Howdy y’all,

That’s some of Texas that’s come back with me to London after SXSW in Austin this past week - which went very well. Our workshop ‘Boring 2 Brilliant: B2B Storytelling The Hollywood Way’ had a full house, and we got some great feedback afterwards. It’s not just about storytelling though, as we said in our workshop. It’s story FINDING. And production workflow. And pilots. And seasons. You had to be there! But we’re doing a version of this for a new client soon, and are keen on doing this for other companies who’d like to explore the topic - so drop us a line if that’s you.

Speaking of which, the B2B creator economy was the topic of quite a few SXSW panels, along with quantum computing. There was a sense of optimism around AI, despite its inroads into every creative sphere. There’s a firm belief that humans aren’t going anywhere yet, as it should be. I attended a great workshop by IDEO where we got to create a story live, complete with book illustrations, thanks to a custom GPT they’d built. Fascinating, but the exercise was to help us see the chinks in the armour as well as experience the process of working with AI - I thoroughly enjoyed learning by doing.

Right, the links are below, and I’m off to kick jet lag. See you next week!

Anjali

Podcasts As Lorecasts: What Severance Gets Right About Fandom (5-minute read)

30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything in March 2020 (data visualization)

Last Meal With Tom Nash (new YouTube series)

One Million Experiments: Making A Plan (zine)

B2B Creators: The Creator Economy’s Dark Horse (60-minute watch)

DOGE Is Four Letters: Records, Kept (3-min read)

I Am Trapped In The Criterion Closet (4-min read)

Decoding The Knock-Knock Situation (3-min read)

How Substack Creators Are Pooling Audiences With Live Video Co-Hosting (6-min read)

Time Portal: Travel Through Time And Figure Out Which Events You Landed In (online game)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

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Podcasts As Lorecasts: What Severance Gets Right About Fandom (5-minute read)
The always interesting Dirt magazine with a look at why podcasts are like the new Blu-ray extras, and why companies like Criterion Collection are actually using them to build on the relevance and, sometimes, popularity of a film or video. Writer Paula Mejía catches up on the TV series Severance, which prompted the thought, as podcasts get deep into a subject the way you could get Director’s Cuts on Blu-ray: “Much of the podcast involves actors talking in-depth about the craft itself—particularly how they prepared for especially challenging scenes, and the technical realities of the programmable robotic arms on the camera rig that have helped the hallway sequences of Severance become so stressful to watch.”

30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything in March 2020 (data visualization)
This week marked the 5-year anniversary of the event that changed the world for a lot of us, in different ways. The New York Times goes into some of those changes in this scrolling dataviz, covering time spent socialising with others, ‘adopt a dog’ searches, time spent watching TV, the number of business applications, and more.

Last Meal With Tom Nash (new YouTube series)
While at SXSW, I had the pleasure of watching ‘host, DJ, Speaker and badass quadruple amputee’ as his website says, Tom Nash, interview Yale professor Laurie Santos live. That conversation was a consequence of an episode he shot a couple of days earlier in Austin with her, for his brand new YouTube show Last Meal With Tom Nash. Episode 1 with Masih Alinejad launched on March 12th right after the SXSW talk, and the show sees Tom speaking to well-known people like Howard Bloom, Richard Dawkins, Aella, Kathleen Stock, Rory Sutherland and Nick Gillespie, as they eat what they would choose as their last meal on earth, cooked by Nash. I love the format and look forward to watching this series.

One Million Experiments: Making A Plan (zine)
HT to Laura Olin’s newsletter, where I came across this lovely project from Interrupting Criminalization and Project Nia. One Million Experiments is a ‘curated collection of community-based safety projects and a podcast exploring how we define and create wellness and reduce harm in a world without police and prisons’, and Making A Plan is one of these projects, a zine with a template that helps those who want to become activists or make an organising plan - particularly noteworthy in these current times. Simple and useful.

B2B Creators: The Creator Economy’s Dark Horse (1-hour watch)
Both Matt and I attended this panel discussion at SXSW, where Brett Deshevsky, founder of Creator Economy NYC, moderated a conversation on B2B creators with AJ Eckstein from CreatorMatch, Chris Do from The Futur, and Olivia Owens from Teachable. LinkedIn became a core focus of the chat, but the panel also covered topics like multi-platform presence, consistent content creation, monetisation strategies and challenges for creators. There were a lot of lessons - in fact I went and created my first LinkedIn video on the back of this!

DOGE Is Four Letters: Records, Kept (3-min read)
From creative thinker Go Like Hell Machine, who also runs the Work is Four Letters project, a new one called DOGE Is Four Letters, where he interviews ‘federal employees and contractors, whether still employed, on administrative leave, fired, or currently in litigation over your status’ about their work, why they did it, what it means for all of us and for them. Reminds me of Humans of New York and one of Storythings’ favourite formats, Uses This - though this project’s focus on federal employees is a neat way of reminding ourselves of the importance of what government employees do, often easily forgotten. Here’s the whole series.

I Am Trapped In The Criterion Closet (4-min read)
This is partly sour grapes because I never got to go to the Criterion Mobile Closet at SXSW as it had long queues at all times of the day, but I found this McSweeney’s piece very amusing!

Decoding The Knock-Knock Situation (3-min read)
Seth Godin ruminates on the conundrum of being a creator and making money at the same time: “If you create a knock knock situation, you have to alert people to what’s on offer, but not actually give them what’s on offer. You need ‘who’s there’. That means that your online posts and videos are about the thing, they aren’t the thing itself. And the opportunity for tool builders and community organizers is to give away the punchline, often. To focus on abundance (of connection and utility and trust) not scarcity.”

How Substack Creators Are Pooling Audiences With Live Video Co-Hosting (6-min read)
A look at an interesting new trend on Substack - where creators are working with each other to grow their follower counts with their recently-introduced video co-hosting feature. As with most platforms, Substack’s algorithm seems to be pushing video, though this has not been confirmed by the company.

Time Portal: Travel Through Time And Figure Out Which Events You Landed In (online game)
A nice one to send you off into the weekend: an online game where you look at a bunch of AI-generated pictures and videos from an era and try to guess which moment in history it is from. Have fun!

Thanks for reading all the way till here, y’all. Gosh, I’ve GOT TO GET RID OF this Texan drawl. I will, if you’d like to share this with your friends and colleagues. I promise. You’ll get a whole lot of gratitude from us as a Thank You - and next week, no drawl! Win-win.

Bon weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings