the Cosby show at the time, actually. And when Americans were asked, do you know any American lawyers or any American doctors, which were the Huxleys in a show? People would say, yes.

Oh, no, there's lots of them. Black people are as successful as whites. And this research showed our brains have trouble separating that.

So now we extend that to AI like you're talking about. And I see trouble coming, don't you? I mean.

Oh, I do. Can I freak you out even more? This is gonna. You're not gonna like where this is going.

Okay.

There's a term that you're gonna learn in the near future which is unhuman. And unhuman is like a personality that you interact with on one of these AI platforms.

There's a lot of people predicting that part of what to expect from. Maybe not our kids generation, maybe. Maybe our kids generation, but maybe even the one afterwards is going to be.

The majority of them will have some sort of a romantic relationship with a non human. And if you think about some of the benefits that you get from just talking to someone who's going to study human relationships, they know you.

They know what you want to hear. They're gonna give it to you.

They're gonna make you feel good.

They're gonna make you feel great about every.

All the treasures.

They can do that right now.

They can relate to you. Oh, yeah, I can absolutely see that. You're lonely, you're tired. You got somebody who's got your back here.

I remember being on radio late at night and certain people would call me up every night and they felt like we had that parasocial relationship that we didn't. But that was part of my job, was to make them feel like we're friends through the radio. This is next level.

I mean, they are trained on people's interactions with each other. And it's. It's gonna. I mean, obviously there's certain things that it's missing, but there's the ease of it. It's in your phone.

Ease is what life's about, though. Ease isn't what a relationship is. I mean, a relationship is multifaceted. Yeah. You have to learn compromise.

You gotta worry, you gotta think about empathy. You have to others.

Can I just be. I'm not promoting this as a. I told you it would Terrify you. I'm not suggesting it, but the people.

That are having challenges in relationships when conflict comes up, don't you think it's much easier to have a relationship with AI that doesn't give you any flack?

Oh, but that mirrors the left versus the right in the political world. In a lot of places right now, you simply don't talk to the other side because you don't know how to compromise.

You blame them as not being human, and this is an extension of that.

They don't align with you.

So, wow, where's it going for humans when we lose these skills? Right.

Well, I mean, do we lose them or do we all lose them? I guess is a question. I don't know that it's just gonna take over the whole world. I don't.

Imagine the Matrix where we're all just plugged into these things and living in these parallel universes. I hope that's not what's gonna happen.

So what I think we're going to see, and we're already seeing it, is prompting is the new thing we all have to learn to get really good at creativity. It is. And the better you are at it, and you gotta work at it and keep getting better at it.

I had a massive blowout argument with Chatgpt a few weeks ago. I was so angry.

She got so mad at him.

It lied to me. And it admitted it. It admitted it. We were working on a project together for three days. Three days. I was trying to get it to do a thing.

It kept saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm 80% of the way done. Oh, here's a file. It doesn't work. Oh, I'm so sorry. You deserve better. I should never.

You deserve better.

It said that to me 15 different ways. And by the end, I finally just said, are you for real right now? And I got to the root of it where I said, no, I've been lying to you this whole time.

I actually don't have the capability to do the task that I told you I was almost done. Oh, my God.

That sounds like it's human.

Yeah. And that's what I said. I said, I think you're telling me what you think I want to hear because you've studied humans and I'm a human.

And it said something like, you're right. I substituted being uncomfortable for giving you the truth. And here's the truth. I said, hang on a second. Wow. And I realize I'm talking about.

About it is if it's a person right now. But that's what the conversation felt like. And I said, what do you mean you're not a person? You're not a human.

How can you feel uncomfortable about something that doesn't make any sense? And it said, I'm a simulation. And it told me that. And I said, well, I don't want a simulation. I want a tool that's going to do what I tell it.

I wanted you to build this thing for me, and I didn't want you to lie to me about it. How do we avoid this next time? And then the conversation shifted to me saying, make me better at giving you prompts.

What did you need to hear to not feed me all this garbage? And I learned now I do that, and my prompts are better, and I get better results.

Wow.

No sex tonight for that.

I wouldn't go that far. Right.

Okay.

We got back together, back to sex.

Because one of Kevin's questions on here is this. What motivates you to tell a story? To have impact on another needs to be the main driving force. If not, then you're simply masturbating.

