AI Has No Place in Your Zone of Genius, with Victoria Westcott | The AIQUALISER Podcast

In this episode of The AIQUALISER Podcast, John Bennett talks with Victoria Westcott, who juggles many roles including producing films and managing a winery, about how she uses AI across very different businesses and why the one place she keeps it out is the work she cares about most.**

Victoria and her sister Jen make independent films. To do that without a studio or investor, they need income that does not take over their lives. AI makes it possible to run a cleaning company, a landscaping business, a YouTube coaching channel and a side-line in wordsearch books, creating income without any of them becoming 'a job'.

Victoria shares where she finds AI most useful but also where it does not work. Film budgets have defeated it despite a lot of trying: union rates, location-specific tax credits, and constantly shifting figures are more than it can reliably handle. Writing convincingly in a specific author's voice is similarly out of reach. Her most unexpected use case is something different altogether: a personal GPT built around the twelve-week year methodology, which plans her daily meals based on her schedule, fridge contents, and protein targets.

The episode closes with advice for creative people uncertain about where AI belongs in their work. Victoria's answer: use it for everything outside your zone of genius and keep it away from the work only you can do.

In This Episode

- Victoria's route from inner-city teaching to independent filmmaking

- How the AI helps Victoria create businesses to fund the films

- AI and the Toronto International Film Festival: researching and personalising at scale

- Different approaches across film, cleaning, YouTube, and word search books

- Negative scaffolding: what it is, why AI does it, and how to remove it

- Where AI falls short: film budgets and voice replication

- The protein tracker GPT and why it works

- Why most people using AI are making more work for themselves, not less

- Zone of genius as a practical filter for every AI decision

- Advice for creative people who want to use AI without losing their voice

Chapters

- 00:00 Introduction to Victoria Westcott

- 07:44 AI for the mundane stuff

- 17:34 Juggling roles with AI

- 29:50 Negative scaffolding

- 31:58 What AI can and can't do

- 40:44 Protecting creative work

- 52:10 Listener question: the zone of genius

- 57:39 If AI disappeared tomorrow

Transcript

John Bennett (00:17)

Welcome to the AIQIUALISER podcast where we try and balance out the AI noise with conversations about how people are really using it. And today, I'm talking to Victoria Westcott who juggles more careers than anybody I've ever met from.

producing films to managing a winery from creating word search books to running a cleaning company and now AI consultancy as well. Hello Victoria.

Victoria Westcott (00:40)

Hey, that's a great description.

John Bennett (00:42)

So really,

there's a lot there. So hopefully, I'm sure I missed some things out probably, but I'm sure we'll get into them. So yeah, it'd be great to chat to you about AI, but before we do, maybe tell us a bit about that and how you got to wearing so many hats.

Victoria Westcott (00:58)

Oh my gosh. Yeah, so I'll try to give you the briefest version of this story because it's a long, windy, you know, road to where I am today. I started out as an inner-city school teacher in London, England. So I'm Canadian, but I went to London in my my young 20s and I taught there in Brixton and Hackney. So true, proper inner-city schools and I loved it.

But then I went into recruiting of teachers. So I discovered fairly quickly that I loved working with young adults to help them get their footing in the UK. And so I started a recruitment agency and I ran that for about 10 years. And so I would recruit Canadian teachers to work in London, specifically in inner city schools. And I learned a ton about running a business.

I didn't really know a lot before that and you know it was pretty transformative to be my own boss and to help other people you know make this transition to overseas life. And then I got really bored as one does and Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Work Week. This was I would say early 2000s and it really impacted my life in terms of thinking about work and going I don't actually need to work a normal job.

You know, and I was working a good 60 hours a week at my own company and it was mostly filled with nonsense. And so when I figured out this four hour work week thing, I got my workload down to about 10 hours. In the meantime, my sister, who's my best friend, we're born on the same day, but three years apart, so we're very tight. She was a screenwriter and screenwriting is challenging to say the least. Any good writer out there knows how hard it is to

know, produce high quality work that actually gets made into a movie and then, you know, seen around the world. And so she, you know, had been writing for a really long time and I met someone at a party. So Jen, my sister, won this big award for one of her screenplays. And we met somebody there who looked at us and said, you guys, you you own a business, Vic You're the writer, Jen. You guys should just make your movies yourselves. And we were like, we don't know anything about how to make a movie. And he's like,

Nobody else does either. And so that led us down the path of, we can make our own movies. So around 2010, we produced our very first movie. It was called Locked in a Garage Band. It premiered at Raindance in London. And it most importantly taught us how to do really hard things with a small team of people on a very limited budget. And then from there, we made our second movie.

And while all of this is happening, I'm still running my tiny little recruitment company, you know, One Woman Show. This is all pre-AI, of course. So it was a lot harder than it is now. Anyway, so we made our second movie. Our second movie was called Elliot, the Littlest Reindeer which is still streaming worldwide. It had John Cleese from the UK, had Martin Short, who's just a Canadian comedy legend for us, and then Josh Hutcherson out of the Hunger Games.

Anyway, that was an animated feature and my sister was the writer-director and I was one of the producers. And it was a crew of 300 people. So that was kind of insane. Not something that, you know, was easy. So to go from like teaching, you know, kids, which is not easy either. I would argue out of all of the careers I've had, the inner city school teaching was by far the hardest. Anyway, long story short, our parents opened a winery in Ontario. So our father decided to retire.

for about a week and then bought land, planted grapes and went on this crazy ambitious tour of life to form a winery that sells, that grows Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. And they sell their wine all over England now, which is pretty cool. And across Ontario, in Canada, there's a lot more laws and rules around where they can sell their wine. So while they were building their winery, our animation was happening.

And so I moved from British Columbia where I live on the west coast of Canada to Ontario to help my folks with their winery. And I did the winery sales for about seven years. And I knew nothing about wine. And seven years later, I now know a lot about wine. And now, of course, we've got the pandemic. So the pandemic hits 2020 and in Ontario is particularly shut down. So the Ontario response lasted a very long time.

John Bennett (05:18)

Great.

