#305: Personal Interest + Analytics Chops = Career?

0:00[Announcer]: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. [Announcer]: Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language. [Michael Helbling]: Hey, everybody, welcome. [Michael Helbling]: It's the Analytics Power Hour, and this is episode 305. [Michael Helbling]: Follow your passion and you will never work a day in your life. [Michael Helbling]: We all know that quote. [Michael Helbling]: We also all know it's kind of bullshit.

0:28[Michael Helbling]: But sometimes working hard and combining your passions, I think it can work out well. [Michael Helbling]: You know, as with any career in data, oftentimes how it is applied and to what is maybe kind of the real thing that energizes you. [Michael Helbling]: And I guess we wanted in this episode to have a bit of fun and talk to someone who has combined their data skills and their passion for something into a unique and wonderful career.

0:53[Michael Helbling]: But first, let me introduce my co-hosts. [Michael Helbling]: Julie Hoyer, how are you today? [Julie Hoyer]: Hey there. [Julie Hoyer]: I'm doing great. [Michael Helbling]: Excellent. [Michael Helbling]: Great to have you. [Michael Helbling]: And Tim Wilson, how are you? [Michael Helbling]: Doing well. [Michael Helbling]: A little over caffeinated. [Michael Helbling]: Tim is a great example of someone turned his data skills into his passion of telling people that they're wrong.

1:11[Michael Helbling]: So that's amazing. [Michael Helbling]: Wow. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm Michael Helbling. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: Our guest today is someone we are excited to talk to. [Michael Helbling]: Stephen Follows. [Michael Helbling]: He is a film data researcher whose mission is to help filmmakers get their films funded, shot and seen. [Michael Helbling]: He's a film data researcher. [Michael Helbling]: He consults with the Guinness World Records on film-related world records.

1:32[Michael Helbling]: He writes and researches extensively on the film industry at StephenFollows.com. [Michael Helbling]: And he's also the founder of CatSnake, a storytelling agency that helps nonprofits identify and leverage narratives. [Michael Helbling]: And today he is our guest. [Michael Helbling]: Welcome to the show, Stephen. [Stephen Follows]: Thank you so much for having me. [Stephen Follows]: And it's really fun to be the fun guest rather than in the film industry where I'm the boring analytics guy.

1:52[Stephen Follows]: So that's quite nice. [Julie Hoyer]: Oh, yeah. [Julie Hoyer]: That's true. [Julie Hoyer]: In this context, you're kind of the cool... [Julie Hoyer]: I never thought about that juxtaposition. [Julie Hoyer]: That's incredible. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: You're at home. [Michael Helbling]: You're with friends. [Michael Helbling]: Yes, right. [Michael Helbling]: Thank you so much. [Michael Helbling]: I've needed this so much.

2:10[Michael Helbling]: I'm so grateful. [Michael Helbling]: So, yeah. [Michael Helbling]: So to jump into it, I think, you know, obviously you have an incredible website where you do tons of research and articles and things like that. [Michael Helbling]: But I think the first question that came to my mind is sort of, yeah, how did this all begin? [Michael Helbling]: Like, how did you kind of combine these two things? [Michael Helbling]: So which came first?

2:29[Michael Helbling]: Was it a love of film or was it kind of a love of data? [Michael Helbling]: Like, what was the genesis of this? [Stephen Follows]: Well, I get asked that a lot, I think, because what I do is unusual. [Stephen Follows]: Or at least people think they understand one part of it and then they hear about the other half. [Stephen Follows]: And that doesn't make any sense in that sort of image they have. [Stephen Follows]: It makes sense to me, but I think I'm the only one.

2:47[Stephen Follows]: So when I was a teenager, I didn't know what I wanted to do. [Stephen Follows]: I knew I had aptitude in some things, but I also knew that I wasn't just going to follow along a path. [Stephen Follows]: And so I knew I wanted to do. [Stephen Follows]: I wanted to do film and I wanted to do thinking. [Stephen Follows]: They were the two things. [Stephen Follows]: And that's only the extent to which I knew what I wanted to do. [Stephen Follows]: And so everybody said, go to university and study thinking.

3:07[Stephen Follows]: Go do philosophy or there's analytics, something like that. [Stephen Follows]: And then just do film on the side. [Stephen Follows]: And because I'm pathological demand avoidance, I did the opposite. [Stephen Follows]: And I went into an art college and did a three-year degree in film. [Stephen Follows]: And never having done any film, never filmed anything before. [Stephen Follows]: And then that led on a path where I made, after that, I set up a little production company.

3:27[Stephen Follows]: We made short films. [Stephen Follows]: And we made films for charities and TV habits. [Stephen Follows]: And that sort of went on a journey. [Stephen Follows]: But as that was going on, I knew that I wasn't doing the thinking bit. [Stephen Follows]: And I could see that film wasn't going to take me to that place where I get to use those particular parts of the brain I wanted to use. [Stephen Follows]: So I started doing it off my own back, doing analytics for friends.

3:46[Stephen Follows]: They were putting a business plan together. [Stephen Follows]: And I mean, it was a pretty bad year because everyone said to me, I am making this film. [Stephen Follows]: I know it's going to make a lot of money. [Stephen Follows]: Can you prove it? [Stephen Follows]: I was like, great, I'll go and do that. [Stephen Follows]: And then I could never prove it would make money. [Stephen Follows]: And then after a year, I went, oh, none of them make money.

4:01[Stephen Follows]: I thought I was doing it wrong. [Stephen Follows]: And it turns out, you know, it's passion. [Stephen Follows]: It's all fine. [Stephen Follows]: So I ended up doing that. [Stephen Follows]: And I started sharing it online. [Stephen Follows]: And then, as you guys know, like whenever you have a passion or a niche thing and then you do it again and again, you become like a lighthouse. [Stephen Follows]: And people come to you and you build a community or you take part in existing communities.

4:19[Stephen Follows]: And that kind of grew from there. [Stephen Follows]: So for the last 15 years or so, I've been publishing two or three times a week with all sorts of different data studies, trying to look at film in different lenses. [Stephen Follows]: And that's led on to various things. [Stephen Follows]: So these two paths of a company that was a film company now raises money for charities with film and story. [Stephen Follows]: And on the other hand, being the analytical view on the film industry makes sense to me is two sides of me.

4:43[Stephen Follows]: But they sort of there aren't many people that would do both. [Tim Wilson]: I think in those early days, how like what portion of the if you just look like the raw time and thought work you were doing, how much were you doing that? [Tim Wilson]: Like didn't pay or didn't have like a direct I'm getting compensated for this. [Tim Wilson]: Like were you was it clear that you're like, well, some of the stuff I'm doing is a passion and hopefully it'll turn into something.

5:07[Tim Wilson]: And the other stuff I'm doing to pay the bills. [Tim Wilson]: Like, what did that look like? [Stephen Follows]: Well, that was easy because nothing paid me anything. [Stephen Follows]: So that's an easy question, right? [Stephen Follows]: So I think I'm used to following passions that then might pay off later on. [Stephen Follows]: So it's not that I was privileged or had the ability to do that. [Stephen Follows]: It's that when I left.

5:26[Stephen Follows]: University, although I said I was doing my own production company, I was at a full time job working in a sort of marketing video company as a runner. [Stephen Follows]: Actually, I applied to be a runner. [Stephen Follows]: The lowest job didn't get the job. [Stephen Follows]: They then the person they hired concluded that it was too much work for them and they hired me to be their assistant. [Stephen Follows]: So there was no title for it.

5:45[Stephen Follows]: I just did everything. [Stephen Follows]: So that was a year and a half or so where I was earning money from one place and then trying to build up my own agency. [Stephen Follows]: And then I started doing them. [Stephen Follows]: I moved to a tiny, tiny. [Stephen Follows]: Little office in a film studio. [Stephen Follows]: And that was right next to a film school. [Stephen Follows]: And I like teaching. [Stephen Follows]: I like sharing things.

6:03[Stephen Follows]: And so I started doing guest lecturing and then that grew. [Stephen Follows]: And then in the evenings and weekends, I was teaching there trying to set my agency up. [Stephen Follows]: So my agency wasn't paying me very much. [Stephen Follows]: I think my business partner reminded me recently the first month we got paid 86 pounds each for the month. [Stephen Follows]: And so like that never made any money. [Stephen Follows]: But I was teaching.

6:19[Stephen Follows]: And then as the agency started to make money, I could do less and less teaching. [Stephen Follows]: But I was then at that point also doing the writing. [Stephen Follows]: And the analytics stuff. [Stephen Follows]: And it's only occasionally I get paid to go like an honorarium to do a talk somewhere. [Stephen Follows]: But mostly it was about the travel being fun. [Stephen Follows]: And then I started to be able to turn it into money.

6:37[Stephen Follows]: But I only turned what was a WordPress blog entirely for free into a sub stack with a paid component in the last year and a half. [Stephen Follows]: I could have done it earlier, but I didn't get around to it. [Stephen Follows]: And so, yeah, I think the money has always followed way, way later than the work. [Stephen Follows]: And I kind of expect. [Stephen Follows]: That now, like I just I don't start anything thinking, well, there's pay because it probably won't.

7:00[Stephen Follows]: And it certainly won't now. [Stephen Follows]: Got to start as a passion project. [Stephen Follows]: I don't know if this is good advice. [Stephen Follows]: I only know this is what I did. [Stephen Follows]: Please don't anyone follow this. [Julie Hoyer]: But yeah, it sounds right to me. [Julie Hoyer]: I was going to ask, too, with that initial question that you had, like your friends asking you, like, will this film make money?

7:17[Julie Hoyer]: And you started to actually dig into that. [Julie Hoyer]: Where did you start? [Julie Hoyer]: I mean, that is such a big, broad question to answer. [Julie Hoyer]: Where did you start if you didn't do schooling and like the thinking side of what you wanted to do? [Julie Hoyer]: Like you were saying, like, what were your first steps to attack that question and what resources did you use? [Julie Hoyer]: What what did you try? [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, I mean, so it's actually fun to think back because it's so different nowadays.

7:42[Stephen Follows]: But it's a great question. [Stephen Follows]: So I always had an aptitude for maths, but no interest in it in and of itself. [Stephen Follows]: So I started it to 16 GCSE is the is the is the sort of first set of compulsory exams in the UK when I was a kid. [Stephen Follows]: And so I did maths. [Stephen Follows]: I did quite well. [Stephen Follows]: I think I forgot to bring a calculator into one of the exams and they still got an A.

7:59[Stephen Follows]: So I had an aptitude, but I had no interest because I forgot to bring a calculator. [Stephen Follows]: I just didn't care. [Stephen Follows]: And I remember saying, can I have a calculator? [Tim Wilson]: You were Julie's kindred spirit. [Tim Wilson]: This is. [Stephen Follows]: I just didn't care. [Stephen Follows]: It just no one could convince me it was meaningful. [Stephen Follows]: And even now, actually, I still don't think the maths part is I mean, we all have we have AIs.

