Zach Hammer: [00:00:00] The simplest option is to just start writing down the headline of what the story is about so that you at least have that in your mind of some stories that you can go back to and reference and then whenever you’re looking at building out your marketing your training your education go to your Cabinet of curiosities and start looking for what is a good story to pull into this and maybe you realize Oh, you know what? I actually have a story that would be a great fit for this that isn’t in my cabinet of curiosity so you write it down you get it added and you start building this library of your own stories that make you unique that really nobody else could steal from you not in a way that is authentic or in a way that people will align with and you start really solidifying your ability to be effective but also your ability to stay effective in an AI driven world where a lot of these skill sets are getting automated more and more but your stories won’t be your stories they’re not something that could be created by AI.

Zach Hammer: Welcome back to the AMP Intel [00:01:00] Show, I am Zach Hammer. And today, we are talking about why stories make marketing unforgettable, and how to use them effortlessly. So we’re going to be diving in to the power of stories, the power of storytelling. know, something that I think many people already understand, but maybe you’re not leveraging them in the way that you could be because it has historically been hard you know, to, have a good collection of stories, to know how to leverage them, and we’ll be diving into that and how to break through that in the current AI age that we’re in and how to make that easy.

With me today, I have Charlie Madison. Charlie of Referrals While You Sleep. He’s with me, is my cohost is always. Charlie, what do you think about this topic?

Charlie Madison: Story sell, right? And we’ve all got a bunch of them and what you’re able to do with AI now. you know, You’ve talked about how do you take one thing and show it a bunch of different ways is pretty cool.

Zach Hammer: So Yeah, let’s, so let’s dive into it. So. What we’re talking about here, when I say story, what I’m meaning is I’m meaning just the idea you know, of a story of how [00:02:00] we would describe it. Typically, I think most of us, we have our own, stories, our own experiences of how we’ve, gone through life, how we relate to the world.

It could be as simple as telling the story of a lesson that you learned when you were a kid. It could be a story of how you came to decide that uh, you know, a certain feature was necessary. Sometimes even stories, they’re not our own, but they’re stories that we like because they illustrate a point well, and we know that we can rely on that story consistently in order to convey a point.

A good example of that is a story that’s a parable of the scorpion and I forget what the other animal is, but you know, the crossing of the river and it’s, like, oh, climb on my back. And then it’s like, oh, but you still got stung. Anyway, there’s things like that, it’s a story that may not even be your own, but it’s a useful thing to go back to for a specific point.

And the reason why we tend to find so much power in stories in general is because all throughout history, it’s really the primary mechanism that in many ways, makes humanity. It’s the story of why we think of ourselves as nations, that ultimately, you, you have [00:03:00] tribes of people getting together in bigger and bigger groups. You could really argue that stories are a big part of what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Chimps and gorillas, they exist in these small tribes, these small communities, these small groups, but they don’t band together and form armies in order to coordinate and communicate in order to achieve goals. That’s not part of what they do. They can make tools to achieve their goals. But what they aren’t doing is they aren’t building up these groups of people together. And really, that’s all done through stories. That’s through the story of my grandma and then her grandma and those people before them, we always did it this way. And you’re part of that great lineage. And now, we’re going to carry it forward, and that’s why we need to go and kill these people that are trying to talk to us right now.

That aspect is a big part of what ultimately allows humanity to do what it does. And even it’s what ultimately makes you buy the things that you buy and take the actions that you act. It’s the stories that we tell each other and that we tell ourselves that ultimately do that. And so stories are really like buried deep in our DNA, in [00:04:00] a way that connects with us more than just about anything.

If you want your marketing to be effective, if you want your education to be effective, if you could tie whatever you’re looking to teach or persuade or sell or whatever with a story, the chances of a connecting go drastically through the roof. Is that something that you’ve seen as well?

Charlie Madison: Yeah. Jamie Smart, I’ve trained with him. He’s one of the top NLP trainers. He used to have a you know, Hypnotist NLP. He’s I mean, one of the best communicators in the world. He called this the Wunderkammer, Cabinet of curiosities. And he said that the reason is, like you said, throughout history, that’s how we pass knowledge.

And so, when you tell a story, everyone else, he calls it milk and cookies mode. You know, when you’re like, When you were at school, maybe you’re in kindergarten and the teacher said, all right, everybody, sit up, come around, you know, and you cross your legs and you got your milk and your cookies, and you just everything kind of falls away and you can just get the message [00:05:00] directly. And he often does this in the training. He’ll start talking like this, can I tell you a story? And he’ll like, tell a story. And he’ll be like, now, did you just fall into milk and cookies mode? And you did.

