Dear Reader,

You can’t force a message to go viral.

But you can craft something remarkable enough for people to see themselves in it.

That’s the heartbeat of this episode.

Brian Brushwood and Roy H. Williams pull back the curtain on why some ideas spread like wildfire while others die on the launchpad.

And the answer isn’t algorithms, hooks, or clever editing.

It’s identity.

It’s curiosity.

It’s transformation.

And more than anything, it’s the human ability to sense meaning before we can logically explain it.

In this conversation, you’ll discover why:

  • The viewer must be the hero or the clip doesn’t stand a chance
  • Titles aren’t labels — they’re invitations into a role
  • Curiosity is neurological, not optional
  • Authenticity beats strategy in the era of cheap polish
  • Viral moments are harvested, not manufactured
  • Human pattern recognition still outpaces machines in detecting what’s real and what resonates

The world wants to believe AI can replicate creativity.

But AI can’t feel tension.

It can’t sense emotional symbolism.

It can’t predict the moment the meaning of a line changes the second time you hear it.

People can.

And that’s why the future of storytelling still belongs to humans — those who dare to speak with honesty, cut with clarity, and trust the instinct that whispers, “There’s something here.”

If you’ve ever wanted to understand the natural laws behind virality — not the gimmicks, but the truth — this episode will sharpen your instincts and elevate your craft.

Lean in.

Remarkable is rarely accidental.

But it is always human.

Watch / listen above or read below.

Todd Liles: The thing about doing a show like this with two very creative minds is that I’ll put together a plan and go, this is where it’s going. And then it sometimes goes there, and sometimes it goes where it needs to go, and it’s always good. And the conversation is richer when it just happens. But the question is, can it be on content? Can it be on topic? But one of the things that I have found with our desires to go viral is that oftentimes it’s the things we never planned that hit the hardest, which leads us to today’s topic.

Brian, can we actually write content on purpose that goes viral? And you have a channel with over two million subscribers, and I know that you’ve had videos that have hit that virality and have just taken off. Could you tell us about a video or two that has really stood out amongst the others, and do you know why it stood out?

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, first of all, writing for virality usually results in a bunch of me-too content where they’re just late to a party. They’re chasing a trend. They’re chasing the trappings of viral content, not creating anything new. Here’s the key ingredient of every bit of anything I’ve ever made that’s ever gone viral: there’s one main character, and it’s not anyone on screen. If the person watching it cannot easily know their role and inject themselves into the narrative, it will not go viral. Let me say that twice. If the main character, the viewer, the reader, the listener, the consumer cannot easily insert themselves into the story, knowing exactly what their role is and what they themselves are getting out of it, then it will not go viral. All the way down to the title and thumbnail.

We did a video must have been an hour and a half of learning how hats were made. And at some point he explained that this is a hat block. You use it to shape the hat on. And he mentioned offhandedly that you could tell this one was made before 1910 because it’s a solid block of wood, as opposed to this one, which was made after 1910. That’s when they started gluing them because the right adhesives were around. And so that’s how you could tell the difference. That got made into a one-minute short. And when I launched it, it was dead on arrival. Who cares about hats? Who cares about hat blocks? Who cares about these guys talking about hats? Or this magician who’s in a hat shop for some reason? Then I changed the title to “How You Can Always Know Whether a Hat Block Was Made Before 1910.”

Nothing got more interesting, except the main character was instantly given their role. Now, to pass by it, they needed to identify themselves as somebody who was comfortable not knowing the difference between these two things. And that is more uncomfortable than to go ahead and click on it and stick around just to find out what the difference is.

Todd Liles: Roy, is that a hovering question mark?

Roy Williams: Absolutely. Yeah. The point is, I’m looking at it a little bit more selfishly. I’m saying, okay, I would see that. I would like to know. So the year is 1910, and tell me how to spot the difference. And you know why I’m gonna go ahead and watch it? It’s only a minute long.

Brian Brushwood: That’s right.

Roy Williams: Now, if it’s 15 minutes, screw it. I don’t need to know 15 minutes’ worth. I need to know one minute’s worth. And so I wanna be the guy that sees a hat block and goes, oh, this was made after 1910. Well, how do you know that? It’s glued together. 1910 and before is all solid wood. That just makes me look smart. I like looking smart. And so you’re gonna give me an opportunity to look smart at some point in the future. Someday I’ll see a hat block. I’ll be the smart guy in the room. That’s worth a minute. I’m in. So I’m the star of the show.

Brian Brushwood: So another thing to remember is the moment anybody’s given a data point, they can’t… In fact, just now, when anybody heard me say that sentence, they tried to guess where the rest of the sentence was going to go. Humans are predictive little machines, and we love finding out if we’re right. We don’t want to be right, because if we’re right, that means that whatever we’re seeing is predictable. We don’t want it to be wildly wrong, because that means it’s nonsense.

Roy Williams: So you change the title, same content, you change the title, and by what percentage did the views increase?

Brian Brushwood: Tenfold. It suddenly 10x’d, just by changing that title. Adding the word “you” into the title.

Roy Williams: “How you can know the age of a hat block.”

