Transcription
Welcome back to another episode of Behind the Diary. There are three things this episode that I think you're going to learn.
Number one is this crazy thing happening in AI that I learned from the CEO of a company called Fiverr, but gives all of us a glimpse into what the future of AI looks like, especially if you're a freelancer, a contractor, a creative.
The second thing you're going to learn is about hiring. People are motivated and manipulated by a framework called Rice. And I've built a tool, which is my secret weapon, which I'm going to give you the link for a survey. I've built to send to candidates when you hire them.
Lastly, in this episode, there's something that I learned from Mr. Beast which I didn't say in last week's episode which I believe is maybe the most unappreciated thing for anyone that's trying to build an audience. This is like an amazing insight that that would ultimately change 100 shows potentially, and we're going to talk about that as well today. So lots to learn in this episode today. Hope you enjoy it. Let's do it.
Think about your favorite company. And now imagine that they let you see in every meeting in every room from day one. Boy, I've forgotten how much work it actually is to start a company. It's a lot of work. We're building a media company and an investment fund. So what does that mean? In our studio, we create and scale new shows. You might have seen these Flight Studio shows, but they're really taking off. I mean, top 10. We're live. We're all here at V Studio. Use that audience to accelerate some of the most exciting companies in the world that I have invested in. This is Flight Story. Amazing.
As a content creator, um, uploading content to the internet, whether you're building a podcast, a Tik Tok, an Instagram, whatever it might be, it can feel a little bit like roulette, because you you upload something, you get a lot of views, and that it's all very, very random. But that is not true. And this is something that I think elite content creators know and new content creators don't yet quite understand.
At Flight Story, we've hired a guy called Austin Go, who is now director of business intelligence and operations. One of his key responsibilities is to create what we call a feedback loop with us as creators at Flight Story. We have all of these talents, all of these shows that we're producing. And as talent, what I want is I want feedback on the content I'm putting out there so I can make it better in the future. So, what Austin does is he's built loads of dashboards using artificial intelligence and a variety of other tools to pull in the data after every single upload that I do, whether it's on the podcast or on other channels, and then give me insights on how I can be better in the future. And I know this sounds very complicated, especially if you're just a one-person band, but this is something that every single person can do. Um, and it's very, very simple. Here's a simple way to do it.
Regardless of what stage you're at in your journey, regardless of what resources you have, and if you do what I'm about to say, I promise you, you have an advantage on 99.9% of creators. Very, very simple. Look at your analytics. Look at your analytics. And don't look at them once. Look at them every single time. I started doing this about six or seven years ago, and it was probably the single most important thing I've ever done as a content creator.
So, I've got a call downstairs with Austin right now, and he's going to talk to me about some of the things that he's noticing on the back end of our shows. Much of my objective with Flight Story is I think we can build an astonishingly good media company if we have one of the best feedback loops in the entirety of media and podcasting. So, yeah, I was going to say the key thing for me is after the episode comes out, so after a podcast comes out, is what information are are we able to give the team that will make them make better decisions in the future? Some things I think about is how many people were listening at 90 seconds because that tells me the impact of the trailer, for example, and I want to be able to go to the production team and say we saw the biggest drop off at 5 minutes when the person explained their professional CV and education. So then for me as the host I go, okay, probably don't dwell on that too much. There's really specific things that I'm looking for cuz right now like the difference between us and Mr. Beast is in many respects is after every single thing that they publish there's a post-wrap document that says this is how we could have been better as a team. What we do is we call them after-action reports. So I get all the smartest people in my company just do a very in-depth breakdown of like here's the retention chart, here's every time someone clicked away, here's where it was the flattest, here's where it was the worst. You know, we'll take like so if I upload a video that's 20 minutes, we'll take our last 10 20-minute videos and we'll go, you know, uh the median retention on the last 10 20-minute videos was 10 minutes and 60 or 55 seconds is the median. So, if the retention on this new video is 11 minutes or above, we did a good job. If it's below that, then we did below average. And so, usually after 2 weeks after we upload, we'll we'll look at that with all my top people and then we'll just be like, what did we [ __ ] up? What did we do? Well, cool. Move on.
Austin, what have you been working on? I saw that you had submitted this um dashboard.
Shall I share my screen? I can show you a few things of where what I've noticed is that there's quite a lot of inconsistency in terms of how information is shared across the likes of Slack or in email and so forth. So what I've actually been building out is this framework. What we want to do is basically understand the fundamentals of what happens and why. If we look at people who are incredibly unique or have a certain aesthetic that is very different that hasn't been seen on the show, you typically see really good subs to view ratios, which is really great. What we also see as well is that there are diminishing returns when you have repeat guests. But we can actually see that as a science now to turn around and go fine, if they're coming on again, we would expect a x% drop off in subs. So that could come quite quickly. We're just trying to put it in a This is This is like an amazing insight that that would ultimately change a 100 shows potentially. It would have such a profound impact.
