Matthew Dix (6:23)

I am thrilled to be doing it.

Ted Seides (6:25)

I think the best place to start is for you to just tell a story.

Matthew Dix (6:29)

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 has 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 it. 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 philosopher. 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 because we're in Adirondack chairs. 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 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 realized 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 as 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 5th 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 gonna 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.

Ted Seides (15:25)

Wow. That's amazing.

Matthew Dix (15:28)

That was a moment.

Ted Seides (15:29)

That is a moment. I'm dying to ask what he said, but we can come back to that later.

Matthew Dix (15:33)

Well, it's intentionally left out, so I'd.

Ted Seides (15:36)

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?

Matthew Dix (15:50)

In July of 2011, on a whim and encouragement from my friends, I went to the Moth, this nonprofit in New York City. True 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 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 a 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 I95. I was already driving home when the 10th name came out, and it was mine. 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 E.T. i loved the movie, but there's a scene in that movie that 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. A 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, 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.

Ted Seides (18:56)

How did you go about breaking down, how you construct a story that led to storyworthy?

Matthew Dix (19:03)

I started teaching people. I started telling stories first at the Moth. 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, will 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. I 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 happen to have the skill of taking large, complex processes and breaking them down into small, repeatable, practiceable parts. That's essentially what I did. I thought about how I told a 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 Storyworthy was born in terms of the content. I didn't actually write the book until 2016. I started running 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 storytelling 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 gotta 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.

Ted Seides (21:44)

In the aftermath of the book, what led you to start working with businesses and other interesting organizations?

Matthew Dix (21:50)

It was one guy, Boris Levin is his name. He's a businessman here in Connecticut, very successful factory owner. He's the CEO of a company that was employee owned, and they recently had a fantastic buyout 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, 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, oh, that's the wrong way to do that. I quickly realized I 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, then snowballing into finding my way into the doors of the biggest companies in the world.

Ted Seides (23:25)

I'd love to tap into your ability to teach this. We could start with the story you just tell where do the ideas come from that lead you to construct a story?

Matthew Dix (23:35)

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 onto 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 onto 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 onto 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 standup, and which are just moments I want to hold onto for the rest of my life that I may never tell anyone, but are worth holding onto.

Ted Seides (25:34)

How do you describe the homework for life as you do it?

Matthew Dix (25:38)

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 repeats stories over and over again. They exist in the world. I just wanted always something fresh. I want to be able to sit 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 gave 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 discover 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 onto it, and you'll have more stories to tell than you have time to tell them.

Ted Seides (27:17)

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?

Matthew Dix (27:28)

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 gonna 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 gonna tell it to you in chronological order. Start at the beginning, end at the end. That's how 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 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 lake house, 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 B, A, B, C, 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 sits next to him. He takes you to the past. He tells you about his life growing up. That story is actually A, B, A, B, A, B, A, B, A, B, A, C story, because different person sits on the bench. He takes you to a different place in his life. 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 got 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 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 there was no really middle point. What I ended up telling you Was a C, A, B, C. Which means I started at 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's still standing there and I still deny you what he said that day. But that is me starting at the end, C, 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 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.

Ted Seides (30:37)

What makes for a really good start?

Matthew Dix (30:40)

The simplest answer to that is start with location in 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. Oxytocin, which made you like me more than you liked me before. Dopamine, which made you feel good as I was telling the story. Cortisol, which made your memory work better and heightened your alertness. Endorphins got released, which means this is a crazy one. If your knee was sore when I started telling the story. Endorphins reduce 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 and 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, what's let us take over the planet. We should have been eaten a long time ago by a lot of things. But we're 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 in 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 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 in West Hartford, Connecticut. I've been teaching for a long time. I'm in a classroom and it's about noontime. I just sent the kids out. 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.

Ted Seides (33:50)

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's 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?

Matthew Dix (34:07)

The way that we can entertain an audience. There's four ways to do it. We provide stakes, which is, what should you be worried about? Wondering about, curious about. The first stake I give you is John Paul just said something amazing happened at recess. What is it? 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. When 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 raise the stakes by telling you she's pregnant, but then you see her in a terry cloth robe. I know as 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. It's 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's surprise as well. 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 is 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 audience's emotions and moods, covering over or 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 you're 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. Suspense, surprise, and humor. That's how I had you on the edge of your seat.

Ted Seides (37:24)

You mentioned that once you learn how to unlock humor, you can use it wherever you want. How do you unlock humor?

Matthew Dix (37:31)

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 strategy is the same. It's a different joke, but it's the same math 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 damn 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.

Ted Seides (38:28)

So you've led me with suspense. What are three or four of your favorite humor strategies?

