Chip Colquhoun - The Never Ending Story

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Today, we have the incredible honor of welcoming Chip Colquhoun, a master storyteller who has dedicated nearly two decades to unlocking the transformative power of stories. Chip isn’t just someone who tells tales; he’s a visionary who understands storytelling as a fundamental human survival skill—one that has shaped our evolution as much as fire or shelter.

Chip’s journey began with a keen observation: children thrive when immersed in stories. They perform better, engage more deeply, and unlock parts of themselves that conventional teaching struggles to reach. Whether it’s a non-verbal child finding their voice, a stutterer gaining fluency, or reluctant readers becoming voracious learners, Chip’s methods have empowered countless young minds around the world.

From collaborating with top institutions to running groundbreaking experiments that prove the cognitive power of stories, Chip has redefined what education can be. His work has led to remarkable results, such as students increasing test scores by 26% and discovering the joy in learning through story-led lessons.

So, join us as we dive into the world of storytelling with Chip Colquhoun—where education meets magic, and where the stories we tell shape not only young minds, but the future itself.

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George Monty

My name is George Monty. I am the Owner of TrueLife (Podcast/media/ Channel) I’ve spent the last three in years building from the ground up an independent social media brandy that includes communications, content creation, community engagement, online classes in NLP, Graphic Design, Video Editing, and Content creation. I feel so blessed to have reached the following milestones, over 81K hours of watch time, 5 million views, 8K subscribers, & over 60K downloads on the podcast!

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the true life podcast. I hope everybody is having a beautiful day I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing I hope the wind is at your back and that you are embarking on an incredible day I know that I am and I have a great show for you today if you enjoy Stories if you enjoy learning and if you enjoy maybe you're an avid reader like me But if you enjoy the art of storytelling, then you're going to enjoy this show today. I have with me the incredible Chip Calhoun. And I just want to let everybody know who he is. He's a master storyteller who has dedicated nearly two decades of unlocking the transformative power of stories. Chip isn't just someone who tells tales. He's a visionary who understands storytelling as a fundamental human survival skill, one that has shaped our evolution as much as fire or shelter. Chip's journey began with a keen observation of Children thrive when immersed in stories. They perform better, engage more deeply, and unlock parts of themselves that conventional teaching struggles to reach. Whether it's a non-verbal child finding their voice, a stuttering gaining of fluency, or reluctant readers becoming voracious learners, Chip's methods have empowered countless young minds around the world. From collaborating with top institutions to running groundbreaking experiments that prove the cognitive power of stories, Chip has redefined what education can be. His work has led to remarkable results, such as students increasing test scores by twenty-six percent and discovering the joy in learning through story-led lessons. So join us as we dive into the world of storytelling with Chip Calhoun, where education meets magic and where the stories we tell shape not only young minds, but the future itself. Chip, thank you for being here today. How are you? Thank you. I'm good. I really want to let your listeners know I did not write that script, okay? I'm in the dark about who this Chip Cahoon chap is based on everything that you've just read out. I mean, it's kind of right, but still, wow, what an introduction. Wait, I'm fascinated by stories. And when I go to the multiple websites that you have, which will be down in the show notes, you have really accomplished some cool things. And it's always fascinating to me to get to talk to people who have accomplished things that they believe in, in a way that is contagious. And I think stories are contagious and there's a deep history of it. And maybe we're going to start off with your background. Like, Did you get read a lot of bedtime stories as kids? Did you have a vivid imagination? What brought you into this world of stories? Yeah, well, all of that. I mean, stories definitely are contagious. I think that's a key part of what makes a story. You can't have a story without there being more than one person involved. So there's always going to be that transitory element. And for me, I grew up with separated parents, but one of the things that both of them did incredibly well was read me stories. And because they were doing it in separate locations, they had very separate styles. They were using separate libraries. From my mum, I was getting all of the wonderful picture books, ones I'm sure your listeners will be familiar with, things like Hungry Caterpillar, Spot the Dog. and all that kind, whereas my dad was very much into traditional fiction books, which were barely illustrated at all, such as Thomas the Tank Engine. But what he would do is he would also make up stories based on my favourite characters. So once we'd exhausted all the Thomas the Tank Engine books that were there, He would make up a new Thomas the Tank Engine story, which would usually be about them visiting the beach with Snoopy and Woodstock, because, you know, why not? And he would let me lead the direction that the story was going. And I suppose because this was the day or in the time when few families could afford televisions, our family certainly couldn't afford television. I basically stories reading and writing became my childhood entertainment. And I think I told Jed Lee this because it was Jed Lee who put you on to me, wasn't it? And I have to have to admit, I do wonder whether you are Jed Lee in disguise because your voice and his voice, like when you were doing your podcast with him, it really sounded like you were talking to yourself. I was having to try and really concentrate hard to work out who was who. But yeah, I think I said to Jed Lee, the very first story I wrote, I wrote before I had been taught how to write. And I only know this because I spent two years in foster care. You have a foster system. You know what I mean by that. So I spent a couple of years in foster care. And when I came back to live with my dad, I found a story that I had written in a collection of stories. And I hadn't been to nursery and learn any words, you know, I hadn't been to anything like kindergarten yet. So I didn't know how to write letters. All this story was, was the word the, which I'd obviously copied from another book, then the picture of a fish and then loads of squiggles, but they were properly punctuated squiggles. You know, there were full stops in there. There were paragraph breaks and everything. So it was obvious that, even though I couldn't remember what this story was about, that I had intended to be a writer from an age before four. That's all I can place it really. It's amazing to think about not only the history of storytelling in your life, but the history of storytelling in education and the way we move forward. When we, when you look back at, at the way information used to be handed down, you know, whether it's indigenous cultures, it was always the storyteller. If we look back to the Greeks, like there was these incredible stories that were being passed down. And then you have the printing press come in and the illusions, of the ideas of exact repeatability that come into play. You have found, according to a lot of the things that you've been doing, that storytelling really helps individuals, be it children or adults or the workplace, be an incredible form of education. Do you think that we've kind of slipped into less of an education system with the written word versus the spoken word? I think there's a risk of slipping. I don't think it has happened completely. One new way of interpreting it that I'd like to run by you, just because I know what your podcast is like. So I just want to put a kind of evolutionary model forward to you. So storytelling is almost like the cells. It's the original base biology of any form of storytelling. As we've already said, it is... It is something that involves two people, one of whom has something that they need to communicate to the other. And in very early times, this would be probably a whole series of grunts. It would be images being painted on the wall. It would be statues getting carved. Very basic things that took ages. That's why they couldn't get terribly lifelike and so on. Every single time we've moved to a new phase of storytelling technology like the printing press, there has always been this immediate concern from the new generation that this is going to be regressive in some way. It's going to stop stories. If they're put in stone, it's going to stop some of the imaginative work that goes into it. But really, it's more like what happens when cells come together to form a bigger whole. So you get those little amorphous single-celled organism things, which start joining together to create all of these different species that we have. And each one of those is still a collection of single-cell organisms. So the power for the creativity and the mutations and the evolution is always there. But for any one species that exists, they are that entity. So if you think you've got a book that is that story. That story though is still going to have an impact on the lives of another, another bunch of single-celled organisms that can still take it and mutate it and change it and be impacted by it. So this is why even since the very first book was printed, there have been variations of that book printed. It wasn't long before we started getting second edition and third editions. It wasn't long before we started figuring out that some translations of the Bible have naughty words in, and so they need to produce a translation that is less incendiary. And it's the same with the latest technologies, you know, the video games and virtual reality. All of this is new forms of storytelling that are taking what's gone on before and building on it in a way that can impact the next generation of stories and storytelling. The problem that you can have, the risk that we have is that some people get fixated on the current level in exactly the same way that we had a period of time where humanity thought humanity was God. And I think there are still members of