Brian Brushwood: “Why you need,” “what,” “which is more important between blank and blank.” Give them a role, give them a job. And keep in mind, everything is an echo of the performance. There is no one-minute short. There’s only a one-minute version of the show. If you write a short correctly, it’ll begin with 20 seconds that will mean one thing the first time you see it, and then by the end of the short, it will loop again, and that same 20 seconds will now be radically different and more important the second time around, because you, the protagonist, the viewer, are now changed.

Roy Williams: Okay. Perfect example. Perfect example. It takes a human being to understand that when you see this the first time, it’s going to mean something totally different than when you see it the second time, right? Now, a human can know when you’re creating, yeah, they’re gonna take it to mean this the first time, but there’s gonna be a transformation that’s gonna have a whole different meaning the second time. That’s what I was thinking in our other episode that AI cannot yet do, is that human perception thing. So that talent to know, what can I put here that’s gonna have a totally different meaning than here, and what will those two meanings be, and what caused the meaning to change? Humans are super good at knowing that, and AI doesn’t.

And so that was my whole argument about symbolic thought and that skill that you figured out. You can’t program an AI to know what would cause the transformation for this statement to mean something 60 seconds later, different than what it meant the first time. The song that we were going to play last episode, it’s what it does. Several times, the definition of what it means “we don’t stop at red lights anymore” changes as the song goes on. And so a human detects, oh, the evolution of the change, the different meaning it has. More times you repeat it, it gets a whole different meaning. Computers don’t know that, and they can’t do that.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah. I can’t speak to creating that kind of alchemy on purpose. Most of the viral hits are things that I discovered. You start with kind of the raw beer. You turn on the camera.

Todd Liles: You discovered after the fact why it worked?

Brian Brushwood: Correct. Correct. Yeah, we begin an episode with the title and thumbnail in mind, and then we shoot whatever the test is. We’re gonna learn a thing, we’re gonna try a thing, and then we’re gonna find out what happens. And then that gets condensed down into a fine, maybe three-act structure. We’ll see what happens. And then you slice it into one-minute chunks. Those one-minute chunks oftentimes reveal themselves into a fine three-act structure.

At that point, I go wherever the bottom, the lowest point, the all-is-lost moment at the end of the second act. That gets cut out and put right at the beginning. I want to if there is if all communication boils down to three acts, and, but, therefore, begin with “but.” Don’t waste any time explaining, throat clearing, setting up, introducing. I ain’t got time for none of that. Show me that moment of pain. Begin with a door getting kicked open, and then, like, I don’t know why that is, and then have it end with somebody about to kick that door. ‘Cause what are you gonna do, leave? No.

Todd Liles: So get to action immediately.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, or but again, notice I didn’t say get to action.

Todd Liles: You said start at action.

Brian Brushwood: Because the action there was a bunch of things that led up to that. Take away all those. Give me the credit to assume that I can figure it out.

Todd Liles: So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in the mind of the shorts watcher, ’cause one of the things that’s constantly being said to us from our marketing side of the team is, hey, it needs to be shareable. Content’s gotta be shareable. And I’m like, what’s shareable? So that’s the question is what makes it…

Brian Brushwood: Well, think about it. When do we share things? We share things when they’re things that we want to say without saying them. If we have somebody who we love very much in our lives who’s doing something dangerous, we share with them a PSA about that thing. We share with them a heartwarming story about an unrelated person. This isn’t me talking to you. This is something I saw and made me think of you. That’s when you think about the various layers of all that, when you realize that the thing you’re claiming that something is about is not actually what it’s about, oftentimes, in somebody else’s life. Then it becomes very easy to figure out. In general, what does well, yeah. I don’t know.

Todd Liles: That’s really good. So things that we want to say to other people without us actually saying them that’s a very shareable thing. What other things do you find to be shareable? ‘Cause I’ll tell you one of the things that I find that is interesting about our content that gets shared, not near as much as yours, is that you’re right about that. Number two, they see themselves in it. You’re right about that. Number three, it’s polarizing. We got a lot of love and a lot of hate. People love to love it, and they love to hate it. So it seems to be like and we don’t know why, by the way. We’re trying to get to the place of being intentional about it, which is one of the reasons I was so excited about having you here.

Brian Brushwood: I would recommend against that.

Todd Liles: Really? Tell me why.

Brian Brushwood: You’re trying to get to a place where you could be intentional about inspiring love and hate.

Todd Liles: Not love and hate, but virality, shareable content.

Brian Brushwood: Yes. These are a lot of words to say: we’re trying to be inauthentic.

Todd Liles: Okay.

Brian Brushwood: I would caution you: in this age where polish is cheap, authenticity is about to reign supreme.

Todd Liles: So should we not even try to make viral content?

Roy Williams: All right. What I hear is Brian is actually extracting viral content.

Brian Brushwood: That’s correct.

Roy Williams: He’s not creating it.

Brian Brushwood: That’s correct.

Roy Williams: He’s recognizing the moment when it happens. He just clips that moment out. The moment happened by accident. He said, “Wait a minute. If we take this moment and rearrange it thusly, you take this that should have been the ending and you put it at the beginning, right? So that you watch it like six times, you get six views for one viewer because he sees it six times in a row because it gets cool. He watches it because it’s cool. It’s kind of built to do that.

So you extract the content. But for the if you’re gonna say, number one, going back to what Todd said, staying on topic. Okay. So the most authentic, long-format, rambling conversations that always stay on topic would be Joe Rogan. And I’m saying, so Joe Rogan has more viewers than networks have. I mean, it’s like he’s got more viewers than Fox. And it’s like you’re going, wow. So how does he do that? He sits and rambles for like an hour and a half with some buddies, and he’ll have a guest there, and he asks really, really, really, really, really good questions. And everybody has authentic opinions, and there is no polish. Nobody’s gonna say Joe Rogan has a polished show.”

Brian Brushwood: Although I will say… I think of think about whiskey distillation, right? Joe Rogan, hours and hours and hours of the beer. It’s a very consistent beer with a very consistent flavor profile all the way across. And as a result, somebody can take segments of that and distill it down into a tight five minutes on this subject, a tight five minutes on this subject. And those can be distilled down even farther to shorts.

Roy Williams: Exactly. You’re talking about viral. I’m talking about he’s extracting the magic from what was originally 90 minutes. And so what I’m saying is you’re never gonna sit down and say, I’m gonna create something viral. Viral things happen, and it’s only when Alex looks at the 90 minutes that he goes, oh, this is kind of a magic moment. How long did that take? And I’ve got stuff from whenever we had people lecturing at Wizard Academy. And we’d always record everything, and I would make a note to extract that little thing out of there as a little standalone clip that just is this really tight, little, wonderful, self-contained story. I’m going, yeah, I’m gonna keep that.

Brian Brushwood: And the expectations are just getting higher and higher in terms of “do not waste my time.” We’re now at the place where even breaths need to be snipped out if you’re just talking. Repeated words, filler words all need to be eliminated. Threads that don’t go anywhere. All of this judicious editing gets noticed because now we’re in an efficient market, a tournament of attention, because we’re back to the channel-flipping days.

And it’s objectively an awesome experience to feel like a king on a throne just saying, next, bored now, get out of here. And when you’re in that place, if you waste I heard it once said, think about a video that gets a million views and think about one wasted second in there. That’s a million seconds of wasted time out in the world. Every single second needs to be accounted for. Does this serve the story?

And also, there’s not just one story. Does this serve the story as it will be seen by a beleaguered housewife? Does this also serve the story as will be seen by a 14-year-old teenage boy? If you do it right, you hear Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU, was renowned for its four-quadrant storytelling: young, old, male, female, right? Add another axis for attention. Does it play at a casual glance out of the corner of your eye? Does it also play on repeat seven times in a row? Is there new insights that you’re gonna learn every single lap that you go forward on it?

And it’s simply, it’s mathematical. If the answer is, well, no, this doesn’t, then no, it won’t go viral. Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have published on it. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have purpose.

Todd Liles: Because there’s still value to something that’s not viral.

Brian Brushwood: Of course, of course, because just as there’s value to every human when they’re not in the middle of doing something for everyone else.

Todd Liles: But I think that’s an important distinction, right? Because the topic is how do you write something to go viral? And you’re saying that there’s things that you can do to help it go viral, but you should still write content that is good to be written for a purpose.

Brian Brushwood: Virality is a signature marker of one thing: whether or not there’s an unmet need in the universe. When Scam School came out, you could go to YouTube and type in “magic trick” and you would get tens of thousands of tutorials, and they were all abject garbage. They were all shot on a webcam by people who didn’t even have volunteers. Oftentimes, they weren’t comfortable showing their face on camera. But that was a marker of an unmet need in the universe.

Scam School showed up, three-camera shoot in the bar, high-definition, with television-level practices, and it over-delivered on polish in a soft, unmet space. So, figure out in our content right here that we’re talking about right now. We already have one strike against us: three middle-aged white dudes, right? Okay, what are they doing? Are they punching things? Nope, they’re talking. Oof, competitive, competitive. All of this means that we have lots to break through. Transgressive, are they at least gonna curse? Nope. Blasphemy? Nope. I feel like, what are they talking about, business? God, more competition.

This is a heavily saturated space. We got a lot going against us. At least now one of the three is yelling. At this point, something interesting is happening. These are all the vectors that you have to think as you refine. Rick Rubin, the producer, co-creator of Def Jam Records, made the Beastie Boys famous. He says, “I am not a producer. I am a reducer.” Virality is what happens when a sharp hand axe becomes a razor’s edge, a diamond-like razor’s edge, and it pierces that barrier between you and the audience.

Todd Liles: Talk about your process of getting there.

Brian Brushwood: Right now…

Todd Liles: Let me give you a practical standpoint. I’m gonna set the stage because I know that there are people that own plumbing companies, air conditioning companies, etc., and you see it. They’re trying to go viral. What most of these people are doing is being very unoriginal. There’s one guy who’s actually a hell of a nice guy, but his content is just him essentially cloning the most popular viral content. His guys are doing it. It’s just an air conditioning company doing it. It’s kind of funny. It’s all right. It’s just gonna be short-lived.