Victoria Westcott (05:34)

It was quite traumatic, obviously, for the world. And I'll say that in Ontario, we suddenly didn't have enough teachers. And I hadn't taught in over 15 years, maybe even 20. But I raised my hand to return to the classroom just because I needed to help in some way. And I landed in a grade five classroom. So, you know, it was this like weird route. And then all of a sudden it's 2021.

Movies are still not getting made, the world is still shut down, and I've realised now that I'm teaching instead of being at the winery that I want to get back into film full-time. Like, that's the passion. I've got to figure out a way that I can pay the bills without having a job. Because the problem with a job is that it eats up all of your time and energy. And then as a creative person, you can't do the creative work. You just can't. It's just too hard.

⁓ And so I, my sister and I decided we're going to start a cleaning company. And we knew nothing about it again, but we also didn't know anything about making movies. I didn't know anything about, you know, growing Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. And so I figured, all right, like, why not try it? And at that time, so 2021, this is kind of peak, you know, internet sharing and a guy named Rohan Gilkes, who's on Reddit.

John Bennett (06:36)

Okay.

Victoria Westcott (06:56)

did this post all about how to start a local service company that brings the industry online. And prior to this, and I know this is like, it's hard to believe, but if you do your own research, you'll see this, prior to this, there's no online booking for cleaning companies in our city. And so if you want to find a cleaner, you have to phone 10 companies. And out of those, 30 % will answer the phone. These are true stats. 70 % don't bother answering the phone.

And none of them have online booking. And so we were like, ⁓ okay, we can do this. And so that was it. So now we have a cleaning company. And then in all of this, we discover AI and I discover, ⁓ shoot, I can do a lot more than I've ever done before.

John Bennett (07:44)

This is really interesting because a lot of people have had a transformation with AI, but you were already doing like lots of different things and trying to balance them and also trying to streamline what you were doing. So what was that kind of first realisation that AI would be useful to you like?

Victoria Westcott (08:01)

Well, it's interesting because we are creatives, there's a lot of controversy around AI and a lot of resistance to the use of AI. And I agree with the artist's side.

so I have to be really careful here in how I talk about AI when it comes to the creative side of our lives because rightfully so, there's a lot of artists and creatives that are very angry about the use of AI and the way that I use it is to help me with the mundane stuff.

And there's a lot of mundane stuff when it comes to producing movies. And I think when I speak with other filmmakers and creatives and I say, hey, I use it a lot, because it'll come up at parties and they'll be like, I hate it. I hate it. It's destroying the planet. It's destroying the arts. It's destroying. And I'm like, I'm fully on board with that. I agree. However, have you ever written a grant application? And then they're like, ⁓ I'm like, yeah, it's really good for helping me with that. So

I think, you know, for me as a producer, the transition was fairly easy. It's like, ⁓ it can read 200 page government documents that tell me everything I need to know in order to apply for a grant. And then it can tell me exactly what the wording is that I should use to frame it in a way that the person reading it says, she's ticking all the boxes. You know, so that's how I use it for producing. For everything else, it's really my customer service

agent. And I use the word agent loosely. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what that means. So sometimes when I talk to somebody who maybe doesn't know as much about AI, they'll call it an agent. But in my head, that's like autonomous for me. Like that's replacing a human role. And so that's why I say I use the term loosely because I'm still in the loop. I'm the human in the loop.

And so I haven't set the AI free to, you know, be a human replacement answering the phones or anything like that. It helps me to make decisions without emotions. I can fire clients without being, you know, no, I can't let this client go or, you know, whatever. And so it just helps me to make executive decisions that are like, hey, Vic, you've talked about this person a lot and they're

John Bennett (10:04)

Okay.

Victoria Westcott (10:18)

clearly not following the rules of your cleaning company, so just let them go. I'm like, okay, thank you. So I need it to kind of coach me, but then also to help me to write the language to say, hey, you're fired. We can't work with you.

John Bennett (10:31)

That's interesting.

So how else do you use it to juggle like all the, because there's so many things you work on. How do you use it to try and coordinate the different things that you work on and the different times that you need to do things?

Victoria Westcott (10:44)

No. And I have tried tools that do that. There was one a couple years ago that was really popular that was all about juggling your calendar and that it would slot in things if you didn't get it done, it would know. And anyway, it was way too complicated for me. So I used it for the trial period and then accidentally got charged, of course, and then canceled it. But yeah, no, I read near Eyal's...

Unhooked and Indistractable, which are fabulous books, and he teaches you how to time block your day. So time blocking is, the concept is pretty basic, but it just means instead of writing a to-do list, which in my case is overwhelming, I have a time blocked calendar where it's this work block is for this type of work, you know, this work block is for this type of work.

And that way everything gets on my calendar and if it's not in there then I'm not going to do it. And so I really follow that fairly religiously. At the same time there are days where I don't follow my calendar at all. Like yesterday ⁓ we had a horrible school shooting here in British Columbia and where I live and it's incredibly rare to have school shootings in Canada. Incredibly rare. And so we had this horrible incident and

John Bennett (11:40)

Hmm.

Victoria Westcott (12:03)

I could have looked at my time blocked calendar. I have to work on this. And I was able to go, yeah, no, I'm going to watch the news and then I'm going to watch the Olympics and then I'm going to calm my nervous system and think about my friends and family and loved ones. And so I'm not super strict about it, but that's the benefit of having all these hats. I own my own time. I make more money than I've ever made in my life while still owning my time.

which is incredible. And I'm not saying I'm rich, I'm not, but compared to an inner-city school teacher salary, life is a lot easier now.

John Bennett (12:41)

So in a way, that kind of structure that you put in gives you flexibility to be able to go beyond the structure. that's

Victoria Westcott (12:47)

Yeah, yeah, you got it. That's exactly it. Yeah.

John Bennett (12:51)

So you don't use the AI to juggle the different projects, but you do use it on the projects, I guess.

Victoria Westcott (12:58)

Yeah, exactly.

And so I have, it's kind of hard to describe without showing, but I have different structured GPTs and I'm saying GPT because I'm currently using ChatGPT, but I'm about to change for multiple reasons. forgive me for saying GPTs. I'm just going to keep saying that even though that's probably not what they're going to be called, but that's the language we'll use for now. So I have my unique GPTs that have different roles.

