The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

The Neuroscience of Storytelling With Lisa Cron

Storytelling is how we make sense of the world. In this episode of the podcast Lisa Cron talks to us about how we're hardwired to respond to story.

Lisa's early love for story telling from an early age
The reason finding the thing you love is a struggle
Why story is a hardwired survial mechanism
The reason stories help us to navigate reality
Understanding how to shape and develop stories
Why making the impossible possible is a journey
Digging deep enough to find your true gift is
Why we tend to think in terms of stories
Separating the things that make us feel successfull externally and internally
The challenges of pursusing any path on your own
How story and the brain evolved in tandem
Why story is incredibly effective for changing behavior
The reason we make every decision based on emotion
Using stories to change our behavior

Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence.

Storytelling is how we make sense of the world. In this episode of the podcast Lisa Cron talks to us about how we're hardwired to respond to story.

Lisa's early love for story telling from an early age
The reason finding the thing you love is a struggle
Why story is a hardwired survial mechanism
The reason stories help us to navigate reality
Understanding how to shape and develop stories
Why making the impossible possible is a journey
Digging deep enough to find your true gift is
Why we tend to think in terms of stories
Separating the things that make us feel successfull externally and internally
The challenges of pursusing any path on your own
How story and the brain evolved in tandem
Why story is incredibly effective for changing behavior
The reason we make every decision based on emotion
Using stories to change our behavior

Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence.

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Duration:: 1h 10m
Broadcast on:: 02 Jun 2014
Audio Format:: other