humanity who do think humanity is God. And so they go around thinking, you know, it's OK to ruin the natural world. It's OK to drive everything else into extinction because we are the the pinnacle of evolution. In exactly the same way, there might be people who look at video games and think, this is it. I don't need anything else. This is all I need to entertain me. And what you lose by just focusing on the one form of story access or entertainment is all of the cognitive... just the cognitive soup that comes from having all of the different vibrant arenas of storytelling. You lose your own ability really to do the creative work and start putting your own output out there. So rather than just kind of getting sucked in and absorbed by a single creative storytelling form, we need to have all of them. And that's the reason why storytelling is nowhere near dead. Storytellers like me, a dime a dozen, really. It's just we don't get talked about as much as the fancy new technologies. That's a great description, and thank you for putting it that way. I love the evolution of the story and the fact that like the, the deeper you go, the bigger it gets. It's like this giant cave. Like the, the more you go into it, the more you see how, how deep and wide it is inside. You're like, Oh, we're going to scratch the surface here. It's true. And thank you for thanking me for that. Because like I said, that was a completely new interpretation that literally came into my head a moment ago. So it probably sounded a little bit cat candid, but if you're going with it, I'll go with it too. Yeah, well, that's another point to storytelling too, right? Like sometimes the stream of consciousness is a performance in itself. And like that's an addition to the story, right? Absolutely. Beautiful segue. That is exactly how storytelling works. The whole thing about storytelling, which I try to emphasize when I'm leading workshops, especially workshops for educators or marketers or anybody who isn't looking at it as a performance aspect. element is that storytelling is not actually a performance thing at all storytelling is not a case of you trying to get everybody to look at you and see how wonderful you are at conveying a story or a character when you're doing storytelling properly what you're trying to do is get inside your audience's heads you're hoping as well to get them looking inward all of storytelling is about getting people not to look at you, but to look at themselves and to have a bit of a conversation with you. So every time you tell a story, it's different because whoever you're telling it to, they're going to be building up their own picture. They're going to have their own response. Their picture and their response will tailor where you go with the story, what happens next. And as a result, it could be exactly the same story. Usually it's exactly the same story, but how it's told will be unique to that group of listeners. When you find yourself telling a story, do you – obviously, it seems to me that you see the crowd as active participants in that story. My question is – Absolutely, yeah. Do you see each individual seeing your story as a completely different story? I know it's kind of a complicated question, but is that something you think about when you're telling the story? Every one of these persons has a different idea of what my story is. So the way I tend to think of it is a bit like a conductor and an orchestra. So Storyteller is like the conductor, keeping everybody on the same page, everybody going at the same pace, and helping the movement of the emotions around. But every single instrument in an orchestra, that's where the actual creativity happens, isn't it? You know, if a conductor was there on his own, they'd just be waving their arms and it'd look funny, but it wouldn't be giving you what you actually paid to go and see. The music comes from the orchestra. They're the ones who are doing the real creative work. And every single one of them is contributing a different tonal range, a different tone. pitch range, different timbre, all sorts of musical words that I don't really know because I'm not really a conductor. But the point that I'm getting at is, you know, it's less about creating a whole series of individual journeys. It's more about creating one journey that everybody is going on with their own unique perspective. It's a little bit like life, basically. Because we are all doing that, aren't we? We're all going through life and everybody can look at one object and get a totally different response from it. You must know the Zen story about the blind men and the elephant. You know that one, don't you? Yeah, maybe you could tell people who may not know, though. I'm not sure I know it well enough, but I'll give it a go. So you've got blind men and they all meet an elephant. And they're wandering around with their hands trying to work out what it is that has come into the middle of them all. And one of them grabs hold of the trunk and says, oh, it's a snake. It's obviously a snake. Another one of them grabs hold of one of the legs and says, yeah, daft, this is a tree. It's obviously a tree. Another one is pulling on the tail and saying, look, any minute now you're going to hear the bells ring and you're going to realize we're in the middle of a church. And something like that. They're all touching exactly the same object, but getting their own perspective on it because of where they are. And life is like that. Stories can be like that too. It's so well said. It reminds me of previously before we jumped into the live part of the interview, we were talking about stories. And I had mentioned to you, sometimes I see my life as a story and myself as the main character. And I can shift the hero's journey in some way by telling myself this story. And you had said something I thought was fascinating about the way you interpret your own internal stories. I was wondering if we could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, well, I guess the way I interpreted how you put it to me, that you are the kind of teller of your own story, was that you live your life and you tend to think, well, if I have this attitude, then that is going to keep my spirits up. It might manifest what I want to manifest. Is that basically what you were getting at? I think you nailed its butt on. Okay, cool. So I don't think there's maybe as big a difference between that and what I came back to you with. But I now live in the house of a chap called Samuel Pepys. It used to be owned by Samuel Pepys. And I'm not sure how well known or how popular Pepys is with your listeners. But here in the UK, he's a key historical figure because he kept a diary for nine years in the which covered an incredible decade. It had the Great Fire of London. It had the Great Plague. It had the end of Oliver Cromwell's protectorate and the start of Charles II's restoration. It was the last time that England ever got invaded, like properly invaded, with foreign boots on the soil trying to take it over, invaded, and also nearly winning, invaded. And it was, you know, we managed to beat them back. without American help as well so it was incredible and the thing about living in his house is that I've recently been encouraged to keep a diary too and so if you've been to my website you'll see this I'm kind of retelling his diary but I'm also looking at my own life from from the same point of view And the thing that happens when you reflect on your day is that you notice those moments where you were in control, you were kind of the living example. equivalent of lucid dreaming you know you're right there you're you are manifesting you are choosing your emotions your responses etc but you also notice that there are loads of points where you slip out of that you go back into the full dreamer going through life and maybe you take an action and you don't really know why you do it you get really angry you don't know why you are you fall deeply in love you don't know why you are but when you reflect on them you get to really think, OK, well, what am I going to take from that? How am I going to interpret that story so that I can shape what comes next? And for me, what's really important when doing this, because I am a storyteller, is thinking, what is the impact of this going to be on others? And that's a perspective that I can bring which Samuel Pepys didn't because he never expected his journal to be read. And I expect most people don't write in a diary or keep a journal expecting it to be read. But I like to consider that if somebody else was to get hold of my diary, what could they take away that might enhance their life? Because that, again, that's where stories started. It was all about communicating with one another so that we can help our tribe, our nation, our species as a whole to survive and do well and thrive. So yeah, it's trying to think of your story from that perspective. It's awesome. It's so fascinating to think about some of the similarities that you talk about. You talk about the great plague and all of a sudden you guys have COVID. You know what I mean? It's just so meta that you live in that place right now. It's so crazy. Oh, it really is. Yeah. Like I say, I'm currently keeping two journals on my website because I keep one, which is a weekly interpretation of peeps. So if you can't be bothered to read all the, every day of Samuel Peep's life for nine years, you can read just a weekly blog version of his. And then you've got my version, which is some three hundred and forty six years later. And I love clocking some of the little nuances that he talks about. I mean, for example, for Peeps, he was living in a time when not only had they you know, all of this plague going around. But they had executed a king, very soon after had a Lord Protector, very soon after had another Lord Protector, very soon after had a complete parliamentary shift, almost like a military government, and very soon after that had a new king. So in a very short space of time, they had five new rulers. And if you know anything about UK politics recently, in the really short space of time, we have just had five prime ministers. So it is absolutely uncanny. There's also something he says at one point, which is talking about how He goes over to visit Holland where they had the orange principality. He talks about how likely or unlikely it is that anyone from the orange background could ever be a good ruler of anything. And yet you folks have Donald Trump. So, you know, the links to various bits of modern history are just beautiful. it's so fascinating to me to, to see, it's almost as if there's a higher power, just kind of playing with us. Like, let me just sprinkle this little thing over here, but that'll see if they find this clue, which, which