And so for example, before TIFF, which is the Toronto International Film Festival that happened in September, they published this giant book of their films and who's attending and it's massive. I've never read it before. It's the kind of thing you skim read. But to prepare for going to the market, well the festival, which is becoming a market, but anyway the festival, I...

was able to feed my AI this entire book, as well as our, what's called a one sheet, which is your, basically it's like a one page, what is your movie? And so I feed it the one sheet saying, this is the movie I wanna pitch, that we wanna make, and here's some context around it. Now look at this giant book of who's attending. Find me the top 10 that I need to meet with, and why.

You know, and so we break it down and it's a lot of back and forth, but you know, okay, this is a black comedy or a dark comedy. So I don't need to meet with people that are making horrors. That's not gonna help me, right? And so I still have to guide it, but eventually we get to the point where I now have the right emails to write to each of these people to say, hey, I'd love to meet with you and here's why. You made this movie, you made this movie. I loved what you did on this. I'm making this. Let's have a meeting. What do you think?

And as a result, I get better meetings than I've ever had before. More focused meetings. I'm not meeting with people that it doesn't help me, it doesn't help them. Whereas in the past, you know, and I've been at this for 15 years, in the past, I would have just randomly met with people. It's such a giant waste of time. It's fun. Don't get me wrong, but like we're all there for the reason that we set out to go there for. And so, you know, it's a lot more fun for me as a producer. It's just...

a better use of my time. And I think that, you know, ultimately it's like how you use it, how you coach it, how you train it is the key. And if you just go in blind and you give it a generic question, you're gonna get generic slop back. And I get a lot of slop. I'm just like everyone else, I get so frustrated with it, because I'm like, no.

John Bennett (15:34)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Victoria Westcott (15:51)

And that's actually another point to talk about the creative again is that it is a terrible writer. And it will, a lot of people are scared that it will replace, you know, screenwriters, for example, the people who write our movies and TV shows. But it just produces the same crap, you know, because it's all, it's got this like mediocre baseline. So I'm not worried about that at all. I just, it just can't, I don't think it ever will be able to either.

John Bennett (16:16)

Yeah.

Well, that's probably heartening news, isn't it, if you're creative. So, in that example you just gave us there, so that's something you just couldn't have done before, where you've got this big book, and no matter how much time you spent on it, you wouldn't really have surfaced the right meetings to have. So that's a really interesting use case, isn't it? And it's again, as you say, then give you the time then to enjoy the festival and meet with the people that are

Victoria Westcott (16:24)

That was brutal.

Okay.

know what else I did? I actually got to see movies this time. And because the next layer of that is I said to it, what movies should I see and why? And, you know, I get back a list of here's your top 10 and it said, and these people might be in the room. So look for these people. And I'm like, that is so smart. Because I now can see the headshot of, you know, the producers that would have produced that film.

John Bennett (16:49)

Hahaha

Victoria Westcott (17:11)

so I know what they look like and they're probably gonna be in the audience, because it's their premiere of their film, and then I could go and meet them. I never actually went that far with it, but I would next time. No. Mm-hmm.

John Bennett (17:22)

That's really interesting. And again,

that's something that you wouldn't have necessarily, it's suggesting something there that you wouldn't necessarily have joined those dots before.

Victoria Westcott (17:31)

Exactly. Yeah.

John Bennett (17:34)

So yeah,

so that's how you use it for film producing. And one of questions I had that I was gonna ask you, and it's probably gonna come out just naturally, it, does the way that you use it differ from your different projects? Do use it in different ways?

Victoria Westcott (17:38)

Yeah.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah, because it's fulfilling different roles, right? So if it's a film project, I need it to be like my executive producing coach. Like it's helping me to level up my producing in terms of the meetings I get, in terms of how to get the financing. So this, again, it's not about making a better movie. It's about just getting the money, which is a very important part of filmmaking. So it helps me with that side.

Then I'll have our how we actually pay the bills right now, which is our cleaning company. And so our cleaning company, you know, we have, I don't even know, we have 2400 people that, you we've cleaned their homes over the last four years. In terms of business model, it's recurring revenue is, you know, the jam there. That's the what's the beauty of this kind of company is that it's a high demand, low service.

kind of company. And so for the cleaning company, I use it for two things. It's communicating with the clients, and then the second one is helping me with communication with the cleaners. And that's it. It's very simple, but I need it to, again, it's taking my emotions out of the picture and helping me to, for example, if a cleaner does something wrong, I need to be able to tell the cleaner, hey, you messed up.

but in a way that's nice and positive and to the point and not an hour long conversation. In the past, it would have been an hour long conversation. Now we can do it via text or email and soften the blow but still give the feedback. And so the next level of that, which I have my nephew now who's 20 and in university and just 20 year olds, they're so smart. They've grown up with their devices in their hands their whole lives.

John Bennett (19:31)

Okay.

Victoria Westcott (19:43)

And so he is now automating a lot of the mundane stuff for me. And so I'll be able to, I mean, I only work an hour a day on that company, but I'll be able to drop it down to maybe five or 10 minutes, which is just mind blowing to me. I know, I know, I already work so little on it. Yeah.

John Bennett (19:57)

Wow

I mean

that's a big reduction isn't it percentage wise. Wow.

Victoria Westcott (20:07)

Mm-hmm.

John Bennett (20:13)

And so we've done film producing, we've done the cleaning company. What have we got left and how do you use it there?

Victoria Westcott (20:17)

Cleaning company.

⁓ So

we have our YouTube channel called Cleaning Company Blueprint and this is where my sister and I coach people on how to launch, and scale their own cleaning companies so that they can free up their time and do other things in their lives like us. And so our YouTube channel, helps us with script writing. So right now I do a lot of live interviews like what you're doing.

And so I don't have to use AI for that at all. I just do it. It's live stream on YouTube. But when I do a video that's scripted, so that means I've decided ahead of time this is exactly what I'm going to talk about, then the AI will help me to fine tune my script. And the important thing there is we look at who is the ideal person, the ideal customer persona, your ICP as they would say, for

who's watching this and what do they need to hear? What will help them overcome their resistance of starting one of these? Anyway, so it's a little bit more in depth than just sitting down and writing a script. Each script takes me about two full days, like no joke, going back and forth with the AI, fine tuning it, making it my voice. It takes for fricking ever. The actual recording can take 20 minutes, 40 minutes, and then the edit, of course, takes forever.

