Best of Storytelling: Matthew Dicks

(upbeat music) On Ted Sides, and this is Capital Allicators. For the second year, our summer series will share some of the best episodes of the past, curated from our favorites and yours. You can pull down many of the great ones on our Spotify playlists. This series pushes them to your regular listening feed. Our 2026 summer series focuses on improving the investment process. Over the next six weeks, we'll share 10 gems from interdisciplinary skill sets that will help you level up your investing across decision making, interviewing, storytelling, negotiations, and habit formation. This week's summer series is a tofer on the essential skill of storytelling. Whether pitching an investment fund to a prospect, an idea to a portfolio manager or CIO or a request of a family member, storytelling helps you get what you want. To help understand the art and science of storytelling, Matt Dix, a retired middle school teacher and author of the best seller, Story Worthy, and Don Miller, creator of Story Brand, business started with his book of the same name, describe how to improve your storytelling ability. Before we get to the interview, we're excited to introduce the next chapter of Capital Allicators University, an online on-demand curriculum with an annual in-person gathering for investment professionals committed to continuous learning. One of the great ironies of investing is that the skills that matter most over a long career are often the ones least formally taught. Things like decision making, communication, leadership, time management, interviewing, and building relationships. That's why we've evolved Capital Allicators University into an online on-demand experience, making those lessons accessible to investment professionals everywhere. The best careers don't compound through knowledge alone. They compound through knowledge and relationships. If you'd like to explore the curriculum or someone on your team comes to mind, visit the link in our show notes or the university page on our website. Thanks so much for spreading the word about the next chapter of Capital Allicators University. Capital Allicators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing transcript or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For Allicators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing incorrect source or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. 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Back in April on episode 497, I sat down with Randall Stuttman, the executive coach behind admired leadership. There's advised more than 500 CEOs, including some of the most respected names in asset management. Randall introduced me to Alex, an AI leadership coach's team built on 40 years of proprietary research into what the best leaders actually do. For investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching, grounded in the behaviors that drive results, and build the kind of fower ship that retains your top talent. We use Alex and our team at Capital Allicators' Squarespace. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes, tryAlex.admiredleadership.com. Please enjoy my conversations with Matt Dix and Don Miller from the end and beginning of 2025. Matt, thanks so much for doing this. I am thrilled to be doing it. I think the best place to start is for you to just tell a story. Yes, so I told a brand new story two nights ago at the moth, so I figured it's not anywhere else in the world. It hasn't been released, so you'll get the first recorded version of it. I have to think about where it starts. That's always the question. It's so funny. The opening of every story is the key to unlocking the story, so I'm always like, what's the first sentence? All right, so here's the new story. I'm standing in the front of my fifth grade classroom. Recess is ended and John Paul runs up to me and says, Mr. Dix, Mr. Dix, you're not going to believe what happened at recess today. And in my mind, I think I will believe at John Paul. I have been here 27 years. It is so unlikely that you are about to say something that I have not seen before. I have a student in my classroom this year whose mother I taught 19 years ago. I have been here a long time. I once stepped out of the door of my classroom, turned left, and saw a skunk staring at me in the hallway. I once saw a mouse fall off a pipe onto the shoulder of a teacher, and it sat there for 30 solid seconds before she even noticed that it was there. My principal once walked into my classroom and found one of my students in a trash can. So tall, she couldn't get out of the trash can. And that student was also my principal's daughter, and I was the one who put that child in the trash can. Last year, my student who happens to be a Syrian refugee witnessed a shooting in our neighborhood, and the shooter was my former student. And the next day when that Syrian refugee came to school, and I said, "Are you okay?" He said to me, "Oh, I was in the war. I saw a lot of people get shot. That person only got shot in the foot, so it's fine." So I have seen a lot. The fact that John Paul thinks he's about to present something to me that I've never seen before is kind of ridiculous. Except every time I hear moments like this, there's this glimmer of hope in my heart, this grain of sand of brightness that makes me think, maybe this is one of those times when something's going to happen that I truly have never seen before. Because once, once in my life, something happened that felt so unique that I felt like the universe for a moment was winking at me. It's the summer of 2007. I'm in Vermont, I'm at a lake house with some friends. I'm sitting in an Adirondack chair next to a guy named Phil. He's actually the parent of students in our school, and he's become our friend. This is his lake house, and we've come up my wife and I to spend some time with him and his family. I love hanging around with Phil. I have a reputation of being a person who says whatever is on his mind at the worst possible moment and causing lots of problems for myself and the people around me. But Phil is like Mount Everest to my mole hill of inappropriateness, meaning every time I'm around Phil, I actually seem sophisticated. Phil only says offensive things at all times to every person. So whenever I'm in his presence, I actually strike people as polite and appropriate, which is really what I'm looking to be. So we're chatting in these chairs when I hear a scream, my wife. She's screaming from somewhere inside the house. And anytime you hear your wife scream, it's a serious piece of business, but my wife is seven months pregnant. She is super pregnant. She is unquestionably, I have a giant belly pregnant. And so when I hear her scream, I panic. I leap out of the chair. Actually, I don't leap out of the chair 'cause we're an Adirondack chair, so you can't really get out of them easily. So I pry myself out of the chair, and I turn and face into the house when I see Eric, Phil's son, my wife's former third-grade student. He's running through the kitchen, and then across the living room, he's running faster than any little boy I've ever seen run in my life. And he's screaming as he runs. He hits the stairs and heads up to the second floor. And then a second later, I see my wife. She's chasing him. She's wearing a Terry cloth robe, and she's sprinting across the kitchen, which is crazy. My wife is as a. uncoordinated as any human being I've ever met in my life. And yet she's somehow at this moment like a pregnant gazelle. She's moving through the kitchen with greater speed than any seven month pregnant woman should. And so I get into the house and I sort of intercept her in the living room. And I grab hold of her and I say, what are you doing? What's wrong? The moment I grab her, I realize this is not a pregnant gazelle. This is a wild dog. I've never seen her so enraged before. I almost let her go because I'm afraid she's going to bite me. And I say, what is going on? Tell me so she takes a breath. She finally collects herself and she explains she had been in our bedroom, which is a separate room off the kitchen. And she had been in the shower. She took a shower after going swimming and she had toweled off. And then she had gone out into the bedroom to gather her clothes that were on the bed. She was completely 100% naked standing in the center of the bedroom when the bedroom door flew open and Eric, her former third grade student, a 10 year old boy now walked in and saw his former third grade teacher completely naked and seven months pregnant. She said there was a moment where they stared at each other that felt like it's still going on to this day. It was this pregnant pause where she was torn between two different sides. One was, I'm his third grade teacher. This is a terrible thing for him. Oh my gosh, what's going to happen? And the other side of her thinking, I'm going to tear this boy limb from limb. What the hell was he thinking not knocking? Now that second version of her took over and she screamed. And Eric, I don't know what he thought. What do you think is a 10 year old boy when you see your third grade teacher completely naked and pregnant? Probably the first naked woman he's ever seen in his life. We'll never know how that broke that boy, but it broke him. He started running and my wife chased after him. And I have now intercepted her in the living room and said, you can't kill him. He's 10 a month later, I'm standing in the front of my classroom. And in my fifth grade class is that boy, Eric, I am now teaching the boy who saw my wife completely naked and pregnant. There's only two people in the world who have ever seen my wife completely naked and pregnant. And it is me, the teacher in the front of the classroom and the 10 year old boy sitting in front of me. As I take this in on this first day of school, it occurs to me that in this universe and in all universes that will ever happen or have happened, never, ever again, will there be a situation where there's a boy in the classroom who saw a naked woman who was once his third grade teacher and also happens to be the wife of his current fifth grade teacher. I think about that moment all the time. I think about how ordinary and common and expected our lives can sometimes feel. How the life we're living is essentially the life that other people are living in some variation. I think about that moment. And I think there are moments if we pay enough attention. Moments where something truly unique, one of a kind will never, ever happen again, ever, those moments sometimes happen. And when we recognize them and hold onto them, they can actually feel precious. So when John Paul comes in from recess and he looks at me and says, you're not going to believe what happened at recess today. I am 99.99% sure that whatever this boy is about to say to me, will be some variation of something I've seen before. But there is that tiny glimmer of hope that maybe what this boy is about to say will be something so unique, so singular, so impossibly rare that I may have another one of those moments where I feel special in this universe in a way I have never felt before. Thank you. Wow. That's amazing. That was a moment. That is a moment. I'm dying to ask what he said, but we can come back to that later. Well, it's intentionally left out. So I'd love to take a step back before we dive through the art of storytelling and get a little bit of your story. How did you find yourself after all these years