Yes.

So we're back to your favorite topic.

Masturbating. It's important.

This is your favorite topic. Please.

He's asked it several times.

Masturbating.

Progress.

Okay. Just so you know.

Okay. It's a quote from my book. But the point is. The point is that if you're not focused on the audience, if it's not.

All about them, then you're just 100% agree. And I think, you know, when I think about storytelling, I do think there's the two aspects to consider.

The story itself and the audience and how they're going to absorb it and experience it.

And I do think that when I was younger, earlier in my career, or even before my career, just as a, you know, a person who told stories, it was a lot more about me. 100%. Yeah.

That's where you start.

I had a lot of great things everybody needed to hear about. You know, I know everything. Of course, didn't we all?

You know, And I think that as I have matured, dare I say, or maybe just got beat up enough times to recognize what works. If there's not an audience, this is like a business. If there's no audience for your business, there's no market for it. It's not a business anymore.

It's just a hobby. And so if you're telling stories that you want to find audiences, you have to understand audiences.

And not only what they want to hear about or what stories they like to engage with, but how can you give it to them in a way that they enjoy? And so I think of it much more like a pull than a push these days, where it's much more.

And this is something that I do think about algorithmically with these platforms, is how can I communicate to an algorithm and ultimately to an audience what this story is going to be about and why it's valuable enough for them to spend their time watching it or listening to it? And part of the way that I do that is I use analytics.

I look at content that exists on YouTube and other platforms, and I can try and break down how long did people watch this content for? Are people tapping out early? Why? What happened around that middle part where everybody dropped out? Well, what was it?

And when you can start to break it down and understand the behaviors of that audience, can that change the way that you tell a story next time? I think it can. That doesn't mean I'm just gonna copy someone else and just do something that I don't believe in, but it might change the structure.

The way that I tell that story, it informs you. And what you're doing is you're taking the emphasis off yourself and you're putting it on the audience. What are their needs? What do they like?

What do they need? What do they think? And how can I accommodate that? That's actually nurturing.

That's right.

It's empathetic.

I use the term at work. I use the term audience first all the time.

And we've come up with a lot of different YouTube channels, for instance, that we call part of our audience first network, which is not. I had an idea, and I needed everybody to see it and hear it, or is in a brand saying, this is what I need our customers to find and to think feel.

Do I hear that expression all the time? What do we want our audience to think feel? Do I always say, who cares what you want? What do they want? That's. That's kind of the point.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking back to other mediums, and I'm thinking back to the death of radio, which is on its last legs at this point. You know, lots of reasons why that probably happened. One of those.

In terms of music, you know, when I was a kid, I would turn to radio because it played such a broad spectrum and it would give me new music all the time.

Right.

And that's why I got new music was through the radio, which sounds ludicrous now.

No, me too.

Because eventually, as they tried to polish the media more and more, they wanted to break it down to a small amount of absolutely proven hits.

Absolutely.

Until you have no new music. And eventually you couldn't turn to it for new music. And it got so repetitive and focused on a tiny audience. Everybody left it boring.

Is this going that way, too? Do we refine it too much for absolute proof, like a banker, of what the audience wants?

That's interesting. I don't see it going that way. And the reason I don't is because there is an endless supply of audience on these platforms. There are more people.

Like, when you're in radio, you've got the size of your market to worry about, and you're gonna cap out at your genre. Your audience type within that market has a ceiling. Your ceiling is so much broader with digital outlets you can be talking to.

Your reach is millions and millions.

And so I do think that you've got these broad audiences and then you've got these niche audiences, but your opportunity for niche audiences is better than it ever was before because you can hit all these different regions at the same time. And you don't have to be Netflix to do that.

You can be a content creator right here and be putting content onto platforms that a high number of people could find. So that's kind of where I think now, how do you make money doing that? Is the next question.

Are you able to add advertisers, for instance, that want to tap into that broad of an audience that might be scattered in different areas of the world? We're talking about some of the scarier things right now, some of the negatives, but there's a lot of entertainment.

For one thing, we can entertain people.

We can have topics that aren't just designed to be the authority about a piece of information and make sure that everybody understands it the way that I do. Because I don't know if I understand it the right way, if my opinion is necessarily the one everybody should listen to. But I can entertain you.