So that's kind of a big piece of the pie right now. Our coaching, we make affiliate revenue from all the software programs that we recommend. And then we also have a private membership that we're launching. And so that's a kind of fairly large project, I would say. We didn't cover my Word search books. These are just silly and fun. But I'll share this one. I found a YouTuber. This was Christmas 2024, and I was bored.

John Bennett (21:58)

Mm.

Okay.

Victoria Westcott (22:12)

Because you you have so much time off at Christmas, it's the weirdest thing when you're a serial entrepreneur like I am, where you're like, what am I supposed to do? So I found this YouTuber who was teaching how to create Word Search Books using AI. And I was like, that's weird. I'm going to have to try it. And so I leapt into that and started making Word Search Books while I'm watching television at nighttime. And so we've published, I don't know, more than 70.

And you know, this is a whole like thing. People are into word search books. I know I'm not personally, but people are. And I did some deep research with AI trying to figure out like, who are these people? Why are they, why are word search books hot right now? And the answer came back and kind of hit me in the face. And it was.

John Bennett (22:44)

Mm. ⁓

Victoria Westcott (23:03)

people that are in hospitals recovering from something horrible that's happening in their lives. And so they want an analog activity that is relaxing and calming their nervous system. And so when I realised that, I was like, ⁓ now I feel like a lot more warmth towards making these word search books. But.

The cool thing with them, and I'll suggest this to anyone out there, is to find the YouTuber that's explaining how to make them. It's dead simple. And then they get sold on Amazon. You make nothing. Like, we've made $1,000 in a year after publishing, you know, more than 70 books. So that's an enormous amount of time. Like, we're making less than a penny per book, probably. Per, like, per hour, I should say, for my effort. But the opportunity there is for anyone who needs to do...

John Bennett (23:47)

you

Victoria Westcott (23:53)

you know, school fundraising or some sort of charity fundraising because they are easy to pump out and you can make them as specific as you need them to be. And then you sell them through Amazon and you make maybe five dollars a book. I shouldn't say, you know, it's not nothing. But I put no effort into the monetization of it. I just let Amazon do its thing.

John Bennett (24:10)

Hmm.

Yeah, it's a great point, it? And it's actually, it harks back to something that was in the very first episode. had a guy on called Dr. Dan, and we were talking about how with AI, now you can make a hyper-personalized, probably he was making a meal planner for his family, he's low carb, his wife's not low carb, and so on. You can make something that would never been made before because you couldn't get a developer to do it. And I love that idea of hyper-personalized.

Victoria Westcott (24:34)

Mm.

John Bennett (24:43)

word search book that could be for a school fundraiser or as you say for a charity or that sort of thing. So it's making these things sort of accessible to more people.

Victoria Westcott (24:53)

Yeah, and I'm thinking like, you know, when I was in teachers college, I worked at like a summer camp that was like an educational summer camp. And had we had this opportunity, I would have been able to, from the start of the camp, get all the kids names, you know, and find a way to have like a personal kind of word search. So like each page could be, you know, that kid's like favorite words or whatever. If it's a science word camp or science camp, then you could make word searches about the science.

curriculum but combining it with those kits and then you know create a cover personalize it to the camp and you can sell that on Amazon like other people won't buy it but certainly everybody at the camp would and all of their you know friends and family and then you donate a portion of that back to the camp you know so these kinds of things I just think are fun I just want to be clear that this is not a massive moneymaker and there's a lot of people making

John Bennett (25:39)

Yeah.

Victoria Westcott (25:48)

generic word search books right now. And so if you're trying to make it big by having the top 500 word search books of all time, you are entering a very competitive space because you're a couple years behind. And that is how fast AI has moved.

John Bennett (26:02)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And what do use it for in the word search? Is it coming up with the word list? Does it help you make the grid and all that sort of thing as well? And the filler and...

Victoria Westcott (26:15)

Literally all of it. Yeah, so

the biggest thing is the words and so you've got to you know like here's This one's been done. So I'll show you this so You know you look at the bottom and you see What the words are and all of those words have to line up within the actual book and so there's a Software that you use but the big thing is coming up with unique word searches and again human in the loop here

If you just tell ChatGPT come up with 50 word searches about cats, it's going to repeat the same words over and over and over again. But instead, if you go, hey, one word search about mountain lion cats, no repeating words. And then you have to tell it the length of the words. So between three and.

20 characters with a wide range within that. Now you can get an actual word search book that's decent of high enough quality that somebody actually wants to do it. Yeah.

John Bennett (27:25)

Okay, that's interesting. Wow.

Okay, mean, have we left anything else out? ⁓ Have we covered all the things? I mean, have we?

Victoria Westcott (27:35)

The AI consulting is

new. And this has come out of every time I talk to somebody that's not in my immediate world and AI comes up, I realize how much more I'm understanding it than other people. And I understand why so many people get confused because it's a new tool and it's, you know, like we didn't understand the internet the first day we started using it.

And so with the AI consulting, I help businesses that are between like one and $10 million in revenue, I would say. Below one million, they're just not ready to go all in on it. don't, you they're time strapped. They tend to be working within their business. But after, you know, the one million mark and up to around 10 million, that's kind of my sweet spot because I can help guide them to how to use AI better within their organization. And so...

helping the heads of department, no matter what the business is, it doesn't actually matter, but helping the heads of department implement AI so that their staff are using it in a way that actually grows the business in the same direction that everyone else is going. The challenge here is that for a lot of companies, their workers are using AI, but they don't have guardrails right now, or they don't have brand cohesion, or...

rules and guidelines over, you know, how do we communicate with our clients? How do we communicate with our customers? When are we using AI? When are we not? And so all of those things really matter. And so I've been consulting with a few businesses. It's been really fun just teaching them how to use AI better.

John Bennett (29:13)

Brilliant. That's interesting that you say that as well. So even if a business thinks that they don't use AI, they are. Their people are using it without those kind of...