I have got an idea and I've been thinking about this for a long time. Over the last decade, I've hired thousands of people and I've come to learn that when we think about company culture, like the culture of a team, we often think in terms of like values and these other sort of fluffy words like are they empathetic or are they um resilient? Are they kind? Are they ambitious? But actually, the revelation that I had a couple of weeks ago is that culture isn't any of these fluffy words. Culture isn't the thing you write on the wall. Culture is how a team member behaves in a certain situation. My question becomes, can I build a survey based on everything I know about organizational psychology and great teams and high performance from all the interviews that I've done? And can it put people in scenarios and can it ask them what behavior they would take in those scenarios? Going to put it at cultureest.com. And I'm building this for me, my companies. I'm building it for my founders in my portfolio at Flightstory fund. But I'm also building it for you because I know from the conversations we've had in the comment section and the DMs that you've sent me that one of the hardest things you find in business is hiring people. So, we must be able to build a scenario-based culture test that says things like, "Your colleague is working late in the office at 7 p.m. on a Friday. They're struggling to get their work done for their deadline. Your work is complete. What do you do?" How you behave is culture. Culture isn't personality. Culture isn't the values you write on the work wall. Culture is behavior. And I remember I think a couple of years ago hearing I think it was Ben Horowitz, one of the great investors entrepreneurs of our time also say something very similar to this that culture is behavior. It is how you behave. It's a very difficult but important thing in that you have an organization, you've got a mission statement, you have all the management techniques, you have KPIs, OKRs, whatever you're using, you know, goals and objectives, but none of that is what the culture is. And none of that really drives the real kind of day-to-day behaviors that define you. Like, do you return that phone call like immediately, tomorrow, next week, never? You know, do you show up to the meeting on time? Are you late? Do you go home at 5:00? Do you go home at 8:00? Do you stay at the Four Seasons? Do you stay at the Red Roof Inn? Like all these things are your culture. And anybody's worked in a company knows you're either this way or you're that way or you're, you know, you're on time or you're not. The kind of advice that you get when you're a CEO is all wrong on it because it's like, oh well, what you do is you go and you have an offsite and then you kind of have everybody say what they think the cultural values are and then you put them on like a nice, you know, plaque. I love the the quote from the way of the samurai, which is like a culture is not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions. What you do is who you are. It's not what you believe. It's not what you think. It's not what you tweet. It's what you do. It's not the values you that you have. That's not who you are. Who you are is what you do. And in the samurai, they call them virtues because it's the behaviors. The behaviors are the culture, not the values. And that's why when people have 20 values, I'm like, well, how many of those behaviors do you have? Like none. So, your culture is hypocrisy. And that is what I'm working on this week. Um, while I'm traveling around the world, I'm going to try and build this culture test, this survey to send to um new hires.
Right. Got to go. I'm so tired.
So, where are we going?
Exactly. Stockholm, baby. Do you know what this means? When I change my background to red on my phone, it means get your [ __ ] together. It means that there's been several days in a row where I'm not proud of myself. And it's just a reminder to focus on working out, what I'm eating, how I'm sleeping, etc. And that's actually really what I'm thinking about. The reason I'm in code red, again, this is not an excuse. I don't like excuses. I don't like making them. I don't like accepting them. I don't like receiving them. Um, is because we've flown from LA to New York to Egypt to Dubai to New York to London to Sweden in 7 days. So, my body clock is all over the [ __ ] place. It's really a mess. That's my excuse if I'm allowed one. But there's no excuses. And it's time to get my [ __ ] together. Clearly, I'm not going to make the right decision myself. So, I need like a third party to be my mediator. And that's what that's what my phone is being for me now.
