How To Stop Being Boring Thomas Frank Menfluential [0:00:00]
Antonio: Are you boring?
When you talk to people, do their eyes glaze over?
Do they yawn?
Do they start to fall asleep?
The reality is, gentlemen, is that most people are boring, but it doesn’t have to be that
way.
In today’s video, we’re going to talk about how to go from boring to incredibly
interesting.
[Music] So, in today’s video, I’m bringing in my good friend my Thomas Frank.
This particular presentation was from my Menfluential event in Atlanta, Georgia which me and Aaron
Marino run every year.
Now, today’s particular topic how to go from boring to interesting.
Thomas: Who here like Bill Nye The Science Guy?
Audience: [Yes] All right.
There are zillion scientists out there in the world and a lot of them published papers
and all of them would love for more people to read their scientific papers.
The only problem is their scientific papers are [babbling] boring.
And I know these because I have to read through them all the time for my videos.
By contrast, everybody likes, Bill Nye the Science Guy, everybody likes Neil deGrasse
Tyson, everybody loves listening to David Attenborough narrate a nature documentary.
These people are the greatest science educators in the world because they know that their
enthusiasm and their infectious passion for their topic is going to – is going to bring
up a new generation of future scientist.
You can’t start and get people interested by talking about the different temperatures
of ice cores you’ve drilled in the arctic and show them lots of charts and graphs.
You got to show bull shark hunting or you got to blow something up or you got to have
a cool sound effect and you got to be really enthusiastic about it as well.
My favorite cooking show in the world is Good Eats with Alton Brown because Alton Brown
is super infectiously excited about cooking and the science behind it.
That’s why I love to cook today.
So, you have two options when it comes to your enthusiasm.
Number one, assume that you don’t need to be enthusiastic, people are going to come
to you because they are interested in your topic or, assume that you have the ability
to use your own passion for what you’re doing.
To use your own enthusiasm to bring people’s interest up.
And if you do that, you increase the size of your potential audience exponentially.
I was talking to Mike just last night.
He wants to build a channel that helps 28 to 30-year old programmers have social skills,
right?
And I’m sorry I’m calling you out, but I am.
[Laughs].
And I said, okay, 20-38 or 20 -- 28 to 30-year old programmers are probably going to be your
bread and butter.
They’ve got the money, they’re you absolute target demographic for buying your products,
but doesn’t a 20-year old college kid also want to know how to talk to girls?
Doesn’t a 39-year old single mom also want to know how to be more confident when she
goes in the public?
So, make videos that everyone will like.
If you look at people like Tony Robbins, he makes most of his money from these super high
ticket really exclusive events that almost no one ever hears about because we’re like
way bottom of the funnel.
But, he’s not on TV and he’s not writing books about how to make $10 million a year
if you’re already making $8.
He’s writing books about why walking across coals are going to make you more confident
and probably burn your feet as well or how to sleep burn your feet as well or how to
sleep better.
I’m not sure, I’m not a big fan of Tony Robbins person.
But, I know that he casts a wide net because he knows that if he cast this wide net and
he uses that infectious personality, he’s going to bring in a lot of people at the surface
level and a few people are going to trickle down into where he wants them to be.
So, be enthusiastic, cast your nets wide, and you’re going to get the people you want
along with a lot of other people.
And I forgot that this slide of Scott was in here, but this is a great example.
Scott makes comic book videos, right?
Comic book video seems like, oh, this is the coolest thing in the world, right?
Comic – wouldn’t you care or you wouldn’t be in the comic books, but some people are
just not going to care.
So, be enthusiastic and don’t use the stuck this is just – don’t use this.
Okay.
Principle number three.
Become an interesting person.
So, this is a tip for anybody who is the face of their business.
I know a lot of people want to make content, they want to remain behind the scenes and
they want people to follow them on the quality of the things they’re putting out there
and that’s totally fine.
But, one of the things that I’ve learned is that if you build up a fascination around
yourself, then you’re going to have a much easier time taking your audience from wherever
they are now and whatever you’re teaching them and getting them excited about something
else because you’re excited about it.
Now, this is definitely partly due to enthusiasm about your topic and your presentation charisma,
but you can also do other things like building up your Instagram presence or telling stories
from your life.
One of my favorite YouTubers at the moment is Peter McKinnon.
And, Peter McKinnon is a YouTuber who primarily teaches people how to make better videos,
so filmmaking tutorials, camera gear tutorials.
He goes into Premiere Pro and shows you how to color great stuff correctly or how to do
better audio.
[0:04:57] And, to be honest there are a lot of channels out there on YouTube who teach
the stuff, but nobody has been able to build as big of a following and as quickly as Peter
McKinnon.
Well, I took the screenshot here over at 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube.