in the situation where you're creating such incredible stories in July of 2011? On the whim and encouragement from my friends, I went to the moth, this nonprofit in New York City, two stories told live on Stage Without Notes. I went there because my friend said, you'll be great at this. You've had the worst life you anyone we've ever known. So go and tell stories at the moth. I went there with the intention of telling one story and never again, but bucket list item that I would check off and be done. I dropped my name in the hat. As soon as I dropped my name in, I prayed that my name would not be chosen. I was in a room full of hipsters with side eye and man buns. And I thought, why am I here? This is not what I do. I'm a novelist and a writer. I don't want to be on that stage. We got through nine names that night without my name being called. And they only call 10. My mind was on I 95. I was already driving home when the 10th name came out and it was mine. And I sat still for a minute because it occurred to me. No one in this room knows who I am. There's 500 people here, but nobody knows me. So if I sit quietly and still, they'll eventually just give up on me and pull another name, but my wife was with me, Alicia. And so she kicks me under the table and she says, that's your name. And I said, I know, I know my name. I don't want to do this. She said, get up there and do it. So I got on that stage. I hated every minute of that evening until I began speaking into the microphone. The first words out of my mouth, I knew I want to stay up here forever. I never want this story to end. That was the launching point for me in terms of becoming an official storyteller. But if I really think about my life, when I was 10 years old, I went and saw the movie ET. I loved the movie, but there's a scene in that movie that's so offensively broken that it ruined the movie for me. So when I came home, I wrote a letter to Spielberg that basically said, I love your movies, but in all your movies, you seem to have one scene that's stupid. And you don't seem to be aware of it. And I asked him to send me the early versions of his movies before they went to the theaters. So I could tell him what was wrong with it. So he could send perfect movies to the theater instead of these broken movies. And I gave it to my mother, the letter and said, can you mail it to Steven Spielberg? And she said, sure. And for years, decades, I've been angry at Spielberg for not writing back. The kid takes the time to write that and you don't at least reply. It wasn't until three years ago that it occurred to me, my mother never sent that letter. In 1981, there's no way without the internet. How does she find Steven Spielberg's address? She probably read it. So I thought it was cute and threw it away. So I'm 10 and I'm analyzing movies and determining what's not working in the story and what is. Did I get my start when I was 10 and I started deconstructing films, which I've been doing for years and then books later on and then other things? Or was it when I took a stage and first told my story? I don't know where, but all my life, I've been obsessed with stories in one way or another, whether it's on the page or on the stage. How did you go about breaking down how you construct a story that led to story worthy? It started teaching people. I started telling stories first at the mouth, had lots of success. Then my wife and I launched Speak Up in Connecticut, a curated storytelling show that we do quite often. People would watch me tell these stories and then eventually people said, well, you teach us how to do this. I thought at first, no, I teach kids all day. I don't want to teach adults in the evening. Eventually, enough of them asked that I said, I'm going to do one workshop and never again, 10 people paid me to teach them storytelling. We did it in the Newington Public Library. I got a room for six weeks on the first night. I had them all tell me a story. All their stories were terrible, not terrible in terms of the content, but terrible in terms of structure and all the things that stories need. They came home and I said to Alicia, I don't understand why people can't tell stories. What's wrong with them? Why would you tell it that way? And she said, I don't know. Maybe you should teach them because you do it and they don't and maybe not be a jerk about it. She was right. I started thinking about what they were doing wrong and what I was doing. Right. I essentially had to take my process and break it down for them. And because thankfully I'm an elementary school teacher for the last 27 years, I happened to have the skill of taking large complex processes and breaking them down to the small, repeatable, practicable parts. That's essentially what I did. I thought about how I told the story. I thought about the decisions that I was instinctually making over years and years of telling stories. And then I started teaching those strategies to those folks. And eventually I started creating a curriculum around it, giving things names because that's an easy way to remember things. And that's how story worthy was born in terms of the content. I didn't actually write the book until 2016. I started writing workshops all the time in 2016. I did a summertime boot camp. It was going to be a full week with me eight hours a day. And it was going to conclude in a story time. show. I ended up in Connecticut with two people from China, a person from Vancouver, a person from San Diego, two people from Chicago and four people from Connecticut. I was so angry with them. I like low-stakes situations. I like it when a Connecticut person takes a workshop with me and it's right around the corner. So if it's not working out for them, it's no loss. Two people from China came to work with me in Connecticut. There's nothing here. You see the Mark Twain House and you're done. That's all there is to see in Connecticut. To come here, I thought this is crazy. In 2016, I said, I got to write a book because I can't have people having to come to Connecticut. So I wrote the book literally because of that workshop. But it all starts with me having to deconstruct my own process to help other people understand the process. And the aftermath of the book, what led you to start working with is this is another interesting organization. It was one guy Boris Levinis's name. He's a businessman here in Connecticut, very successful factory owner. He was the CEO of a company that was employee-owned and they recently had a fantastic buy-out with another company. Boris saw me perform at a fundraiser. I was doing an hour of stories for some charitable organization and then after I performed, I was drinking fruit punch in the back with a little reception and Boris came up to me and said, I want you to teach me what you just did for my business. And I told him, oh no, I don't do that. I said, I just tell stories that make people laugh and cry on stages. And he said, no, no, you could help me. I've always been a person who says yes to everything, even when I think it's ridiculous. So I said, all right, I'll have lunch with you, but I suspect that you'll hear from me and discover I have nothing to offer. We were 10 minutes into the lunch when he was describing some of the things that he was doing and some of the ways he was attempting to tell stories as a leader and as a business person, I thought, that's the wrong way to do that. I quickly realized there could help him. So I started working with Boris. Boris referred me to an engineering company here in Connecticut and the engineering company referred me to two other companies. Within six months, I found myself working with Microsoft and Salesforce and Slack and Google, the FBI. I work with these days helping their hostage negotiation unit tell better stories. I work with the clergy nonprofits, but it all started with Boris discovering I could do it than snowballing into finding my way into the doors of the biggest companies in the world. I'd love to tap into your ability to teach this. We could start with the story, just tell where do the ideas come from that lead you to construct a story? My stories come from my daily life. And oftentimes the ones I end up telling are the ones that happened yesterday because I find those really interesting. They come from either a process I call homework for life, where I'm examining my day, extracting stories from the day, holding on to my day in meaningful ways, and then telling those stories. Then also through lots of exercises, I've created over time that allow me to probe my life, look back on time, and pull stories from the past that we've left behind. The tragedy of all of our lives, we live throwing everything that we've ever done, our memories away. The worst game I play with people is I'll sit down with a group of people and say, let's think back on to 2018, not that long ago. Take a pen and a paper, write down everything you can remember from 2018. I'll give you 15 minutes. And so they go. And some people can't remember a single thing. If you're good, you get 10 items. Then I say, okay, take out your phones, now you can use your calendar. I'll give you another 15 minutes, go through your calendar, and add to the list. At the end of that time, people will get if they're really good 50 items, 50 from a full year. So when we talk about how time flies, it doesn't actually fly. That's just nonsense. What happens is it just gets forgotten. So we look at a full year, 365 days, and we reduce it to 50 days or 50 moments or 20 moments. That's why time feels like it flies. I, as a storyteller, am obsessed with myself in a healthy way. I'm self centered in a positive way, meaning I actually afford myself time to think about myself through this process I have called homework for life every single day. I take a few moments to reflect upon my day and I have a system by which I'm able to hold on to these moments and then reflect back upon them and say, which of these could be a story? Which of these could be an anecdote that I can use to make people laugh or a joke in my stand up? And which are just moments I want to hold on to for the rest of my life that I may never tell anyone, but are worth holding on to? How do you describe the homework for life as you do it? We have an app. You can do it lots of ways. But essentially for me, it started with a spreadsheet. I was worried that I was running out of stories to tell. I had started with a big list when I first decided to become a storyteller. As I saw the list get shorter and shorter, I realized I'm going to run out of stories. And I didn't want to be one of those guys who just repeat stories over and over again, they exist in the world. I just wanted always something fresh. I want to be listed across from you and say, Hey, here's a brand new story. I just told Tuesday night, now we're together. I'm going to tell it to you. I wanted to be that guy. Because I'm an elementary school teacher, I give myself homework. It's my way of solving problems. I just said, I'm going to look at every day at the end of the day and ask myself, if I had to tell a story from something that happened on this day, what would it be? Really, the prompt used to be if someone kidnapped Alicia and Clara and Charlie, and they wouldn't give them back unless I took a stage and told a story about something that happened today, what would that story be? I wrote it down. Not the whole story because that's a chore. That's writing. That's hard for people. But on my spreadsheet, there's