And you know, it’s probably one of the reasons that, you know, sometimes, podcasts are so powerful because you’re washing the dishes and you’re in that kind of background milk and cookies mode. Because our defense has fallen. We just listened to the story.

Zach Hammer: Yeah, I love that. And so, what it’s able to do is it’s able to, bury itself deep in your subconscious. It’s able to capture your attention. It’s able to make something that you would typically find uninteresting, interesting, by putting it in the flow of something that happened. right? You’re able to put them into that modes that it could actually be essentially the mechanism that actually gets your message into them, so that the message can do its work.

When you just list out the facts, when you just list out the bullet points of the logical side of things, it’s really hard to connect with people. And so, we use stories as a way [00:06:00] to make any message that we want to convey drastically more effective. And we could use it in our emails, we could use it you know, in things like webinars, on our sales pages, in our videos, we could use stories really anywhere and everywhere in order to make a message either more persuasive or more effective for teaching. Cause really what it does is it allows whatever you’re trying to convey, connect on a level that’s a drastically deeper than the information by itself.

But I don’t know about you. I know this information. And when it comes time to write something or talk about something, half the time, I’m like, I got this point. So Right now, I’m in the midst of launching a project. The project’s already launched, but part of what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to build something that is bigger than me. right. I’m trying to build something that could run, that could exist without me having to do the day to day work, And so, without me having to do all the processes.

And so, part of what I found is that I need to be able to equip my assistant in order to do some of this [00:07:00] work that I would do normally myself. And one of the hardest things to offload, like I could create perfect processes. I could create the exact templates and scripts and all of that. But the key thing that is always going to be missing, if I’m going to imbue what makes me effective in something is my stories. And I don’t want it to be that any type of story is needed, that somebody has to come ask me, or that I have to come up with a story or have to think about it.

Instead, I’d rather it be that the stories are already ready so that, the things that I know make my communication effective, I can actually leverage at scale and start building a team around me that can leverage the same stories that I know are effective, but they could do it without me having to be present. Does that make sense?

Charlie Madison: Yeah, 100%.

Zach Hammer: And so, having a library of stories could be really effective, could be really useful. right? Having a database where you’ve just collected stories that stand out to you, lessons that you’ve learned, things that you know, that you go back to, that sort of idea, it would be really useful because even by itself, it gives [00:08:00] somebody a reference to look through, and that somebody could be you.

Right? Like Sometimes, I forgot this story, or I forgot this idea, or I need some sort of inspiration that goes along with this. And maybe you’re in the midst of you just got done with a grueling, a grueling amount of mental work, and so your brain isn’t at its peak, but you still need to get something done or you, still need to move forward on a project.

Have you ever seen uh, Harry Potter?

Charlie Madison: I have. Yeah

Zach Hammer: I think it’s the fifth and sixth one. We’re technically And it comes into the seventh, as well. So, In Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows, there’s a tool that Dumbledore uses uh, in order to give himself clarity around a concept. And the biggest thing that it lets him do is it lets him pull him out of it, pull the idea out of his brain, pull the memory out of his brain, and throw it into something that he could revisit it on.

Do you remember what it’s called? I think it’s called a Pensieve. I don’t

Charlie Madison: That sounds right. That word sounds familiar.

Zach Hammer: My son is hearing me in the distance and just gave me the thumbs up, said, yes, it’s called a Pensieve. So,

Charlie Madison: Good memory.

Zach Hammer: [00:09:00] Indeed. That idea from Harry Potter is actually a really powerful way to think about what it does to take things out of your head and put them into something that you could observe from the outside. It gives you clarity around something that you maybe don’t have if you just let it sit.

And so having a database of stories can not only help you personally, if you’re looking for inspiration and clarity around what story you might pull to add flavor to something you know, that you want to sell or that you want to communicate more clearly. So you have that.

But not only that, just like with the Pensieve and Harry Potter, Dumbledore pulls his memories out and puts them in the Pensieve. And then Harry is able to observe his memories. Harry is able to actually learn from it and learn from those ideas. And so that same sort of power we actually could get if we create that database.

Now, we’re going to, we’re going to be honest here, Charlie.

Charlie Madison: Oh, no.

Zach Hammer: You are very familiar with the power of stories, right?

Charlie Madison: Yes.

Zach Hammer: I am very familiar with the power of stories. Have you ever tried to sit down and document your own stories?

Charlie Madison: Yes. [00:10:00] Uh, Jamie actually gave us a worksheet called the Cabinet of Curiosities. He said, if you want to be good at what you’re doing, you need to fill this out. Guess how many I wrote?

