Content Binge-ability Principles That Build Trust With Best-Selling Author of Smart Cuts, Shane Snow

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazzard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all noise with the Binge Factor.

Hey everyone, Tracy Hazzard here on the Binge Factor and I had an opportunity to interview someone I'm a big fan of, someone whose content I binge on and I thought that would be great and different for us today. So I met Shane Snow, who's going to be my guest today at an influencers dinner that was sponsored by John Levy. And he's a podcaster as well. He has some podcasts. I think he's pod faded, but it's a great show and you should check it out because the style of his show is really fascinating as well. But I met him at this event that he does where he invite really interesting and provocative thinkers to come in and give a little salon style speech. So they might say something for 15 minutes, they might read from their book, they might sing a song, they might share a story, they might just get do a Q and A. And that's the night I met Shane. We were at this really cool speakeasy underground in la and it was just this cool kind of theater space that was down there and it was a part of a building that an architect owned. And so it's late at night because that's when all of these run, they run late. And Shane decided to do a little bit of a PowerPoint because he could. And he was showing some diagrams and different types of things from his book, Smart Cuts of which I had heard of but I hadn't actually read at that time. So I immediately of course went on my Kindle and said here, download and bought it right there on the spot and I read it and I've been a fan of her since. And so I've been following him. And pretty recently he started a newsletter in LinkedIn and that newsletter is something that I share very frequently with friends, with family, with co workers, with clients and other things because there's a lot of really great thought provoking concepts in there. So I'm really excited to have him here. So it kind of not often there's been a few times where I'm such a fan of who I get to Interview. So this is really exciting for me. I hope I don't geek out. Right. There you go. But anyway, let me tell you a little bit about Shane's background. So Shane Snow is an award winning journalist. He's an explorer, an entrepreneur and author, and he speaks globally about innovation, teamwork, and has performed on Broadway, been in the running for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism. He has helped expose gun traffickers, explored abandoned buildings around the world, eaten only ice cream for weeks in the name of science. Oh, that must have been a hard job. And taught hundreds of thousands of people to work better through his books, including his number one bestseller, Dream Teams. So he has the book Dream Teams, the Storytelling Edge and Smart Cuts. As I mentioned before, Snow's writing has appeared in gq, Fast Company, Wired, the New Yorker, and more. And he's a board member of the media technology company Content Lee and the journalism nonprofit the Hatch Institute. I'm really excited to have you guys hear this perspective on a different type of binge factor. So in this case, I'm the binger, right? I'm the binge listener, the binge watcher, the binge reader, and he is the creator. So let's take a listen to this sort of flip on the Binge Factor today with Shane Snow.

Hey, Shane, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.

I'm really happy to be here too.

You know, I interview a lot of people, but I don't always get to interview people whose content I consume and your newsletter that you produce on LinkedIn and that you produce out of your site anyway, because I think I'm subscribed in both places.

Oh, no.

You know, it doesn't matter. But I share it very frequently with members of my team or mentorship clients or other things like that. So we sometimes don't even realize it. I'm sure that the power of the content that we're creating.

Are you finding that with my own content? It's really hard as a writer to know what's happening sometimes, right? I see the view counts. How many people open my newsletters, how many people read my articles. But the percentage of people who write in and say something ends up being really, really low. And I talk to other author friends of mine. Sometimes it feels like the only people who are reading are people who are angry because someone's angry. They're more likely to write in when you're a writer because you're not interacting with your audience as much. However, I do every once in a while put out little surveys and feelers to ask my audience what's valuable to them. And that's when I feel a little bit more confident about people paying attention because I'll get the feedback that, hey, I've been following this for a long time. Here's the things that I want to hear more of. And that's great because now I know that I'm on the right track or the track I can try to be on.

It's so interesting that you say that. I was watching Inside Bill's Brain about Bill Gates the other day and the journalist who wrote the article that set them off on the path of that Melinda Gates read that set them off on the path of developing toilets in the third world. And that whole thing, he was on it and he was saying, you know, you don't know that someone that influential is going to not only read what you're writing, but then take it and do something about it. You don't know till they tell you. And so that's such a hard thing. And I think that feedback loop is very difficult for writers and it always has been.