brings me to the idea of one of my favorite storytellers is Joseph Campbell. And he goes to so many talks about so many different mythologies. And for those of us who love stories, you know, it's, it's so amazing to see, you know, the quest for the Holy grail and the Arthurian stories or the, the hero's journey and everything from mythology to Star Wars. Do you think that it's possible to move past the hero's journey on some level, or is that just the foundation of every story going forward? Or not every story, but is it a good foundation block for most stories? So I... personally don't believe that the hero's journey is the model for all stories okay right right um I believe there is one essence to any good story and that is uh well actually I'll tell you what I'll take you through this the way that I usually share it with everybody because then your listeners can can join us on the journey too yes so um in school I was taught that every single story has three essential elements that begin with the letters B, M and E. So what do those letters stand for? What would you say they stand for? Be me. B, M, and E. So yeah, not as in a phrase, be me, which is really an interpretation. But if you see them as initials, what do they stand for? Every single story must have a B and a M and a E. What am I talking about? There must be a battle, a moving through adversity, and then an an ending, a beginning, a middle, and an ending. I love it. If you had been the teacher in my school when I was in grade two or something, then that would have been perfect to hear. What you're more likely to hear in grade two is just beginning, middle, and end. But you're absolutely right. Beginning, middle and end is a useless structure. It's all right if you're writing a narrative or if you're thinking in terms of narrative, because it's that kind of causal structure, isn't it? We go from one to the other. But here in the UK, one of our biggest champions, if you like, was Shakespeare. We always talk about Shakespeare. I hate going on about Shakespeare, but I love the fact that he never uses a beginning. Anything you know about any of Shakespeare's greatest stories, Romeo and Juliet, starts right in the middle of a battle. You don't find out how this battle starts. You just get plonked right in the middle of the battle. Hamlet, his father's already been killed. He's right there in the middle of discovering that his father's ghost is roaming around. You start right in the middle. And I know there in the U.S., I can't remember exactly what it's called. You'd probably be able to tell me. You are home to the longest running soap opera, aren't you? Is it something like Changes or something? Is that what it's called? I'm not sure. My Auntie Jane used to watch General Hospital and there's As the World Turns. How long has that been going on then, General Hospital? Uh, thirty years, somewhere around there. Thirty years. So, and does it look like it's ending anytime soon? Uh, I don't think, I don't think so. I, I don't think any of those shows. Days of our lives. Thank you very much. Days of our lives. There you go. There you go. I knew, I knew there was a, a really long running soap opera. Um, that one's, has that, that one finished though, right? Days of our lives. Is that one finished now? I don't know, honey. Can you hope it's out here? Is that one finished? Yeah, since the sixties. However, General Hospital, is that still going? I don't know. I'm not sure. I'd imagine it could be. You know, maybe the longest soap opera is our political system over here. Yeah, yeah, quite possibly. I know in Australia they've got Neighbours, which got resurrected or something. So they looked like they were trying to end it. But then is it Amazon brought it back or something? And here in the UK we've got Coronation Street, which is our longest running soap. It's been going forever. We're getting on a massive tangent here. But the point is, if endings were important for a good story, none of those would have been successful. Because they are proof that you don't really need endings. So I think where you went with it straight away is far closer to the truth. You talk battle. The one that I usually use for the letter B is bad thing. Oh, yes. There is no good story in the world. No story that has stood the test of time when nothing bad happens. And I have asked countless audiences if they can give me an exception to that rule. No one has. Even the hungry caterpillar gets a tummy ache. You know, Bluey and Peppa Pig are having all sorts of troubles thrown at them all the time. A big one that came out from this country. I'm sorry I'm having to be so UK-centric, but, you know, that's where I am. Have you heard of the Teletubbies? Do you know who the Teletubbies are? Of course, of course. You know the Teletubbies? Thank goodness. Okay, so you know the Teletubbies. One of the cutest children's programs ever. And yet they are really popular for the phrase. So, of course, bad things are everywhere. But what's really interesting, actually, is Honey's just added to the chat, we live for the bad. I don't think we actually do, because we don't like these things to happen to us in real life, do we? We don't actually want bad things to happen to us. And we really suffer when these things happen to us or to our loved ones. We don't want bad things to happen to our loved ones either. And we feel terrible when we see things happening in the news, like people getting blown to pieces or nations going to war. And yet we have to have that in our fiction because if we don't, we don't get grit by our fiction. So what's going on? Well, that's where the M and the E are really important as well. If you have a story that's just loads of bad stuff going on, no one's going to be interested in that. If it's just a story where you have a group of aliens come down and literally wiping out the planet, No one's going to be interested in that. You also have to have the M. Now, the way you put this, which I thought was beautiful, was something like moving through adversity, wasn't it? Right, right. And I love that. I usually make these things much more concise because time, you know, people aren't paying me to be verbose. I... That's the reason why I'm being verbose now, by the way, is because he's not paying. Love it. Yeah. So for me, it's just message where you can also think of it as meaning. You can also think of it as moral. But the point is, every story that gets told that enters into our hearts is sharing something with us about that bad thing, a way we can look at it, which reduces it to something manageable. And maybe that is the hero who gives us an example of how to behave when these bad things are happening so that we can look at that here and say, okay, if something similar happens to me, that's what I'm going to be like. And I know there are loads of true crime podcasts out there as well that keep telling those stories because they want us to be able to see what happened to those victims and say, now you know the sorts of things to look out for. Yeah. Now, thanks to these people who suffered, you can hopefully stop the same thing happening to you and your loved ones. Let those victims basically be elevated to the platform of heroes because they have trodden that uncharted territory for the rest of us. So so that M, that message is a vital component. And again, I challenge you to think of a story that has stood the test of time that does not have a message or a moral or a meaning. There are loads of authors out there right now, especially children's authors who claim that kids don't worry about that and that kids just want their stories to be, you know, complete nonsense and, you know, definitely have the bad thing in there because it's fun. But they don't have to have a message or a meaning. And it's certainly true that those sorts of stories are entertaining and they can be fun and they are useful from the point of view of just getting something out your system. But the stories that enter our hearts and end up being the ones that we remember and go back to again and again and again, those are the ones with messages. And I see children recognizing this again and again and again. If I tell a story that has a questionable moral or a questionable message, especially when you're thinking, you know, stories from medieval times being retold for modern audiences, kids of today will straight away pick up on them and be like, actually, I don't think she should go and live with him now and have a happily ever after because I think he's a right twat or something along those lines. So it's a very vital component, even so. Probably the most important element and the one that I think a lot of creators miss is the E. And this isn't so much about an ending. It's about empathy. That's what the E is for. So I used to go into a lot of schools for younger people. And one of the reasons why I started getting really attracted to using my profession for assistance with education is that we actually started just going out to do it as entertainment. And when we were going into schools again and again, because they loved having us back, some kids would bring us up their stories that they'd written, just completely off the bat. And the first thing that you think when this happens is, my goodness, isn't this amazing? We tell these stories and it gets kids inspired to create stories and share them back. That was the first big thing that hit us. The second big thing, though, was just how terrible these stories were. Because they would be stories along the lines of, there's an alien invasion, and the soldier has a gun full of unlimited ammo. He kills them all. And that was the end. Or they would be stories like, there's a fairy's tea party. And that was it. And the thing... The thing about these stories is that, you know, sometimes they would have the bad thing, like the fairy queen might drink some poison, but it was okay because they were fairies, so they could magically go on. And what's really missing with all of these, I mean, if you think about it, they do have a message. You know, the message of the anti-alien story is, you know, when the world gets attacked, fight back, you'll be okay. You may have cheerio, honey. Just saying goodbye to honey, everyone. She's just leaving us. I don't know how we're going to survive without you, honey, to be honest, because you've been so intrinsic to this conversation so far. But with the fairies having that tea party, you know, again, you've got the message perhaps to look within because they have the magic that they need to be able to get the poison to go away. but it would be a real struggle for anyone else listening to that story who wasn't really close to the creators of those stories to think, how was this gonna apply to me? You know, these bad things are happening in these stories, but we need to think, how's it gonna apply to us? How is this message gonna apply to us? And this is the reasons why Jerry and Joe did an amazing thing with Superman. They made a man who could leap tall buildings in a single bound. You could shoot at him. You wouldn't be able to kill him. He was strong enough to just pick up the car and shake you out into a jail cell. But he would still fall in love. So if you wanted to get to that guy, you go after Lois Lane. And that is a weakness that everybody could instantly connect with him through. Everybody's like that. You may be a total narcissist. You may think you are the bee's knees. But if someone goes after the people that you love, it can be crushing. And that was the empathy point for Superman. And there are empathy points for all these characters. We take, again, a character like Bluey, who Yeah, is a dog. You know, you might think we can't empathize with a dog. But of course, this is a dog in a very familiar, familial setting with a father who has all of his problems, a mom who's desperately trying to keep everyone together, a sibling who is blooming annoying, but also really cute. And, you know, they're all little things that allow kids to be able to watch that program and go, that's me. I can see myself in there. So these are the three core elements, the bad thing, the message, and some level of empathy. Those are the elements that make stories last the test of time because that's where we connect with them at a human level. It's really well said. Thanks for putting it that way. On some level, I can't help but draw the comparison to people who find themselves in crisis. I talk to a lot of people in the psychedelic movement who are using psychedelics to help people get through PTSD or childhood trauma or these things, but it does seem like the story they're, they're, they're trying to figure out a way out of the story on some level. And maybe they can't approach the story in a first person point of view, because there's so much shame there. They can't get past the, the, the first threshold guardian, you know, or the final boss or something like that. But what, What role do you think seeing the story in a third person perspective or going back and relistening to a story helps us as individuals get through the transitions in our life? That is a brilliant question. And I'd love to answer it. I'm just going to have to think about it because it is. The reason why, I mean, I do love that question because this is exactly the sort of thing that I think stories are perfect for. And I have seen a lot of the salvation that has come through story. But I think there is a danger with answering questions like that, especially from the point of view of someone like myself who may be perceived as an authority on the subject, that I could say something which could have general applicability, but for a few is actually going to end up being the total wrong answer. And that's why we're treading on eggshells with this one, I think, because there is benefit to seeing storytelling as escape. There is benefit in seeing the goal of humanity to transcend humanity. But a danger of that is you then start to lose touch with what humanity actually is. And a lot of humanity is gorgeous. I'm thinking in particular of families who may be fleeing a war-torn country. They are going through incredible pain and incredible suffering and incredible hunger. And they are looking down maybe at a newborn child in their arms and they are seeing beauty and perfection and connection and love, which if you transcended at that point, you would lose. And it would be of absolutely no benefit to that newborn child. So I kind of... I guess what I'm coming to here is that there's no one answer for the whole of everything. And that's exactly the same with stories as well. The reason why we have some people saying there are seven basic plots, there are twelve basic plots, there are fourteen basic plots, or in my case, there's one basic plot. In all of the different interpretations, it's people seeing what matters to them. And again, this is where the empathy comes in because any storyteller who is sharing a story, if you're writing it in a book, you're trying to make it as general as possible so that you will bring in a big readership. Or maybe you're not. Maybe you are targeting one particular audience and you're happy with it being a cult classic and fitting a particular niche. Or how do you folks say it? Nietzsche? Yeah, I just go with niche. Niche. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Because Nietzsche is completely different, isn't it? Especially when we're talking about philosophy. God is dead. But, yeah, so, oh, niche. Niche was the other pronunciation I was thinking of. So, yeah, so when you put down a story in a solid form, then you have to be thinking, you know, long-term in how this is maybe one day going to be interpreted. When you are storytelling face-to-face, which is the kind of storytelling that folks like Jed Lee and myself do an awful lot. Right. What we're doing is we are thinking, well, how is this story going to be specific to this person in front of us or this audience in front of us? And even when you've got an audience, you know, that's a whole bunch of individuals there. You've got to be careful that you don't go too far in any one direction. I remember doing some Halloween storytelling at a museum, and this kid turned up. who had first met me online during COVID. And that's just a little response to something that I remember you and Jed Lee talking about in your conversation with him about how different online storytelling is and how it loses something. It absolutely does. But for those who get to it and when it's their only thing, it can be phenomenally powerful. You can still make that connection. You can still have those conversations. And this kid was only a couple of years new to England. So English was not his first language. He was only six. In fact, it was his sixth birthday the day that he met me online. And just he got so absorbed in watching someone on a screen telling a story as opposed to seeing, you know, spaceships flying and pigs dancing or whatever you usually get in TV created for that age. his parents were flabbergasted and they went out and bought some of my books for him to read and he got really into them even though again it was not his first language these books were chunky books about ten times the size of what he was getting from school and as soon as lockdowns were over and I was doing this thing in public for halloween they really couldn't wait to bring him to one of my events in person So there he was. I think by now he was probably seven. So not much older. But sitting there in this little room in a museum with me telling a ghost story. And there was a bit of, oh, yeah, I recognize you. It was such a happy start. And then I kind of like started the story. And of course, it's a Halloween story. So it starts with someone dying. And very soon after that, we have a character going into a forest and hearing footsteps coming up behind him. He turns and he can't see anything. And this kid literally just stood up and ran straight out the room. And his parents, shocked, apologetic, worried, everything. They ran out after him. You know, there was no way I could have expected that because up until that point, I thought this was someone who would be with me for every single moment of every single story. And yet maybe it was because of that, the level of intense fear reached him more than it did anyone else in the room. So he didn't come back. He didn't hear the end of the story. I wasn't going to let that be the end of it for him. And because of GDPR and everything that goes around these days, I didn't actually have a means of communicating with him directly. So I had to do it through the museum. But I wasn't going to let this not happen. And I recorded a little message specifically for him to go out on the museum's social media, which basically let him know just how amazing a human being he was. Because the thing is, if you get scared by a scary story, that shows that your imagination is incredible because scary stories are stories about things that don't exist. You know, there's no such thing as skeletons that come out from the grave and chase you. There are no such thing as zombies that start walking around trying to eat you, you know, and there are no such thing as evil witches that ride broomsticks to chase you and curse you. These are all things that have been put in imaginary tales. So if you can imagine get so scared by one of those stories that shows that your imagination is working so incredibly well you must have one of the best imaginations in the world and that means you're probably going to be like one of those folks who invent a cure for covid or um like uh who are they john and mary who invented the first successful heart um heart lung machine uh you know all of these folks who had really good imaginations john there um being a poet as well as the inventor of medical technology uh and they also create these incredible things that they know must be able to work and they keep working at it they keep thinking about it they keep imagining until they're able to produce it in reality so that's what the imagination is and just looping this back to your question then yeah what really is going on here is the importance of the imagination The more we tell stories, the more we hear stories, the more we reflect on our own story, What we are doing is we are practicing this real gift that is the latest in evolution. And regardless as to whether any other animal has it, human beings are definitely the experts when it comes to imagination. We're the ones who have dominated the world because of our use of this particular development in evolution, our ability to close our eyes and suddenly be in another part of the world suddenly see something that doesn't actually exist And that underpins every single aspect of how we can make life progress, whether it is closing our eyes and thinking, okay, how can I actually get out of this situation? How can I actually survive? Whether it's closing our eyes and saying, what do I need to invent that is going to be a tool that will help me to survive? Whether it is picturing ourselves in the future, you know, ambition is basically... imagination isn't it imagining your future self um whether it is trying to understand those around you a bit better empathy is just another form of the imagination so that that I think is the real answer to your question if you can actually remember what your question was because it was so long ago no it's beautiful I I appreciate the in-depth understanding and and giving the