As you probably noticed, this month we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at Mint Mobile.com/switch. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first-three-month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of detail. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where I speak with creative entrepreneurs, artists, and other insanely interesting people to hear their stories, learn about their molding moments, tipping points, and spectacular takeoffs. In this episode of the Unmistakable Creative, I speak with Lisa Kron, all about the neuroscience of storytelling. Hey there, it's Srini. I hope you're having an awesome morning. Before we get into today's episode, I want to share a quick story with you. In my earliest days of being a freelancer, I had no processes and no systems, and I basically operated in a reactive mode, and this hindered my progress for many years, and I didn't even realize it. I was overwhelmed with paperwork, chasing down clients to get paid, and other time-consuming administrative activities, which weren't really all that valuable. Some simple math turned out to be one of the most revealing insights ever. I actually had the CEO of FreshBooks on the podcast, and he asked me, "Is your time worth more than $20 an hour?" And when I said yes, he said, "Well, then you should be using FreshBooks, and I have ever since," and now you can even try it free for just two months, and stop wasting your time dealing with invoices, paperwork, and all the other headaches that keep you from getting paid faster. Visit GetFreshBooks.com and enter Unmistakable Creative, and how did you hear about a section? Lisa, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks for taking the time to join us. Oh, my pleasure. So, Lisa, I want to ask you my very first question, which is, "Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, your story, and how that has led you to doing the work that you're doing today?" Absolutely. Let's see. The truth is, ever since I was a little kid, I have loved story. I have loved getting lost in story. It's just like most of us. When I was 12, I decided I was going to see every movie that ever came out, like if I had to drive. I lived in LA, and it was before we had to worry about how far we drove and our carbon footprint. So, I would drive 100 miles to see a movie. When I moved to New York, after college, I would sit in the subway, and I would look at the ads, and I would think, "What story are they telling me? How are they trying to get me to buy their product?" I never did this. I wasn't intrepid enough, now with the internet I might have, but I always wanted to write them notes and go, "Okay, you said this, but really the truth is it's making us feel uncomfortable, so what you really might want to do is this." But anyway, so then my love at that point was writing, so I went into publishing, and I worked with writers and story for really pretty much my whole career first in publishing. Then I worked as a literary agent, I worked in film and TV, I read books to film for years, I worked one-on-one with writers, and the really interesting thing that I noticed was that when I was analyzing manuscripts, and I was reading manuscripts that, you know, these days, of course, now that we have self-publishing, people can read them, but back in the day nobody read the kind of stuff that we readers read. And most of it was really pretty bad, but the really interesting thing was it wasn't necessarily that it was poorly written, it was that these people did not know how to tell a story, and I realized that even though they were making their own, you know, everybody makes their own spectacular mistakes, they were really making the same mistakes over and over when you boiled it right down. And I realized that the places where these novels and nonfiction where it was going wrong had little to do with their ability to write and everything to do with their ability to tell a story. So I started to notice what it was I was looking for, and I realized that what a story actually was and what really pulls people into stories is very, very different than what's taught and what people tend to believe. And at that point I started teaching, and I thought, I thought, well, we're wired for story, you know, we think in story. And so what we come to story for isn't the surface, isn't the plot, but it's really about how the plot is affecting the main character, the protagonist. We need to feel something, we need to feel what they're feeling as they're making sense of what's going on. And again, I kind of thought this is really cool, we're wired for story, and I thought it was true, but I kind of thought of it as a metaphor at that time and at the same time I've always been really interested in neuroscience, which of course was just becoming very big at that time. I mean, up until when I first started reading, they're really, they didn't have, you know, MRI or functional MRIs, they didn't know what they know now. So it's really relatively new in it, and as you probably know, there's been an explosion lately in what we know and what we can just, reading neuroscience, which is fascinating. I mean, neuroscience and stories are the same thing, that we really dive into them to find out what makes people tech. And suddenly I discovered that it wasn't just a theory, it wasn't a metaphor, it was a fact. We really are wired for story. We really do come to stories looking for these very specific things that were what I had realized I was looking for in everything that I read. And going deeper, I realized and discovered again reading the neuroscience and the behavioral evolution, it really, story really is a hardwired survival mechanism. It's not something that we turn to for pleasure. The reason that we feel pleasure when we read and when we get lost in a story is so that we pay attention to it, because story isn't something that we actually turn to to escape reality, which is what we tend to think. Story is something we turn to to navigate reality. And kind of once that became very clear along with some other things I'd love to talk to you about, it sort of became my mission to get that out there in any way that I could. So at this point, I work with writers, but I also work with nonprofits and businesses and just, I just really feel like the more people understand the power that story has over us because it has a power over us that we tend not to be aware of, that we will be able to navigate this world in ourselves with way more, being way more aware of why we're doing what we're doing and making decisions that might be a little more in it, that might be a little more authentic to us than some of the things that we find ourselves doing otherwise. So a couple of questions for me come from this, you know, I want to go back to the very beginning of this. You said something at the beginning, you said, you know, even as a kid, you had this profound love for storytelling, and this is something that I keep finding as I talk to more and more people at this show. I think there's something that we lose touch with as adults, something that is like a childhood dream or a childhood longing in your case of love for a story, and I'm really curious how we get back in touch with that or how we find it if we've lost it. That's a really good question, and I don't know if I know the answer to it. That is a really, really good question. I mean, I guess I can only answer that for myself, and that answer would be that I think that very often the biggest struggle that we go through is finding the thing that we really love that really calls to us. And I mean, I want to say it's a passion. I know that people often quote Joseph Campbell, that follow your bliss, which as I understand really pissed him off, because it sounds like it means just find what you like, and then it's going to be very easy just to, you know, actualize that in some way and it's this effortless thing, and he said really it should have been follow your bliss stirs, because it's really, really hard to then turn around and really follow it enough to turn it into something. And I think that is the tough thing that we run into, which is, okay, how do you take this thing that you really love and turn it into something that, and this is just the world that we live in, that can at least support us financially so that we can survive. And that's I think what's really hard. I think the other thing that pulls us away from it anyway, just has to do with our education system and the way that we're brought up to kind of really think about solely the second part of that, which is, okay, how are we going to make money, and how are we going to turn around and live in the material world. And those two things are kind of taught as if they're separate, or as if what matters most of course is making it financially, and it's very easy then to leave the passion behind or that thing that might not be fully formed in terms of what you'd want to, because for me I love story, but what did that really mean I was going to actually then become? That was the hard part. Some people, I mean a lot of people really feel it instantly. I remember when I worked, I worked Norton back in the day, and they published Stephen J Gould, who was a naturalist and wrote several books, and I remember he once came to one of our conferences, and he said that when he was five years old, his dad took him to a natural history museum, and from that moment on he knew exactly what he wanted to do. But because there was a very clear path, he could go on to become a naturalist and to become the person that he was, it was clear, there were those steps. I think the hardest thing is when there aren't those steps, and I think that's really pretty much hit or miss. I don't know how you do that. For me, I kind of fell into it, honestly, and a lot of the people I know who are successful, that's exactly what happened to them, they fell into it. And maybe it comes from being open to it, and maybe it comes from not therefore throwing yourself into something that is hard and fast that you don't want to remember hearing one really sad story when I lived in New York. A woman who, she was a dental hygienist, and she talked about the dentist who she worked for, and he was very wealthy, and they had a big apartment on Central Park West and a country house, and he was, I think, 50, and he said, "You know, I hate being a dentist." But what do I do? Because any other thing I try to do now, my whole entire life is going to implode. I can't support this big life if I go back to school and become a poet or whatever else it would be he'd want to do. So balancing those two things, that's the trick, isn't it? How do you do that? How did you do it? It's interesting, because I think you're right. It is. It is something that you often fall into. It's kind of the existential crisis of the world we live in today, right? You've got dissatisfaction at an all-time high with the way life is, and, of course, a world of people who are continually challenging the status quo telling you, "By the way, you don't have to do that." And yet, in all reality, there are real needs and real things that have to happen. Food has to be put on the table, bills have to be paid, lights have to be kept on. You don't want to end up on the streets. So it is a constant battle. And it's interesting because one of the things that