Yeah, it's my version of that story. It's much less influential. But one of the crazier things that happened to me is I have a tattoo on my forearm of a rocket. And I'm really into space. I'm really into rockets. In my first book, I wrote about SpaceX and their quest to build rockets that independently get to orbit and eventually go to Mars. And someone took a photo of my rocket. So it's a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And somehow that photo ended up in front of Elon Musk, who then sent an email to every SpaceX employee of my tattoo saying, hey, good work everybody. We're in tattoos or something like that, right.

We got so far that now we're cult tattoo material.

And then that email got forwarded to me. So I have an email that's says from ElonPacex.com and it's a photo of my own tattoo. So that's my craziest one of those. But yeah, you never know where things are gonna go, especially if you're putting a lot of stuff out there. Not that I'm putting my tattoos out there, but yeah, it's crazy sometimes.

Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier on the intro to the show, you and I met an influencers dinner with John Levy, who is a friend of Mars. Well, actually he's a very, very good friend of my brother in law. And so that's how I know him and got to meet him. And so it's like that nice circle of meeting people. But the night that I saw you, you were giving a little talk about Smart Cuts. Is that your first book or your second book?

My first book.

Your first book, yeah. And so I had heard about it, but I hadn't actually read the whole book. I think maybe I saw an excerpt somewhere, you know, where someone was talking about one of your concepts or something. But what happened at that point was the way that you presented, and something about what you were doing there got me saying, I really like the way his brain works. I'd like to read more. And I think that that's what we don't see happening when we read an article, I go, I read an article, and that happens. And I say, I want to read more. And I start consuming more and consuming more. But we don't, as writers or as podcasters or any of those things, get to see that point at which it goes from that first entry point where they find something about you and then consuming more and more. So we don't start to see the similarity between the person who subscribed to our newsletter, who bought our book. Like, we don't get to see that. And I think that's a shame.

The closest thing that I can think of to any kind of feedback like that is looking at the popular Kindle highlights of a book, which I actually haven't done in quite a while. But I often check this. When I get a new nonfiction book, I'll look at what are the highlighted parts. It kind of like spoils the ending. But this is one of the reasons. This idea is one of the reasons why Netflix, for example, can make such bingeable content, is they know exactly what you watch next. They know if you hit pause and rewind and you watch the same episode over and over again. They know all about the behavior of someone who's discovering a new show or a new director or whatever, and they use that to inform what they make next. And I think it would be really cool, as an author, to get that kind of analytics. I don't know if in podcasting you get some amount of that. You get downloads, but you don't really know, like, re listens and what they listen to next.

Or we can get a sense of binge listening happening when you see a pattern of a lot of listens at once, but you realize that your daily downloads is not the same. So your daily downloads is at a certain level, but then all of a sudden on a weekend, you have this huge spike of listenership. Typically, that Means one subscriber is listening to all your shows, depending on how many you have. So that's the only way you can do that until they reach out to you. And that's what happened. The very first time, for my very first show, was on 3D printing, and so it was called WTFF. And someone reached out to me after we'd done maybe a hundred episodes and reached out to us and tweeted something about, are you going to cover this topic? I've only gotten through the first 50 episodes this weekend. And that's the way they worded it. And I went, people are binge listening to us. And that was the first moment that the thought occurred to me that it happened. But the problem with it is that it's a verbal media, so the shareability isn't the same. So we don't get that opportunity to get the highlights and know what parts are resonating with them, what are they sharing with their friends, what are they telling them about? Hopefully they say, listen to the episode, but we don't get about that excerpt part, which I love. That's the exciting part. That's why we turn everything into blog posts, though. So hopefully it will happen. Somebody will tweet a paragraph. Right.

I found that a lot of the content that has that I've had referred to me, that I've ended up checking out has been because of, like, the bites of either stories or studies or something from a podcast that someone that's clear enough and surprising enough that someone's able to then rehearse to me then causes me to look it up. And it's so much easier to do that with a blog post or something written that you can just copy, paste and send them a link to, than it is a story that you orally recount. But before blogs and before podcasts, that's how books went viral. Right? Is you read something and then you're at the pub and you tell the.

Gang about it and maybe recite a section if you have a good memory. Right?