answer to that you did. I do think it's a very important part and there is a lot of responsibility in there and it's captivating. I, I can't help but begin thinking about the evolution of the story and imagination. And on some level, like you are a masterful storyteller. I love the way the body language, the way you're able to build images for me as we're listening to the story. And that brings up this question of like, Do you think that there is a transformation of sense ratios? You know what I mean by that? Sometimes it seems that it used to be that we would listen to words intently. And maybe we still do. But maybe with... Things moving into a more visual world. Maybe we're beginning as species to rely heavier on different ratios. Maybe the ratio of our senses is changing. And how might that change storytelling? It seems like that is part of the evolution of it on some level. Is that too far out? Is that too crazy? I think we're getting better at it, but I know that there are studies out there which really do point to some of the stuff that you're talking about there. So audio books, for example, have become hugely popular, even though we are living in this apparently visual world where they're developing better and better CGI and the ability to do deep fakes and everything. And yet audio books suddenly take off. No one expected that. But it's because people are listening to them while doing the dishes or listening to them while driving to work or listening to them. I mean, they're listening to podcasts as well, we hope. They're hearing this conversation, aren't they? So people are doing more with words in the background. They have done studies, though, and they have shown that people who listen to audiobooks definitely are not getting as much out of it as those who read it on paper. And the theory behind it, I actually got this from a podcast, I believe, which I was listening to while I was hanging out and watching. So it was probably the most apt thing to be listening to at the time. But they were saying, can I actually remember what they were saying now? That's the challenge. I've got to be the exception to the rule in order to share this information with you now. They said that when you are reading books, Every so often, even without thinking about it, you will read a sentence more than once. Your eyes will flick back just to clarify the word, clarify the meaning. Sometimes your eyes will flick forward so that you get a sense for what's coming up to help you contextualize what you are reading in the actual moment, the actual sentence that you are on. And all of this means that when you are reading and fully reading, you are getting way more immersed in it. Audiobooks, however, Don't give you any opportunity for that. The moment a word is uttered, the transitory nature of the experience means it's gone. You're not going to be able to get it back unless you do the rewind thing, which I hope a few people are doing now because that was a very important thing to remember, folks. That's the reason why, yes, you will obviously get something out of it, but you may not get as much depth as you would if you were giving all of your attention to it. But again, I don't think that's a bad thing. And I believe that it's important for us to be able to practice all of these different abilities, being able to watch a film, for example, and turn and have a conversation with someone next to you about it. That's actually really, really important because you are then using that film as a conduit for a relationship. So, you know, I'm definitely with the old German saying, theatre director practitioner Brecht, who used to really encourage people to take the popcorn in, really encourage people to have a little natter about what it was that they were seeing. He saw that as being one of the benefits of the theatrical experience. There are probably loads of people who are on their way to the cinema right now thinking, absolutely not, I do not want to have someone munching popcorn in my ear while I am enjoying the latest Disney or whatever. But the The key thing is that you may not appreciate it then, but you will at some point appreciate being able to talk to someone about that story. So being able to have that and either choose to concentrate on it or choose to have it as something else that you're doing. And that kind of level of flexibility, I think, is important. But you know when you need to do it, I'm sure. You know when you need to actually stop and either press the rewind button and listen a bit more intently or think to yourself, that was a fantastic movie. I'm now going to get the book or that was a fantastic audio book. I'm now going to read it. Yeah, it brings up the idea. I can almost smell the popcorn sometimes when you go back and you remember a story or a movie that you've seen. You're like, oh, yeah, I remember I saw that scene. Oh, that's when I got the popcorn and the Skittles or whatever it is that you're having in there. It's interesting, the the sense of smell too and like that's in a lot of stories too like you know we often hear about how I just think it's fascinating the way we use our language to describe our senses in an audible story or a video story but you can almost feel it internally and that's kind of a broad observation but what's your take on describing the senses with our words and stories Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely important. You want to get everybody connecting with your story. It's part of what makes empathy work, isn't it? Being able to connect with the story on a level like, oh, yeah, I understand what that smell is or I understand what that sight is. It's why fantasy and sci-fi writers have some of the biggest challenges because they're often describing worlds not only... completely alien to us, but without a reference point either, because if you're setting something in the future, you can't exactly say this shape came out the distance. It was glowing yellow and curvaceous, but it was quite clearly smelling organic. It was basically like a McDonald's in space. You can't do that because the moment you do that, you know, you pull people totally out of the world of sci-fi. So they have to find really common base level images and smells and that they will often end up relying more on sounds and smells and colors and textures than they will on things like metaphor and simile. So yeah, it all comes down to connecting with your audience. But for the same reason, you don't want to have too much of it because people sensory overload in any kind of writing or any kind of description what you can end up doing is taking people into a place where they're having to think too much about the experience that it starts to become uncomfortable. And they think, actually, I don't, I don't want to be part of this. I don't want to be in this or, um, goodness me, when are we going to get onto the bits that we actually like, like the bad thing or the message, you know, it's, it starts to, it starts to become overwhelming. It's fascinating to think about that, that aspect of it is that, um, Like, where did you learn that? Like, is that did you go to school to understand how to build stories in that fashion? Or is that just from trial and error and experience? It is literally experience. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we we did get taught some stuff at school, like the importance that every story has a beginning, middle and end. And we also got taught. Have you heard the phrase show? Don't tell. I don't think so, no. No, you haven't heard that one? Hold on. Anybody who's been to certainly an English, as in a British school or a British writing school will have definitely heard that phrase, show, don't tell, or if you've maybe read a book on writing. I think it's used a lot in script writing schools as well. Mm-hmm. So that's one of the big things that you get taught there. And you also get taught to widen your vocabulary with things like adjectives and alternatives to said. So rather than having a character in a story with a passage, Oh, he said you want to have something like, oh, he exclaimed or, oh, he shouted or, oh, he mused, which is basically all the writing advice you need to never get published ever. Because most of the books that end up on our shelves, it's almost like those people have never been to school because they throw all of that out the window. Again, like with Shakespeare, you don't go with a beginning. You just jump straight in. The best language for a book is often taking out those adjectives, taking out the alternatives to said, because then dialogue becomes effortless. It just flows and images come quicker because you're thinking in terms of the movement and the verbs, the things that are actually happening. And likewise with the show don't tell thing. I hate that phrase, not least because I'm a storyteller. You're basically rendering my entire profession a waste of time if you say you should be showing, not telling. Telling is essential for stories because telling is the bit where you have somebody on the receiving end. Telling means that this is a dialogue rather than just, hey, look what I can do, which... anyone can do in an empty room. You can practice a magic trick, you can practice a script, you can practice a musical instrument, you can do all of that without needing to have an audience. I can't tell a story without an audience. But I know what they mean when they say show don't tell. And the problem that a lot of people have by really taking that literally is that you end up with stories where way too much of nothing happens because they're so busy showing you every little detail of everything that someone is doing. Or you don't actually get any of the empathy because you're never let inside the heads of the characters. What they actually mean when they say show don't tell is pull, don't push. They're wanting you not to just throw information at people and say, look, this is all of the stuff you need to know in order to get this story. They're wanting you to present that information in a way that attracts people into the story. And sometimes that actually is giving them loads of information. Sometimes that is showing them a character actually feeling the emotion so that they can understand. either of their own choice get inside that character's head and feel the emotion too or observe it because they need to have a bit of distance they they're not in a place in their lives where they can hack that level of trauma right now so it it all comes down to being sensitive to the story and as I keep coming back to time and time again in this podcast in in my life's work thinking of being sensitive to your audience Yeah. For me, when we started thinking about the relationship between the story