8:18[Stephen Follows]: We don't like I'm not saying that the maths doesn't matter. [Stephen Follows]: I'm saying that it's only a part of a larger point around logic or. [Stephen Follows]: And so it was all first principles. [Stephen Follows]: Yeah. [Stephen Follows]: So I didn't go in there thinking, oh, I know how films make money. [Stephen Follows]: I mean, I have no idea. [Stephen Follows]: So I went around and spoke to people. [Stephen Follows]: And it's not that you can get people's private financial data or anything like that.

8:37[Stephen Follows]: You're not getting true insight. [Stephen Follows]: But what you can do is say, well, we know these ones were very successful and these are the numbers we do have. [Stephen Follows]: And back then you'd have video numbers and you'd certainly have theatrical theatre, cinema money. [Stephen Follows]: And you could say, OK, well, when I film on this budget makes at least this much and then, you know, it's probably in the profitable end.

8:55[Stephen Follows]: So. [Stephen Follows]: What we're trying to prove here is not that it's a good business investment, because I can assure you, no film is a good business investment. [Stephen Follows]: We're trying to prove that they've done the best they can, given that it's not a financial thing. [Stephen Follows]: It's a passion project or they're trying to convince an investor who's going to get big tax breaks for doing it to do this one, not that one.

9:13[Stephen Follows]: All you're trying to do is show that you've done more thinking than everyone else and that you're more likely to be in that category of things that might break out. [Stephen Follows]: So the bar is very, very low. [Stephen Follows]: I'm not having to do a proper business plan. [Stephen Follows]: I'm showing that they understand the market. [Stephen Follows]: That they are favorably comparable to similar ones. [Stephen Follows]: And also that you do every now and then get a Blair Witch film, a Blair Witch project or a paranormal activity that can make 100 times its budget.

9:38[Stephen Follows]: And then they sell the investment in their film as a kind of like this is we fund, but it's a lottery ticket. [Stephen Follows]: But when it does happen. [Stephen Follows]: So it's it was very loose. [Stephen Follows]: I didn't have to understand business school economics. [Stephen Follows]: I had to understand what numbers were there and how this film compares with all those films. [Stephen Follows]: I have numbers for. [Julie Hoyer]: Mm hmm.

9:57[Julie Hoyer]: So then as you continue to do these different analyses and writing and things, what have you focused on then on the thinking side? [Julie Hoyer]: Is it more of that like psychology? [Julie Hoyer]: Is it more classic business stuff? [Julie Hoyer]: Is it heavier, actual like mathematics? [Stephen Follows]: I mean, it's all of that stuff. [Stephen Follows]: I mean, I never really learned to code. [Stephen Follows]: I learned PHP a little bit when I was at university, but self-taught, but I didn't really use it.

10:23[Stephen Follows]: Excel was my main driver for a long time. [Stephen Follows]: And I used to get teased from a lot of scientific science friends, quite rightly, that I was only using that and it was very slow to do anything else. [Stephen Follows]: And so I but I would talk to people and I would try and just I don't mind saying I don't know. [Stephen Follows]: And I'll go and ask. [Stephen Follows]: And after a while, you realize nobody knows or there are one or two things that you that are behind some sort of barrier.

10:46[Stephen Follows]: And if you chat to people, you can get that information so I can learn rules of thumb and apply them to data we do see. [Stephen Follows]: Because although I didn't have any. [Stephen Follows]: Secret access or training. [Stephen Follows]: No one else has special training for this. [Stephen Follows]: This isn't like being a doctor or a lawyer where there is a corpus of facts that you do need to know. [Stephen Follows]: And if you get wrong, you know, there'll be consequences.

11:08[Stephen Follows]: This is a lot more subjective because it's the arts and it's the business of art rather than just business. [Stephen Follows]: So those people had to learn them somehow. [Stephen Follows]: And I didn't have the resources or the data or their personal data. [Stephen Follows]: They're the films they worked on. [Stephen Follows]: But people would show me stuff or tell me stuff. [Stephen Follows]: And especially when I started blogging.

11:25[Stephen Follows]: It people would come back. [Stephen Follows]: I'd never share anything private, never getting any trouble. [Stephen Follows]: But I would say some, you know, I'd love to know about this. [Stephen Follows]: And someone would say, hey, come have a coffee with me. [Stephen Follows]: And they'd show me stuff. [Stephen Follows]: And I'd be like, oh, I understand how that works now. [Stephen Follows]: So when I go on the next project, I can apply the same logic and know that it's broadly right.

11:42[Stephen Follows]: And then somebody would correct me if I got something wrong. [Stephen Follows]: And so it was sort of just asking and doing and trying to be humble and curious, I guess. [Tim Wilson]: Michael. [Tim Wilson]: How many times? [Tim Wilson]: Have you rebuilt the same analysis? [Tim Wilson]: Oh, that depends. [Tim Wilson]: Are we counting the times I said this time I'm documenting it? [Tim Wilson]: Absolutely. [Tim Wilson]: Then many, many times.

12:06[Tim Wilson]: That's where super skills in Prism come in. [Tim Wilson]: You can take an entire analysis, including multiple steps, dependencies, conditions and checks, and package the whole thing into a reusable template. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, so not just one query, the whole ridiculous journey? [Tim Wilson]: The whole ridiculous journey. [Tim Wilson]: Run it again on new data or a completely different. [Tim Wilson]: and they will move you to the top of the list.

12:54[Michael Helbling]: Reuse the analysis [Michael Helbling]: and save the artisanal suffering. [Michael Helbling]: Tim, how many browser tabs does it [Michael Helbling]: take to answer one simple measurement question? [Tim Wilson]: Apparently, all of them. [Tim Wilson]: STAPE, GTM, GA4, and at least three tabs I'm afraid to close. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I've lived that life. [Michael Helbling]: STAPE's AI Assistant is designed to help with exactly that.

13:15[Michael Helbling]: It's built directly into STAPE and can connect to Google Tag [Michael Helbling]: Manager and GA4. [Tim Wilson]: So you can ask questions [Tim Wilson]: about your containers, review GTM configurations, [Tim Wilson]: check server-side container usage, [Tim Wilson]: or see whether new events are actually showing up in GA4. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, and it can do more than answer questions. [Michael Helbling]: You can ask it to create STAPE and server-side GTM containers [Michael Helbling]: or even set up tags and triggers in GTM.

13:39[Tim Wilson]: Basically, fewer scavenger [Tim Wilson]: hunts through menus. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, exactly. [Michael Helbling]: It is conversational, built into STAPE, [Michael Helbling]: and there's no separate MCP server or technical installation [Michael Helbling]: required. [Michael Helbling]: And I mean, honestly. [Michael Helbling]: The best part, you're not burning tokens [Tim Wilson]: from your own LLM subscription. [Tim Wilson]: If you want to see what STAPE's AI Assistant [Tim Wilson]: can do, click the link in the show description to learn more.

14:01[Tim Wilson]: Presumably, there's a lot more data now. [Tim Wilson]: And at some point, we've got to talk about the numbers, [Tim Wilson]: because it's just timely, because that's kind of wild [Tim Wilson]: what's going on there. [Tim Wilson]: But when you started, was there a point where you said, [Tim Wilson]: I need to start formally capturing or cataloging either [Tim Wilson]: what I'm getting one-on-one? [Unknown]: [Tim Wilson]: Anecdotally, versus what the data sources are?

14:25[Tim Wilson]: Did you come across a year or two in, and you're like, oh my god, [Tim Wilson]: I just found a gold mine? [Tim Wilson]: Where did, when did you start structuring it? [Tim Wilson]: Because it sounds like you sort of became the guy who had kind [Tim Wilson]: of a unique level of breadth and depth [Tim Wilson]: in one angle of the industry. [Tim Wilson]: But that also seems like, how did you keep that organized? [Tim Wilson]: Did you find yourself kicking yourself three years?

14:51[Tim Wilson]: And then saying, oh, I wish I had done something more structured? [Tim Wilson]: Like, does that make sense? [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, no, totally. [Stephen Follows]: And it is a little bit about how you create stuff yourself. [Stephen Follows]: I'd breach, I was led by articles back then. [Stephen Follows]: So I'd be like, OK, I got to write an article. [Stephen Follows]: I want to do one. [Stephen Follows]: Back then, I was doing one a week.

15:05[Stephen Follows]: So I'd create a folder for it. [Stephen Follows]: And you start creating, OK, there's a data folder. [Stephen Follows]: And there's an images folder for later on. [Stephen Follows]: And then I would create, you'd get, grab, gather [Stephen Follows]: unique data sets for each one. [Stephen Follows]: But after a while, you start realizing, oh, no, [Stephen Follows]: I can use that data set again. [Stephen Follows]: And I'd organized all of this.

15:19[Stephen Follows]: And I showed it to somebody after a year. [Stephen Follows]: Or two of doing it. [Stephen Follows]: And they're like, wow, this is really organized. [Stephen Follows]: And I remember thinking, no, it's not. [Stephen Follows]: It's pretty basic. [Stephen Follows]: And I think that people who think they're messy [Stephen Follows]: probably have a quite tidy house because their bar is quite high. [Stephen Follows]: So my bar of how to do this if I was paid [Stephen Follows]: or what I would tell someone else to do [Stephen Follows]: is a lot higher than what I was doing.

15:39[Stephen Follows]: But because I was in a field where no one's doing that, [Stephen Follows]: no one runs away to do the maths for the circus. [Stephen Follows]: So I was one of the very few people doing this. [Stephen Follows]: And in fact, actually, I gave a talk at a business school [Stephen Follows]: early on. [Stephen Follows]: And someone came up to me afterwards and said, oh, you must. [Stephen Follows]: That book, I can't remember how they mentioned it.

15:57[Stephen Follows]: But they mentioned it in passing that a certain book had obviously [Stephen Follows]: been very important to me. [Stephen Follows]: And it was a book called Category of One. [Stephen Follows]: And I was like, I've never read this. [Stephen Follows]: What is this? [Stephen Follows]: And they were like, really? [Stephen Follows]: And so I went away and read it. [Stephen Follows]: And it's a very good old marketing book about the idea [Stephen Follows]: that one of the things you can do in marketing [Stephen Follows]: is create a new category, like light beer.

16:14[Stephen Follows]: And then you're number one in that category. [Stephen Follows]: And he had concluded from my work that I had been decided [Stephen Follows]: to be the only one. [Stephen Follows]: I was the only guy doing data in the film industry. [Stephen Follows]: So therefore, I would be the best one, [Stephen Follows]: which is mathematically true. [Stephen Follows]: But a lot of this is I was the only one doing it. [Stephen Follows]: And in answer to the other half of the question, which [Stephen Follows]: is about like, so I would go out and gather data.

16:34[Stephen Follows]: Initially, I think the first article [Stephen Follows]: I wrote that really took off after three or four articles [Stephen Follows]: were doing it was I went through someone else's work. [Stephen Follows]: I went through the British Film Institute, the public body. [Stephen Follows]: And they had done a huge statistical yearbook, [Stephen Follows]: which I was reading every year for fun anyway. [Stephen Follows]: And it was already kind of fun and well-written.