Exactly. And, you know, it's the same principle. I think ultimately, content is the thing that ends up being shareable. It's just certain media is easier to binge, but then harder to sniff out and share.

Yeah, absolutely. So we got to find a way to do both. It's been interesting. So as I've been reading some of your newsletter items, and I think you're building on both what your book Dream Teams, which is your most recent book, Dream Teams and Smart Cuts, you're kind of building off of some of the concepts that you had one a couple of weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, that was about trust and building trust and benevolence and how the factors of all of that and that sort of pillar of trust over time. And it was fascinating to me because it resonated exactly what I've been telling podcasters for a really long time. I've been telling all our clients, I've been telling everybody here on the binge factors that if you come with a service first mindset, instead of what am I going to get out of this podcast in terms of promoting me, but if I push out and I'm giving and I'm serving and I'm giving you information that is very useful to you, what I realized is, is that tapping into that benevolence factor first and the reversal of, I call it the reversal of the know like and trust factor. Right. So you build the trust first and then they want to get to know you and buy it and binge on everything you have.

Yeah. And I think on both sides of say like an interview show or a conversation podcast. Right. On both sides, there's a lot of people that can go out and get great guests and interview them whose podcasts are never going to get that popular people are not going to trust them, the host as much as other hosts because they may show, oh, I have the expertise and I may have the competence and I may be smart. But if they don't convey the warmth that they really sincerely care about the audience and about their guests, then that will come through and the content will be different. And I mean, people subscribe and binge because of who they're getting the content from. In large part, especially these days where anyone can make content, it's less about. I'm trying to find the perfect, absolute best person on this topic. There's lots of people talking about every topic, but it's the person who I trust that's going to give me the content that I can feel good about spending trading my time for. And that is a function of benevolence and warmth and passion, not of expertise.

Yeah, the expertise comes in later.

Yeah. It's almost like the table stakes. Yeah.

Yeah. I usually go over the binge factor for every person. And so I'd love for you to talk about some of the things that you believe are bingeable factors. But first I want to just let you know that I've chosen to binge on your content. And that is because there's a smartness and an open mindedness which I know is one of your topics and one of your areas, you call it intellectual humility, I think in your book. And there's this open mindedness to the approach that you take to everything that comes across in every article that you put out and that I appreciate. I grew up with a broader worldview than most. I actually lived outside of the country for a long period of time when I was very young. Where in South Africa when I was about 9 and 10 years old.

Wow.

And so my dad was on a project there and so that was at the height of apartheid. So different worldview. I think I have a view of the world that's a little bit 1960s understanding what was going on there, but with a modern view of it doesn't have to be like this. And so it's a little bit different. But when I look at that, I don't get that a lot in other people's content. So when I found this like flip of perspective and thinking, then it was like, ah, I can't always talk to someone like that in my community. I don't always get the opportunity to have that in the people that surround me. But I can get it when I consume some great content.

That's such a nice compliment. I'm kind of getting a little bit of chills hearing you say that. Thank you for telling me. It's been really important to me as a writer to. The reason I do it actually is I love exploring, I love learning and I want to know what I don't know. And I think that approach carries through in. In what I do. I'm not right about everything and I often have to go back and correct my thinking.

But you know what, you're open to that, so that's a good thing.

Yeah. I like to think of myself as on a journey that I have in my head is I'm in the jungle with the machete, like two feet in front of my audience. They are on this journey and I'm exploring a little bit ahead because I am a little bit more manic and a little bit more curious. But we're all trying to learn this and so I'm not calling back having discovered all the answers After 50 years of having done it. I'm exploring and kind connecting dots and hacking vines with the machete. So I like to take that approach.

I think that's a great approach as whether you're a podcaster or whatever. When we started our 3D print podcast, I mean, I'm not an engineer, I didn't do engineering. Drawings. And luckily I had a partner and my husband, who is my partner. The two of us were able to complement each other really nicely. But I had a high curiosity level. And so it enabled us to ask a lot of great questions and just be that little bit ahead of everybody else. So that's a factor right there. I think having a high degree of curiosity and curiosity into the welfare and interests of other people too, not just your own. Like having it be both is a good thing, right?

Yeah. For me, the thing that I'm trying to optimize for is influence. I mean, in the way that we met through John Levy's Influencers Network. And not influence for individual gain, but influence for like, I want to help people to help other people, sort of that second order effect. And so when I think of that as the like the metric, not that I can really measure it, but the metric for what I'm trying to accomplish with my writing, it changes how you write and how you explore. So exploring it really is exploring to help the person who's two feet behind me to see further themselves. And chances are they're going to be someone who's a much better business person than I'll ever be. But this bit of exploration that I help them see can help them help a lot of people that I think is having that lens makes me really happy. It also maybe in a way insulates my ego from, okay, if I don't make billion dollars off of doing this, then at least maybe I'm helping other people to do things. So maybe there's something there that I'm tricking myself for when not that many people read my stuff. But for me, it does help. And I suspect that that kind of mindset is helpful with the podcasters that you work with that you see, the ones that truly are trying to help people will earn more trust and have more fun at the same time.

Yeah, you know, I think sometimes also that, you know, we think about that in terms of it do soothing our ego. But at the same time, I think it sets you up in a place to be more authentic. Place of curiosity though, because if you're truly doing it for trying to understand where people need to go, what they need to do, and you're willing to be out at the forefront of that, then you're a great guide and that comes through. And it comes through and it does translate into more bingeable content, which should translate into more circulation, more sales, more jobs, right? It should, it should. And in some ways it does. But you're doing some Interesting things. So you're on the board, I believe, of Contently. So tell us a little bit about that because I want to understand content like it seems like what everybody's talking about today.

Yeah. So the brief history of contently is 10 years ago, a couple of friends of mine and I created what we thought was going to be like a marketplace for journalists who were laid off from their jobs in newspapers and magazines to get work as freelancers. And what it turned into is a lot of the folks who wanted to hire freelancers who had, who were high paid, a lot of professional experience. The customers that had the most money to pay and were really eager, that couldn't find this kind of talent tended to be brands who wanted to do content marketing. So New York Times can find a journalist in Alaska if they need to. They don't need a company like Contently to sort of broker talent for them. But when Pepsi wants to do campaign about World Water Week and they need journalists to go and interview experts in environmental science and water preservation, clean water and stuff, they don't know where to go to find talent. And so that's what Contently originally ended up doing. And then out of that we built software to help manage content and to help measure content. And so we found ourselves in the middle of this industry where our job was to not just connect talent with content wanters, I guess, content providers with content publishers and companies, but also to help them use content to build relationships with audiences and also to help them treat their talents in a way that helped them to get the best work out of them so that they could serve the audience. So we learned a lot about remote teamwork. For one, managing people who aren't in your office who don't work for you.

Kind of valuable today, right?

Super relevant right now. Yeah, we've contently made the transition to everyone working from home like piece of cake.

Yeah, we didn't have a hiccup either, so.

Yeah, yeah. But then there's also just for a decade trying to help shape the course of the brand publishing industry so that people do it ethically so they do it effectively so you're not wasting money or wasting people's time. So that experience all kind of. So I was a journalist first started that and I was still writing part time on the side while running content with me. And then a few years ago I stepped out and now I'm just on the board and I've come back to full time being a journalist. And so much of what I learned from helping brands manage freelancers and be publishers has fed back into my own content process. And a lot of it has to do with what we're talking about. Understanding what the audience wants and not leading with what you want from the audience, not trying to sell them the thing, but actually giving them a lot of value and a lot of content so that there's no question that they've gotten value from you. So if you do have something that you want to sell. So in my case, companies can pay me to speak or to train their employees or take courses from me. You're not going to do that until you've read a hundred articles of mine. And that's fine, but that's how it works. You build that trust over time before I would even should feel good about asking for someone to make a transaction. So that's the main thing that I learned from that.

