 60% of the audience believe that their decisions are rational and logical. The conclusion is this, that every single decision you've taken in your entire life, and you will take for the rest of your life, every single decision is driven by emotion or instinct. There are no exceptions. So, welcome to the show, David. It's a pleasure having you. How did you get started in storytelling, especially the research behind it? Well, my passion has been communication my entire life. For me, that is the single most important subject any human can learn. And about five years ago, I just started being really mesmerized by the effects of storytelling. Now, I got to think, how can it be so powerful? It's almost like it's mind-blowingly powerful. And whenever I find anything that is remotely mind-blowingly powerful, I just have to dig into it. Absolutely. And I know for us this month, we've been talking a lot about the importance of emotions in storytelling, how to become a better storyteller. And a lot of our listeners and our clients ask us exactly that. How can we strengthen our storytelling skills so that we can have a compelling interaction that becomes memorable? Because we've all been influenced by that one story that we held on to and we loved. But a lot of us don't feel that strong in this department. And how do we get practice in developing out our storytelling skills? Well, I would say that my recommendation is, as with anything in communication, that is when I do training in communication, I do training in storytelling, people think that when they're on stage, that's when they're supposed to practice. But that is entirely incorrect. So where you're supposed to practice is your everyday life. Your every single conversation, every meeting, by the coffee machine, by the car, wherever you are, that's when you're supposed to practice it. And then what happens is if you can become brilliant there, you are simply brilliant on stage. Now, my practical tip for what you should practice is the following. Whenever you're in a situation and it's at least remotely funny or remotely weird, remotely strange or anything that sticks out, you should look at that situation from the four basic steps of storytelling. And the four basic steps of storytelling, as I teach, is a prep, background, development and conclusion. So whatever strange situation you're in, you just form it in those four boxes in your head as you're standing there. And then you see, can I make that funny? Can I make that interesting? Can I make that even more weird or whatever? And then you try it on someone and they're like, ooh, maybe they laugh and they go, yeah, that's cool. You just tweak it a bit and tweak it a bit and tweak it a bit and tweak it a bit and boom, you have a good story. That is the best way to learn storytelling. You do that every single day. My God, you'll be a storyteller in no time. I think, you know, lots of great things happen to us on a daily basis. And, you know, in those moments we have that chuckle to ourselves. I mean, those are opportunities to make a mental note. And what's great about this is I started doing this a few years ago. It's like we have these devices in our pockets now and I have a running pages of just interesting things and my perspective on it and why it stuck out to me that day. So that, you know, when I do go back, when I'm looking for stories, when I'm looking for anecdotes to showcase something, I have these things that are where I'm the main character, but it's happened to me and that perspective allows for others to put themselves in my position and experience those things. Absolutely. That's a brilliant thing. Just copy-paste that. That's superb. Well, the other point that you make that's so important is reading the audience and actually practicing on people to see their response. Because sometimes we can think a story is great when we only share it with ourselves and we're telling it in our head, but we don't know how that story is going to sound until we actually start sharing it with people. True. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, that's the thing. That's the way you learn storytelling. And I like that idea by just writing down the different situations you're in and the scenarios that happen to you in your everyday life and you just package it. I think the thing is to package it in real time where you are there with these four steps because that is really bringing storytelling to life. So let's break down those four steps, the prep, the background and obviously understanding storytelling to a great degree. It's important that we allow the audience to know where this is transpiring, where this story is beginning and a little bit of that backstory. So what is the prep? Okay. So I'll just give you a real time story then. You just called me, let's see here, 22 minutes ago. I was at home. I was sitting with my kids. I was looking through a photo album and I thought that we were going to go live at 6.30. Okay. So that's the story for you. So I'll tell it the incorrect way first, which goes like this. I was at home. I was looking at the photos and then I saw that and then I panicked. I ran to the office. I came here and then I got everything together and now I'm here with you guys. That's a bad way of telling a story. A better way of telling a story is, okay, so imagine I'm at home. I'm sitting there with my kids. I'm looking through the photos and I'm all like my empathy and I'm feeling things for these photos and then suddenly the last thing you want in the world, the last thing, you get a phone call from the US. You go like, oh shit. Something's wrong. Something's up. I've missed something. You know that feeling of panic. So I tremble on my voice. I pick up the phone and there's someone on the other side and they go like, hey, where are you? And I'm like, oh crap. I've got to run and I just run out of the house. I run over the yard and what I don't know is, well, I'll come to that in just a moment. I run over the yard. I come in. I rig everything up and the terrible part about all of this is that when I sit down, I've got all this stuff up and I think, okay, we're going to go live now. You guys, you want me to turn on my video camera and hey, do you see what I look like? This is not my professional me, but sometimes you just have to play the game, right? So I'm sitting here now and it's brilliant. Thanks for having me. It is such a pleasure sharing you. Thanks. Okay, so that's a better way of telling the story. The prep is I'm sitting at home with my kids. The development is I'm running over the, or the background is I'm running over the yard. The development is what happens here and the conclusion is that I'm happy to be with you guys. What's great about this is giving it the first example and you gave us all the data points and we can all understand that, but there's certainly no emotions involved, but what did you add for the emotions that kick in? Well, I immediately felt the emotions kick in when you