16:50[Stephen Follows]: It's helping for my education and also [Stephen Follows]: for teaching other people. [Stephen Follows]: And I'd written 50 interesting things we'd learned. [Stephen Follows]: It was like an article like that. [Stephen Follows]: And then lots of people appreciate that. [Stephen Follows]: So there were bodies like that who were already sharing data. [Stephen Follows]: And then you have private bodies like IMDB and people [Stephen Follows]: like that who've done a lot of the work cataloging it, [Stephen Follows]: either as an organization or as a collection of people [Stephen Follows]: like Wikipedia.

17:12[Stephen Follows]: And a big step forward for me in the very early days [Stephen Follows]: was learning how web scraping worked so that I could go [Stephen Follows]: and take all of Wikipedia, put it into Excel, [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: And then I could go and do it. [Stephen Follows]: And then be able to do everything myself. [Stephen Follows]: Because again, I wasn't coding very much. [Stephen Follows]: So a big breakthrough was web scraping.

17:27[Stephen Follows]: I would talk to a friend who'd do it, [Stephen Follows]: or there'd be a tool off the rack. [Stephen Follows]: Or sometimes I used People Per Hour quite a lot [Stephen Follows]: where I knew what I was doing was way out of my capability, [Stephen Follows]: but it was also incredibly basic for anyone [Stephen Follows]: who knew what they were doing. [Stephen Follows]: So I was happy to give someone a few bucks, [Stephen Follows]: really a few bucks, like not very much.

17:43[Stephen Follows]: I might be like, hey, I put a post out saying, [Stephen Follows]: hey, I know, I believe this to be very simple [Stephen Follows]: because someone did it for me before [Stephen Follows]: and it's just tweaking this. [Stephen Follows]: How much do you, what does someone want for doing this? [Stephen Follows]: And they'd look at it and be like, oh, give me 20 bucks. [Stephen Follows]: Or they'd build me a self-contained tool [Stephen Follows]: as a one-off use for 50 bucks.

17:58[Stephen Follows]: That wasn't every week, [Stephen Follows]: but every now and then that would give me a large data set [Stephen Follows]: because I could run that, gather all this data, [Stephen Follows]: which wasn't always taking data off other people's things. [Stephen Follows]: It wasn't that I was taking IMDB's database, [Stephen Follows]: but it might be that I was taking reviews [Stephen Follows]: or other things that I could turn into data.

18:16[Stephen Follows]: And then the only thing I was ever sharing or publishing [Stephen Follows]: was my thoughts and the, [Stephen Follows]: the combined graphs at the end. [Stephen Follows]: So that data, I didn't do anything with it. [Stephen Follows]: I didn't give it away, sell it, all that. [Stephen Follows]: So I felt quite ethical that it was, [Stephen Follows]: although I wasn't part of an academic institution formally, [Stephen Follows]: I was doing that the way a university might.

18:33[Stephen Follows]: And so I never got in trouble from that really. [Stephen Follows]: And from that, I was able to say, right, [Stephen Follows]: I went to this site and this site and this site, [Stephen Follows]: and I combined all those insights, [Stephen Follows]: and this is what I found. [Stephen Follows]: And here's three graphs that are interesting. [Stephen Follows]: See you next week. [Stephen Follows]: And that seemed to be quite sustainable [Stephen Follows]: for the first few years.

18:47[Tim Wilson]: It's funny, because when you talked about like the ones, [Tim Wilson]: I feel like that once a week discipline, [Tim Wilson]: when I started blogging 2007, [Tim Wilson]: it was literally just a, I will do something once a week. [Tim Wilson]: And there was some nerves upfront of like, [Tim Wilson]: what happens after three or four weeks? [Tim Wilson]: Will I be out of things to say? [Tim Wilson]: Which I never was. [Tim Wilson]: I certainly watch, and this happens with podcasts [Tim Wilson]: and blogs and substacks now where somebody, [Tim Wilson]: they're like, I'm gonna start doing this.

19:18[Tim Wilson]: And the first thing they write is, [Tim Wilson]: they're gonna write this. [Tim Wilson]: They're gonna write this. [Unknown]: [Tim Wilson]: They're gonna write this. [Tim Wilson]: And then they write this like half of a book. [Tim Wilson]: Like they just empty their soul into it. [Tim Wilson]: And then the second thing is like a week later [Tim Wilson]: than they expected. [Tim Wilson]: And the third one never comes. [Tim Wilson]: So it does feel like you had that.

19:37[Tim Wilson]: I think even what I was doing, [Tim Wilson]: there was a lot, [Tim Wilson]: I had a lot of passion for like little tips and tricks [Tim Wilson]: in Excel and was never like the Excel God [Tim Wilson]: would never win any sort of Excel competition. [Tim Wilson]: But I was like, hey, I found this thing [Tim Wilson]: and it took some digging. [Tim Wilson]: But it seems like you had that mix of, [Tim Wilson]: I'm gonna hold myself to this discipline.

20:01[Tim Wilson]: It is something I care about. [Tim Wilson]: Was there a component of it? [Tim Wilson]: And instead of just having idle thoughts or exploring it, [Tim Wilson]: if I tell myself I'm gonna write it down by this date [Tim Wilson]: and explain it clearly, [Tim Wilson]: that will help with my thinking as well? [Tim Wilson]: Like you were consciously like building up your mind. [Tim Wilson]: Was there any sort of muscle on that front? [Stephen Follows]: I think, I mean, I've definitely done my fair share [Stephen Follows]: of exactly as you said, half a novel a week late [Stephen Follows]: and then gone.

20:27[Stephen Follows]: And I've done a fair number of them. [Stephen Follows]: I don't like that. [Stephen Follows]: I feel very bad about that. [Stephen Follows]: When I start a new project, I really want to avoid that. [Stephen Follows]: I think I want things to be interesting to me [Stephen Follows]: and I'm naturally a curious person. [Stephen Follows]: So I found the whole process of doing it [Stephen Follows]: was primarily for my own knowledge.

20:42[Stephen Follows]: I wanted to learn all of this and I would, [Stephen Follows]: the film industry, although it is a niche, I guess, [Stephen Follows]: within it is huge numbers of things to look at, you know, [Stephen Follows]: on screen, off screen, behind the scenes, [Stephen Follows]: all these different jobs, money. [Stephen Follows]: So every week I'd pick something [Stephen Follows]: and I deliberately would find something [Stephen Follows]: as far away as I could.

20:57[Stephen Follows]: So if I was looking at money one week, [Stephen Follows]: I would think about actors the next week. [Stephen Follows]: And so I enjoyed reading my blog slowly [Stephen Follows]: the few days before everyone else. [Stephen Follows]: And then the teacher in me, I always want to, [Stephen Follows]: I want to work out how things work [Stephen Follows]: and share it with other people. [Stephen Follows]: Like that is a deep pleasure of mine.

21:14[Stephen Follows]: What they then do with it, it's up to them. [Stephen Follows]: Like I never thought like they should, [Stephen Follows]: I should have a hand on the teller [Stephen Follows]: of what they're making. [Stephen Follows]: But I wanted to share this information. [Stephen Follows]: So the course of the week, [Stephen Follows]: so I'd publish on Monday morning. [Stephen Follows]: So the course of the week would be [Stephen Follows]: that I'd be thinking about it during the week [Stephen Follows]: and maybe I'd spend a bit of time gathering some data [Stephen Follows]: or I had something, but I would think about it.

21:30[Stephen Follows]: And then the deadline would be coming up [Stephen Follows]: and I'd be like, oh shit, I really should catch up. [Stephen Follows]: And so, or maybe on the weekend, [Stephen Follows]: I would do some work on it and get the, [Stephen Follows]: oh, all right, I got the thing now. [Stephen Follows]: I know what the thing's about. [Stephen Follows]: And then it would be writing up on the Sunday [Stephen Follows]: or rushing it on the Sunday.

21:45[Stephen Follows]: And I quite enjoyed that Sunday morning, kind of like, okay, [Stephen Follows]: so I sort of have to do a summary [Stephen Follows]: of everything I learned this week about this. [Stephen Follows]: And I started to establish the question [Stephen Follows]: as the headline format that I then talk about the answer, [Stephen Follows]: but talk about how I went about, [Stephen Follows]: found the answer in a way that everyone feels like, [Stephen Follows]: oh, I didn't know that, that makes sense.

22:01[Stephen Follows]: Oh, that's good to know. [Stephen Follows]: And so I would enjoy that process [Stephen Follows]: of almost tidying up on a Sunday, [Stephen Follows]: of tidying up those thoughts and presenting them, [Stephen Follows]: queuing it up, and then that's ready to go on Monday. [Stephen Follows]: So I found it useful, although it wasn't the driver. [Stephen Follows]: It wasn't that I was like, [Stephen Follows]: I've seen people that have calendars [Stephen Follows]: that want to have like a no broke, [Stephen Follows]: no, you know, a streak that's not broken.

22:18[Stephen Follows]: It wasn't that, it was just when else [Stephen Follows]: was I going to force myself to sit [Stephen Follows]: and organize those thoughts [Stephen Follows]: and actually write something up. [Stephen Follows]: This podcast does have an unbroken streak of, [Tim Wilson]: we have one co-host who might have that motivation [Tim Wilson]: unhealthily so. [Stephen Follows]: My business partner in my other business, [Stephen Follows]: which maybe we'll talk about it first time, has got OCD.

22:41[Stephen Follows]: And I think that has been one of the best business decisions [Stephen Follows]: I've ever made because we are never late on anything, [Stephen Follows]: otherwise his world ends. [Stephen Follows]: And I have, [Stephen Follows]: like I want depth and accuracy and things like that, [Stephen Follows]: which he cares about, but only through me. [Stephen Follows]: So that can be such a good self-sustaining, [Stephen Follows]: team building thing, [Stephen Follows]: as well as a good place to put those thoughts [Stephen Follows]: if you have them.

23:02[Stephen Follows]: So yeah, I think good on you. [Stephen Follows]: That's really good. [Tim Wilson]: Clearly we got the wrong person on this episode [Tim Wilson]: because that's the guy I want to talk to. [Julie Hoyer]: How do you catalog and then like pick what question [Julie Hoyer]: you're going to go for each week? [Julie Hoyer]: I know you said like you, [Julie Hoyer]: I liked that you were saying you try to go for something [Julie Hoyer]: as far away from the previous week.

23:23[Julie Hoyer]: And it's amazing just that the film industry [Julie Hoyer]: does have so many different like angles and lenses [Julie Hoyer]: you can kind of go after. [Julie Hoyer]: But I mean, how do you keep track of what sparks [Julie Hoyer]: like interest for you? [Julie Hoyer]: And then how do you decide, [Julie Hoyer]: is there like an official catalog? [Julie Hoyer]: What do you use to prioritize? [Julie Hoyer]: I am awful at that. [Stephen Follows]: And in the first few years, [Stephen Follows]: I know maybe the middle few years before the pandemic, [Stephen Follows]: but after I got into a rhythm of this, [Stephen Follows]: I had to remind myself every time [Stephen Follows]: that I was about to do something to Google it first [Stephen Follows]: to find out if I'd already done it.