Do you find this thing where some. All of a sudden someone reaches out you. They're already ready to hire you, and you're like, wow, we're having our first conversation. Like, you didn't even. And that's because they consumed a lot of content before they reached out.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this week, a very large company that's working on vaccines right now, who I had met one of their executives a long time ago, and they'd been reading my stuff for years, reached out and had me virtually talk to their executive team about how to manage their team of scientists during this hard time based on all the dream team stuff. And it was several years in the making. Actually, you reached out to me after we met four years ago or whenever it was, and I guess I had no idea that you'd been reading my newsletters. And my opportunity to speak to your audience and to learn from you is a function of all of that time that apparently spent getting to know you. Yeah. So thank you for that.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm glad you mentioned dream teams, because I definitely want to touch on that. It's a challenging book because it challenges a lot of our preconceived notions about what makes great innovation. And I've worked in innovation a long time. And you mentioned a story in there about Herman Miller, which was my second job. I worked for Herman Miller. I'm actually sitting on it. And you can see the top of my Aron chair back there, and that's an original Aaron chair from the very first runs that they did in 1994. 95. So I worked back with them back then. So I experienced and I knew the story firsthand from Bill Stummy and on Chadwick about how the focus groups went. And my job at Herman Miller was to do color materials and finishes management. So I would work with every single design team and help them integrate the surface materials, because those were standard across all their products. And so my job was to help them integrate them, develop new ones, like the armrests that were on the Aron chair, new colors for the back. Even though everybody sees it in black, it used to come in like a dozen different colors, I remember.

Oh, yeah.

So back when the height of the tech boom, right. There were flashy colors going out there then.

Lime green, I remember.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I was responsible for helping with that. But they told me the story about the focus groups and how bad it was. And this is. I'd come out of design school, I'd worked in the textile industry for a while, and I always kind of had this bad taste in my mouth about focus groups, too, and didn't understand that. But Herman Miller has a really different approach to them. So it's not only that they do them, but they actually have secondary and third types of groups that they run after it. So that's why it didn't kill it there. That's the part of the story you may not have heard. So the focus group didn't kill the chair, first off, because everybody believed in it and so really believed in the mission of the project. But secondly, they went to these other stages of it. And what happened over time is that they would then take the chair and they would do different types of research. And we did this in the color materials and finish group. We would take all of our finishes because changing color palettes on architects and designers is a dangerous thing. They get upset set like, I can't buy my Coca Cola red. Right. Like that kind of thing. And so what we did was we would take the materials, we would do research about the usefulness of them and all the different things. But at the same time that we were asking them more qualitative questions about things, we were getting buy in for the idea that the paradigm was going to shift. And we learned that from the Aeron team, and that's what they did. So they got buy in from facility managers who were going to realize how much easier this chair was to take care of and clean from the HR department, who might be getting a lot of ergonomic complaints about how their back hurts and other things like that. And so they would have different sizes that would now accommodate that. So they would address the point to each one of those groups, make sure that they were knowledgeable that this was coming. And so then they would tell all their friends and at conferences they talk about this chair that was coming and that's how actually how it scaled up to being the best selling chair. So which is a part of your dream team's idea was that you get people cast, you call it cast in from the different departments that are going to be affected by the change. And so in this case they casted from their client base.

That's awesome. Yeah. And one of the things that I struggled a lot with the title for the book, even though the title says what the book is about, but really the main concept is that who we think of as our team is not usually what our team is. Our team can be a lot bigger and a lot more interesting than just like you. People all sit together at this desk, in this office that the team that can launch a product can include all of these people who will be affected, who can help shape it, get buy into it, but also help spread the word. I'm trying to remember exactly the thing that I focused on I think was when you're making a product, you often test it on people who are like you.

Yeah. Because you were talking about another company, G Corp, who did the extremist. I found over time of having done. I've done over 250 new products that are in the consumer market. So over time that you can also take the outliers that sometimes that's not the best strategy in consumer retail. You can do it when you have the power of a big brand like a Herman Miller. You can take that risk, but you can't always when you're a small business or you have a single product line or something like that. And so how do you take into consideration those extreme customer use cases but turn it into something that is still mainstream, acceptable. And so that's the difficult part. Right. So the innovation level. But how do you do that? And so this is so interesting to me because I have a 60 person team worldwide right now and the majority of my team is overseas and I'm building the US team and I keep thinking about how am I going to build that dream team. And so your book has been very timely to me and you're mentioning about highlighting. So one of the things I found myself getting into is I was highlighting go, oh, okay, we do that, we're like that. And then you debunk it the next section. So now I'm thinking to myself, maybe I should go back to it and unhighlight that Section. So you don't think I missed the point, but I did highlight it and then on and realized, oh, that's not what he. He's trying to debunk that. Oh, okay. But that's your style of writing.