Victoria Westcott (29:19)

they do.

They absolutely, I mean you see it everywhere

and now, know, especially with ChatGPT it's become particularly generic and I, you know, this is why I'm frustrated with it. I'm leaving ChatGPT it's just that even though I've coached it for two years, like I have, in a very high level, it's still starting to go a little bit generic and a tell right now that I'm seeing everywhere is negative scaffolding. So do you know what that is? Should I explain it?

John Bennett (29:48)

No,

no, maybe just explain that if you can.

Victoria Westcott (29:50)

Okay, here's

the tell. And now that I'm, when I tell you, I apologize in advance, this is going to ruin your experience online because now you're gonna see it everywhere and it's gonna drive you nuts. But here it is. The AI will say, it's not this, it's not this, it's that.

John Bennett (30:10)

Okay, that's that's called negative scaffolding you do see that everywhere don't you yeah, and that's yeah

Victoria Westcott (30:13)

And I had to,

the only reason I know it's called negative scaffolding is I had to ask the AI, why is this driving me crazy? What is this? And you know, and I literally said, it's not this, it's not this, it's that. Why do you keep doing it in every single thing that I write right now? And it said, that's called negative scaffolding and humans really like it. But maybe not as much as I'm doing it. Like, yeah, no, that's now a rule. No negative scaffolding. And it doesn't matter if I put that in the personal instructions, if I put that in the personal.

⁓ You know, this very specific GPT, if I put it in the project, it does not matter. It always does it. And so then I have to do what I call the no negative scaffolding pass. So it will do the first run, the second run, the third run, and then finally I go, okay, now go back, you know, and find it. And it's to the point now where, you know, almost every YouTuber I'm watching, because they're all using the scripting with AI, they're all doing it too. And that's why I say, like, I've now ruined your experience. You're gonna see it everywhere.

John Bennett (30:48)

Soon as it.

Yeah.

Victoria Westcott (31:13)

And

it's incredibly irritating. So.

John Bennett (31:17)

interesting.

Yeah, I mean, definitely. It's something I was aware of. And it's something that it does to me as well. I just wasn't aware of that term. But really interesting. I asked a different question just today. I found recently the AI keeps on saying to me stuff like, here's a clean list of whatever you're saying. And I just said to it today, why do you keep on saying clean?

Victoria Westcott (31:37)

Mmm.

John Bennett (31:37)

and

it's called conversational scaffolding. It's just interesting that it's another scaffolding thing. It clearly has this thing about scaffolding. So I've done the same thing today. I've said that in my personalization, please stop using conversational scaffolding, but I know it's going to keep on doing it. it,

We talked about how you use it differently for different projects. I guess what we haven't really covered is do you find that AI is more suited to some of your projects than others? Does it work better with one thing that you do rather than a different thing?

Victoria Westcott (32:14)

You know what I wish it could do? And I haven't cracked it yet, and maybe somebody watching this can tell me. What I wish it could do is film producing budgets. So, and I've tried this a hundred different ways. Film budgets are complicated and it's a skill that, you know, I barely have. I've done them over the last 15 years, but I hate it. It's not...

You know, my zone of genius is not in working with Excel spreadsheets. And so, like many others, I've tried to go, here's my movie. Can you whip up a budget for me? And it just cannot do that. And then I've gone, okay, well, here's a sample budget for my previous film. You know, can you do the, it's called a breakdown. Can you break down the script and then, you know, come up with this budget for this film? And no, it cannot do that.

There are of course much smarter people than I am coming up with AI solutions where they want us to pay a subscription fee or something and they claim that their AI will be able to whip up film budgets. ⁓ It just can't do it and I wish it could. In the same way that...

I wish it could write in the voice of an author better. I wish that I was able to just feed it five screenplays and go, here's the voice of this particular person. Now can you edit this particular script in their voice? And it is impossible. And I think every good writer out there would love a personal assistant in an AI, even if they hate AI. Because wouldn't that be handy to have an AI that can

know, read and write in your voice. And I know other people have done it, maybe with a lot more money or a lot more patience or a lot more practice, but certainly in our world, that's just not a thing. ⁓ So yeah, so I wish it was better at that.

John Bennett (34:09)

Yeah. At those things. So those are things

it's not so good at. What's the most unusual thing that it's actually helped you with that you maybe wouldn't have expected it could do?

Victoria Westcott (34:23)

things and this is probably a bit more personal but one of the things that I'm using it for right now is so I read the 12-week year which is a fabulous book for setting goals and intentions and following through on them and the concept is if you set a New Year's resolution the chances are very high that you will never do that thing because in January you're motivated in February you start to lose momentum and then you think well I've got a whole year so

you never end up doing it. So the 12-week year says, you know, but if you do that in just 12 weeks, you don't lose that momentum as much. And so I started a project to eat more protein. And this just has to do with my age, being a woman, and I weight train. And so I, you know, read a bunch of studies and I'm like, okay, I have to get between 120 and 150 grams of protein a day. And that's a lot.

Like that's a lot. I'm actually supposed to get more than that, like 180, but I can't do it. Like that's insane. That's meat all the time. And so I was like, okay, I need to get 120 to 150 grams a day. Here's what I like eating. Here's what I don't like eating. And can you come up with a realistic, you know, day-to-day meal plan for me? And so I have a, you know, a personal GPT just for this one project.

And at the end of every week, and this is part of the 12 week year, you have to give yourself a score. So between zero and 100, what is your score? And your goal is to reach at least 85 % every week. Because if you could do that, you're going to achieve your ultimate goal, which in my case was to lose 10 % body fat. But in a way that is increasing protein, doing strength training, and not dieting. And so...

My GPT, it's actually been really fun. Like, I'm like, every day I log in, I'm like, hey, okay, here's what I have today. I have three Zoom meetings, I have, you know, strength training at this time, I'm doing this kind of workout, here's what's in my fridge, what am I eating? And so it just, you know, and it's like, at eight o'clock you're having this, at 11 o'clock you're having this. So it takes decision fatigue out of my life, which is the most important thing when you are like me and you're doing a million things, right? Because there's a million decisions being made every day.

And so I need that decision of fatigue to go away and for the chat GPT to tell me what's eat. So it's been, I don't know, five weeks and I have consistently scoring over 85%. So I'm like, all right, know, let's see what happens at the end of week 12. That's the most consistent food wise I've probably ever been in my life. Yeah.

John Bennett (36:52)

Britain.

Hmm, OK.

Hmm.

And it's by it's by it taking that kind of as you say, the decision fatigue away you've you've you've taught it the rules you've taught it the requirements you give it the information daily about your day and what you have available. Interesting.

Victoria Westcott (37:15)

And it's just stupidly nice to me.

And sometimes I'm like, okay,

I had a bucket of ice cream. I know this is gonna lose me some points, but I need you to help coach me with kindness. And sometimes I'll say, I need some tough love here. And it's like, okay. Don't go off the rails. And I'll say, I grew up with diet culture. need you to be my health therapist right now. Don't immediately go into diet, blah, blah.

Anyway, it's been fun. Like, surprisingly fun. And I, you know, I wouldn't have thought that I would say that.

John Bennett (37:53)

That's interesting. You've kind of touched on this already, but one of the things I wanted to ask you, I find sometimes I can waste a whole morning doing something with AI that I think it's going to be able to do and it should be able to do and it tells me it will be able to do it. And before you know it, you've lost three or four hours and it's just gone. Do you have any of those and what are they?

Victoria Westcott (38:01)

Mm.

Right? Yep.

So many, so many. The biggest one is probably the example I gave before about doing the film budgets, you know, and like losing a week of my life and then going, I need to go old school, pull up the spreadsheet and then figure it out. One thing, although my tweak, which is interesting. we have, film budgets are complicated because we have unions and we have day rates and we have locations and we have different rates for different locations and we have tax credits.

And so it's quite complicated to do a film budget that, you know, and they're a work in progress. They're constantly changing. And so one thing that I was able to get my AI to do was to read all of the union paperwork and figure out the day rates for each type of role. And then what the union fees are and then what the tax credits are. And so all of those things and then go.

how much is it for my sound person who lives in British Columbia? We're shooting in British Columbia, so therefore the tax credit applies to them because they're a BC resident. And we're shooting north, which means we get an extra tax credit for it being north. And so that's very complicated. And so I am able to say to it, which of these things apply? And so again, it's that decision fatigue, but I can't rely on it 100%.

you know, because it still makes mistakes, particularly with numbers. And that's where I have to go through with my, you know, microscope kind of vision and go, okay, nope, this is wrong. It forgot about this tax credit or this incentive or whatever. But yeah, that can be whole weeks where I'm like, why can't it do it? Why is it so bad at numbers? You know?

John Bennett (39:51)

and a gut feel I could be... yeah, what can I do? And I guess

the numbers are much, much harder to, if it's made a mistake with numbers, it's much harder to spot than if it's made a mistake with words.

Victoria Westcott (40:06)

That's the thing. And then it's like, I should just use my human brain and just do this myself. That would be faster and easier. So that's where I usually end up with. But one day, maybe.

John Bennett (40:13)

Yeah. But you found

a way, you, to get it to do the things that it can do for you in that, at least, which is good.

Victoria Westcott (40:21)

Exactly. Yeah. And I think,

you know, the key there, John, is in understanding the words LLM. It's a large language model. It's not a large numbers model. You know, and everything is just zeros and ones anyway, but doing math, it's not great at. Yeah.

John Bennett (40:36)

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

So, and I think you've kind of touched on this as well already, but what are the things that you've you've you'd never ask you to do?

Victoria Westcott (40:54)

Direct a movie, art for movies, anything that's artistic. No, it's just rubbish and you spot it and it looks terrible and you're actively taking jobs away from artists, which is just morally and ethically not cool. And I will say actually, the more AI is taking over our world, the more art we need.

the more human connection we need. So, for example, going to see a play, a theatrical play, a performance in person is just such an amazing experience. And so I think the more human experiences within the art space is just so important for us to cherish and hold onto and support.

One of the things that I've started doing, even just on our YouTube channel, which is our cleaning company Blueprint, where we're coaching people how to start these cleaning companies, I do live streams now. So I do all of my interviews are now live. And the intention behind that is going, hey, we all know everything, you know, we can, somebody can create an AI version of this using my voice and, and, you know, whatever. but doing it live, we can't replicate that.

And so I just think the live human connection, the in-person connection is so important. And I don't think that's going away. I think it's only going to become more important.

John Bennett (42:22)

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's come up in a couple of conversations recently where, you know, if AI saves us time, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could spend some of that time on more human to human interaction, face to face interaction rather than Zoom or, you know, those sort of things.

Victoria Westcott (42:37)

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think, you know, the saving us time thing has actually been shown to be untrue. Especially for companies that haven't trained their staff on how to use AI properly. All of the data suggests that for people that are using AI, they're spending more time, not less time fixing their work. We are the exception to that rule.

John Bennett (42:46)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Westcott (43:05)

in that we've been trained and we know and we understand it, so we're able to use it at this very high level, but the vast majority of people that are using AI at work are not saving time at all. Because of corrections.

John Bennett (43:16)

Yeah,

yeah, but not not not putting the intent right at the outset. It's far more work in in correction. Absolutely, absolutely. So and that's quite a nice segue really into something. So obviously you've you're now doing AI consultancy. So from all the stuff that you do yourself, I guess that's really helped you kind of.

Victoria Westcott (43:24)

You got it. Yeah.

John Bennett (43:39)

develop an understanding of what works for you, what needs to be done that helps you kind of apply that for your clients.

Victoria Westcott (43:43)

Yeah.

Yeah, and ultimately it's about making more money. You know, I'll be honest there, like how we use it, it's all about being smarter, not...

not working harder, but working smarter and ultimately making more money so that we can do the other things.

and

I'm able to look at how to use it in a way that benefits the individual but also the organization. And that's really the key, I think. And I think it's just because I'm a former school teacher in a way, like I can't help but try to help other people. That's like ingrained in me. And so I love coaching and I love being able to share, oh hey, have you tried this or have you tried that?

My biggest challenge is, as you have said, wearing so many hats and fine-tuning where I spend my time and not just wasting my time. Because it's so easy to do that in the use of AI. Like you said before, you can waste whole days ⁓ tinkering. And I need it for high-level thinking. ⁓ And then for mundane tasks like customer service.

And it's not so related to AI, but it is related to how we run all of our companies. My sister is able to write full time without worrying about where her next paycheck is coming from. And when you're a creative, you are always worried about where your next paycheck is coming from. And that never stops. And I know Hollywood actors, you know, where it's like, okay, what's my next gig? That is the role assigned to you as a creative person forever. And it's very, very hard, but...

because we have our cleaning business and we have the $1,000 from our word search books, we have the AI consulting now, we also own a landscaping business, I forgot about that. We own a landscaping business which is also about online booking. And then we have our YouTube channel which is our coaching and all of these things make it so that we can focus full time without knowing where our paycheck is coming from on the art side of our lives.

which is by far the most important side of our lives. So when I say like, is about making more money, what I mean is, it is about making more money so that we can produce the art that we produce, which is film.

John Bennett (45:56)

interesting. ⁓

⁓ So it's like enabling you to spend the time on the art.

Victoria Westcott (46:14)

100%. We would have quit. A million times over we would have quit. It is so hard to pay your bills when you're filmmaker, an independent filmmaker. Especially when we're not working for studios. We're not for hire. Disney's not knocking on our door saying, hey, will you work with us? And we want to make our own work. We're making independent film. And it's insanely hard. And we've made two.

And we meet people at parties. This is the funniest thing. People are like, wow, but you've like really made it. We're like, what are you talking about? Like not at all. You know, and so it's just this illusion, you know, from one filmmaker to another filmmaker of thinking, you know, somebody else has like made it. There is no such thing. ⁓ You've just made one thing and then you're waiting to make the next thing. And you know, so we're really, really lucky that we found this Reddit thread that we

John Bennett (46:58)

Hmm.

Victoria Westcott (47:05)

had somebody say, start this cleaning business. You know, this is how you do it.

John Bennett (47:12)

it's really interesting though, because you're talking about sort of that perception where we all think that somebody else has got this other idea that we don't have, or they've got this, you know, they're more successful. And it kind of leads me on to the whole thing of hype, because there's sort of two conversations that I keep on having on at the moment. One is about hype.

Victoria Westcott (47:31)

Hmm.

John Bennett (47:32)

and how there's so much hype in AI. But the other is about how curiosity is important. And we need to be kind of open-eyed and trying to see if new things are happening and how it's changing. how do you kind of balance it? How do you kind of see through the hype and look at what actually is genuinely new and what's worthwhile?

Victoria Westcott (47:53)

⁓ god, I wish I knew the answer to that.

Well, we can talk about imposter syndrome. That's probably the best segue I can make there is, you know, what I've learned in my 49 years on this earth is that everybody feels imposter syndrome and everybody thinks somebody else has had more success than they have. And, you know, it's all just kind of like high school.

You know, where you're like, but they're the prom king or they're the, you whatever. And secretly that person is inside, you know, having an emotional mental struggle about who they are. And I just don't think any of that ends. I think that's life. I think that's who we are on this planet. The difference is now I know everybody feels that way. And so I'm able to go, you're feeling some imposter syndrome, you know,

And so now it's like, I'm not gonna have imposter syndrome anymore. I've made a decision, that's it, I'm done with it. When I feel it, I'm gonna say, nope, somebody else who has less skills than you, has less talent than you, has less ability than you, is out there saying that they can do it so you can too. That's it, like full stop. And now we have the tools of AI to help us to take the emotions out.

John Bennett (49:01)

So that's...

I think that's a great approach to life. I'm trying to think how, so let's just have a try between us. Let's try and apply that to hype if we can. I'm just trying to think, yeah. So I think there's a nugget there that we could probably apply. we're saying, well, you know, because we all do don't we? We all think that, you know, that we're, that everybody else is more successful than we are. That everybody else is better at things than we are.

Victoria Westcott (49:11)

Yeah.

Yeah. to the AI hype.

Mm-hmm.

John Bennett (49:37)

So what does this mean for hype? think it might be that when we hear the hype, go, ⁓ hold on, that's something I don't know. Because I don't know if you find this, but quite often somebody will put something on LinkedIn, they go, this is my framework for doing this, and it's amazing. And you get the framework, and you go, yeah, well, that's something I already knew. Or that's five steps that are pretty obvious. And I wonder if that's the same thing with hype. We're thinking that there's an answer there that we don't have.

And yet actually...

Victoria Westcott (50:06)

Like yeah, everybody's excited about AI or in my world, pissed off at AI, right? So keep in mind, my feed is filled with filmmakers. And so again, I have to be careful because there's a lot of people who have very strong emotions and it's real. They are losing their jobs. The film industry is in a very challenging.

time in our lives, particularly in the United States. Canada, we're not feeling it as badly as I think the American filmmakers are, but certainly AI is having this massive impact. And everybody I know that worked in animation, which is, know, animated movies, TV shows, they've all moved into gaming because there's jobs in games, in video games. But the ones that didn't pivot out of filmmaking are struggling.

And you know, they're saying I will never use AI. And I totally understand why. Totally understand it. Because they're losing their jobs. Like that's real. You know, and that impacts us all because when you turn on Netflix and you try to find something to watch, like I don't know about you, but like I'm having a hard time finding anything good.

John Bennett (51:04)

Mmm. Yeah.

you

Victoria Westcott (51:18)

because we're not supporting the artists to make original creative stuff. everything is about algorithms, everywhere. And so we're turning over this massive decision, which I'm saying on the one hand, my god, I love it. It takes away the decision making for me. On the other hand, I'm like, my god, this is the worst thing ever for our planet and for the arts because a computer shouldn't decide what we watch.

John Bennett (51:45)

Hmm

Victoria Westcott (51:47)

you know, we're gonna end up with all this generic crap if we allow that to happen. So we have to unplug our TVs and go to the movies and go to the theater and see live shows and read actual books written by humans, not written by AI.

John Bennett (51:47)

Yeah.

so one of the things we like to do at Victoria is we like to get a question in from a listener and this one's from Beth and it says how can creative people make the most of AI without losing their originality and creativity? I mean you've covered a lot of that already but it'd be interesting to get your take on that.