Zach Hammer: How many?

Charlie Madison: I got one.

Zach Hammer: Good work. And that’s the reality. I’m in a similar boat. you know, I set up for me You know a section of my obsidian note taking app where my plan is to collect stories. And I think I have listed out stories, but I haven’t actually like written them down or pulled them all out of my head.

Quick pro tip, that’s actually a good place to start for many of us. Even if you just do that, even if you just write out, this is the basic idea of the story. Not the full story, but just the story about that I call a whoopie stick. And I call it a whoopie stick because of a story of growing up and it’s a practical illusion that my grandpa used to do. and so like, I have stories around that and I’m, I could create something around that. But if I wrote a whoopie stick in my personal stories thing, I’d know, that would unlock something for me. But it it would be meaningless for you. Uh, In fact, you might [00:11:00] think it’s something, potentially uh, not safe for work.

Right. anyway, Anyway, that could potentially help. But you and I are in the same boat. It’s really hard to sit down, take the time to actually just sit and document out the stories.

And you know, even with what I’m about to say today, I don’t think that completely goes away. But in this AI world, I am on a constant quest to look at how can we take these things that we need to do and make them easier now with the power of AI. And I think that I’ve cracked the code on part of what makes this easier, at least it makes it easier for somebody like me. And I think it might make it easier for somebody like you, as well.

It is a lot easier to sit down and just actually talk through a story than it is to sit down and write a story.

And what’s nice is that because of how AI works, if you could do that, if you could sit down and just capture, Hey, I want to add a story to my Cabinet of curiosities, that I want to add a story to my Wunderkrammer, or whatever, that you could talk out a story and it, it’ll feel easier.

And then with the power of AI, even if you’re a little bit rambly, like you [00:12:00] don’t capture the story perfectly, You, you’re like, Oh, wait, I needed to mention this, and I forgot to mention that.; AI could do a really good job of being able to essentially do all of the documentation that would be necessary for that AI or for that story to be categorized and put into a database to then be able to leverage into the future.

So imagine with me, if you will, doing this process and see if it at least feels like it would be easier compared to trying to go through the exercise. you know, the exercise that you’ve already tried, like of trying to sit down and write the story. So imagine that what you do is you open up Loom. You click the button to start recording a self recording thing. You can have the screen share on, you can have it off, whatever, doesn’t really matter cause we’re really just focused on capturing the audio. So you turn on Loom, you click record and you say, all right, I’m going to tell a story about this basic idea.

And you don’t have to already have pre thought through this. You’d kind of know the story in your mind. And you might mention a few things. You might say, this is a real story that actually happened to me. Or you might say something like this is just a [00:13:00] story that I like. It’s not real. It’s made up, but it’s a good example. You might give a little bit of context. You might not, right? but you, flow into the story and then you tell the story.

You say, here’s the thing that happened. Here’s the events that, you know, if I was telling a story that I feel like matter, you wouldn’t say it this way, but that’s what you’d be doing.

And then, you know, again, just like I said, maybe you forgot a part. So part way through it’s, like, Oh, I forgot this, and you mentioned it, right? So you flow naturally that way. And then maybe at the end of it, maybe you do, or maybe you don’t, you include some things like, maybe you say, here’s one of the lessons that I got from this, or here’s some of the ways that this impacted me, or here’s a key outcome of the story, or here’s kind of the point of this story. You might even include some other ideas or themes.

Now, you stop there, you turn off the recording. And maybe there’s a tool that automatically grabs that, or maybe you drop that link into a tool and then it could process it for you. And what that tool does is it generates a title for the story that’s descriptive, generates a short, maybe one to three sentence description of the story right?

To, have some context about what the story is as a quick reference. [00:14:00] Then it actually takes what you said, and it restructures it, as if it was like written by the world’s best storyteller. right? So it has all your context. It has all of the flow, everything that you included, and it rewrites it as, here’s the full story, like, and written in a story format.

And then it also goes through and it adds in categorization, like, uh, is this first person, 2nd person, 3rd person? uh, Is it real? Is it fiction? Is it? Is it following a, hero’s journey story arc? Is it a Rags to riches story? Is it an Underdog story? where It goes through and you don’t have to think about any of that, but it adds that categorization, knowing that you just click the button and kind of flow naturally, and then all the rest of that happens. So first and foremost, do you think that concept would help somebody like you to be able to, flow through and at least more easily get a story documented.

Charlie Madison: Mean, for me, it’s always easier to talk to someone than to write it out. And it’d be even better if I felt like I was sending [00:15:00] it to you personally. Like, I’m talking to you, I’d be like, alright Zach, here’s the story that I’m going to tell you today. Just mentally. And, yeah, so that, that would be easier. That would be cool to have it categorized, as well.