Yeah. What I like to look at common wisdom and take it apart and see when it doesn't apply and when it's actually no longer relevant or a lot of times our instincts are the things that hold us back. The things that are good or that have been good are the things that precisely prevent us from getting better. And yeah, I mean, you know, from my writing, a lot of what I like to do is I like to make the case for something and then shatter that and then sort of reassess it and say, well, now here's how these things all line up together. I like to take people down sort of the wrong path sometimes so that I can show them the path that I want them to see.

It's a very useful strategy to how you do that. Would it translate into a video or a podcast? Like, that's something that you have to think about is the way that you present your content. Would that work in a different media? And sometimes it doesn't. And we have to think carefully about that.

Yeah. When thinking about just the theme of your show. Right. And what makes binge worthy content, I will say that a lot of my inspiration for how I set up the case for things that I want to teach in my writing, especially in longer form, like in magazines and books, I actually get from television. I used to map out great episodes of television that I really loved. Like, take notes like a nerd while watching Alias, which was my favorite for a long time.

My favorite too. See, I knew we had a similar mindset. Here we go.

So I would take notes scene by scene. Here's what's happening. Here's how each scene starts and ends. Here's the cliffhangers. Here's what's happening with these characters, which is like, not like a fun way to watch tv. But I would do that because I thought that the way that certain television shows are written so brilliantly makes it impossible to stop. And so drawing from that psychology and sort of the strategies that some of that some great TV and movie writing works is actually what feeds into some of that stuff that you see in my books, where I want to get fully on board with something and then to throw in a twist that is basically undeniably makes you rethink everything that you just read and then also have to get to the end because how does this line up? I also did a thing that. Like a J.J. abrams kind of thing, where it's like you start with the story and then you cut it off right at the part where you want to know what happens, and then it's like three months earlier. And then you have to learn the backstory. I often do that with stuff that's a little bit harder to get through or maybe like science stuff that maybe is not what you would on your own, just want to read a chapter about. But if it's in the.

You certainly don't want to start the article with all the science part.

Right, Right. But in the context of this cliffhanger story, you're like, oh, whatever this science stuff is that I'm reading right now has to have to do with how whether this person's gonna live or die, if their car's gonna go off the cliff or whatever. And so then I come back to the story. So that strategy is directly pulled from.

Right. We call that open looping techniques. Right. You're. So you're open looping them. Because I don't wanna have an unfinished story. That's a personality trait of your listeners. So if you want them to listen to the whole show or you want them to read the whole book or the article, you've gotta flow them to keep that story maintained. And so that they. Keeps them interested to say, like, I can't stop now, even though I'm frustrated with, you know, or I disagree with his opinion. I've got to keep going because I got to know the end of that story. That's human nature.

Open looping. I like that.

Yeah. So it's actually a stage technique that I was taught by the person who taught me some speaking skills that says to me that you would require a structured show, which makes sense because you're an investigative journalism at heart. Like, that's the core of who you are. So you'd take more time with research, you'd have a more setup show. So much of podcasting is sort of like we're doing right now. Right. Kind of ad hoc casual improv. Right. And that may not be satisfying both to you as the host and to the people who follow you and are fans of yours when you translate into a new media type. But you are already aware of it, so that's a good thing.

Well, thanks. Yeah. I think as tv, as the analogy. Right. There's some shows that you look at, like someone like Colbert, who's so talented at on the Fly, he does not know what his Guest is going to say, maybe they do some prep, but he doesn't know what they're going to say and he's ready to roll no matter what direction things. That is a special talent and makes for a great host. I think there's a lot of great podcast hosts that can do that. And that gives me anxiety. I can answer the questions if it's topics that I know about and I care about. But from a managing the flow of entertainment and education without knowing exactly where things are going, that gives me anxiety. Versus more planned out. Maybe this American lifestyle of, well, see.