But if I’m an air conditioning company, I’m going, “I’m this gun show guy.” Listen to previous episodes. I’m gonna put actual energy and effort into it. I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna put some energy and effort into it. And now I’m just thinking about us. We’re putting energy and effort into the podcast. And the first video that we had that did over a million views, and for us that was viral in our space, it’s like, “Whoa, that’s cool.” It was Elmer Zubiate. And literally, my editor, not Alex, but Joshua, who selects the social shorts, said that it was a clip that he pulled and he was about to throw it into the trash can. And he goes, “Nah, I’m gonna keep it.” It was literally trash. In his brain, it was trash. And I’m like, “Well, why’d you keep it?” He goes, “I kept it because I didn’t know what he was saying the first three times I watched it, and then I thought I might as well put it out there, see what happens.” The second clip that we had kind of go viral…

Roy Williams: Is that the Elmer clip?

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: It is his origin story. So Elmer is a legend. And he took air conditioning repair in high school, in a public high school. And he said, “Bill Whitlock, my instructor, sat me down and said, ‘Elmer, there’s only two things that can be wrong with an air conditioner. Either it’s doing something it’s not supposed to do, or it’s not doing something it’s supposed to do.'” And so that is remarkable wisdom and hysterically funny, right? And so when Elmer delivers it, he delivers it in the perfect possible way because it sounds like sage advice. It’s like this is Confucius talking.

Brian Brushwood: It actually is extremely profound because all I do with my viral content is add more steps. So those are two vectors. Look at a system. Is it doing something it shouldn’t? Check yes, no. Is it not doing something it should? Check yes, no. Those are two ways to look at it. With virality, just add more dimensions. I think of performative art as sort of an 11-dimensional, extra-dimensional being that we can only see slices of it at any one time. I could go through this one-minute slice thinking, all right, I am a South Korean girl, and I’m seeing this. What could I possibly be getting out of this? And then maybe the answer is nothing. That will inform me. It’s like, okay, I am somebody who is the biggest cheerleader of this company of all time. What’s there for me? Again, that clarity of identity. If you adopt all the identities of everybody you can imagine watching it and see it from their eyes, if you’re missing something, is there something the video’s not doing that it’s supposed to?

Roy Williams: All right, so here’s the deal. What I’m hearing about is it’s not exactly binary, but there’s a third thing that enters into it, which is what I’m gonna call transformation. I’m making the same point that I’ve made throughout the day. Something the human mind does really well and the connections and perceptions it makes.

All right, in 15 seconds, this is one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems because it does what you just said, okay? It seems simple, but then you realize, oh, he’s saying two different things, and he’s talking about two wildly different things. “Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to know that for destruction, ice is also great, and would suffice.”

Brian Brushwood: So here’s if that were a YouTube short, my impulse right now is I can’t wait to read it again to see if I understand it this time. And that’s why that one went viral: it sounded like gobbledygook and every lap it made more and more sense. And now because I have at least an idea of the framework…

Roy Williams: Well, what happens is a person hears it and they go, “Well, wait, some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” So, okay, either we plunge into the sun or the sun dies out and the earth freezes over and we end in an ice age and everybody dies. Some say the world will end either by burning up or we’ll all freeze to death and it’ll just be a cold rock in space, right? Then he starts talking about, “I’ve tasted enough of desire.”

Brian Brushwood: What does that have to do with it?

Roy Williams: “To hold with those that favor fire.” We’re talking about passion.

Brian Brushwood: Oh, yeah, of course, of course…

Roy Williams: The passions will destroy us. But I know enough of desire… “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those that favor fire.” I think our passions, our lusts will destroy the world. “But if it had to perish twice, I also know enough of hate,” coldness. “I also know enough of hate to know that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.”

So he says either hatred will destroy us or our lusts and passions and desires and greed will destroy us. But wait a minute. The first time he said fire and ice, he was talking about literally the earth burning up or literally the earth freezing. And five seconds later, he’s inserted two words: Desire and hate. He’s relating desire to fire. He’s relating hate to ice, coldness. And he says, yes, our desires and hatreds can also destroy the world.

The whole thing’s less than 15 seconds. It’s like 10 seconds. And you’re going, “Wait a minute. He did a transformation of the meaning of fire and ice.” Huge transfer of the meaning. So it’s like, wait a minute, I just see two things it means. But then the transformation of fire and ice meaning something totally different the second time it’s only 10 seconds later. That’s that… So now we had fire, ice, and then we had world ending. Okay. But then we had love and hate as a different type of fire and ice. So now we have a freaking Rubik’s Cube. But the whole thing comes together and the Rubik’s Cube is solved. It’s introduced and solved in 10 seconds.

Brian Brushwood: So if that were a YouTube short, the very first line instantly hands the job, hands a role to the consumer. The job is to be the judge because it says, “Some say blank, others say blank.” I know exactly what my job is. My job is to decide who’s right and I’m listening to oral arguments. Then you listen to this and that. And then on the second lap, very close but adjacent, you move to the role of decoder, of archaeologist, of what does this mean? And it rewards laps on laps on laps. Now, having said that, if you want, we can… If you want to do an experiment with something, we can.

Roy Williams: The question is, what would we title it?

Brian Brushwood: Okay, that’s great.

Roy Williams: What would we title it?