I keep seeing over and over again is, I think the people who fall into it and are open to it, they seem to have, it's not even luck necessarily, but it doesn't seem as much of a struggle as people who see sort of the creative career and are like, "Okay, that's it. I have to have that, and I am going to work to get it." It seems like when you fall into it, it's a very different feeling. I almost liken it to you're riding a wave, you're adjusting to what the wave is doing. Of course, I can relate everything to surfing, but that's, to me, sort of the existential crisis of the world that we live in is that there is no sort of right answer to that question. In fact, I think that the question itself is a journey. I agree with you. And I think just to go back, when you said there's luck involved, I think that is absolutely true. And it's one of the things that people don't tend to really focus on, they tend to take credit for what they did and not see the amount of luck, whether it's like literal luck in the right person saw you at the right time or luck in terms of who your parents were or where you were born or the advantages that you were just given from birth on, because we do tend to see the way that we grew up and the world that we grew up in as the world as opposed to our world, but the other flip side is luck favors the prepared. And kind of the more that we've given voice to that thing that really matters to us, the more likely it is that those opportunities are going to present themselves at whatever point. But I think also when you talk about it being existential, I think, and this probably goes off topic, but I think that one of the biggest problems that we have, and this is just not something that can be easily solved, is that we evolved to live in a world that we no longer live in. I mean, we evolved to live in, there's a number called Dunbar's numbers, Robin Dunbar, who came up with a number that we evolved to live in communities that exceed no more than 150 people ever. And we evolved to live in a world where our survival was something that we really had to take care of. In other words, if you didn't farm, if you were 100 gatherers, up until 10,000 years ago. So when you got up, you had to go out and find your food, like there wasn't a choice. You had to find your water. You had to find your shelter. And as a result, you had a sense of purpose. You knew what to do. We are so far removed from that that I think just even finding purpose is really kind of hard and terrifying. And think about it on that other level. It's like, if tomorrow you woke up, or any of us woke up, and there was no food in the market, and there were no food in the restaurants, within three days, what would you do? How would you survive? If you walked into the kitchen, and you turned on the spigot, and no water came out, what would you do? We couldn't survive. It's really kind of terrifying. And so I think that what drives us, and what draws us to something that interests us, or to something that brings us sustenance, is something that becomes so almost conceptual. What am I going to pick? What is it going to be? There's so many choices that that in and of itself can be paralyzing. So yeah, I agree. I think part of what you're saying is that that thing that really does interest us, that we are interested in from the time that we're small. If we can really find a way to tap into and listen to that, it might lead us towards what it is that is at least going to give us enough of a sense of purpose that's going to take us out there and allow us to find a way to mold this thing that we're interested in into something that is going to bring us the sustenance, I mean, literally food and shelter that we need. But as you can see, even this conversation has become conceptual because there is no hard and fast, hunter and gatherer, this is what I have to do in order to survive. There's so many choices. And people tend to think, we think of freedom, and as if we're having a lot of choice, we can do whatever we want, and that's a good thing. But the fact of the matter is endless choice isn't freeing, endless choice is paralyzing. It's funny you say that because I actually wrote today, I said, you know, a little essay on what I called making the impossible possible, and I said one of the most daunting things you can ever face is nothing, you know, and what do we do as creative people, our lives are basically dictated by every day waking up and trying to figure out how to make something for nothing and make the impossible possible, and I thought, you know, possible is not a destination. The entire answer to that question is actually a journey that you have to be willing to spend your lifetime on. Exactly. I totally agree with you. Well, let's do this. I want to ask you a few more questions. You know, you brought up the beginning of your career where, you know, you've worked in writing, you've worked in publishing, you've worked as an agent. You know, one of the things that always interests me is kind of how people's past and their previous experiences mold and shape them into who they are and the things that they brought with them. So I'm really kind of curious, you know, what are the challenges that you face during the earlier part of your career? And then of course, how have all of those things that you've learned from those various careers and various things influenced the way you show up in the world today and the work that you do today? That's a great question. Let me see if I can answer that somewhat succinctly. I would say, I mean, to narrow it down to something that makes a point, I would really say that what makes me who I am today, honestly, if I had to bring it down to kind of the linchpin, like, what is that thing, besides it really being love of story, meaning why is someone doing what they're doing? Because that's what we're hardwired to come into. That's what we turn the story for. That's what we look at everybody and we're thinking, what are you really thinking? How are you making sense of this? What's actually going on here, as opposed to what's going on on the surface? And I would say that growing up, especially being female and in the times in which I grew up, and I think in the world that we still live in, because I think there's a lot of racism and a lot of sexism. I think sexism is the last bastion that we're allowed to be biased in. We've gotten really great at really recognizing how to interact with people and how to value other people. But women are the last group that we can say things like, oh, he cries like a little girl, and that's OK. I mean, we had Brent Ratner, who got kicked off of producing the Academy Awards because he went on a show and talked about what he said in terms of movies and some movie he just shot and someone who liked to rehearse, and he said, "Oh, rehearsal is for fags." And he got kicked off because you can't say that and rightly so. But for women, you can still say, oh, you know, he breaks down like a little girl or he throws like a girl or, oh, you're just like a little bitch. I mean, it's still completely OK. And kind of growing up where that was way more OK, even than it is now, I really felt my entire life as if when I was going to say something, I had to prove it six ways from Sunday. I couldn't just say something and expect people to go, oh, yeah, I see what you mean. If I was going to explain why I thought something was true, I was going to be able to back it up from every different angle. And because of that, when I, you know, most of my career, again, has been working with writers and working with story, whether, again, publishing was an agent or I do a lot of work right now, what I do is I work a lot one-on-one with writers at this point, kind of, all over the world. And if I was going to tell them, OK, you need to change this, OK, this isn't working, I needed to dig so deeply to figure out why. Why isn't this working? What would make it work? What do you need to do in terms of pre-work in order to make it work? What do you need to know that that need, and I will say, it's a need, it's a need to want to be seen, like we all have. We want to feel like what we're doing has importance. We want to feel like we're making a difference in the world. And I wanted to feel that way. And I felt like the only way I can do that is to dig so deep that I wasn't going to be looked at as, and at this point, it wasn't about sexism anymore. But that's where it started. You know, no one was going to look at me and go, "You don't know," or, "I don't believe you." I mean, they might argue with me. I'm not saying I'm always 100 percent right on everything, you know, at all. But I was going to be able to back it up and go back and forth. And that really, that's who I bring to the world right now. That is what made me who I am. And that's what kind of gave me the confidence to go forward. And it also helped me, going back to what you were saying about, you know, creativity and finding that thing that you like and digging down. It's because of that that I realized what my true, and I hate even using this word, but my true gift is. And if I have any, because there's a ton I don't have, but if I have one, it's I can look at any story and tell you why it's working, why it isn't, and what you need to do to get it onto the page. It's just like a light goes on. I don't do anything at this point to make that happen. It just happens. But I think it probably comes back to, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the was it was at the tipping point of the, you know, you have to have he talked about 10,000 hours, which actually comes from, I think it's a guy named Herbert Simon, who I think he won the Nobel Prize for this. And he talked about, you have to have 50,000 chunks of information before knowing something gets regulated to what's called your cognitive subconscious, where, you know, someone could ask you a question, you're a mathematician or a doctor, and they ask you a question that anybody else is going to take six weeks to figure out, and you just know the answer, not because, you know, with writers, they'd say it was the muse, but not because there's some muse or some external force, but because you've just internalized that you've got the muscle memory that you can look at it, you just know. And that's what I also take into the world is that ability. And again, it just came from really wanting to be seen and from wanting to dig down so deeply that I was going to be able to answer any question anybody asked about what I had to say. Again, I'm not trying to say I'm always right by any stretch, but just that that's what drove me. Did that answer the question? Mm hmm. Okay, good. I never know. Yeah, that absolutely answered the question. So you know, as you might have guessed by now, that actually raises more questions for me. It's really interesting you bring up sort of this deep need to be seen. I think that it's funny. I think that the clear underlying deep need for me and why I do this is I have a deep need for connection with other people. And same thing. Same thing. Need to be seen. Need to connect. Yeah, absolutely. So the question I have for you, you know, you brought up that you have a gift for being able to do that. And I would say my gift is being able to navigate a conversation and curate people like you and finding threads and connecting dots in a way that most people