You know yourself, so that's a good thing. But then it makes it longer for you to take to jump into that media type because you got to make sure it's right for you. Well, wonderful. Well, one of the things I want to mention before we go is that things like your dream teams, and this is a really, I think the way that you lay out your content and the complexity of the subject that you're tackling too, like, this is not building a dream team, doesn't happen instantly. I mean, you have a checklist at the back of your book. But I looked at it and I was like, that's a lot of stuff to check off. Right. Like, it would take me a long time, eight years to build all of that in and refine all of that and get it right for my organization. So this isn't something where you can just, like, it's a blueprint, you follow it and like, it's done and you start up and it works. Right. It's trial and error. And that's part of the process of your book as well. And I think a really good podcast, a really good learning experience, something that's both educational and entertaining. So edutaining does that where it's keeping you engaged enough along the way, giving you enough of the story and enough of the understanding and the conceptual basis for me to say, I can tackle these things, I can't tackle those. And that may be why I'm just going to go, I'm just going to call Shane and have him come in and talk to my team. Right. That may be why people make that choice, right?

Yeah. I mean, very much part of what I try to focus on when I can is underlying principles. So the world's going to change, it's going to keep changing, technology will change, but human nature and human behavior, there are fundamental things that are just built into who we are and are a lot less likely to change. And so I like to focus on those kinds of things. And that's why. Yeah, you get to the back of dream teams and you see, here's a checklist. If you're in business and you're trying to build a good culture or whatever, and it's like really foundational stuff that might require you to make some really big changes, it's because it's the underlying principles that we've gotten through. And also, I don't want to be under any illusions that I can solve everyone's specific business problems. But if I can help you to think from the right starting point about how you can solve your business problems, you're going to be smarter than me at tackling that. If I can give you some tools for understanding people and for understanding some thinking processes that can help you do a better job than you would have before. That's my goal. And so for me, how I can help the most people have the most influence without getting sort of caught in the weeds in a way. But also, I don't want to give people the wrong advice either. And that's why I don't focus on just one sector. I don't have the confidence that I can deliver the kinds of industry expertise that some people already have. But if I can deliver the underlying principles than that, that can make a big difference.

Yeah, it's just thinking about, I've been sort of, because of this show, analyzing the underlying principles of bingeability. Right. The binge factors. Really I should have an S on the end. Right? Because there are more. But the one that I think that you just touched on is the one that I think is probably the most prevalent is that it's not what you're putting out there, but it's also in how I perceive it and how I receive it, my mindset and my open mindedness and all of those things. So when you're in the position of curiosity and how you push out your content and how you put your information out there is an exploration. And not like this is how it needs to be. Decision making, checklist time. Right. Total blueprint. When you put it out there, then it allows me to sift through that, take it in and move my perspective up into a place that I need expansion. And that's a really good place that when you do that, that's human nature to want more of that because it makes me better than I feel that I am at this point stage. But it is the characteristic of the listener. A great brand is how it's perceived, not what they say they are, right?

Yep. Oh yeah. And I Think this speaks to something that I'm really passionate about, the power of storytelling. You know, it's a lot easier to get someone to consider changing their mind or being more open about something or changing the way they do things if you use story as a mechanism to get them to remember and to get them to feel. And so I think that also plays into the curiosity thing. You know, when you started sharing about how you grew up part of your childhood abroad, and my first reaction was, well, where I want to know, I want to know that story. You hooked me with that in a way that makes me more likely to care about whatever lesson it is that you're going to share. As a result of that, it also makes you more human. It makes me perceive you in a way that does build more trust. But a lot of people want the checklist and the takes and the quick advice, and if they're ready for it, great. And if it's relevant and it's on point, then great. Life's usually more complicated than that. And often the things that, you know, the medicine we need to take or the things we need to reconsider being open to are harder than, you know, we resist that. However, learning the stories behind the people who have over feeling the emotion of the things that people have been through make us a little bit more open to making the hard changes, making the hard journey, and actually to believing in people who are the hosts of these shows or the authors of these things. You know, the stories are the things that get us on board a lot more. Then anyone can find some stats, anyone can find some bullets of advice. So I think that's a big factor. And anything bingeable that keeps my attention for hours at a time is going to be a great story.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, because that's your other book, Storytelling, right? That's the title of it. Storytelling.