mentioned I was sitting there with my children. We were looking at some old photos. So now we understand what how precious the time is with spending with our children. Looking at old photos where you're probably telling some stories to your children and eliciting some emotions from them and creating this environment, we can all understand what a surreal and beautiful moment that is only to be all of a sudden alerted that you were missing an appointment and you were in the wrong place to now have to drop everything that is going on and running to the office and of course prepping yourself for the interview that's going to be at hand. I mean, there are so many emotional bids there that I felt shift and engage from both stories and just that small sample. Those four steps, they're brilliant. We can get back to them. Hey, let's play a game, guys. Are you with me on that? Yes. The storytelling game. All right. So you'll do it to me first and then I'll do it to you. So the thing is, and this is such a brilliant exercise. We do it in the workshops and anyone who's listening at the moment can just do it straight away. I promise you will. You will be the favorite parent of all parents if you got kids. If you do this, it's beautiful. Okay. So that's the prep. Did you hear the prep? Yeah. Yeah. So I've built up anticipation now. Okay. So the next step is or the background of this is that I want you to tell me to give me an object and a place. So I want you to give me a place and an object. And as soon as I say the word, the objects, the name of the object, I want you to give me another object. And then when I've said that, I want you to give me another object and we'll do that three times. And I'm going to tell you a story based on those random objects that you give me. And the conclusion of all this is that that will really teach you how to be fast in storytelling. And that's what I want to teach you. So give me a place, give me an object. Soon as I say the word, give me another object. All right. Jim treadmill. I don't know if you guys, if you've been at the gym, but what's brilliant in the gym is that you can go either you can go, you can lift weights or you can go in and you can do yoga or you can do, you can be, you know, a bit of everywhere. But the place I love, the place I love is the treadmill. So I go on the treadmill and now you're going to give me another word. Towel. So this is too easy. You can't go there. All right. I'll do that one. But the next one has to be complicated. I'm on the treadmill. I'm treading away and then I'm, I'm starting to sweat profoundly. And to the right of me, this is beautiful, beautiful girl. I'm really like attracted to, but I can feel the sweat just pouring down my chest, my back and the, and he's starting to smell because you know what I forgot. I forgot the one thing you cannot forget, which is my towel. Motorcycle. So I'm like, Oh, no, this is bad. And I'm seeing my chances just flying away. I won't get this girl. And then suddenly the thing happens that you don't want to happen. This guy pulls up outside of the window and he says, cool as you come. And you can see the girl going like, Oh, here's my superhero coming. And if it's not enough that it looks like a supermodel, he dresses like a supermodel, but he comes in on this really hot sexy motorcycle. And he jumps off the motorcycle, comes into the gym, goes to the treadmill to the right of the girl. And of course they hook up or because I obviously forgot my towel and I haven't got a motorcycle. All right. So that's, yeah, just telling spontaneous stories. You did way too easy for me though, man. You're going to, I'm going to, I'm going to get you now. Okay. Are you with me? I'm ready. Yeah. All right. Here we go. So the place would be the Eiffel Tower and the object would be a, an owl. Okay. So I'm sitting with my fiance, Amy, just next to the Eiffel Tower on this beautiful lawn and we're opening up our picnic basket. We're excited to open this beautiful bottle of French wine that we've been salivating over after purchasing. And out of the corner of my eye, I see an owl swoop out of a tree treadmill. And as this owl swoops down to catch this mouse, I start running because I'm now nervous that the owl is going to come attack our food. And as I'm running, I trip and fall and Amy yells at me that I should have exercised a little bit harder on the treadmill so that I kept my balance and actually would have been in good enough shape to scare away this owl. Coca-Cola. Thankfully, inside of our beautiful picnic basket, not only do we have that gorgeous bottle of wine, but we also had a one liter bottle of Coca-Cola. It's the only thing that could quench my thirst after such a dangerous run. Okay, you've got to finish now then with a UFO. As I'm sipping on this Coca-Cola and satisfying quenching my thirst out of the corner of my eye yet again. This is a wild day in Paris, obviously owls and mice. I notice an object that doesn't look like a plane and it certainly doesn't look like an owl. I couldn't help but think to myself that it was a UFO. True. Yes. Could be. Could be. Good point. Well done. Okay, an applaud from Sweden. Excellent. Okay, so the cool thing with this exercise is that when you know how to spontaneously tell stories like that. So the first step is to learn to do stories like that. Do it with your friends, do it with your kids, you two do it together in the studio. And then when you've learned to tell spontaneous stories like this, what you do then is that you add the structure to it. So then you add a prep and a background and a development and a conclusion to that. So you start practicing that in real time spontaneously on that kind of story. And when you want to really add the next level to it, you add senses. So smell, taste, emotion, feeling, yeah, goosebumps, so on and so forth. And if you want to really top it off, you want to become really super brilliant. You start adding different kind of signaling substances to it consciously. Like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, testosterone and so on and so forth. So yeah, you've got some practicing. Yeah, one thing that I noticed about the story examples, especially yours, was this taking of the emotion and adding a sense of actual physical feeling to it. So not just saying I was nervous, but my fists clenched. And having that physicality that ties to the emotion, I feel like creates such a visceral response in the audience. Like they can feel the emotion with you. That's a good one. And let's talk about this angels cocktail that you just discussed, right? Because these four signals that you cover in your angels cocktail are so important in creating this dynamic in the story to allow the audience to be fully engaged. Can you unpack those again for the audience? Sure, yeah. So we have four basic signaling substances, let's say five signaling substances and hormones which control our emotions. They are our emotions. Our emotions are signaling substances and