and the audience, the struggle between translation and interpretation comes to mind. I've often heard the idea that Translation is interpretation. But maybe you could speak to those two forces. Because on some level, you have to translate the story from vision into reality. And you also are interpreting that same thing. What do you think about those two words and that relationship together and how that affects storytelling? Yeah, translation is an interesting one because... the same phrase could be translated verbatim into another language and it will mean absolutely nothing to the users of that language. So you do always have to be thinking about interpretation for it to get across. And as a storyteller, we get a bit more meta with it because we are translating from historical cultures into modern cultures. And sometimes if you just take what you've got from the past and shove it into your own culture, it is not going to work because it's full of beliefs that people don't believe anymore. Or it is full of stuff that people may find traumatic. They haven't got the same life experience that they had back then to be able to just soak up the fact that twelve people just got butchered by their own mother or whatever it is that happens in a, you know, ancient fairy tale. So what tends to happen with storytelling is you interpret the story for the, again, we're coming back to it, aren't we? And really soon this time, the audience that's in front of you, how is this story going to land with them? And you may be thinking, you know, what is the original message that you want to convey? What was the message they were trying to get across in those ancient times? How can I share it now so that the message still comes across for modern audiences, but the actual presentation is one that they will accept as well. And a fantastic example of this, if I have time to give an example, do I have time to give an example? Yeah, please. I'll give you an example. OK, so let's let's take an example that I think most people will recognize wherever they are in your listenership, which is the example of Cinderella. You know, Cinderella. Bring into a pumpkin. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't sure whether you were thinking there or you'd frozen, but yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So a bit of both. So yeah, Cinderella, we mostly know Cinderella today, thanks to two sources, one of whom is the Grimm's version, and one of whom is the, I never remember his last name, I think it's Charles... Perrault, I think it is, from the French guy who was essentially like the French equivalent to Grimm's and who converted a lot of fairy tales into the kind that people would recognise from Disney, like Beauty and the Beast, etc. Hopefully, anybody listening who knows him will know who I'm talking about. And if you don't, just... Google and hopefully you'll eventually get the answer. AI is clever and all that. So the source that the Charlie guy had, though, was most likely something like the Grimms, who had their own name for Cinderella, which was Ashen Poodle. And the story there begins a certain way, which I will come back to, I promise. Disney a couple of hundred years later, decided this was going to be one of his first animated films. And you can probably more readily call to mind the beginning of Disney's Cinderella, the original animated version where you have that book and you hear once upon a time and the book opens and you hear it talking about there being this girl who had this perfect life with her father, but then her brother, mother died and and then her father remarried and for a time everything was okay with this new stepmother and so and so but then the father died as well and now the stepmother's wickedness was shown up so is this is this familiar? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. At what point did you start falling asleep? For everybody who's listening to this, okay, for the last little while, his mobile phone's been pinging off and he keeps turning to that. And he's been way, way more interested in that than the story I've just been telling. Even though I've just been retelling Disney, for crying out loud. You know, Disney, one of the most remarkable storytellers of the And yet I've been almost verbatim relaying that story, and I just could not keep his attention. However, let's put that side by side with the Grimm's version, okay? And I want you to tell me whether you could leave your attention from me and turn it to your mobile phone in the middle of this, okay? Because this is how the Grimm's begin. Okay. Ashen Poodle's mother was on her deathbed. She grabbed hold of her daughter and said, whatever happens when I pass, you must live life with God at the centre. Promise me this. Promise me you will live your life with God at the centre. OK, mother, I will, said Ashen Poodle. Now, have I lost your attention yet? A hundred percent in, in, in depth, in the story, way more, way more intriguing, which is better. Once upon a time or her mother was on about to die, you know, straight away. Grim's new, get to the bad thing, get to the empathy, get to the message as well. Cause you know, within the first few lines of their telling of the story, you've even got the message there almost, which is, you know, if we, if you keep divinity at the center of your life, things will go well for you. Now, all of that is still in Disney's version, but they take their time to get there. I'm sure the reason they did that was because anybody going into the theaters in when was it? The was it the forties when Cinderella came out? It was one of the early ones, wasn't it? It might have been the sixties. If Honey was here, she'd tell us, wouldn't she? She would definitely tell us. But they were putting this into theaters where two things were going on. First of all, you had audiences who had maybe never seen a feature length animation before. let alone a feature length animation with synced up voices and sounds. So, you know, there was the wonder of the format that you were being given. But you've also got to remember, this was a time of huge war. We'd just come out of a period where people had lost loads of loved ones. And depending on exactly when this was coming out, there would be some sort of unrest going on in the world as well. So the chance of really scaring people, if you give them this sensory overload of visual animations of people immediately dying and so on, We hear stories of kids who were terrified by the dragon in Sleeping Beauty or the wicked stepmother from Snow White. And those were elements that Disney managed to keep in. So to go straight charging in with the kind of Grimm's version of the fairy tale would have been terrible. The main message of the story, though, is still there. At the end of the day, it's about staying kind. Disney's Cinderella, she's not just a woman waiting for her prince to come along. She is a woman who is incredibly kind. She's decent to the animals around her. She goes out of her way to serve her wicked stepmother and sisters, even though they are horrible to her, because she does it willingly. She goes into it trying to be the best that she can. And that's why we feel that her story is vindicated when she gets to marry the prince. You can then jump almost a century though, and we get the live action version of Disney's Cinderella. And it's almost like they have gone back to the Grimms again. They do exactly the same thing. And you can almost just compare the film posters. You've got the animated Cinderella who's kind of like doing a little curtsy in her prince's dress. You've got the live action Cinderella who is looking up at the prince, but not from a position of kind of... I'm subservient. I'm down here. You're my hero. She's got her chest out. She's got the power in that frame. And there's really a sense that, you know, we are now in a world where women do have the opportunity to say more. And we do have an opportunity to make life more equal if we have the gumption to do it. It's pretty much exactly the same message. And, of course, it's a very similar story. But they've taken the format, they've looked at the audience they've got now, and they've retold it in a way that is going to land with this audience. And I don't think it's a surprise that most people reckon that version of Cinderella, the live-action version, is the better version for audiences today. Even my cat was saying so. I don't know if you could hear him there. Yeah, I can. You absolutely agree, don't you, Kitten? You going to come and join in the conversation? Yeah, let's see him. He's thinking about it. He's a cat, so he does have free will. Yeah, exactly. I think he saw the fact that this is live and thought, maybe not. You know, it's so fascinating to think about the way stories are told over time and the way it seems to me on some level, at least maybe it's because we're in this political cycle or whatever, but it seems to me that on some level, The narrative is trying to control. Do you think the narrative that is told to us through major television or if we look at some of the work of Edward Bernays, do you think that there is a real attempt to shape society with the stories that are being told? Sometimes. Yeah, I think there are creators who go ahead and try to do that. There are also creators who try to almost photograph their society through through their storytelling. Usually it. if you really want to go into it, you can see that genres can play a role in this. So a lot of really progressive works out there tend to be things like science fiction and fantasy, because they are creating worlds that are entirely based in the imagination. So they give people a sense of, OK, maybe this is an ancient-looking world, if you think of something like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. But the actions that people take, the way that even the most insignificant person can end up being a hero, we see it happening in this imaginary land, and we think that sort of thing can happen in our real landscape. Cross over to something like murder mysteries, and there you have a genre where the tiniest little detail is essential to the puzzle. So the reader is playing a game almost with the writer, seeing if they can work out who the baddie was, the murderer was before it's revealed. And as a result, murder mysteries tend to be really evocative of the period that they are from. You read in Agatha Christie and you are right there in early twentieth century history. Britain with all of the upper middle class divide, the upper working class divide, all of the dances and the secluded mansions. You read a more recent murder mystery or you watch one of the fantastic crime dramas that you folks keep churning out from over that side of the