a date. I stretched the B column across the screen, and it's in that B column that I allow myself the room to write. So it's not much. It's five or six sentences about the moment. And then I moved on. My goal was one new story per month, 12 stories at the end of the year. Instead, what I discovered is our lives are filled with stories. More than we could ever imagine, moments we should absolutely be holding on to that we fail to notice. And even when we do notice, we just forget. So I have discovered and tens of thousands of people all over the world now who do homework for life with me have discovered that all you have to do is start paying attention to your life, finding a way to hold on to it. And you'll have more stories to tell than you have time to tell them. Let's dive into this story that you just told right before you started, you said, oh boy, that first line really matters. How do you decide where to start a story? It's probably the most important decision a storyteller makes. I spend 75% of my time deciding on where to begin and what that first few lines are going to be. So it's a good question. There's different chronological structures to stories. If I'm telling you a story that takes place over a short period of time, an hour, a day, even maybe a week, I'm probably going to tell it to you in chronological order, started the beginning and at the end. That's home more than half of the stories I tell get told. And that makes sense to people. Time flows in one direction. It's the easiest way to tell a story. That story that I just told you though has a moment that takes place in 2008. But it also has a moment that takes place literally a week ago with John Paul. I could tell you that story chronologically, but that would not be the right way to tell that story because essentially what it would be is two stories at that point. It would be a story that happens in a Vermont layhouse. And then a whole bunch of time goes by where we don't really know what happened, mystery time. And then I have a moment with a boy in front of my classroom. That's a disjointed way of telling that story. So instead, what I do is I say, let me try BABC, which means I'll start somewhere in the middle. And then at some point, I'll work my way back to the past to pick up anything I need to pick up. And then I'll move the story forward. That's Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump starts with a man on a bench. Someone says next to him, he takes you to the past. He tells you about his life growing up. That story is actually a BABABABABC story because different person says on the bench, he takes you to a different place in his life. But filmmakers there understood we can't start with Forrest as a kid because we can't tell a story about a man's 50 years of life because that's too long. And we don't want to start our movie without Tom Hanks. We get the greatest star in the world. We don't want to wait 20 minutes before we get to him. So they start in the middle of the story because it makes the story feel shorter. Really Forrest Gump is a story about a man on a bench who's about 20 minutes away from meeting his son for the first time. And then he's going to get married to the woman. He's always wanted to get married. And then she's going to die of a mysterious illness. That's the chronological structure of the story. That's all it is. And everything else is backstory. It's Forrest telling us about the past. That also did not work in the story I just told you because it was no really middle point. What I ended up telling you was a C-A-B-C, which means I started the end. The end of the story is John Paul comes up to me and says, you're not going to believe what I just saw at recess. And then I pause the story there and say, maybe he could be right. Maybe for the first time in a long time, I won't believe it. And I take you into the past. I give you the moment of singularity in my life. And then I come back to the end of the story again, where John Paul is still standing there. And I still deny you what he said that day. But that is me starting at the end. See? Then going all the way back and going A-B and then ending up with John Paul again. I do that, though, because when stories have moments that take place far apart from each other temporarily, time-wise, we don't want to tell them in a chronological order. So all of those choices come into play before I even open my mouth. Once I have that in place, the story gets much easier to tell. What makes for a really good start? The simplest answer to that is start with location and action. Every story you tell for the rest of your life, you should start with where was I and what was I doing. Those two things activate the brain in a storytelling way. Five chemicals got released as soon as your brain recognized that a story was being told. which made you like me, more than you like me before, dopamine, which made you feel good as I was telling a story. Cord is all, which made your memory work better and heightened your alertness and door friends got released, which means this is a crazy one. If your knee was sore, when I started telling the story, and door friends reduced pain, your knee is less sore as a result of listening to my story. And serotonin, which allows for long-term memory storage. All of that happens because it's evolutionarily based. Human beings for the first 200,000 years of our lives could not write anything down. Writing in the internet, it's super new in terms of human history. If we think of human history as a football field, writing only appears in the last two inches of a football field. So our brains have evolved to pay attention to oral storytelling. It's what kept us alive at what's let us take over the planet. We should have been eating a long time ago by a lot of things, but with the only species that could pass information from one generation to the next, and it was through oral storytelling. So our brains have evolved to think he's telling a story. It could keep us alive, pay attention, and here's a whole bunch of chemicals to help you. So when you start a story with location and action, it's the easiest way to trigger those chemicals in someone's brain. But we also start there because if I give you a location, I'm standing in the front of my fifth grade classroom. You now have a perfect picture of what's happening in my story. I don't use adjectives if you notice I didn't describe my classroom in any way. What I do is I grab nouns that I know you already have in your head. I know you have classroom in your head already. I'm not interested in trying to describe the reality of my classroom. What storytellers should do is take the nouns or the locations that exist in your brain, and I leverage them on my behalf. I don't want to describe my classroom because that's a time and that's cognitive load for you. I just say I'm standing at the front of my fifth grade classroom, and you can see a fifth grade classroom perfectly. Now yours might have tables instead of desks. Yours might be larger or sunnier or better decorated than mine, but none of that matters. What I want to happen is a perfect image in your mind of that location. So we start with location to activate imagination and then we start with action to signal to the brain the story's already going because so many people begin their stories with nonsense they start with teaching you about something I might have started that story with saying I'm a fifth grade teacher and West art for Connecticut. I've been teaching for a long time. I'm in a classroom and it's about noon time. I just sent the kids up. Can you feel that's just awful, but that's how most people start stories they're like I gotta teach you a whole bunch of stuff so the story makes sense. Don't do that instead you start the story and you teach along the way, but you get the story going with some action so that's a long way to say how do you start a story start with location action and choose the right place. When you then take it from there back in time or you have this idea you're going to go back to this moment where your wife screaming and all this stuff is happening. How do you think about the different aspects of the story that kept me on the edge of my seat for a long time. The way that we can entertain an audience is four ways to do it. We provide stakes which is what should you be worried about wondering about curious about. The first take I give you is John Paul just said something amazing happened at recess what is that that's a stake throughout the entire story you now are waiting to find out what happened at recess. But then there are additional stakes one my wife screams that's a stake when I tell you that she's pregnant I raise the stake when you see Eric running through. The kitchen and the living room that's a stake when you see my wife running that's a stake all those are ways to get you curious wondering worried interested in my story those are stakes suspense is the strategic inclusion of information alongside the strategic exclusion of information I use that all the time that's just the idea that I'm not going to tell you all of the stuff at once I'm going to give you one little bit at a time. So a lot of those stakes we can also couch them in suspense meaning when you hear the scream that's definitely a stake but it's also some suspense what is happening I wonder what's happening I raised the stakes by telling you she's pregnant but then you see her in a Terry cloth robe. I know is the storyteller what's happening but I don't tell you that suspense is I'm going to tell you some of the thing but not all of the thing and I'm going to hold it back and that's going to keep you paying attention. And then surprise is the third way to entertain an audience is the best way it's the number one way I just watched you when you discovered that she was naked the look on your face was fantastic I knew I had achieved surprise which is what I wanted because I was surprised that day too whenever I'm surprised in a story the audience should be surprised I'm going to identify moments of surprise in a story and I'm going to find a way to cause that surprise to be my audience is surprised as well. And then the fourth one is humor the fourth way to entertain people that's just finding moments of humor that are both strategic and appropriate. The interesting one in that story for me is the joke about the Adirondack chairs I can kind of be funny at all times in a story once you understand how humor works you can do the math and you can be funny all the time but what I choose to be as funny at the right times so that Adirondack chair joke is there for a reason I've just told you that a pregnant woman screamed. I recognize that the audience is now worried that they're in a story where a woman might have a miscarriage really late in her pregnancy I don't want that worry to exist very long. I make the joke about the Adirondack chairs as a signal to the audience that we're still having fun probably not a miscarriage story because he just made a joke about an Adirondack chair. I strategically place humor in places that it helps me the most which is manipulating the audiences emotions and moods covering over papering over boring parts with humor opening a story with humor because humor also triggers all five of those chemicals it convinces an audience that I'm smart weirdly we believe that funny people are smart it's automatic an idiot can tell great jokes and you'll assume he's the smartest guy in the world when he's still actually an idiot. But the ability to make someone laugh is perceived to be so challenging and difficult that when you're capable of doing it people just assume your smart so there's places to be funny which is what I was trying to pick out in that story but those are the four things I do stakes that spend surprise in humor that's how I had you on the Adirondack chair seat you mentioned that once you learn how to unlock humor you can use it wherever you want how do you unlock humor I learned how to be funny as a kid I discovered that by telling stories about my stupidity. People paid a lot of attention to me when I told stories about my success nobody cared I would always lean into the failure and then I became self-deprecating so I instinctually absorbed humor strategies that I was then able to deploy throughout my life but then people came along and said Matt I want you to teach me how to be funny I began looking at my stories and jokes that I tell and breaking them down into strategies content is different but strategies the same it's a different joke but it's the same. Matt that leads to the joke I currently have a list of 27 humor strategies that I can teach people my top 10 you can use them all the day I'm time and be funny it doesn't mean you become funny in life necessarily you might if you practice enough but what it affords you is the opportunity to put humor into stories that you're preparing ahead of time so you've led me with suspense what are three or four of your favorite humor strategies. The easiest one to use especially in business is an nostalgia people almost always laugh when you remind them about how the past once was in business this is really helpful because when I'm working with business people the last thing they want to do is to make a joke that doesn't work they feel really stupid there are some humor strategies that you can use that even if they don't make people laugh. It's almost like you being informative anyway I'm demonstrating my wisdom of the past and if it happens to make you laugh because it's funny that works out great if I tell you that when I was a kid and had an allergic reaction actually ends up being an reflector reaction it's terrible like dying a prop back to life but I don't know what's happening to me because in the 1980s no one was allergic to anything we all a gluten packed bread baked in a spesto factories by men who are smoking cigarettes that's on the nostalgia. My favorite example of this was I was working with one of these companies that helps you find employees I want them to open their pitch with the idea that. In 1986 if you wanted a job the way you found a job was you sat on your front porch at around 3 30 in the afternoon a 16 or a boy rode by on his bike and through the internet at you the internet at the time was a newspaper on the back page of that newspaper was all the job possibilities you have in the entire world. They were all geographically bound you could only get a job in the towns that touched you and they all were attached to phone numbers you actually had to call human beings and speak to them that was a time when employers had all the power you had almost no power whatsoever there was no remote work you couldn't find your way and there was no LinkedIn none of that happened. In this world today employees have all the power so I was trying to make that argument for this company by leveraging the nostalgia at the beginning it would make people laugh but also demonstrates knowledge of the category and history they actually didn't go with it and they're out of business today probably not for that reason but it was a really good example of how we can make people laugh but also sound knowledgeable at the same time so nostalgia is the first one I teach everyone how about some others well one of these things is not like the other is one that once I teach it to you you will never. Unsee it because comedians use it more than anything else in the world essentially it's you're going to list three things the first two are going to have something in common and the third one will be nothing like the first two so my favorite story telling in the world is a guy named Steve Zimmer he tells us. story about living in a neighborhood as a kid where no one likes his family. They actually think that his family is robbing houses. They're not, but that's what they think. He's moved to the neighborhood and suddenly there's burglaries everywhere and they assume it's his family. So they have this neighborhood lieu out and they don't invite his family. So the next weekend his family has their own Zimmer family lieu out and it features pine apples, Hawaiian punch and despair. Despair makes you laugh. It's one of these things and not like the other. It's the simplest. Now, if you go watch a comedy special, you will see a comedian use that strategy seven times in an hour every single time. Another simple strategy that you can be used at any time. How about one more? This is my favorite one. It's a little harder to teach, but it's what I call definitions. It's essentially you can make something funny by defining it in its simplest form. So if you think about an object like a window and you say what is a window in its simplest form, it's a hole in the wall. Once you have that definition of hole in the wall, what can you do with it? So I can say, well, a window is a hole in the wall that prevents me from walking around naked all day. That's me saying, what is a window in its simplest form and now that we have it down to its simplest form, how can we play with that simplest form? That's my favorite kind of humor. I think it demonstrates an awareness of the world that alone makes people laugh. It's a hole in your wall that you've weirdly placed there. And then you say what does a hole in the wall do? Oh, it also, it affords me the opportunity to see a world I wish I could be exploring right now, but instead I have to sit on this call and listen to two business people argue over whether we should use collaboration or cooperation, like either one's going to make a difference. There's lots of ways you can do it. As you go through the story, there's a whole bunch of speech patterns that take a meandering path as it poses this straight chronological linear path. I'd love to hear how you break that part of telling a story down. When I'm telling a story, what I'm trying to do is not create a linear path. Those tend to be and stories. This happened and this happened and this happened and this happened. First graders tell these stories all the time. They're terrible. So why we don't want to listen to first graders. What we want to do when we're telling a story is we want a story to feel the heartbeat monitors up and down. That's what I'm looking for in my story is sort of an up and down path, which means that I'm constantly trying to butt or therefore through my story, mostly butt, actually. I really want my stories to be saying this happened, but then this happened. But then this happened and because of that, this happened. That creates a story that has some dynamism to it, sort of some energy, it creates a story that feels like it's constantly changing to the listener as opposed to a clear path. Butt is my favorite word in the English language. Because if I tell you I had a great day but the possibility that a butt affords, I had a great day but I believe that creates suspense instantly. What's on the other side of the butt? It's on the other side of the butt is almost impossibly large in its possibility. Almost always what the butt is tends to be a surprise, something that is not expected. So if I can butt my way through a story, I will always do it. So I'll say I'm sitting on the Adironductures looking at the lake, but then I hear a sound. So I jump out of my seat, but I can't jump out of my seat because it's an Adironducture. So I sort of apply myself out of the seat and I turn around and I see a boy. He's 10 years old. He's always that how can I get to the next butt or how can I get to the next, or how can I get to the next because all of those words. What are some of the other important speech patterns that you try to get people to not use? I try to avoid words that don't help us in any way. A word like suddenly, we should never use that word. I could have said I turn and suddenly I see Eric running across the kitchen, but suddenly is a word that never makes anything feel suddenly. It only signals that a surprise is about to happen. If I say I look outside and suddenly I've now spoiled the opportunity for surprise because I've indicated a surprise is here. What we should instead say is I turn and I see a 10 year old boy running across the kitchen. That's surprising. I see my pregnant wife running in a Terry cloth rope, that's surprising. We load in these words that are purposeless like suddenly or little did I know. We never move through our lives going little did I know because we can't see the future. Yet those phrases appear in stories all the time. We have to get rid of those. We have to get rid of things like guess what? Someone comes up to you and says guess what? My answer is always no thank you. Trying to train people that that meaningless phrase is a horrendous way to begin any conversation. What it really is, it's an indication that I'm facing a human being who doesn't know how to tell stories well and can't get the attention of his audience or her audience. So they load in a phrase like guess what or what John Paul said. You're not going to believe what happened at recess today rather than just telling me a lovely story about what happened at recess that day. He tries to get my attention but desperately saying this is the funniest story you've ever heard. I guarantee if you use that phrase, it will 100% not be the funniest story I've ever heard. So just ruined any chance of humor because now I can see the humor coming. I know you're about to say something funny. Those meaningless words, when we get rid of those stories get a lot cleaner and a lot more fun. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Ridgeline. Ridgeline makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridgeline's front-to-back AI native platform, your typical tech pains disappear. No integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles. Instead, you get real-time data flowing through everything from portfolio accounting to reporting, to reconciliation, trading, compliance and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to Ridgeline gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous, game-changing and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at Ridgeline.ai and now back to the show. When you take it from the words to the aspects of the story, how do you decide what details to keep in and what details to take out? If the detail does not serve the story, if it does not help me get to the end, if it does not bring something to clarity or entertain, then it goes away. Fail is sitting next to me in that Adirondack chair. I don't tell you how old he is. I don't tell you what he looks like. I don't tell you his race. I don't tell you his religion. One thing is important about fail in that story, and it is that he is more offensive than I am. That was actually crafted in that story because when I went and told it in Boston at the mouth, the theme was manners. I was demonstrating how Eric threw that door open and had bad manners. In the manners version of the story, the one I was on stage that night, I attached Phil's bad manners to his son's bad manners and I combined them because I had to match a theme. When I tell that story again someday, is Phil still going to be in the story described in that way? Probably not. Phil may even remove Phil from the story because he's not actually relevant and I'm always removing people who don't serve. If I'm sitting in that Adirondack chair and I hear a scream, do I need Phil standing next to me? Probably not. Phil's probably going to disappear in the best version of the story, the one that doesn't try to match a theme. I'm only telling you details that are relevant to the story or ones that help the story to be more entertaining. My wife is in a Terry cloth robe because eventually you're going to make the connection that, oh, he was in a robe because a minute ago, she was naked. Eric is 10 years old because I want you to know he's not 14 because a 14 year old boy walking in on a naked woman is a little different than a 10 year old boy. I don't want you to think it's creepy. I want you to think it's innocent and silly. He actually burst into the room to get a kite under the bed. They stored their kites under the bed of the guest room. That's why he runs in. That might be a detail I add in the future. If I decide people need to know why this boy is running into our bedroom, why is he throwing the door open without knocking? But that's the choices I'm making. I am only choosing details that get me to the end or entertain you along the way. As you work your way through the story, it feels like there are a bunch of different things that come up. I'm wondering if there are ways you think about what you choose to put in. I guess I'm just choosing the moments relentlessly that connect the beginning and the end with the greatest clarity possible. It's the same thing when I'm writing a novel. My second book I wrote, my agent read it and she said, "What's up with chapter eight?" And I said, "Let's hilarious." And she goes, "It is one of the funniest things you've ever written and it does not belong in the book." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Is it advancing the plot or is it just you demonstrating your ability to be funny?" And I said, "Well, isn't that entertaining?" And she said, "Not if it stops the story." If it stops the story, it's no longer entertaining, it's just you showing off. So we took chapter eight out, which killed me. She said, "Well, you could put it on the internet as extra material," which is an agent's way of saying, "I don't care what you do with it, but it's not going in the book." So for me, it is ruthless in that I will remove it. things from stories that don't get me to the end even if I love them. What we have to understand is that there's the story that storyteller wants to tell and then there's the story that the audience wants to hear. 95% of storytellers are telling the story that they want to tell. The best storytellers in the world are saying, this is the story I want to tell and I'll tell my wife that story. For an audience of people, strangers, investors, customers, there's a story that they want to hear that is not the same as what we want to tell. In business, it happens all the time when a market with scientists. The scientists want to tell how we came upon the process for the procedure. We don't want any of that. We don't want to know how you did it. We don't want to know the experimental method. I'm sure there's someone down the road that has to hear this, but not these potential investors. The investors want to know what is it that you discovered? Why is it important? How can I make money off of it? And that's about it. That's a scientist saying, but that's not what I want to tell. As opposed to a scientist saying, I want to say this, but it's not what the audience actually wants. How do you think about landing the plane when you construct it? Where is it end? Well, I started the end before I began saying anything. I know what my ending is first. If you don't, you're like getting in a car and you don't have a destination. You will make bad choices. You get in the car and I say, go to Maine. You don't have a map. You're going to make some bad turns along the way. You're just not going to know where to go. That's what most people do. They started the beginning weirdly. And then they think they're going to get to the end in an efficient way. But instead, they're going to throw in the kitchen sink along the way and just take detours that don't even make sense. The end is what I'm thinking about always. At the end of that story, what I want to say is a little boy told me that something happened that I wouldn't believe. I didn't think it was likely, but I was hoping it was true. That's what I want to get to. That's the whole purpose of that story is to say, there are moments of singularity in your life where you know you do something that will never happen again and has never happened before. And they're pretty amazing. I had one once and now I'm hoping it might happen again. That's all I want to say. Once I have the ending in mind, I always say the typical pattern is you saw something which made you think something which made you feel something. And that will almost always work because the end of every story is always a realization or transformation of some kind. It is seeing the world in a new way. It is the recognition that I once was one person, but now I'm another. I once thought one thing now I think another. I once felt one thing now I had to feel another. That's the end of the story. It's the most important part of the story. It's the most important thing you have to say. So you should end the story right there. Damn it. It's often I saw something or heard something. Something happened which caused me to think differently which caused me to feel differently. It doesn't always work that way, but that's a pretty good pattern to end the story. If you're giving the cliff notes version, if someone just wants to get 80% of the way there, what are the most important things they need to take away? I often say I can get you 80% of the way there pretty quick. Tell the B minus version of a story, which is better than most stories. Most stories are D minuses. So if you get to B minus, you're actually going to be recognized as a very good storyteller. What you essentially need is an effective beginning and an ending that actually contains meaning and the two of those are in opposition to each other. That's what I call the frame of the story. The beginning and the end have to be deliberately and strategically chosen and chosen well. The beginning needs to use strategies that leverage brain chemistry and get people's attention. Right there, you're probably better than most people because that means you're actually going to say something of meaning because you've started at the end. You're going to start at a place that garner's attention and really causes people to want to hear you. And if you just do that, that's pretty great. If then you say to yourself, to get from A, the beginning, to B, the end, I need to be entertaining. Let me at least attempt to leverage some strategies. I'm going to say some of the thing but not all of the thing right away. I'm going to use match strategy of suspense. It's pretty easy. So if you're like, I'm going to get from A to B and I'm going to be funny twice and I'm going to use suspense once and I'm going to load a stake into the beginning, you're a really good, solid storyteller now with what you're doing. When you take this whole art of putting stories together and then apply it to the business world as you did in your recent book, so many business people see themselves as giving a presentation. Yeah, it's a bad word. You should get rid of that word and think of it as a performance because no one ever wakes up in the morning hoping to see a presentation but they do wake up every morning hoping to see a performance. So get rid of that word for sure. When you use the word presentation, it allows you to use teleprompters and slide decks as teleprompters. A performance requires preparation. It's an acknowledgement that does an audience and it's an acknowledgement that regardless of what you're doing, you should be entertaining. Regardless of what you're doing, no matter how dry it is, you should be entertaining. My mother died. I went to the funeral home two days later to plan the funeral with the funeral director. He made me laugh twice. I was so grateful for both laughs. By the end of that meeting, I felt like I had just spent quality time with an educated human being who took care of me and knew how to make me laugh. I was entertained. I was entertained at the planning of my mother's funeral. Not entertained in a way that, if I go watch Nate Bargette's performance, I will be entertained. But I was genuinely entertained, meaning I would enjoy spending time in that place with that man and he moved me emotionally. So get rid of the word presentation. Assume you're doing a performance, then suddenly you're going to discover I have to prepare. I have to be entertaining. I have to recognize the audience wants something from me that is different than maybe what I want to say. All of those things. I'm sorry I interrupted you, but I hate the word presentation. Because I'm always like, if you're just doing a presentation, you might as well just get a slide that can have a monkey read it, because that's essentially what a presentation is. When you've worked with businesses, a lot of the storytelling that you've been involved with feels personal. It's some personal anecdote. How does that translate into a business person giving up performance? A couple of ways. One of the ways that works really well is what I call speaking through adjacency, meaning we're going to use a personal story. But when you use it in order to really a business concept to it, last night I was working with an executive at a very large company. She was talking to salespeople about the importance of getting customers to refresh equipment. They have old equipment. We're selling that equipment. We want them to understand it's important to refresh and buy our new equipment. She tells a story about when her dishwasher breaks. It's a 20 year old dishwasher. Her husband says let's get a new one. She says, "No, we're not a disposable couple. We're going to get this fixed." She calls her repair company guy comes in. He says, "It's 20 years old. I can get the part, but it's going to be like six weeks." She goes, "Good, do it." For six weeks, they hand wash dishes. The whole time she's like this ridiculous, but she can't admit to it because her husband's standing next to her thinking, "I told you so." Six weeks later, the guy comes with the part. He takes the whole dishwasher apart. It's all over the kitchen. He's got YouTube up trying to learn how to fix things that are 20 years old. Two hours in, he looks at the woman and says, "I can't do it." It's her recognition that this dishwasher is old enough to be a sophomore in college. At some point, it's just better to replace things. She tells that story and then she says, "That's where we have to convince our customers." We have to convince our customers that even though they're running old equipment, they have to understand there's no efficiency in it. You're holding on to old things. Then she goes, "Didn't you dishwasher? It's a place for my wine glasses." So they don't break anymore. This dishwasher is so quiet. I don't even know if it's running unless I put my hand on it. I can have calls in the kitchen and not worry about the rattling ancient dishwasher. So suddenly, her life is better too. She does all that. That's what I call speaking through a agency. I'm going to tell a story about a dishwasher and relate it to the refreshing of servers in a company. The other way is we just say, we're not going to tell a personal story but we're going to leverage the storytelling strategies that we use in a personal story while telling our business story. If we think about the fact that, well, we can still use stakes, even if we're not really telling a story. We can still create suspense and the audience's mind, even though we're not really telling a story. Let's make sure that they're surprised at some point. It maybe could be dared to make someone laugh along the way so that they think of us as more intelligent than we really are. If you watch Steve Jobs 2007 iPhone launch, he uses stake suspense, surprise, and humor, all four of them in the first six minutes of the presentation. He does it masterfully, and brilliantly. He's not really telling a story. He's bringing out a new product for a bunch of people who are going to be completely over the moon about it, but he recognizes I better entertain them. I'm going to come on the stage in the first sentence he says is, I've been waiting two and a half years to tell you what I'm going to tell you today. That's the state that is the greatest technologist of all time took two and a half years to make something. Automatically, you're thinking what the hell took two and a half years to make first sentence. He lays a stake down. Later on, he uses suspense. When he reveals that it's an iPhone, he says, and it's right here on my pocket. And he slides it halfway out of his pocket. And he says, but I'm not quite ready to show it to you. And slides it back in. Now the whole time, they're just looking at his genes, trying to figure out the form factor inside the, but that's suspense. For surprise, he goes on stage and he says, today we're releasing three new products, a touch screen iPod, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Three products. He puts all three on the screen. And he says three products today. He says it over and over again. He's cementing three products in their mind. And then the three products begin spinning and they start to become one and he says, "Are you getting it? Are you getting it? It's not three products. It's one." Everyone at Macworld loses their mind because he's given them a surprise. He said three and he's flipped it and said one. He understands that. That's surprise. And then he uses humor when he says, "And here's the iPhone and a picture gets up there." And it's an iPod with a kitchen timer attached to it. It's a janky looking ridiculous. What would be the iPhone makes everyone laugh. He does all four of those things in the first six months. He continues to do it throughout the whole talk. He understands, "I'm not telling a story, but I'm gonna leverage the storytelling strategies that exist in this world to make our presentations engaging, entertaining, and unforgettable." What are some of the worst things that you've seen business executives do at the beginning of your trying to teach them how to do this? Get together with a company and they say, "We have a new product, Matt, that we want to launch." And then they open PowerPoint and they open a slide and they say, "What should we start with?" And I say, "Why are we looking at PowerPoint?" It's weird that they think that stories begin with slides. Stories don't begin on slides. Stories begin with the words that we're going to speak or the words that are going to be on the page or some combination of the two. Slides should be used to support a story only when necessary. They should not be the story. And yet every time I meet with a company, they open the slides. They have a blank first slide and they go, "Where should we start?" And I say, "Close it." I say, "If you need slides, you're not telling a story. You're just a slide monkey. You're just building slides that people are going to shove around in weird orders. You're not going to tell a story anymore." I say, "What we begin with is we're just going to talk. We're going to talk about what the actual story is. Just like me telling you the story, I just told you I started the end. We're going to start at the end. What are we trying to tell our customers? What's the final message that we want to land with customers? Let's begin at the end. Let's start the beginning as the opposite of the end. And then let's work our way through it in such a way that it makes sense, that it contains some of the storytelling elements that can entertain and engage. They never think this way. They start with slide one and work their way down to slide 20. Then they think they have a story. Then they start shuffling the slides around. And then some vice president says, "Hey, I really like these two slides. Can we put them in? Can you imagine? You're putting together the movie Die Hard." And then someone comes along, one of the producers and says, "Hey, you know what? I really like Burger King. Can we get a Burger King scene into Die Hard? I know he's trapped into building. I don't know, could we have a phone call into a Burger King?" That's what people do in business though. They go, "Hey, I got two slides. I really like, I wanted them." It's not the story we're telling man. And they're like, "I don't care. Put the two slides and destroy the story." They're not really telling stories. They're just building slides that they report to tell stories, but really they're creating de facto teleprompters with terrible images that are necessary to tell the story. If you need a slide deck and you're competing against me, all I will do is I'll cut the power to the building. Then I will walk in and say, "Oh, you don't have your slide deck because you don't have electricity?" Well, fortunately, I know my company. I know my product. I know my story. I don't need a slide deck. So I don't, I just present without the deck. And then my competitor can do his best without his deck and I'll kill him every time. If you need a deck, you're not telling a story. You shouldn't even be walking in the room if you need a deck. Stay home and practice. Turn it into a performance. There's such a disconnect between, I got my deck, but I might try to add a little bit of a story, but mostly I'm just going to tell you what's in the deck. How do you get people from here to there? Ideally, what they do is they recognize that when you're actually prepared and you perform, you can do what Steve Jobs does, which is have one of the greatest presentations about technology that ever existed. Jobs famously practiced for months on that performance. And the crazy thing about is he messes up on the second sentence. He actually speaks the fourth sentence second, cuts himself off, fixes it, and then goes back. If you watch it, now that I've told it to, you'll never unsee it, but no one ever sees it because he's so prepared that when he makes a mistake, he's utterly unflustered because he knows exactly what he's doing. You just have to get people to understand, if you want to sell a product, if you want people to believe in your company, if you want people to believe in you, nobody believes in somebody who walks in and clicks buttons and reads slides. That is just not the way to inspire people. I just saw a leader of an organization take the stage, sit on a stool, take out his phone, and then begin reading his speech office phone, a 10 minute speech, the leader of an organization designed to inspire his troops. If you can't prepare 10 minutes to inspire people and you need a phone, you should find someone in the organization who is better equipped than you and have them do the inspiring. All you have to do is watch a bad presentation and know you're doing the same damn thing. It's hard to get people to practice. It's hard to get people to prepare, but the benefits are enormous when you do it. What are the best ways to practice? The best way is you make a recording of the story you want to tell and then you begin listening to it. If you think about all the songs you know in your life, you probably didn't try to learn the lyrics to most songs. You listened to the song long enough that the lyrics landed in your head and you can never forget them for the rest of your life. I just heard a Richard Mark song from 1991 that I have not heard in 30 years. It came on the radio with my wife and I said, I know everywhere to this song, even though I haven't heard it for 30 years, I sang it. And she was like, in that crazy, I said, yeah, but you can do the same thing with the talk, especially if you're given the same damn one all the time, if you're a salesperson, make a recording of it, you listen to it. You listen to it passively. You don't even have to listen to it actively folding your laundry, listening to your talk, grocery shopping, listening to your talk, listen to it, allow it to be absorbed in the same way you absorbed living on a prayer in 1987 when it was on the radio every four minutes. That's a great way to do it. You can also then use that recording right before you're going to perform. So you listen to it ahead of time, just an hour before because we have long-term memory and short-term memory. We're trying to put the words into long-term memory up until the day that we perform. On the day of the performance, we put it into our short-term memory by listening to it. We allow those two things to work together and then we really have something. How do you think about the balance of memorization versus the comfort of having a conversation speaking? What we say is you want to remember your talk but not memorize your talk. The story that I just told you, I actually crafted that story about two hours before I performed it on stage. I had no time to memorize it. I told the first version of that story in here to my production manager, Kaya. I got in the car with a couple of buddies. We drove to Boston. They said, "What's your story?" And I said, "I got to work it out a little bit in the car with you guys. I just told that the Kaya was a little messed up, so I told the second version to the guys in the car." I told the third version to myself as we were walking from the parking lot into the venue and on the fourth time I told it on stage. So it was definitely not memorized. The version I just told you sounds different than the one I told on stage two nights ago. They're the same story, though. They have the same beats, the same moments, but the sentences are going to be different. That's what you can want to get to. Now, admittedly, I memorized the first sentence of the story because you want to start out great. I tried to memorize the end a little bit when I say never in the universe. Was there a student sitting in a class who wants to. I knew I had to get that sentence perfect, so I worked it and worked it and worked it while I was sitting in my seat waiting for my turn. I was going over that sentence, trying to create a groove. So when I got to it, I'd say it right. So there are aspects of memorization that are helpful. When you memorize the whole story, what happens is you create a chain of sentences. And if you forget one of those sentences, the chain breaks and then you're trapped. I did a show once at Bam Brooklyn Academy music. It was the biggest show at the time I'd ever done. 3,000 people. The producer that night was the director of the moth. And she was directing my story. And she was directing one other guy's story, a Vietnam vet who flew planes onto carriers and you watch one of his buddies go over the side and die. It's a really sad story. She was so worried about this guy the whole night. You know, she's like, I hope you can pull it off. She's telling me this. I was becoming a little jerk. I was thinking, why isn't she talking about me and my story? So eventually I said to her, all right, why aren't we thinking about my story right now? And she said, oh, I don't worry about you. You won't stop talking. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, you might make a mistake, but you're not memorized. So you'll just keep talking until you find your place again. You never stop. He's memorized. If he loses his place, he's done. That was a good lesson for me because she was right. If I forget what's going to happen next, I'll just keep talking about the thing that's happening now until I find in my mind, oh, right, that's where I have to go next. They won't be any long pauses. They won't be any awkwardness because I don't memorize. I remember that affords me the latitude to play with the story and to be flexible enough that if I forget something, I'm not in trouble. I'd love to hear an example of what you found have been the most impactful shifts when you're working with a business. God, that's a great question. One of the craziest ones. I don't know if this is really pertaining to storytelling as much. I was working with a vice president Slack. Slack is now a part of Salesforce. She was giving me the talk so that I could give her feedback. As I started to give her feedback, I told her something she did well and she stopped me and she said, "Listen, I'm not the kind of person that you have to say nice things to. You can just tell me what I need to fix." And I said to her, "I don't think you understand the nature of feedback. I told you what you did well because you might not be aware of what you're doing well, so I don't want you to lose it, thinking it's not valuable." I also think it's so great what you just did. I want to increase the chances of you doing it again and again. I'm trying to increase frequency and consistency by giving you positive feedback. I'm not here to make you feel good. I'm here to make you better. That's the purpose of every bit of positive feedback I ever give is to make you aware of what you're doing. doing well so that you're consistent and more frequent with it. At the end of our whole talk, she said, "I have to tell you something." She said, "I have never in my life thought of positive feedback as something that could be useful in the changing of human behavior. I always thought of that sandwich where I say something nice, give the hard thing and say something nice." She said, "You've really changed the way I will give feedback to people for the rest of my life." I felt like in that moment I had made a shift in that corporate culture, maybe not storytelling-wise, but I will never forget that moment thinking everyone's going to benefit from now on when dealing with this particular human being. I think they're actually going to be better employees and she's going to be a better manager or leader as a result." That was one, which is not terribly storytelling related to that. How about one with storytelling, really? I'm working with a biotech in Boston, with sending five scientists to a conference to report on what they've learned. They're looking for leads. It's a sales conference. They're going to present their new experiment or their new findings, and hopefully people want to do business with them. They hire me to help these scientists infuse storytelling into what they're doing. All five of them do a good job putting stories into their presentations, but one guy, John, he's a rebel and he says, "Let's just tell a story. No data." And I'm like, "I don't know, John." You're a scientist. His company makes tubes for manufacturing and experimental processes. His competitors all make a single type of tube that they have to retrofit and make it work no matter what they're doing. His company makes 18 different types of tubes. They make tubes that fit exactly what you need. There's no retrofitting required, but his tubes cost a lot more. You have a choice. You can go with the people whose tube is cheap and you retrofit it or you go with the guys whose tubes are expensive, but it's exactly what you want. I say, "All right, let's tell a story." So John tells a story about going into the grocery store in Saturday mornings and how much he hates grocery shopping because his family is miserable when it comes to making grocery lists. His wife texts him throughout the week, just random items when they need it. His son just shouts at him when he sees they need something and his daughter leaves posted notes on the fridge. Essentially, it has to collate three sources into one shopping list, which takes forever because nobody is willing to use an app. So he's already frustrated. And when he gets to the grocery store, the first thing he faces is the apples, that big table of apples and his family can't agree on apples. Everybody has a different request. So he has to bring a sharpie. His son wants cosmic crisps, some new apples. So he's going to find that and put it in a bag and label it. And then his daughter likes yellow delicious, who the hell likes that apple, but she does. And his wife always wants a variety. Like, I want three macounds and two red delicious. He says, "It takes me forever just to get through the apples." People think I'm crazy. I'm writing my family's name and the type of apple on it. Then he says, "But I love my family." And I think they should get exactly what they want. He says, "My company feels the same way. Our competitors believe here's a Macintosh. Make it work. No matter what you're doing, no matter what you like, make this Macintosh work for you. It's cheap. We believe you should have all the apples, even if it costs you a little bit more. That's all he does. He doesn't present any data. All of the scientists do their thing. Two weeks later at the company, we meet with the vice president of marketing. She flies out from California to New England to meet with me. We discover looking at the numbers that John has more sales leads than the other four scientists combined. She's really angry about it. She's angry because John hasn't presented any data at the conference. I've sent a scientist into a scientific conference to talk about apples. That's what she's mad about. I point out to her, he has more leads than everybody else, and now he can present the data because they're going to call and then you can have all the data conversations you want. She's not mad because I sent a scientist into a conference without data. She's mad because I've upended the way she's been doing business for 25 years. I've told her there might be a better way, and she's really pissed about it. It takes me a long time to get her to come to my side of the table. What I eventually point out to her, what convinced the sir, as I say, you don't even understand the power of that story because every single time someone is in that sales conference for the next three months, and they're standing in front of the apples in the grocery store, they're thinking about John, your company, and they're smiling. You're going to get even more leads over the next three months. We've created a physical manifestation of the business that you do in a place that people go all the time. That's when she takes her notebook and she throws it across the table and goes, damn it, I think you're right. At that point, that company changes the way they do business in terms of these scientists had better be telling stories that are memorable, that are connective, that are entertaining, and they start doing that relentlessly. That's a company that buys in, but they only buy in because they see the results, they see the numbers that enjoy telling producers. It's a lot harder to go into a company and say, you got to shift the way you're doing business without the actual evidence. I got lucky. I ran into a scientist who decided to be a rebel and just tell a story that doesn't happen that often. So I have to convince people a lot that this is going to be the right way to go. What's been as you work with businesses, the consistency of the impact from shifting, giving a presentation to giving a storytelling performance? The thing I hear most from people is what happens right after their presentation or performance is done. Almost always, people tell me, I can't believe how many people came up to me once I was done to talk to me. I used to do my thing and I'd step off the stage and essentially I'd go use the restroom and go home. I step off the stage. Now people just come up and talk to me. Now a lot of times they're talking about apples and grocery shopping and those kinds of things. They're relating to the story that was told on the stage, but it means you're getting a personal connection with a person. It means you're going to tap phones and exchange LinkedIn information. It means you're going to get a business card. The response that people get once they're done performing is always extraordinary to them. The other thing that happens all the time is people who are marginalized in the business world, women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, they tell me, if I start with location in action, weirdly, the whole room goes quiet. The reason is because, as you start with location in action, the brain gets flooded with chemicals that essentially say, shut the hell up. This might keep us alive. So, so many of the people I work with who don't find opportunities to speak or can't get people quiet, they say, if I actually start with the story the way you tell me to start it, the room gets quiet in a way I've never heard it before. Before we get close to wrapping, I have to ask on the off chance that it mattered. What did JP say? It's pretty funny. He said, this kid was swinging really high and then jumped off the swing so high and went flying through the air. And I said to JP, JP, I saw a kid fly off those swings once so high that I was calling 911 before he hit the ground because when he hit the ground, he broke his leg. So, was the boy that you saw taken away on an ambulance today? And JP said, no. And I said, then I've seen it before a buddy. So, sadly, it was not a singular moment. Nor was by the way the time that kid broke his leg because that has probably happened a hundred thousand times over the course of history. Yeah. Yeah. In the immortal worlds of King George and Hamilton, what comes next for you is you wrap up your teaching career. It's weird to not think about teaching next year because I love kids so much, but there's just so many opportunities for me to do other things. My goal in life now, once I'm done teaching is to be able to do the things I do now, which is coaching, consult with corporations, deliver key notes around the country, write more, both novels and non-fiction. I started as a novelist, the first six books I wrote were novels and they were successful. I was decently successful novelist when this non-fiction derailment happened. So, my next book coming out is a novel. So, I hope to write a lot more. Ideally, my kids are 16 and 13 and I would like to think that my wife had 10 years with our kids. She spent 10 years at home raising them. I'm liking to think that maybe I'm going to have three to five years