hormones, chemicals in our brain. And what's interesting is depending on which one has a high concentration, it will influence your psychology. So if you have a high concentration of oxytocin, you will tend to be more generous, more feel more empathy and you'll feel more bonding with the person. And the second one is serotonin. Serotonin is produced when we feel pride, when we feel significant. And so any story which increases serotonin will make the other person feel more significant, increase their self-worth and they'll feel more pride. The third one is dopamine, which is expectation and it's easily the most important one. So I won't take that one now. I'll go to number four instead. We'll cover endorphins. Endorphins is something that just makes you less critical and it'll make you a happier person and you'll be more willing to listen to whatever is being said, more accepting. Now the last one is testosterone. And testosterone will make you more risk-taking. So if I in a story induce testosterone in you, you will become more risk-taking as a human being. Okay, I think that was that. Or maybe we should go back to dopamine and just describe that just a little bit more. Can't leave that hanging there. Okay, so dopamine is created when you get cliffhangers. And dopamine is behind all motivations. I'll put it like this. Every single time you sit in an audience and you lose focus from whoever is speaking or presenting. And if you're turning this pot off, it means that you are getting dopamine from somewhere else because you are addicted to it. So dopamine creates focus, creativity, memory. Focus, creativity, memory and motivation. Would you say that those are important things in any story or any presentation? Absolutely. Yeah, just imagine that the next time you deliver a presentation nobody is focused, motivated, nor creative, nor do they remember anything that you just said. Yeah, so that's the reason why we turn off TV series. That's the reason why we turn off movies. It's because we simply were not stimulated enough by the desire to know what's happening next. Obviously, we can all understand the importance of these and with dopamine being able to create them and I think a lot of us look for opportunities to get more motivation or to get more focus and get better memory throughout the day. With the technology that is in front of us, do you see any issues with our dopamine receptors being either overly stimulated and it's going to take more and more now or is it simply desensitized to a lot of different stimulus? Yeah, well, easily our dopamine receptors are overstimulated. We're desentercised absolutely to a certain extent. I think the problem today is that our attention span is so much shorter than it was before in the past, in the good old days. Yes, it was way, way longer. So the problem today is that we can get dopamine injections not immediately by just bringing up our phone, checking social media, checking Candy Crush or TikTok or whatever. And you can just imagine, every single time you do that, you bring out a needle and you go tsk tsk tsk in your veins. Every single time, every single time you do that. And I call dopamine the fabricated happiness. So dopamine is fabricated happiness and the less happier you are with your life, the more you want dopamine because it gives you that quick, quick hit. But the problem is that you go tsk tsk life is beautiful. And you go tsk tsk and that is your life. It goes up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. So yeah, the problem with that is that it is so hard to hold someone's attention when presenting, speaking or even during a pod show. And the attention span is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller because all these Facebook, YouTube, did you know that YouTube, 72% of everything that you watch is recommended by the artificial intelligence engine? It's insane. And it's optimized for you to look at things that grabs your attention as fast and as much as possible. But you know what? I usually say this, the people living today who will die within the next 20 to 30 years, that is our last generation of storytellers. It is the last generation of storytellers. Those who lived before the television came by me, those who listened to their grandfathers and grandmothers when they told stories, this is an art which is dying. And what's sad with that is that I can have kids in front of me, totally addicted to TikTok, totally addicted to YouTube, but they will drop their phones and listen to a story because it kicks ass with anything out there. So looking at those molecules and obviously their importance in generating emotions, how can we as storytellers elicit those emotional responses and those chemicals in the audience? You can, well, let's start with the most important one, which is dopamine. You should add hooks to your story. Add hooks to your story, which means that in your story, you should say that something is coming up but not exactly what. A simple example could be that a very short story is of a man who got out of bed, but as he was getting out, things seemed to be just a little bit too quiet around him. He didn't bother much but he walked toward the door. The door was open and he knew that he'd closed it when he'd gone to bed and nobody was at home then, but still it was too quiet. So he walks out, he walks up to the balcony, looks down, and there he sees exactly what he knew that he'd never wanted to see in his entire life. But it was there, straight in front of him. And there you go, that's dope. Yeah, what's there? We're hanging on Cliff Hanger. Okay, so Cliff Hanger's elicit that focus, motivation, better memory. What can we do with oxytocin to elicit that? Oxytocin is bonding with a character or an object. So bonding with a character or an object. And that's the reason why you have so much junk in your cellars and in your attics. It's because you've bonded with the items there. You feel for them through oxytocin and it feels like you get ripped apart when somebody would throw them away. So yeah, you would create a character which we would feel for. And you know what's almost terrible with oxytocin? It is that we fall for it and we crave it so badly that we can even bypass our morals and ethics. I'll give you an example from Breaking Bad. You know the show Breaking Bad? Yeah, of course. People all over the world, they've been watching Breaking Bad. What's sad with that is that people behind the TV screens, they're going like, yeah, yeah, come on, brew more meth, man. Go, yeah, brew it. Yeah, brew big in industry. Build an industry. Become a magnet. Become a drug king. Shoot the police. Yes. Just win over them. You can own this. Yes. And I know this is smuggled to kids and kids die from it, but still brew more. And we're on the other side and we're rooting for the bad guy like we're insane. And that is the power of oxytocin. If you as an author, you write, in this case, what was his name? The main character of Breaking Bad. Walter White. Yeah. And