wouldn't think. The question I have is, when we're looking at our own lives, how do we pick up on the threads where our own gifts might lie? That's a really good question. I would say, I've not thought about that, where our actual gifts might lie. I don't know that I can actually answer that question to tell you the truth. I'm trying to bring it back to story because, not trying to, oh my God, everything's got to come back to story, but it kind of does because the truth is, you know, in our lives, it's like we think in story, it's like you're the protagonist in your own life and you evaluate everything, whether it's physical, social, or, or conceptual based on one thing. How is this going to affect me? Given my very specific agenda, which doesn't make us selfish in any way, just that's how we survive. Our agenda might be, you know, even to be, to be, quote unquote altruistic because I think, I think just altruistic is a misnomer in the sense that we never do anything 100% selflessly. We do it selflessly in the sense that we might not get anything back in a material sense, but everything we do, we do based on how it's then going to make us feel. So I guess the answer to that question might be to really look into our lives and see that what, what are we doing that makes us feel like our most authentic self, that what really matters to us most as opposed to how we're necessarily seen out in the world. And sometimes, you know, as we both know, especially considering the way that we're often brought up where, you know, the goal is to, you know, is to gauge ourselves based on not just how others see us because we do gauge ourselves by that. And that's, I think, a given I don't think, I think it's impossible not to because we're sort of wired to take our cues from other people because we want to belong to, we can talk about how and why that's true, but we want to belong to a group. So that really matters to us. But there are sort of these artificial markers for success like I have a big house or I have a fancy car or I have a, you know, handsome husband or a beautiful wife. And those things might be things that make us feel successful externally, but are completely at odds with what make us feel successful internally and I think being able to separate those two and see what makes you really feel good about yourself very well might bring you back to that thing that matters most to you. And like, for instance, for me, again, because I can, we can only use our own lives as examples or as, I mean, that's what we know better than anything else. I would say that when I look back at my life, every single thing I ever did had to do with story, every single thing I ever did had to do with not just story, but how story affects us, how we're being affected by, I'll tell you, I mean, interestingly, when I was in college, I wanted to and I didn't because I didn't have follow through then, at least in this way, I wanted to do a paper on the effects of advertising on the roles of men and women because I felt like whether or not you, you buy whatever product you're seeing in a commercial and this was back in the day before you could fast forward through commercial. So we saw a gazillion of them that whether or not you went out and bought, you know, tied or end dust or whatever it is they were advertising, you were buying into the lifestyle that it was that you were seeing in those commercials like, you know, your house had to be clean and women were the ones who cleaned and I think that that's always been what's really interested me. In fact, I think I mentioned that just did a TEDx talk a couple of in March at Furman University that did a whole TED on story and how, you know, they called it, I think it was story, the common thread of our humanity and I began the talk with exactly that, with the effect that those commercials had had on me and how I saw my life separate from that I was seeing my life in myself in terms of commercials, but if you'd asked me what I believed, I would have told you the opposite of the way I actually lived my life and what I actually did. I think on one level it's being able to separate those two what society has told us we should be and what we actually believe and feel like we should be and that's a great place to begin and to go what really matters to me and I think that those two things become so separated on one in one sense that when we really find that thing and tell me if this is, I bet this is true in your life also or with people that, you know, almost everyone I know who's been super successful didn't begin what they were doing to make a lot of money. That was not their goal ever. It was because they were really interested in it and then it somehow would catapult them into something when you said earlier luck, that's when the luck found them and suddenly something would happen that if you saw it in a movie, you'd go, "I'll give me a break." That really happened, that's just way too convenient and yet that really is how it happened. But it's that we're disconnect between doing something and not really paying attention to or doing it because this is going to make me a bazillion dollars so I hope that answered the question. Yeah, definitely. You know, I have, so there's one other thing that you mentioned and, you know, this is the last thing I want to ask you about the past before we start really getting into what I want to get to, you mentioned follow through and not having it then and I think this is so critical to anybody who wants to accomplish anything in the world today. You know, my business partner Greg Hartle calls it a bias towards action and that it's absolutely necessary if you, you know, want to be an entrepreneur and I always say I'm like, you know, people have this idea in their heads that by the way, you have the whole thing planned out and you know everything that's going to happen down the line and I keep, I said, you know, at best all we're doing is making educated guesses. The whole thing is guesswork. And I'm really curious how you develop follow through and the bias towards action based on your experience, based on the people that you've seen throughout your career. You know, what are the things that they had in common? Well, I really think, I think one of the pro, I think just to go first, like why we don't have it to begin with or at least why I didn't have it to begin with. And I think that came and I'm hoping things are at least slightly different now, but maybe not, especially with a common core coming in. But when I went to school, the education and what you did in your life were completely separate even if you were studying to be something in college. It was still a completely different, different kind of model. So unless you're kind of going to leap into a model that was already there, like, I'm going to be a doctor. So I know exactly what to do. There, it was what we were saying earlier. There were so many limitless possibilities that it became utterly paralyzing and without there being some kind of context for it, it became, well, I can do it tomorrow or I can do it when the time is right or I can do it when I've had enough sleep. And I think that most things in life, that's exactly what we do. We put them off until tomorrow. And if you look on a calendar, what it says under tomorrow is a week from never, you know, we never do anything until we're sort of forced to. So for me, you know, when it comes to follow through at the end of the day, I mean, it was really two things. The necessity was one I really did at that point, have to go out and take what I knew and put it into action because I needed money, because I needed to find something that was going to bring me in some kind of an income. But more than that, it really came down to what I said earlier, which was I really wanted to make a difference. And I felt like I was saying something that no one else was saying and I wanted to get it out in the world and that made a difference, that made a huge difference. And the other thing, I really think it's important on that level is being able to slog through when it feels like it might not work and you don't really know and really taking it step by step because it was hard and it took a long time. It took a really long time, but it was that fire of, you know, I want to make this difference that kind of kept it going. And I think that that's really part of it too, is wanting to take something out into the world. That really makes a difference. And then also surrounding yourself with people who also are motivated in that way. I think that makes a huge difference. I think doing it in a vacuum is really, I think I could have done it much more quickly. Everything I did, I did by myself, like 100% by myself, I kept wanting to have partners and trying to bring them in and it just never worked because I would kind of do all the work and then it was like, yeah, okay, this, I might as well just do this by myself. So the other thing I think that really helps is having partners and being around like-minded people who can both frame what you're doing, but perhaps they're doing something different so they can give you feedback without necessarily changing what you're doing, without trying to change what you're saying or what you're doing because often you kind of come into that when you're working with people who are doing exactly the same things. Like I've been hearing about, and I'm sure you must know about these. What do they call them? The maker studios, you know, the maker labs where they have the big buildings and somebody has bought like the million dollar equipment that if you were an entrepreneur and you wanted to start up in terms of inventing something, you would need a million dollars for a startup but now. Spark something uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from uncommon goods. The busy holiday season is here and uncommon goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand-picked gifts for everyone on your list all in one spot. Gift that spark joy, wonder delight and that it's exactly what I wanted feeling. He scoured the globe for original, handmade, absolutely remarkable things. Last year I found the perfect gift for my nephew, periodic table building blocks. These blocks were a big hit and considering he was talking in full sentences before he even turned two, I'd say that's a pretty good win. They're not just educational but also a fun way to spark his curiosity. 