here at the end with the kids where I'm not raising them, but when they need to ride home or they want help with the homework, I'm not going to be sitting at a literally game watching my son play about having headphones on and listening to a vice president's recording of his presentation so that I can provide feedback for him later on, which is basically how I live my life now. It's going to be a lot less hairy and a little more considered and hopefully helping people better than I currently do tell better stories. I want to ask you a couple of closing questions. Their closing questions are brought to you by Old Well Labs or OWL. OWL is the very best software I've seen for allocators to find and track managers and I've seen a lot of them. If you haven't seen OWL check them out at oldwellhyphenlabs.com/ted that's OLDWELLhyphenlabs.com/ted and trust me, it'll be worth a look. All right Matt, couple of closing questions and we'll wrap up. What's the one thing most people don't know about you that you find interesting? I think it's interesting I had a raccoon as a pet as a kid. I've never told that story officially. Had a raccoon as a pet as a kid and that raccoon loved me, really loved me and didn't love anyone else. I know it sounds crazy to care a lot about a raccoon that's definitely dead. I'm a person who doesn't know his father very well. My father left when I was seven and has been in but almost always out of my life, occasionally making a slight appearance. But my father was a horse guy. a cowboy in every sense. He was the guy who would break the horse that couldn't be broken. I grew up on a horse farm until my parents got divorced. He was known as being a horse whisperer. He wasn't with me when I had the raccoon, but the raccoon loved me in a way that did not love the rest of the family. We have cats now. The cats love me in a way that they don't love other family members and it's stretching it out of hunger and desperation. But I think about that raccoon a lot and the thing like maybe that's the thing that my father had that I had that somehow we look at animals and we know what they need and what they want and what they see in us. As a boy who never knew his father and as a man who wants to know his father and can't seem to break through in order to do it, I'm always hungry for anything that I can find to relate to my father. So that raccoon is not a story I've told, but it is a thing I think about all the time and think that the raccoon would have loved my father the same way he loved me. His name was racquet and eventually we had to release him because he was too dangerous for everyone with the exception of me. What's the best advice you've ever received? Let's guess out terrible. I was trying to decide in college if I should run for president of the student council. It was community college. It was my first foray into college. I didn't get to college until later in life. I got kicked out of my house homeless a lot of mess. Eventually I make it to college and I'm managing McDonald's full time in the city of Hartford 45 hours a week managing McDonald's. I'm also running my DJ business. Every weekend I am DJing weddings with my partner and officiating weddings and I'm taking a full class load at Manchester Community College. I'm also already the president of the honor society and I'm the columnist for the newspaper. Chris Johnson comes up to me and he says, I'm running for vice president of the student council and I say, great, I'll vote for you as my body and he goes, and I want you to run for president. And I think it's a crazy thing. I have no time. There's no way I can do this. But as I told you earlier, I say yes to everything. So I say yes. So I'm in the debate against this woman named Jane Beams. It's me versus Jane Beams for the presidency. It's a debate with people asking questions and the college campus. I get the question from someone that says, why do you think you can be president given all the things that you do? Don't you think you're going to have a problem with time? I say to the person, when I was trying to decide whether I want to run for president, I called my father to ask his advice. And my father said that great men don't wait for time. They make the time to be great. So I'm going to follow my father's advice. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to allow time to be an excuse for not doing something. Now I didn't call my father because I don't know my father. But I knew in that moment that I should express the willingness to seek advice from other people because that is an attractive quality. I knew that asking a question of my father would indicate that I am a person who has centred in family. And then I asked myself, if I actually knew my father, what advice would I want my father to give me? And that was the advice I imagined my father giving me. So that is what I told that woman in the audience. And after I said it, I thought to myself, that is excellent advice, which I've been following ever since. So the best advice I have ever received was advice that I imagined my father would give me if he was willing to speak to me. But originally it came out of my own head, which is really an awful answer to that question because I just told you that the best advice I've ever received is advice I gave myself. I would like to tell you I've received better advice than that. But I honestly live by that piece of advice more than any other piece of advice in my life right now. What's your biggest storytelling pet peeve? As a bunch, I hate the storyteller who goes on stage in an effort to say something nice about themselves. I once saw a guy in Boston get on stage and tell a story about being on the Princeton campus. All he wanted to say was he went to Princeton. That's essentially the whole purpose of the story. He said Princeton like 90 times. But the story is about how he gets locked on the roof of a building on Princeton's campus in the middle of the day. And it goes to the edge of the building and he sees that there's a tree limb pretty close to the edge. It wouldn't be very hard for him to jump to the tree limb and scurry down the trees on the third floor, three story building. But he recognizes if I miss it, I'm going to get hurt. So then he sees some people down on the ground and he yells to them, "Hey, I'm stuck up here. Can you come open the door?" And so they open the door. And that's the story. That's the extent of the story. The thing I'll never forget about the moment is he's sitting right in front of me and my wife, Alicia. And he comes and he sits down. He's sitting with a woman, his girlfriend, his wife, somebody. And she kisses him and says, "That was incredible, honey. You did such a good job." There's a part of me that's still trapped in that moment to this day because I can't help but wonder. Did she know it was terrible? But she's saying nice things to him to make him feel good. Or does she actually think it's good because he thinks it's good. So maybe she does too. The pet peeve is someone gets on stage because they want to say nice things about themselves and they couch it within a story. Nobody wants that. I don't even think your mother wants that. It's weird because they want us to like them more. But what they've done has caused us to like them less. I hate that. How about another pet peeve? I hate when people start stories with a quote that will never be remembered by the end of the story. So they'll get on stage and say, there's two kinds of people in this world. There are people who see Jell-O and think of it as food and there are people who see Jell-O and think something else. Then they start the story. And I go, that Jell-O sentence was stupid. It was unnecessary. It's given away part of the story already. And by the time you get to the end of the story, if I turn to someone saying next to me and say, what was his first sentence? They'll never remember that ridiculous quote that people open stories with all the time. I can't imagine why you would start by saying played all one said. And then you quote some Greek philosopher. And then you tell a story that happened yesterday. And you think that somehow we're going to remember that. I can't stand all of that nonsense. I have something called the dinner test, which is the story that I tell you. The story I told you today should be a close cousin to the story I would have told you if we were having dinner together. You might have interrupted. I would have taken a bite. It would have been a little less formal. But it's essentially the story I would tell a dinner. Can you imagine if you and I sat down for dinner and you said, how was your day? And I said, Aristotle once said, gave you a quote and then began telling you the story. It doesn't pass the dinner test. It's weird. And it makes me crazy. What's a mystery you wonder about? This is going to make me sound terrible. I'm a reluctant atheist. I'm a person who wishes you could believe in God, but is incapable of doing so despite the fact I try all the time. It is a mystery to me. If the people who tell me they really believe in God, really believe in God, the objective science behind the possibility of an all-knowing being just leaves me unable to have faith. I've also read the Bible cover to cover three times. And if you ever read the Bible cover to cover even once, you will find yourself with a lot less faith at the end of that book. A mystery to me is when people profess faith, I am always wondering, are you saying it because you want it to be true? Are you saying it because you've been saying it all your life? Are you saying it because genuinely authentically you believe that there is an all-knowing, apparently male creator who has placed us here for a purpose? I would like that to be true for the record. I don't need them to be male, by the way. I think it's weird that we imagine God with a penis. That's a crazy thing. I'm not denigrating people of faith saying that there are ridiculous because I want to be like them. But the mystery I have is, do they really believe? I think they're engaging in Pascal's wager. You know, the idea of Pascal said, whether you believe or not, say you believe, because there's no cost to it. I think God will know you're engaging in a Pascal's wager and be like, that wasn't called faith buddy, so get the hell out of here. Okay, I have one more. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? I have learned to not delay the moment you have an idea. This singular second, you have an idea, you should immediately pursue it as relentlessly as possible. I wrote a book called Someday Is Today because I think most people say that someday they're going to do something and then they die instead. I think most people die having dreams that are never fulfilled because they just think this is going to be a tomorrow. What I've discovered is when you have an idea, you just run at it as fast as you possibly can, no matter what, and chase that idea down, chase that dream down and do not delay a moment. I wish when I was 20 or 30 that I had known that. I knew it by 40 for sure. Somewhere between 30 and 40, I said to myself, I delay longer than I need to on these things, I just have to run at them, and that helped a lot. Matt, thanks so much for sharing your insights. I'm really excited to see what happens from this coming up. - Thanks, this was really great. - Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one, and see you next time. - All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.