Brian Brushwood: For this one, because the content itself is a question, I don’t see any problem with just asking the question in a tiny form. I love self-similar patterns. I love fractals, right? So if the question is… It would be a less poetic version of what he just said. “Do we die in fire or in ice?” Question mark. Like “we,” so I have a role.

Roy Williams: So you’re involved.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, exactly.

Roy Williams: “Do we die in fire or ice?”

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, or…

Roy Williams: No, that would work. I think it’s good.

Brian Brushwood: Or “Which is worse: dying in fire or ice?” Again, still makes the viewer in the lead.

Roy Williams: Right. “Which is worse: dying in fire or ice?”

Brian Brushwood: Right.

Roy Williams: And then they go, “Wait a minute. That’s not what I was expecting, but it is a little bit profound.”

Brian Brushwood: But it also is congruent with their role. They clicked on it assuming they get to be the decider, and it does fulfill on that promise.

Roy Williams: Exactly. Now, my point is, I was saying that type of double entendre is far beyond AI right now. It’s the one thing that AI is utterly blind. It cannot perceive those far-ranging double entendres that are not trite or contrived or predictable, and they don’t work on any kind of a matrix. It’s kind of like love and hate compared to fire and ice. That connection AI cannot make and use. So even if you taught it hate is equal to fire and love is equal to fire and hate is equal to ice, well, it would get confused because sometimes hate is hot and rage is hot. And you’re going, okay, okay, okay, so it’s the context that makes it whether it’s cold or hot. And then how do you trigger it so that the customer realizes it?

In the context, instead of having to have it explained to them. And what I’m saying is all good advertising scripts, all good scripts 100% of them are saying far, far, far, far more than is being said in the script. Far more. Had a whole meeting this morning when I was talking with Brian Scudamore. And what we’re doing right now is we said for 12 years, “We make junk disappear, all you have to do is point.” That’s called full-service junk removal, right? It’s magic. We make junk disappear. All you have to do is point.

Well, now we’re talking about transformation. And transformation is whenever you show a room that’s cluttered and it’s not being used for any good purpose, it’s full of stacked boxes and furniture they’re not using right now and luggage that you’re not using right now. Okay? A lot of people have a space like that. And when you say… Gee, my mind just went blank. I’ve talked about it so much today, I lost it. “Imagine the possibilities.” And so, “Imagine the possibilities.” Did you know that?

Brian Brushwood: He predicted it.

Roy Williams: Yep.

Brian Brushwood: Put it in a sealed envelope.

Roy Williams: Yeah. And so, “Imagine the possibilities.” And so what happens is when we start talking about we’re 1-800-GOT-JUNK? , we talk about hope. We talk about dream. We talk about transformation. We talk about people. And whenever you show this cluttered room and he’s talking to you and you see this cluttered room and then he says… And then all of a sudden, boom, the room is empty. And then one second later, boom, the room is completely refurnished for a whole new purpose. And then the next second, it’s full of people in there living life, having a wonderful time. And it’s like, wait a minute. Three seconds ago, that was just a nasty room stacked full of crap. And stuff’s gone, it’s redecorated, and now people are in there doing…

And you end with “transformation.” Oh, God. The ending scene was so much better than the junk-filled scene. And it happened literally in like three half-second images. Bam, bam, bam. And so all we have to do is shoot that transformation and it ends with happy people doing happy things and enjoying this space together and using it for its new purpose. And you’re going, “Wow, they took a thing that was horribly underused and redeemed it and made it a happy place.”

And so when we show that and we talk about that, “Imagine the possibilities.” Whenever you say “Imagine the possibilities,” who are you talking to and who’s gonna be imagining possibilities? You’re imagining the possibilities of reclaiming space at your house. It’s not about removing the junk. It’s about what you’re gonna do after the junk is removed.

Todd Liles: So I wanna float a question out to the table. And what’s going through my mind here is I’m listening to everything you’re saying, and I’m also thinking about this bridge of marketing and advertisement. So here’s the question. Is there such a thing as having an ad that can go viral on its own?

Brian Brushwood: Of course.

Todd Liles: Okay. Talk to me about that.

Brian Brushwood: Well, it’s a matter of… We talked about virality and shareability or whatever. Think about… I bet there’s somebody out there today. As a matter of fact, I’ll show you the best ad I’ve ever seen. It makes its point so eloquently. Hold on. I’m literally gonna… This is how you know the party’s over is when somebody starts playing the viral videos.

This is a Vodafone ad. So here’s an ad, the purpose of which is to show that minutes can be expensive and that it affects your relationships with other people. Main characters are a father and a son. The message, the takeaway they want is don’t worry about your minutes and don’t let that damage your relationships. So it does it with this five-second ad.

Son: Dad? I’m gay.

Dad: Excellent.

Announcer: Sometimes life’s more…

Brian Brushwood: That’s it!

Todd Liles: Text that to me.

Brian Brushwood: Okay. That was a lot of fun. It was five whole seconds, and that was an ad. So yes, you absolutely can make it a viral hit.

Todd Liles: That’s hilarious. Very fine. Thank you for sharing that. And I floated it out there. I know that ads can be viral. I just think it’s a little bit more challenging sometimes.

Roy Williams: Well, I will say we’ve done a lot of local ads that did go viral on YouTube.