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And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those owners to your contracts, they said, "What the f*ck are you talking about? You insane Hollywood f*ck." So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. For a couple thousand dollars, you can come in and have an office there and all sorts of people do. So I sort of think on an NPR where, you know, so that way your, they were talking about a guy who had, was putting together something about a, some kind of a, a wheelchair that had a camera so it could see where it was going, but he needed something that was going to do for the camera and the way that that was going to really need an engineer and like two doors down was a guy who had some sort of a startup and he was an engineer so they could like go back and forth and trade expertise so it was as if his company actually employed and, and an engineer, but they didn't have to. And I, I honestly think that the more people can get involved in something like that, the more connected they're going to feel and the more they're going to have skin in the game. Because I think that really is the key thing when you're doing it all by yourself, you don't have that kind of skin in the game and it takes gutting it out and that's incredibly hard in my experience. So, you know, so I think that might also be a way of pulling it out and putting it into the world and really finding a way to find that follow through because accountability, I mean, just showing up, even if everybody else is doing something different than you, I think really makes the difference. There are times where I really wish that I had an office somewhere where there were other people around me because I work, you know, completely by myself. Just having someone else there, I think I would be even more productive than I am and I, as it is, I sort of work 24/7. But I have that addiction that I think is the biggest addiction these days that has nothing to do with cigarettes or, or, or getting high or, or, or drinking, which is checking your email 10,000 times a day, anyone like so addicted to that, that I just wish there were people around who would see me and then stop me from it. So I think accountability also, if you can find that in any way, really makes a difference. So as far as the, the digital addiction goes, I can, I can completely relate and I think it's just kind of the nature of the world we live in today. I mean, the fact that you have digital detox camps is a, is it a real indication of that? Yeah. You know, I, I want to shift gears a little bit and I want to start getting into what brought you here in the first place with, and, and what really kind of drew me into your work because I felt that it was so relevant to everybody that is here. You know, I, I had a chance last year as a, you know, by, by way of our former guest, Linda Sivertsson, to stumble upon your book Wired for Story. And I really want to get into this whole idea of, of the neuroscience of storytelling and how it applies in our lives and, and you know, because what I saw really was I saw a framework for storytelling that I as a content creator could tap into with every single episode that I do of this podcast, uh, that anybody who is listening to this, who creates something, whether it be products, whether it be services could tap into it. And obviously I told you the other, the other dot they connected in my head as I was reading the Pixar book, uh, by Ed Catmull Creativity Inc. And I thought, okay, here's people who clearly know how to tell stories. And I'm like, who do I know that could help us with this? And immediately you came to mind. So I'd love for you to, if possible, kind of walk us through the concepts in Wired for Story, uh, how they apply and then how we can incorporate them into our lives and our work. Um, I think the easiest thing, if I could sort of, uh, just, I mean, as I said earlier, um, we really do, we think in story, story is hardwired into our brain. And the problem, I think that we have as a, especially in our society is that, and it's, it's really ironic, um, because we love story so much, we tend to have really marginalized it. And so we think of story as something we turn to for entertainment. Uh, the truth is there's never been a society on earth that didn't have storytelling. It's a human universal, which probably should have clued us into the fact that there's more to it than just a great way to spend a Saturday night. But the reason that we don't know that is again, because we tend to think of stories as entertainment. And so we marginalize them and we think, you know, yes, sure, our lives would be far drabber without story, but we'd have survived just fine because we don't, because stories just, uh, you know, it's something that we turn to for entertainment. It doesn't serve an actual purpose. And that really couldn't be further from the truth. Story was more crucial to our evolution than opposable thumbs because all opposable thumbs did was let us hang on. This story that told us what to hang on to. I mean, just think of story as the world's first virtual reality, you know, minus that geeky visor. And I think this is why when people understand this, that it really helps them understand that story is the only way that we communicate because without story, all we'd have is the perpetual now. And I don't care how great people think Eckhart Tolle is being in the now all the time is a really bad idea because if we were only in the now, we wouldn't even know there was a tomorrow, let alone be able to speculate on the, you know, dangers and delights that weight us there. It's story that lets us step out of the present and envision the future so we can plan for the thing that from then to now still scares us more than anything, which is the unknown and the unexpected stories are there. Think of it as, as a way to vicariously experience difficult situations. We haven't had to be in yet to think what would I need to learn and what would it feel like in order to survive and I think without kind of going deeply into and giving you an example of that, the key thing to really think of when you think of story and this really kind of twists what we've been told about story is story was so crucial. It was so seminal to our survival that nature saw to it that it felt good. So we pay attention to it and learn what we needed to do in order to survive. In other words, that great feeling that we get when we're lost in a good story and we all know that feeling because it's what draws us to story. That feeling isn't ephemeral, it isn't arbitrary, it's not pleasure for pleasure's sake, it's not love of language as they say. That feeling is actually, it isn't even the point, it's, it's, think of it as a biological lure. It's the hook that literally physically paralyzes us so we can get lost and experience the world of the story. Do you know what it actually is? That great feeling? It's actually a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine that's always, that an effective story always instantly triggers by making us curious. It's your brain's way of rewarding you and urging you to follow your curiosity to find out how the story ends because again, you just might learn something that you need to know. And as I said earlier, the takeaway is we don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality. And what it really helps for people to know beyond that is that, is that story, what it does is it takes big ideas, dry facts, abstract concepts and it translates them into something very specific so that we can experience that, those realities and figure out what they mean to us and what we should do as a result. And that is why. And this probably also comes as a big surprise. We use story and not facts to make sense of everything. So that basically is how story in the brain evolved in tandem and why story is so crucially important. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. But naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. Balancing a wellness routine and busy travel plans? Try Aloe moves. The health and wellness app you need to stay consistent. Join alomoves.com with code ACAST for a 30-day free trial and 20% off an annual membership. From yoga and Pilates to strength workouts, Alomoves has it all. From 5 to 60 minutes, Alomoves has classes or flow that fit your schedule. Plus, Alomoves offers meditations, sound baths, nutrition tips and self-care tutorials. And your perfect wellness routine anytime and anywhere with Alomoves. So, ask me another question for... I want to move forward from that, but I'm not sure where you want me to go after that. Yeah, well, you know, I actually have an idea of where I want to go, which always works out well because I always know where I want to go when it comes to this. I want to get back into this idea of escaping versus navigating a story. That's a really, you know, using story to escape reality versus navigate reality. I think that's a really, really fascinating way of looking at it because I would have never thought that. You know, when I sit down to watch a movie, for example, I sit down to watch Johnny Depp and Blow, which is one of my favorite first-person narration movies of all time, I don't necessarily know that I want to navigate the reality of being a Colombian drug dealer or, you know, bringing cocaine into the United States, but there's something about that story that is so appealing to me and I'm very curious, like, can you talk more about this idea of escaping versus navigating reality and then, of course, you know, how it applies to us? And then I want to actually bring this, I want to bring around a tactical example, and I'm going to be very selfish with my tactical example, but let's talk about this first. Okay, let me give you, let me give you two examples, I think that might really help. First example, and then this is just a very quick one, is in terms of story changing how we navigate reality, because it doesn't just necessarily mean navigate, like, in the physical world, are you going to be a drug dealer and I'm watching this movie to see the pros and cons and what am I going to do? I mean it just as much in terms of socially and how we relate to one another. For instance, there's, and they actually said there's a social scientist term for this, and we've all seen this happen recently, and in my lifetime, I have never seen anything turn around as fast, and I'm talking about the way that in this country we look at gay marriage. I mean, if you look at how that has flipped in the past 10 years, it is astounding, and do you know one of the main reasons why it flipped? I don't. They call it the will and grace effect, like literally that is the term for it, because that show went on, and people who had never, who thought, of course, they didn't know any gay people, or they had no idea. They watched that show, and they went, "Oh my god, these people are not as different than as I thought. Oh my god, we're more alike." And they really feel that that is what turned the country around, or part of what turned the country around so quickly, but let me give you a more specific example. There was a study that was done in 2010 out of Ohio State University, and it was in part to see what would have a greater effect on college age women's use of birth control. Would it be a new style documentary, write facts figures on the horrors of teen pregnancy, or would it be an episode of a very popular TV show? So one group of women watched this new style documentary that they made, and it was really good. I mean, it had great production values, it had a lot of really scary facts and really scary figures, and all the awful things that were going to happen to you from the time you had a baby until you died, and PSU died sooner. They had teen moms and dads who were talking about how their lives had been upended when they had babies. The other group watched an episode of a very popular nighttime TV show, one I think that you're probably familiar with, called the OC, in which two of the main characters, high school seniors, Ryan and Teresa, were dealing with the heartbreaking gut-wrenching consequences of an unintended pregnancy. No facts, no figures, just what would it be like? I know you know where this is going. The women who watched the new style documentary, their