Atlantic, which we really love over here. And what we got, we got things like Criminal Minds, we got things like SWAT, we got things like Castle, all of these brilliant shows which are really capturing what our society is like at the moment. SWAT is a fantastic one for doing that. You know, the moment the George Floyd happened, That was part of the storyline. While COVID was happened, that was part of the storyline. And there's going to be a time, I'm sure, when people are going to look back at crime dramas and see them as essentially the way that we here in Britain see Samuel Pepys now, capturing exactly what life was like in those times. What about you individually? Is there a certain genre that you turn to? Like, oh, I really love this science fiction or I really love these murder mysteries. What do you kind of turn to when you have some free time or you can just be free for a little bit? What genres are you into? Yeah, I think I'm into the genre of story. I just love a good story. If it's got those elements that we were talking about earlier, the B and the M and that E, and you can drag me in. My wife hates it because she will be watching something with me and she'll think it's as cheesy as anything. So cheesy that, you know, she could be throwing up with her lactose intolerance. And yet I will be absolutely there in the moment getting moved to tears by the dragon that's just come back to life or whatever it is in the latest Disney. And, yeah, I can really be there in the moment trying to figure it out with the detectives or... want to convert so-and-so to the light side of the force or whatever it is. So I think as long as the storytelling is good, I will always be there in the story. It's interesting you talk about Agatha Christie and the way in which she's able to communicate to the readers through her novels on some level. And we can see other authors that are almost toying with the reader. And it's like this timeless beauty where they can reach through the book and almost have like a conversation with you. Like, you see what I did there? You see that? Mm-hmm. Is there a certain sort of cheekiness or playfulness that people who read your books in the future might see you talking to them as? Oh, I hope so. Of course. I think I can get it wrong. At the moment, I do occasionally get asked to put on writer's courses or storytelling courses. And one of the first things I will do is I will show an excerpt from the first book I ever published. And I will say to folks, would that interest you? Could you get into this book? And occasionally, people are nice enough to put their hands up. But usually I say, you know, you can be completely honest because I picked that book up a couple of months after it was published. And my heart sank when I opened it because I thought ten year old Chip would think this was a pile of rubbish and, you know, would not take this out of library. It was it was awful writing. But what was interesting about that is. My first children's book, I had been commissioned to write. And I was asked to write it by a UK publisher called the History Press, who were doing a series of folktales from around the country. And they're probably going to hate me for giving this really terrible advert for the book. It is just my book, though. The series as a whole, fantastic. But they had been specifically asking storytellers to write these because storytellers are on the pulse of folklore and folktales. So I was asked to write the version for my county here in the UK, Cambridgeshire. And there was already a grown-up Cambridgeshire folktale. So I was asked to write the Cambridgeshire folktales for children. And because I was asked to write this from the point of view of me being a storyteller, I wrote it like I was telling the story. And literally the words that I was putting on the page were pretty much exactly what I would say if I was in front of a group of listeners, young listeners. Of course, if you are from Cambridge, then you probably will enjoy the book. It's definitely the case that it's one of my biggest selling books because I come from Cambridge, so a lot of people around here were getting hold of it. And if you are interested in Cambridge here, or if you're interested in history, there are other reasons there to go to the book. But what I learned between that book and the next book I wrote was that it's really interesting when you're thinking about translation and interpretation. The storyteller, the art of storytelling does not translate straight onto the page. When I go into a room with a group of listeners, I have time to talk to them, ask some questions, develop a rapport, then figure out the exact kind of story they're going to want to listen to, the exact kind of presentation they are going to most respond to. And they get a story that I know I can always guarantee for them they are going to love because they've effectively helped me both choose it and tell it. If you write like that, you are not going to get that back because you're not getting any response. You're having to kind of guess what responses might be. You're telling the story in the blandest way possible. So eventually you might get into it because, you know, very soon you'll get to that bad thing. Very soon you'll get to that message and the empathy and all that. But you have to go through a bit of a quagmire to get there. And it basically helped me to realize that when I'm writing, I need to really focus on that BME. I need to almost take the storyteller chip out of the writing so that the story itself gets heard more. And something really interesting happens when you do this. The way that you do that, the way that you draw out the empathy, the message, and the bad thing, that's what becomes important. That's what gives you your storyteller's voice on paper. Excuse me, your author's voice. And that's what makes someone be able to pick it up and straightaway go, this is a Chip Cahoon book, or this is an Agatha Christie book, or whatever. Goodness me, I do apologise. We've been talking about living in a house from a key moment of plague history and maybe it's getting to me. LAUGHTER Are you still okay on time, Chip? I have a couple questions from the audience that they had sent to me that I wanted to ask you if you still got a little bit more time. I do need to get going, but I will hold off another ten minutes or so for questions because we've been talking so much about the importance of the audience. It would be incredibly remiss of me to say no. Okay. Your work has shown that storytelling increases the scores and engagement. Do you think there's a deeper, perhaps even subconscious connection between storytelling and intelligence? Oh, you froze for a moment there, but I think the question was, do you think there is a deep connection between storytelling and intelligence? Yes. Was that the question? So, yeah, I think it's not necessarily about intelligence in the sense of knowledge and knowing stuff, although in a way it kind of is. I'll address that first because that's the one that gets the most scientific study. You know, mnemonics are definitely a thing. The idea of taking knowledge and putting it into a kind of story form because it helps you to remember it. But that's that's studied quite quantitatively. So we know that it works. I don't think anybody has really pinpointed, though, the qualitative side of it, which is why it works. And it's almost definitely because or it's definitely going to have something to do with the fact that what storytelling really heightens is your creative power, your ability to go to that imaginative plane and think of things that don't exist. So if you go back to the moment in history where Homo sapiens or humans, were living at the same time as other cave people like your Neanderthals and your Florenzis and your Denisovans and all of that. Every single one of those species had the ability to build fire, which is an amazing creative leap. Every single one of them was able to create tools. There's actually some strong evidence out there that Neanderthals were the ones who invented counting. You know, they were the ones who first tied knots into things or put marks on the wall to show that they were thinking creatively because you don't just find numbers lying around. You have to put a mark up to say this is the quantity of this. But there is absolutely every evidence that the first species to start thinking in terms of images and reproducing those images were the Homo sapiens. And regardless of all the environmental factors that were at play, because you had all of these different cave people species in different parts of the world with different climates, The one that managed to survive and become dominant was the one that started to imagine. Which when I'm sharing a version of this story in schools usually ends with me saying that basically what you've just heard there is proof that stories have kept people alive for forty thousand years. They're more important than fire, more important than tools, more important than clothes, more important than all of those other things. It was stories that gave us bread. It was people sitting down and telling stories in the middle of Turkey somewhere that led to some of the first agricultural communities. It wasn't the other way around. For a long time, people thought, you know, we developed agriculture and then we started storytelling. But if you read Yuval Harari's Sapiens and all of the research around things like that, it was actually people coming together and telling stories that put them in communities where they then started to domesticate crops and so on. So when we talk about the impact that storytelling has in education, it doesn't necessarily help people to know more. It doesn't necessarily help people to be able to have better skills, but it does make them more adaptable. That adaptation can make them more resilient. It can make them more inventive. It can definitely make them more empathetic. Every single one of the skills that makes a human being you know, really stand out from the rest of creation. And that of course is what leads to them being able to survive and thrive better. That was a really long answer to the question, wasn't it? It's a beautiful answer. It's poetry, man. I think it really underscores the relationship there. And I'm grateful for your time. This has been a really fun conversation for me. Hit me with it. It sounds like you're wrapping up. I'm not going to let you. Hit me with another question. I'll stay for a bit longer. Okay, fantastic. I just wanted to make sure. You've witnessed storytelling help children with autism and stuttering overcome significant obstacles. Do you think stories have the potential to act as a form of mental software reprogramming the brain