what did he have? Well, he had cancer. Cancer. Yeah. So this story wouldn't have worked if he didn't have cancer. But because we feel empathy for him through the cancer, we can bypass other things, bad things that he do because, you know, it's the end of his life and so on and so forth. So that bonding, that connection is what elicits oxytocin and endorphin, creativity, relaxation, focus. How can we elicit this in a story? I'm really sorry guys, but I'm sorry. I can't remember. Let's move over to endorphins. Okay. So you're laughing at the moment, which means that I induced endorphins in you, which is great. So that is the simple thing with endorphins, just make people laugh, tell jokes. Adding some humor. Add humor to your stories. Yeah. And testosterone risk taking, that one seems a little more challenging. Testosterone. Yeah. That could be challenging. But no, you just tell hero stories, really. So I could tell you a hero story. And what's good with that hero story is that it induces both testosterone and serotonin. And it goes like this. The man was 20 years old. He looked back at his life and he concluded that this was not what he intended. This is not what he wanted. At 15 years of age, he'd been thrown out from home after fighting with his brother. He'd made a woman pregnant. He had a child. The woman had left him. He'd put a company into bankruptcy. And he said to him, sad in a self-sad voice, this was not what I intended in my life. But he was a smart and clever guy. He wasn't religious specifically, but he loved the idea by having words and laws to live by. So what he did, he took a piece of paper and wrote down the 12 things that he wanted to become. And at the top, he wrote the dates or the days of the month. So it was kind of two axes. One axis with things he wanted to be and one axis with the days of the month. He walked over to his friend and said, look at this, look at this, this is brilliant. What a method I've come up with. And the friend was far from happy. The friend said, ah, I don't know, that's silly. Why is it silly? Well, because you're none of them. Well, that's the problem. That's why my life looks the way it looks. And the friend said, hey, if you're going to do this, you should add a 13th because my God, you need it. Add humility. And this guy went, hmm, humility, tasted it. Hmm, yeah. Okay, cool. We'll go with humility. And this guy was far from humble because what he wrote, he wrote behind each of these, he wrote what they were meant. And behind humility, he wrote no less than Socrates or Jesus, which is far from humble, I think. And then he began life. He became an author. He became an inventor and a true story. He invented the iron stove. He invented the difficult glasses, the swim feet and the lightning rod. But all that pales in comparison when we know now that he founded the first library in the first insurance company in the U.S. But all that pales in comparison because he also is seen to be one of the fathers or the main father behind the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. But that also pales in comparison that he was the trusted advisor of the three first presidents of the United States of America, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Now, when he died at 82, he'd written in his diary at 81. Benjamin Franklin wrote because that was his name. You can find him on the $100 bills in the U.S. today and he's seen to be one of the most influential characters of the U.S. history. He wrote in his diary in his 81. I became what I wanted because one day I chose who I wanted to be. So, fellow listeners, when did you choose who you wanted to be? Because apparently you can have a tremendous effect. The end. That's fantastic. So how did we elicit testosterone and serotonin in that story? Probably more serotonin, but you get a feel for that. You go like, wow, that's a pretty cool person. And you don't feel envy, but you feel that you want to go home and maybe you just want to do something systematically different in your life because you sense that you have a power over your life. So I would say that that would be it. But then testosterone is always released when you win and he won. But if I wanted to induce pure testosterone, I would probably give you more of an even bigger success and more masculinity, more nakedness, more hardcore, more risk. So like a warrior story, a hero's journey. Yeah, like a hero warrior. And obviously looking at these stories and their importance in communication, personally, we know they connect us and bind us together. But they're also used in business. So you look at presenting ideas, selling, pitching, trying to go to networking events. We talked about this in networking last month. And I feel like a lot of us sort of don't view them the same. And what is your view on that, whether we're personally telling stories or we're telling, sharing these stories professionally? Do these rules still apply? Absolutely. Yeah, no question about it now. No question about it. A quick tip for you is this. Just as you did there with the example where you wrote down events that happened to you. What you can do is what I would recommend every single person on this pod to do and you to write down the stories that you tell. You can just use the title. You don't have to word them word by word. Just the titles and you use Excel or something similar. You write down all your stories in one column and then the power comes when you start indexing them. So the powers that people laugh at index them as endorphins. The stories that people feel empathy for index them as oxytocin. The stories that people feel success and pride in index them as serotonin. Stories that people feel they cannot stop listening to. You always got their absolute, absolute anticipation. I can tell you one of those later if you want to. But one of those super hardcore dopamine stories. Then you classify that as dopamine. And if you tell the stories where after you've told the story people are really hungry. You can see them in their eyes that they want to do something. They want to win something. You classify that as testosterone. And you do that with every single one of your stories. Imagine that you have 100 stories. That means that you now have 100 more or less weapons in your pocket. If you walk into a crowd and you go like these need oxytocin and they might need a bit of endorphins. Let's see what we have. I'll take this one and I'll take this one. You just launched them at them in the first 10 minutes. And how do we make that angels cocktail? How do we mix those together? It would just be a story which combines all of them. So a story which builds anticipation is dopamine. A story where you are attracted to the character or the object, which is oxytocin. And it ends with a hero kind of grand finale, which is serotonin. And maybe a laugh here and there, which is endorphins. That would be your angels cocktail. I would recommend not mixing angels cocktails. I would recommend taking the