behavior didn't change. They felt like people were telling them what to do, and you know how it is. Once you believe something, it becomes part of your identity. So they were just, and what that does is, when someone, I mean, just a short time out, when we just get facts, what happens is it calls up our analytic brain and its goal is to just put calls in everything that we hear. It's like once we believe something, it becomes part of our self-identity, even if it's that we believe our toothpaste is the world's best brand. And so we're going to argue with it, and I'm sure that's something that we've all been through, especially in our country. It's so incredibly polarized at the moment. And no matter what side you're on politically, at some point you probably thought, "Only I could explain, give the facts to the other side." They see we're all on the same page, and we agree. So I'm just going to explain it to them one more time. And the thing that happens is, is while you're explaining it to them, you know what they're doing? They're just waiting for you to stop talking. So they can tell you why everything you just said was wrong, and why would they believe is right? And when they're talking, you do the same thing to them. Story does something very different. So those women who watch that new style documentary, they just felt like, "Well, that would never happen. You know, what I'm doing has worked so far. That would never happen to me." And so not only did their behavior not change, but I'm sure you've heard the term cognitive bias, which is what we believe something. We only tend to hear things that reaffirm our beliefs, and things that don't, we totally either don't hear or minimize. So as far as they were concerned, what they were doing was working so far. And they looked at those other people, that other teen moms and dads, and thought, "Well, that's what those idiots would do." I would never do that. I would never be in that situation, and their behavior didn't change if anything. They doubled down on what they already believed. Women who watched the episode of the OC, because they had been in the skin of Teresa, and just, you know, just to let you know that they've been functional MRI studies that show when you're lost in a good story, the same areas of your brain light up that would light up, if you were doing what that main character was doing. So they were watching Teresa go through that. They were Teresa going through that experience vicariously. So the last thing they wanted to do was experience that in real life and their behavior changed. And just think about it for a minute. The sole reason for being for that documentary was to change behavior, and it didn't. What was the sole reason for being for the episode of the OC? I mean, you know, to get high ratings, to sell soap, but that's what changed behavior, because the thing is there's no such thing as mindless entertainment. We are being changed by stories every minute of every day, whether we know it or not. Stories enter through our gut. They make us feel something. Then it changes how we see things, and it looks at our eyes, and we see the world differently. And if you want to say mindless, the only way it's mindless is it very often does not go through our cognitive thinking brain. So that story, whatever it is that you watched about the drug dealers, while you might not then become a drug dealer, hopefully, I'm thinking you probably didn't. But I am betting that there are certain ways in terms of how people treat each other, or how you might now read the way that someone might be thinking when they're talking to you, or what they might do, or looking for their motive. It did change you in some way, because we're changed by stories all the time. And the scary thing is, we often don't know it. And you know who really knows that? Like writers tend to know that, which kills me. But you know, really knows it well. Advertisers, and politicians, and televangelists, they really understand. In fact, they call stories a Trojan horse. It's a Trojan horse. You're going to get involved in the story, and they're going to kind of sneak in ideas and beliefs that if you saw coming at you head on, you would run from. So that really is the power of story. And that really is why we turn to story to navigate everything. And the reason really is, and I could go on and on about this forever, I hate to tell you, but the reason for it is, is because what story does is, I mean, facts cannot affect us because they're conceptual. Story changes those facts into very specific scenarios that make them accessible to the one system by which we make every decision we ever make, which is another thing that people do not tend to know at all, and think the opposite of, is that we make every decision we ever make based on one thing, our emotion. And that, again, flies in the face of what we've been talking. Story spins facts into feeling. That's the point. It's how we make sense of everything, because emotion is our barometer for what things mean to us. As Daniel Gilbert so brilliantly said in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, indeed, feelings don't just matter. Feelings are what mattering means. So that is why story has the incredible amount of power that it does, and why only story has that power. Because story can be two words. I mean, think about it with the right, the right had a story when the whole thing was going on, and probably still is to some degree with the Affordable Health Care Act, they could say, if you know, and this is where it comes down to all the people listening and who might be wanting to communicate with other people, a story can be two words if you understand the mindset of the person who you're talking to, and the stories they tell themselves about their lives and what matters to them. So the right in terms of the Affordable Health Care Act back in the day could say a two-word story. And you know what that story was? Death panel. If they said death panel, here's the story their audience heard. Oh my God, if this goes through, the government is going to take grandma and not going to give her chemotherapy. They're going to put her on an ice flow and send her out, you know, to die on the ice because we all know that insurance companies would give grandma that. Wait a minute. Of course, they never thought it through that much. But that was the story they were going to tell it themselves. So understanding that we think in story, that we think in narrative, that we use narrative to make sense of the facts really gives you an incredible amount of power and power that's often vilified because people don't like to think that stories move them again because we think of story as kids stuff as once upon a time and emotion is something that we run from because, and again, I'll stop there. I could give you a whole feel on emotion and why we run from it. But basically that is, I hope, the answer to your question. That was mind-blowingly cool and amazing and insightful. So I believe it or not. It's funny that you brought up the OC of all things because the OC has hands down my favorite TV show of all time. Did you see that episode? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, well, I mean, I was addicted to the OC from the moment it came out. It was like, this is like 90210 with better dialogue and better music. So just a lot of really interesting things there about story, emotion. I mean, just a super eye-opening look, you know, and as I was listening to you say that, I was thinking through some of the most popular episodes of our podcast and why when somebody, you know, like our friend, Joe Loya, who robbed 30 banks in two years and spent seven years in prison talks, he glues us to our ears to our headphones and we don't want to stop listening versus somebody who comes and teaches how to with facts and steps and why, you know, when we sat down and analyzed, look at all our most popular interviews. The thing that always we could come back to was that it was the story of an interesting or remarkable person that people were drawn to, not how to do something that they had done. Right, exactly, exactly, because it all comes down to I want to be in that person's skin and I want to experience it because the brain, the thing to think of is the brain doesn't learn by thinking about things. The brain learns by experiencing things and stories, the language of experience. So you're in there and you're feeling and you're going through it with that person. In fact, you know how they say it's so interesting. You know how they say over on the same wavelength? The truth is when you listen to someone telling a story, you really literally, and it's not figurative. It's like neuroscience has turned so many metaphors into fact or proved to the metaphors. In fact, you really are, they look at your brainwaves. You are the same, your brains do synchronize except for one place. There's one time where your brainwaves change. You know what that is? It's when if you were telling me a story and I'm listening and now your brain and my brain are the same and now you get to a place where something exciting is going to happen, my brain is going to leap forward and my brainwaves are going to change because I'm going to anticipate where I think that story is going because I'm dying to know what's going to happen. Your brain is not going to leap ahead because you already know. So that is the only time when it will deviate. But yeah, stories hook us because we've got that dopamine. There's that old expression that to get lost in a good story is a willful suspension of disbelief. Couldn't be less true because there's nothing willful about it. And that dopamine grabs you. You're helpless. You are lost in the world of the story. That's why you're reading at night and you go, yeah, I'll stop after one of this page, after the next page, after the next page, and then suddenly the sun's coming up. Not because you never made the conscious decision, but literally your body, your brain put reality on hold because it thought, oh my God, I might learn something that's really going to help me. Now that question, because we do come to every story asking one question, what am I going to learn here that's going to help me make it through the night, but that's hardwired into what's known as our cognitive subconscious. We don't consciously think that. But yeah, that does not surprise me in the least what you just said that the people were more interested in podcasts that told stories than ones that were. And if you take beam A and attach it to beam B, you know, yeah, I totally believe that. So, you know, the question that I have actually is in addition to the stories that we experience through external stimuli, like the movies, like books, like television, we also have an internal story. And you know, you talked about how stories can help us change our behavior or do change our behavior. So how do we work on the internal narrative so that it changes our behavior for the better? That's a really, if I was a psychologist, I could answer that. I'm going to try anyway. What the heck? But and really, I mean, there's some great books on that. There's a book called Redirect by Timothy D. William, Timothy D. Wilson, who talks about that. And of course, oh, man, what's his name? Pentabacher writes a lot about that. My mind is blanking on his first name, but he writes a lot about that too. And really, it does come back to looking at your narrative and how you see the world and the meaning that you are reading into the events of your life. Because again, what we do and what we turn to story for is there's the surface world. And the surface world is a world we all agree on. We all see the surface world. It's kind of the party line. And what we're really interested in story, both in ourselves and in the world out there is, well, what's really going on beneath the surface? And that is the meaning that you assign to the things that happen out there in the real world. And I think in terms of looking at your own stories, it really is going back and seeing what happened and then looking at the meaning that you assigned to it and then reframing it in terms of, wait, was that real and kind of trying to uncover those places where you might have been off. Because the thing to think of, and I think the most important point I could make here, perhaps not being able to answer your original question, but one thing I would say is I think we are on one level way too hard on ourselves. Because the way that we make sense of the world has to do with something that we said earlier. People tend to think that the way that we make sense of the world is, there's one way the world is out there. And when we go to school, we learn what the world is like, and we all sort of have the exact same definition of things out there. It's the same basic definitions and the same basic rules. And we see things the same basic way, except for people who are really super screwed up. And hopefully they'll get back, they'll get a lot of therapy and they'll get back on the plan. But the truth is, the way that we make sense of things, the way that we interpret what's happening to us and what's going on in the world is based on one thing and one thing only. And that is what our past experience has taught us that things mean. That is the yardstick, the decoder ring that we use to analyze and make sense of what's happening to us in a moment, how other people are taking it, and what we should therefore do, given what our specific agenda is. But the thing is very often, we are operating based on misbeliefs. And those misbeliefs are usually something that worked in the past and that now didn't, because we don't ever believe anything just to be mean or just because we're jerks or just because we're idiots. We believe things that keep us safe and that protect us at the time when they're inculcated and then often they're just wrong. And we need to learn sort of to overcome them and to see that. But often we take those misbeliefs and we beat ourselves up for them. What's wrong with me that I think? What's wrong? I'm such an idiot. I'm such a fool that I think that. And now we fall down this rabbit hole of feeling badly about ourselves and we can't really deal with the problem, which is somewhere or something happened that is going to make me feel that way. And I might immediately feel that way when whatever happens. I'll give you an example of that in a moment. But then I can stop and think about it and undo it. For instance, I once heard Dennis Polumbo talk, he's written I think several, he writes mystery books. But he's also a therapist and he works with writers who have writers block and a friend of mine gave it through a talk where he was he was going to be there for the evening and was filling up seats. So I went and he talked about the fact that, and he using this example only because it does play into old especially female stereotypes, but he felt that when he was young his mother had been very demanding and he'd had a really hard time with her. And so whenever he met women, he'd always, and he used like his hand. He took his hand and he kind of grabbed the front of his shirt. And he said, I always think they're going to be manipulating me and I always feel negative. And he said, I realized that there's nothing I can do to stop that hand from grabbing my shirt. I'm wired for that. There's no way I can undo it. But when it happens, I can take my other hand and pull it out of my shirt and then really look at what's happening. I can really tell myself a different story and move forward. So the more that we're kind of aware of where our stories came from, but we don't vilify ourselves for it, the easier not only is it going to be to kind of overcome and craft a new narrative, a new context within which to make sense of what's happening, but also to really like ourselves in the process and not be full of kind of self-hatred what's wrong with me that I feel that way. Because I think that's one of the biggest problems. Or for instance, just certain things that we're all hardwired to feel and think. We have what's known as, well first, here's the problem that we tend to see in ourselves. We tend to think, what's wrong with me? I always jump to the worst scenario, the worst case scenario. It's like you wake up and you see you've got a hang nail and you immediately think, oh my god, I have hang nail cancer. I'm going to be dead by the end of the day. Why do I always jump to that worst case scenario? There's something wrong with me. In fact, I heard someone on the radio. I loved one saying, oh yeah, that proved we have low self-esteem. That's why we do that. And I was yelling at the radio, no, no, no, that's not it. The reason we tend to jump to worst case scenarios is because we have an avidity for really leaping to the worst case scenario because of things like, for instance, back in the day, if you mistook a stick, a snake, a stick for a snake, let me get this right, if you mistook a stick for a snake a hundred times, you were going to be okay. But if you mistook one snake for a stick, you were going to be dead. So we're wired to leap to that, oh my god, here's the worst thing that could happen, because in case it did, you had to be ready to fight, you know, fight or fight, fight or fight, fight instant. So we have that natural inclination to leap to that worst case scenario. That, in no way, means that there's something wrong with us. It just means we're human. But that said, and knowing that, we can look at that hang nail and go, you know what? I don't think there's even such a thing as hang nail cancer, and probably 10,000 million people have had hang nails, and they didn't even, they didn't even get sick, let alone die. So I think probably I'm going to be okay. So just, I think often knowing a little bit about how we're wired and the way that we look at things, the way we're wired to come into the world, because as I said earlier, we really are hardwired to deal with 150 people max. That is who we are biologically, and really understanding that can help us also be kinder to ourselves. And the kinder we are to ourselves, the more likely we are to be able to see things a little more closely as to how they are, as opposed to from, you know, from everything being so incredibly fear-based. Wow. Halisa, this has been absolutely amazing. So I want to ask you one last question. You know, our show is called the Unmistakable Creative, and we live in probably one of the most noisy times in the world. And you being somebody who has studied that we're, you know, wired for story. I want to close with the question that I've closed every interview with for the last probably 25. What is it in your mind that makes a story, a person, or something in the world today a piece of creative work unmistakable? Oh, that's a really good question. I would say that what makes a story unmistakable? And if by unmistakable you mean it is going to grab you and it does that thing where you can walk by a hundred of them, but this one you're not going to walk by. It is going to grab you. And it's a really interesting, I think, paradox, which is it's something that really speaks to a universal, something that we all feel, that we all experience, and yet it does it in such a specific way, a specific unique way, that it instantly both pulls us in based on the specific and then allows us to tap into something that's so universal that it takes our breath away. Does that answer the question? Yeah. That's a question to answer. It is, and that's the reason I ask it because I never get the same answer twice, which I guess wouldn't, you know, wouldn't make any of the guests unmistakable if I got the same answer. I got similar answers, but but no, I mean, and I am always very curious. I hear that, you know, I hear it from so many different perspectives just because I think it is an important question to answer. But Lisa, let me say it has been my absolute pleasure to have you here as a guest on the unmistakable creative. I mean, this has been just packed with so many cool insights. And, you know, I mean, I read your book last year. I thought I'm like, there are certain things here I haven't been able to really get my head around, which is why I wanted to talk to you. And I thought, you know, this is going to benefit a lot of people. This has just been mind-blowingly fun, and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners. Oh, thank you. It was really fun for me too. I just like going forever. I just loved it. Thank you. Yeah. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. Today's episode of the unmistakable creative has been brought to you by Fresh Books, the simple accounting solution for business owners who want to skip the headaches of tax time, no more hunting receipts, digging for invoices, going through records one at a time. For a limited time, you can try it free. For 60 days, that's two whole months to see how much more efficient it will make your invoicing process. Visit getfreshbooks.com to learn more. And remember, when you get to the "How did you hear about a" section, enter unmistakable creative. And don't forget, when you support our sponsors, you support our show. You've been listening to the unmistakable creative podcast. Visit our website at unmistakablecreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives. At Amica Insurance, we know it's more than a life policy. It's about the promise and the responsibility that comes with being a new parent, being their day and night, and building a plan for tomorrow, today. For the ones you'll always look out for, trust Amica life insurance. Amica. Empathy is our best policy. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? Well, what if you could turn that fear into creative fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called "The Four Keys to Success in an AI world" and this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. We're talking about real differentiators here, like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and much more. Inside, you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person, or just simply someone who loves personal development. This isn't a story about tech taking over. It's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI. Picture this AI as your creative co-pilot not just as a tool, but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills. The Four Keys ebook will show you exactly how to do that and view AI in a new way that empowers you instead of overshadows you. Transform your creative potential today. Head over to unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys. Use the number four K-E-Y-S that's unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys and download your free copy. [BLANK_AUDIO]

