How To Master Storytelling

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, look, it's Shaan here. I don't want to toot my own horn, but beep beep. This is an interview that somebody else did with me, David Perell, who you might know online as The Writing Guy. He invited me out to San Francisco, and we did an interview for his podcast called How I Write. And my episode is doing so well, so well. I have this little Chrome extension. This thing is doing 11X. 11X means it is 11 times higher performing than his normal videos. Something good is in this video that it's doing 11X on YouTube. And it's all about storytelling. It's all about writing. It's stuff that a lot of people ask me about, but I'd never have taken the time to sit down and talk about it. Well, David got me to sit down and tell you everything that I know about this stuff.
I hope you like it. I was a little sick during the interview, but it was my Michael Jordan flu game. I came prepared and I brought the heat.
I'm really hyping this up, and it's because I'm excited about it. I'm really proud of this interview. It's doing really well. A lot of people are messaging me about it. And so we want, you asked David, hey, can we run this on our feed?
You know, we took the episode from him. We're gonna run it on our feed. It's basically an interview where he's the interviewer and I'm the guest talking about storytelling and writing. So if you like those two things, you're gonna like this episode.
Story is a five second moment of change.

**David Perell** (1:26)
Whoa, what does that mean?

**Shaan Puri** (1:27)
You want to work backwards from the emotion. The only things people will share is things that are LOL, WTF, OMG.

**David Perell** (1:34)
Wait, so all of that here, so now for the podcast. So like what should I do next time I sit down to write?

**Shaan Puri** (1:39)
The real great writers, I believe, are great at framing their ideas.

**David Perell** (1:42)
Oh, interesting.

**Shaan Puri** (1:43)
So Mr. Beast, Steven Bartlett, Dave Chappelle, Hasan Minhaj, those are the people I try to learn from. You know, I could teach a 30 second master class.
It's just this.

**David Perell** (1:54)
Shaan Puri is one of those guys that I really wanted to learn from. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to tell better stories by listening to good storytellers, but Shaan has really deconstructed the storytelling process. And you hear people saying all the time, oh, storytelling is really important.

**Shaan Puri** (2:09)
You should get really good at it.

**David Perell** (2:10)
But there's not a lot of people who come in with concrete, clear frameworks like he does. So this is a master class on storytelling. Come on in, it's time to roll.

**Shaan Puri** (2:21)
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**David Perell** (2:49)
I said this to you when we first shook hands, but this podcast was probably the biggest increase in terms of how much I've admired a guest and how much that's grown through the prep process. And so I just want to compliment you on that. And in particular, there's a lot of things that you do really well in your writing that I'm not good at.
And this is one of those episodes where I just have a bunch of questions and I'm here to make my writing way better. And the place I want to start is storytelling. I have no frameworks for thinking about storytelling.

**Shaan Puri** (3:21)
Before you do storytelling, can I give you a compliment on your compliment?

**David Perell** (3:24)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (3:24)
So great compliment, first of all, very specific. But the second is actually, it's a writing tip, which is I didn't, the thing you said where you're like, you know, I started kind of going down your rabbit hole and my like, whatever, respect for your, whatever you said, like my, whatever, your score went up a lot during that process.
I learned this from these two guys, Dylan and Henry. They're young guys and they were like 21 when I met him and they were recording these videos. I was like, how many views do these get? And they were like, oh, nobody watches these. And I'm like, but you guys are like really trying. Like, is it like someday somebody will watch these? He's like, yeah, specifically, we're creating a binge bank. And I was like, what's a binge bank? And he goes, it's when you basically stack material. So that like, even though each one of these, if we just looked at the view counts, it'd be kind of discouraging. Like, not that many people read this or watch this.