Todd Liles: Yeah, Brad, for sure.

Roy Williams: But, but, but, but, but you don’t know they’re gonna go viral. You weren’t planning for it to go viral. You just knew that it was something really remarkable, and you just felt like you had to do it. And a lot of times, it’s hard to explain to people why you know it will work. But if they just have the confidence just to go, “What the hell? How bad can this turn out?” And they go ahead and do it. Those are the ones. The ones that people didn’t understand when you explained it to them. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” And whenever they just say, “Well, okay, you know, if you really think it’s something we should do,” and because I knew it was so unexpected that people were gonna be delighted. It was not a derivative of anything they’d ever seen before. It was totally violating every possible expectation and giving them something that they go, “That is just weird and inexplicable, but it’s fun.”

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Brian Brushwood: So there’s some people… I used to be the kind of person that would bristle at kind of hippie stuff where it’s just vibes and feeling and stuff. And now I feel a little bit better with this explanation.

Roy Williams: What do you mean by hippie stuff?

Brian Brushwood: I’d use a different S-word instead of stuff, right? Whenever we talk about the supernatural or whatever, I’d get annoyed. But now what I understand is that at a core level, the reason that humans are the most successful species on the planet is not because of our very intelligent system two logic brain.

That’s nice that we have it, but as we all know, people make their marketing decisions, their purchases, with the heart, and then they justify. The job of the Vulcan upstairs is just to check the boxes and make sure that, “Yep, I approve of this thing that I’ve already decided to do.” Jonathan Haidt calls it the rider and the elephant problem. The rider likes to say he’s telling the elephant what to do, but he’s just rationalizing after the fact. But at a core level, our system one knowledge, our gut intuition that this is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is the most important thing that has kept humans alive.

We have the world’s most finely honed sense for when something isn’t right. As a matter of fact, if we did an experiment where you had, let’s say there was a cash payout for if you turn over certain cards from a shuffled deck of cards, and you were to play and go through three different decks, you would, way before your logic brain was able to figure out which one had more winners in it, you would have a gut intuition that one of these decks was luckier. Now, of course, lucky is a bunch of hippie stuff. And your logic… But your system one is so excellent at parallel processing, it just knows that one of those decks feels better than the others. Likewise, there are those flashes of inspiration. What’s happening is at a core level, you can feel that this is going to hit.

Roy Williams: Except, let’s make that… Because what you’re talking about now is hippie shit. And what I’m saying is let’s get scientific about that because what I was talking about with the right hemisphere being pattern recognition, okay, whenever you say we’re successful because we recognize when something isn’t right, okay, correct. Now how we recognize something isn’t right it isn’t our logical, rational, sequential, deductive reasoning brain. It’s not the left half. It’s the right.

Half of your brain does not understand words, and it doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, true or false, and it has no morals. No morals, doesn’t understand true and false, doesn’t understand right and wrong, doesn’t understand correct and incorrect. “Once upon a time” is the same as “thus saith the Lord.” It’s like, I’m sorry, it’s just I don’t understand that things can be wrong. I’m open for anything. But it recognizes patterns. So when they teach Secret Service agents, Treasury Department, to recognize counterfeit bills, do you know how they do it?

Brian Brushwood: Mm-mm.

Roy Williams: By never showing them counterfeit bills.

Brian Brushwood: Really?

Roy Williams: They spend one week studying in intense detail real money. They are unbelievable experts on real money, and they can glance at a piece and instantly recognize something incorrect. Why? Because they know what correct is. They have only been trained on what correct is. There’s too many different mistakes you can make. Don’t teach them the mistakes. Only teach them correctness, correctness, correctness. And so pattern recognition the youngest what you’d call a genius, a man named Brian Kryia he teaches, he’s a professor in West Virginia right now in college. But we grew up together in radio. We’re like 20 years old, 19 years old. And he was a program director. And he was a legend because he could get an album and find the song on like cut three, side B. Now the title cut of the album, he goes, “Yeah, it’s good, but this is the winner here.” And it would be some obscure track, and he would start playing it.

And it wasn’t the cut the record companies were pushing, but he was prophetic. Every time he would turn in what he was playing, the record companies started realizing, “That bastard will never play what we want him to play. We’re making a big push for this song.” But he was always the first guy to start playing this other thing. The day he got the record, he started playing cut three, side B.

And they finally asked Brian record company calls up one day and says, “We’ve noticed you always play the hit before anybody else knew it was gonna be a hit. How are you doing that?” And he says, “When I was growing up, my only joy all the kids would be playing in my backyard, and I had a little record player. And it had the little built-in speaker, looked like a little piece of luggage, and it would only play a 45 RPM single.” Now, he’s my age. And he says every week he would get his allowance and go down to the record store and buy whatever’s the number one record.

Top ten, number one record that week. And he did it month after month, year after year, listening only to hit songs. Only to hit songs. Never listened to anything if it wasn’t a number one hit. He can’t tell you, he cannot tell you what makes a song a number one hit. There’s an infinite number of ways to make a song a number one hit. Infinite. He just knows one when he hears it. And so when you orient yourself and you train your brain, I can’t explain what hits are. That would take my left brain. But my right brain goes, “That’s one right there.” Makes sense?