Victoria Westcott (52:24)

Cool.

Bath.

⁓ I would love to know how, like, specifically how she wants to use it.

Yeah, we've definitely covered it. But I'll just say, Use it for for the stuff that isn't in your zone of genius. So if your zone of genius is, know, you're an illustrator, you're a visual artist, use it for getting your work seen by others. So writing the emails to say, hey, you know, I'm an artist, here's my work.

you know, can I get shown in your space? And the way I would use it is I would do research on, so let's say I'm a visual artist and I want to get my work shown in a gallery. And it's a famous gallery and I feel imposter syndrome and I'm thinking, I'll never get shown in this gallery. So what I would do is I would do the deep research or any research really on who have they shown before. Then,

I would look at who is the programmer. So, and all of this is available because of the internet. who is the programmer, who are the artists that they have loved in the past, and I would get the AI to read every single interview that has ever been done by that person online. So that when I reach out to them saying, I'm an artist and I want my work to be shown in your gallery and here's why, I'm able to answer that genuinely, which is that you've worked with this artist and you said in this interview,

and then use a direct quote from them. And there's no human on earth that doesn't love being quoted. So you'll actually get a reply from that person who's a decision maker that otherwise would probably ignore you. So the short answer there is personalize it by doing research on that person and then use AI to help you do the writing. However, one caveat, don't just write a generic email.

use exactly that structure I set. So you've programmed this, here's a direct quote from you that I absolutely loved and here's why, you know, would you consider looking at my work? And then I would get over the imposter syndrome because as creatives we feel it all the time and realize that it's a numbers game and everything's a numbers game. know, you, the Wayne Gretzky quote of you missed 100 % of the shots you don't take.

John Bennett (54:45)

Mm.

Victoria Westcott (55:00)

And as creatives, you we have to take a hundred shots to maybe get one reply. But the way you use AI today, if you use it in that way that I just described, you will get much more replies. And every reply will help feed your soul in terms of going, okay, I'm doing it. I'm getting replies. What a lot of artists do is they, you you have to become, you have to have such a thick skin in handling rejection. It's a constant part.

of our lives and it's awful, it's horrible. It doesn't get any easier. But what does get easier is knowing the numbers part of it and going, okay, I've got to reach out to 100 to get one or two replies. And then I've got to reach out to 1000 to get, you know, 10 or 20. And so you just have to keep doing it that way. That's how I would use it if I was in an artist's shoes. I wouldn't use it for the art. It's not going to help you. It's terrible at that. But I would use it for the stuff that you're probably not that great at. It's not your fault. It's just...

John Bennett (55:59)

That's, yeah.

That is really good advice. There's so many things you said there that I like, but the zone of genius is a ⁓ really good one, it? Define that zone of genius and use the AI to do the things outside of that to free up time to do the things yourself that are in the zone of genius. And then this idea of research and personalization and...

Victoria Westcott (56:00)

not your zone of genius.

John Bennett (56:27)

accepting, I it's always been a numbers game I'm guessing, but accepting it's a numbers game and then using it to actually expand your reach and kind of increase your numbers to get there. I think that's brilliant advice. Thank you for that one.

Victoria Westcott (56:30)

always.

I get ⁓

cold emails almost every day from people that want us to make their movies. We've never made anyone else's movie. it's just somebody hears, ⁓ they made this movie, so I'm going to reach out to them. And so I get these cold emails, and they don't do this. And the internet, it tells you everything you need to know. But your human brain doesn't have time and thinks, I'll just reach out to 20 people, and I'll send the exact same email to 20 people.

Well, you're better off doing that extra little step because I can tell you every single time somebody has personalized an email to me and talked about my specific movie or my specific quote, I've written back every single time because I'm like, ⁓ I want to have a conversation with you. Who are you? Plus, you've just flattered me in the most nice way possible, talking about my work, what I'm passionate about. So it works. I can say from personal experience, it works really well.

John Bennett (57:35)

Brilliant.

Super,

that's great advice. So I'd like to have one question to finish with and this is it, I think today. So if you lost access to AI tomorrow, what would you miss the most?

Victoria Westcott (57:48)

God, it's happened actually a few times this week where my chat GPT has gone down and I'm like, ugh, I have to do this myself. Writing emails to clients. So I coach people on the cleaning company side of my life and I coach other people on running their companies. And one of the things I coach pretty hard on is how to use AI to craft emails that are personalized, but.

still saying the same thing every single time. And when I have to sit there and actually write it myself, I'm like, ugh. And it has happened this week. Mine was down for good three hours. I just, because of my time blocking, I was like, have to get this email out. And so I had to craft it myself, and it was painful. And then I realised, my god, how much time people spend on email. Because before this, I could spend a whole seven, eight hours a day.

responding to queries and dealing with scheduling changes, whatever, questions, just all the nonsense. And being able to answer things quickly with a high level of customer service where the person thinks that I've just written this amazing email just for them. That's how we run our whole business. And so it sucks. When it goes down, it does. And yeah.

John Bennett (59:06)

So emails.

Victoria Westcott (59:08)

But you know, and it's funny, like I had to do this like risk analysis of our business for this grant that I was applying for. And my biggest risk was if the internet goes down. It wasn't if AI goes down, it was the internet. Like, because we do everything on it. Like I wouldn't be able to send a cleaner from somebody's house to another person's house without having the internet.

So it's not so much AI, but just how we exist in this world. And sometimes, John, I don't know about you, but I want to unplug the damn thing and go and live in the woods. What was it like to read physical books and not be online 24-7? So it's a blessing and a curse.

John Bennett (59:42)

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe

we'll find out depending on what happens in the future.

Victoria Westcott (59:56)

I know.

John Bennett (59:58)

Ha ha ha.

Victoria Westcott (1:00:00)

Yeah.

John Bennett (1:00:04)

Well,

I think that's probably a great place for us to end so thank you so much for your time really enjoyed that chat and Hope to speak to you again soon

Victoria Westcott (1:00:12)

Awesome, thanks for having me on, John. I really appreciate it.

John Bennett (1:00:14)

You're welcome.