23:57[Stephen Follows]: Because like, I just wouldn't quite remember. [Stephen Follows]: And quite often like the investigation is quite large, [Stephen Follows]: but the article you write has to be quite narrow and focused. [Stephen Follows]: And so you write one part of it up, [Stephen Follows]: but you know it's sort of unfinished in your head [Stephen Follows]: or what was the interesting part for everyone else [Stephen Follows]: is actually not the bit that interests you.

24:12[Stephen Follows]: So you can write something, publish it [Stephen Follows]: and forget all about it. [Stephen Follows]: And so I have an image of it. [Stephen Follows]: And in more recent years, including last year, [Stephen Follows]: I forgot that rule and published an article [Stephen Follows]: a week after I published it, [Stephen Follows]: realized it was basically the same article [Stephen Follows]: I'd done six months before. [Stephen Follows]: Oh.

24:29[Stephen Follows]: About like, I think it's about like [Stephen Follows]: when bad films make money [Stephen Follows]: or like what are the conditions under which [Stephen Follows]: some films that critics don't like, [Stephen Follows]: why they still make money. [Stephen Follows]: And I wrote the question in two different ways. [Stephen Follows]: And like, I left them both up there [Stephen Follows]: because it doesn't matter. [Stephen Follows]: But it's, and I was quite relieved [Stephen Follows]: to find the same answer.

24:45[Stephen Follows]: And maybe people wouldn't realize, but, you know, [Stephen Follows]: I was like, oh, I actually did this. [Stephen Follows]: So I did, when I have a random idea, [Stephen Follows]: I did have a Dropbox paper document, [Stephen Follows]: or I guess I still do somewhere. [Stephen Follows]: And I write it in there. [Stephen Follows]: Or if I had like a data set, [Stephen Follows]: I'd put it in a separate set of folders [Stephen Follows]: than the actual articles.

25:02[Stephen Follows]: And now, thanks to things like AI and things like that, [Stephen Follows]: I'm able to do things at much greater speed [Stephen Follows]: when it comes to the analytical part, [Stephen Follows]: not the writing, because that was still a human. [Stephen Follows]: So that's the bottleneck. [Stephen Follows]: So I now have a work in progress folder [Stephen Follows]: that has about 250 projects done, but not written up. [Stephen Follows]: Wow. And so that's, that's the bottleneck.

25:17[Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: So that's the bottleneck. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: So that is a challenge, [Stephen Follows]: but I also believe in the evolution of ideas. [Stephen Follows]: If it's a good enough idea, it'll come back again, [Stephen Follows]: or I'll be compelled to do it. [Stephen Follows]: So it's, because I have no boss, [Stephen Follows]: and it doesn't matter that I forgot something, [Stephen Follows]: I kind of don't mind.

25:32[Stephen Follows]: I wouldn't suggest any, this is all terrible advice. [Stephen Follows]: But for me, it didn't matter if I had a great idea [Stephen Follows]: and dropped it, because it would come back again [Stephen Follows]: if it was a great idea. [Stephen Follows]: And if it didn't, that's fine. [Stephen Follows]: But as I said, I don't think, [Stephen Follows]: that's not a professional way of doing it, [Stephen Follows]: if you're a business.

25:47[Stephen Follows]: Who needs to work through a set list. [Julie Hoyer]: Yeah. But I think it just speaks to the fact that, [Julie Hoyer]: like you said, this is your passion. [Julie Hoyer]: You're able to do it in your way of working, [Julie Hoyer]: and it's worked because nobody else is doing it. [Julie Hoyer]: And so it doesn't really matter if you have a perfect system [Julie Hoyer]: to prioritize in this setting. [Julie Hoyer]: I am curious though, because you were saying, [Julie Hoyer]: you know, the help of AI.

26:11[Julie Hoyer]: I had seen a title when I was looking at some [Julie Hoyer]: of your articles and it was about movie poster colors [Julie Hoyer]: analysis that you did. [Julie Hoyer]: And I immediately was blown away. [Julie Hoyer]: I was blown away by like, how did you get that data? [Julie Hoyer]: Like, how did you go out? [Julie Hoyer]: I mean, you, I don't have the exact number, [Julie Hoyer]: but it was tens of thousands, I thought, [Julie Hoyer]: of posters that you had like looked at [Julie Hoyer]: or included in the analysis.

26:31[Julie Hoyer]: And it was over time. [Julie Hoyer]: And so I'm curious, how did you get that data specifically? [Stephen Follows]: Because that one fascinated me. [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, no, me too. [Stephen Follows]: It's one of those questions that I'm so excited to answer. [Stephen Follows]: Like I said, I'm a fan of my own blog. [Stephen Follows]: I want to read these things. [Stephen Follows]: I just am also happy to share them. [Stephen Follows]: Okay, well, that one is a really good example [Stephen Follows]: of something that's become not an issue [Stephen Follows]: that would have been an issue before, which two issues.

26:55[Stephen Follows]: If I tried to do that 10 years ago, [Stephen Follows]: I would have faced, the first issue would be, [Stephen Follows]: how do I take a single image and turn that into data [Stephen Follows]: that would be color data? [Stephen Follows]: I would have to go away, which I often didn't, [Stephen Follows]: read Stack Overflow or talk to scientists [Stephen Follows]: or read up about like, how does one do that? [Stephen Follows]: Like, what code do I need?

27:10[Stephen Follows]: Can I just hack together code that already exists? [Stephen Follows]: Because usually, I mean, what I'm doing to gather this data [Stephen Follows]: is not groundbreaking. [Stephen Follows]: So quite a lot of people don't know that. [Stephen Follows]: So I'm not going to go into that. [Stephen Follows]: I'm going to go into that. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: I'm going to go into that. [Stephen Follows]: But quite often, someone has done that in a different context [Stephen Follows]: and I can just take the best of it and adapt it.

27:21[Stephen Follows]: So the first of the two challenges would have been, [Stephen Follows]: how do I do that? [Stephen Follows]: And second of all, how do I do that at scale? [Stephen Follows]: Because how do I get so many images and how do I put, [Stephen Follows]: I think it was, I don't know what it was, [Stephen Follows]: 50, 60,000, something like that. [Stephen Follows]: And then how do I make, within that scale question is, [Stephen Follows]: how do I have data for all those things?

27:36[Stephen Follows]: Now, actually, it's incredibly trivial [Stephen Follows]: because first of all, you can go to AI [Stephen Follows]: and you can have a conversation and say, [Stephen Follows]: hey, I want to study movie posters. [Stephen Follows]: I want to study color. [Stephen Follows]: What kind of things should I read up about? [Stephen Follows]: What should I consider? [Stephen Follows]: And for example, in that one, it's like, well, [Stephen Follows]: your mind might say this poster is very orange, [Stephen Follows]: but when you count the number of pixels, [Stephen Follows]: orange may be the second or third color [Stephen Follows]: because it's against a black background.

27:58[Stephen Follows]: So then you start realizing you can't just count [Stephen Follows]: the number of pixels because what we're carrying, [Stephen Follows]: what we're looking for is saliency as a human. [Stephen Follows]: So then you go, well, what should I read? [Stephen Follows]: And yeah, exactly. [Stephen Follows]: So I love that process. [Stephen Follows]: I love going from not knowing to knowing. [Stephen Follows]: So the first stage would be like, okay, color.

28:13[Stephen Follows]: So AI solves that kind of thing. [Stephen Follows]: Because then you say, give me the code. [Stephen Follows]: There'll be a JPEG in this form. [Stephen Follows]: I'll go to this folder and I want it to generate these numbers [Stephen Follows]: because of this conversation has told me. [Stephen Follows]: And the AI can say, oh, you want this algorithm now? [Stephen Follows]: And all those two you might consider. [Stephen Follows]: And then I go and read up about them and come back and be like, [Stephen Follows]: yeah, we'll do the advanced one or we'll do this one.

28:30[Stephen Follows]: But I'll put in the notes, the caveat that it has this flaw [Stephen Follows]: or whatever it might be. [Stephen Follows]: So that's the first problem. [Stephen Follows]: The second problem of scale is massively solved [Stephen Follows]: by technology being faster. [Stephen Follows]: So I have a fairly fast computer. [Stephen Follows]: One of those I published a report a few years ago [Stephen Follows]: about horror films that I did sell.

28:47[Stephen Follows]: And that brought in some money, not very much money, [Stephen Follows]: but a lot of money by my standards. [Stephen Follows]: So I bought a nice computer with a strong graphics card [Stephen Follows]: and a load of hard drive space and stuff. [Stephen Follows]: And so I was able to leave things chunking away. [Stephen Follows]: And as you know, with code, if it works for one, [Stephen Follows]: it can work for 60,000 just as easily.

29:03[Stephen Follows]: And the same with data sets. [Stephen Follows]: Like I already have metadata on all the movies. [Stephen Follows]: So the main criteria I use is the IMDB ID for a movie [Stephen Follows]: because almost every movie is on IMDB, [Stephen Follows]: not alone, but almost every single one. [Stephen Follows]: So with that as a unique key, I can go back, [Stephen Follows]: to my metadata data sets and say, [Stephen Follows]: I know this ID means this is a comedy.

29:21[Stephen Follows]: So when I then have lots of posters [Stephen Follows]: and I know the IDs for them, I can then say, [Stephen Follows]: well, give me all the comedies divided by, [Stephen Follows]: you know, into buckets by a year. [Stephen Follows]: And I would, up until very recently, [Stephen Follows]: that would all be manual with Excel. [Stephen Follows]: As in, I would just, it would have 60,000 rows. [Stephen Follows]: I was constantly fighting Excel, like a million rows [Stephen Follows]: or having over many columns and like hardware issues [Stephen Follows]: because I was really trying to get as much as I could, [Stephen Follows]: but I can write and whatever.

29:47[Stephen Follows]: Formulas were need to build like, okay, [Stephen Follows]: I want all that by year, by genre. [Stephen Follows]: And then as for getting them, [Stephen Follows]: there are lots of established data sets online, [Stephen Follows]: whether it's Kaggle or just searching for stuff. [Stephen Follows]: I find that quite often there is a kind of quasi, [Stephen Follows]: so there's full data sets that have permissions and whatever. [Stephen Follows]: Then the other end of the spectrum, [Stephen Follows]: there's private data sets and copyrighted material [Stephen Follows]: and things like that.

30:10[Stephen Follows]: And I try and avoid all that stuff, [Stephen Follows]: even though, as I said, sometimes I go into that space, [Stephen Follows]: but I'm doing it from an educational point of view. [Stephen Follows]: I'm deleting the data afterwards, [Stephen Follows]: or I'm certainly not sharing it. [Stephen Follows]: I'm not telling people how to do it. [Stephen Follows]: I feel like I get a lot of leeway [Stephen Follows]: because the way a scientist would, [Stephen Follows]: like I'm largely being ignored, [Stephen Follows]: which is what you want in that regard.