And correct me if I’m wrong after this talk, but I don’t think anybody else on YouTube
who does filmmaking tutorials video editing anything like that even has a million.
It’s just a pretty niche thing.
I mean it’s like I always said it’s a 5% content creators, 95% content consumers.
So, if you’re doing content creation tutorials, you’re limiting the size of your audience
except I’m wrong about that because Peter McKinnon is it.
And the reason that his audience has grown so exponentially and so explosively is that
he doesn’t just give you a tutorial on how to make better colors in your films or how
to, you know, use a different camera, he also vlogs his life.
And he’s interesting, he’s flying to the Arctic Circle to take photos there or, you
know, he’s going to an awesome spot in the ocean and taking drone footage there.
And he vlogs it like Casey Neistat does.
He uses amazing cinematic footage to tell stories about his life and as a result he’s
interesting.
So, I’m like a new Peter McKinnon video?
It’s about motion blurring.
I pan shot with 120 frames per second camera, that I don’t own, still watching it because
he’s going to do something interesting in it and I’m going to learn something new.
All right.
Principle number four.
Be funny.
So, I want to talk about a video that I made a few months ago.
Most of my videos for reference get maybe 120,000 to 200,000 views on average.
But, I made this one a few months ago called Why You’re Always Tired.
And, with a lot of my videos, I actually take – I don’t take the time to script out
an entire thing, I just make a bullet list and then I look at the bullet list on my iPad
while I film and I just say what comes to mind to the camera until it feels right.
But with this video, I scripted out the entire thing because there was a lot of scientific
data about health in it and I wanted to be correct, I wanted to be specific about it.
So, I wrote the entire script, I gave it word for word, but before I filmed the script I
spent an extra couple of hours going through it tightening up lines and trying to add in
jokes.
And because of that, the watch time on that video and the retention is awesome and that
video has 1.3 million views right now.
It is easily my most successful video in the past few months.
And I should probably do this a lot more often.
So, when I think about being funny, I’m reminded of a quote from one of the writers
of Arrested Development which is let’s have so many jokes that we can throw half of them
away.
And you don’t have to have a joke every single line in your video script, but I want
you to think about this line and keep in your memory because when you’re looking at your
educational script about fragrances or about how to tie a tie or whatever it is, you’re
going to think this is a topic that doesn’t have any potential for jokes whatsoever.
It just doesn’t work.
If you think about this and you look at every single line and you apply some of the principles
I’m going to talk about in a few seconds here, you’re going to find ways to be funny
and to keep people watching much, much longer.
So, here’s a great example, awhile ago I did a video about hydration and I wanted to
make it the ultimate video about hydration because everyone says drink your eight glasses
a day which is wrong and I wanted to figure out like how much should I actually be drinking.
So, this took about a week of research to do.
And one of the ways you can tell if you’re hydrated is by checking the color of your
urine.
Now, I’m thinking how do I make this funny without resorting to toilet humor?
There’s got to be a way.
So, what I ended up doing is just having one of my circles be, oh, if you’re pee is blue,
you’re an escape government experiment.
And then, for three frames of the video, so if you didn’t pause at the exact right time
you wouldn’t catch it.
I just threw it in this stupid message with a reference to X-Men origins with – with
William Stryker and then there’s like a Gucci gang reference in there because I’m
a weirdo and I will never deny that, but my audience thought this was hilarious.
And a lot of people caught this and they paused it and there’s like six comments where people
just typed exactly what that is into the comment box and just shared it.
So, this is an example of how to get a joke out of something where you don’t think you
could get a joke.
So, there is a book called Secrets of Comedy Writing.
It’s by a guy named Mel Helitzer.
And he breaks down all comedy into six different factors or dimensions which he calls the THREES
acronym.
So, every joke you have ever laughed at has one or more of these elements – target,
a hostility against something, realism, exaggeration, emotion, or surprise.
And going back to this slide here, this is an example of surprise.
All referential comedy is a subtopic of surprise comedy because nobody expects for one, the
Spanish inquisition, but for two, nobody expects you to talk about escaped government experiments
and have X-Men references in your, you know, chart about urine color.
[0:10:04] And they also don’t expect you to have a Gucci gang reference in your X-Men
reference.
I’m going references within references because I’m good friends with exhibit, that’s
just my talent there.
You could do one reference, but surprise is really, really versatile.
All referential comedy is surprise-based and people love referential comedy because, again,
you’re connecting whatever you’re talking about to something they already love, right?
I didn’t – I did a reference the other day in video about multitasking.
There’s really not a whole lot of, you know, actual connection between those two things,
but if you’re trying to be funny, there’s connections everywhere and these are six avenues
to make those connections.
All right.
So, final principle here, take advantage of your medium.
And this is video, this is podcast, this is me being on stage here.