Matthew Dix (38:33)

The easiest one to use, especially in business, is 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're 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 it ends up being an anaphylactic reaction and it's terrible. I die and get brought 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 ate gluten packed bread baked in asbestos factories by men who were smok cigarettes. That's all nostalgia. My favorite example of this was I was working with one of these companies that helps you find employees. I wanted 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 and around 3:30 in the afternoon a 16 year old boy rode by on his bike and threw 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 had 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 in. 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 it 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.

Ted Seides (40:36)

How about some others?

Matthew Dix (40:38)

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 storyteller in the world is a guy named Steve Zimmer. He tells a 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 luau, and they don't invite his family. So the next weekend, his family has their own Zimmer family luau. And it features pineapples, Hawaiian Punch, and despair. Despair makes you laugh. It's one of these things that's 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 can be used at any time.

Ted Seides (41:39)

How about one more?

Matthew Dix (41:40)

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 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 people. 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.

Ted Seides (42:46)

As you go through the story, there's a whole bunch of speech patterns that take a meandering path as opposed to just straight, chronological, linear path. I'd love to hear how you break that part of telling a story down.

Matthew Dix (43:01)

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. That's 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 but or therefore through my story mostly. But 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. But is my favorite word in the English language. Because. If I tell you I had a great day but, the possibility that a but affords I had a great day, but I believe that creates suspense instantly. What's on the other side of the but? What's on the other side of the but is almost impossibly large in its possibility. Almost always, what the but 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 Adirondack chairs 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 Adirondack chair. So I sort of ply myself out of the seat and I turn around and I see a boy. He's 10 years old. It's always that, how can I get to the next but? Or how can I get to the next therefore? Or how can I get to the next because all of those words.

Ted Seides (44:43)

What are some of the other important speech patterns that you try to get people to not use?

Matthew Dix (44:49)

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 a 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 robe. 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. And yet those phrases appear in stories all the time. So 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. I'm 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 by 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. You've just ruined any chance at 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.

Ted Seides (46:39)

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?

Matthew Dix (46:48)

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. Phil 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, don't tell you his religion. One thing is important about Phil 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 Moth, the theme was manners. I was demonstrating how Eric threw that door open and had bad manners. And 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. I 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. So 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 gonna make the connection that, oh, she was in a robe. Cause 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.

Ted Seides (48:51)

As you work your way through the story, it feels like there are a bunch of different things that come up. And I'm wondering if there are ways you think about what you choose to put in.

Matthew Dix (49:04)

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, that'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 can 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 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. But 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 I'm working 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.

Ted Seides (51:10)

How do you think about landing the plane when you construct it, where does it end?

Matthew Dix (51:14)

Well, I start at the end, before I begin 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. If 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 start at the beginning, weirdly, and then they think they're gonna get to the end in an efficient way, but instead they're gonna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 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.

Ted Seides (52:56)

End a story if you're giving the cliffnotes version. If someone just wants to get 80% of the way there, what are the most important things they need to take away?

Matthew Dix (53:06)

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. It'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 garners 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 Matt's 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.

Ted Seides (54:30)

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.

Matthew Dix (54:42)

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 there's 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 Bargetzi's performance, I will be entertained. But I was genuinely entertained, meaning I enjoyed 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 deck and have a monkey read it. Because that's essentially what a presentation is.

Ted Seides (56:11)

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 ways.

Matthew Dix (56:25)

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 we're going to use it in order to relate 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 gonna get this fixed. She calls a repair company guy comes in, he says, It's 20 years old. I can get the part, but it's gonna be like six weeks. She goes, good, do it for six weeks. They hand wash dishes the whole time. She's like, this is 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. And 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 what 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, the new dishwasher. There'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 adjacency. 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 in the audience's mind even though we're not really telling a story. Let's make sure that there's surprise at some point and maybe could we dare 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. So I'm going to come on the stage, and 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 a steak. 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 in 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. But that's suspense for surprise. He goes on stage and he says, today we're releasing three new products. A touchscreen 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, then 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 minutes. He continues to do it throughout the whole time. He understands I'm not telling a story, but I'm going to leverage the storytelling strategies that exist in this world to make our presentations engaging, entertaining, and unforgettable.

Ted Seides (60:39)

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?

Matthew Dix (60:46)

They 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 start at 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 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. Could we get a Burger King scene into Die Hard? I know he's trapped in a building. I don't Know, could we have a phone call into a Burger King? That's what people do in business now. They go, hey, I got two slides I really like. I want them in. It's not the story we're telling, man. And they're like, I don't care. Put the two slides in, destroys the story. They're not really telling stories. They're just building slides that they purport 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 why 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 professional performance.

Ted Seides (63:16)

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?

Matthew Dix (63:26)

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. The crazy thing about it 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, 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 off his 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.

Ted Seides (64:54)

What are the best ways to practice?