30:28[Stephen Follows]: I'm certainly not commercializing that. [Stephen Follows]: In the middle ground, there's quite a few. [Stephen Follows]: So like with color data, [Stephen Follows]: it might be that I need a really big image [Stephen Follows]: or it might be that I can deal with a small size [Stephen Follows]: that is fair use that's on the Wikipedia page. [Stephen Follows]: And having already got lookups for films with metadata, [Stephen Follows]: and then also knowing the way [Stephen Follows]: to get to the Wikipedia page from a previous project, [Stephen Follows]: it's not that hard to just go and download all those files [Stephen Follows]: and knowing you're okay, [Stephen Follows]: and then running it through that program.

30:56[Stephen Follows]: Or sometimes it is just scraping existing sites [Stephen Follows]: that have this data. [Stephen Follows]: But the hard thing as well then is to make sense of it [Stephen Follows]: because now I will do many deep research [Stephen Follows]: from AI prompts to learn about topics. [Stephen Follows]: But back then I would just manually read through stuff [Stephen Follows]: and I might be like, okay, well, first, [Stephen Follows]: I'm going to look at the academic literature on posters.

31:19[Stephen Follows]: Has somebody studied this? [Stephen Follows]: Have they already cracked it? [Stephen Follows]: But also what is the history of the movie poster? [Stephen Follows]: And it might be as simple as the Wikipedia page. [Stephen Follows]: I don't have time to do two weeks work on everything. [Stephen Follows]: So I might read the history of the movie poster [Stephen Follows]: and discover that's interesting. [Stephen Follows]: Or quite often it's data led.

31:34[Stephen Follows]: I'll see there was a big spike in the 1980s [Stephen Follows]: and be like, why was that? [Stephen Follows]: And then I have to condense that down to one question [Stephen Follows]: that can then be answered in an article [Stephen Follows]: that isn't way too long or sprawling. [Stephen Follows]: And that's usually the bit that saves me. [Stephen Follows]: Because I'm like, well, big data set, loads of answers, [Stephen Follows]: not a lot of clarity, but there is one thread, [Stephen Follows]: one vertical throughout all of this.

31:54[Stephen Follows]: I can go from beginning to end. [Stephen Follows]: Okay, I will write about that. [Stephen Follows]: And I will let all this fragmented messy stuff on the side [Stephen Follows]: sit for another project or another time [Stephen Follows]: where I have more understanding. [Julie Hoyer]: It's nice to hear that you start [Julie Hoyer]: from a well thought out question though. [Julie Hoyer]: Because a lot of times I think we, [Julie Hoyer]: as people that work with data, we see a lot of people say, [Julie Hoyer]: oh, there's all this data out there.

32:16[Julie Hoyer]: So I'll just like, look what data is available [Julie Hoyer]: and decide like what it can tell me. [Julie Hoyer]: And we talk a lot about going from the opposite direction [Julie Hoyer]: and actually starting from an interesting question [Julie Hoyer]: and doing the research before either collecting the data [Julie Hoyer]: yourself or grabbing what's available. [Julie Hoyer]: But I also think that makes someone much more attuned [Julie Hoyer]: to if the data that is available is actually, [Julie Hoyer]: to your point about the color, like is the data available [Julie Hoyer]: talking about the ratio of pixels or is it representing [Julie Hoyer]: what a person picks up on visually?

32:48[Julie Hoyer]: Because that would possibly give very different answers [Julie Hoyer]: to the question you're essentially trying to ask the data. [Julie Hoyer]: So it's great to hear some of your process that way. [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, I try and keep a sort of layman's point of view. [Stephen Follows]: I assume everyone's a smart layman [Stephen Follows]: and I don't assume they know any knowledge [Stephen Follows]: about the industry or about the topic.

33:08[Stephen Follows]: Cause I wouldn't, I certainly didn't 10 years ago [Stephen Follows]: and I may not have 10 minutes ago. [Stephen Follows]: So I try and, but I try and make it [Stephen Follows]: so that it's a logical set of answering. [Stephen Follows]: And sometimes the joy is in the answering, not in the answer. [Stephen Follows]: Like, you know, if I'd said to you, [Stephen Follows]: they're more blue than they were before, like, okay, [Stephen Follows]: that doesn't mean anything.

33:24[Stephen Follows]: I can't even remember what the answer was, [Stephen Follows]: but the process of breaking that down [Stephen Follows]: or looking for the correlations within that [Stephen Follows]: is really fascinating. [Stephen Follows]: So I quite often think it is the journey, [Stephen Follows]: not the destination. [Michael Helbling]: Right, Steven. [Michael Helbling]: So what's in my head right now is, [Michael Helbling]: obviously you've done so much research [Michael Helbling]: and so much digging in and analysis.

33:42[Michael Helbling]: How is the movie going experience for you? [Michael Helbling]: What happens when you sit down in a movie theater? [Stephen Follows]: Well, I mean, most people who get into film [Stephen Follows]: find that the first five years after college is ruined for them [Stephen Follows]: because you see the structures, all of the obvious points, [Stephen Follows]: Chekhov's gun, you know, you know, something's going to happen. [Stephen Follows]: And you know, the, especially non-innovative films.

34:06[Stephen Follows]: So most films are following a very set structure. [Stephen Follows]: And once you know that you see it everywhere [Stephen Follows]: and it kind of ruins it for a bit, [Stephen Follows]: and then you learn to let go. [Stephen Follows]: Or if you're- [Michael Helbling]: The Wilhelm Scream, that sort of thing. [Stephen Follows]: Exactly. [Stephen Follows]: And it takes you out of the movie, right? [Stephen Follows]: Cause you're like, oh yeah, there's that thing I know.

34:21[Stephen Follows]: Or there's a reference to that. [Stephen Follows]: And a lot of friends who work in visual effects [Stephen Follows]: have had visual effects movies ruined for them [Stephen Follows]: because they're looking around the edge of the hair [Stephen Follows]: and they're like, I can see the green screen, [Stephen Follows]: that's poor work. [Stephen Follows]: And you're just like, yeah, right. [Stephen Follows]: But after a while, you kind of have to let go [Stephen Follows]: of all that stuff.

34:36[Stephen Follows]: And my partner's always amused when people assume [Stephen Follows]: that I watch good films. [Stephen Follows]: I don't, I watch trash. [Stephen Follows]: Like I'm not a cinephile. [Stephen Follows]: Like I like good films. [Stephen Follows]: Definitely. [Stephen Follows]: But I think I can definitely split the studying [Stephen Follows]: of the film industry from the watching of it. [Stephen Follows]: And very rarely do they overlap in any significant sense.

34:58[Michael Helbling]: So what's a good movie you like? [Michael Helbling]: Well, wow. [Michael Helbling]: What's a favorite? [Stephen Follows]: I mean, I'm a huge fan of the Bridges of Madison County [Stephen Follows]: and Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood is just extraordinary. [Stephen Follows]: And I- [Stephen Follows]: I almost don't want to say any more about it. [Stephen Follows]: I want to- [Stephen Follows]: someone forced me to watch it. [Stephen Follows]: I used to, with a friend of mine many years ago, [Stephen Follows]: go around to his house and we used to rent a video.

35:22[Stephen Follows]: That's how old it was. [Stephen Follows]: And we'd agreed to rent something and he got- [Stephen Follows]: and he saw this on TV the night before [Stephen Follows]: and refused to rent what we were supposed to rent [Stephen Follows]: and said, no, we're going to sit down and watch this. [Stephen Follows]: So I watched it under protest and it's just incredible. [Stephen Follows]: But also there's this local theater near me [Stephen Follows]: that does throwback screenings where they show older films.

35:40[Stephen Follows]: And I saw Speed in the cinema. [Stephen Follows]: I mean, I've only ever seen it on video or whatever. [Stephen Follows]: And it's just incredible, timeless movie. [Stephen Follows]: Just perfect. [Stephen Follows]: Like, so I think I want to get lost into a movie. [Stephen Follows]: I want to get- [Stephen Follows]: I don't really mind if it's emotional or fantastical. [Stephen Follows]: I just want to forget the real world. [Stephen Follows]: Sounds darker than I meant it to, but like, that's what I want.

36:01[Stephen Follows]: Like, I want to get lost in it. [Stephen Follows]: Yeah. No, I love that. [Stephen Follows]: I think that makes a ton of sense. [Tim Wilson]: Do you ever find yourself- [Tim Wilson]: like if you're watching Speed in a theater, [Tim Wilson]: like, like some kind of not the of the moment experience, [Tim Wilson]: does that- do you find yourself- [Tim Wilson]: either in or shortly after having that trigger [Tim Wilson]: any of those questions?

36:20[Tim Wilson]: Like, do you, you know, [Tim Wilson]: how many movies have featured a bus that doesn't stop? [Stephen Follows]: Or some- [Stephen Follows]: I mean- [Stephen Follows]: That's a good example, actually, [Stephen Follows]: because I want to- I haven't finished it yet, [Stephen Follows]: but I'm doing a video for my YouTube channel [Stephen Follows]: that I'm looking at- each time I'm looking at a different actor [Stephen Follows]: and I'm doing one on Sandra Bullock [Stephen Follows]: because I think she's great.

36:39[Stephen Follows]: And I've concluded that most of her movies are Speed, [Stephen Follows]: whereby she is an every woman pulled in [Stephen Follows]: to a situation and there is a bus. [Stephen Follows]: In every monom- [Stephen Follows]: sometimes the bus is a boyfriend, [Stephen Follows]: but like in every film there is like- [Stephen Follows]: and she- every film she's done is Speed, basically, [Stephen Follows]: in a wonderful way. [Stephen Follows]: And because she is the every woman brought into things [Stephen Follows]: and I love her for it.

37:02[Stephen Follows]: But yeah, so I quite- yeah, [Stephen Follows]: I do sometimes leave movies and have ideas for stuff. [Stephen Follows]: Another random one, actually, [Stephen Follows]: I've got a group of friends who I've been watching movies [Stephen Follows]: with on Tuesday nights on- we stream them, you know, [Stephen Follows]: and I've got a group of friends who I've been watching movies with on Tuesday nights on- we stream them, [Stephen Follows]: on Discord just to- there's a- [Stephen Follows]: there's about 30 of us, [Stephen Follows]: but we'll probably end up watching about 10 of us every night, [Stephen Follows]: every- every week, [Stephen Follows]: because some people can make it, some can't.

37:23[Stephen Follows]: And we watch great films and terrible films. [Stephen Follows]: And we started during the beginning of the pandemic [Stephen Follows]: as everyone started doing things and we just haven't stopped. [Stephen Follows]: And we were watching trailers to work out what to watch next week. [Stephen Follows]: So we picked trailers randomly and then choose it. [Stephen Follows]: And we watched the trailer for Unbreakable. [Stephen Follows]: And there is a unbreakablemovie.com or whatever domain.

