Caroline Adams Miller
speaker
417 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Caroline Adams Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think too many people try to create something that is really broad. And when they create something that is really broad and hits the most number of people, what they find is they're actually not communicating to anybody because it's just not specific enough. If I said to you, I have a great podcast for human beings. Do you have any idea what that podcast is about? You really don't.
But if I said, I have a podcast for human beings who collect Matchbox cars. Okay, I actually might listen. I don't collect Matchbox cars, but I'm fascinated by you guys who do this.
Great to be here with you, John.
Thank you. It's been a fun ride and I'm grateful that it's helping so many people, especially you.
Yeah. Talk about communicating clearly. Yeah, I've only done 560 of these episodes.
The human brain spends about 30% of its time daydreaming. It's actually a survival mechanism. When the brain can't figure out how the information it's being presented with is going to help it survive and thrive, meaning your body stay on the planet and your resources grow, when you're encountering information and you can't figure out how this is going to help you in some way, you daydream.
And it's the way that your brain says, hey, there's nothing here that we need that is useful, so we're going to go into rest mode. And it stops paying attention. That's why you daydream so much in church, right? Because you're having trouble figuring out how the second chapter of Numbers is going to do anything for you. And so you daydream.
Until the pastor says, it reminds me of when my cousin and I tried to jump across the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle. All of a sudden everybody in the room is paying attention because he started into a story. So story is the only tool known to man that can stop people from daydreaming for not just 10 minutes, 20 minutes, for hours on end.
When you're watching a movie, when you're binging something on Netflix, you pay attention and your brain engages. And so the reason it's so important to understand story, how it works, how to invite people into a story is because if you have a passion
that you want other people to know about or understand or join with you in working on, you need to invite them into a story in which doing that and taking action on that passion actually benefits them in some way. And so understanding story and story structure is really about how to understand how to communicate in such a way that people listen to you, they hear you, and they join you.
And if you don't use story to do that, you've got a very low chance of anybody engaging your ideas. So story is very important as understanding how to communicate if you want people to pay attention.
Not just religion, but political movements, autocracies grow almost exclusively through narrative propaganda. Not often true when it's an autocracy, but horrible things have happened in the world because leaders have understood how to tell stories that scare people into doing what they want them to do, which is almost always to the benefit of the autocrats.
It's important to know how story structure works so that you can use it yourself to invite people into doing good things, and so you can understand when it's being used to benefit something that is very harmful for the world.
Well, yes, both and. Hitler was arguably the world's best, perhaps in history in terms of world leaders, at using narrative structures and propaganda to fool a lot of people. And of course, the way that you know that this is harmful is if it's filled with lies. Like if you actually test the story and discover that's not true, this is not true.
Arguably the second best, and maybe the best because he won, was Winston Churchill, who used the same powerful narrative structures to counter. So you had one story that was being told that from our perspective, of course, was true. defeating a story that was filled with lies.
That was a story war, the story of the allies standing up to evil versus the story of the German people being superior beings and needing to spread that propaganda for the betterment of the world. Of course, those are absurd ideas. But even in... A lot of people don't think of the emperor of Japan
who told the story that he was a descendant of the gods, literally, that his family were descendants of gods, designed and brought to Earth to protect and offer security and provision for the Japanese people, which is going to necessitate taking over the mainland China. and the Philippines and a bunch of other islands over there. And that was the story that he was telling.
So we had to go over and deconstruct all of that. But all those bombs that were dropped and the people who were killed and the atrocities that were committed started with words. And they were defeated with words from Harry Truman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and so forth and so on.
And then Stalin continued to use that playbook after World War II to kill millions of people in Russia. If you understand these things, you can... And I wish more people did. I wish that more people could understand when they were being hijinked and when they weren't. What that does speak to is how powerful story is at...
brainwashing of hijacking a human brain it is very difficult for a human to know what is fiction and what is not fiction at the emotional level pretty easy on a cognitive we know that the marvel comics are fiction. But while you're sitting there in the theater, you certainly feel like it's true.
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