story that you indexed, which is high on one or two of the signaling substance and launch that at them. They don't need complete angels cocktails. That is just a synonym for if you want to entertain someone. The power lies in picking them. Understanding the underlying emotions of the stories, what they elicit in the audience, categorizing them so that you have them available when you need them. And then of course practicing them and paying attention to the audience as you develop out these stories so that you have one for each of those categories. Absolutely. Most definitely. And one of your other famous TEDx talks is the death of the PowerPoint. We think about presenting in business. We think about presenting on stage. Oftentimes we are using a PowerPoint and we do change our view of sharing stories and connecting with the audience when there's slides behind us and there's words on the screen. So we talked a little bit earlier about this. It is no different whether you're telling stories personally, whether you're telling stories at a networking event or even you're on stage. We need to be eliciting emotions in the audience. We want their attention. We want their focus. How can we do that when PowerPoint is involved? Yeah, good point. All right. So I would say that you can still kick ass with dopamine. So a couple of quick tips is the following. Imagine that you bring out a slide and you go, Okay, this one. Ah, we could probably skip this one. Oh, no. Oh, I know you can't really read what's on it. But yeah, so I'll just point here. Yeah, that's a bad way of delivering a slide. Okay, so that is bringing the dopamine down to the floor. Now, better way, the magical way of delivering a slide is what I call sell your slide and it goes like this. Just prior to delivering the slide, you go, Oh guys, girls, the next slide coming up is my personal favorite. It summarizes everything in such a beautiful way. So just hold onto your seats. Here we go. Boom. And the dopamine is sky high. People go like, Can't do that every single time. Next slide is my personal favorite. They'll carry you away if you do that more than two slides. But you can still sell slides. Okay, so we've had, we've had a look at the theory. Let's have a look at a super exciting example of how this works. And then you bring that out. So dopamine can be used by selling stories. No, selling slides. Sorry. Yeah. So that's one. There's so many ways to create dopamine in PowerPoint. But I don't know how much you want me to talk about it. But that's one key way. Well, that's a great example. Are there other emotions in your PowerPoint that you feel are important? Yeah, absolutely. The second one would be just value everything that you say. You go like, Ah, look at this number. That's a bit worrisome. Ah, I hate this number. Look at this. This excites the heck out of me. Do you see that number? That's eight to six. It's incredible. When you go like, Oh, I don't know, you know, I'm feeling really, really bothered by this number. This is really getting to me. And it's the end of the month. I don't know. So yeah, value your numbers because every single time you do that, you transfer your emotion to the people listening. And you know what? Is it okay to just do a quick experiment with you two guys? Yeah, sure. Of course. Okay. And of course you, who's listening as well. Do the same thing. Okay. So grab a pen and paper. Do you have a pen and paper, guys? Or do you have anything to? Yeah, we have some notes here we can write on. It's okay. Yeah. All right. And you as a listener as well, grab a pen and paper, write down the, let's see, the three last things that you've purchased just spontaneously, three last things that you've purchased. Okay. So it can be water, it can be a car, jet plane, candy, hamburger. I'll just give you a moment to write that down. All right. So we could make this list like 30 items long, but three is enough. All right. Now I just discussed you two guys in between each other. Yeah. What drove those decisions? You have three options to pick between either it was instincts that drove those decisions or it was emotions or it was logic. So three things you can pick one of those. What drove those decisions? Instinct, emotion and logic. And while you two guys do it, you who's listening do it as well. So discuss what drove those decisions. All right. So AJ, you want to start with yours? Yeah. Should I identify the objects? Yeah. Okay. So swimsuit was emotional. Okay. Coffee was instinctual. And so was tofu. All right. Protein bar was instinctual. Water was instinctual. And beer was just needed at the moment. That's pure emotion, man. All right. So what's fascinating, you guys did really well and it's a thumbs up on all those good answers. But what's interesting is when I do say that I've got an audience of a thousand people, I'm delivering a keynote for them and I ask this question. So everyone in the audience will write down three things and then they get to discuss exactly this. It is 40% of the audience who come to the conclusion that you two guys came to. 60% of the audience believe that their decisions are rational and logical. All right. But the conclusion of this is, and you who are listening, the conclusion is this, that every single decision you've taken in your entire life and you will take for the rest of your life, every single decision is driven by emotion or instinct. There are no exceptions. And so why I'm saying this and why I just wanted to jump into this is because you guys are talking about emotion and we're talking about the signaling substance and hormones. Why this is absolute core? Why this is more important than anything is because if you walk into a meeting room, a conference room, a presentation and you do not elicit an emotion into those who are listening, you will not move them. You will not make them take a decision. They will nod. They will smile. They will sign. They will walk out of there and something else will attract their emotion and boom, they're off in that direction. If you fail to create that, you fail to move people and that is why emotion in PowerPoint is so important and that is why the signaling substances are so important to pick. Well, we've certainly seen it many times and a lot of the clients we have can be very overly analytical and we'll talk about sometimes when they're going into a meeting where they're putting together their PowerPoint presentation and I will laugh because at the end of the day they put most of their efforts in the slides and making sure that the facts are up there. The numbers all work out. And I can't count how many folks that we've had in here who do pitches for living or do marketing are like, throw all that out. Let's make sure that you walk in busting with emotion and to elicit whatever you need, you're going to have to first feel it in yourself and it never ceases to amaze me because of course if you're going to school for this it's going to be all the data points that you think is going