37:43[Stephen Follows]: And someone in the group said, [Stephen Follows]: I wonder if that domain's available. [Stephen Follows]: And I can't remember if that one is or not, [Stephen Follows]: but it got me down a sidetrack where I was like, [Stephen Follows]: well, I think I could work that out. [Stephen Follows]: So I found, I went through all the data films I have, [Stephen Follows]: and I checked what domains they used when the film came out. [Stephen Follows]: This is like 99,000 movies.

38:01[Stephen Follows]: And then I identified which ones were, [Stephen Follows]: which were like proper movie domains rather than like [Stephen Follows]: Warnerbrothers.com slash whatever. [Stephen Follows]: And that's about 30,000 and no 45,000. [Stephen Follows]: And I found that about 15,000 of them are available to buy. [Stephen Follows]: So one in three movie domains that were big part of the promotional part [Stephen Follows]: of the movie are currently just, you can purchase.

38:20[Stephen Follows]: And so I'm doing a video on that as well, but I bought one. [Stephen Follows]: I won't say which one it is yet for the video, [Stephen Follows]: but like there are some big movies you can buy the domain for. [Stephen Follows]: And like, that was quite the journey [Stephen Follows]: because it was an idle comment someone made in a trailer, [Stephen Follows]: like just watching films with friends. [Stephen Follows]: And it just kind of, I was curious.

38:37[Stephen Follows]: And I just thought I'd see when I fail. [Stephen Follows]: I don't mind failing in the slightest. [Stephen Follows]: I don't, I just don't want to not try. [Stephen Follows]: So I just kept going. [Stephen Follows]: And I was like, Oh, I think I learned something I didn't need to know. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: And quick counterfactual for you on Sandra Bullock. [Michael Helbling]: Yes. [Michael Helbling]: In the blind side, I would posit she's the bus.

38:56[Michael Helbling]: Nice. Yeah, there you go. [Michael Helbling]: So if you can work that one in. [Tim Wilson]: You've mentioned it in passing a couple of times and it's weird. [Tim Wilson]: This is a little meta because you're because you've kind of done the filmmaking. [Tim Wilson]: But you started as writing these videos that you now do are. [Tim Wilson]: Like, incredible. [Tim Wilson]: Like, I look at them like these are so these cartoons like they are.

39:20[Tim Wilson]: They clearly reinforce your I want to be a clear explainer and a teacher. [Tim Wilson]: But they're like daunting from a looking at it from a content creation, [Tim Wilson]: like the handful of times where I said, I just want to explain this well in a video. [Tim Wilson]: And I spend weeks or months because I just want to do something clearly. [Tim Wilson]: So can you talk about that? [Tim Wilson]: I mean, partly the process, partly like why?

39:46[Tim Wilson]: What do you shift from writing and then adding on the little kind of short film version of the writing on top of it? [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, it's been something that's been really new. [Stephen Follows]: I think I launched in February this year and people have been telling me to do video for a long time, but I don't really want to be on camera. [Stephen Follows]: Like, I just it just doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. [Stephen Follows]: And it makes my screen call a little bit.

40:06[Stephen Follows]: I don't mind other people doing it. [Stephen Follows]: I just don't want to. [Stephen Follows]: If I didn't have that part of my personality, I'd be on like one of those people on TikTok being like, hey, let me do this. [Stephen Follows]: I'm going to do this. [Stephen Follows]: Hey, let me explain this to you. [Stephen Follows]: But it just doesn't work for me at all. [Stephen Follows]: And I also don't want to, as we talked before, start something and not finish it.

40:21[Stephen Follows]: And I'm aware how big commitment is to make regular videos. [Stephen Follows]: So for a very long time, I didn't do any video of any kind. [Stephen Follows]: And I was just doing audio stuff, guesting on podcasts and I had my own one for a little bit and then a lot of writing. [Stephen Follows]: And a friend of mine, Ben, who's a really good filmmaker, was pestering me for years saying, you've got to do it, you've got to do it.

40:38[Stephen Follows]: And I said all this and he was like, well, why don't we do it together and we'll do it as a cartoon? [Stephen Follows]: So it's my, we write it together based on my research, but he's the one leading the editing work, he's doing the editing and I'm giving notes. [Stephen Follows]: And then the animation is a version of me. [Stephen Follows]: And so that, so it came from him saying, no, it's crazy, you're not doing stuff. [Stephen Follows]: Also, there is a business opportunity in there.

41:01[Stephen Follows]: Not that we're making very much money from it, but as I said before, like, I think the money follows if you're lucky sometimes. [Stephen Follows]: It's certainly not a good use of time financially. [Stephen Follows]: But I'm very fortunate. [Stephen Follows]: Although I'm very new to YouTube, I'm coming in with, I don't know, 500 published articles already. [Stephen Follows]: So I know the ones that have resonated, I've done the work.

41:21[Stephen Follows]: And also it's, the same work can be used there that can be used somewhere else. [Stephen Follows]: And so there's a lot of overlap. [Stephen Follows]: Ben is a really, really talented filmmaker and works really hard. [Stephen Follows]: And, but both of us also share a slightly anarchic sense of the world. [Stephen Follows]: We want to take serious things silly and silly things serious. [Stephen Follows]: And so we try and keep the madness of a first draft.

41:43[Stephen Follows]: And we're just talking about it because he's on the movie group as well. [Stephen Follows]: He set the whole thing up. [Stephen Follows]: And so when both of us are like, yeah, I wonder what domain's available. [Stephen Follows]: Let's buy one. All right. [Stephen Follows]: How many can we buy? [Stephen Follows]: No, it's too expensive. [Stephen Follows]: Let's just buy one. [Stephen Follows]: How would we rank them? [Stephen Follows]: Oh, well, there's a good question.

41:56[Stephen Follows]: And like, we try and keep that madness so that you're watching it thinking, what is this? [Stephen Follows]: And because a lot of my writing is, I'm not an academic. [Stephen Follows]: I've literally never, I'm really not an academic on so many levels. [Stephen Follows]: But I, my writing is a bit more academic than, you know, I'm not an academic. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: I'm not an academic. [Stephen Follows]: I'm a bit more academic than perhaps what I'm like in person when I give a talk.

42:15[Stephen Follows]: And this is the opposite. [Stephen Follows]: And this is the anarchic kind of, it's YouTube. [Stephen Follows]: Like, I want to get it correct because I care, but it does not matter. [Stephen Follows]: And it matters more. [Stephen Follows]: Did you entertain people? [Stephen Follows]: Did you, you know, introduce them to a new idea? [Stephen Follows]: So I'm not trying to achieve anything other than just have fun for six minutes.

42:33[Tim Wilson]: You weren't applying, you weren't applying those early analyses of how to make, [Tim Wilson]: predict that these films are going to make money. [Tim Wilson]: You're like, I figured it out. [Tim Wilson]: Cartoon. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: I can tell you that I have made so many poor business decisions if you were to see my life [Stephen Follows]: as a business thing. [Stephen Follows]: But, um, but that's fine though. [Stephen Follows]: I mean, Ben and I really enjoy it.

42:52[Stephen Follows]: It's really fun. [Stephen Follows]: It's mad. [Stephen Follows]: It's, but one of the things that has helped us again, to sort of use AI as an example, [Stephen Follows]: we could not have done this five years ago. [Stephen Follows]: We're not using AI to, to come up with ideas or to write anything, but we did spend some [Stephen Follows]: time building a animation pipeline because in the very first ones we were doing in February, [Stephen Follows]: all the test ones we did last year, at the end of last year.

43:11[Stephen Follows]: We use, um, Adobe character animator and we create these characters and have them, the [Stephen Follows]: character and then the mouth moving. [Stephen Follows]: It was very, very, very time consuming and also animating the graphs so that the lines [Stephen Follows]: come on or whatever. [Stephen Follows]: And this was taking a very long time and we were like, wow, this is not sustainable. [Stephen Follows]: But this year we've spent a lot of time writing code through AI to do that for us.

43:33[Stephen Follows]: So we now have a whole pipeline where we can take something I've said and put it into just [Stephen Follows]: put it, plop it into there. [Stephen Follows]: So we've got the character animator that we've built. [Stephen Follows]: It automatically reads it. [Stephen Follows]: It says, okay, well this point, the character should have his happy face or his sad face. [Stephen Follows]: These are the mouth movements. [Stephen Follows]: It generates a first draft, which we go in there and change where all these tags are [Stephen Follows]: and then hit generate again.

43:55[Stephen Follows]: And it's generated a whole, I mean, it could do an hour. [Stephen Follows]: It could do anything at a time. [Stephen Follows]: And also we use 11 labs to generate my voice, not for the final piece. [Stephen Follows]: The final piece is all me. [Stephen Follows]: But when we're doing a rough edit early on, when we've just got it all in text, it's like, [Stephen Follows]: is this going to sound right? [Stephen Follows]: Well, let's just see how long this is.

44:13[Stephen Follows]: Let's see if it makes sense. [Stephen Follows]: And we, so we use a lot of stuff behind the scenes to help us keep the madness of the [Stephen Follows]: ideas. [Stephen Follows]: But the execution is like having a team of 20 behind us who can just do things. [Tim Wilson]: Wow. [Tim Wilson]: It just feels like that's like the AI lesson, like the, the, the human part of keeping the [Tim Wilson]: madness and the madcap and the, and then like, but I don't want to, I don't want to record [Tim Wilson]: the script 15 times over.

44:39[Tim Wilson]: So I hate 11 labs. [Tim Wilson]: Exactly. [Tim Wilson]: Like, it's like, you've, you've, you've also managed to kind of find, and I'm sure it's [Tim Wilson]: still evolving sort of the sweet spot of, of how to, how to use AI, but keep the human [Tim Wilson]: component. [Stephen Follows]: That is the future. [Stephen Follows]: That is what, you know, I read something yesterday talking about how writers are now deliberately [Stephen Follows]: putting in typos and stuff like that to try and show as human.

45:01[Stephen Follows]: And to some degree, you know, we buy handmade soap, there's records, there's, you know, [Stephen Follows]: the flaws are, it's not that we want it to be bad. [Stephen Follows]: It's just that we, that's the sign of humanity. [Stephen Follows]: I, it's complicated as to how much that will carry on in what way, but certainly we know [Stephen Follows]: that the fact that this is made by two humans with a perspective is the important bit.

45:18[Stephen Follows]: And it's also why we're doing it. [Stephen Follows]: I don't want to create 400 of these because I could generate them from my video, my articles. [Stephen Follows]: I can take all 500 of my articles. [Stephen Follows]: I can auto generate the voice and the animation. [Stephen Follows]: I could do that today. [Stephen Follows]: And I could also probably even use, we've got a lot of clips and we've already embedded [Stephen Follows]: them and we can search on them with like close up of phones.

45:36[Stephen Follows]: All this sort of stuff can come already. [Stephen Follows]: We could do all of that. [Stephen Follows]: And it would be soulless and empty. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: Yeah. [Unknown]: [Stephen Follows]: It would be being pointless. [Stephen Follows]: And why would I do it? [Stephen Follows]: Like, what a waste of my time. [Stephen Follows]: But for me working with Ben and coming up with something mad and then executing it and being [Stephen Follows]: like, ah, and then when someone watches it, they also go out, what was that?