Matthew Dix (64:56)

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 listen 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 every word to this song, even though I haven't heard it for 30 years. I sang it and she was like, isn't that crazy? I said, yeah, but you can do the same thing with the talks, especially if you're giving 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.

Ted Seides (66:17)

How do you think about the balance of memorization versus the comfort of having a conversation? Speaking?

Matthew Dix (66:26)

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 buddies. We drove to Boston. They said, what's your story? And I said, I gotta 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 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. 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 of 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 he watched one of his buddy go over the side and die. It was a really sad story. She was so worried about this guy the whole night. You know, she's like, I hope he 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 gonna 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. There won't be any long pauses. There won't be any awkwardness because I don't memorize. I remember. That affords me the latitud to play with the story and to be flexible enough that if I forget something, I'm not in trouble.

Ted Seides (68:58)

I'd love to hear an example of what you have found have been the most impactful shifts when you're working with a business.

Matthew Dix (69:04)

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 at Slack. Slack is now 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 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. And I think they're actually going to be better employees, and she's going to be a better manager or leader as a result. So that was one which is not terribly storytelling related.

Ted Seides (70:50)

How about one with storytelling related?

Matthew Dix (70:51)

Right. I'm working with a biotech in Boston. We're sending five scientists to a conference to report on what they've learned. They're looking for leads. It's a sales conference, so 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. So 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 on 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 Post it notes on the fridge. He essentially 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 Crisp, some new apple. So he's gonna 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 McCowns 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 convinces her, is 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. That's when she takes her notebook and she throws it across the table and goes, damn it. I think you're right. And 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 storytelling produces. It's a lot harder to go into a company and say, you gotta 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.

Ted Seides (75:14)

What's been, as you work with businesses, the consistency of the impact from shifting giving a presentation to giving a storytelling performance.

Matthew Dix (75:22)

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 linked 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, matt, 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 a story the way you tell me to start it, the room gets quiet in a way I've never heard it before.

Ted Seides (76:37)

So before we get close to wrapping, I have to ask, on the off chance that it mattered, what did JP say?

Matthew Dix (76:45)

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, and I've seen it before, buddy. So, sadly, it was not a singular moment, nor was, by the way, the time the kid broke his leg. Because that has probably happened 100,000 times over the course of history.

Ted Seides (77:30)

Yeah.

Matthew Dix (77:30)

Yeah.

Ted Seides (77:30)

In the immortal worlds of King George and Hamilton. What comes next for you as you wrap up your teaching career?

Matthew Dix (77:38)

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 coach and consult with corporations, deliver keynotes around the country, write more Both novels and nonfiction. I started as a novelist. The first six books I wrote were novels and they were successful. I was a decently successful novelist when this nonfiction 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 a ride home or they want help with the homework, I'm not going to be sitting at a Little League game watching my son play, but 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 harried, a little more considered, and hopefully helping people better than I currently do tell better stories.

Ted Seides (78:54)

I want to ask you a couple of closing questions. Our closing questions are brought to you by Oldwell 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 of them. If you haven't seen Al, check them out at oldwell labs.com Ted that's O L-W-E-L-L-L-Labs.com Ted and trust me, it'll be worth a look. All right, Matt, a 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?

Matthew Dix (79:26)

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 7 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 it 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 think 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, I bet the raccoon would have loved my father the same way he loved me. His name was Racket, and eventually we had to release him because he was too dangerous for everyone, with the exception of me.

Ted Seides (81:09)

What's the best advice you've ever received?

Matthew Dix (81:12)

This is going to sound 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 till later in life. I got kicked out of my house, homeless, lots 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 the 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. He's my Buddy. 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. 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 on 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 gonna 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 is centered 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.

Ted Seides (84:07)

What's your biggest storytelling pet peeve?

Matthew Dix (84:11)

There's 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 he 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 gonna 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.

Ted Seides (85:53)

How about another pet peeve?

Matthew Dix (85:55)

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 Jello 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 Jello 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 sitting 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 Plato once 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 at 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.

Ted Seides (87:21)

What's a mystery you wonder about?

Matthew Dix (87:23)

This is going to make me sound terrible. I'm a reluctant atheist. I'm a person who wishes he 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? Are you saying it because you want it to be true? Are you saying it because you've been saying it all your life? Or 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 him 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 they're 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 Pascal's Wager and be like, that wasn't called faith, buddy. So get the hell out of here.

Ted Seides (88:57)

Okay, how about one more? What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

Matthew Dix (89:02)

I've learned to not delay the moment you have an idea. The 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 there's 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.

Ted Seides (89:58)

Matt, thanks so much for sharing your insights. I'm really excited to see what happens from this coming out.

Matthew Dix (90:03)

Thanks. This was really great.

Ted Seides (90:05)

Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website@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 in securities discussed on this podcast.