to drive this home but in actuality you're not in the room if your data points didn't make out. You're in the room because they want you to get them emotionally excited about what you have to offer. Yeah, yeah, simple as that. With emotions driving decisions it's important that we at least pay attention to them when we're presenting when we're sharing stories of course that connect us. And in your TEDx talk on Death by PowerPoint we'll link it up in the show notes. You go into great detail around some slide structure for all of you who are interested in presenting especially slides. Why do you think people put so much emphasis on the slide deck itself and don't pay attention to the emotion and realize the delivery? We believe that we are rational human beings and that our decisions are rational and logical and if they are they're based on logic and therefore we build slides which are truly logical. I think if we truly would have a sense that our decisions are driven by emotion if we knew that for real and we could feel it all the way into our bone we would build presentations differently but we just I don't think we can people just don't relate to it. Like I said 60% they believe that every single decision they take well we can see it in a lot of our the entertainment around us is certainly going to elicit a lot of emotion but even the information that's presented to us if we look at all the political strife going on kind of everywhere but it's all emotionally driven there may be some data points behind it but there's going to be a narrative that gets you rowed up in order for you to buy into whatever these sides are peddling I think the other key point in all of this and I know you talk about it in your course as well is first impression we talk about it in our boot camp how important it is to set the tone with a great first impression of course it's going to hook the audience it's going to get their attention to whatever you're presenting or even sharing stories what are your thoughts around creating a compelling first impression and its impact in our storytelling? Yeah absolutely super important I call it the halo effect and the hell effect but it is commonly referred to that you can make a first impression in two ways hell or halo and interesting studies have shown that if you are interviewing a person for a job and they are three minutes late that will impact your entire perspective of this person during the entire interview so yeah the hell and the halo effect is incredibly important so I put a lot of I put a lot of effort into making the best possible first impression that I can not overdoing it but still making it as good as possible and when you're on stage and you have to present whether it's slides or share a story or give a keynote what are you focusing on in terms of your first impression to engage the audience? Well I run a seven step psychologically beneficial structure and I hit every single point of those every single time I present and I see too that I know my structure and I know my beginning, my first three minutes flawlessly it's like you could wake me in the middle of the night and I would go like boom boom boom boom you could pick any of my keynotes and I could do my seven steps in a split second that's what's important to me and that's when I do keynotes or presentations if I meet a person and I'm meeting you or I'm in a one to one meeting my beginning would be different of course I would listen a lot more Right and when you're talking about that first three minutes what is the key focus for you? Building, well I listen into which signaling substance they're low in and then I counteract that with bringing up the signaling substance that I think they or I desire in order for the meeting to have a great outcome So there's reading the room there's emotional intelligence there to understand where the signals are high and low for the audience and then working to manage those to your advantage So a simple one would be say that a person is one example I had a meeting about a year ago I went into the room there were three gentlemen sitting in there they were all highly ethos individuals very strong very cocky they didn't really want me there So what I had to do is I had to break their ethos to begin with to bring their serotonin down to normal levels and you can't just go in and give someone a tell-off when you're going into a meeting like that so you have to do it indirectly So the way I did it was that I walked into these guys and I said well I shook their hands I greeted them I gave them a compliment of some sort and just before I sat down I said just before I said I don't forget just before I sit down I said I don't forget I was sitting outside and while I was waiting for you I read through your brochure and in your brochure it says that you work with these different types of pedagogy now as you know as well as I know it's called the word is androgogy because obviously you teach adults and you don't teach children so I just wanted you to know that because whoever you wrote that copy just have them check that just as a helpful thing okay let's get on with the meeting now obviously they were the guys who wrote this but obviously they didn't know that pedagogy is teaching children and androgogy is teaching adults and I indirectly gave them I love their serotonin their confidence So identifying that mistake for them calling it out indirectly in a way that doesn't attack them lowers their serotonin cockiness balances out the room yeah so that could be one one way to do it so understanding it sounds a lot of whether we're telling stories or giving presentations or pitching that the understanding of the audience is the most important step I feel like a lot of us when we're trying to memorize our stories or memorize our presentations we're thinking about all the slides oftentimes we're not paying close attention to the audience some of the key things that you're focusing on when you're paying attention to the audience is there body language signals that you're noticing yeah so two answers to that when I built my TED Talks they are roughly 18 minutes long took me 70 hours per TED Talk to build and rehearse so I do not listen to my audience for a single second when I deliver those I just I know and presume their reaction and action to every single thing that I'll be saying because it's pre-planned and I don't deliver the TED Talk for the people in the room even like in Stockholm there was a thousand people listening I do not deliver it for them I deliver it for YouTube and doing that is just different so yeah that is one version if you have 70 hours to prepare an 80 minute presentation in your life if you don't it's listening to the audience and my third TED Talk is called the 110 steps of the 110 techniques or the 110 steps of excellence where I spent seven years studying 5000 speakers and presenters and I think I became the first person in the world to detail every single communication skill human beings use when