Storytelling is how we make sense of the world. In this episode of the podcast Lisa Cron talks to us about how we're hardwired to respond to story.

Lisa's early love for story telling from an early age
The reason finding the thing you love is a struggle
Why story is a hardwired survial mechanism
The reason stories help us to navigate reality
Understanding how to shape and develop stories
Why making the impossible possible is a journey
Digging deep enough to find your true gift is
Why we tend to think in terms of stories
Separating the things that make us feel successfull externally and internally
The challenges of pursusing any path on your own
How story and the brain evolved in tandem
Why story is incredibly effective for changing behavior
The reason we make every decision based on emotion
Using stories to change our behavior

Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence.

Storytelling is how we make sense of the world. In this episode of the podcast Lisa Cron talks to us about how we're hardwired to respond to story.

Lisa's early love for story telling from an early age
The reason finding the thing you love is a struggle
Why story is a hardwired survial mechanism
The reason stories help us to navigate reality
Understanding how to shape and develop stories
Why making the impossible possible is a journey
Digging deep enough to find your true gift is
Why we tend to think in terms of stories
Separating the things that make us feel successfull externally and internally
The challenges of pursusing any path on your own
How story and the brain evolved in tandem
Why story is incredibly effective for changing behavior
The reason we make every decision based on emotion
Using stories to change our behavior

Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence.

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