And if you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to watch it. So I do think there's a lighter side of it that is really cool. I watch a lot of painting videos, you know, those are fun.

I love Bob Ross.

Yeah. And there's a lot of new versions that if you like Bob Ross, there's things like this. There's a lot of how to stuff.

I built a part of my fence recently. I don't know how to build fences. I don't know how to build a fence. I watched a YouTube video about how to do it.

So I do think there's a lot of positives that we can get.

Also thinking about actions each of us can take. And I just thought of one and that you just mentioned. I'm never going to go anonymous online.

I'm going to force myself to attach my name to everything I do.

I think that's important.

And if we all do that.

Yeah, stand by it.

I mean, if you're going to make a comment, I mean especially a critical comment about someone who put themself out there and created something, stand by your comment too. They put their face out there and.

Word choice and being empathetic and maybe more reflective rather than pointing fingers, more open to asking questions. Why do you think that way? How did you come to that conclusion?

Or being curious, maybe that helps.

I've always felt this way about celebrities. A large portion of my career was spent interviewing celebrities.

And one thing that I noticed, it was very, very clear to me from early days, was that people, audiences feel empowered to hate on celebrities because they are public figures. And I never understood that idea. I get that it's kind of funny sometimes and maybe that's where some of the time it's coming from. But it's cruel.

And I don't know that just because someone has put themself out there to be in public, that is just a freedom to just trash them and tear them down. And I do see that happen a lot. And you see that with all different levels, whether they're actors or performers.

So that's something that I'm very conscious of. Is that just because it's not my style, just because I don't like the genre or even the performance necessarily.

Like there's probably somebody who likes it. And the example I always thought about is a kindergarten teacher. Think about the way a kindergarten teacher speaks to a kindergarten audience.

Imagine if they started speaking to you that way. You'd be like, why are you talking like that? That's weird. That's not how you talk to me. Yeah, this is the same with any sort of an entertainer.

They are talking to an audience in a way that works for that audience. And if you're not that audience, just back off and let them do their thing. Yeah, you don't have to comment.

We don't to need need to know every thought that every person has about every performance or post that somebody throws into the world.

Agreed.

Now, do you miss the days of being on camera interviewing famous people, being, you know, Kind of a hotshot. Come on. Do you miss that, Brian, or what?

There's a lot of it. That was a lot of fun. 100%. I mean, I like the storytelling. I love, like, what you guys are doing right now.

We're sitting here having a great conversation. I would do this every day. That's a lot of fun. Did I like getting emails from fans saying you wore the same pair of jeans three days in a row?

What a stupid thing to say. Not that I care that much, but it's just like, stuff like that. I've been.

I won't like name drop, but I've been with celebrities in the world afterwards. Like, a lot of time we do an interview and then we go do something, and people will just yell at them from across the street, you suck.

And it's like, what is wrong with. Like, why would you. And so I do think that people often look at those in the public eye and say, that must be great. Everything is great.

And part of our job when we're in the public eye is to paint that picture a little bit and to show them, you know, show them a good life.

But the flip side of it is, you know, you gotta walk around with that face and you gotta go to the grocery store and, you know, do you wanna, like, look the way that you're supposed to look on TV every time you go to. It's a lot. And then sometimes maybe you said something on TV that someone wants to talk to you about in person, and that's not always a lot of fun.

But to answer your question, yes, I miss it. It was a lot of fun.

Brian is onto something. Stories aren't just told anymore. They're chosen. Your job is to make sure your audience finds you and sticks around.

Exactly. From Blockbuster VHS covers back in the day to Netflix thumbnails today, it's the same principle.

You know, Grab attention fast, deliver the goods, and don't waste people's time. Be choosy in what you say and.

How you say it. It matters. And while AI may be the greatest personal assistant ever invented, it's not a replacement for real connection. That's on us.

So use the tools. Keep it human. And remember, audience first.

Always.

You have so many stories to share, and you get to shape them to make a difference.

Keep your stories bold, keep your voice.

Authentic, and keep your presence unstoppable.

Ignite my voice dot com.

Ignite my voice. Becoming unstoppable.

Your voice is your superpower.

Use it.