Okay. I've got a meeting downstairs right now with Will to talk about Behind the Diary. Funnily enough, the most important thing I'm thinking about for Behind the Diary is context. I watch a lot of YouTube vlogs and the thing that annoys me the most about YouTube vlogs is they don't give you context on what you're actually seeing because they kind of assume that you know. So, they'll introduce people and characters and situations and inside jokes, but you don't have context. So, one of the things we're going to try and do on Behind the Diary to make sure that you guys always know what is going on and who these people are and how all of this links back to us building this company called Flight Story and where I am and what I'm doing and what I'm talking about is constantly give you context, which is very hard to do because the way I would describe it is if I gave you the Harry Potter book and I told you to start reading from page 140, you wouldn't enjoy it. You would you would wonder who this person Hermione Granger is and who is Ron Weasley and what's the backstory and what's the context and so you would churn out and I hope that on this channel with this series we can give you more context on everything you're seeing so that you can come on this journey with us regardless of what episode you start on. As you hopefully have noticed by now we're trying to build this vlog with you in mind and with your feedback in mind which has been really helpful by the way. Um and it's going to be interesting to see what it becomes. So, the first episode I watched, my feeling was context. I'm happy for these videos to to not do big like big view numbers, but I'm not happy for them to be low context. And in fact, the higher the context, the higher the views, the higher the context, the more new people can join at any moment. We should we should take an extreme context approach. It's not going to be easy because it's never been done before. Well, so you really have to think in terms of first principles. I'm trying to make the world three-dimensional to the viewer. And when I watched the like guy in Dubai in the car and I saw him driving somewhere, my brain goes, where is he going and why is he going there? And the story has these layers. The story is like he's in the car because he's in Dubai. He's in Dubai and this is obviously not we're not going to include all these layers, but this is the broader story. And the Middle East are like very keen to bring business to the region. So they book Steven, which goes to the studio that's going to drive revenue to the business, that's going to drive revenue to Flight Story. And the more revenue flows through it gets, the more investments it can make, the more shows are concerned, the bigger it gets, the more it can manage its investments. So that's why the the guys in Dubai. This is obviously extreme. And I I don't think many people that made these kind of videos ever consider these things. Yeah. Because it's hard. There's a few ways I think we can do that. Okay. Have a really strong first 2 minutes that outlines the mission really clearly. First two minutes you understand what you just said about the mission and then you also get an insight to keep progress. Marcus, this is how far we are. I've got a storyboard I can show you.
Oh, sure. The episode opens. Big overarching hug. Yeah. Think about your favorite company. And now imagine that they let you see in every meeting in every room from day one. That's a big hook, right? And then you've afforded the right to go a little bit deeper. So we go into here's who we are. So the the Flight Story. We're building a media company and an investment fund. And then what we're going to accomplish in this episode.
Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Cool. We've got time on Tuesday to film that and we'll do it in the office.
Okay. But you're happy with this kind of flow?
Yeah. Great. So, the survey is just to see how aligned decisions are across Flight Story. So, would X person that fills out the survey respond in certain situations in the same way that the leadership would respond? It's really been informative to me because I think people are trainable. Again, there's no right decision, but there's the way that Flight Story does things and it's it's attitude. So, for example, on the AI thing, maybe in a nursing practice, like they don't give a [ __ ] about that, but in our business, we really care about that. And alignment is so key to company culture because misalignment is all the all the worst things that occur. You end up creating lots of little subculture, sub mentalities and stuff. So he was a university dropout. Yet today he has created a huge media empire hosting one of the world's fastest growing podcast. We think we know him. But who is the person really behind all of this success? That's what we're going to find out today. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Steven Bartlett.
I would say that the single most important thing that anybody in this room is going to do in the next 5 years, every single person, I don't even need to know who you are, is you're going to make a decision how important hiring is personally and professionally. And it's it's fascinating to me because when I look at my investment portfolio, which is about 40 companies in, I I feel like I can literally predict the long-term success of any of those companies by how many hours in the founders' calendar they are personally spending on recruitment. And the critical issue that you will make and maybe you have already made is that you didn't you didn't go through the the extreme difficulties, the extreme fight to get extraordinary people to join you personally. Thinking about your partner here, your friends or professionally. Back there, I was building a survey form for new hires. I'm head of recruitment in my personal and professional life. If you're building a business or you work in a company now, your biggest problems probably came from bad hires. So, what's the opposite of that? Your best decisions will come from good hires. I'm saying this with great passion because I'm so annoyed that nobody said this to me when I was 20 years old starting my business.
I interviewed a spy called Andrew Bustamante. And his job was to go undercover for America, fly to places like this, act undercover, figure out who he needed to get information from, and then get into their secret life. I said to him, "How'd you do that?" And he says, "Well, people are motivated and manipulated by a framework in the CIA they call RICE: reward, ideology, coercion, and ego." He said the most powerful way to motivate someone is ideology, which is doing this is good for your country. Understanding what matters to them at a really deep fundamental level. Doing this is good for your family. And that's what he would do. He'd listen to them and this is what you do when these exceptional people to work for you. You listen to them. You understand their ideology. He said the second most powerful is ego. A lot of people think it's reward or money but actually he said we all have an ego. So you speak to their egos. Number three, he said, is reward, which is the money and all those kinds of things. And number four is coercion, which is pressure. And he said, you want to ease off pressure because once you hold a gun to someone's head as a spy, they never trust you again. So one of the big things I do when I when I meet an extraordinary candidate like an Amy Golding, the youngest woman to build a nine-figure business, she could do anything with her life and her time, is I listen for a long, long time. And I try and step out of this is something else he taught me. I try and step out of my perspective and into her perception. And this is one of the things he says if you want to be a great salesperson or leader, you have to almost practice the art of pausing when someone's speaking to you and stepping into their perspect perception. All of you are looking at me and this is what you see. I had no idea this was here. Now, if you're able to sit in my seat when you're talking to me and look this way, you will be able to motivate and manipulate me. And that is what he taught me the spies are trained to do. And it's the same with hiring exceptional people.