Brian Brushwood: Yep.

Roy Williams: And so what you’re talking about gut feelings, hunches, instincts, whatever that’s hippie-shit talk. You’re talking about the pattern recognition, pattern recognition, right hemisphere of your brain that understands patterns of events, patterns in language, patterns when a person is lying or whenever a person is telling the truth. They just recognize that person’s telling the truth. How do I know? I’m not sure.

But I know they’re telling the truth. It’s actually an entire half of your brain that is its only job is to spot the pattern, and it knows what that pattern indicates from observation 24/7/365.

Todd Liles: Yeah. So that kind of ties back in a little bit to that authenticity thing that you were talking about.

Brian Brushwood: Which, again, I’m trying to not be in the business of saying AIs will never be able to do blank, because that usually blows up in people’s faces. But I will say that calorie for calorie, our brains appear to be the most efficient authenticity detectors on the planet. And I think that it’ll eventually even if robots can do the job, I think it’ll be cheaper to just hire a human than to pay for the kilojoules of energy that it takes to get the same results. So in that regard, I am bullish on humans having a job for a while.

Todd Liles: As long as we don’t degrade our intelligence by using too much AI, right?

Brian Brushwood: Yeah.

Todd Liles: So you’ve made it very loud and clear. You’re not intentionally trying to write viral content. You are harvesting the viral content that is there naturally.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah, and this is fairly common. Stephen King says a version of it. Steven Pressfield mentions it in The War of Art. A good artist, and I’m not calling myself a good artist, but I know that good artists, they refer to the figure of Mercury was always in the block of marble. They just revealed it. They just took out everything that wasn’t the figure of Mercury. Likewise, for anything that has ended up being a hit, it’s been something that was always there that just got reduced and concentrated.

Todd Liles: King is famous for saying that he never writes to a plot, he only writes to a situation.

Brian Brushwood: That’s right.

Todd Liles: Which I think is really an interesting way of looking at things. All right. So I’m gonna do a few fun questions and then we’re gonna wrap it up. Who do you think is the world’s greatest viral video maker?

Brian Brushwood: I wouldn’t know. I’m, strangely, I only make dog food. I’m sorry.

Todd Liles: What does that mean, you only make dog food?

Brian Brushwood: I don’t eat the stuff. You think I’m sitting around scrolling, watching TikTok? No.

Todd Liles: All right. Roy, I’m gonna ask…

Brian Brushwood: To be honest, I can’t speak to who the greatest is, but I bet there’s one thing: they are authentic. I believe that they are going out, figuring out what is a thing to be, a way of being, a type of person to be, a situation to have that is, number one, an unmet need in the universe that is congruent with and is sufficiently polished and timed right.

Todd Liles: Roy, I’m gonna ask you the same question, but I’m gonna put it more into something that you love, which is music. Who do you think is the greatest viral musician?

Roy Williams: Viral musician?

Todd Liles: Someone who writes something and it just takes off, it goes like crazy. Number one hit writers.

Roy Williams: Oh, okay. Now, see, that’s a weird question because the people that crank out the most hits are people you’ve never heard of.

Todd Liles: ‘Cause they’re songwriters.

Roy Williams: They’re songwriters. What happens is they’ve never sung, they never show up in public. They write these songs, which is my goal. I don’t wanna sing. I don’t wanna perform in public. I’m saying, but I want people to know what this song can sound like. I can write hit songs. I promise you. I promise it. I can write them. But now I need the artists and the record companies to know what this song can sound like, ’cause once they hear it, they go, “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna rearrange that, use different instrumentation, we’re gonna slow it down, we’re gonna add,” whatever. Great. I’m just saying I needed to put some voices behind it so that you could experience the song the way that people experience songs, which is through their ears.

So writing it, okay, that’s how come this book I’m writing I’m using the AI to perform the book with kind of a haunting, rhythmic… Think of it as New Orleans voodoo trance music kind of underneath it, you know? And then the performers are up on top of the music, and they’re talking kind of a little bit in rhythm with the music, and it’s very hypnotic. And so you have a really powerful story using a lot of symbolic language, and you go into this kind of it’s not exactly a trance, but it feels like it. You just keep listening because this is really interesting. It’s going places and things are happening. I’m not sure I understand all of it exactly, but it’s really weird and interesting. And you can get lost in that state. I’m sure it has a name. So my point is writing it is easy. Demonstrating it requires a performer.

And I’m going, oh, if I can get performers for free and they’re convincing, and all I’m trying to do is show off the damn writing. I’m not trying to sell the performance. I’m trying to use it to demonstrate what this would sound like if I had the talent to perform it the way that real actors do and the way that real voices do that can sing and crap. And so the greatest songwriters there’s a bunch of them I wouldn’t recognize them if they walked up and kicked me in the nuts. It’s like I just don’t know what they look like, but I just know that there are people that have made vast amounts of money by writing songs.

And then all of the stars here’s the deal. All these people that bring out all these deep emotions, and there’s all these kids, they love them, “that person’s so sincere, that’s a real human being.” Nope. None of those are their words. They didn’t write shit. They’ve never written a song in their life, but they have a great voice and they look good in tight jeans.