45:50[Stephen Follows]: Like that feels a good use of my time and of the audience's time. [Tim Wilson]: So now that you're kind of the guy or one of the guys who's got built up all this, do [Tim Wilson]: you find, do you have people coming to you for the data that you've either created or [Tim Wilson]: like do you have to i'm trying i'm thinking i think it might be daniel paris with stat significant [Tim Wilson]: has like yeah he has like a a paywall to like you know access my data so that clearly kind of [Tim Wilson]: happened to him so are you getting people coming to you saying hey do you have anything on this [Stephen Follows]: could i use it how could i get it okay oh yeah i mean uh 25 emails a week about that kind of stuff [Stephen Follows]: from the film industry like it's quite a lot but i i almost never almost never give out that data [Stephen Follows]: because first of all it doesn't come from me quite often if i've gathered it or scraped it [Stephen Follows]: from somewhere else it's not mine so whether that's a legal thing or a moral thing it's just [Stephen Follows]: not mine it's not really a question of me withholding um if i've done a truly original

46:48[Stephen Follows]: analysis on something or it is an open source data set then i'm much more open to it certainly [Stephen Follows]: if it's for a good cause as well but i'm not i'm not going to be there to be able to support that [Stephen Follows]: data either so let's say that i have taken wikipedia plot summaries and i've applied some [Stephen Follows]: kind of analysis to them and i've got a data set for it uh [Stephen Follows]: you can't do that without a data set so i'm not going to be able to support that data either [Stephen Follows]: that's fine but if i then like um i did a lot of that stuff with embedding uh uh in text embedding [Stephen Follows]: if i then have to explain to somebody what this is what model i used how it worked it's a huge [Stephen Follows]: amount of servicing for that bit of data and then maybe they want it slightly different i can't i [Stephen Follows]: can't service that i just don't have the time for that so i do try and help where i can but quite [Stephen Follows]: often uh very very rarely can i actually help the core way they want help for as well as the fact

47:32[Stephen Follows]: that most of the people within the industry that come to me want it as a silver bullet [Stephen Follows]: as a [Stephen Follows]: panacea to prove that the thing they already want to make is going to make money and it's not going [Stephen Follows]: to and i'm not going to be able to prove it so i've got very good at saying no like i 99 of the [Stephen Follows]: time people email me for something i have to kindly say that's not possible or i'm not doing it [Stephen Follows]: um and that's fine like that i'm very happy for people to ask don't mind saying no but i think [Stephen Follows]: i have thought a long time about linking to other people's data like i have a huge data set from all [Stephen Follows]: the public bodies around the world and all of the data they have i'm like it's [Stephen Follows]: i don't know three or four hundred gigabytes and i could put that back online but again it's not my [Stephen Follows]: stuff even public bodies like i'd be better saying hey go to the korean film institute and then maybe [Stephen Follows]: they change what their website is or how it works and i just can't support that so i just say i

48:21[Stephen Follows]: can't or individually i'll say okay go here and have a look and go get it yourself so so maybe [Tim Wilson]: that's the not that i know where michael's gonna be like we're heading towards a wrap but the the [Tim Wilson]: and i don't want to make this a downer but i'm [Tim Wilson]: sort of mentioned it briefly earlier can you talk a little bit about kind of the ai impact on [Tim Wilson]: the whole tale of the numbers and we'll link to your post about it but to me that was kind of a [Tim Wilson]: oh like i had not thought through how ai could literally basically crush a data store i have a [Stephen Follows]: very complicated relationship with that ai i use a huge i got four claude max accounts like and i [Stephen Follows]: really use every credit i am really using it at the same time i'm deeply [Stephen Follows]: worried about the future and where we're going and what the effects of this are and i was very [Stephen Follows]: lucky i got an early access to gpt3 when in 2022 something like that um and i used it to do an art [Stephen Follows]: project with a uh an astrophysicist in sweden uh we managed to convince a hollywood producer to

49:23[Stephen Follows]: give us money to go and write a script and so they paid us the same amount they normally have pay a [Stephen Follows]: writer and we developed that in 2022 before chat gbt so i've been around that kind of stuff for a [Stephen Follows]: while and i and if there's something we don't know about this let me know in the comments because i [Stephen Follows]: would love to hear from you if you're interested in such things as well i'll see you next week next week [Stephen Follows]: And I feel a lot like Cassandra because I keep saying how much it's changing things.

49:40[Stephen Follows]: I'm not saying automatically better or worse, but like the world everyone's walking around. [Stephen Follows]: My partner's not very technophobe. [Stephen Follows]: She wouldn't say she's technophobe or a Luddite, but she's just like, well, I didn't need it. [Stephen Follows]: And I feel like it's two realities of like how much this is fundamentally transforming so much. [Stephen Follows]: At the same time, you go out and you buy an ice cream and everything looks the same.

50:02[Stephen Follows]: And maybe it will be the same in 10 years. [Stephen Follows]: I don't know. [Stephen Follows]: But it's the biggest change I think we've been through. [Stephen Follows]: It's certainly at this speed as a race, as a human race. [Stephen Follows]: Right. [Stephen Follows]: And so I'm interested in telling that story. [Stephen Follows]: And it's very hard to not just be shouting people. [Stephen Follows]: So this particular story about the numbers.com was a really good example that fell in my lap to be able to say, look, here's just one example.

50:24[Stephen Follows]: So a bit of background. [Stephen Follows]: The numbers.com is one of the foremost box office tracking websites. [Stephen Follows]: And it used to be in competition with Box Office Mojo. [Stephen Follows]: But Box Office Mojo was bought. [Stephen Follows]: It was owned by IMDB. [Stephen Follows]: And then just before the pandemic, they put it behind, some of it behind the paywall. [Stephen Follows]: They sort of made the inshittification of that because it was now owned by Amazon.

50:43[Stephen Follows]: So the numbers became preeminent. [Stephen Follows]: And I've known Bruce Nash, who runs the numbers, probably as long as I've been in this stuff, because I probably went to him first asking for data. [Stephen Follows]: He's British, but he's lived in San Francisco most of his adult life. [Stephen Follows]: And every time I go to the West Coast, I go and spend some time with him and his lovely wife. [Stephen Follows]: And so I got to know him really, really well.

51:00[Stephen Follows]: Like we're good friends. [Stephen Follows]: And he does a few things. [Stephen Follows]: He does market analysis for filmmakers. [Stephen Follows]: They sell their data in bulk to studios and to hedge funds and other. [Stephen Follows]: And then they also have this website called the numbers.com, which has public box office data going back years. [Stephen Follows]: Lots of really cool tools and things like that. [Stephen Follows]: In March this year, the site just went down and just wasn't publicly available.

51:24[Stephen Follows]: And I don't talk to Bruce all the time, but I reached out and said, is everything all right? [Stephen Follows]: And he kind of went dealing with some stuff. [Stephen Follows]: Talk to you later. [Stephen Follows]: All right, fine. [Stephen Follows]: And then. [Stephen Follows]: It was a good couple of months. [Stephen Follows]: I knew he was very busy because it was something we were supposed to do and he kept pushing it off. [Stephen Follows]: And so in the end, I did have a Zoom with him and I was like, hey, what's going on?

51:44[Stephen Follows]: And we caught up socially. [Stephen Follows]: And then he was like, right, I need to tell you the story. [Stephen Follows]: And he told me what happened. [Stephen Follows]: And at the end of it, I said, look, this is really self-serving, but can I write about this? [Stephen Follows]: Because obviously we're just friends. [Stephen Follows]: He told me off the record. [Stephen Follows]: But because it fits into this wider narrative, I think people should know.

51:59[Stephen Follows]: How do you feel about that? [Stephen Follows]: And he thought about it and was like, yeah, actually, he's a big. [Stephen Follows]: Yeah. [Stephen Follows]: Advocate for free speech and for open data. [Stephen Follows]: And he actually took me to the Internet Archive. [Stephen Follows]: They have a church in San Francisco where the server is a little blinky light. [Stephen Follows]: He took me there years ago. [Stephen Follows]: So I know he's this is part of his belief as well.

52:19[Stephen Follows]: So I went with him to write this long article about what happened. [Stephen Follows]: And there's sort of two things that really affected him. [Stephen Follows]: One is the massive increase in AI bot traffic. [Stephen Follows]: So there was always search engine traffic that would slow down websites or at least cause problems. [Stephen Follows]: For servers. [Stephen Follows]: But the deal was that search engines would cruel this information and then send you traffic because they'd be like you'd search for something and then they'd deliver the page.

52:43[Stephen Follows]: And it was manageable. [Stephen Follows]: But about a year or so ago, they started most website hosts, certainly data rich sites, started to see a massive increase in the number of bots to the point to which I think there's some study that I managed to find numbers for that's in the article that talks about how many page views the bots would go on to compared to how many humans they send you. [Stephen Follows]: And for search engines, it was something like every 10 views.

53:08[Stephen Follows]: I can't remember the ratio. [Stephen Follows]: It's very, very low number. [Stephen Follows]: For Anthropic, it was 32,000 sites visits, site visits from an AI bot for each one human being they actually sent you as traffic. [Stephen Follows]: So it's an overwhelming volume of traffic, you know, just swamping these sites. [Stephen Follows]: And so that the numbers were suffering from that. [Stephen Follows]: They did some clever stuff.

53:30[Stephen Follows]: You can make your pages lighter. [Stephen Follows]: You can do stuff with robots.txt. [Stephen Follows]: But also they put. [Stephen Follows]: A little thing in there that said, if you're an LLM, you can license our data this way. [Stephen Follows]: And that helped reduce the traffic. [Stephen Follows]: But then this other AI thing happened, which is that Polymarket, everyone's favorite slash worst prediction market, has markets where you can bet on the outcome of box office.

53:52[Stephen Follows]: And they use the numbers as the answer. [Stephen Follows]: There's the kind of like that's what will resolve this contract. [Stephen Follows]: And so somebody or some people, I'm sure it wasn't just one, started using tools off the shelf. [Stephen Follows]: Like, I don't know if it was Claude or Chad GPT, but it's not hard to imagine. [Stephen Follows]: It's one of those type things to search for vulnerabilities. [Stephen Follows]: And this is a 30 year old website with over 150,000 legacy pages.

54:16[Stephen Follows]: And it found some and it kept hammering it and hammering it. [Stephen Follows]: And I'm not at liberty to give all the information away, but it looks like and certainly my reading of it is that somebody with a basic AI tool broke into his website, took it over to try and front run the numbers to try and see before it gets published. [Stephen Follows]: Oh, just the last minute, you can see that film is doing better than this. [Stephen Follows]: Or maybe they published them on Mondays, but they're putting them in on each day, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

54:42[Stephen Follows]: I don't know what they thought would be the case. [Stephen Follows]: And so it took down the site and they can't turn the server back on. [Stephen Follows]: And Bruce is now sitting there thinking he's got a basic version of the site back up. [Stephen Follows]: The rest of his business is surviving because it's the other types of business. [Stephen Follows]: But he's sitting there thinking and he was asking me about what do I do with a website in 2026?