Zach Hammer: Right. And so what’s cool is, that is all possible. I’m actually in the midst of building a tool that does exactly that. And anybody that’s part of AMP Intel Elite will get access to this tool, as part of, what we’re already doing. And so the way that it works, that’s exactly what I’m gearing it toward is, to be able to do it that way, so that ultimately, you could tie it back into your own library of stories, so that really, here’s what becomes powerful.

Say you’re working with an email copywriter. Say you’re working with an assistant. Say you’re working with, maybe you’re just doing things on your own, you can leverage that and actually feed that database into an AI that you could say, I’m writing a thing about this. What’s a good story for my database that would go along with this? And it would have all of the context that’s necessary in order to you know, [00:16:00] achieve that well.

Now, there’s a couple of things that are important. Everything that I described that it would output, you and I both have already, already mentioned; Would you ever take the time? To do like, I mean, we’ve already established it’s hard to even write the story. would you ever take the time to do the other stuff of coming up with a title and a few sentence description and listing out like potential categorization of the story? Would you ever take the time to do that? Could you imagine yourself doing that in any reasonable habbit?

Charlie Madison: I would never do it. I mean, I might do one.

Zach Hammer: Right? Yeah. Me too. but here’s, what’s interesting; so when it comes to really being able to leverage AI in this process, all of those things are drastically beneficial for AI to be able to assist you in actually leveraging your stories. This is like a technical understanding of AI that if you don’t understand it, it can hurt you if you don’t realize that this is what’s necessary. Which is AI sort of needs these context windows, where it can have a really good understanding of something with minimal characters. That’s at least how it’s [00:17:00] currently set up.

And the way it actually works is it’ll go into a database and it’ll pull back chunks of information in order to give context to then inform what it’s actually going to write, right. or what it’s going to research next or what it’s going to look up. And so by including the title description, some of those key categorization ideas, that’s part of what you unlock for your stories to actually, essentially be able to be understood by the AI at a high level to leverage on your behalf.

right? And so the system doing those things for you is a big part of what unlocks its ability to help you further.

So that when you’re in the midst of working on something, or if you want to give this tool to an assistant so that when they’re writing your emails on your behalf, they still look, feel, and sound like you, even to the extent of having your own stories that you tell, having your own stories that matter to you. So that you could start to build a team around you that can operate at scale. That team might be partially your AI assistant that knows that understands your story so that it could help you at [00:18:00] scale, but still in a form that is you and your own ideas.

But yeah, that’s kind of a little bit of a peek behind the curtain of what we’re working on and why when it comes to this story extractor, to make that easy for people.

So anyway, that’s on the horizon. Is that something that you feel like uh, will ultimately be useful and relevant to you in your day to day work?

Charlie Madison: Yeah, I’m thinking, I mean, me and you, we just got finished talking about You know, specific knowledge from Naval Ravikant, you know, we’re talking about that earlier today. And you know, imagine, if I had a tool that had a bunch of different stories of mine that could say, take this idea of specific knowledge, we just talked 40 minutes about. And how could it apply to these different stories?

you know, Because one of the things that Jamie does that’s really fascinating. And I talk about him a lot because I’ve never had someone that runs a better workshop than him. And you know, I’ve been working together for six years now.

And the other day, he was telling her, he got me into milk and [00:19:00] cookies mode. You know, And I know he does it and I, you know, I’m grateful for it. He’s like, going on Sundays, like, can I tell you a story? And what was fascinating was he told me a story. At this point, I’ve probably heard 20 times, but he applied it in a brand new way that I’ve never heard before.

And I actually said, that’s interesting because I’ve never heard you put emphasize this, but this emphasis on it before. And he basically said, once you have the story, think of all the different ways you can pull facets out of. you know, But in order to do that, you’ve got to have a story in the first place.

Zach Hammer: right. Yeah. And, a key part of that is, I’ve really found for me, there isn’t a way around it. Not in my experience. There isn’t a way around taking it out of your head and putting it somewhere else so you could observe it from the outside. Once you do that, it unlocks a certain ability to like recall it.

You know, I really love the idea of a Cabinet of curiosities, because when you think about a story that has happened to you, creating the [00:20:00] visuals of like how that exists in my brain, it almost doesn’t exist. Where it exists in my brain is more like just in a sea of history. But if I take it out of my head and I say, this is this story, right? Like in my head, For instance, I don’t know why this is the first one that comes to mind. But I have in my head a joke that is based on a story that has to do with a duck asking for grapes. right? And so the, duck grape story exists as like an object in my head, Right. because I’ve, thought through it. I’ve, haven’t actually written it, but I’ve, said it enough times that it exists as its own thing. It has permanence.