Todd Liles: You know who I thought you were gonna say?

Roy Williams: Who?

Todd Liles: I thought you were gonna say Paul Simon.

Roy Williams: No.

Todd Liles: No?

Roy Williams: No, no, no.

Todd Liles: You just have a personal…

Roy Williams: No, no, no, no. What I’m saying is that’s not viral.

Todd Liles: No, maybe well, some of his older stuff was.

Roy Williams: No, no, no, no. You said viral. Viral is different than a hit song.

Todd Liles: Sure, sure.

Roy Williams: And I’m saying viral is whenever a person can just crank out songs. Now, Paul Simon, he wrote such a vast library of content. And I mean, when you write as many songs as he did, I mean, he writes like I do. He just writes nonstop. He just has oceans and mountains of content. And the odds are some of those are gonna be big. Okay. But he wrote for himself. And I’m talking about the people that really are the hits, the hit writers. You’ve never heard their names because they write songs, and then the record companies and the artists go, “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna sing this.” And so they will pick this guy’s song, this person’s song, this person’s song, this person’s song, this person’s song, and this one’s been done a bunch of times, but we’re gonna sing it. I can’t remember what song it was, but more than 100 different performers have performed it on more than 100 different albums. And it’s kind of like everybody thinks they can do that song better than it’s ever been done before. The only person really making money is the guy that wrote it. Does that make sense?

Todd Liles: Yeah.

Roy Williams: Because nobody knows the name of the guy that wrote it. They just know the artist who they think sings it better than anybody else. So I’m going, hang on a second. Let’s make this clear. None of those artists came up with that story. They are just, in my opinion as a writer this is they’re frickin’ ventriloquist dummies. It’s the ventriloquist who wrote this thing that’s moving you. It’s rocking your world. And you just get this good-looking person with white teeth and tight jeans, and they sit there and they do this, and they have a good voice and they know how to wiggle, and everybody goes, “Oh, I love you so much.” And I’m going, if the song’s rocking your world, it was a writer that did it, asshole. You know, so that’s me being vain. And arrogant?

Brian Brushwood: No.

Roy Williams: Thank you very much.

Brian Brushwood: Nailed it.

Roy Williams: I’ll be here all week.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah. That’s authenticity.

Todd Liles: That’s authenticity. Here’s the very last question I have for you. What’s one video, viral or not, but maybe it’s on the short side of things, that no matter how many times you’ve seen it, when it pops up again, you stop and watch it?

Brian Brushwood: Oh, man. I don’t know that I have just one. I… To… I don’t think I have a good answer for you on that one. I don’t…

Roy Williams: What’s yours?

Todd Liles: My viral video that I’ll watch anytime over is anything with birds that are talking and playing with their owners, because I’m a bird owner. So if it’s got birds and the birds are talking, especially if it’s a starling and it’s mimicking R2-D2, I’m in. I’ve watched that one video of the starling…

Brian Brushwood: So let’s unpack that, because I would do the same thing for anything with a Weimaraner in it, because I have a Weimaraner, right? But so in that case, you know your role. The moment that comes up, you’re like, “Oh, birds, I am a bird owner.”

Todd Liles: Yeah, a bird daddy.

Brian Brushwood: Exactly, yeah.

Todd Liles: Yeah, so there’s a video of this starling that… I didn’t know that starlings could mimic or speak, first of all. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. And they don’t look like a typical bird that would do that. And they can speak with such clarity and they can mimic music and sounds. I’ll find it and I’ll send it to you.

Roy Williams: Okay. I didn’t know what kind of bird it was. I always thought it must be a mockingbird because mockingbirds mock things? I don’t know. But maybe it was a starling. For several weeks, every morning, Pennie and I would be walking around the house looking for the telephone that was ringing, because there was a bird in our backyard that could literally sound exactly like a ringing cell phone. Exactly. I mean, the length of it, the tone of it, the exact sound, and the time distance between rings.

Brian Brushwood: That’s so funny.

Roy Williams: And so I’m saying, it was so… And it’s every day, it’s like, is it the bird again? Because it fooled us 100% of the time because it sounded just distant enough, it’s like a phone in the next room. You know what I mean? Because the back wall is all glass and sound passes through glass pretty easy.

Brian Brushwood: Yeah.

Roy Williams: And I’m going, so it sounded like it’s in the next room. And I’m going, it has to be a bird. I never saw the bird. But thank you.

Todd Liles: I’ll send you the video.

Roy Williams: It’s a starling.

Todd Liles: I’ll send you the video too.

Brian Brushwood: Sure.

Todd Liles: Well, thank you for being here, Brian. Thank you for being here, Roy. What a great…

Roy Williams: I want the video of the bird.

Todd Liles: Thanks for being part of this four-part journey with Brian Brushwood and Roy H. Williams. Over this four-part conversation, we’ve talked about illusion and honesty, attention, empathy, creativity and technology, and now legacy. If you have enjoyed this series, then share it with a friend or teammate who loves great stories and great ideas. And make sure that you’re subscribed because you’ve got more conversations of advertising and branding wisdom coming your way very soon. I’m Todd Liles and I look forward to talking with you and seeing you in the next episode.

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