55:00[Stephen Follows]: Do we even have a website? [Stephen Follows]: If I'm going to have another website, is it going to get taken down again? [Stephen Follows]: So what's the point? [Stephen Follows]: Like, I can't even get human traffic. [Stephen Follows]: So, yeah, a real sign of the times. [Stephen Follows]: But it's a long read and it's worth it because and it's got loads of Bruce's quotes throughout it because he was very generous with his time.

55:17[Stephen Follows]: If you're interested in thinking about how the world is changing and how AI is affecting it in ways you may not think, it's really worth reading. [Stephen Follows]: But give yourself 10 minutes afterwards before you interact with people because you'll be sad. [Tim Wilson]: Well, I mean, on the on the business side, there's all this like, how do we show up? [Tim Wilson]: You know, all these companies saying. [Tim Wilson]: What do we need to do to show up?

55:36[Tim Wilson]: You know, the whole AO and GEO. [Tim Wilson]: Like, I want to show up in those results. [Tim Wilson]: Like, so it's like, oh, it's like, go counterpoint this. [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. [Tim Wilson]: Wow. [Tim Wilson]: I did head us towards a downer. [Tim Wilson]: All right. [Tim Wilson]: Good job. [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. [Tim Wilson]: Good job. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: Overall, this has been a fascinating conversation. [Michael Helbling]: And thank you, Stephen, so much for coming on.

56:04[Michael Helbling]: And talking about it. [Michael Helbling]: And I think it's sort of universal, like a love for movies and looking at sort of the stories and the data beneath them. [Michael Helbling]: One thing we like to do on the show is go around and share a last call, something that might be of interest to our listeners. [Michael Helbling]: And Stephen, you're our guest. [Michael Helbling]: Do you have a last call you'd like to share? [Stephen Follows]: Yeah, I got a website, which some of you will know inside out and some of you may never have heard of.

56:27[Stephen Follows]: I hope you've never heard of it because you're about to lose three or four hours of pure joy. [Stephen Follows]: Go to pudding.cool. [Stephen Follows]: P-U-D-D-I-N-G. [Stephen Follows]: Please say, yeah. [Stephen Follows]: P-U-D-D-I-N-G.C-O-O-L. [Stephen Follows]: They are incredible data projects. [Stephen Follows]: They make you think. [Stephen Follows]: There's a new one up there about a load of menus from New York and around America.

56:48[Stephen Follows]: And what can the hash of menus tell us about America? [Stephen Follows]: You're going to spend so much time on it. [Stephen Follows]: I love it. [Tim Wilson]: It's nice. [Tim Wilson]: Very nice. [Tim Wilson]: Remember when they broke down like Ali Wong's first special or something? [Tim Wilson]: I mean, it's just bonkers. [Tim Wilson]: It is. [Tim Wilson]: Boy, that is amazing. [Tim Wilson]: There was. [Tim Wilson]: In the vein of this discussion.

57:05[Tim Wilson]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: If there remained any doubt, Stephen, that you were not one of us, you could dispel all of that. [Michael Helbling]: No, there was no doubt. [Michael Helbling]: Awesome. [Michael Helbling]: Very cool. [Michael Helbling]: All right, Julie, what about you? [Michael Helbling]: What's your last call? [Julie Hoyer]: Mine is a YouTube video from David Epstein. [Julie Hoyer]: Actually, it was his one of his newsletters recently.

57:26[Julie Hoyer]: But I loved it because it was sports plus science plus, you know, some fun numbers and stats. [Julie Hoyer]: And like, that's right up my alley. [Julie Hoyer]: So it was why messaging? [Julie Hoyer]: I see barely runs. [Julie Hoyer]: And he just like goes through kind of this whole broad analysis and deep dives into psychology. [Julie Hoyer]: And it is just I loved it. [Julie Hoyer]: It was so good. [Julie Hoyer]: So highly recommend.

57:47[Julie Hoyer]: Very cool. [Tim Wilson]: I read that. [Tim Wilson]: And then I watched one of the games. [Tim Wilson]: I was like, oh, my God. [Tim Wilson]: I mean, I follow more closely or like aware of that. [Tim Wilson]: And I was like, oh, oh, my God. [Tim Wilson]: Like, he really that's wild. [Julie Hoyer]: Yeah, I know. [Julie Hoyer]: I was shocked. [Julie Hoyer]: It was it was great. [Julie Hoyer]: Full of fun tidbits. [Julie Hoyer]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: All right, Tim.

58:06[Michael Helbling]: What about you? [Michael Helbling]: What's your last call? [Tim Wilson]: I'm going to go with Dave. [Tim Wilson]: I've I've had Eric Sandisham articles before, but he wrote one called Three Kinds of AI. [Tim Wilson]: And it's short. [Tim Wilson]: And he breaks down like predictive, generative, energetic, energetic, a little messier and talks about kind of gives a definition to me, like very, very useful because people say I. [Tim Wilson]: And I feel like we talk past each other.

58:32[Tim Wilson]: And he has. [Tim Wilson]: Some thoughts on like the ease of measuring and getting achieving ROI from each different type. [Tim Wilson]: But it's his articles tend to be short and they tend to be kind of brilliant. [Tim Wilson]: And that one I have not stopped thinking about since he published it. [Tim Wilson]: What about you, Michael? [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it's interesting. [Michael Helbling]: I sort of involves this conversation a little bit.

58:58[Michael Helbling]: I was reminded of a very favorite one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams. [Michael Helbling]: It is. [Michael Helbling]: It's a book, Life, the Universe and Everything has this definition of learning how to take on the knack of flying, which is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. [Michael Helbling]: So it's sort of like a repetitive process where you throw yourself at the ground and then try to distract yourself before you hit.

59:23[Michael Helbling]: And it sort of reminds me of the advice of like, yeah, how do you succeed in some of these sort of things? [Michael Helbling]: It's sort of like that. [Michael Helbling]: And it's sort of. [Michael Helbling]: It's mind twisting to be like, OK, don't try to replicate what I did, but just sort of like throw yourself at the ground and then miss. [Michael Helbling]: So anyways, and also just read, if you haven't, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy in five parts.

59:51[Michael Helbling]: I don't know if there are books I've laughed harder reading than those. [Michael Helbling]: So anyway, so that's my last call. [Tim Wilson]: On the list of people we lost too soon because that guy's brain. [Michael Helbling]: It was different. [Michael Helbling]: Very different. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: Well, it's been great. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm sure as you've listened, maybe you've got questions or maybe you want to reach out to us.

1:00:10[Michael Helbling]: We would love to hear from you. [Michael Helbling]: The best way to do that is to reach out to us on our LinkedIn group or on the measure Slack chat or through email at contact at analytics hour dot IO. [Michael Helbling]: You can follow Stephen's work at Stephen follows dot com, where there are articles upon articles for any interest you might have on exploring data. [Michael Helbling]: And movies. [Michael Helbling]: It's it's almost endless.

1:00:35[Michael Helbling]: So it's like so hard to know where to start. [Michael Helbling]: You're like, just find an article and dig in. [Michael Helbling]: You'll be there for quite some time. [Michael Helbling]: It's excellent. [Michael Helbling]: And Stephen, once again, thank you so much for coming on. [Michael Helbling]: It's been such a pleasure. [Michael Helbling]: I think hearing people explain what they're passionate about kind of ignites your own passion in a way is sort of inspiring and encouraging.

1:01:01[Michael Helbling]: And like, I'm not going to. [Michael Helbling]: Dig into film like you have, but like it kind of like reinvigorates me for the things I'm excited about. [Michael Helbling]: So thank you so much for sharing that. [Stephen Follows]: Such a pleasure. [Stephen Follows]: And thank you for destroying my idea of how long an hour is because that flew by and it does not feel like it goes quick. [Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: And of course, please, as you're listening on whatever platform, leave us a rating and review.

1:01:24[Michael Helbling]: And you can also reach out to us if you'd like a sticker for your water bottle or laptop. [Michael Helbling]: And you can do that on analytics hour dot IO. [Michael Helbling]: So. [Unknown]: [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, lots of ways to engage. [Michael Helbling]: And I think I speak for both of my co-hosts, Julie and Tim, when I say no matter what the box office is going to be on your next major dashboard report, keep analyzing. [Announcer]: Thanks for listening.

1:01:50[Announcer]: Let's keep the conversation going with your comments, suggestions and questions on Twitter at at analytics hour on the web at analytics hour dot IO. [Announcer]: Our LinkedIn group and the measured chat Slack group. [Announcer]: Music for the podcast by Josh Crowhurst. [Announcer]: Oh, smart guys want to fit in. [Announcer]: So they made up a term called analytics. [Announcer]: Analytics don't work. [Charles Barkley]: Do the analytics say go for it no matter who's going for it?

1:02:16[Charles Barkley]: So if you and I were on the field, the analytics say go for it. [Charles Barkley]: It's the stupidest, laziest, lamest thing I've ever heard for reasoning in competition. [Michael Helbling]: But it's just because I've seen it and I thought it was an incredible piece of film. [Michael Helbling]: No, but I'm. [Michael Helbling]: Going to go back and see it. [Michael Helbling]: I'm I wasn't sure initially if it was worth it. [Michael Helbling]: And then I saw it and I was like, now I need to go back and see it at IMAX.

1:02:40[Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I will go see it in IMAX. [Michael Helbling]: And then lastly, Stephen, we like to send a small gift to say thank you for coming on the show. [Michael Helbling]: If you have the ability right below this thing, this is mailing address in the document. [Michael Helbling]: There's a little box. [Michael Helbling]: If you just could type a good mailing address for you, then we can send that out to you. [Michael Helbling]: That's very kind. Oh, yeah.

1:03:00[Michael Helbling]: There I see. [Michael Helbling]: Say thanks. Yeah, that's. [Michael Helbling]: And that's we just want to say, you know, thank you for taking the time. [Michael Helbling]: It's a. [Stephen Follows]: Well, I hope you send it after, though, it's in case I do it terribly. [Stephen Follows]: And then you can just send an empty box to me. [Stephen Follows]: We have we have two different gifts. [Michael Helbling]: And you'll never know.

1:03:21[Tim Wilson]: Actually, I've never shared. [Tim Wilson]: I I was this close because I kind of keep the the warehouse keeps just boxes and they're already sort of pre and then stuff gets just a little addition. [Tim Wilson]: And I. [Tim Wilson]: I was dangerously close. [Tim Wilson]: I. [Tim Wilson]: I was dangerously close to actually shipping an empty box accidentally once. [Julie Hoyer]: Oh, my God. [Julie Hoyer]: Because I just kind of. [Tim Wilson]: Such a bold move.

1:03:39[Michael Helbling]: Oh, well, thanks for coming on the show. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, we giving you back what you gave us. [Michael Helbling]: Nothing. [Michael Helbling]: But. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: No, no, no, no, no, no. [Tim Wilson]: Rock. [Tim Wilson]: Red flag and Chekhov's gun.