The Storytelling Edge.

Yeah, the Storytelling Edge. And so, yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that because that's one of the things that I think some of the best podcasts are the most successful ones. They have a story woven into it, or they pull a story out of their great guests that no one's heard before. So those are the ones that definitely have a binge factor. Edge up. So, wonderful. Well, what are you working on now? Is there a new book in the works? Is there something you can give us a hint at, especially us big fans?

Well, there's a few things in the works right now. I'm spending a lot of my time writing Articles and doing training programs around the shift to remote work and just what everyone's going through right now because it's really needed application of the dream team stuff I've been working on for so long. But the fun thing that I'm working on is not a book. It's a TV project that we're in negotiations right now to get produced. So I can't quite share, but I can for anyone that's watching the video stream on my window, right here are the sticky notes. Love it. Laying the whole project out.

That's awesome.

It's a big story afoot.

You know what, that's really great though. And you cannot be more timely because all of us on the other end should we get have to be remote yet again and we'll want more content. So. Yep, absolutely. Well, Shane, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I'm glad we've gotten this chance to talk one on one, which I've been looking forward to for some time, so.

Well, thank you so much. This is wonderful.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did. That was just fascinating to get into his mind about how he creates and how he writes and what he thinks about and how important that sort of process is to him. So it's not just something he does casually, it's something he spent time and effort thinking about. How is he going to structure it? How is he going to write this article? How is he going to write his book? How is he going to share the information out there? So he's always thinking not only about his own process, but he's thinking about how it's being perceived by the reader. In this particular case, the reader. And of course, as he's talking on our show, you guys, that's the listeners and viewers. But thinking about that. We don't often spend quite enough time thinking through our show sometimes, right. We get into the sort of franticness of making sure that we're producing our next episode and we're getting on that and everything. So I think this taught me today. And also because I'm working on a series where I've had to be a little more research driven, I had to do a little more prep work. And so I'm thinking that that bodes well for how I like to show up. And so I've slowed down a little bit. Not taking quite as many episode interviews as I do each week has helped me be take more time in the preparation process. So I was really glad to hear him say that the Other thing that I wanted to mention that he said is he was talking a little bit about Colbert and a little bit about how people binge on things and what those binge ability characteristics might be underlying principles of it. And it made me really think of something that I talk about all the time. And another great writer I appreciate is Malcolm Gladwell. And Malcolm Gladwell was on the Colbert show on Stephen Colbert Show. He said that Stephen Colbert asked him why did you start a podcast? And he said, because you think with your eyes but you feel with your ears. And so I think sometimes we really do have to raise the power of what we're doing out of just the medium of writing, move it into listening and so getting to interview. And so if you're not ready yet to do that great structured show Shane and I were talking about that he might create someday, right, that alias model. If you're not ready to do that, then going and guesting and making sure that you're telling new stories and sharing new pieces of information and sharing bits about your process and yourself, just like Shane did today. A great way for you to get exposure and get and tap into that feeling part where we connect more with you and want to binge more on what you do provide and how you show up in the world. And in Shane's case, that's his great books and his articles and his newsletter. So remember everybody, you can catch all of the links for this blog post. Make sure you connect up with all of Shane's information. I've got all of that laid out for you in the blog post in the bullet points at the bottom of the the blog page. You could do that@thebingefactor.com and then click on the episode for Shane Snow here. So thank you to Shane for coming on the show. I had a fabulous time getting to interview someone I admire and I hope that you all got a good sense of it from the other side and from a different media type about the power of written words and the power of what that does over time. And really, even though we don't see all of the people who touch us and who are getting information from us, but you know, living in that world of I'm helping people help other people and if you live in that just like Shane does, I think you're going to have a more binge able show. You're going to have more success and you're going to feel more satisfied with the results because as we mentioned, you can't always see all your subscribers. You don't always know who they are, but the ripples of how they touch, they come back to you later tenfold. So thank you all for listening today. I'm Traci Hazzard, and I can't wait to bring you another episode of the Binge Factor next week as well.

You've been listening to the Binge Factor Podcast. For more information on podcasting and videocasting success tips and tactics, please go to thebingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed you'd brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.