I’ve called out a few people here.
This is me taking advantage of my medium here.
So, we all know the presenters and the YouTubers who have that presentation charisma, right?
Aaron Marino has amazing presentational charisma.
You do very little editing in your videos, just basic cuts.
But that works because Aaron is constantly jumping around the screen.
He has that amazing charisma, he’s high energy.
I mean we all know how it goes, right?
Gentlemen, if you want to impress that spicy senorita, then you need to get frosted tips.
That’s my number one style tip.
Right?
[Applause] That’s my number one style tip.
And I encourage you to work on this.
What I’m doing right now is difficult for me.
And, ten years ago, I would have been like up on here shaking, so work on it, right?
And you work on it by doing lots and lots of videos.
But you also have the ability to take advantage of your medium.
I do not have the presentation charisma that Aaron has.
As much as I try, I just don’t have it.
So, my secret weapon comes in my editing.
I have ways of using the post production process in my videos to make them a lot more fun to
watch.
Again, through using humor, but also through using things like title cards where I’ve
got really cool fonts and these things actually animate up with a long shadow or I’ll do
a lot of B-roll.
I did a video about talking or talking about my iPad Pro recently.
So, I set up a nice shot with a nice shallow depth of field on my lens, I had some plants
in the background because I think attention to detail and color contrast really matters
and I panned across it.
It looks really nice and it’s better than just staring at my face all day.
I built an overhead shooting rig where I’ve got four lights.
There’s wax paper over them just from Home Depot.
It cost me about a hundred bucks to build.
And I can clip my camera in pointing straight down and I can show anything I want.
So, if I want to show people I know ticking technique, I can actually show it.
If I want to have all kinds of cool like what winter core backgrounds there, I can do it.
I can do wiper animations.
If anybody has watched ASAP Science, five or six million subscribers last time I tried
or checked and all they do is these short little white board animation videos.
It takes almost no computer skills to make these things.
They just draw and they speed up the footage.
Really easy.
Or I’ll do things like quote animation.
So, anytime I want to quote a source or quote a book, I’m not just going to stand on camera
reading it off my iPad.
Every single time is an opportunity to learn something new to put a cool picture of a brain
back there or throw like a Blade Runner filter over it to make it look like a hologram.
There are a ton of opportunities that you have to spice up your presentation regardless
what your medium is.
If you’re a podcaster, you’re like,”Well, Tom, I can’t use all these after effects
things, people don’t even see my podcast.
How can I do that?”
Go listen to StartUp, go listen to 99% Invisible.
They take advantage of their medium.
If you listen to these podcasts, you’re going to hear some studio recording, you’re
going to hear some on the street recording, you’re going to hear the car sirens and
people throwing trash bags out their window and whatever it is.
You’re going to hear cool music that transitions from segment to segment.
And because they take the time and the put the effort into adding these production elements,
these podcasts are ridiculously popular.
If you’re a writer, I started out as a writer and my initial blog posts were just, you know,
the kind of things you see in tenth grade English class.
Just paragraph after paragraph.
I indent it, but, no, nice line breaks.
And I just expected people to read it.
And then, I started reading my friend Steve site Nerd Fitness and I noticed, oh, there
are sub-headings and there’s bullet points, there’s italicized texts, bolded texts,
fun pictures of Legos and all kinds of stuff.
And he had created like this multimedia experience where it’s not just the text anymore, there’s
all kinds of stuff that keeps my attention and keeps me engaged while I’m reading the
entire article and these articles are five thousand words sometimes.
And now, I write five thousand-word articles and I do the exact same thing because I know
that’s going to keep people engaged.
If you’re speaking, again, engage the audience or have really cool slides, add in jokes.
Sometimes you could even use props.
But bottom line, take advantage of the specific elements your medium offers you to become
elite.
You don’t have to do everything, just do something.
[0:15:09] Antonio: Great stuff, right?
Solid information presented very well.
Thomas did a great job.
And, guys, if you want to be there in person, I invite you to my Menfluential event.
I’m linking to it down in the description.
And by the way, we now have a virtual ticket so no matter where you’re at in the world,
you can join us live.
I want you to take action on the information we’re putting out there, so that you can
become the man you know yourself to be.
Guys, if you want more of Thomas Frank, I’m linking to him down in the description.
Also, with some of my favorite videos that he’s put out over the last few years, so
go check them out.
Such an awesome guy and a good friend.
If you want to make the trek out to Atlanta, I would love to see you this year.
I’m, again, linking the Menfluential down in the description.
But if you just want to grab a virtual ticket, you can also go to the Menfluential website
grab a virtual ticket and that’s going to actually be interactive.
It’s going to be really cool.
Al right, guys, take care.
See you in the next video.
[Music] [0:16:02] End of Audio