And by taking the effort to document a story in whatever way, it like makes it real and recallable in a much more tangible way. And so unlocking the ability to do that easily gives us a lot more ability to actually leverage those stories in our work daily. And further with AI, even equipping our team to have a bit of our spark of humanity in their work as [00:21:00] well, which is really, really powerful.

Charlie Madison: One of the things that I’m seeing over and over in my business is really, I’ve got a handful of principles and concepts that I cannot repeat enough. There’s a lot of noise out there. I know it because I think about it all the time, but I’ve got mine.

And if you look at EOS, or you look at you know, Vern Harnesses teaching, Good to Great, a lot of them, they said, you know, what you need to do is, you know, you’ve got your core principles. you know, and yeah, I think it seems like most businesses are that way. And what’s cool is if you give AI your stories, if it’s cataloged.

Today we talked about the Cabinet of curiosities. We can take this story and say, please apply it to my view of compliant clients. Next week, it could be take that same idea and apply it to my view of 80/20 and how it’s fractal.

Now what it does is it gives you a, really a million different ways to [00:22:00] say what’s important to your people.

Zach Hammer: Yeah, exactly. And in the way that really matters because that’s the key. If you’re just talking about the 80/20 rule and you’re just talking about it over and over and over again, you’re saying, you know, well, 80/20 rule is that leveraged results come from you know, smaller amounts of effort, right?

And you just keep saying that over and over; that actually starts to become like white noise, right? where people just ignore it.

Charlie Madison: They don’t even hear it.

Zach Hammer: Right, but if, you say, uh, I figured out that, man, I was able to you know, 10X my business cause I figured out that most of my, money was coming from this one group and most of my problems were coming from a different group. And so by cutting out that, that group and focusing on the group that, made me the most that I enjoyed working with, like I was able to have more energy, And like, when you say that, it’s, like, okay, now you’re conveying the principle.

When we say, ah, you know what? I figured out that if I wanted to spend time with my kids, this is the thing that I had to do. And by doing this, I unlocked drastically more time over the course of a year than if I didn’t do that thing, and so this one thing made a massive difference.

It’s the same principle conveyed over and over and over through different stories. [00:23:00] And what’s interesting is, as people, I will listen to nearly infinite stories. It’s just like you said, sometimes the same story over and over and over again. But if somebody just says, I’m going to get up and talk about the 80/20 principle, they just reiterate it. I’ve heard it enough times at this point that they almost have to bring stories into play for it to be interesting for me.

So anyway, that’s the idea here. Hopefully, overall, that concept is useful for people. The kind of the key takeaways that I’d say is right now, regardless of whether or not you’re part of AMP Intel Elite or not, and again, if you want to join that, go to ZachHammer.me/contact, and you can reach out to us and let us know that you’re interested in joining up along with us to uh, learn about how you could leverage AI to build a team of AI empowered people, to help grow your business and systemize your operations.

But yeah, if you want to join us for that, I’d love to have you and reach out to us. But regardless, start leveraging stories, you know, do what you can to start documenting them. Record yourself talking about them, record conversations with other people. The simplest option is to just [00:24:00] start writing down the headline of what the story is about so that you at least have that in your mind of some stories that you can go back to and reference.

And then whenever you’re looking at building out your marketing, your training, your education, go to your Cabinet of curiosities and start looking for what is a good story to pull into this. And maybe you realize, Oh, you know what? I actually have a story that would be a great fit for this that isn’t in my cabinet of curiosity. So you, write it down, you get it added and you, you start building this library of your own stories that make you unique, that really nobody else could steal from you, not in a way that is authentic or in a way that people will align with. And you start really solidifying your ability to be effective, but also your ability to stay effective in an AI driven world, where a lot of these skill sets are getting automated more and more, but your stories won’t be. Your stories, are not, they’re not, they’re not something that could be created by AI. They’re something that could be changed and morphed and leveraged, but creating your stories in your own real experiences. That’s something that can’t be stolen from you.

So I recommend that people do [00:25:00] that. I think there’s a lot of power in that. If you want to make the process easier, I recommend you join up with AMP Intel Elite, so you get access to the tools that we’re building in the process. But otherwise, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us about stories and AI and how we can use AI’s to make capturing our stories easier.

Charlie Madison: You’re welcome. It’s always fun.

Zach Hammer: All right. Until next time, we’ll catch you guys in the next one.