in ways that current psychological therapies have yet to tap into? Ooh, do you know what? I've never thought about it like that, but I do, I do like the analogy. Again, I think there is a danger with it though, that like we were talking about earlier, there is a risk that you start yourself sounding like you're touting a one cure fixes all. And again, Yes, I have seen ninety nine times out of ten storytelling really profoundly shift the lives of people who are going through incredible traumas or disabilities and so on. I personally haven't seen any adverse effects from that. But I know that there is a danger that there could be. There may well be a time where, like that little child who came into my room, an absolute fan, really keen on stories, effectively went from being someone who struggled with English to someone who is incredibly literate in English in the space of a year, wowing his teachers. And yet my storytelling became too much for him. And I mean, we're still in contact, actually, because I ended up becoming very close to that family because his story inspired one of my books, one of my educator books. And he came along to the book launch and he's all grown up now. So I know that there were no hard feelings from the fact that I terrified him to within an inch of his life. But even so, I think if I was to say, all you have to do is start storytelling and you are going to have someone struggling with autism, instantly growing empathy, or someone who's nonverbal, instantly able to speak, or someone with a stutter, curing their stutter. I would be concerned about putting that forward just because, yes, I have done all of those things. But I guess what it comes down to is, like I said earlier, being sensitive to the audience. And the skill of storytelling doesn't come down to remembering the story or even putting on funny voices or anything like that. The skill of the storyteller is purely being sensitive to the audience. So if I have this person in front of me, I'm reasonably confident now that I would be able to find a way to help them with their story. their ailment, whatever it might be. If I don't, I'd be worried about, you know, someone instantly just thinking if I read books to my child or if I make storytelling more of a thing in the classroom, it's instantly going to change everything. There's a part of me that believes it will and I want to say that and I know from so many other people's experience that is what happens. But I'm also tentative because there will be the case where it doesn't happen and that will be the case where it goes horribly wrong. I guess what we need to do is we need to train more people to become storytellers so that they have this skill. They have this ability to pick up on the nuance of audiences. And we just need to be paying more attention to each other, really. I think it's really well said. In some ways, all courses are courses in stories. Might we learn more if everything was a history lesson or a story behind it? Let me tell you the story of how this happened in math. Let me tell you the story of how this... It's a more holistic approach on some level, and it gives people other avenues to walk down, to learn their own ways. It's mind-blowing, and I think you are doing that, Chip. I think that from what I've read on the site and talking to you today, it's really... I'm thankful for our conversation and I'll give you one more before I let you go. And that is if, I mean, let me jump down here to the. I love how it's transitioned to you letting me go rather than me being generous with my time. But yeah, I can do one more. Let's have one more. Finally, in the future of education. if the future of education is indeed story-led, what would a fully story-driven society look like? Could we create a culture where stories are not only used to teach, but to resolve conflicts, inspire innovation, and connect people in ways we can only begin to imagine? Well, to the latter part of that question, the answer is yes. To the more open half, what would it look like So when you are using a story-led curriculum, the way that it works is that you open up this world of story. You ask your learners to start creating the world with you. And that might be a physical thing where you get them to actually turn the classroom space into a cave or a plane or a jungle or whatever. And then you start sharing with them the narrative. And then as you get to certain parts of the narrative, you know, problems in the story and so on, you pause and allow them to start figuring out what's going on. Why is this character ended up in this position? What can we possibly do to help them? Do we need to know anything more? The reason why stories can be useful for subjects like geography or science is because, you know, you have to think, well, would an extra bit of knowledge really help us here to keep the hero going? So what is the undercurrent to all of that? is, of course, the empathy that you're building and the way that your learners are there thinking about other people, other cultures, what they are doing is something that is to help somebody else. And there's a really interesting thing that goes on They have created these characters themselves, remember. Right from the beginning of this conversation, if people can remember an hour and a half ago, we were talking about how it's actually the creative work being done by the audience. So in this case, the learners. If you're telling a story about, say, Hercules having to go down and fetch Kerberos from the underworld, they've created Kerberos in their head. They've created Hercules inside their head. So when they start helping Hercules and go down and complete his challenge, they are also helping a part of themselves. It is incredibly health healing. And the learning that they're doing along the way is going to become more intrinsic because they're basically creating the solutions as they come across them. I can't remember the guy who founded Harvard University, but I'm pretty sure he was the one who came up with this phrase, the habit of success. So often we have this thing in education, don't we, where we teach children this is the way to do something. And we present them with examples of problems. And, of course, the first few times they get it wrong because they are desperately trying to learn, but they haven't learned yet. So they keep getting it wrong and you keep having to show them. All of that means that their first experience of that learning is failure. So they've got to overcome the sense of failure before they can grasp whatever it is that we're trying to help them learn. Whereas if you first encounter that problem in a story and it's a character who's undergoing that problem, not you, and the character manages to find a solution, all of this is still going on in your head. You are creating the character, you're creating the problem, you're also creating the solution. And because the story ends up going happily, most of them do, you then have their very first experience of that problem being one with an outcome of success. So to try and tie this back to the question, you are going to end up with a society that is more self-confident because they are learning with a habit of success, is more compassionate because they are looking at the problems of others and coming out wanting to help them. and better equipped to go out and do that helping, to be more compassionate to one another and to be more supportive of themselves. So it's everything that you would want. Why would you not want that? If you are an educator listening to this, switch to a story-led curriculum. I love it. I love it. You have been incredibly gracious with your time, Chip. Maybe you could tell people where they can find you. I have links in the show notes, but is there links where maybe you could say it out loud so those listening could hear it? And what do you got coming up and what are you excited about? So I have my own website, which is storytellerchip.com. That is a Substack site that I started shortly after moving into Peep's house here in the UK. And if you go there, you can subscribe to my Substack. At the moment, it's all free because I haven't worked out exactly what the... The element of that that's going to sustain my bread and butter is yet. But you're welcome to go on there and send me some money. If you found any of this appreciative and you want to keep me alive a little bit, then please, please do consider doing that. There's also a lot of the schools work that I do and a lot of the books that I release are through a publisher and educational events organization called Epic Tales. And that's epictales.co.uk. Even though it's a UK domain, though, I should say for all of your good US listeners out there that there is an American side to the business. We print all of the books in the US. So you don't have to feel that by getting any copy of our work, you are destroying the planet with air freight or whatever. Because it will be printed on your shores and sent to you from your shores. And one of the things that we like to put out there is our reading club. It's called the Fables and Fairy Tales Book Club. It's a monthly fee and it gets a new book to you every single month with two short stories for children. and they're written in an accessible way which means that anyone who is reading these with a child from the age of six up will be able to see the vocabulary getting understood and building up pictures in their mind so that by the time you get to the end and the vocabulary has enhanced and the ideas have enhanced they have come on that journey too so it's kind of like helping them to to gather up those extra ways of discovering and sharing images and it's all about developing this reading for pleasure that has helped. And all of the scientists have come along and said, this is the thing that works. This is the thing that makes better human beings. Other than that, I'd say, yeah, through all of these methods, the Epic Tales website or storytellerchip.com, you can send me messages. You can find me on social media. I have a very unusual surname, full name combination. So put that into any social media. I'm probably the one that will come up. And, yeah, if you do that, feel free to message me. I'm willing to travel. I'm willing to do online workshops and talks like this. So, yeah, just get in touch. Let's see how we can build a story together. I love it. To everybody listening, go down to the show notes. Check out Chip's website. He does incredible work. He's a master storyteller, and his background in understanding and formulating stories is bar none unbelievable. So, Chip, hang on just briefly afterwards, and I'm going to steal some more of your time. Ladies and gentlemen, that's all we got for today. Aloha. Aloha.