Please give me a minute. I've received a WhatsApp text from a founder in my portfolio expressing that he's got a bunch of issues with his team and it's so clear to me that the cause of these issues is that he doesn't have a rigorous enough hiring process. The way to recruit exceptional people is to have an exceptional process. I'm going to call him after my workout and explain to him exactly how we hire and how we've introduced rigor into our process to ensure that we bring world-class people into our team.
I just read your message and I thought I'd just give you a call cuz it's faster. By reading your message made me think that maybe your recruitment process isn't robust enough. Like when we interview someone, the the base assumption is that every single person in my company including me is bad at hiring. So if you start with that base assumption
Yeah. Like so and you you probably have seen this in the past like we all have biases towards hiring, right? So if I let one person in my team hire, I can tell you the exact demographic and age of person that they will hire. When you like accept the fact that everyone's bad at hiring, you construct a recruitment process which is absolutely free from bias. Five different people should interview the person and every single not one of them should be allowed to um confer until they felt filled out a feedback form for you. And this is it's been such a game changer and something that I learned from Amazon is at the end of the survey there's four options. Really inclined to hire, inclined to hire, not inclined to hire, really not inclined to hire. Um no no sitting on the fence and you've got to make a decision. And I'll send you a document which shows our recruitment process end to end. It's been an absolute game changer because all the best decisions you'll ever make are people and all the worst decisions you'll ever make are people.
Thanks, mate. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Cheers. Bye. Bye.
One of the most important things I've come to learn is that humans are so susceptible to groupthink. So, we don't allow anyone who interviews a candidate to speak until they've filled out their feedback form in their surveys. And this is because of something I learned at 16 years old in my psychology classes called the Ash paradigm. The Ash experiment is one of psychology's oldest and most popular pieces of research. A volunteer is told that he's taking part in a visual perception test. What he doesn't know is that the other participants are actors and he's the only person taking part in the real test, which is actually about group conformity. Please begin the experiment. You will be taking part in today involves the perception of line length. Your task will be simply to look at the line here on the left and indicate which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length. So for example, the actors have been told to match the wrong lines. The volunteer will be monitored to see if he gives the correct answer or if he goes along with the opinion of the group and gives the wrong answer. In the first test, the correct answer is two. Uh, one one one two one. Once again, the correct answer is two. Three. Three. Three. Three. Three. The Ash experiment has been repeated many times and the results have been uh supported again and again. We will conform to the group. Again, we're very social creatures. We're very much aware of what the people around us think. Uh we want to be liked. We don't want to be seen to rock the boat. So, we will go along with the group. Even if we don't believe what people are saying, we'll still go along. One, one, one, one. Group dynamics is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. In most companies, because of the power of groupthink, if you confer, groupthink will take hold. And the person with the most authority, the most senior person will ultimately just end up making the decision on their own. This is why we have five to seven people interviewing every single candidate. And we do not let our team talk to each other after they've interviewed somebody. So now our hiring process looks like this. Candidates do the cultureest.com survey before they even get a chance to interview. Then they meet with five to seven of our team members, none of which are able to speak to each other or confer about what they think. All of them fill out a survey.
which tests the candidate on 10 points of culture fit and 10 points of competence for the job. Every interviewer has to then vote on whether they are inclined to hire, strongly inclined to hire, not inclined to hire, strongly not inclined to hire. They submit their answers, and then we meet up as a group to talk about it, which we call the debrief.
And in this debrief session, we get to see what every other one of our colleagues has said about the person, how they voted. We talk, we discuss, we debate, and we make a decision.
I want this channel to be more than just me making videos and broadcasting them. So, we will be doing community meetups. We will be hanging out together. We will be putting events on. But also, in the comments section, I would love all of you to start engaging with each other.
So, here's what I'm going to say. Can you share the single biggest professional issue that you currently have with your career, with your ambitions, whatever it might be professionally, and everyone in the community, pile in and offer some advice and some words and some thoughts and your experience to anybody that shares the biggest challenge they have at the moment? Give context to who you are and explain the challenge. And together, including me, I'll be in the comment section, too. We're going to try and solve some of your problems.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And I guess this is time for the bloopers. I wonder what the bloopers are this week. I never get to see them. I just see them when you guys see them. Let's do the bloopers. Looks great though. It's like crispy. Oh, it's got like a Oh, that looks so good. It's got Oh, I love these. Imagine if I went [ __ ] it and just went and then finish off with and they come they grab me. You want to come talk? I'm like [ __ ] off. That that is [ __ ] banging. What? That is so good. I know. It's so good. The way that they choices they make, the smell plus the look, the crisp level. How good is that? Texture, the raspberry levels. Oh my god.