we communicate I don't know I haven't seen anyone else do it and what's interesting with this is that what I want to come to is this that have you ever walked into a room and you immediately feel that you don't trust the person and probably the opposite where you met a person and you go like oh god I love you from almost the first instance you've been there yeah so after studying these 5000 individuals I learned to understand that we have five layers of communication and the five layers are facial expression word voice body language and gesture now what's interesting when you walk into a room where you can't trust a person there's a discrepancy in their communication there's something not lining up between these five to an example could then be that they say hey so good to see you and you can hear in their voice that it's fairly okay you know it's good but their facial expression is not saying the same thing as their voice and when there's a discrepancy in any one of these five layers you immediately sense it you don't know what it is I can because I've broken it down to 110 different things but a normal human being wouldn't be able to pinpoint exactly what is wrong in this situation so when looking at the audience you should read into the audience to in regards to these five layers have a look at their facial expression have a look at their body language have a look at their gestures what's interesting then is that they have to be in synchronicity i.e. if they got folded arms and at the same time they're smiling that doesn't mean that they're negative so these have to be the more they are in synchronicity the more true you can read a person understanding those five layers and the more congruence there is between the five the more accurate that reading of that person is so if someone has crossed arms and a big smile and those are the only two signals you're seeing you can't really say that they're either closed off or they're happy absolutely not and looking at obviously something like a TEDx talk even in the 70 hours of prep I'm assuming you were paying close attention in your delivery multiple times to read and sense how the room is going to react and after practicing it enough times you can start to make those assumptions that these are the moments that people laugh at these are the moments that people are really engaged these are the moments where I know I'm going to get their full attention etc yes absolutely so obviously understanding making a great first impression understanding how these chemicals influence our emotions and working to the best of your abilities to evoke these emotions in your audience and a lot of practice is how we can become more effective storytellers yeah absolutely I would say that to simplify it go with the first thing that I said look at all the situations in your life package it in those four structures where you have the prep, the background the development and the conclusion if that is the only thing that you practice it'll make you 500% or 1000% of a better storyteller within just six months and then you can add the other layers of that but that'll make the biggest difference I think the other thing that most people need to realize is yes this is a skill that can be developed but it is within all of us we have evolved through storytelling we have learned through storytelling and so for all the times that we hear I'm not a good storyteller or for all the times that we hear very good stories to tell that is just untrue you just haven't given yourself those opportunities to bring out what is already there inside absolutely and to de-dramatize it just don't call it storytelling for God's sake just retell a daily thing that happened to you in that structure that I just mentioned and boom you have a story that is simple and just a really quick one as well as you haven't asked me about that how long does something have to be in order to be a story so the shortest story ever written was written by Ernst Hemingway it's six words and it goes like this it's a sad one it's oxytocin are you ready for it? goes like this baby shoes never worn for sale okay so that's a story because what happens when I tell you that story is that it puts images in your head and those images are associated to emotions and references and associations that you have to children who may not have been born and those emotions are then created through your own fantasy and your own memories I didn't need to create them in my story I simply place the words in your head so then to argue that stories can be even shorter what can they be even shorter than six words? yeah they can because metaphors are the shortest definition of a story because metaphors they create images in your head and to those images you have associations and memories and those create emotions so if I were to say hey have you seen the boys room looks like havoc in there or you go have you seen the boys room looks like an absolute tornado going on in there so the second would bring out much more emotion and associations in you so yeah stories don't have to it's not this complicated thing just look at it as a story you create visuals in the head in the brain of the people listening and those create or they are associated to memories and they create emotions yeah it's that transfer of emotions and you don't have to be verbose to do it as you just described I think a lot of times exactly that when we hear storytelling we tend to overthink it and overanalyze it and try to add all this fluff to it and over complicate it and really being more willing to share and practice and look for opportunities to share those daily moments especially the ones you've categorized paying attention to the audience are you evoking that emotion seeing that signaling back is still set the last question I have for a lot of us who give keynotes or have to present our ideas I think we spend a lot of time as we talked about on the slides and then prepping for the presentation but the one piece you can't really control is the audience response and questions after your presentation what is your mindset how do you go into your presentations to handle those questions are way yeah so whenever I build a keynote or an entire course for that sake I always look into what kind of objections can the audience come up with and then I build in a, I don't know what you call that a pre-objection what do you call that I lost the word so yeah I then ask myself how can I handle that objection I build that into my keynote so that the objection can never happen it never happens so when you listen to my keynotes they are usually at least like 99.5% bullet proof if they do come or if you know that they will be coming see to it that you induce serotonin and endorphins into your audience because that will reduce the likeliness of questions like that popping up at the end and I would say the third one is there a third thing you can do yeah control questions okay so the biggest mistake you can do is end your presentation with questions you should always own your ending and an ending has three steps the first step should be questions so you go before I summarize are there any questions we have four minutes for questions then you do the summary and then you do the grand finale the grand finale is super important because you need to inflict emotion into their brain go but the trick here is to go before I summarize are there any questions we have four minutes now you control the entire agenda because after four minutes you can go okay time's up we have to continue now and then it's perfectly okay if you haven't said that it is rude to go in and stop them but now you have the full authority to do so and of course that gives you an opportunity if for whatever reason you may have fumbled an answer or not felt good about a response to a question to come back in the summarization and in the grand finale and fix that so you're not leaving that presentation on a low note where the audience might be doubting your understanding or your viewpoint because of the question you were posed so are there key steps in the summary and it sounds like there are important pieces to the grand finale as we get to the grand finale of this interview what are you looking for to summarize and what is that last piece in the grand finale well I love ending whatever keynote presentation I do with the story so I told you earlier that I have this really really high injection to open the story so I'd like to end with that if that's okay with you and as a summary yeah I would like I just love giving content and knowledge to everyone that can listen and who I need of it so just look at my three TED talks that's an awesome summary, learn from them but if there's anything in storytelling it is what I just said previously and that is just get down there and practice the four steps in the storytelling structure in your every single day life that will make a tremendous difference at the third point because you should only have three things in a summary not four, not five, but three so this is the third and the last one and this is the one that will make you most popular of all in any party at any dinner with your kids as a parent as I said and that is the spontaneous storytelling exercise we did give the person, give your kid six years old a place and an object let them tell the story and then boom another object you'll be rolling down on the floor you'll be laughing, you'll be having such a good time you can do this in a taxi you can do it on a bus, you can do it wherever you want to and every single time you do it you teach them how to do storytelling and you teach yourself how to do storytelling so those three things would be core summaries for me so this is the story that changed my perspective on storytelling and it just did so forever and it's an old tale and as with old tales they began a long, long, long time ago this is a Jewish tale and it takes place in the Middle East in a small, small village and at the edge of this small, small village there's a small little beautiful house and in this small beautiful house lived two women and these two women were the most beautiful women you can ever imagine now these two women were sisters and the one sister's name was Story and the other sister's name was Truth now there was a inherent problem with them thinking that they were beautiful because they were constantly arguing who was the most beautiful and this particular day this argument grew into a growl and they started fighting on who was the most beautiful and they couldn't agree and so they stopped and they say hey we cannot agree who is the most beautiful of us too let's have a contest let's walk down the middle street of our town and see who attracts most attention so they went to bed the morning rose they walked up to the street and they stood in front of the of the street and then Truth said hey can I go first sister and Story said yes of course so Truth she she stood firmly she looked down the street and she boosted her self confidence and she started walking down now she walked down you can see the kids playing football they ran away you can see the families who are having picnics they quickly put all their food back in the basket and they walked away the people behind the blinds they closed them at the top of the roofs the children they walked back so they didn't want to see what they saw when Truth came to the end of the road she asked herself why am I not beautiful why are people not attracted to me and she thought is there any other way I can become even more attractive and she came up with this brilliant idea and she unbuttoned her cloak and she let her drop and she was entirely naked and now with renewed self confidence she walked up the street but instead of people gathering around her the few that were left they fled she came up to her sister and she said I'm sorry I don't know what happened but I didn't attract anyone and then Story said don't worry sister let me try it happens Story stood there she did a gaze down the street she built herself with self confidence and then she walked down and this time you can see the kids coming back with their footballs and they were playing on the street you can see the children and the families sitting down and having their picnics again and the people behind the blinds they opened them up and the kids on the rooftops she turned around and she walked back when she came back with her sister Truth said I'm sorry sister I am sorry you are the most beautiful you are the one who attracts them all I have lost I'm sorry you are the most beautiful and then Story said no that's not entirely true it doesn't have to be true the thing is though people are not attracted by the truth people are definitely not attracted by the naked truth what people are attracted to is a story but what people love more than anything is a true story so Story took her cloak and wrapped it around the shoulders of her sister and this time Truth walked down the street with a cloak of story and every single person in the entire village in every nearby village flocked around her to watch the most beautiful thing we know the most attractive thing which is a true story because isn't that true that every single time you watch a movie and it comes up based on a true story your entire brain ignites in a way that it doesn't if it's just fictional that my friends is a great story and the end thank you for sharing and all these amazing storytelling tips where can our audience find more about your university and learn how to become such an amazing storyteller like yourself just head to JPuniversity.com and you have a full full course on storytelling and every single signal substance and how you inject that in other human beings and the 110 steps and you can learn it all there well thank you so much for staying up late with us we appreciate all the stories and the experiments you ran on us Johnny and I and enjoyed them thanks for being open to that guys I had really good fun